LMScast with Chris Badgett

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Chris Badgett offers a comprehensive guide on how to strategically plan your online education business for 2026 in this LMScast episode. He emphasizes that planning is about developing clarity, focus, and adaptability to maximize the probability of success rather than forecasting the future. He starts out by emphasizing how crucial it is to determine your main audience, or the “who,” and comprehend their requirements, goals, and frustrations. Chris clarifies that many business owners erroneously concentrate on their product or method rather than the results that their clients need, and he advocates delving deeply into details like quickness, assurance, understanding, or preventing unfavorable outcomes. Chris presents a multi-layered strategy for planning.In order to create ambitious long-term goals, he suggests beginning with a 10-year vision, reducing it to a 3-year vision for more achievable milestones, and finally creating a comprehensive 1-year plan. From there, weekly and daily execution guarantees momentum and advancement, while quarterly themes aid in prioritizing focal areas, important projects, and initiatives. He highlights the significance of “anti-goals,” or things you consciously choose not to pursue in order to stay focused and avoid distractions. He also emphasizes how important it is to link your company with its goal, vision, and values. Values influence your decision-making and corporate culture, vision reflects the long-term effect you wish to generate for your audience, and mission outlines how you will do it. Chris demonstrates how these components influence hiring, team duties, and leadership choices using examples from LifterLMS. Chris delves into operational planning, outlining how to view your company as a “product” made up of people, procedures, and technology. Even for solopreneurs, he advises creating a basic organizational chart to clearly define roles and duties and to choose where to assign or employ staff. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today I’m doing a solo episode about how to plan for an entire year as I’m recording this. It’s the tail end of 2025, and we have a resource on the Lifter LMS website in the lifter LMS Academy called the Annual Planning System. I’m gonna go over some of the highest level. Concepts in that, but I would encourage you to go check out the annual planning system. I happen to actually be a very big planner and believer in plans and there’s so much going on in our space in terms of. Change and disruption and the economy and geopolitics and everything that having a plan, an intentional plan, but more importantly than a plan, is the system you use to create the plan can really increase your odds of success as a course creator, a coach, a membership site owner as a WordPress professional who builds learning management system websites for clients. I’m gonna give you all the secret sauce on planning. And, we’re in this interesting stage where the education market is maturing. We have artificial intelligence accelerating in the world, in the economy, in tech. But keep in mind that planning doesn’t equal prediction, but what a plan gives you is a much higher odd of success. So there’s a famous quote that Mike Tyson says that everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. But what I wanna say is the act of planning and coming up with a strong plan is super important and makes you far more robust and capable and clear. A better leader and just an easier way of being in the world in terms of business and even life. So this is for the course creators, coaches, membership site owners and agencies out there. And we’re gonna go over, the planning stack because it all cascades down from the plan. And the problem with entrepreneurship is a lot of us. I have to constantly zoom in and zoom out. We may zoom out and work on a strategic thing, and then we have to get in the weeds and work on a very small technical issue or work with a specific customer or work with a team member. But what I encourage you to do is to create the space to actually stay zoomed out and create a really high level plan, but then also start taking step functions down. From a big vision to a annual plan, to a quarterly plan and, down to a monthly plan, down to a weekly plan, down to your daily action and project management and things like that. The annual plan basically, which is what we’re primarily focused on today, is gonna set the direction the quarterly plan creates focus. The weekly execution creates the momentum of executing on the plan. But the common failure points are that plans are too vague or not committed to, or there literally is no plan. I’m often shocked when I see. Entrepreneurs of all kinds, not just education entrepreneurs, literally with zero plan in 100% reactive mode. And it’s sad because life and business could be so much better with some planning. That doesn’t mean you’re not gonna get setbacks or some kind of macro shift from the global economy or whatever, and things are just gonna change in your plan. Kind of gets outdated, but it’s the active planning that is super important. And it’s important to mention that even if your plan gets hit hit off track by some event, it doesn’t mean you can’t pivot the plan, edit the plan, change the plan, re or reprioritize what’s in the plan. The first thing we’re gonna talk about is really your core focus when it comes to a plan. You’ve heard me mention if you’ve listened to this podcast, I think Dane Maxwell, who we interviewed on this podcast a while ago, said it best that a business is really only three things, a customer, a result, and a mechanism. So the customers who you serve, the result is the outcome that they want, usually pleasure, pain, or transformation based, and the mechanism is how you facilitate. The result for the core customer. That’s literally all businesses. And we have a challenge in our industry where a lot of folks are super focused on their mechanism, like what we do, how we do it. I sell to people who want what I know how to do. It’s very vague, but the first part of creating an annual plan. Is to really drill in on that core focus and find the signal and the noise. The first part I just wanna say, and I, the, I’ve been in this industry for almost two decades and I realize that the number one thing missing from most businesses that hold them back from successes online education companies is the who you should always start with. The who. Who are we helping? Who is it? Who is the customer? Some people call that the customer avatar, the ideal customer persona. But what in reality happens is a lot of people are not very clear on the who, and they’re just saying I help anybody who wants what I do. So that’s not a WHO statement, that’s a mechanism first thinking statement. So we gotta get clear on who we serve. As you create your plan, the number one thing I would recommend you do is to figure out and even challenge yourself if you think you’re clear on who it is that you help. So you gotta develop that. You gotta question even if you think you’re already doing it and you’ve got a clear. Target market and customer avatar and stuff. I want to challenge you to keep drilling in on the who do you help? What are their pains, what are their frustrations? What do they want? What results do they want? I heard I think it was Dev Basu who said that customers only want four things to save time. What was the other one? Sorry. Save time. Oh, here we go. Sorry. Lemme back that up. What he said is, customers are looking for four things, speed, certainty, and insight. And the fourth one, which is funny, but not really, is to stay outta jail. So when you are creating an offer for a specific person. They’re either looking for speed, certainty or insight or to stay outta jail. So when you’re really clear on your who is, and you figure out which one of those like primaries are between speed, certainty, and sight stay outta jail, you’re starting to get much more crystallized around who it is you help, how you help them, and the benefit that they see in you, which now are tied into the result or the transformation. So let’s assume that you have figured out who you help. ’cause your plan, if you make it about you and what you want oh, I wanna make more money. I want, I don’t want as many obligations on my time. I want to create passive income and automation and all these things. That’s not really a plan, that’s just what you want personally. A great plan is built around. The people that you serve, the people that you help. So I’m a big believer in that you should put your customer at the center of your business, not your product. So let’s, when it comes to annual planning, let’s put our customer at the center, not our product. So we’ve got the who in the center of our business. We know what they want we know we have the unique mechanism to help them get what they want. Now we need to come up with a plan to actually make this happen. So in order to make that plan happen, what we also need to do is work on ourselves and our company culture, and we need to do the mission, vision, values work. So to go over it briefly, there’s a lot we could do on mission, vision, and values. We have a whole training on this and the perfect offer playbook in the lifter LMS Academy. But just to, put the basic ideas out there. A vision is the world that you want to create for your who, for your avatar, for the customer that’s literally at the center of your business. One way to think about vision if you’re a little stuck when it comes to your subject matter expertise. Is to think about what wrong do you wanna right in the world? So that’s, you can back into your vision by doing an anti vision of the world you don’t wanna live in or you don’t wanna see. Keep persisting and fix that for a specific type of person because you have the skills, experience, and knowledge to do that. This is the territory of vision. Mission is how you do it, what success looks like, or what the opposite of failure looks like. Lifter, LMS is an example. Our vision is to, in the broadest sense, lift up others through online education. I believe that education entrepreneurs are some of the most powerful, impactful. Positive outcome generating people in the world. So I throw out a stone with my software lifter, LMS, an education entrepreneur, picks that up and then throws out a stone to help their ideal learner get the results that they’re looking for, that which then helps more people. So it’s like a stone in the water that has multiple. Outward ripples of positive impact in the world while also creating financial impact and creative freedom. So this is the vision territory where I live, but the mission is to help, a million education entrepreneurs change the world through online education by launching successful courses, coaching programs, education companies. Internal training resources for inside companies and so on. That’s the mission. The values are how you do what you do. So Lifter, LMS has seven core values and when the first time I heard about values, I think of it as being cheesy. So for example there are cheesy values like. Integrity, honesty synergy collaboration. Now, those aren’t bad, if you, if those align with you. But to really create strong values, I think you have to get way more specific and not just come up with a name, but actually explain what it means for you. For example, the lifter, LMS company values are community focused. Reduce friction, continuous improvement. Learner results First, extreme ownership, clear communication, and fulfill potential. Now, I’m not gonna go into a big thing about what each of these mean, but these are values that I embody as a leader in the company and I hire and fire against those values. Whenever I have a difficult decision as a company, I go to those values. They’re super important and a lot of what we do is about reducing friction. That’s, if I had to pick one, that was our primary, that’s what we do. We reduce friction through software and also content like you’re watching right now, like this content is a, I’m trying to reduce friction in your life by sharing with you. An annual planning system that I’ve used for a very long time. That really works. So that’s mission, vision, and values. So the next thing you wanna do is comes from the personal development world in terms of developing a a vision that’s more. Like a vision board, something that you can see and basically, even if you have a hard time thinking about that, like I know as a parent, when I ask my kids, where do you see yourself in five years or 10 years? They have no idea. And you might be listening to this and be like I’m an adult. I don’t have any idea where I’m gonna be in 10 years, but I’ll encourage you to slow down, press pause. And Dan Martel says, dream a little bit. Think about, what do, where do I want to be in 10 years? I wanna see, a lot of people creating online training platforms. ’cause I personally believe that there’s a course inside all of us learning and teaching is part of the human experience. And I see all I’ve always seen this, I see all this value trapped in. People where they’re not sharing it, they’re not helping other people. I call it hoarding all the value. So in 10 years, I want to see a million people using lifter LMS, making money, changing the world and creating like ideal, extremely creative lives that they’re super happy with and proud of. But we can get specific. In constructing a 10 year vision, so what do you want your annual revenue to be? As an example lifter as an example, we’ve already achieved this where we have customers in every country. I don’t think we have a customer in Antarctica, but we have a customer in almost probably 99% of every single country. And that was on division on the plan a long time ago, and we’ve achieved that. What do you wanna be recognized as a leader of how many employees do you want? Do you want a big company? Do you want a small company? Do you want to be a solopreneur? Do you want to be a micro business, a big business? This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Do you want to go out on the stock market and have an IPO? What do you want? What kind of like sales motion do you want? What kind of conversion rate do you want? What do you, if you saw yourself on a stage 10 years from now, not from an egocentric way, but just from a celebration of success, what award would you be receiving an award for? Is it a, like some kind of YouTube award? Is it a humanitarian award? Is it a Nobel Prize? What is it? Dream a little bit. So come up with your 10 year target. And the other thing to create a plan around is like, what’s your main marketing strategy? Marketing is attracting customers. So what does that look like? How do you close sales after you’ve got the lead? Where what is your, go to market marketing strategy? Are you growing through partnerships? Are you growing through content? Are you growing through ads? So basically condense your marketing strategy down to your ideal customer competitive advantage, proven process and results g guarantee. For example, at LifterLMS, our ideal customer. Is a a WordPress website freelancer or agency, or do it yourself site builder with at least two years of WordPress experience. Ideally they have four plus years of WordPress experience. They’re polite, they’re successful with their courses or their clients are very successful. Then what’s your competitive advantage? What makes you unique? We’re entering a world of AI disruption, and I can’t impress upon you enough how important it is to know what your competitive advantage is as a human and not just the information. Because artificial intelligence is making information more of a commodity, in that light, for example, coaching, like going beyond the content and helping people when they’re stuck in their unique personal situation. Having that human connection even through the internet is an extreme competitive example. And then what’s your proven process? Do you like how do you get customers, how well, how do you get leads? How do you get customers? After they become a customer, how do you make them successful so that they love what you do and refer their friends? And then what’s your guarantee? See, this is part of the benefit of planning. Some people get nervous about a guarantee when they have an offer because it feels I can’t really offer a really strong guarantee because it’s up to the student or the customer to do the work and get the results. If you’re really good at what you do and you’re really good at qualifying the people that come in that you allow to purchase from you, you can put out a really strong guarantee, like I’m talking about a hundred percent of your money back after X amount of time, like Dr. Dream a little bit. A guarantee can be a very strong sales tool, but more importantly than helping with conversions, when you think about a guarantee and construct it. What you’re doing is really putting your money where your mouth is in terms of what your online education is all about, and your confidence in the offer that you’re offering. And then, you’ve done the 10 year vision, you’re exploring your unique mechanism, which is where we’ve been about how you do, what you do, how it works, what’s the process, but dial it back to three years. What’s your three year vision? 10 years feels really hard. But in three years that should be easier. Do you wanna be making a million dollars, $10 million? Do you wanna have a thousand customers? 10,000, a hundred thousand customers or clients? What is your vision for three years? What do you want to have ac have accomplished in three years? Do you wanna have a signature course that just sells like hotcakes that you make better and better year after year. Do you wanna have a huge membership library of training? Do you wanna have this really strong coaching model with other coaches working inside your education company, helping people get results? What do you want? What are dream a little bit, think about those three year desired outcomes and accomplishments. Then dial it back again to your one year plan. So now this should feel more approachable. One of the reasons we do the 10 year and the three year is we wanna dial it back to think. All right, cool. I have these big goals. ’cause what you don’t want to do is you don’t wanna put a 10 year goal and a one year plan. Everything is just, all of it is unreasonable and unlikely. Unlikely to be accomplished, but it’s important to dream big at the multi-year, 10 year, three year level, so that you can come up with a reasonable and strategic one year vision. So think about that. What are the revenue targets in one year? What are the key projects? Now we’re getting more into tactics. What constraints do you wanna remove? What friction do you wanna remove? And more importantly than anything is what are you not gonna do, even if it’s considered good advice? What are you just not gonna focus on the first year? Like your anti goal list, even if you want to get to it to achieve your 10 year vision, but not this year? Think about that. So once we get past, 10 year, three year, one year, we start getting into quarterly planning, and this is where this should feel relaxing. The more tighter the focus gets because you get more control, the closer in time you are to what’s coming up. So when you do an annual plan, in this case for 2026. We’re ultimately gonna end up looking really hard at quarter one of 2026. So I like to do themes per quarter. So what theme do you want to focus on to achieve your one year goal in quarter one? So in your accomplishments from your one year plan, let’s say you wanted to, you had four goals like. Get over a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube, launch five courses develop like a coaching system. And the other one was to come up with a template library. So it’s not just about content, it’s also about this awesome value packed resource library you have that’s part of your membership. I’m just making these up as an example. The cool thing about quarterly planning is you don’t have to do all those all at once and multitask and simul simultaneously work on them. So let’s prioritize like what is the theme for the quarter? Maybe you have a theme of we’re going all in on YouTube, or we’re gonna go all in on AI to accelerate our business, or we’re gonna focus on our website. Conversions in quarter one. So you can, you don’t have to do ’em all at once. In fact, it’s super dangerous to try to do too much all at once. So like within the theme, like what are the key projects? So if we choose the YouTube theme as an example for quarter one, that can mean a lot of things. That can mean. We’re gonna start a weekly live stream to attract new clients. We’re gonna hire a designer to improve our YouTube thumbnails. We’re going to upgrade our video and audio and editing equipment. We’re going to do brand collaborations with other YouTubers. So you start figuring out your key projects. Which is super important. And then once you’re in your key projects it’s important to think of not always just doing brand new things. What do we want to amplify that’s already working? Let’s say we already have a YouTube channel and we see that, content about this. Subtopic within our niche does really well. Let’s do more of that and get more exposure on YouTube as a, and then, like if we haven’t done live streaming before, that’s like a new project. So I recommend actually amplifying what you’re already doing well at a greater percentage to adding new projects. So if I had to pick three things for YouTube as an example, I might remake. Some of our oldest top performing content for modern times, that would be a project. Another one would be doing collaborations with other YouTubers, which we’ve been doing, but do more of that. So those are amplifications, whereas like doing YouTube ads, that’s a new thing. So I might do that as like a new project. The other thing that is part of planning is removing problems or constraints. So what’s constraining you in your business and how can you remove that bottleneck? So sometimes projects are not about necessarily brand new things. It’s about removing things that aren’t serving you anymore. So if we keep going with this YouTube example, let’s say you don’t have a strong home office set up for creating videos and audios and things like that. So you wanna remove the constraint of always having to do all this setup to make a decent video so that you can just step into your office. I can turn everything on and I’m ready to roll to make a high quality video. So you’re removing a constraint of. Time to create a high quality video, which then furthers furthers your goal. And then what do you wanna stop doing or not do? So maybe you’ve been, let’s say, blogging every day and doing a ton of social media every day. But in order to do more YouTube. You might need to reduce those things. So let’s say you move your blogging to once a week or once every two weeks. And in terms of social media, maybe you just take a temporary break from one of your social media channels or find somebody to help so that you don’t have to do it as much, or, just choose to discontinue a social media channel that you’ve been working for a long time that is not yielding any results. So turning things off is just as important as turning things on. So another part of annual planning is developing the business. So I like to say we’re really making two products. There’s like our education company offer, whether that’s a course, a coaching program, a membership site, or whatever it is. But the other product we’re making is our business and our business product is comprised of people and processes and technology. So that whole like business product. What do we want to do there? And particularly what I want to focus on is the people aspect. So maybe you’re listening to this and you’re a solopreneur, but maybe you have, you occasionally work with freelancers or maybe you have a team or even have a giant team. So even if you’re a solopreneur. Creating your organizational chart is a very important part of the annual planning system. And this doesn’t need to be fancy. You don’t need like a org chart software or have to even create something fancy and Google Sheets or Excel or whatever. But put down like the key functions of the business. The way I divide up an organizational chart is. It comes with seven areas. So those seven areas are product, marketing, sales, engineering, operations, and admin customer success. And then we have the CEO or the leadership role under those, each of those. So if you’re doing it low tech, you can literally do it on a Google document with each of those, and then you put bullet points under those. And the bullet points are like breaking out the functions. So as an example, like under engineering or tech as an example, we might have who’s in charge of the website? Who’s in charge of customizing lifter LMS to meet the needs. Who’s in charge of the hosting, who’s in charge of the marketing automation as an example, and if, and then you put people’s names by it. You really, you just build out your org charts so that each key function and functions within that function has one name next to it. If you’re a solopreneur. Your name will be everywhere. But the reason it’s an important exercise to do this even as a solopreneur, is that you can start seeing where you want to get help first. Like perhaps it’s under the CEO role. Perhaps you wanna hire a virtual assistant to help you first. That could be, but when you do that, you’ll start to see I like being a CEO. I like being a leader. I’m spending a lot of time here, but I also need to spend time over here in marketing or in sales, or on product, or on engineering or customer success, all these things. And you can start to see where there’s a gap. So part of your annual quarterly planning or 10 year vision, it’s about people. It’s about the business product. What kind of organization do you want to have? What seats need to be filled? What are, what is the personality of those people that you want in those places? So that’s a accountability chart. The next thing is to develop a conscious artificial intelligence plan. We’re being. Disrupted as a society, just like when the internet became a thing by artificial intelligence. So think about that. When you’re doing your 10 year vision or your three year vision, or setting your annually plan, annual plan, or working on a quarter, start thinking about how will AI be involved? How do we wanna leverage ai? Even if you don’t know like the tool you want or whatever. If we go back to our YouTube example. We might wanna figure out how to do better video editing using ai. I’ll tell you the answer right now. Get the script. Script is an awesome AI powered video editing tool. It can make shorts for you. If you’re watching a clip of this on YouTube. It was made with the script very quickly. It can remove filler words and gaps and all kinds of stuff, what’s your plan for ai, for content creation, for coaching, for marketing, for developing ads, for making your videos better for doing research? What’s your plan like or what do you need? And even if you don’t know the answer, that’s fine but come up with the question, how can I use artificial intelligence to help me? Be a better YouTuber. Bring that question to ai. Dream a little bit, talk to AI a little bit and think about that one. And the final thing I’ll mention, and by the way, I’ll say it again, I mentioned it earlier, the annual planning system that I use is free on the Lifter LMS Academy. If you go to academy dot lifter lms.com and look for the annual planning system course. Enroll in that you can get the template I use that I use every year to work on my annual plan. And the cool thing is once you’ve done it once and you come back to do it again the next year, you might have a few updates to your 10 year vision. Maybe you’re moving faster or slower in certain areas, so this gets easier the more you use an annual planning system. The last most important part is that you are a human in business. So what personal development goals do you wanna set for yourself? Maybe it has to do around your productivity or when you wake up, or how stressed you are, or your work life balance or your ability to communicate public speaking your personal relationships outside of work, whatever it is. Doing an annual plan, I highly encourage you to incorporate personal development so that you become a better person in the process, not just have a better, more profitable, impactful business. ’cause those things work really well together. So planning is a practice, it’s not an event. It’s all about progress over perfection. And. When you really commit to annual planning and give yourself permission to not be perfect, and sometimes you won’t hit your targets. Sometimes you will overshoot your targets and that’s great, but it’s a work in progress. It’s a way of being in the world of operating with a plan. It’s like the military. If you think about an elite operating unit, the Navy Seals or the Army Rangers they have plans all the time. They’re really good at planning, but then when they hit the ground and the stuff goes off, they have to adapt on the fly. And you have to do that in business and in life as well. But planning is really important. And the process of planning, the act planning even if the world doesn’t go exactly according to plan. Your odds of success are gonna be so much higher. You’re gonna be so much more clear, less stressed, adaptable. So I would encourage you to develop your annual plan. Head on over to the lifter LMS Academy, find the free annual planning system course. Fill out the document. You copy it, you put it into your. If Google Drive or download it and upload it to whatever WordPress processor you use and work on your annual plan, it will change your life. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. 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This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Marcus Carter from Carter School of English returns in this episode of LMScast to provide a detailed look at how he turned decades of conventional English instruction into a scalable online learning company driven by LifterLMS and WordPress. Marcus, who has taught for more than 30 years, describes how the COVID epidemic compelled him to switch from traditional language schools to virtual ones. His tentative TikTok videos and lack of camera confidence eventually developed into a powerful social media presence, which helped him see the possibilities of digital courses as a long-term business strategy. He distinguished himself in a competitive market by concentrating on his proficiency in phonetics and multilingual instruction for Spanish speakers. Marcus also discusses how, after months of trial and error and sluggish early development, YouTube turned out to be his most successful growth and sales channel. One little alteration to a thumbnail served as the catalyst for a breakout video that has already amassed millions of views after more than 160 films were uploaded before gaining significant popularity. From there, he was able to create a devoted worldwide audience by using YouTube to easily integrate content with course sales through straightforward links and weekly live sessions. Marcus highlights his open, trust-first approach to marketing throughout the discussion, providing prospective students with thorough walkthroughs of his courses rather than depending only on exaggerated claims. He talks on how producing top-notch courses takes a lot of time and effort often nearly a year each course and why having several revenue streams such as YouTube, teaching, sponsors, and digital goods is crucial for long-term viability. Marcus concludes by discussing how he is now utilizing AI to make language learning more dynamic and interesting, continuing to push the limits of LifterLMS’s capabilities while producing significant results for students worldwide. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. Today I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Marcus Carter. He’s from Carter’s school of english.com, the Carter Method. And Marcus, what this episode is primarily gonna be about is how he’s figured out to make online language learning more engaging, more effective, more interactive, how to push the boundaries with WordPress Lifter LMS using AI to help. This is gonna be super fascinating, but first, welcome to the show, Marcus.  Marcus Carter: Thanks very much, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be here. Be here.  Chris Badgett: I’m real excited you’re here. And for those of you who are listening via podcast a little later in the show where Marcus is actually gonna get into screen sharing. So if you wanna see what we’re talking about, go to the lifter, LMS YouTube channel. And find this episode. If you type in LMS cast Marcus Carter, you’ll find it. And if you have the ability to switch over to the YouTube while you’re listening right now, I’d recommend doing that. But first, Marcus, let’s give a little context. Tell us about the Carter School of english.com. Just bring us up to speed on what it is, how long it’s been running, and your brand and your approach, and what your mission is and what’s going on. Marcus Carter: Okay I’ve been teaching English for the last 30 years and up until COVID the Pandemic I had my own language schools and we were all obviously, in different places and in different towns. And then COVID hit and that all went to pot, basically. And we had to diversify a little bit, although we did continue online a little bit with our students for a couple of years, but I could see that it was going downhill pretty quickly. And so I. My wife convinced me to start uploading TikTok videos and super embarrassed at the beginning. I had no camera confidence at all, or even though I’ve spent years and years in front of people, I couldn’t speak to a camera. In fact, my first videos was like with a cartoon head you couldn’t even see my face. And anyway, I kept going and eventually got a bit of traction on TikTok and managed to get lots of followers there. And trying to work out how I could monetize all of these people that were following me. I started opening telegram groups for people for free, but most people were on it for like the free ride. There wasn’t much conversion there, and I didn’t actually have anything to sell. I was trying to get people into the online courses, that we were doing. And that was the time when I started thinking about, Hey, maybe a digital course would be something that I could sell to these people. That’s when I discovered lifter LMS and that’s when I set up my first course, which was within the. The context of English teaching. I’m also a writer. I’ve written like nine or 10 textbooks but I’m also very focused on phonetics. I consider myself an expert in phonetics. I’m also bilingual in Spanish. I’ve got certain things going for me on social media that maybe other teachers don’t necessarily have, and that gave me a niche that I managed to fill and became quite popular. And I transitioned from TikTok over to Instagram, still trying to work it out how I could sell courses. It was pretty slow at the beginning because I, it was, it was, everything was new to me and I didn’t really know how to, bring the people to the courses to do webinars and those kind of things. That all was a kind of learning curve for me. And then from there, I always had in the back of my mind, I loved watching videos on YouTube and I always thought, I’d love to be a YouTuber, but I didn’t wanna transition over to YouTube because I knew that the editing process was gonna be so much more laborious than what it was on these social media platforms. But I thought, I decided one day, that I was gonna be a YouTuber and started uploading to YouTube and took me 164 videos before I got one of my videos. And it was actually very funny because it was one of my videos that I uploaded, I had uploaded eight months previously. And I was just looking through my videos and I thought, I’m gonna change the background in that video in the little thumbnail. I literally changed the background and even today, like three years later, it’s still my best performing video. It’s crazy how something like that can completely change your life, because from there, obviously it’s so much easier. In YouTube, you’ve got your links for your digital course into your website. Under the videos, people just start clicking in and you’ve got hundreds of, that’s, that video’s got over 2 million views now. And that’s where I transitioned into then starting to earn money from the platform of YouTube and starting to sell my digital courses. And I started with the phonetics course, which was my original one. Then I did a basic course for beginners, and then a year ago I launched an intermediate course, and just a couple of weeks ago I launched my Between basic and intermediate, which is my latest product, which is based on ai.  Chris Badgett: Wow, this is cool. And before we get into what you figured out with your recent courses on how to make them more effective a couple quick clarifying questions. Do you do any like instructor led training on Zoom or it’s all kind of self-paced within the LMS?  Marcus Carter: I had, I’ve had everything. I had cohort, I had a, like a Saturday group, but there were like 40, 50 people coming every Saturday. It’s pretty difficult with English because everybody’s at a different level. So I always had to invent like global concepts that I could teach to people. That’s where phonetics is great because phonetics is, there is no level in phonetics of in English. It’s not like the vocabulary or the grammar that you have to be a bit more advanced. So I was focusing heavily on, on phonetics and just putting sort of global vocabulary. And so I did have the cohort, I was using my lifter LMS platform for that every Saturday for three years straight. And that was very successful. Had lots of students in those classes. That went very well. I do still teach online too. Now I, because I’ve got more limited time, I only teach private classes to high level executives for for those reasons that I don’t have much time and to do groups and things. I still have a couple of teachers that work for me, two or three teachers. And, but my main focus is now on, I just love creating digital courses. I just, it’s just so much fun doing that. And obviously the YouTube channel, I have to keep that going. So I’m live every Saturday at seven o’clock, always on, on YouTube, and I always have a good community of people that come there expecting my classes. And it’s really nice to, they’re all there before me, chatting to each other and, things. And yeah, I’ve tried to create a nice community in YouTube, which that’s what I use to, to boost, the sales and to promote the courses while I’m live or in my videos.  Chris Badgett: Quick question just tactically, like what’s your advice to somebody who’s, using YouTube as a marketing channel? You got like a link below the video and the description, but how do you, how does the actual conversion to sale happen? Is it pretty straightforward and that they click on the link and they’re like, yep, that looks good. Price looks good. I’m in. Is there any other kind of sales motion involved there? Marcus Carter: Yeah, basically I’m probably not the, I’m, I could probably sell a lot more than I actually do, but basically all I have under my videos, whenever I’m live, the first thing I do when I’m live on YouTube is just say, before we jump into the class, just remember that the links are below to all my courses and I always have the one, the most recent course at the top. And another thing I have is a a WhatsApp number as well, business WhatsApp number. So people can click on that and directly send a WhatsApp. And I personally answer those those messages. So that’s a kind of good way to get some more, personal engagement from from me. People are quite shocked sometimes when I answer with an audio and I say, it’s you. And I said, yeah, it’s me. Don’t worry. And so yeah, I think that’s a good, and I also have a little WhatsApp logo on my website too. WhatsApp, I can’t remember what it’s called. It’s a plugin for WordPress where people can just click that on any of the pages and they directly send me a WhatsApp and I answer that too. So I think that’s that’s important because people always have a lot of questions about, when they’re gonna buy a digital course. And another thing I’ve done for the last two courses that I launched, so a lot of people are selling digital courses online. Obviously when you go onto their landing pages, it’s full of promises and you’re gonna learn this, you’re gonna do that, blah, blah, blah. This is what’s inside the course, click to buy, but. You are, you’ve just gotta trust what that person is saying is true on that website. And I’m probably not a very good salesman, but I am a very transparent, honest person. And so what I did in my previous, not this latest course, this latest course too, but the previous one is I filmed a, I had a webinar where I brought everybody in to launch this course and I showed them everything that’s inside the course. Every little detail about what it was all about. And you click here and these are the audio, and then you listen to this and these are the videos and blah, blah, blah. And then that’s on my website. So anybody that goes to my, to the page to buy that course, it’s like a 45 minute video. You know exactly what you’re buying before you buy it. And I did exactly the same thing with this course that I just launched as well. So I’ve got that, and I think that’s important because a lot of people have said to me in comments that it, things don’t live up to their expectations. That a lot of people are sending courses. I’ve tried to do this one, I’ve tried to do that one, and then, I’m so pleased that I can actually see what I’m buying before I actually get it. And if you are, if you’re a quality content creator and your course is quality, why not? Don’t be afraid, in my opinion, that your competitors are gonna be looking at your courses and thinking, oh, that’s a good idea. Fair enough. It’s worth the comp. Probably not many competitors are looking at my courses anyway, but I would prefer to be so open and to say I’ve created something that I know is quality. There it is. Have a look and if you’re interested, you just buy it.  Chris Badgett: I love that approach. The, it’s, I would call it like in marketing, I’d call it like a video sales letter, but it’s not a bunch of promises in this. It’s Hey, here’s what’s in the box. Here’s how this works. This is exactly what you’re gonna see. Like we’re removing all the mystery. Come on in. If this sounds like a good fit to you, it’s awesome. Marcus Carter: You go and buy an iPhone and you’re standing there in the i in the iPhone store, and you’re testing it before you know what it’s all about before you buy it.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s brilliant. That’s my approach. Can you get into just a little bit of if we take a snapshot of today just the impact you’re having, like things like whatever you’re comfortable sharing, number of students you’ve mentioned it’s become like your full-time income stream. Now you’ve mentioned, I’m curious like when you’re teaching English to Spanish speakers, like what parts of the world are you hitting and who’s, and also. Do you have any stories about how people have gone through the Carter method and got some job or some outcome? I’m sure you have all that stuff, but can you just tell us, inspire us a little bit with the impact of the site? Marcus Carter: Yeah. Obviously when you, the digital, the last digital course I just created, it took me 11 months to create this course, and the previous one before that, it took me a year to, to create that. So you’re I’m it’s not my full source of all income. Obviously I’m, I’m teaching and I had sponsors also on the website, and YouTube obviously pays me. So I’ve got, MSI, multiple sources of income. I think that’s important for any kind of content creator to, open your. Possible sort of income sources so that if one isn’t doing too well, you’ve got another one. And you can more or less keep going. And so I know it’s difficult to spend a year creating a course, and not have any income at all for that course. And you don’t even know if you’re gonna sell it when you get to the end of it. ’cause you are, you’re reaching a stage. You’re gonna try and do a webinar, you’re gonna try and bring people in, and then hopefully you’re gonna buy it. And then obviously from that moment onwards, it’s just a passive income that you are getting. And I don’t know how many students I have, hundreds of students that have bought my digital courses. Definitely, maybe, probably 300, 400 I dunno how many exactly. I’ve sold. But the important thing for me is to always be have, they all have their separate telegram groups. I’m in all those groups. I answer everything as. Quickly and as detailed as possible, anything they need to know, because they’re asking me questions about English. And what about, how do you pronounce this word? Audio message is to have a lot of close contact with the students after they have bought the courses, which then brings them into, a close field of contact with me to build up trust. Because at the end of the day, when people, a lot of people come into the, to the webinar one thing I must say, when I do my webinars to sell the courses, the launches, I’ve actually only done about three or four launches. The last two were the most successful ones. The typical webinar that people are advertising come to the webinar and we’re gonna teach you this and blah, blah, blah. So a lot of the time it’s using Facebook ads or YouTube ads or something, and you click on that and you sign up for the webinar. You might not even know that person. So what I did is I. Told people in the, I did YouTube ads in the last one, but I told people in the ad, I said, Hey, are you interested in seeing a new English course that I’m just about to launch? It’s this kind of level or whatever. I didn’t say come to the webinar, which is another strategy I tried three years ago where people came, I gave them this webinar about phonetics. I was teaching them things and that, you’re gonna get a load of value and then here comes the sting in the tail. I wanna sell you something at the end of it. And that is the typical pattern of webinars that me as a, not as a salesman I don’t feel comfortable hooking people in and then trying to, get that sale at the end and say, I’ve given you that value. You owe me, some of you owe me a sale now at the end, so everybody that came to that webinar, they knew why they were coming. They were coming to see the presentation of a new course and. Almost all of them knew who I was. ‘Cause I’ve got, I dunno, 300,000 followers on, on, on YouTube. If they didn’t know me, they probably would’ve clicked on and seen my videos and things anyway. So I don’t have to prove that I’m an authority, which is what a lot of people have to do in these webinars. Say, look, I’m this person. These are all the testimonials I have from other people that have bought my courses. Look how great I am. I just said, look, this is who I am and this is why you are here. And so whoever was there to see a presentation of a course and they knew that I was gonna sell it that day. And that makes me feel super comfortable when I’m in these webinars. And I don’t have to like, start getting a lump in my throat when the sale’s coming up and then, all of a sudden come out with a price. But it’s a bit lower today because, and all of these things. I was just very comfortable. So I’ve probably sidetracked a bit from your original question.  Chris Badgett: Oh, I love that. Yeah. Just the piece I was looking for on the reach which. Spanish speaking countries. If you have 300,000 views on YouTube, you’re probably hitting all of them, I’m guessing, but Totally.  Marcus Carter: Yeah. It’s primarily Spain USA, Mexico, Columbia, but it’s just all of them, everywhere really. And I got a lot of people in, Australia and things because they’re just, Spanish speakers who have, gone to other countries to live and they need to brush up on their English. So yeah, it’s just wherever the algorithm takes me.  Chris Badgett: And just one more question before we get into our screen share. I’ve noticed I’ve seen patterns, ’cause I’ve worked with a lot of course creators and ones like you that are just crushing it and moving it multi-year in. I noticed three things. One of ’em is they’ve already got some experience with WordPress, like maybe a couple years before they get into it. The big one is. They’ve already been making money with this expertise probably in the offline world. Like for you, you said you’ve been teaching English for 30 years, so you’ve been in the space a while. And then the most interesting one is you people take forward imperfect action and just keep going. You’ve played around and experimented across social media. You’ve gotten better, better at tech. You’re implementing with ai. You get in the weeds sometimes and you get tech support or get help from AI or just mess around until you figure it out. You try a lot of tools. I’ve just seen this movie before, but is there anything else you would add to even if it’s motivation related, like why do you think you’ve been successful here, besides those factors that I mentioned? Marcus Carter: Yeah. Don’t have a plan B. That’s probably number one thing I would say. When I, yeah, when I closed the academies, all like the furniture, I had three schools all that furniture went into storage. And I still had, receptionists that was still working for me, but they didn’t really have anything to do. And I, we had five at the beginning, we had to get rid of some of them. There was just two left at the end and they were like, okay, Marcus, what are we gonna do? We’re gonna reopen the schools and take all that stuff out. And I was like. No, we’re not gonna do that. I was like, Hernan te, like I’m burning the boats and I donated all the furniture to some local schools, and I said, we’re going digital 100%. And I, and it was just like, there is no plan B. These digital courses have to work. Yeah. And when you’re, when you find yourself in that corner, you’ve got no other option than to make it work. And that is when, you kick into overdrive. And I love what I do. I love my studio. I love coming in here. I love creating content. I love tech. I’ve always loved tech since I had my, Zi X Spectrum, 81 in my bedroom, when I was a kid and things. So I’ve always loved that side of things. What was difficult for me was the camera confidence, and being natural on camera. But, it’s just press record, just keep going. It just, and just, there is no. Escape. You just gotta keep going in that direction and eventually you will get there. And if you are, if you’re struggling, and it’s you’re in a specialist niche, keep learning all the time. Just keep learning and learning, looking at other creators and try taking something from there. Put your spin on it and just keep, because you can have the best course in the world, but the biggest problem, or the best I, telephone in the world or whatever product the number one pro problem for every creator or any kind of product or service is, how do I put that product in front of the people that are gonna buy it? I could have a physical shop, that’s one way of doing it. But if you’re online, like most of us now. How do you get it in front of those people? And so you can pay your Facebook ads, your YouTube ads, but then you are somebody that isn’t, you don’t have an authority channel where people can say, oh, okay, this guy, all right, let’s click on here. Okay, he’s, he must be good ’cause you’ve got 300,000 followers or something like that. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re good just ’cause you’ve got that. But and so organic reach for me has been the number one way to, to reach people and to create that authority and that community by just keep going and going. And, as I say, 164 videos on YouTube before, I remember my first check from YouTube was like $2 36 cents, like two years in. But for me, it was like I said to my wife, I said, I’m just so happy that I’ve monetized the channel. Finally people are coming to the channel. But it, because it was just, I’m like that kind of terminator mentality. It’s just, I will not stop.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Marcus has already dropped a ton of gold and he’s got a YouTube play button behind him. I don’t have a YouTube play button. I’m looking I’m taking notes on these YouTube tips. But another thing about the great course creators is this not just about having a great website and making the sale and figuring out your marketing channel. You actually have to deliver, quality, engaging, effective learning content. And Marcus is gonna take us on a tour, some of the stuff he is done with his latest course to inspire. If you’re listening, go find the YouTube version of this LMS cast with Marcus Carter. I’m gonna pop your screen up here, Marcus, and just. Can’t wait to see the show and tell here. So it’s it’s up in the window.  Marcus Carter: All right. Okay. So what you were saying just then about having a great website. I don’t have a great website. That’s one of the things I gotta work on a bit more. I’ll actually show you my my, I was just like fiddling it. It’s not a great website, it’s just a basic elemental website that I’ve created here. It’s nothing special at all. And I need to improve it. I know I do. ’cause that’s my son keeps telling me, dad, you gotta get this website sorted out. But even that doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, it’s not about, I don’t think it’s about the website, it’s about the landing page. It’s the link that goes from wherever you are. If you’re in TikTok, in Instagram, YouTube, whatever, that people land on that page and that page is well explained. I’ll just show you for example, what I was explaining before, so this is Genesis is the name of the new course, and this is the landing page for Genesis that I just recently created. Here is the video where I explain the course in detail inside, I streamed it on YouTube live at the same time. I was doing it on Zoom. And so that’s the first thing people find. And it’s just a basic basic web, a basic page that goes down here with your buttons. One thing I’ve created here is I’ve got four courses now. A lot of people like to buy bundles, and that’s when I use the memberships obviously in lifter MS. And so here you can say, okay, I want the basic course, gives you the price there, and I want to add it to Genesis. It’s telling me this is in Spanish, but it’s telling me how much I’m saving down here and I want to add this one too. Or I can have all four. So making things easy, as easy as possible for people to be able to upsell very easily. I always, whatever, this is my, my phonetics course is the one on the right here, pro Speech, so that’s 249 euros, about $280. But if you buy that course with any of the others, it’s only a hundred dollars more. So I always, when people contact me, I say, buy the phonetics course. You need to add that to any of the others. And it’s just, it’s almost standard now that people buy the package of Genesis Plus Pro speech or Intermediate plus Pro speech or Basic plus Pro speech. Yeah. As I say, my website’s nothing, nothing special at all. It’s just a basic thing that I throw together and I keep every course seems to have a different theme. So as you can see, this one here is kinda like purple, I dunno why. But the other ones are like orange and green and things like that. So I show you that now how I’ve changed the colors and that’s one of the problems because really my logo is blue and white and my, sun keeps telling me that I should keep the same colors and things like that. But let’s go into my area where my courses are. So what I just wanna  Chris Badgett: add while you’re pulling that up, I’ve seen this movie before too, where it’s the offer and the training. Like we can get really obsessed with web design, but when you have the right offer for the right people and you’re good at what you do, like the design, while important and a website can always be improved. It’s the offer that matters. And you nailed it. And I think, by the way, that’s a beautiful landing page that you were just showing us. Marcus Carter: Okay, thanks. Yeah, but even looking here, my courses, like the basic course doesn’t have a background, the intermediate course, that was, I’m looking at it now, I’m thinking, why didn’t you just do them the same? But these are just things that I overlook, as a creator or genesis. I just threw this together ’cause I didn’t have a featured image for the Genesis course, but I’ll show you, for example the intermediate course, which is the course that I launched a year ago. And this is when I started going a little bit higher in my technological skills as far as the course is concerned. So I’ve got all my modules here. There’s 63 lessons in this course 10 modules, and they all have like evaluations at the end of every module. So if I just click into to lesson one. Each. Listen all my videos are based on videos and this is why this course took so, so long. ’cause there’s 63 videos that I had to edit, which took me an eternity to do that. And I’ll explain the way I changed it in the next in the next. The way I teach English basically is I have this is what the counter method is based on, is that there’s a set of vocabulary there and I introduce a word and then I immediately ask a question to the student. As you can see at the bottom here, it says, do you play chess? And what I do is I leave a gap here. So yes, I play chess, play. Do you play chess? So as you can see here, I ask a question, students are supposed to answer out loud, and then they compare their answer with mine. Yes, I play chess, or no, I. I don’t play chess. And so there are always what we call closed questions, which is a yes or no answer. They say it out loud, there’s no real interaction. I’m just hoping that students are actually saying these answers out loud. Okay. That has worked very well up until now, but I wanted to change things for my new course. So after this part here there’s another series of audios. I’m keen  AI: on going camping in summer  Marcus Carter: for people to  AI: camping  Marcus Carter: people to listen to the audios here. And then I used this is a plugin that I used here for some different kinds of exercises. You can put the cursor down here, see the translations. No. Okay. This is a pretty basic lesson. This is the first one. I actually got better as I was going along with this course. If I go into one of the more advanced lessons, I can show you how I advance, and let’s go up to here or something. Chris Badgett: It’s funny how things. You start making something and you’re, that’s that continuous improvement. You just keep getting better. And it’s you can’t, you don’t always have time to go back. I’m not gonna reshoot everything. Marcus Carter: Yeah, you could, you just gotta keep going here. I learned how to do these audios and put these in. So that happened after about less than six or seven, but I didn’t go back to change the first ones ’cause there was a lot of work done there already. These, this, the one thing I should say for everybody listening, I’m not a coder, I know. Ha I just know like super basic things, like the and I could not write code myself at all. Everything that you’re seeing here, all of this has been the help of chat GPT to be able to do these things. And so what you do need to, what I would definitely advise anybody is to become an expert on using chat GT on a daily basis or whatever AI you want to use. So I started putting, different kinds of, exercises in dragon drops and things like that you could do here. These are audios that you can play. She  AI: looked at herself in the mirror and realized she had forgotten her glasses.  Marcus Carter: Or I can play it at N 0.5 speed if that’s a little bit too fast. I put my cursor over here and this come, this pops up. So this was a great course, and a lot of people bought this course. They really liked it. It’s got lots of listening vocabulary, it’s got the videos and yeah, great success. This was the intermediate course,  Chris Badgett: but lemme ask a quick question here. How do you go from getting custom functionality and chat GBT to your website? Are you. Like building an A custom plugin with chat GBT or are you, is there something on this page that it’s just unique for this page that has an HTML block in it or something?  Marcus Carter: Yeah, that’s all it is. All I’m doing is, I’ve got Elementor, I’ve got the Elementor Pro plugin. You could do this in Cadence as well. Cadence is my website theme, but I always use Elementor Pro for building everything. And so these are just nothing more than HTML blocks, that’s all they are. Then once you are, once you wanna design what you wanna do, you just chill. Tell chat, GPT, I wanna do this. You’ve gotta go back and forth loads of times with chat, GPT sometimes, for, to get the buttons right and to do this. But he will just basically design it for you and explain, paste this. And if you don’t, if you’ve got the paid version of chat G tbt, which is 20 euros, $20 a month or something, just screenshot and just say, oh, this button’s over there, why is that? And then he’ll just do it again until you get it, and then once you’ve got it, it’s just copy and paste. And I’ve got all of these blocks here are in templates. So all I do is I just paste a template into a new lesson, change that vocabulary, and I’m ready to go for another one. So I’ve got a, and Chris Badgett: Are the audio files living in your WordPress media library? Marcus Carter: No, the, I use bunny.net. Yeah. As a content delivery network. That’s where I have my audio files and sometimes PNGs and those kind of things, rather than clog up my WordPress site with with too much audios and things. And to, and also because I think Bunny is a better content delivery network. Yeah. All over the world, they’re everywhere. They’re super fast and they’re super cheap as well.  Yeah. Anyway, so these kind of exercises I’ve got, I dunno, about eight different kinds of exercise. And every lesson there’s two or three, two or three, and I just rotate them and they’re just different and yeah. So that worked very well. So let’s go back to where we were and where were we, sorry. So when I designed the new course, this one Genesis is a course that, it was my original course before I even did my phonetics course. That was the name of it. And I did three or four lessons and then I left it. So I thought I’m gonna, give it birth again to Genesis. And my intention was the only thing that was missing from the intermediate course was the interactivity. And because students just speak out loud, but they’re not actually using their microphones. It does have a, at the end of every module, it has a, pronunciation recognition lesson where students listen to sentences and then they record themselves and it gives you a scoring on your pronunciation. So I’m connecting to APIs. Nobody knows what these are basically their, chat. GPT in my new Genesis course is connected to my Genesis course through what we call an API. So it’s just basically a little let’s say a wire or a bridge or something that connects chat, GBT, the brain of chat GBT to my course. I’m connected to another two or three more APIs. One of them is this pronunciation scoring API. Another one is 11 labs, which is the the voices. And can’t remember which other one I had. Anyway, those are the three main ones. So now I’ll show you the course. The basic course is very similar to the intermediate course although it was the first course I did after the phonetics course, I revamped all the exercises and made them very similar to the intermediate course, but at the basic level. But Genesis is a different concept. So this is the course page. Obviously what you’ll see here is a league they people win g coins. And I was actually watching one of your one of your guests just recently who was talking about gamification and things like that and saying and she was saying, you can do more than just a league and and streaks and things like that. I was thinking, oh, I only had leagues and things. But anyway this is just this first concept that I put in. The other a PII have is with telegram. So the telegram group is connected. To the course. And when people are on the course for an hour, there’s a power hour, message in the telegram group that Peter is on the course for an hour. It’s a power hour. If they’re three days, they get a streak message into the Telegram group. If they reach 5,000 G coins or 10,000 g coins. For Genesis coins 10,000 or whatever, that these messages are popping up in the Telegram group. So one of my, one of the big problems, I would say, the biggest problem for creators of courses that, have students on their courses is getting the students to finish the courses. It’s a real I know that students would learn a lot of English if they finished the course, but if you just buy the course in the heat of the moment and you don’t finish it, you’re not gonna learn English. And it might be the best course in the world, but you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna get there. So one of my, missions with this new course was actually to try to hold students’ hands as much as possible in the telegram chat. And putting these things in for motivation. Students dunno this yet, and I can say this ’cause none of my students are gonna be watching this podcast, but I also have with print full. I dunno, that’s a merchandising thing that I used to have on my website, on my YouTube channel. I still have all my products on there, so I have the phonetic table on a mouse pad or a cup with some expressions on it or something like that. I will be sending those when that guy, Luis. When he gets to 30,000 G coins, he doesn’t know this yet. He will be receiving through the post, his mouse pad with the phonetic table on it. Yeah. So that, just to take it a little step further, what does it cost me $20 to do that, and to be able to reward somebody who’s got 30,000, this guy’s doing really well. So I thought that was important. Anyway. As you can see here, I’ve changed the lifter LMS. This took me a lot of work, Chris, it looks like it. To get in here and to get this to look like this. Yeah, it was not me, it took chat, GPTA lot of work, let’s say, because it’s, you’ve gotta go into the little source code details of lift drill MS to be able to change the colors. And it was really difficult to do this, but I just wanted it to look a bit more futuristic than the basic courses that I had before, which were all just a white background, with the normal squares and things. There’s 50 lessons in this course, and instead of it being on video, it’s all through ai. So I’ll just click here on lesson one. I. Okay, I’ve got five monitors and my Mac Mini is a little bit slow at showing these things on the screen. So this is just like an automatic popup that you get on the first lesson of every new module. So the first lesson is all about the present simple. This is the grammar that is in this first part. It pops up on the first one but it doesn’t pop up on lesson two for students to read through that and they just click off here. For my course, because I’ve got people all over the world, it’s important that they have the option of British or American accents. So I’m British, let’s go for British. And also they can choose, masculine or feminine voices or masculine. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. That’s coming from 11 labs, right?  Marcus Carter: The voices are coming from 11 labs. Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Yep.  Marcus Carter: So this is what I wanted, instead of it being a scrollable course where students go down, as I was showing in my previous course what I wanted to is to have the sensation of a web app where you are, on this screen. This part here substitutes the video part where I, had to edit all those 63 videos. Now I don’t have to do that. Now I’ve got a CSV, which is on Google Sheets, and I’m pulling from that CSV and it automatically fills in all of this vocabulary, and it’s connected to 11 labs. And 11 labs has given me the word. So when I click on the word, always, do your parents always visit you on holidays? I’m also using cashed audio because it, it turned out a little bit expensive to be continuously generating. That’s why it was so fast the way it gave it to me. And basically here, I just, these are the yes no questions. The same as before, but I’m gonna actually say it. Yes, my parents always visit me on holidays and it will give me a correct answer if I said it correctly. I can check my pronunciation here. And that’s the other API that I’ve got connected there. It also comes out this API in other parts of the course. So cut me off if you want me to make this shorter. No, you’re  Chris Badgett: good. Keep going. My mind is being blown here, so keep doing it. I’m so impressed. And as a especially as a non-developer, I think that’s just incredible.  Marcus Carter: Yeah. You don’t have to be a developer nowadays to do these things. So some of the problems I’ve had, for example, where if you look down here, it says back to the Genesis course, just to get rid of that button that lifter LMS had at the top there, which was interfering because it, I had to put that in there. So this now works, and I can go back to straight back here. Let me just click back in. Go to lesson two this time. So it’s slow loading because of all these lemme just close Google that I have somewhere else. Yeah. So as I say, so the good thing about this for me is that I didn’t have to create 50 lessons. I just had to create A-C-A-C-S-V with all the vocabulary. And the AI does the rest for me. Basically. You can, I can click on, if I click on this rest word here. Do you often rest when you travel? I can also click here and, it gives me the translation. So I’ve got, I’m using I’m deployed on the courses up on GitHub, which is the repository, which is then connected to render, which is what deploys it all over the world. And that’s where all my nodes are of like, for the translations and the speaks and all of those things which are connecting to the APIs. So as I was saying before, what I wanted is like an app. So you’re looking at like a web app. So when you want to go to the next part, or lemme just show you this, if I wanna bring up that grammar part again, I just click here and I can, I. Have a look of any of the grammar that I want that will bring that popup back up. That was another thing that I added. I try to think of everything that a student might need while they’re in the course. Oh, they don’t ans understand that question. You can translate it. Don’t worry. Oh, what was that grammar? You can look at the grammar. Wherever you are in the course, you can check it, you can change the accent again, if you want to, you can start the lesson again. Once you’ve answered one question, then it graze out so that you remember which ones you actually answered. You can repeat the question. You’ve got your progress bar. You can let’s, it’s too fast for me, so let’s put it down here. And, ask another question. Relax. Do you think recycling helps the environment a bit slow? Or if that’s too slow for me, and I want it asked fast early. Do you wake up early to enjoy your hobbies? So I’m trying to think of everything that a student might find challenging and to help them out so that they can calibrate the course to their liking along the way. So when I click next, this is what I call the training section where they’re learning the vocabulary. They’re just using close questions. Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. If I make a mistake, for example, if I say yes, I wake up late to enjoy my hobbies is it will detect that as a mistake and it will tell me the, what I should have said there. Yes, I wake up. Early to enjoy. So just to, and then you just say it again and then it’ll update the progress bar. So go to the next part here, which is practicing with the ai. So you’ve done the training, you’ve learned those 10 words. Now the AI is gonna converse with me and induce me to use that vocabulary. So I start the lesson. Hello Marcus. Let’s practice the words you learned in the training section. Our first word is wake up. What time do you usually wake up in the morning? So it says, hello Marcus. It’s pulling from the lifter LMS ID of my name to say that it says that in a couple of different places in the course. And now I can basically converse in this part with whatever I want. I don’t have to answer his ques, I can say whatever I want. So I can say I wake up at three o’clock in the morning because I’m a fireman and I have to go and rescue people from houses. That’s quite early. I see you have an important job. How often do you wake up at that time for work? Yeah, this is quite a long conversation. So he’s using how often he’s using the vocabulary from the first part. He also tries to interact a little bit and say, oh, that’s an important job, to acknowledge what I just said. It’s not just a cold next question that he’s saying. If I make a mistake and I say, wake up me every day, I noticed a small mistake change. You said, wake up me every day. The correct way to say it is I wake up every day, please repeat this sentence. I wake up every day. Well done, Marcus. That’s much better. Now let’s practice, get dressed. What do you usually do after you get dressed? Okay if I didn’t understand that, I can also, see the translation here and it’ll show me in Spanish. And if I dunno what to say, I can also click on this here and it will give me a a suggested answer. I usually have breakfast after I get dressed and they automatically disappear those things. Okay, so then that’s the part where you put into practice everything that you’ve learned in the training section. And then you go over here and this is the exercise area which substitutes what I had in my other course, the part where those audio things were and things. So I wanted to go to town with this. And you start off with just the basic flashcard exercise, which is, pretty basic here, where you just got flashcards and if the idea is to get a streak here. So if you knew it, you just say, I knew it. I knew it. And you get a diamond for the first ones there. Get another one here and then that’s it. And you go back. So that’s just to, to start off the exercises. What I didn’t say before on the AI conversation is when you finish the conversation, it analyzes everything you said with your mistakes. And a popup comes up and it tells you all the words that you used. It gives you recommendations on the mistakes that you made if you might need to revise the present. Simple or something like that. Do you want me to go through all these exercises, Chris?  Chris Badgett: Yeah, let’s see. ’em, my mind is completely blown. And also, you’re doing all this in chat, GPT, right? And the APIs to the various tools like 11 Labs and the per. Pronunciation checker or the grammar checker or whatever.  Marcus Carter: Yep. Everything. Sometimes I have to go to Gemini or gr if I don’t get it right with with chat. But yeah, basically I’m just 90% on chatGPT.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. Let’s see these other interactive learning tools, I think this is fascinating. Marcus Carter: Ooh, that’s not good. Could not load. Breathe. Refresh your paste. That’s not good. Something’s happening here. These are the, I’ve been like literally the last two weeks just ironing out all the bugs that people keep telling me. Should have loaded. Why is that? Failed to load exercises. Okay, that’s not looking good. Forget that part. We’ll edit that out. Let’s go to a different one here. Okay, this one here is like a bit of a game that I decided to a bit of a stressful thing here where you get 30 seconds to answer the question and I’ll show you what you can do here. There are different kinds of questions, so you’ve gotta fill in the blank here. You, I’m just gonna reveal the answer here. Finish, and then I just press and it gives me the right answer. I can ask for a little tip if I don’t know. It says, oh, it’s one word and it begins with an S. Okay. So it’s gonna be some here because it, I’ve gotta use one of these words here. If I’m get stressed out with the time, I can freeze it.  Chris Badgett: Wow. You do think about your students like and their experience?  Marcus Carter: Yeah, a lot of my students are actually very senior. I’ve got 75 year olds, quite a few, over 60. A lot of students. Yeah. This is just a multiple choice here which is, pretty basic. Nothing interesting going on here. You can translate here if you click the translations on, then when you hover over it, you get a tool tip pop out. So that’s that one there. Fill in the audio one here so they gray out, because I’ve obviously been testing with this course whoops. So you listen, we will arrive at the station by noon. So here, I’d have to write, arrive, and then go to the next one. Nothing. This one’s a pretty cool exercise where you, this is a pronunciation exercise, so students have to listen to the sentence. I wake up early every morning for work and then record themselves. I wake up early every morning for work, so it gives me a a rating for my pronunciation here. And if I do it, let’s just go to the next one. If I make a mistake, the new telephone costs less than my old one. So what I do is I click on these and then it opens up another little modal here, and I just say this word. So more. Okay, now I can continue. Now that one will be. Green more. I dunno why that shifted down a bit there. But anyway, shouldn’t have done that. Then I have a listening exercise here where basically students listen to a dialogue.  AI: I usually wake up early on weekdays. How,  Marcus Carter: If I don’t understand that dialogue, I can flip it out here and you can’t see. ’cause I’ve got my toolbar at the top, but that’s not normally there. And I can translate everything that’s there and it will translate it into yellow text, which should do. There you go. And the good thing is if I what times I wake up early? I usually wake up early. I’m gonna, I’m gonna make a mistake here. If I make a mistake,  AI: I usually wake up early on. Weekdays  Marcus Carter: it, how  AI: about you? It  Marcus Carter: actually. Plays the part of the dialogue where the correct answer is. And when I get it right, it just continues. So that’s my listening exercise. And then writing here is the final one. There is when you finish the writing here you’ve got different kinds of writings. You can do a story, a diary, an opinion, a description, an email, for example. And it would generate your prompt, write an email to your manager about your late arrival. And you have to use five of these words at the top here, not all 10 of them. And when I use one, if I say I wake up as I write the word, my progress bar highlights and it shows me that I’ve done that word, but I’m not gonna write it. But you’ve gotta write a over a hundred words to finish the writing as it says down there. It doesn’t go green until you get to a hundred. And then you click check. And then the I AI gives you all the feedback, the mistakes. How could you could improve it. Yeah. So that’s, Chris Badgett: that’s basically it. I’m gonna pull your screen down and just say I’m completely blown away. This is this is incredible, Marcus. And I know, ’cause I also like you, you’re like, I know my students need to freeze. Like I know what the people listening or watching this are gonna ask. Could you just re rehash the tech setup there? Like the APIs chat, GBT, WordPress Lifter and also, yeah, I guess let’s start with that. Just, so if somebody’s interested in this, can you describe your, the tools you use and the workflow you use to create a new lesson?  Marcus Carter: Yeah. Okay. I’ll show you. I can even show you. Do you want me to share again and show you the  Chris Badgett: yeah, I’ll add your, I’ll add your screen back so we, we’ve got the Genesis screen back up here. Marcus Carter: Okay. Yeah. If I go in here, are you not seeing, ah, yeah sorry. There it is. Can you see the backend now?  Yeah. Okay. So this is the template here, and in this template there are different HTML blocks in Elementor. It could be in cadence or whatever theme you’re using. You just add an HTML block. Now, as I say, I’ve been doing this for 11 months now, and there are like 30,000 lines of code for that, for, for what you’ve just seen. So if I click on this one here, this is section two AI conversation, HTML. So that’s where we were doing the AI conversation. This big one here is the the first part, the training. Each one of these is the exercise menu and the different exercises. So it’s just basically. An Elementor page with blocks of HTML stuck into it. Now I’ve learned what, how I should have done this. I should have used global CSS styles and even had those CSS styles on Bunny. I didn’t do that. I didn’t know anything about that at the beginning. Chat GT didn’t tell me that because I started with the training section and I said, Hey, let’s do this next part. Oh, let’s do this. And it wasn’t, I didn’t have the, the experience of the architecture of the way I could have done this much more easily. So it’s given me loads of problems. I had loads of problems with. Making the course responsive to all the different screen sizes. Yes. And realize that was gonna be a problem. And I’ve literally just finished today, two weeks later, getting it to work on iPad, which has been the biggest problem I’ve had. It’s taken me literally three days to get one button working on the iPad because it was receiving, merge files or whatever. Lots of things that I had no idea, I didn’t realize I was gonna have problems. Literally two or three days before the course launch, I was testing with a teacher. I said, just go through the lessons and things she was saying, but I can’t see the screen. It’s all off the screen. I said what are you using? I said, I’m just using my laptop and I’m using a 27 inch monitor and I’ve only ever tested it on this. Yeah. So I didn’t realize I was gonna have all of these problems. But as I say it’s basically just modules of HTML files. And the only reason I put it into different modules is because I was getting really confused in the first one when I was with chat GBT, it was like over 3000 lines of code. And then he said let’s put the next one. And I said can we do it in a different block at least? So I can just scrolling through, be organized and just to get there. Yeah. So basically I have a template in my WordPress site with the, with all of this on. And in lifter LMS in every lesson I have one little HTML block stuck at the top, which calls all of these lessons. That’s all it is in lifter LMS. So I have one template a global template, and then in each lesson, like the 50 lessons, there’s one little HTML block, which calls the CSV and calls the template and that’s all it is. And then That’s very  Chris Badgett: cool.  Marcus Carter: Yeah. And then it’s I can show you if you like.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. And a question I have here when you’re doing this is the how much are you writing, like all the individual like phrases and things you use in all your different blocks? Or is chat GBT like selecting the question about waking up earlier or whatever?  Marcus Carter: Yeah, none of it is hard coded.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. Okay.  Marcus Carter: Everything comes from ai. So what I’m doing is I’m caching the I’m caching the files the audio files because 11 labs. Has turned out to be quite expensive, a bit more than I expected with loads of, it’s like doing loads of things. So I’m caching it onto Bunny. Like different versions. There might be for one word, five different possible questions that they could ask you in the cached file with the different accents so that at least, there’s a variety of five or six different questions they can ask you with the different accents that they might use and different genders. Chris Badgett: So do the students get do they all have the exact same experience or not necess necessarily? No. Yeah, that’s  Marcus Carter: the beauty. Yeah. Nobody does the same course.  Chris Badgett: That’s cool. But driving towards the same outcome of learning that level of language.  Marcus Carter: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. The conversation part, everything’s different. So if I go here to lesson one and I go into Elementor that’s all I have. Yeah. I just have a, that’s all it is. I’m just calling the template.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Marcus Carter: In lesson one.  Chris Badgett: Wow.  Marcus Carter: Yeah, that’s it. That, that, that’s what’s in, that’s what’s in lifter.  Chris Badgett: That’s amazing. I’m pulling your screen down again just to Okay. Lay on the plane here. But, and this, especially since this is December 19th, I’m gonna say this is the coolest AI thing I’ve seen all year. And and I am just so impressed because, WordPress, myself included I can’t write code. We have talented engineers on the team, but I understand the whole point of democratizing the web is to make it so anybody can be as creative as your being while leveraging technology. Sure. Maybe you’re a developer or maybe you just want to keep it simple and WordPress, but you’re empowered to just go with WordPress and chat GBT and all the AI tools that integrate in. It’s fascinating. It’s fascinating. And the also notice, like you, you’ve removed yourself as the teacher, like the 11 lives, voices and stuff, but it’s not like you’re not teaching, you’re orchestrating this whole thing like a conductor. And so you’re still teaching, but now you’re just leveraging technology and your body of knowledge together to come up with a wonderful learning experience. It’s amazing.  Marcus Carter: Oh, but the whole idea is scale, yeah. I can’t edit 63 videos, it’s just. Burning out my eyes sitting here, yeah. Doing that. So the whole idea, now I can now create my next level course and just take that template and just change the CSV, maybe update a little bit of the exercises, make them a little bit more difficult. But more or less, in a month or less than a month, I’ve got the next level of the course. I can do three or four courses, and one of my ideas now is to do tailor made courses for, for example, some of the big companies I work for, they don’t know this yet, but I’m gonna give them a presentation and say, look, this is a financial banking course in your corporate colors designed for you. They’ve got the one, one of the things I’m talking about, they’ve got like 35,000 employees. And so I’m like, this is. Designed specifically for you and your employees. How can they not buy it? It’s if they’re gonna be teaching English, why would they go with the normal, these big English teaching companies when they can have something completely tailor made for them. Very easy for, for human resources to see the results of how they’re doing. If you’re using the the groups plugin and things like that for them to pop in and see how they’re getting, the results on their evaluations and things. The good thing about what, AI has given us is your. Only limitation is your imagination. Now there is no excuse for you to say, I dunno how to do it, because knowledge is 100% free now. And so it will be a learning curve, obviously, because you’re gonna have loads of problems. And I’ve had them, I’ve had, I’ve literally, as I just said, I’ve spent three days trying to get a button to work on the iPad, and that is super frustrating. Yeah. But as I say, I don’t have a choice because there’s a woman who bought my course and she and my course is 600, 600 and something dollars. That course is, on offer. It’s actually $800. That course. She only has an iPad, so I have no choice. I have to make it work on the iPad. And I spent the first few days doing some other things, but then there was just one button that I couldn’t get to work and I finally got it working this morning. So Amazing. Yeah, it’s just  Chris Badgett: You’ve gone exponential Marcus. This is impressive to watch. And that’s a, yeah. And as a, I think what’s most important here is developers can write code and, or accelerate with chat GPT and stuff, but you as a subject matter expert in education and language learning, particularly in the English, Spanish you’re just, you can do anything now. It’s it’s amazing.  Marcus Carter: Totally. It’s amazing.  Chris Badgett: I see why you wanted to show this, ’cause I’m proud of you, man. This is so cool. Yeah. And I I just wanna ask the question again, just ’cause I know people watching or listening are gonna be curious. I’ve heard WordPress, I’ve heard lifter, LMS I’ve heard some of the add-ons, like groups and so on. You’ve mentioned chat, GBT, you’ve mentioned 11 labs, some other APIs for niche language learning scenarios. You also mentioned GitHub. And you’ve mentioned Elementor. Is there anything else that kind of fits into this stack that’s like critical for somebody to understand? And particularly, could you touch on the GitHub piece? What, how GitHub gets involved? Yeah. And for a non-engineer to start using GitHub, like I’m sure that was a little intense for you and. Here you are.  Marcus Carter: I still have no idea how GitHub works. I don’t even know what it is really. It’s just basically, I know it’s a place where people put their codes, and they call it a repository, whatever that is, and so I was designing the course for the first 11 months locally. I had it on local server here, on my computer. And then, chat said later we’ve gotta deploy this on on whatever. And I was like, okay, we’ll do that later. And then when it got to the stage, about two weeks before I said, okay, we better start moving this, because I didn’t do it initially because it just takes longer when it’s deployed onto the servers. If you wanna update something, you gotta wait for it to deploy and then come back and I locally, you just press enter and then it’s ready.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. And  Marcus Carter: Literally chat. GPT walked me through every single step. He said, press, you gotta have the screenshot thing, where you pay the $20 so you can screenshot and upload that to him. And he says. Press that button there in the corner that says upload file. And then you know, it you got no excuse for not doing it. And then from there you connect it to render. I still don’t really know what render is and what’s the difference between bunny and render, but I had to do that. He said, you need, he told me you had to choose render or one of the others or something like that. I don’t know if I pay five or $10 a month to render for that. And so he just walked me through it and it was surprisingly easy. It was literally a couple of hours and you are live worldwide. I was like, wow, that was amazing. I also use Python Anywhere, which is another, some kind of server or something like that where you can put Python code, which is what I have no idea, but I’ve got quite a lot of Python code on that thing. And that is what connects everything to my Telegram groups. That’s where all the messages go through there. And yeah as I say, I have no I might have said GitHub, like it’s a repository, but I’ve got no idea what that is really.  Chris Badgett: And in terms of, I’m just, I’m left with this question what do you do when you get stuck? Like I know you’ll email Lifter a support ticket as example. But there’s only so far we can go like in helping with chat GBT and render and all, and Bunny and all this other stuff. Maybe you’ve hit elementary with a message about something. It sounds like predominantly you’ve just figured out how to work with chat GPT as a co-pilot to get you unblocked whenever you get stuck. Marcus Carter: Totally. You will never get stuck with chat GPT because it’s he knows everything, and it’s his language and he speaks all the languages, all the coding languages. He knows everything. He will make mistakes and he, you will do things and he forgets, like what he said two paragraphs ago. And you have to always keep, quite often, I just re I just say, here’s the code again, here’s the code again, just in case, you just have to learn how to work with him, but he will always get you out of the. Out of the wherever you are stuck. And and I have obviously, lift LMS sometimes I need some support from them or something like that if I’m trying to find workout things that are in the plugin. But really no other platforms have I needed to use any kind of support. I had a problem with Elementor. I, when I started trying to save my, because it’s got so many lines of code on the same page, I was getting a server error from SiteGround, which is what hosts my WordPress site, and I had to open up support with them, and they just upped the memory that I needed in my PHP and that was it. Away you go. Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s absolutely amazing. And on that note of like hallucination in chat, GPT, when it says something wrong or it doesn’t work, I would, if I was. Guess, I would think at some point you’d hit a wall, you can’t get over and it’s, you’re just totally stuck. But maybe not Marcus Carter. He’s not giving up. He’s burned the boats. He’s going forward no matter what.  Marcus Carter: Yeah, it literally, sometimes I have been stuck on certain things of code that it didn’t work, and I’ve had to go to Gemini and then I’ve had to go to Grok and then I’ve gone to Deep Seek and I’ve had perplexity open and I’ve had like, all five of them are like, we gotta work this out. Like this block here is halfway down the page. Why can’t we put it, yeah. And it’s taken me different ais to actually find the the problem to solve the problem. But you will always find the solution with the ai because it’s just like having a full stack developer in your pocket. Chris Badgett: I think part of the reason you’re so good at this is that you actually, you have really strong vision. You know where you’re trying to go. You’re continually protecting like the integrity of the learning experience and the learner. Yeah, because it’s easy to get into AI tools and just start messing around and being like, oh, that’s cool. Oh wait, I can do this. But you know the outcome you really wanna have and that’s impressive.  Marcus Carter: It all started with the intermediate course when I started making those exercise and I thought, hang on a sec, I can create any kind of exercise I want to create where you can press a button and something happens on the screen and you listen to an audio. And that’s when I thought maybe I could make like the whole screen a different color and have some kind of UI and where people could actually, and it just went from there, just like I thought, right? I don’t want to be making video courses all the time ’cause it’s just too time consuming. I can’t scale them. And I can now make the course for the big companies. I can, very quickly I can change the CSS, change the colors, put their logo on it, change the vocabulary for this, for their industry, and away we go.  Chris Badgett: And you you do continue to make videos for YouTube, but that’s for YouTube, right? Marcus Carter: Yeah, that’s where the sales come from. So I can’t, YouTube is I haven’t actually uploaded a video for six months to YouTube. Because I’ve been so full on with this course, and one of the problems with the course was when do I launch it? When’s it gonna be ready? And I was like, more or less, I had it done, but I still had a load of things to do in sort of October and I said, November the 30th, that’s the date. And then it was just a massive rush up until then. And literally two hours before the webinar I finished, it wasn’t even working properly. There were bits that weren’t working properly. I finished two hours before, but if I didn’t put that deadline, it would’ve just kept dragging out. So I thought, let’s, and I had, like in the webinar, I had over a thousand people that are supposed to be coming, but you normally get a quarter. So about 250 people came to the webinar and yeah. I just hope this is an inspiration for people to think you can do what you want. Yeah, you can do and build whatever you want. Whatever you can imagine, you can do it and just try, go on an HTML block, go into chat, do say, Hey, can you put a button in the middle of the screen that when I press it explodes and says, hippy hip, hip, hooray, and he’ll do it for you.  Chris Badgett: Do you have an example where you use chat GPT to help with lifter? For example, one of the questions in my mind is okay, if we’re delivering the experience through this interactive content that’s coming from somewhere else, how does lifter know when the lesson is complete?  Marcus Carter: That was another thing I had to hack. I had to hack the listen complete button. Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Marcus Carter: I dunno if you saw that. It says, I finished the lesson, did you see on the exercise menu at the bottom it says, I finished the lesson. Okay. That’s your button. But I had to I had a little bit of a problem with the toggle because you can toggle it on and off in lifter LMS and so at the moment you can just say, I’ve completed the lesson. You can’t re toggle on yet, because when you re toggle on. I get the button pops up at the top of the screen, so I said, okay, I’m just gonna toggle it off at the moment if you’ve completed this. But so basically chat, TT he’ll go into your website and he’ll look down through your documentation and he’ll find out what are the IDs, for that button. But very often he hasn’t been able to do that. I’ve had to go into your plugin myself, and it’s super extensive and there’s just so many things you’ve got there. And I’ve just and I take a screenshot and he says, click on that bit where it says that and open that bit of code and paste it here. Ah, so the student ID is, this is the thing that they use. And and then eventually I find things but, and sometimes I actually go onto your website and I look at the little videos because he can’t read the videos. And so you’ve got videos where it explains how to do something if you wanna, whatever. And so I go in there and I look at the video. So I’ve just seen it in the video. It’s this, and he’s oh, okay. Like it’s just so yeah, he will dig in.  Chris Badgett: That is awesome. I’m serious when I say that is the coolest AI thing I’ve seen this entire year. I’m passionate about online education, so there’s a lot of cool AI things, but this is something else. My, my hat’s off to you. That’s Mark Marcus Carter. You can find it at Carter’s or Carter school of english.com, the Carter Method. If you are a Spanish speaker looking to learn English check out the courses. Yeah. And you have all kinds of different levels and stuff like that, but Marcus, thank you for being a shining example of what I call an education entrepreneur. It is just amazing. You’re obviously really good at both education and entrepreneurship, which includes, marketing and sales and building a product and all that stuff, but it also includes innovation and you are just innovating at a crazy exponential rate. It’s really fun to watch. Thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it. I can’t wait to talk to you from a year from now. ’cause then it’s, I don’t know where we’re gonna be, but thank you so much and keep up the amazing work. Thank you. Thank you. You’re welcome. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How To Build an AI Teacher With ChatGPT, WordPress, and LifterLMS Online Language Learning With Marcus Carter appeared first on LMScast.

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

Chris Badgett outlines a comprehensive, useful process for utilizing ChatGPT to create an online course that centers around your special skill. He emphasizes that while depending exclusively on AI results in generic. Low-value course content. ChatGPT should enhance your creativity rather than replace it. In order to determine the course’s path. He starts by selecting a targeted, outcome-driven topic and creating a distinct student avatar. The “Human Knowledge Dump,” a 20–100 page compilation of your thoughts, frameworks, notes, examples, and any pertinent research, is the foundation of his system. It provides ChatGPT with rich context, enabling it to produce material that genuinely sounds like you. Using this framework, ChatGPT assists in creating a solid course overview, well-structured lesson material. Scripts, slides, and talking points appropriate for various teaching modalities, including teleprompter delivery. Informal talking-head videos, and slide-based lessons. For accessibility and clarity, Chris advises creating written courses first, then turning them into video material. Following the creation of the course material, ChatGPT may assist in creating the course name. Sales page text, short and long descriptions, and even a launch marketing strategy. He ends by illustrating how to put everything together within LifterLMS, demonstrating how ChatGPT can greatly accelerate the construction of courses without compromising authenticity or quality when done correctly. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today we’re doing a solo episode about how to create an online course with ChatGPT, and to do it in an effective non cr cringey way so you can move faster without losing your voice and while actually creating a valuable, unique course. So the good news is. You’re listening to this or watching this right now in the podcast format. A lot of the things we’re gonna talk about here from an ideas and conceptual standpoint, we have created a full free course called Create an Online Course with ChatGPT that is available on the LifterLMS Academy. So you can head over to academy dot lifter lms.com. And sign up for the free course called Create an Online Course with ChatGPT. It has video walkthroughs, video demos, all the prompts, templates that you can use to create an online course with ChatGPT. But first, it’s important to note that ChatGPT is not going to do the whole course for you. If you try to do that it’s gonna come out generic. It won’t sound like you, you’ll lose your voice. But what ChatGPT is excellent at is being an assistant to you, a co-pilot to you. It will give you leverage, but you still have to create, and even just using all the templated prompts we use, you’re gonna create. A much better online course. Faster using ChatGPT now to go over some of the secret sauce of how to use ChatGPT correctly. ChatGPT is great at structure filling in gaps in research iteration, rewriting concepts, filling in the blanks, giving you a sounding board to bounce ideas off of or provide new insights. But it’s, if you don’t use it correctly, you’re just gonna end up with garbage in and then generic out. But the method that we teach in our free course called Create an Online Course with ChatGPT, we help you avoid all the mistakes of using ChatGPT in a suboptimal way. Basically what’s in the course is like seven kind of steps and ways of using ChatGPT. So the first is around selecting a topic and outcome. Next is creating your student avatar, your ideal learner profile. The next is to do a human knowledge dump, which is the secret sauce that makes working with ChatGPT effective, and I’m gonna go over that in detail in a little bit here. Then you can leverage ChatGPT to create an effective well-written course outline. Then you can actually use ChatGPT to create lesson, video scripts. Text content. Finally, you can optimize your course title and description or sales page content using ChatGPT. And then finally you can use ChatGPT to help you with your launch plan and marketing. So to get started. We actually have another course called the Perfect Offer Playbook. It’s not free, but offer construction is the foundation of any successful course. So instead of going to ChatGPT and saying make me an online course about how to get better at marketing that’s just. You could do that prompt and it will give you a course outline and stuff like that. That’s not really a strong offer. As an example you could do something more outcome focused how to get your first clients in seven days instead of marketing 1 0 1. But we’re starting to drill in on offer construction a little bit here. So part of the human work you have to do is to. Figure out your, who you’re helping, how you help them, which is their, your unique mechanism and the result that they want. Now that sounds simple. And you’ll hear copywriters use frameworks like how to get X and Z amount of time with without Y objection, something like that. These concepts sound simple, but to truly create a great offer, you really need to understand who you’re serving. What their hopes and dreams and pains are, and that’s all included in the free course we have on how to create an online course with ChatGPT. If you want to go deeper on offer construction, we have our perfect offer playbook because if you get the offer wrong, nothing else matters. And after that, after you get through some of these offer steps of understanding your student avatar. The result they’re seeking and how your unique mechanism, which is a course and a certain training concept, is gonna help. You have to do what’s called a human knowledge dump. So you have to fight the urge to ask ChatGPT to do all the just come up with all the content on its own. That’s not how it works. That’s where you get garbage in generic out. The human knowledge dump, think of it like a Google document. The great thing about ChatGPT is you don’t have to be super organized. You can just start copying and pasting some of your content into this document, and ultimately what we want to end up with a human knowledge dump. Somewhere around from 20 to a hundred pages of content. So in the human knowledge dump, this is about providing context for ChatGPT. So if whatever you’re teaching, I bet you have blog posts on the topic. Copy paste them into the Google document. If there’s like certain things that you really wanna cover in the course. Type it out okay, I’m going to teach about this thing and I really want to teach it in this way through these kind of three phases or milestones, the core concepts or big ideas that underlie my methodology, which is also your unique mechanism are X, Y, and Z. And then you can also pull in external resources, be like, Hey, I’m really influenced by. This influencer or this author, this subject matter expert, they have a core idea called X Here’s and then you copy like a piece of that content, put it into your human knowledge dump. If it’s a, it’s not like you’re stealing, it’s just like you’re doing research. ’cause you’re like, this is how research works. Like when you write a nonfiction book you get sources and you do research. You put it all together into a book, but in this case, we’re putting a course. And of course when you mention somebody else’s ideas or philosophies or things like that, you can always give them credit when you teach. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants and not just purely inventing from. A blank slate with no external influences. Put your external influences into the human knowledge dump. That’s the slowest part of creating an online course with ChatGPT. But it’s very important because what you’re doing is you’re asking ChatGPT to not just look at everything that it knows on what it’s been trained on, but you’re asking it to really focus in on. The human knowledge dump as like a very important part. If not the primary part of the source material for your training. Now what you’ve done is you’ve focused the AI onto. What’s most important, what’s unique. How you think about things. What your unique course is about. Who it’s for and what your kind of unique takes or mechanisms are. That’s the human knowledge dump. And once ChatGPT has that. By the way, in the free course on the Lifter Elements Academy. The prompts of you know how to do all these steps are there. Instead of just typing real quick, like this quick thing into ChatGPT, we have big prompts that you copy and paste in and replace the places with it with unique things about yours. For example, the next step is creating a course outline. And we have a special prompt for you that you copy and paste into ChatGPT and then that you include your human knowledge dump, either as a copy paste or as a PDF, that ChatGPT can then ingest and then it can create a course outline. If you skip the human knowledge dump and you just say, create a course about x. This episode of LMSCast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins. Card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Chris Badgett: You’re gonna get something really generic, but when you do the human knowledge dump step, you’re gonna get a great looking course outline that’s unique to you, that’s exciting and fun and targeted and good. So do that. A couple of pro tips when we’re doing this work with ChatGPT. I like to keep it all in one thread. That way it has the context of everything you’ve discussed along the journey to creating the course. It has your human knowledge dump. Everything is in one thread, and when you’re doing something big with ChatGPT, like creating an entire online course, it’s important to stay organized and not end up on a million different threads and losing your place and doing things out of order and so on. That’s why our course on how to create an online course with ChatGPT, it gives you all that structure so that your course can flow out quickly and also in the correct order without. Skipping steps. So once we have the course outline, this is a pro move right here where a lot of course creators want to create videos and they want to create if they’re gonna use ChatGPT, they’re gonna create either teleprompter reads or talking bullet points or things to put on a slide deck. And you can do that. But I would encourage you, here’s my pro tip for you. To not skip the step of pretending that you’re doing a text only course, which can actually be fine. But one of the great things about ChatGPT is it’s awesome at text and humans are slow at writing text. So what I’m encourage you to do next, now that we have the course outline, all the context from the Human Knowledge dump clarity on our offer is that. We create a text only version of the course. So if someone were simply going to read the course without watching videos or listening to things the course text is there. Now this is also good because people have different consumption styles. Some people like to watch videos. Some people like to listen. Some people like to read. Some people like to get tactical and do worksheets and assignments and things like that, and you’re doing your students a great service by providing a text version of the course, even if you are most excited about making the videos and doing PowerPoint presentations or talking head or action motion videos. Put the text content in there. And that’s something that used to take a lot of time that you can do quickly with ChatGPT. So imagine a lesson ultimately is gonna have a video the text. So maybe somebody’s can’t play the video there at work or they’re on a plane and they don’t have their earbuds or whatever, and they’re excited and they want to, keep going. They can just read. So it’s good to have and a lesson when you build your course with Lifter L Mask and have multimedia content inside of lessons. It’s also good, by the way, for accessibility. So some one of your students may be hearing impaired, and by having the readable version, it’s great. The other great thing is. Once you’ve created the text content, and again, we have the prompt that you just copy and paste to do that in the flow in ChatGPT in the free course on the Lifter Elements Academy. You just need to follow the steps in the course. But once we have the lesson text content, if we’re gonna do video now we’re in a better position to do video production. So video production you have a ton of options here and it depends on your style. So now that the lesson, you have the text content, you can also ask ChatGPT to create. My personal style that I like to do is now that we know what this lesson’s about, create me a bullet list outline. To just jog my memory, so when I’m talking direct to camera, I can reference my outline and then it comes out in a casual, naturally delivered way. So ChatGPT will spit out that lesson’s outline for a talking head video so that I could record a video like I’m doing here, but have my notes to reference to keep me on pace. Another option you have is to actually create. Teleprompter read like some people really want the words perfect. And ChatGPT can easily take the concept from the lesson that’s written more like for reading and give you a script that you can teach the, on top of that content. And you can do that with a teleprompter or, read it on the screen as you’re delivering the video. It can also help you with creating slides if you wanna do a slideshow presentation. And in the course I also put a bonus lesson, and this isn’t I don’t really recommend this, but I just played around with this because I am just curious about ai. I actually cloned myself and made an AI version of myself that is not me, that can speak and deliver. In the course, I actually created a real course about course pricing, which you can take, and the lesson videos. In that one, I actually used my AI clone to deliver the content. So the way that worked is I clone myself using a tool called 11 Labs. And then, when I was at the step in, in the, how to create an online course with ChatGPT where we’re making video content. I had it create a script. Then I had my AI clone actually deliver the content for that lesson. Doing that, I didn’t just co. I didn’t do a bunch of copy pasting. And I would modify the scripts, make sure it was perfect. Add some nuance, cover some things that ChatGPT didn’t come up with. I’m constantly interjecting myself as a human in the loop with that pro project. So I don’t recommend making an AI clone of yourself. I was just doing it experimentally. But it is an option that you can do, which can speed up the process. But I personally like to have the, raw human element present. So that’s how you get to video. So the slowest parts of all this are creating the human know human knowledge dump. Then actually creating your lesson videos if you’re gonna do that, because that does take time. But if you use ChatGPT to create an online course, you can you can get through this whole flow 10 times faster than the world, the way it used to exist in the world before ai. So that’s the video production part. Next. I personally like to name a course at the end because. After all this work and all this insight, I often will come up with a better name for the course than in my initial planning stage. So we have a prompt in our free course to help you where you kind, you’re at the bottom of a long thread. You’ve been creating your course and it has all that context and you can ask it for name suggestions. And we have a specific prompt for that. As well as the course description, which a simple version is there’s two kinds of course descriptions. There’s like a quick description ChatGPT can help with that. We have prompt for that, but it can also create an entire sales page for the course that’s designed to encourage people to purchase or if it’s free, enroll in the course and ChatGPT is excellent at that. Again, there’s some, you want to be a human in the loop and like constantly, interject and modify and edit, because remember, writing is equal parts, research, writing and editing. So when you have ChatGPT as a course creator, assistant, you need to have that back and forth in the research. You need to have that back and forth in the writing. You need to have that back and forth in the editing where you’re interjecting yourself as a human in the loop. Then finally at this point, you’re done. You created an online course with ChatGPT. When I did this, I created an entire course focused on course and co coaching program pricing how to create optimal pricing. But I was able to go through that whole process of creating the entire online course, which is really valuable in a single day. And you can see that also over on academy dot lifter lms.com. That’s course is called the Course Pricing Focuser. So check that out. Then finally, once you’ve created all the raw materials. You have the text for these are the lesson names. And this is the syllabus, this is the course name. I have the words I want from my course description. The next step is to simply put it on your website. Put it on your LMS website. Now, obviously LifterLMS is a great option for actually publishing your course. And having your learning management system and processing the payments and all that. We have tutorials on how to set all that up really quickly, which we actually showed step by step with no Step skipped in the how to create an online course with ChatGPT course. So you can see how I moved everything from ChatGPT into my learning management system website powered by. LifterLMS. And then the next thing you need is to make sales, to generate revenue. We have a bonus lesson in how to do course marketing with ChatGPT and generate your first initial sales. I’m not gonna go over that in this podcast episode. But you just need to find that one in the bonus lessons that are included in the course. How to create an online course with ChatGPT that’s at academy dot lifter lms.com. AI is great, but it’s not going to replace you. You wanna be careful to continuously remain involved, to be the driver, to not try to delegate too much to ChatGPT. The wild thing about it is if you take our free course and you learn how to prompt correctly in the right order and do the human knowledge dump step, which really personalize it to you and how you think and stuff like that, you’re gonna end up with an amazing course in a very short amount of time. Compared to how long it used to take. So use ChatGPT as an assistant not to do the job for you. Follow our process, and you are going to create an awesome online course using ChatGPT. I’m Chris. I hope to see you in the course. If you have any questions about any of that, just reach out to us and build your course site with WordPress and LifterLMS and leverage ChatGPT to be your co-pilot on the journey. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How To Create An Online Course With ChatGPT appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett shares the growth of creator burnout poses a danger to the prosperity of companies that rely on human ingenuity. Content development, editing, uploading, marketing, analytics, audience interaction, and customer service are all tasks that many producers attempt to manage on their own, which results in mental and physical strain. In addition to decreasing productivity, creativity, and consistency, this unrelenting pace can eventually cause artists to lose touch with the love that first motivated their work. Not only does burnout damage the individual, but it also negatively impacts the company, resulting in decreased quality, lost opportunities, and slower growth. In order to thrive, artists must create sustainable processes that prioritize high-impact work, assign or automate repetitive activities, and produce material in batches rather than continuously. To preserve energy and mental health, it’s critical to set boundaries between work and personal life. Take deliberate pauses, and practice self-care. Reestablishing a connection with the original intent of the work and reframing success in terms of sustainability and quality helps artists stay motivated, create better work, and make sure their business and themselves can prosper in the long run. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett. Today we are doing a solo episode, and it’s just gonna be me. We’re gonna dive a little bit into some pain and help you find some solutions around what I call creator entrepreneur burnout. So if you’re listening to this, if you like this show, you are probably a creator. Whether that’s a course creator, a content creator, a media creator, an entrepreneur, you may be doing it full time. It might be a side hustle, what comes hand in hand with these activities? Burnout. And I see burnout everywhere in our industry. I’m constantly seeing entrepreneurs burnout, businesses fail that don’t need to. And I want to unpack some different ways that you can. Work through burnout, recognize burnout, and eventually, or ultimately overcome it. The main thing here is when you’re a creator or you’re building a business as an entrepreneur, there’s this invisible emotional la labor of always having to be the expert, to be the, if you’re leading the company or you’re leading the business. You have to have all the answers. You gotta come up with a strategy, you gotta do the execution. If you’re managing a team, you gotta guide the ship, if you will, and always being the expert can really burn you out. And one way to get past that is first in mindset of I don’t necessarily have all the answers. I may not have all the resources, but I can be extremely resourceful. So learning when to. Say, I don’t know, but I’m gonna go find that and be okay with taking the time to go find the answer, to not be the expert, and do some research, some reading, some podcast listening, reaching out to a friend or mentor for guidance and help that can help reduce the emotional labor of having to always be the expert. It’s also an indication when you feel that emotional labor. That it might be time to hire. Maybe you need a somebody who’s better than you at something, right? So I’ve done that a lot, like as a software company where I can’t write code. So I work with developers who know how to write code, and by definition, because I can’t write code. They’re all better than me, but that’s okay. We’re all on the train together, and I love this quote I heard from someone once, which is just because you’re on the train, it doesn’t mean you have to carry the luggage. So you can put some of that emotional weight down of always having to be, the expert or the top, and manage absolutely everything. Another thing that contributes to this pain, that kind of seeds, burnout. Is when passion turns into pressure. If you’re really driven like me, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably a lifelong learner and you put a lot of pressure on yourself to continuously improve, to grow your business, to be a creator, create content, courses, businesses, webpage, all this stuff around your passion. So hopefully there is some element of passion to what you do. Making money is great and building a business is awesome, but if you have some passion about what you do that can definitely help. But then it’s a double-edged sword because we’ve all heard that quote that, don’t build a business around your passion or whatever you love, because you’re gonna end up hating it. There’s some truth to that. There’s truth to both sides. One side is be sure to build a business and be a creator around something that you’re truly passionate about. But the other side is you don’t have to take everything you’re passionate about and turn it into a business. ’cause that can be very exhausting. So I am, as an example, I’m really into learning. Just learning, becoming better, like self-guided learning. That’s why I love empowering course creators to send out these positive ripples of learning out into the world. It really lights me up. It’s how I live my life. It’s how I raise my kids. It’s how I approach everything of just enjoying the learning that makes us hu human and empowering others to have great learning experiences and design great learning experiences. I’m super passionate about that. I’m also passionate about some other things like travel or being outside in nature or some fitness and health stuff that I get into. If I were to take, let’s say, my ultra running passion, I’m a long distance runner. I recently completed a hundred mile run. If the thought crossed my mind is, oh, should I create a course about that too? I could and it might be a good idea, but I don’t need to put myself under the stress of always having to turn every passion into a business. And the other thing that’s really important to know about burnout is it’s really easy to confuse fatigue with failure. You might just be tired and need a break. All of us. Creator types and entrepreneur types. I know you can relate of going on vacation and all you’re doing is like thinking about work or, popping the laptop open and doing stuff while you’re supposed to be relaxing. So developing the skill of vacation and breaks and, time away and downtime and empty space is very powerful and it’s counterintuitive. It almost doesn’t make sense in society. Because there’s this mass message and also mass challenge where, you know, for many the, they have the opposite problem. It’s about, getting to work and getting things done. But if you’re here on this show, I bet you have the opposite problem, which is you are trying to do too much and you need to chill a little bit. I, this is a skill that I’m still trying to get better at. The older I got, the better I got at it. It’s been about 16 years as an entrepreneur and I’m way better at chilling or taking a break than I ever have been before. One major way I’ve done that is actually taking a six week sabbatical, which I’ve done a couple times, and that’s hugely beneficial. There’s that saying that it really takes two weeks on vacation to actually start to settle down and unplug. So by giving yourself this massive six weeks or even longer gap, you can really give yourself a chance to overcome the fatigue that has built up the chronic fatigue that you have just gotten used to and normalized. And you don’t always have to take a sabbatical. You can do, many things during the day. Like sometimes I’ll cut out for a run or go do something with my kids. Just learn how to take breaks. That’s just because you’re tired doesn’t mean your business is failing. You might need to take a break, even if things are tight. Like financially or you have deadlines, taking a break, getting good night’s sleep getting your mind off work can actually accelerate you and make you more productive. So in terms of time and capacity like that. Time is a weird thing. I personally love productivity and, being on, I set up my office to be super productive. But this constant pressure you put on yourself to produce, can lead to burnout. And one of the biggest insights I wanna leave with you on this note, which can really help with burnout. Is to value the time that you’re not really taking a break, but you’re not actively doing something. So if you sit down, like I’ll sit down in a chair over there and I actually have a 30 minute time block on my calendar where I call it strategy time to think strategically about the business with no specific focus beyond the prompt. How do I create more value than anybody else in the world for my audience or my customers? So I’ll just sit with that question, be quiet and listen to what comes up. And that’s hugely relieving from a burnout perspective. ’cause when you’re in the weeds as an entrepreneur, as a creator particularly if you’re a solopreneur or you have a small team you’re constantly zooming in and zooming out. By zooming out, you’re in the big picture, you’re thinking strategically, doing some high level project ideas, and then there’s this kind of medium layer where you’re doing more like project management and setting things up for yourself or for others. And then down in the weeds there’s like actually doing the work, right? So actually executing. And as you burn out, what happens is the first thing to go, in my experience. Is the strategy gets weak, and then in the middle layer then the project management gets weak. And then as you go down and you get more burned out, your execution of the details gets weak. So if you see yourself, if burning out at the detail level that’s definitely you’re getting close to the red line of burnout. So when you feel yourself start to be able to do better project management, to think strategically without pressure, you’re on an upward spiral out of burnout. And the thing about burnout is it’s a downward spiral. It doesn’t happen from one trauma. One trauma can cause a serious impact in your life. But for the most part, the kind of burnout I’m talking about is a, it’s a downward spiral that’s slow. It’s methodical. You start normalizing how you feel every day and your energy levels and your focus levels and your productivity, and it just feels normal, but you’re actually spiraling down and the goal is to get on the upward spiral and we’ll talk about some more tools to get on the upward spiral, but in terms of productivity. I like to unload my brain, so if you haven’t read the book, getting Things Done by David Allen, you gotta read it. It’s super old. The book changed my life. Some of the tools and filing systems and things mentioned in the book are outdated from a technology standpoint, but all the principles are rock solid. So I’m constantly trying to remove parallel processing outta my brain. And what I mean by that is. I don’t want to have to like, have a subconscious routine running, trying to remember when my next meeting is, or I gotta schedule this thing, or I gotta be here at this time, or I have a good idea, I need to put that somewhere. Or all kinds of things come up. So I’m constantly unloading my brain into a Google calendar, into Google documents that serve different functions on a notepad, on a piece of paper. Anytime something’s getting in my brain, that’s not what my main focus is for this time. I capture that in a digital or even paper brain, and that really helps reduce burnout because what happens is your head is like a cup and once you get too much water in there and it’s overflowing, you’re just very unproductive and on the downward spiral of burnout. The other thing. Just a pro tip with calendaring that I recommend is a lot of people think of the calendar as just commitments to other people. You could even say the same thing about an email inbox, and I’ll give you a tip about that too. But make meetings with yourself, with time blocks on your calendar, ideally on a recurring basis to prioritize certain things, like I mentioned that 30 minutes of strategic thinking time on Friday. I also have a block for like HR related tasks in my company on Fridays. And that way if an HR idea pops up. I put it where I capture that. Then when I get to my HR block on my calendar. It’s already waiting for me and I know what I need to work on. Or I respect that calendar invite, the same way I respect a meeting with somebody else who’s showing up on a Zoom call or in person at an event or something like that. So use your counter for yourself. I also email myself, so if I’m out running just like the whole thing where you have good business ideas in the shower and all that, it happens to me when I’m running or walking or out in nature. And I’ll pop open my phone when I have that idea. Do a voiced text memo to my inbox and just capture that. Just get outta my head and then my brain can relax so I can get back to. Running or hiking or whatever I’m doing. But when you just let that stuff swirl around and you never capture it it feels like you’re being productive. But productivity is not so much something that happens in your brain, it’s something that happens through systems. So I’m trying to give you a few systems here. And the most important thing is to unload your brain, reduce the amount of water carried in the cup. If you’re fortunate. I am to have the ability to be big picture, but also really down in the details. You gotta know which space you’re in and make time for those things. So like for example, when I’m going deep on a project and I’m in execution mode, most of Wednesday is dedicated for just that and I push everything out outside of that. So my Wednesday workday from the outside, if you look at me like. Somebody who does work. I’m a founder of a company, but I also do a ton of work. This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. And when I’m working on it, like a specific hard detailed, deep project, the best work I do on those is on Wednesdays. ’cause I make the space for that and I keep that commitment to myself. So the other thing is really just thinking about time in a different way. So like the big picture and the detailed work. You can think about time in these different layers, right? There’s what, there’s, the moment you’re in right now, there’s like your day, there’s your week, there’s your month, there’s a quarter, there’s the year, there’s your three year and five year or even 10 year vision. These are all very different. Zoom in, zoom out levels on time. And the key is. If you’re a creator, entrepreneur, you’re highly creative, you’re highly innovative, problems and opportunity everywhere, and what happens is you may be zoomed out thinking, seeing all these problems and opportunities and all these strategies and all these things you want to do, and you try to jam it all into your day or into your week or into your month, and you just overfill it. So I’ve been through lots of iterations on this in terms of, annual planning systems, quarterly planning setting up the week on Sunday with priorities, doing my three most important things I need to get done today. I’ve tried a lot of these things and I still do a lot of those things, but the key is to have a system for each layer of time and know when. Schedule time to be in those different layers of time. So that’s just a really powerful way to just change a relationship with time and not overfill yourself. And the cool thing with capturing an idea for later is once you, I also, we also do a process at LifterLMS called Shape Up. There’s a book about it that the folks at 37 Signals wrote, which I highly recommend from a business planning and focus and prioritization and strategizing down to a plan system. I highly recommend Shape Up. It’s life changing, but whether you do shape up or something like quarterly planning or annual planning, the key to avoiding burnout. Is to not plan what you want to get done in a year and then work on all those things simultaneously. You have to give yourself permission to put something important on the back burner and you can always front load and prioritize whatever you think is the most important, but give yourself permission to have things wait and not work on too many things simultaneously. ’cause when you work on too many things simultaneously. That’s where the burnout, downward spiral just starts kicking up a notch. The other thing is to think about as a creator and as an entrepreneur, the dance and the balance between quality and consistency. So they’re both important, but if I had to choose one, I would choose consistency in terms of preventing burnout. Of course, we always wanna increase the quality. The work we do, the courses we make. The videos, we make the podcasts. And we make, the blogs, we write, all the our website. We just want to constantly improve quality. But what’s more important is showing up, every day, week, month, year, on a mission with vision, with values, and just consistently moving ahead. And being okay with not everything being a hundred percent perfect. The other thing that I find really helpful to avoid burnout is to. When it comes to being a creator, whether you’re creating a course or creating content. Podcast episodes. YouTube videos, blog articles, website, landing pages, marketing emails. The way I like to teach this or describe this, is to look at the act of writing as, excuse me, as three parts, three equal parts. So the first part is research. The second part is writing. The third part is editing. All right? And we’re not even talking about publishing and promotion. That’s a whole other thing. But what happens as a creator if we look through the lens of writing, is if there’s a problem, I can almost guarantee that one of those three areas is getting missed entirely. Or you are way over index on one part and not the other two. So if you’re going to, let’s say, just to use a really specific example, if I was gonna write what I believe would be a pillar, SEO piece of content for my website, I might give myself three days to do that. Three days of deep work. So instead of just jumping in and looking at the blank screen and being like, all right, let’s go, let’s see what I can get done in three days. I’m not gonna touch that. The writing part. On the first day, it’s all gonna be like research outlining just thinking and really structuring and looking at other similar pieces of content and doing research into the ideas I want to talk about and that sort of thing. So I would put a day in the research, I would put a day into actually writing it, and then I would put another full day into rewriting, editing. Ideally making it shorter ’cause we tend to put too much in. So good editing often comes up with something that’s shorter and really spend equal times in the research, the writing and the editing. And if you adopt that system, your quality’s gonna go up and your consistency will go up. If you value writing and you want to, if you were just writing as an example. I would have three days, or at least three solid blocks of time every week on a repeating recurring calendar reminder to gimme the system and the space to commit to what I wanted to do with my content creation. So that’s how to think about it. If you spend too much time, like in research, you might build this giant list of keywords and all this content you want to create. And that’s good to do. But if you never actually write anything. That’s a problem. Or if you write a lot of stuff and never edit it and you just ship it and move on to the next thing, you’re leaving opportunity on the table. So those are just some pro tips and it’ll feel you will start to burn out if all you’re doing is just one of those things. Like constantly just editing. Or constantly just researching or constantly writing without research or editing this, these, that’s the downward spiral to burnout. And in terms of just one more pro tip there, when it comes to content, whether that’s courses or videos or blogs, sometimes you don’t always need to create a new piece of content. You just need to go back to one of your greatest hits. And either make it better or burn it down and start over knowing what you know now and just replace that content or that lesson video. So you, this idea that you’re on this infinite treadmill where you have to create content and it’s always gotta be new and it’s always gotta, you gotta do all this content creation across 15 different platforms. That’s a recipe for burnout. So it’s more about focus systems and priorities. The other thing that really helps with burnout for entrepreneur creators is to work on the isolation issue. It’s funny because entrepreneurs are often perceived as, these extroverted people that are, famous or famous in their niche. Or just hard chargers. Maybe they’re, you’re leading a team and you’re just out there, right? But the goal is to not be isolating. Even being in a leadership role can be isolating because as a leader you are oftentimes, you have your business relationship with your colleagues and your coworkers and your industry partners and stuff. But, and some of those people you’ll be friends with, and that’s awesome. But also you need to take a break. Get out of the driver’s seat, maybe hang out with an entrepreneur buddy. Share a problem, share a win, ask for some advice, and just get outside of the go go. Always leading all, always. Just cranking out work product and take a little break. And just, you don’t have to do it alone. The weird like dichotomy of it all is that entrepreneur creators are some of the most productive people there. There are, but there they can be that act. And if you’re like me, you might. I’ve had this thought before. I basically once I got into my entrepreneur creator flow, there is no end to what I could do. I will, I’m not bored. I will not. There’s all kinds of fun, interesting things to do, and that’s infinite. Taking a break is important, but also not being alone. Just as like a hyper-productive person is if you’re alone like that all the time. It’s a recipe for burnout. And that includes things like, even if you’re not great at it, trying to turn off and spend time with your family, without your phone getting out outside, moving your body instead of your mind or your, fingers on the keyboard or whatever. Ideally, see some people in your town, even just going to the coffee shop or the grocery store could be a cathartic experience. And also just realize that particularly among entrepreneur and creator communities, people help other people. But sometimes you have to be vulnerable and ask for help and reach out to somebody even if it’s a stranger and. Look for an opportunity to connect, and not everybody will say yes, and you can always reach out to people you already know or rekindle old friendships, old colleague relationships and things like that. But that’s an important thing. That takes time, that really deserves a block on your calendar. If you have the resources to add people to your team. If you’re that solopreneur stage, there’s nothing more. Exciting and burnout reducing than getting help, whether that’s a virtual assistant, a designer, somebody to help with a piece or even take over more of a leadership role of a key aspect of the business. So those are some pro tips on dealing with creator entrepreneur Burnout is really unfortunate. Because I see it everywhere. It’s happened to me many times. I’ve been through the fire. I get better at it, but I still struggle with it. And I want you to know that you’re not alone and you’re not broken. And if you’re struggling with burnout, it really needs to be addressed. And this episode is not, medical or healthcare advice. Sometimes it makes sense to talk with a professional and just get, professional set of eyes on your situation to help you basically get out of your own way and get out of the mindset and the, thought patterns and behavior patterns that you have that can be really helpful. So recommend doing that. But if you’re on burnout, be careful and just don’t mistake your fatigue for failure. You might just need to. Reset or just at least get back on the upward spiral instead of the downward spiral. ’cause it really does happen to everybody. And in the world that we live in with infinite content information and demands and all the world issues and everything, it can be very overwhelming. All that stuff contributes to burnout. So keep going, but take a break. Work on your burnout. Build systems. If there’s anything I can ever do to help you. Please reach out and I hope you have a rest, great rest of your day and keep being a creator. Keep being an entrepreneur. These are very important parts of what we do in the world and what we’re called to do. It can be very fulfilling. So just be ke, be careful with that fatigue. Don’t normalize it. ’cause there’s a better way to work on it. And it’s not like there’s a magic bullet. It’s more of a commitment you make to yourself to be open about burnout and getting on the upward spiral and surrounding yourself with people, tools, systems, and ideas that will help with that. Have a great rest of your day. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Creator Burnout Is Killing Businesses Here’s How to Survive appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast, Alex Standiford from Siren Affiliates shared, developing incentive affiliate systems that compensate affiliates, instructors, and content producers according on performance, engagement, and conversions is the secret to increasing the number of courses and memberships sold. Instead of using a single one-size-fits-all approach, course authors may build up many tailored programs by using Siren Affiliates in conjunction with LifterLMS. In addition to offering beginner-friendly programs for new promoters, this enables you to provide bigger commissions to professional affiliates. With the help of the platform’s multi-instructor revenue sharing feature, instructors can earn royalties automatically based on lesson completion, course engagement, or subscription performance. They can also choose to promote their courses as affiliates and receive additional commissions. In order for numerous contributors affiliates, content producers, or instructors to concurrently get rewards for increasing traffic, generating leads, or closing deals, Alex highlights the need of stacking incentives. You may create incentive programs that drive frequent launches, transform cooperation into growth, and take advantage of seasonal events like Black Friday to increase sales by utilizing coupon-based monitoring, event-based triggers, and customizable payout criteria. Additionally, Alex points out that this strategy is quite flexible for different business models. Like partnership income sharing, content platforms, and e-commerce royalties, making it an automatic and scalable method to expand your online business without depending only on advertisements. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. Today I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Alex Standford. He’s from Siren Affiliates. You can find that@sirenaffiliates.com. By the way, if you’re watching this live there is a special Black Friday discount that Siren is doing. It is 70% off. The coupon code is Lifter 25, so L-I-F-T-E-R two five. And you can get started with an incredible affiliate platform. But the great thing about Siren is it’s not just an affiliate platform. Alex has developed something that. Allows you to really create any kind of incentive program you can think of. The more I learn about it and understand it, my mind is blown. It happens whenever somebody gets into siren. We’re gonna get into that today, but first, welcome back on the show, Alex.  Alex Standiford: Hey Chris. Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here and it’s great to see you again.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s I love talking to you as a friend, but also the way that you think about incentive programs. It is just fascinating and not only think about it, but you’ve literally solved it for learning management systems, sites, e-commerce, content creators. There’s all this stuff you can do. I know we talk about affiliates because that’s something that’s pretty well under. Understood. And we’re recording this in the middle of November, so this is Black Friday season. Let’s just start with talking about. What people can do to set up an affiliate program and why Black Friday matters. Why event based sales like Black Friday. It’s not the only time of year you can run a sale. But how to work with affiliates to just get more traffic, sell more courses and memberships. Alex Standiford: Yeah. Okay. I’m a big fan of Launch, launching frequently, launching often, launching early and I don’t necessarily mean just, your initial product launch. An initial launch, launching this podcast episode with you, or launching a cross promotion with other people doing an integration with another company or another plugin in my con in my case with Siren. Obviously I’m using Siren myself, so obviously I’m thinking about it in that context. But the point is I’m very big on launching. And whenever I launch things, I love to launch them with somebody else so that I can borrow their microphone, I can borrow their email list, I can leverage the audience that they have worked hard to attract, to be able to grow my own business, and then also incentivize them to do so and give them something in return. And that’s basically the fundamental. Value behind creating a really well thought out, really well designed, intentionally designed affiliate program. Because it lets you, not only are you able to grow your own business, but you’re able to also pay people who you like and trust and personally work with. It makes me so happy to know whenever I’m working with you, for example, on affiliate program, doing affiliate links and things like that it makes me so happy to know. That whenever I get customers and I turn around and I’m paying for the traffic and the benefits that I received from these conversations that I’m paying you, I’m directly enriching your life instead of just paying Google for an ad or paying some faceless corporation. So for me, affiliate marketing and creating affiliate programs and things like that. Yes, of course. It’s a great marketing strategy and there’s a lot of benefits to it, but for me it’s very much a personal thing too. It’s just awesome to me to think that I’m able to like help and enrich the lives of people around me at the same time. Chris Badgett: You use Siren affiliates yourself. So at the beginning of this show, we mentioned the 70% off coupon code Lifter 25. Which you can use@sirenaffiliates.com. And. How does that work in the background? If somebody uses that coupon, and I know you also have like URLs that you can do that automatically apply that. So if you’re watching or listening to this, if you go to the LMScast website, you’ll see a link and mention of the coupon code and stuff like that. But how does the affiliate system actually work?  Alex Standiford: Yeah. An affiliate, a typical affiliate program, works using a special link. Basically you have you, Chris, as an affiliate for Siren affiliates.com gets your own, get your own special affiliate link with a tag at the end of it. And whenever somebody clicks on that link. I’m able to say, oh, hey, I know that came from Chris because it’s his special link. And then siren behind the scenes tracks, all of that, keeps track of that. And then if that person makes a purchase you then get credit for that sale. Now the coupon code works in very much the same way, whereas if somebody visits the site, even if they didn’t use your special link, if they just visit the site and they use the Lifter 25 coupon code. It then knows, oh, hey, that’s Chris’s coupon, that’s lifter lm s’s coupon code. Let’s make sure that whenever this transaction’s complete that we give Chris credit for that. Or LifterLMS credit for that for that purchase.  Chris Badgett: Nice. What there’s I wanted to help people with a challenge I’ve had as somebody who does affiliate marketing. I gladly pay affiliates for. Sending traffic that converts and all that stuff. There’s this challenge of, there’s, I see it as two types of affiliates. The first type is what I would call a professional affiliate marketer. They’ve been doing it, they for a long time, they know how it works. They’re probably, promoting many different brands and things. But then there’s also a big opportunity to just get regular people that aren’t classically trained as affiliate marketers. To join your program. But they can’t, they don’t, they’re not going to do well with a lot of friction because they’re new to affiliate marketing. They just wanna sign up and go. How do you, how does Siren serve the first time affiliate from their user experience standpoint?  Alex Standiford: Yeah the big thing about Siren is the, and one of the biggest reasons why I created Siren in the first place was because I recognized that, I was frustrated with one size fits all affiliate program solutions out there. So basically the way they work is you create a single affiliate program and it just assumes that every program is gonna work in exactly the same way. And you end up with all these special cases where different people have different rates and they have different needs and stuff like that. Siren uses a multi-program approach. So instead of having just one program, you can create as many incentive programs as you need. And I say incentive program, not just affiliate program, because there’s all kinds of different programs you can create with the system that goes way beyond just affiliate programs. But with with that, it allows you to create a program, different programs for different types of affiliates. So maybe you have an affiliate program that is targeting those. Professionals. You could, it could be like a super affiliate program. I like to call ’em where, maybe they get a slightly higher commission rate or maybe their terms are a little bit different in some way. Then maybe you have a more basic affiliate program that most people go to that’s like public facing that you give to the people that aren’t professional affiliate marketers, but are people who would like to refer your business and hey, they would like to get a kickback whenever that opportunity comes. So you can, it allows you to create multiple programs like that. And the thing that I love about that is it actually. Turns, it makes it a lot easier to treat your affiliate programs or any of your programs in general as a product in itself. So now all of a sudden you can create this program with its own rules, its own sets, settings, and have it as an offer that you then are able to offer as a product that you’re able to push out and sell and promote to affiliate marketers in a different way than you would promote it to the basic affiliate program to other people. Chris Badgett: Let’s blow people’s minds a little bit with there’s the idea of the affiliate program, which is a, incentivized sales and tracking and system for that. But in the learning management system space, you solved a key problem, which is multi instructor platforms. And so if you’ve heard of a website like Udemy. Where a course creator gets a cut of the revenue and there’s all these nuances of what if there’s one membership like masterclass? How do you, does everybody get paid the same or do they get paid based on course completion or popularity? Tell us about how you can use Siren to build a multi instructor rev share platform. Alex Standiford: This is, this was actually one of the biggest reasons, one of the other biggest reasons why I created Siren in the way I did. Like I said, it’s an incentive program builder, not just affiliate program builder. It allows you to create these revenue shares like what you’re talking about. So for just to give you an example, Udemy the way that, that. Company has historically ran. I’m not exactly sure how it runs today, but I know last time I checked about a year ago the way it basically worked was it has, you can sign up for a, as a customer, you can sign up as a, on a subscription model, so you can pay a monthly fee and have access to a large library of the courses that are available on Udemy. And actually Kindle does this as well with their direct KDP publishing platforms. So you can opt into that and basically you get paid a share based on based on how many pages people read of your books compared to other people in the platform. And the same thing applies with Udemy, where they track based on the amount of time people spend consuming your content, consuming your courses. With LifterLMS for example, you’re able to actually track things like whenever a lesson is completed or a course is completed. So because of that, we’re able to actually leverage that information to create our own revenue sharing platform with Siren that allows you to pay all of the multiple course creators on your platform based on how much traffic and how much. How much the members of that program that site are consuming their content compared to each other. To put it in plain terms, let’s say you have a membership on your site for a hundred dollars a month, right? And you have all these different course creators on your site, and they all have. Access and the people are consuming all these course creators content for free for the membership, you can set it up to where whoever had the most people complete courses and complete lessons in that last month will get the biggest share of the revenue. And then the person with the least gets the least amount. So if you had a hundred dollars a month, maybe you’re creating a pool of 25%. So $25 per customer is available and it’s gonna be distributed among all of your course creators, right? And the top performer did the majority of the work. So maybe they get, of that 25%, they’re gonna get 10%, and then the rest of them get, 5%, 3%, 2%, 1%, whatever, based on how well they perform. Chris Badgett: And this is where it becomes mind blowing is Alex has also figured out with Siren affiliates how to stack all these things on top of each other. So you can have rev share with your course creators. You could also have affiliate marketers sending traffic. You can even have content creators on your site. Get like writing blog posts that if they click the link from their blog post or whatever, like all these people can be incentivized in different way. Yep. So it’s a, the ultimate pay for performance system. And there’s a lot of great content that Alex has created on how to actually set all this up and do all this, but he’s thought through everything. For example, you don’t wanna. Accidentally give away set up a program that 150% of their revenue is owed to other people. But he’s thought through all this and teaches you how to do it. Yeah. Any pro tips there? ’cause like a beginner affiliate. Let’s just use a simple affiliate program. The first question you get is what percent commission should I pay? Like, how do you coach somebody in terms of designing incentives and percentages?  Alex Standiford: Yeah, so the first thing that comes to mind for me with that is, of course you have to know your profit margin. You have to know, you have to know your business numbers fundamentally. And the commission tends to reveal itself from that. So that’s a factor. Another factor in that is also just looking at your competitors, seeing what they’re offering, seeing how much what, how much what percent they’re offering and things like that. And also considering the fact that. One of the great things about Siren, because you’re able to run multiple programs, you don’t have to give everybody one percentage rate. You could give the most important, the ones who are gonna be the most impactful to your business. You can, as I say, I like to say, roll out the red carpet for them, right? You can give them the highest rates, the best rates, you can give them the rates that are more competitive than your competitors. You can. Do whatever and then have a smaller rate for the general public or something like that, potentially. And that will make it to where your average, your average percentage rate goes down a little bit between the two of them. The way I think about it is usually, like I said, first off your profit margin, how much that you would be willing to let go in a worst case scenario. I also like to look at what my competitors are doing, and then I and then I think about, what kind of people I’m trying to attract and how I would want to divide up the different programs that I’m going to offer. And then, and that kind of helps me figure out a baseline for what that percentage needs to be. Then I take that number, I cut it in half, and I start there because you wanna have wiggle room. You don’t wanna start with your entire. The entire amount that you’re willing to give away if you stretch and reach out on your tiptoes. You wanna start smaller than that and work up from there. That way you have a little bit of wiggle room to work with and a little bit of opportunity to do that. Especially if you have a bigger, a bigger program that’s gonna hit on higher percents. ’cause the best affiliates are probably gonna be the ones that are gonna be hitting that percentage the most anyway. So you gotta be a little thoughtful about all of those things. 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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. So this is a podcast and not like a screen share situation, but, and you do have lots of great videos on getting sirens set up and how to design these programs, but just talk us through the. If somebody’s interested and they’re like, yeah, I’d like to make more money through a, an affiliate program and get more traffic to my courses and memberships. How simple is this to set up? What are the basic steps?  Alex Standiford: Yeah, so in Siren the process is literally going into the site in clicking on add new program, which then it gives you a field that basically a program creation screen. And inside of there’s a few different key things such as tracking events. Basically all programs are broken down into a few things. You’re defining what events you’re tracking to give somebody credit for, such as clicking on an affiliate link or using a coupon code or a lesson was completed or a course was completed, right? For whatever your program is. You then also have to figure out what the rules are, how, what, how you’re going to distribute. The earnings the reward, right? Even with a program. It can pay multiple affiliates. It can pay just one affiliate. It just depends on how you want, how do you determine which collaborators win whenever whenever the transaction is completed. Then the third piece of that is how much. How much are you going to give? Is it a fixed amount? Is it a percentage of the transaction? And it’s, I think it’s basically those two. And it’s also like how many items in the transaction. So maybe if maybe you have a program just an off the wall idea that I always think about whenever I think about this. We’re coming into winter, obviously, and if you were a clothing site. Store selling clothes, and you still have this batch of shorts that were in stock and you wanna get rid of them quickly before winter closes. You could obviously create a clearance sale on your site, but you could also create a program that’s temporary that you give to your affiliates that says, if you sell these shorts, I will give you a bonus of $5 for every pair you sell. So you could use a fixed rate reward for that, for example. So there’s a few different ways to determine, how much money you pay out whenever the reward happens. And then the last but not least is what parts of the transaction are actually eligible for this. So this allows you to filter programs so that they only apply to certain products. This allows you to. Exclude parts of a transaction. Maybe you don’t want to include fees, maybe you don’t want to account for discounts. Maybe you have some really weird thing that I can’t even consider, and you wanna include shipping costs into it. Who knows? You can break down and determine what those are as well. What’s really cool about that is you could then have, if you had those shorts for that program I was talking about earlier, you could have a program that only applies to those shorts, but then you could also have an affiliate program that applies to all products and they would be able to stack on top of each other, so you would be able to pay that. You know that. That one time flat fee because somebody was able to sell those shorts. And then you’re also able to pay the percentage to the affiliate who was actually able to do that transaction. And then even on top of all of that, one of the other things that comes to mind for me for this is you can actually associate ownership of a product or a course. With a specific affiliate. And what’s really cool about that is that it allows you to create royalty programs. With a multi-course instructor example that we were talking about earlier, you can set up a program so that whenever a course creator’s program. Product. Our course is sold. They always get a cut of the sales. I recently had a customer, I have a customer right now a client of mine actually, who I’m helping them build their website. They they’re using siren for a a really cool desk, this really awesome desk set up, and it has this custom mat that fits, is inlaid into the desk perfectly. And that mat can be printed with anything on it. So what they’re doing is they are working with a bunch of artists and they’re finding artists to create art for this mat. And then that mat they’re selling the mat with those different art pieces. And if that artist’s art is selected for that print, they receive a royalty. Then also, of course, they also get an affiliate link at the same time because they’re gonna be motivated to promote, Hey, go check out this awesome art for this desk. This is my art. You should go buy it and you should go buy this desk and here’s my link. You can support me through that. So it, it gives, it, it just allows you to create really interesting programs and things like that go way beyond just having. A basic affiliate program with a thousand affiliates and 995 of them are just in different people who, are never gonna actually do anything with it. Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. And Siren is a WordPress based solution, so all you have to do is install the plugin and start setting up your first program, which is a, which is amazing. It’s, we’re giving you some. Interesting use cases, but to actually get started it’s really not that complicated. And I like what you said too about the multi instructor platform. Not only can an instructor earn a royalty because their course is getting consumed. But they can, they are also incentivized to promote their course on your platform as an affiliate. So if they go above and beyond just creating the content and getting a royalty, but also helping promote it on your platform, they can earn even more money by. Basically joining the marketing team. Yeah. Which is awesome.  Alex Standiford: Yeah, it’s, yeah it’s great. And it’s, and that’s exactly what it was built for. So now it allows you to and the examples that we’ve done in the past, whenever, ’cause we actually did a video in the past about built literally built this exact Udemy coin that we’re talking about. And in that example, we had set it up to where the course creator. Like I said, with a royalty program, they always receive 50% anytime that course or whatever, you can set it to whatever you want, but in our example, we did 50, I think and they can get, 50% of the sale every time. That product is sold regardless of if they had an affiliate program or if they sold it or not. And then you can give them another, 40% and for the affiliate program on top of that. So now if they sell their own course, they earn 90% of that sale. And basically the platform gets a 10% commission or a 10% cut just for basically hosting it and maintaining it. But what’s really cool is then you can on top of that, create a typical affiliate program, right? That isn’t for course creators. It’s just a regular program and you can have it like a 20% or something like that. That’s a lower amount. And whenever they close and they sell anything. They’re able to get a 20% commission. And so at that point, 60% of the money is being consumed by the owner, but also the affiliate. But you still get a little bit more of that cut because they’re only getting 20% instead of 40%. So that’s what I mean about how, when you’re trying to figure out what your percentage is, it’s a little tricky. You have to design the other pieces of the puzzle to understand how they all stack up whenever you’re using Siren, because it’s, it usually ends up being a more dynamic system than just a simple, dead simple, we have an affiliate program and this is what everybody gets. Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. And the really, the most mind blowing part of all of this is you don’t have to do it alone, by developing, getting other people to help with sales and marketing, or creating course content. In this multi instructor example what Siren allows people to do is to work together and also be incentivized based on what, the performance of whatever effort it is, whether it’s content creation, course creation. Affiliate marketing, sending traffic, whatever. It’s really a beautiful thing. And it unlocks growth. Yeah. And with proper incentives that all that stuff is set up and automated. So it is, the genius is in designing whatever your unique incentive program’s gonna be. It’s Alex Standiford: yeah. Yeah, it is. And actually why, speaking of that, something else that comes to mind for me there that’s really interesting to me that I hadn’t actually fully considered when I originally built it, but this is, this has been what has come out of it. If you create, you could create two programs. One that’s focused on generating leads and one that’s focused on generating conversions. And what’s really cool about that is it could be the lead focus program is for podcasters, bloggers, long tail keyword, longer term people who are, who take a little, who are earlier in the buyer’s journey. And then you have somebody who’s focused on conversions. Maybe they’re focused on doing webinars and they’re doing the one-on-one things where there’s the, later in the journey and pushing people to actually make that purchase. You can create a program where it’s a split commission. So the person who was in earlier in the journey will get a commission, and then the person who actually did the conversion also gets a commission. So they both get it. And what’s really cool about that is whether they know it or not, they’re collaborating, they’re working together instead of against each other. And. If they happen to know each other or something like that, and they know that they’re both in the same system, the same program, they can actually create programs collaboratively together to create funnels together and build entire things in service of promoting your product. So there’s this entire idea where you’re able to create collaboration between your collaborators in a way that is really difficult to do. In a monolithic single affiliate program solution, usually in those cases, they’re competitors, right? They’re always only one person ever wins in those solutions. But with Siren, since there’s multiple programs, there can be multiple winners and you can set it up to where they they’re able to actually work together and collaborate. Actually, something that I’ve seen a lot of people do is they’re working with business partners. Who are owned a portion of the company and they’ll actually use Siren to track their revenue share with each other. So they’ll set it up to where they’ll say, I’m an owner this is the founder that it’s a 40, 60 or something like that, the revenue. And they literally just build an incentive program that is just those two people and they just make it to where it’s a 40, 60 split and they set it up in siren and then they don’t have to worry about tracking how much everybody gets or anything like that. It’s just built directly into the system. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just one more pro tip before we go. It’s not necessarily just about making money, and this is why the incentive program is can be a lot more powerful than ads. For example if you wanna differentiate leads from sales, the simple way to think about that is you could have a free course on your site that you use to warm up your audience, introduce them to you, and stuff like that. And then you have your paid program, but those people in your free thing are, I would consider leads and you could, I would rather pay these affiliates or partners, $5 for every free signup than do ad do an ad based funnel with Google or Facebook or whatever that’s, where I’m just rolling the dice and crossing my fingers and hoping it’s profitable. So it’s, yeah it’s so cool what you’ve built.  Alex Standiford: Yeah. It’s awesome. Thank you. Yeah it’s been a lot of fun and there’s I’m honestly, and what’s crazy is I’m just, I feel like I’ve just like word vomited a lot of exciting, interesting things about siren here, but I feel like it just scratches the surface on a lot of the things that it can do. So there’s some pretty cool solutions that I’ve seen where people are, have, created. Things that are similar. They’ve created programs more similar to DoorDash, but instead of delivery drivers, it’s vendors working on, fixing bugs or working on code for a website. I’ve seen people, like you said, build Udemy clones. I’ve seen people build Netflix clones where there’s different, it doesn’t have to be educational content. It could also be it could just be video content, movies or special, some kind of niche entertainment. I’ve seen, obviously people create plenty of affiliate programs and things like that but the point is revenue share. And royalty programs come to mind too. I’ve seen people create Etsy clones where they have a whole bunch of artists. There’s actually one customer I know who’s using this for 3D printing. So they have a site where people who do 3D printed models. They can share it on that site and sell those models to people who have 3D printers. And when the product is sold, that 3D, the person who made that 3D model, gets a royalty. So there’s all kinds of different ways that this can be used. I see. I’ve seen local furniture shops use it for consignment deals to sell furniture in their. In their in their store. Because all they do is they associate those products with a specific collaborator, and then once that sells, they get com, they get their, their cut. I’ve seen. All kinds of, just, there’s just so many the list just goes on and on. There’s just so many different ways car dealerships are using it to, create bonus programs on top of just selling for the regular affiliate deals. I use it in my own web agency. I have a salesperson who sells things at my business at my web agency, and they, they’re using WooCommerce in that case to basically create quotes using an order. And if that order goes through, it just automatically gives, knows how much to give them for a commission. ’cause it’s just all handled directly through that system. So the sky’s the limit. If you can figure out what to, how to make it work with, WooCommerce or lifter LMS and the program exists, I bet you can build it in siren and if you can’t. You should talk to me ’cause I would like to see what you figured out that you would wanna do that can’t be done. ’cause I bet it can be done.  Chris Badgett: Just for context, Udemy raised a total of $274 million. Over nine rounds to build this platform. Yeah. With LifterLMS and Siren, for less than 1% of far less than 1% of that, you can build the same thing. And you don’t have to spend $274 million. And this is the best time of year where you can get the best tools at the best price. So head on over to siren affiliates.com. Use the coupon code Lifter 25. And that’s a great deal and get started. And if you want more leads and sales, start building your affiliate and partner programs. That’s it for this episode of LMS Cast. Alex, thanks so much for coming back on. Keep up the great work and at Siren and we’ll have to do this again sometime. And if you’re listening to this and fascinated, go to YouTube and search for. LifterLMS, siren Affiliates, build a Udemy Clone, something like that. And you’ll find the in-depth tutorial where we showed you how to build a site like Udemy with the revenue share and everything. Just using Siren LifterLMS and WordPress, and you’re ready to roll. But thanks for coming, Alex. We really appreciate it.  Alex Standiford: Yeah, thanks Chris. I’m glad to be here and I appreciate it. We will definitely do it again sometime soon. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How To Sell More Courses With Incentivized Affiliates appeared first on LMScast.

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

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. 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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.