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 Greg Zakowicz from Omnisend offers a useful, data-driven strategy to assist course developers in expanding their audience and boosting enrollments through successful multi-channel marketing. Greg highlights the significance of moving beyond conventional email campaigns by including SMS, online push alerts, and personalized messaging into a unified approach. Greg has more than 20 years of expertise in e-commerce and lifecycle marketing. He describes how course developers may utilize automation to offer timely, pertinent information at every stage of the learner experience by segmenting their audiences based on behavior, such as engaged prospects, new leads, or inactive users. Greg outlines important lifecycle automation processes that are intended to increase conversion rates and student retention, such as welcome sequences, abandoned cart messages, onboarding emails, and post-purchase interaction. Additionally, he emphasizes how crucial it is to keep email lists healthy and optimize message timing to match client intent. Creators may oversee all communications from a single location by utilizing a unified platform such as Omnisend, guaranteeing consistent message at every touchpoint. 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 Casts. We’re joined by a special guest. His name is Greg Zow. He’s from Omnis Send. You can find Omnis send@omnissend.com. Greg is an e-commerce and retail advisor at Omnis Send. We’re gonna go deep on marketing for LMS websites and the creators of those websites. We’re gonna talk about marketing automation, multi-channel marketing. Changes in buying behavior and what’s going on at the macro level. But first, welcome to the show, Greg. Thanks, Chris. Super excited to be here and looking forward to a good conversation. Yeah, I’m really loving Omnis. Send Omnis send has done a lot of great things in the WordPress space, both with WooCommerce, LMS plugins, membership plugins, and the digital commerce side of things. Let’s start at the macro. What are you seeing in terms of how spending behavior or cons, consumer behavior is changing in ways that might be relevant to course creators and coaches out there?  Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, it’s a good question ’cause we’ve been seeing it for the past 18 months and it’s finally coming to a head now. So I’ll start from the product level and we’ll back over. Because that’s where a lot of that consumer behavior changes data comes from. We all know we live in a relatively uncertain economic time right now. Every day seems to ebb and flow a little bit here and there. But the changes have been coming, like inflation’s been around for years, so we’ve been dealing with it ever since the pandemic. And really it’s, while they say it’s come down, it’s come down over the previous level, which was high, right? So I feel at the grocery store when I go. Buying product. So about 18 plus months ago, we started to see a shift to value focus. Private labels, right? Customer or consumers, would trade down when the value of the private labels matched, product quality or whatever it is, stores now. Costco, target, Walmart, they’ve all expanded their private label offerings. And that’s just an example. So we were starting to see like this value focused mindset, which was groceries, it was products, it was sneakers, it was clothing, whatever. And then you had stores like Teo and stuff like that and Shane, which are facing their own problems now, at least for the US audience. But they were contributing to that. So yeah, I can get a. Desk clamp for four bucks, why not? If it breaks in 12 months, I’m out four bucks and I’ll just buy another one. So that was the shift, and over the last probably six months, we started to see that accelerate a little bit more. So spending was still up, but what we were starting to see was the number of orders were down. So what you would have is consumers focusing on value. So Walmart’s a good example here. If I. Start to buy a couple things at Walmart and my dollar, I need to stretch further and I get the value here. Now what I do is I start to consolidate my purchases. So spending was up, but the number of orders across the board were down. So what we were doing is consolidating purchases. But what that tells me as. A brand as a course creator, as an agency, every sale really matters at that point because there are fewer sales to go around. You wanna capture those dollars. So average order value would go up. And then last month the report came out, came out last week, but last month we started to see consumer spending slow for the first time in almost 10 years. So those tariffs and stuff and kind of that hesitation and concern is caught up with us. So ffr. If you’re a course creator, you’re not selling, widgets per se, where you need to worry about consolidating value, but the shopping behaviors have changed. Consumers are in this value focused mindset that’s gonna translate to everything. Whether you’re buying a car, you’re buying gas, you’re buying a service, you’re buying you. HVAC services, right? You start to evaluate those purchases a little bit differently. And if you’re a course grader, you now need to look at, okay, this is a lens which consumers and my customers are going to order through. Do my offerings, do my value props. All these things match that lens and can I filter that a little bit more? And that’s I know we’ll talk about this a little bit more, but that’s really what course creators and agencies should be looking at. It might not. Directly apply to them from a product standpoint. But that lens at which those same consumers that are buying those things and have shifted their mindset, that’s the lens they’re looking through and that’s what we need to talk about and flesh out a little bit more.  Chris Badgett: Does that make sense? It does. And and I guess it’s somewhat of a controversial issue, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the cost of higher education. I’m a fan of university and liberal arts education as an example. I’m an anthropologist, but I’m a business guy now. And I got a lot of value in university. But when you think about that value lens and the uncertainty of the world I just have this sense that course creator, subject matter experts. Can put together offers that kind of help fulfill the promise of the quote, American dream of get good education and get a good job, or chart your course in life. It seems like there’s a lot of opportunity for course creators and as an example this was several years ago I think in 2 20 19, I was like thinking I could spend two years and get a MBA. Or I could, work with a business coach that really understands software entrepreneurship for a quarter of the cost and it’s more focused and targeted on my domain. And I did that and it was an amazing two years. But what are some thoughts about that in terms of. Creators who want to help people get jobs or grow skills, like in a more decentralized, non-traditional higher ed fashion. Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, it’s a real we could probably spend two hours talking about this, over a cup of coffee or something, but I’m like you, I went to college, loved my experience. Learned a lot, right? There’s a lot of growth that goes in there, especially at those ages. I’m also saving for my kids’ college now, which you talk about the cost increasing. Holy cow. But I work in marketing, like you talk to a marketer, did you go to school for marketing? And it’s 95% of ’em did not. And I did marketing was my minor communications guy. I went to radio broadcasting, right? That was my focus. And I transitioned to marketing. I look at this and go, okay, do you need a marketing degree to work in marketing? Absolutely not. Do you need a X, Y, Z degree to work in a different field? Some cases, yes, doctors, stuff like that. In some cases, a lot of cases, no, you don’t. Now we live in an era where YouTube is probably the best educational platform. Think about it out there, right? I replaced a fuse in the back of my dryer a couple weeks ago, which normally would have to pay a guy to come out. And I just looked at a two minute video and bought a three minute $3 part on Amazon. I’m like, boom. Done. So we talk about courses and stuff like this and upleveling and learning new skills, and I think the, for me, we live in a, that age where, yeah, these things make sense. The more you can, the more you can learn about a specific topic industry. Having a mentor. And then sometimes these things are important for just connecting who’s the instructor on this thing? Can I connect with them on LinkedIn and learn more and ask them questions and things like that without having to pay $20,000 a year or $40,000 a year? Do. So I think it’s great. I think what we talk about courses. We should be like, this is a value add to me. We talked offline about this before about promoting value add, and I think this is one of those value adds. Yeah. Cost of education’s increasing, cost of everything’s increasing, and we have these less costly courses that you can still learn the same skills that will get you ahead and whether you’re full-time in your career. Omni Send, we still do training courses and we take classes and we do stuff like that. You never stop learning. And that’s the thing. And I think that’s the one thing where people, I say this probably more so young people, and I was definitely one of these, one of those where, you get outta college and you’re like, all right. I’ve done it, and now I just need to learn that specific role of my next job. And once I do that, and really the learning never ends. And I think that’s where chorus creators are looking at this going, okay, we have a value here that fits with what people need in a very competitive but really expensive world, and we don’t, we’re not that expensive and we still get you the same value. It’s the one thing people never look at is, okay, I’ve got an instructor here in college that is charging me 45 grand a year to go to, and I’ve got an instructor here that maybe has the same qualifications, has charging me 400 bucks or 300 bucks or 200 bucks to do, right? I might have a little more interaction here maybe not, right? I might have more direct access here, but. Does this person over here have so much more knowledge in this person? A lot of times, no. There’s a lot of people out there that have more knowledge than me on certain topics, and that’s fine. And it doesn’t mean that I’m not valuable. It doesn’t mean they’re not valuable. So I think this is the one benefit that course creators have now is that. People are seeking upleveling, they’re seeking cheaper ways to do things. And it doesn’t mean those cheaper ways are any less effective or any less better. So I don’t know if that answers the initial question, Chris. I might have just skipped over the whole thing, but I went on this diatribe about education, but I think course creators sit in a really unique position now where maybe they did in 20 years ago because it was harder and even 10 years ago. It is, you get these online universities that. You get the bad terminology when the student loan thing was happening a few years ago about these, the fake colleges and stuff like that. But I think people are smart enough to realize, hey, there’s a skill, there’s a class there. That skill will help me. That class is good. It’s got good reviews, let me do it right.  Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. You nailed it. Let’s talk about email marketing or email automation through the lens. I think Omnis send one of the things that makes Omnis send great. Is, it was born out of the Shopify retail space. And what can course creators and coaches learn from more of the traditional online retail email marketing and automation space. Like what tips and tricks, what transfers over quite well that course creators may not be thinking about? Yeah. This is, so this is  Greg Zakowicz: fun because 20 years ago, your B2B. Marketing approaches and D two C were fairly different, right? You had different mediums and stuff like that, and strategies were different. And really those things are like this now, right? You might have a fringe here and there, but for the most part, those strategies are the same. You have the same consumers buying products, running organizations, making organizational decisions that are also buying a pair of shoes on the weekends. What we’ve seen over, I would say the last 10 years, but notably in the last five years specifically was just the convergence of these. So whether I’m looking at a B2B company, their email program, or a D two C company, I’m still seeing the same things. Be more effective than others. Value of email is a first party channel, right? And I don’t discount paid ads on paid social or paid search. I think they’re all part and necessary parts of the journey. But email is a first party channel, so you can. We get this later, but there’s ways to reduce retargeting costs using email and cutting your costs on social platforms and stuff like that. But email is a first part. Channel SMS is the same thing. Someone willingly gives you a piece of information saying, yeah, I want to hear from you. That is gold in itself, whether it be two B or D two C, it’s perfect. The things within that we’re seeing to be most effective, we’ve been saying it for years. I’ve been saying it, everyone’s probably sick of hearing it, but it’s still true. It doesn’t make it less true. It’s automations and. We put out these stats reported on me. Send, we have, excuse me last year, 26, almost 26 billion emails going around for a variety of customers. So we’re looking at the data. It holds true every year. Automated messages are driving 37% of all email orders. They’re accounting for 2% of sends. Reason is they’re timely and they’re relevant, they’re naturally then sending individually. So I take an action, I get an email based on an action. That email is customized and it sends automatically, you don’t have to be awake, you don’t have to schedule it, you just need to set it up one time. So those things are disproportionate from a revenue and it’s a send standpoint, but it doesn’t mean all automations are created equal. So this is like you’ll hear oh, send the birthday message or do this write in engages, and those. Sure they’ll engage. You’ll get high opens, but they don’t necessarily drive conversion. So yeah, you could have, you could create a course, you can try to retarget a customer, maybe you asked their birthday ’cause you’re trying to create a connection. You send ’em and they’re like, okay, great. I got a birthday message. So what three messages that drive more than anything. And this is related to products, it related to course creators, it related, it relates to agencies selling services, welcome messages. Browse abandonment or product abandonment, however you wanna do it, and card abandonment. So check out abandonment. Those three, whether you’re selling something, a service, those things, three things apply to you. Those will make up more than they’re roughly around 87% of all automated orders come from those three messages. So you talk about out weight performance here. Those are the things. So if I’m a course creator I’m gonna have a popup on my website that I probably got you to my website through a paid social ad or a paid search ad. Something. So I’ve already invested money in that. So I get you to my website. I’ve got a popup. I wanna capture that email address. ’cause now I can retarget you, right? I don’t have to spend tons. My email costs what? An email costs which is not much. So I captured that information. Now I can send you that welcome message. That’s one of ’em. That welcome message I can introduce, right? The offerings, the value add, really promote that value on there. If I don’t get you to buy. To put something in your cart, go to the checkout page. I know at that point what you’re viewing. I know what products you’re, your pages you’re going to, so I know a level of interest there. I also have an email that welcome email where I might have links in there where I can look at and say, okay, I clicked on upleveling on marketing. The marketing cores versus the admin course, or HR course, or whatever it is. So I can now do any sort of automation retargeting based on what you clicked or based on the pages you viewed, which is your browser abandonment, right? Viewed. So now we’re sending these things off and we can do email or SMS or both at those things. And if I can get you to a checkout page, conference con conferences, were doing this 15 years ago. I get to the checkout page, I don’t register for the conference. I get the abandoned cart one. It’s really just a checkout abandonment one. And that’s still, that applies to, it could be agencies and it could be course graders. So you’ve got these things that are transferrable over. But a lot of times what I find is either B2B companies, course graders, agencies, they neglect them ’cause they automatically think, ’cause they go through ’em on their personal lives, they think. Oh, this is for products. This isn’t for me. A service or I’m an offering or I’m an online product. So it doesn’t matter. The fact is, it does, and they still work. They’re timely, relevant, and they’re based on intent. I’m on your website ’cause there’s some sort of intent there. I might not be ready to buy today, but I’m interested and that is the intent you need to follow with that stuff. It’s a long answer for you Chris, but we can dig into any one of those strategies you want. We can dig into. Whatever you want but those are the three I hit. Welcome messages. Browse abandonment. Checkout abandonment. 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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. Wow, I think you nailed that. 87% of automation orders coming through those three and. Just to put it out there, if you’re watching or listening this, you can do this easily with Lifter LMS or WooCommerce, or paid memberships Pro with Omnis Send, which integrates directly. And you guys have like templates and all kinds of stuff to make setting this up easy.  Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, everything’s pre-built. You can customize anything you want, but we pre-built segments. We pre-built workflows based on what you want. You select it and you can. Even though it’s templatized, you can then customize the template if you want. But the whole thing is designed to get you to build it in literally a matter of seconds to maybe a minute a couple minutes to create a message, but we even templatize the message for you so you can just customize a couple things and super easy to do. And then you can get more advanced and sophisticated as you want and slowly add and optimize it. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s riff on Black Friday, cyber Monday a little bit. I noticed, the software industry was looking at the retail industry and like what happened at malls and shopping centers and stuff with this craze to buy on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and all these things. And the software industry got on this bus, and particularly in WordPress, where with a very value focused buyer, black Friday typically has substantial discounts. Lifter. LMS is an example. We make five to 10 times a normal month’s revenue during this kind of November, end of November period. And I see a lot of course creators and coaches not leveraging Black Friday or at least trying. Another thing I see, which is interesting is some people do a Black Friday campaign once and then they stop because they’re like. They get bored of it, but I heard this quote that you’re, you may be tired of your marketing, but your market never is. Black Friday will come around like clockwork every year. But stepping back, what could course creators and coaches do, or, and even agency professionals around Black Friday to, get those massive increases in sales or perhaps tie into another event that has. Shopping behavior kind of baked into the psyche and the cultural landscape?  Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, it’s a good question. So I love the analogy kind of you gave there, there was an old saying in radio boss told me it was like, play what you want at home. Play what they want at work. So it’s the same, like your marketing thing was always spot on with it. It’s the exact same thing. Here’s the thing about Black Friday, cyber Monday or whatever. Keep your right if you’re back to school season, which we’re currently in right now, right? Whatever your big sales period is. We talked earlier about the lens of value focused shopping. Nothing screams value focused shopping more than Black Friday, cyber Monday. Those, that, how those holiday deals. So whether you like offering ’em or not is one thing. You can offer ’em. People are expecting it, right? It doesn’t have to be the biggest thing in the world. And I’ll give you an example. I have a couple pieces of exercise equipment at home. I have an iFit membership to check my workouts on and they run Black Friday deals and yearly memberships are not inexpensive. I’m a value focused shopper and they run ’em and. Every Black Friday, I go look to see what the discounts are, look at the previous year, and I will renew my membership at that point. But it’s the subscription, but I’m looking for value on it. I don’t need to do it in June when it expires in December, and I just start stacking ’em. So the one thing I will look at is one, people are expecting some sort of value. So be in the conversation, right? It doesn’t have to be the biggest discount, but be in the conversation. Reinforce to your audience, yes, I’m in the trend. I see you. I can offer this to you. And if you can’t offer, if everyone else is doing 40% and you’re like, you know what? I could do 10% off. That’s what we do here, right? Add onto it with focusing on value. What makes your course different and really promote 10% off for Black Friday. So let ’em know it’s a deal. Let ’em know 10% off. Let a limited time window on there. For four days, only, five days only, whatever it might be. You can use SMS as a flash sale, two hours, maybe get 15% off, but then focus on the other values, direct access to course or have your questions answered by course creators or whatever your value props are. And that’s how you wanna build that whole thing together. So don’t have to give away the farm. You don’t have to do 70% off. Again, you don’t have to, but you need to be in the conversation. If I’m looking at this is just consumer mentality here and the marketing psychology, but I’m looking at two courses. One is, 50 bucks more, but they were giving me 10% off and this one is flat fee. And at the end of the day, they’re at the same price. I’m gonna look at this and go, okay, I’m gonna take the 10% off ’cause it’s priced more here and I’m getting a better deal. So inherently I think we have better value over here. Might not be true, but if they’re not, they’re just promoting 10% off this course and I’ve got. Hey, flat fee, but we get this, and this. Now I’m looking, okay, where is that value? I’m looking through that lens. Where am I getting the best bang for the buck? And it might be on these value props here, so we need to be in the conversation with it, if nothing else. And I think that’s the one thing to look at is, look at margins. Obviously you should have fairly decent margins, I would think if you’re a course greater because you’re not manufacturing products per se. But you need to be in the conversation. But I would promote it. I would try to do, find ways that work with your brand, work with your product, your discounting philosophy as a organization and kind of move from there for it. But I gotta be in the conversation for it, in my opinion.  Chris Badgett: Let’s learn from retail again, and I’m hoping you can do the same thing for SMS that you did with. Email automation. Three emails welcome, email browse abandonment and card abandonment. SMS is underutilized by course creators and coaches. Omnis send makes it easy, but at a international level ’cause a lot of course creators have people all over the world. I think a lot, there’s a misconception that. Email’s easy ’cause everybody has an email. But how do I do all this international text messaging? Omnis Send actually does, it makes it easy to the tech part and the infrastructure part of that. But what kinds of SMS campaigns could course creators do? Greg Zakowicz: I think give you the same answer. It’s gonna be the same messages. So what we see from SMS, just put it in perspective conversion rates, click rates on automated SMS more than double. Just scheduled messages so effective there it’s not 37 to 2%, but it’s, I think the number was 18% of all or SMS orders came from automated SMS 9% of sent, so still two to one ratio. Again, the reason is simple. It’s relevant, it’s timely, and it’s personal to ’em. So what I would do from an SMS standpoint is look at the same ones, right? I talk, I talked a little bit about focusing on high intent messages, birthday messages, great. They can engage, but they’re not high intent. I’m not opening the email because planning on shopping, maybe I am, but. I’m opening ’cause you’re wishing a birthday. And people like their birthdays generally, and they wanna feel good. It’s the intent, the welcome message has an intent. So send an automated SMS message. Just get in their inbox, get in their messages, slide in their dms browse abandonment. Again, there’s a high intent there. What am I checking out? So that’s an easy place where you can just slide an SMS in there and be like, Hey, we noticed you checking out X, Y, Z. Or don’t forget, all. All new subscribers get X, Y, Z, and just have a link there, getting it back. So if they decide, 12 hours from now, they’ve got an easy place to link. And then again, abandonment, check out abandonment. You’re so close, don’t you know? And you just promote Hey, get ahead, get that promotion, whatever that value add for taking that course is right. It’s the same three messages that I would start with, and then you can expand from there. But I don’t think you need to expand a whole lot. Maybe. A re-engagement message if they stop logging into the course or whatever lapse purchase, stuff like that. But I don’t think you need birthday messages on SMS for a course creator. I don’t think you need, back in stock messages. You don’t only have back in stock. So really what I tell people is look at the intent of a, the customer, consumer, whoever it is, what’s their intent, and that’s where you wanna follow your messages. So that’s the second lens that put it through. I’m sure you’ll probably ask me about it. Like we were chatting offline about this is like people are scared to jump in S mess. They either don’t know how to do it, they don’t think, for course creators, it makes sense, or agencies it makes sense. They think, oh, it’s too intimate, it’s too personal, and I’m not a fun brand, right? I’m trying to, I’m trying to educate someone. I would say it, it’s hogwash. So the best thing to do. Is test it and how do you test it? You put ask for mobile. Ask for mobile numbers at signup. On the popup. Leave it an optional field. Do not make it required. Do not make it seem like if they get an incentive, whether it’s an ebook or a discount on the first course or whatever it is for setting up for an email address, you then go to a second step that makes it sound like they need to sign up for mobile to get that. A lot of times they’ll say it, but they still do it. Sometimes they require it. It’s okay to have two steps. Just make that second step optional. If people sign up for your SMS, it’s an indication that yeah, they’re okay getting an SMS from you. If they don’t sign up, it’s your indication that, yeah, maybe my audience for this particular product or course it’s not their jam and that’s okay. But that’s a simple way to figure it out. And then if you need to start, if you start to see those, estimate, those mobile numbers come in, the simple way to start is just put an SMS message in those automations we talked about. Let the automated SMS do the work, and you don’t have to schedule messages every week or every two weeks to those people until you’re ready. Let ’em see if it works. Like my kids say, let it cook, right? That’s the simple way to start. You let the automation do it, you let it test out. If it’s not gonna work on a really high intent, ones that are proven to convert, maybe it’s your indication that yeah, they want SMS, but we don’t really have the formula for what they want from that SMS. And you could slowly refine your automated ones until they start working, and then that gives you an indication of how to build your scheduled messages out.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. You mentioned fund brand and maybe we could use potentially the university professor versus an independent subject matter expert as an example. This is so from like a marketing angle. How do we build, a fun brand office, authenticity, trust, and authority? Because I see a lot of people get hung up in this imposter syndrome stuff. Yeah. And in our marketing, just how can we be more authentic and authoritative and really at the end of the day, build that trust. Greg Zakowicz: I, I think you, the word you used is authentic, right? Like I look at it from a couple, couple different ways. I’ve been in this, I’ve been in email for almost 20 years now, I think 19 plus years. I’ve been doing it for a long time. I’ve been in SMS for over a decade. I’ve been through B2B, I’ve done D two C. I’ve done kind of all roles in it. I still suffer from imposter syndrome. I’m like, I know my stuff, but I still suffer from it, right? I think it’s natural for people. We also live in an era where the industry changes a lot, right? You think about e-commerce five years ago, it was pretty well fleshed out, but it’s so different now. Right now we got a agent tech AI for shopping and browsing and doing all these things and it’s continually changing, and I think that’s where kind of imposter syndrome comes in. But then I look at, okay, if I’m a professor and not knocking professors here at universities, but if I’m a professor and I’m not in the actual field, I’m. Doing coursebook and studying, lecturing off that versus here’s Greg over here who’s living in this day by day and looking at numbers and, talking to brands. Which one might be better for me, from a practical skill standpoint. And it’s probably gonna be the subject matter expert. So it’s not really answering your question yet, Chris, but I think there’s a lot of value to being in the field day to day and figuring out, hey, this is working, this isn’t working. But it used to. And it’s less theory, it’s more practical. And I think the practical skills sell how to build it. I’m really bad at building things like this. Just personally it takes a lot of time and I’m not a course creator, but YouTube, we talked about being I mentioned as the greatest educational tool out there. Right now. You got other ones like Khan Academy and other courses. But collectively, YouTube is awesome. So you have the ability to build. Short videos and things that kind of reinforce it there. You can be more fun on YouTube. You don’t have to be stuffy. TikTok, Instagram, whatever social channels you wanna use, you can be a lot more fun and build the authenticity there. You can write bylines for, industry articles, whatever you want. So I think it’s just a collective effort. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of, it’s a collective effort there to, but you have the ability where. People don’t care if you’re, suit and tie professional anymore. For the most part. They care that whether you know your stuff and you can relate that content transferable and they trust you. And I think that’s the biggest thing. And you build trust by, say say what you’re gonna do and then do what you say it’s the same thing, right? If I’m telling you that automation is awesome and everyone’s automation stinks, they’re gonna be like, this guy doesn’t know what he is talk about, but we see the automation work and now. We can see which ones work or whatever. So it’s all about just building trust and having fun and smiling and, self-deprecating when it matters. You know your audience best and what type of course you’re building, but be relatable. And that’s really the biggest thing.  Chris Badgett: Question about Omnis. Send email marketing platforms and multichannel marketing platforms. They’re a little sticky. But I’ve noticed every two to three years people start, getting frustrated with their current setup. And maybe they’re starting to shop around and looking to switch. If somebody’s looking to start or switch with, switch to Omnis, send particularly around this idea of, welcome automation, browse, abandonment, automation, card abandonment automation. What’s the best way to get started and why should they take a hard look at Omnis Send.  Greg Zakowicz: Yeah. Best way to get started, I think for anyone, regardless of the type of platform, is to understand what else is out there. So you look at your own capabilities okay, what are we lacking that we need? Why do we think we need that? So you gotta figure out what you’re missing, right? And it could be the platform is not advancing. We got ai, but the platform doesn’t have any AI in it. And now I’m using three tools to get one thing done. So you gotta figure out what you’re lacking, why you’re lacking, and then. What you want on the next platform. That’s the easiest thing to do. It’s not always easy, but that’s the simplest place to get started. And then when you start looking at what else is out there, you have to look at the platforms. Do they have these things? And what else did the platform offer beyond these core things? So I think every platform in the world has features that most people aren’t going to use. You get the 80 20 rule, or, 90 10, whatever they want, where, 20% of the features used by 80% of the people. But do they have the ability to have the features? Should you grow into ’em as you scale? Can they meet your scaling needs? And when you look at that, I point you back to Omnis sound, but the platform is just good. I’ve been in, in the email email marketing and SMS platform space for 13, 14 years now. The platform’s good. We have AI built into things you can. Generally talk about segments you wanna build and they’ll build a segment for you, right? So it’s small things like that. We talked about automation. Do they have automation? Is it customizable and is it gated? Now, that’s an important thing too, because you’ll have email providers that say, Hey, we have all these things. You go on there and you get this cheap plan. It’s oh, you gotta get the enterprise plan to get these things. So look to see what’s gated and what’s not. And that’s gonna be an important thing. Our automations, you could be at our free plan, you can use the automations. You gotta figure out that stuff out. Does it integrate with your platform? So WooCommerce WordPress, do you have an integration that syncs the data? ’cause that’s gonna be important then what other tools? Right? Popups. Okay. Popups built in. I can use ’em, I can choose not to use ’em, but it’s there for me if I want to. Do they have testing with the popups? Do they have segment builders? Do they have, like what’s the email builder like what I, when we talk about like why should you use Omnis send, we just check the boxes, we follow the industry trends, we build it into the platform. We integrate very quickly on these things. We take customer feedback and that’s the one thing I will say about Omnis Send versus others. We’re organically funded, so if we don’t have investors to report to, we have our customers to report to. And if we’re not providing a value to our customers, they’re not gonna choose us. They choose us, get 125,000 happy customers. It’s just a really solid platform. When you’re looking, go talk to someone there. You can sign up for Omnis, send for free. You don’t have to put a credit card down. So if you wanna just play around with it, go sign up, play around with it, integrate it, do what you wanna do and see if it works for you and see if those customizations. Reaching out to the company a lot of times will give you a sense of. Are they business oriented? Are they customer oriented? Are they fun to talk to? Are they very stuffy? A lot of times just having a conversation with someone’s easiest way word, approachable team over here.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Greg Zow, e-commerce and retail advisor at Omnis Send. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you online? Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, usual places. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m on Blue Sky more than Twitter now. Not many people are on Blue Sky, but I’m over there. If you go to my Twitter, you can link over, but LinkedIn’s probably the best place you can find me. Anyone else on Omnis Sun there? Omnis Sun as well. They’re pretty active on social too, so just feel free to pop over. We’re friendly.  Chris Badgett: Awesome Greg. Thanks for coming on the show. I could have talked for hours with you on marketing, but it’s been a great conversation. Really appreciate it.  Greg Zakowicz: I appreciate the invite and thanks for having me Chris. I enjoyed as well.  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 Master Multi Channel Course Marketing With Greg Zakowicz From Omnisend 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 the episode, Lindsay Halsey from Pathfinder SEO delves at the ways artificial intelligence is changing search behavior and the implications for website owners, particularly those creating online training programs or e-learning platforms. She explains that with the rise of AI-generated search results such as Google’s AI Overviews and conversational modes users often get direct answers without clicking through to a website. Because of this change, websites find it more difficult to become visible using traditional SEO alone. However, Lindsay emphasizes that this is merely a new challenge and not the end for content providers. She highlights the ongoing importance of human connection, pointing out that when people wish to learn a lot or make an investment in something worthwhile, they still look for reliable professionals. Lindsay suggests producing very specialized, long-tail content that is suited to certain audiences and situations in order to remain competitive. She advises going narrow and answering specific search inquiries that represent issues and objectives in the actual world rather than focusing on broad, fiercely competitive keywords. Lindsay suggests producing very specialized, long-tail content that is suited to certain audiences and situations in order to remain competitive. She advises going narrow and answering specific search inquiries that represent issues and objectives in the actual world rather than focusing on broad, fiercely competitive keywords. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest, she’s back on the show. It’s Lindsay Halsey from Pathfinder, SEO. You can find her and pathfinder@pathfinderseo.com. We’re gonna get into all topics, SEO, and AI, and getting found on the internet. But first, welcome to the show, Lindsay. Lindsay Halsey: Thanks so much, Chris. I’m excited to be here.  Chris Badgett: Let’s just jump right in and the big question I know a lot of people have, if you’re building a website or an e-learning website is how is [00:01:00] AI changing the behavior of people that are, going to their laptop or their phone or their computer to search for stuff Like what’s happened in the past four years? Lindsay Halsey: A lot’s happening and things are evolving reasonably quickly. And really AI is starting to reshape the way we think about search and search engine optimization and and some of the kind of behavior changes. And we can dig into a few of these in more detail. The first is that there is the opportunity for essentially like generative responses directly on, on Google, Yahoo, Bing, right? So when you go on Google and you type in your search query, you get a new row called AI overviews, and in there you get a generated response that has sites or citations and some links to the websites that sort of trained up the ai. But that you may, in this case, one of the things changing is you may decide as a, as the end user not to click through to a website for information, but rather to just receive the response directly from Google. And [00:02:00] then as Google often sees do another Google search and and you can have that more conversational nature. If you’re in the US right now there’s AI mode which allows you to take that that conversation further and have and continue on almost like you would with chat GPT. So that’s just one of the things that we’re seeing happen right now is in some ways people feel like the search engines continue to make it harder to get traffic to your website. Because Google is answering things directly in the search results. So it’s the people also ask boxes that used to pop up where you could just see the results or you put in something like movie Showtimes near me and it just tells you the showtimes. You never go to a website. You can think of AI overviews and AI mode as being in that similar vein of changing user behavior. But on the flip side, the more optimistic piece of this all is that it really is an opportunity for your brand, for your business, for your training, for your expertise to get [00:03:00] shown directly on Google to build brand awareness and to educate, which I know a lot of your audience is all about education and training and, and so I, I see the positive side of these changes. But in the short run, one of the things a lot of businesses are experiencing is a decrease in sessions or traffic from organic search  Chris Badgett: before we zoom in, like on a macro level. At what point, like we often still want to get the visitor to our website to buy the movie tickets or take our paid course or read our, the full article. For the content creator, how do we, where does the wall stop where AI isn’t enough? Even if you think about teaching a course online, there’s pressure from people just learning a skill or knowledge directly from AI without needing a course. Do you have any thoughts on like, where does the creator still hold territory in terms of, getting that traffic all the way over and out of the chat [00:04:00] interface? Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, definitely. So like the biggest thing I think about, because we’re in the same situation as we’re, in the field of SEO education and and so when somebody searches for something like how to learn SEO they’re unlikely to click through to our course about intro to SEO, right? That would’ve been the old user experience. Somebody would’ve made. But now you’re more likely to either put that query into chat, GPT, Gemini Perplexity or Claude, something like that, and get some structured response on how to actually learn this tool or this, the skillset. Or you might put it in a Google and see the AI mode or the AI overview and not click through to a website. I still see the role of the human expert is essentially that we are still human and so we wanna connect with other humans. And so we only go so deep with where the AI response will take us. And the way you can create value in this space is to have contrast. So have an [00:05:00] opinion, take a corner, have an opinion about, what’s happening in your space, share something unique. Tell stories that are like basically founded in real world experience so that your content on your website is different from all of the AI generated response that’s just average out there. And that you, as an expert really shines through because at the end of the day. There is a trust issue with ai and when you’re gonna invest time in learning, you wanna know who you’re learning from and that they’re a genuine expert. And I personally think a lot of user behavior will basically touch on the high level of Hey, it’s nice to get a structured response about how to learn SEO but at the end of the day, if you’re really gonna dig in and get hands on you’re likely gonna benefit from learning from a human and not from the ai. Chris Badgett: Question. And first I just wanna say I got a ton of value out of working with you and your team at Pathfinder. On leveling up our SEO game, even though we’d been at it for a long time. But just to give a real specific example we wanna rank at lifter LMS for the best WordPress LMS plugins and. We had an article on that, it was like rank 23. Now we’re regularly at one or two. Awesome. I give Pathfinder a lot of credit from working with you guys on like really going deep on SEO and throwing every tactic in the book at that. And it worked and it sticks. It’s not like it’s moving. It stays there and we are constantly refreshing it. Awesome. But to get to my beginner question, I think it sometimes when I saw AI come on. I’m like, wow, that’s great. We’ve been in the space for over a decade. So the AI and the language model already knows a lot about us and I’m really glad we’re not new is the thought I have. So what would you say to somebody who’s new in a competitive space to get. At least into that AI [00:07:00] conversation as a source or a personality or whatever, because if you’re not established, that seems even harder than it’s ever been.  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, definitely. So a couple of tips there. The first one is go very specific. It’s really hard to rank for something general, right? Take your expertise and create a piece of content and rank for the big keywords. But one of the things that’s shifting here is people are putting a lot of information in their queries in more detail. They’re putting like the who, how they’re trying to get from point A to point B, what those points might be. All sorts of different scenarios are shifting in how we search online. And so when you start to think about the kind of content you create, instead of playing in the like general competitive keyword space. If you go hyper-specific, you’re gonna find the right audience and likely get more visibility more quickly. And so this is that concept that’s been around in SEO forever, which is that concept of the long tail of SEO, that you don’t just go for like the mothership. Two word, [00:08:00] keyword phrase that everybody else is optimizing towards and has thousands or millions of searches a month. But rather you create more specifically shaped pieces of content and that goes further faster. And so you see a shift in people’s content marketing, for example, away from the definitive guide to whatever the subject is into really specific pieces. And so that’d be my biggest tip is invest in content marketing that really showcases a specific topic. Then layers in who it’s for because that’s what Google is getting better and the rest of the search engines. And really AI is getting better at connecting those dots between the individual behind the search. So that’s the first piece of the puzzle. The other piece of the puzzle is when you’re new you also need to go out and think about how do I build a little like authority and trust out there in this space? And that’s one of the things that established brands get to rely and relax a little bit on is having a domain. And a brand that has a lot of [00:09:00] mentions and backlinks and things like that to it. When you’re just getting started, you don’t have those things. But you can go out and find the low hanging fruit. And so what I mean by that is if you’re just getting started, consider creating a Google Maps listing, even if you don’t consider yourself a local business. And the reason is because it’s a place where you can get some reviews online and it really is training up the AI quite a bit. Reviews on anything go a long ways. So showcasing reviews on your own website, getting them on Google Maps anywhere you can get a review is helpful. One of the things you’ll notice in a lot of the AI generated responses is things when they start to actually talk about businesses in a space is that there’s, they put in like reviewers or people often say things like that, so they are able to very quickly process all of the reviews out there about, say, lifter, LMS. And smush them into a, one to two sentence phrase. That’s a synopsis. And then if there’s a list of like best, whatever [00:10:00] plugins in this space, et cetera, then they’re gonna be able to do the same for your competitors. So just starting out right out of the gate and going and trying to pick up a couple of reviews, whether it’s Google Maps, Facebook reviews, directly reviews you put on your own website that’ll build a little credibility. Then trying to get those back links which is one of the ways you can do it, is just sharing your expertise. So if you invest in writing a blog post on a topic, try to get out there and be a guest on somebody else’s podcast, for instance. Try to get out there and share your knowledge and your experience and do that on as a webinar guest, a podcast guest. All of the, those things go a long ways in building a little bit of brand recognition and authority. Chris Badgett: It seems like for both AI and SEO or just the search engine results pages, there’s a lot more emphasis on things like Reddit conversations. Yeah. Why is that? It’s Google’s [00:11:00] prioritizing, like real people having a discussion, not some listicle about the best, whatever.  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, the Reddit thing has been surprising to me as somebody that like doesn’t tend to go to a lot of forums for answers and things like that, and I thought it was a fad and that Google would play around with it and then back off. And we’ve seen that before, but it does not appear to be a fad. Reddit really does appear to be, it gets strong placement and visibility on Google in and of itself. So being there and it’s training up the AI and and it’s seemingly not going anywhere. Yeah, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s because like you said, it’s real people and and now it can really take all of the information about a topic or a brand or whatever, all of the conversation on Reddit and create a structured sort of understanding of that. And yeah, Reddit’s kind of crushing it right now in the SEO world, and it’s in a lot of those kind of best of queries, et cetera.  Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about AI for content creation. For SEO as, [00:12:00]yeah when I’ve tried, I’ve. I tried to write a whole article with AI and I’m like, it’s just not there. But for research or like building on what I already have, it’s great. Yeah. But and also related to this, do you get penalized if you just publish some AI generated content that’s totally AI generated?  Lindsay Halsey: Good question. So the first you do not get penalized by publishing AI generated content. There’s not like a flag that says, created by ai, don’t show in the search results. Or even worse penalize the brand for it. Instead it’s just that AI generated content doesn’t really add new value. It doesn’t have contrast, doesn’t feel as powered by genuine experience and authority, so it’s unlikely to perform well. So I really think about basically this human centered approach to content ma marketing that’s AI supported. Yes, I think AI tools are amazing. I haven’t published a blog post in the last year without relying on some component of ai. To help me create the content, refine the content, et cetera. That being said there’s always a human involved and so I find that sometimes it creates a better final product. In the ai it takes our weaknesses and can fill in some gaps depending on how you’re using it. It also speeds the process up, but and that content is doing, we’ve done some experiments, like fully human powered content, didn’t touch ai, fully AI powered content in that sort of middle ground that human centered AI supported and we’re not finding that the totally AI created content doesn’t do anything. We’re doing just as well in our performance, in our rankings and making it quicker when we go with that kind of combo approach versus when we just go a hundred percent human powered with no ai, if that makes sense. So you gotta figure out kind of the workflow that works well for you. I think the research piece or just creating structure and a frame can be really helpful sometimes. We are so close to our love our area of expertise. One of the [00:14:00] things we struggle with is seeing the big picture and teaching it, whether it’s in a blog post, a YouTube video, or behind a course paywall or wherever the teaching is. Sometimes, like we’re so zoomed in and narrowed in, we skip the beginning or we miss a step or something like that. And I personally find AI to be really helpful for, Hey, here’s this topic I’m thinking about writing about. Here’s who I’m trying to reach with it. Help me create an outline, et cetera. And then I’ll do some writing, and then I’ll have it reshape it. I’ve used it in so many different ways to help support support our content marketing. Chris Badgett: One of the challenges of LMS websites is there’s a lot of content that’s not visible to the search engine,  Lindsay Halsey: right?  Chris Badgett: So what, because it’s behind the login and that kind of thing. What? Should a, how should a course creator structure their website today to, with SEO and AI discoverability in mind? Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, that’s a tricky one. And that is to say you need to give away some of that expertise and content [00:15:00] for free not being behind a paywall so that you are part of the conversation, whether it is the conversation on Google or chat, GPT, et cetera. You wanna contribute to training the AI in your subject matter, and you wanna get known as an authority in that space. And and so to do that, you have to strategically decide what content, is free and on the blog, and what content is paid and behind a paywall. And there’s no one solution to that in my mind’s eye. But one of the biggest things I like to do is think about if I do give this content away for free, right? Like it’s on a blog post and it starts to get traction. What’s the bridge between getting them, if you’re selling a course or a membership or whatever the purchase now is, what’s the little intermediate step? That’s more of a call to action in the middle, where I’m gonna also get a little something in return. So a lot of times if I publish a blog post that’s educational, et cetera, I’ll embed a YouTube video in it. Like I’ll really try to make it great, right? Add value, share, teach, et [00:16:00] cetera. But then the in content CTA won’t just be the buy the thing, buy the course, or buy the membership. It’ll be the next step in something for free where it can still trade that email address and trade for a download or an email series or whatever it is tied to the topic at hand. So if I’m gonna give something away in the blog post, I wanna make sure that my conversion rate on that blog post to picking up an email address is somewhere in the 5% range. I find if I tie the call to action directly to the topic at hand, so it’s like the next thing you would want on this, and I’m willing to give away just like one ounce more for free then I get a lot of value out of that. And if I just stick a call to action on their sign up for a newsletter, it gets less than a 1% conversion rate. And then you start to say was creating that traffic and giving it away that content away for free worthwhile. It’s harder to measure.  Chris Badgett: I learned this from you all that like original research [00:17:00]is really valuable. Lindsay Halsey: Really valuable.  Chris Badgett: What are, expand on that, let’s say we’re we have a subject matter expertise in X, Y, z. How do we do that original research or publish it in a way that it’s beneficial to AI and SEO?  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah. So that’s always been something that’s been beneficial to SEO. ’cause one it shows your expertise, right? You did original research and you’re publishing it, in a scientific type format, in a blog post, sharing that research it gets quoted, it gets linked to more often. Other people might come back and look at that original research and then wanna link to it. So it does a lot of high value work. In this era, it’s even more valuable because it is that original type research that the AI would like to be trained on and then is more likely to cite you, et cetera. And to showcase your expertise. Anywhere where you can publish that original research it’s tricky. Like in the field of SEO it’s really hard. Most of the kind of big original research is [00:18:00] coming out of big SEO software companies that have access to massive amounts of data, et cetera. So you have to think about like where is your place? But that being said, even if you can’t get like original research in your space, one of the things you may be able to do is genuine storytelling, et cetera. And so weaving that in is something that I know we did in our, some of our blog posts last year, and it really made a big difference. Basically taking the whole intro and starting with a story in the first person and making it relatable and talking about something that happened. And so it’s not research like a comp, compilation of lots of data, but it’s this like singular point in time. And that’s helped our content resonate more with sort of Google’s helpful content algorithms that are really looking at that sort of expertise, authority, and trust behind a post. Chris Badgett: Related to research is doing like charts and graphs and tables and gifs and all that stuff like, [00:19:00] like visualizing data. And that’s so easy to do now and even in Canva you can, it’s give it some numbers and it gives you a nice looking. Chart branded to your brand.  Lindsay Halsey: Exactly. And so you can put that together with so much more ease now. And that also makes it easier to create downloads and things like that where somebody might be willing to like, Hey, I read through it, but download the. The paper version or the PDF version and you’re going to email it to a colleague or something like that. So it is a lot easier to create that high value and to just push yourself to take your content a little further. And so one thing I. Often think about that I think really applies to the folks listening to this podcast is that a lot of times we take our expertise, right? And you go and you create something with it, like a course or training module or whatever it might be, but you have an area of expertise and you create this thing and then you’re like, okay, the next thing I’m gonna do is a blog post. And then what we tend to do if you’re anything like me, is like move to the next topic, right? You’re like, I did the [00:20:00] blog posts, I did the thing, right? That was the marketing piece and the creation of whatever, the training material that was like the sales piece or the product piece. But really I try to make myself. Fit in that space for a lot longer than I ever wanted to. So a while back, Google Analytics launched GA four, right? And it was a topic I really didn’t wanna be an expert in, but became one. And I just decided to sit in that space for three months. And that meant I wrote a blog post. I created a YouTube video. I created social posts. We added paid social behind the paid social posts. I reached out to six. Podcast, webinars, things beyond like our brand. And I was a guest on them talking about GA four, what’s changing, how to handle it. Then I self-hosted a couple of webinars. By the time those three months were over, I was totally exhausted. But the value is that I built up a cloud of expertise and authority in that space that Google could pick up on it. So all the content I created and that’s. Space was performing really [00:21:00] well at the time because I was doing all these other things. And so that’s one area that I think once you decide, hey, this is something I’m gonna, be an expert, this is like a little facet of my expertise that I’m gonna go down a rabbit hole in, make yourself stay in that for a little bit longer so that you really exhaust like all avenues. And to me, that’s. It’s not just SEO, but it is all of those actions were things that helped us build domain authority, trust all these other signals that then help our other content, and it’s the snowball effect, if that makes sense. Chris Badgett: I didn’t entirely get off the content treadmill, but I started going back and instead of doing a new post, make an old one better.  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Like the really important pillar posts like. Coming back to him week after week, and that’s how. Really able to move up to top ranking. It wasn’t about like continually pumping out new content. Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, exactly. So a content revision with something new, like an infographic or [00:22:00] some kind of new visual. And one of the, other areas of SEO that we know that Google’s looking at is when you do win the click and traffic comes to your website from Google, Google is looking to signals around things like engagement. Rate engagement time. If people are like hitting the buy now button, going to other web pages, etc. They’re looking at that user experience because what Google wants to see is oh, this is, this query led to this click, and then they had a really great experience over here that has a positive reflection on Google. So that those are dwell signals in like SEO terms. And so when you take an existing blog post and you add a YouTube and embed video in it, or you add a cool image or you update the intro so it’s a little catchier, or you add some kind of a call to action that maps to the topic, any of those things is gonna be a rising tide because it’s gonna lead to a little bit better. Like incrementally better user experience, which then trains up Google’s algorithms and its machine learning to send more [00:23:00] traffic your way. And that was one of the things that we’ve really seen over the last year or two is like a certain number of posts are just taking off because they get that self-fulfilling prophecy. Whereas other posts that we think are really great, totally fall flat. And I look at it a little bit like baseball, even the best hitters train a ton and they think they are gonna get to the plate and they’re gonna be able to hit a home run. When it comes to content marketing, you just have to keep your at bats going and know that you’re gonna hit a couple of singles and a couple of doubles, and then a home run from time to time. And it’s even for experts, it can be a little hard to predict which ones are really gonna go the farthest, but it’s all about getting back up to the plate and getting a new piece of content or trying again, revising something, et cetera.  Chris Badgett: Question if you do a major rewrite or revision first, is it okay to change the publish date to today. Or should you not do that or does that even matter? Lindsay Halsey: I do change it, [00:24:00] and recency really does matter in SEO and all of the AI getting found in ai. So yeah, recency matters. I do change the published state as long as I actually add new value to the post. If I fix a typo, that doesn’t count. 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 [00:25:00] users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Related to that, like it I see a lot of people, and I’m guilting myself of doing this, if you have a best of X, Y, Z in 2023, but it’s [00:26:00] 2025 now if all you’re gonna do is just change the date, it’s, that, does that help or not really? Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, so those posts can be really at least they were really hard to write. Like I remember years ago writing best SEO plugins for WordPress and like how much time and resource our team put into we already used all the plugins, but figuring out who had what feature, what price point, all this stuff, like creating charts and diagrams, it was a massive amount of work. To create a post like that. And so then, yeah, before you know it, 2023 becomes 2025 in this case, and it is okay to put the new publish date. I think as a end user, I wouldn’t respond very well to the best whatever of 2025 and then see a 2023 publish date. I’d probably hit the back button and be like, that doesn’t align. There’s just a quick like cork in the system. But in terms of refining that content, it’d be a great thing to be able to just drop in the chat GPT and say, here’s this post I wrote, like on the best of what should I consider updating what’s out [00:27:00] of date, et cetera. And and go through some prompts to try to help you modernize the content enough so that you feel good about putting the new date stamp on. Chris Badgett: Same question I get. And I’m sure a lot of people get like all these emails requesting back links that aren’t very good besides creating great content and being a guest on somebody else’s platforms. Is there any other way to think about getting back links that if you want to put some effort into it and just come off well in your efforts? Lindsay Halsey: Good question. So yeah, you still like SEO in some ways has evolved a lot and hasn’t evolved at all in other ways, right? So there’s still people sending you these random emails. Will you link to me da, hit delete on all of those. There’s still people trying to sell you link building at scale, et cetera. Or even link building, not at scale, right? So paid link placement. You can go and buy a backlink in like blogger outreach [00:28:00] and things like that. But at the end of the day, what I always like to do back is take a step back from my overall like online presence and think about my real world. Like how your business does business, right? Who do you do business with? Not necessarily who are your customers? ’cause it’s pretty unusual for customers to link back to your website. But more like who are your partners in an ecosystem, et cetera. So as an example, if you were an interior designer, you would probably get referrals from other architects, general contractors, et cetera, and you would probably also refer business to them, right? You work in an ecosystem and there’s all these adjacent people that anyone who’s building a house needs more than just an interior designer. They probably have five to 10 other professionals like working in their ecosystem space. So most interior designers have all these relationships in the real world, but almost none of them are actually modeling that for Google, right? So if I were to chat with you over coffee, you could tell me about all [00:29:00]these pals and people that you do business with and refer. But if I looked on your website and if I looked on their websites, I’d never know that there was any kind of real world integration. And so in the spaces that we’re all in, we can think of those types of counterparts, like who’s in your ecosystem. And you don’t always have to do a webinar or a podcast, which takes a lot of time and effort to be able to leverage those relationships in a positive way. So it still works to have get links from people in more static ways. If you have a, our partners page and they have an our partners page, you might link to those types of things. You can also give a testimonial away, right? So we have a web, like an agency that helps us with our marketing and our web design. We could give that agency a testimonial of what it’s been like to be a client of theirs and they could put that on their website and then link back from where it says my name to my website, right? So I can do smaller ways of showing like the ways that we do business. You could do something like that for your accountant or a tax advisor like [00:30:00]anybody where you have like real world professional relationship. You can go out and come up with creative ways to show Google and model for Google what’s going on there. Other businesses, like a really generous, or maybe you’re on a board of director you could be generous in your community by supporting nonprofits. You could be a board on a member of a board of directors, et cetera, like related or not related to your business, but part of you who you are, right? So things that we do beyond it. I know my business partner, she’s on the board of the skating club for her daughter. So she has a little bio on the Skating Club website and somewhere in the bio it mentions our businesses and it links to them, right? That’s pretty low hanging fruit. You’re just already doing those things. But sometimes you just need a little bit of follow up to go pick up those links. So there’s not one way to build a backlink network. And I think the biggest way to be successful is to weave it into your real world marketing. So it’s not something you do because I’m sitting down to do link building. It’s something I do. Cause I’m thinking about marketing and partnerships. And trying to add value on the internet and and all of these ways and showcase partners, et cetera,  Chris Badgett: related to authority. I feel like the author page, like on a WordPress site. Or a social media bio or the about page on a business website. Like what can we do just to best practice, explain who we are, what we do, what our expertise is, because that stuff really matters. I think  Lindsay Halsey: it matters a ton. It’s actually one of the things I’m working on our own website right now is like making sure the who shines through behind your content. I think a lot of times as marketers, our initial inclination is I’m building a business website, so I need to look like a business, right? And so you almost take the human out of it. Now you wanna be putting the human back into everything, right? So if you have a blog post, under the blog post, it should have the publish date. Who the author was. And then that little like part where it says your name, it should link to your authorship page. And ideally you have a great authorship page. That could be you talking in the first person, hi, I am so and and then there could be a section there like also seen as, or here’s some blog posts I’ve written. So we invest a lot of time into creating both the individuals. Then also the about page could be depending on how your team is structured. Could be more about the business, but it could also just be about you. If you are a one person business then you need one killer page all about you, which always feels a little uncomfortable, but once you start putting it together, it’s not so bad. And if you have a team, then you wanna try to create something similar for each team member and really make sure you’re connecting the dots and showcasing the humans behind the business.  Chris Badgett: How does social media impact SEO and ai discoverability?  Lindsay Halsey: Good question. In general, I’ve always said social media has overlap. But not nearly as powerful as like backlinks or Google Maps, reviews, etc. Because a lot of that is behind a paywall and Google struggles to get trained up on all of those social conversations. Social has so much paid space right now too it’s just, it’s very complicated. The search engines never really wove social very well into its algorithm directly. So that’s still the case. Like social still only plays some overlap, but I think now we’re in this like massive period of change in evolution and technology has gotten obviously so much smarter and so I think we’re gonna see a little bit more change there. I think of social as standing on its own two legs. It’s its own marketing channel, but it helps me with SEO. Because if you put, say a social post out about a blog post you wrote and then it gets picked up and seen by your colleagues, your friends, the people that follow your business. It gets more likely to then pick up a back link because someone’s oh, you remember I saw like Chris wrote this cool thing on this topic, and then I remember it and I drop it in a blog post, or I drop it in an email. I send like news from the web and things like that. So yeah, social is weaving in more and more. I haven’t spent a lot of time studying how well AI like chat, GPT itself is able to like pull from the social sphere. But right now there’s a big push for making sure your website content is training up the AI as effectively as possible. And that rests a little more on things like technical SEO. And there’s a new-ish file called an L-L-M-S-T-X-T, which is a file that gives directions on how to crawl the website and index it for a learning language models. So there are so many parallels right now between getting found and included in conversations on Google and then chat GPT Gemini Perplexity. It’s not really like a comparison of are you gonna invest in SEO or invest in some of these emerging marketing? Areas, but more of a convergence that the fundamentals work across the board [00:35:00] Chris Badgett: related to the lls dot txt file. Yeah. Some of the SEO plugins now just create this for you. I’ve I’ve looked at it and what I realize is it’s pretty good and it’s probably my own fault for having an old site and what it’s pulling from. It’s, I, it’s not the best. So I realize I need to create my own LLMs txt file, but use that structure.  Lindsay Halsey: Yep.  Chris Badgett: But related to that you’ve got that TXT file let’s say at the end of a blog post, you put FAQ questions that either Google instant answers or AI mode. I forget what overview mode or whatever. Like how’s it, how. How exact does it, does the keyword phrase have to match? And is the AI just gonna spit out exactly what you said or is it gonna modify it or quote it? Or how do we think about that? Because it, you can get lost in the details of the wording and.  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, you really can. You can go. So at the end of the day, I [00:36:00] think whether you’re thinking about the AI or thinking about Google, you really should be thinking about the end user, right? So if you add an FAQ, you should be thinking about like, how do I resonate with the actual human audience that is reading this content? And then when you do that, you will. As a default, be playing well into these like marketing channels you’re caring about and getting found in those places. And so that being said, sometimes we get too comfortable and we don’t say who the audience is or put the keyword in, et cetera. So I do sometimes like just look at my content through both lenses. Like on the one hand I can overdo it and shove keywords everywhere, and then it doesn’t read well, it screams SEO, or and answer engine optimization now and things like that. And on the other side of it, I can give like no context, right? So you can’t even tell like a business I am. And so that also doesn’t work. So you wanna make sure, if you add an F, A Q, you don’t have to overdo the questions like crazy, who do you think the best, WordPress, like plug, you don’t have to go crazy, but [00:37:00] you do wanna make sure there’s context behind, your FAQ questions, your headers and things like that. So that if you were to take I like a tool called Detailed. It’s like a Chrome extension and you can play around with it where you can just look at like the headers on your page and you don’t see the content behind it. So you see the outline, and I should be able to get like the concept of your entire webpage from that outline. Meaning I should know who you are, what you do. Like I, I should get the meet, whether it’s a blog post or whatever the topic is of the page. That’s for me, a gut check of if I can’t get the meat of the topic, I probably didn’t use those keywords enough in those pertinent places. And if I just see the keyword weaving down the whole list of all the headers, then I probably overdid it. Right.  Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Speaking of headers, I feel like this is something that writers for SEO learn gradually in terms of heading structure. So yeah. What’s, this also gets [00:38:00] into the word count question. If, how long does a post need to be, but also like H twos and h threes and all this stuff, like what’s a good average if we’re gonna do an authoritative piece about something what would an example post look like? Lindsay Halsey: Yeah. So even though it’s a little bit like still old school SEO to think in terms of word count, I still do when I create content on my site, on client sites, et cetera, and I typically in this kind of era, am aiming around a thousand words. And I know that I’ve picked a topic that is specific enough when I can cover it in a thousand words. So if I need way more words to cover the topic than a thousand, then I probably pick something too much like a definitive guide. And it’s gonna come out being too generic, right? And not go deep enough into that subject matter expertise. And if I can’t write about a thousand words about it, I probably went too specific or I glossed over something, et cetera. So that somewhere 800 to 1200 words thousand-ish words [00:39:00] tends to, in my minds, I be like a good amount of content. Then within that you’ve gotta break it up. ’cause a thousand words is still a lot for people to read. And so you wanna break it up into sections with headers. And it depends on what the format of the post is. If it’s five best whatever you’ll probably have a header above, the list. And then each item in the list will be like an H three. So the title of your post is the H one, some title or header above the list. And then you’re gonna hit on h threes down below it. But again, you see all sorts of exceptions. You wanna keep the structure, but if you decide to use h fours instead of h threes, ’cause it looks a little bit better on the, in the blog post formatting, it’s probably not gonna be a, the deal breaker. Like it’ll still have its form. It’ll just violate some smaller SEO principles.  Chris Badgett: Our SEO checklist is probably about 50 items long. Is there anything we can stop doing in SEO or, oh,  Lindsay Halsey: good [00:40:00] question.  Chris Badgett: Or long, it’s not as relevant as it used to be thing.  Lindsay Halsey: Good question. Without looking at the checklist it’s hard for me to like necessarily answer what’s less relevant? I’d say one area people debate about how important it is customizing the page title and meta description. Because Google so often creates its own text there, I’m still like a big fan of customizing it. ’cause it’s just to put your best foot forward and market the page how you would wanna market it by customizing those fields knowing that Google may choose to do its own thing. So that’s one area where some people I think are putting less emphasis. But I still I still like to have that sort of. Control knowing I have no control with what they do. I’m trying to think of some other ones. Alt text I would say is more important. Web accessibility and good image naming, et cetera. I would add like extra time and attention to, I still see a lot of people just skip over things related to images, whether it’s file name, the alternative [00:41:00] text, the file size, et cetera. Yeah, those are the big ones that people tend to either skip or kind of debate. Its fa their value.  Chris Badgett: Is there any SEO AI tools that you recommend? For example, sometimes I get frustrated with chat GBT when I’m like, Hey, here’s the whole article. I need a meta description. This is the phrase I’m targeting. These are, this is the content brief, this is everything, and it still gives me something that’s way too long and generic and doesn’t fit in the box.  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or or if there’s other tools that are just more A or SEO friendly for it for.  Lindsay Halsey: So I think there, there are so many tools out there right now. You could just do nothing but play with these ai, SEO overlapping tools, et cetera. And so I like to keep things pretty simple. So I find myself using chat g PT the most, but then relying on the built-in AI functionality of things I already use [00:42:00] in a WordPress site for an example. So Yost with the premium version, you get some AI based. Tooling right directly in there. And so I, I personally am a fan of if you’re writing a page title in meta description and you’re like copying and pasting and then not really liking the output from the ai, you can turn to you can turn to the AI built into WordPress in that plugin. And rely on it. And it is accelerating things like, there are plugins that can help you generate that alternative text on images and help you keep that up to date, et cetera. So there are a lot of tools, I think in the words press space that have been really helpful in terms of, and then you don’t have to go and pay for some other third party SEO, powered or AI powered SEO tool. Yeah that’s what’s been working best for me. Chris Badgett: Niche, SEO question. I see some people and myself included sometimes struggle with keyword research in the sense of okay, now we have all these [00:43:00] keywords and we have these clusters of keywords around this keyword and all this stuff. What’s, how do you think about keywords these days?  Lindsay Halsey: So I think about keywords every time in the same way and use the same framework when I’m getting started. And it’s the customer acquisition funnel. So I think about basically this funnel where at the bottom I have the conversion, right? So it’s people generally speaking for like searching for keywords that are your brand name, your name, et cetera. So that’s at the bottom of the funnel. And then in the middle of the funnel, you’re talking about the consideration phase. Those are like those best of right, or just they’re looking for your product. They’re looking for your offering. They’re looking for course, could be in their keyword search or something like that, right? So they’re in like a, in a shopping state of mind, but they’re looking for the thing that you sell. That’s the middle of the funnel that usually maps on a website to pages or collection pages, [00:44:00] taxonomy pages, things that are like at, in your main navigation. And then at the top of your funnel you have the awareness building and that’s where you’re like thinking about how do I get out there and share that expertise? Or how do I get out there and get in front of somebody? One or two steps before they’re ready for the thing I do. So if you were that interior designer and you wrote a blog post of like best architects in your city, that would be an example of reaching that upper funnel because you’re getting in front of the right audience. Just like they’re not quite ready for what you do, but they will be in a little bit. So you’re building brand awareness. So whenever I do keyword research, I think in this like real world model. And then I think about where am I today and what’s realistic? So I don’t have to go and do a ton of research for my upper funnel, like audience building campaign. If I’m just building my first website and getting started, I should just start with the bottom of the funnel and showing up for my own name, my brand, et cetera. And then start to build from there. On the other hand. If you play in a really [00:45:00] competitive space, you might just put your best foot forward in that middle section of the funnel. But realistically, it might be like, lifter does well in the best queries and has a lot of trust and authority and reviews and has put a lot of effort in if you were just entering that space. There’s not reason really to play very aggressively there. You should probably just skip to the upper funnel. So when it comes to keyword research, I instantly start to think about like how my keywords map into these different parts of the funnel, and then just instantly start thinking along the lines of what’s realistic? And if I were to spend one hour doing something, in which section of the funnel would I have the most impact right now? And that helps me from. Getting overly exhausted with an endless amount of keyword research. The other thing is that you can turn to tools like chat GPT to help you with your keyword research and like export data from the Google search console and help it organize the keywords into a funnel. Pull data from multiple data sources like search console. And if you have like rank tracking software, we use win for example. You can like. Have it do some of this organization and thought process for you which has been a nice accelerator too.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Lindsay, this is like a masterclass in SEO and ai. One quick question, is there the, what is the proper. SEO for ai. Does that have an acronym yet?  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah we just actually published a blog post. ’cause people are starting to do search queries, like SEO versus yeah, we think it’s like SEO and ’cause it’s like all getting pushed under one umbrella. But you’re gonna, you’re gonna see the phrase generative engine optimization, so GEO and then you also see answer engine optimization. It starts to get a lot of acronyms. Like most of the people I talk to, like just keeping PPC from SEO separate. And so the good news is though, again, there’s this convergence, the fundamentals of what you work on in like a holistic SEO. Project are the same things as investing in those other in those other kind of initiatives. There’s just like little extras like the L-L-M-S-T-X-T, et cetera. Yeah. But some of those things don’t really matter till you’re a little bit further down the line anyways. Like lifter is where you have a lot of content, you have a lot of training material out there. And so yeah, just starting with the fundamentals and making sure you have a solid base is really the name of the game. Whether it’s S-E-O-G-E-O or a EO yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna be getting it mixed up myself. And so I try not to use any of those, like when I’m in kind of agency mode talking to clients. We talk about getting found on Google, getting found on chat, GPT, things that we can all relate to.  Chris Badgett: Tell us about Pathfinder. If someone wants to go deeper with SEO what do you offer at Pathfinder?  Lindsay Halsey: We call it a guided approach to SEO. And within our guided approach, we have community coaching and [00:48:00] courses all designed to help you take a step-by-step approach that’s backed with with coaching and accountability. So you can come to group office hours as one of our members get your questions answered, get feedback on your work. You can go through our checklists and in our courses to take a step by step approach that’ll help you get from point A to point B. There are discussion threads in there and and a whole lot more. We have a 14 day free trial if you wanna check it out with kind of no risk. And and learn a little bit more about SEO, but more importantly, learn while doing. And that’s a lot of what we try to help people do is. A lot of people will go invest like 10 hours trying to learn SEO, but not do anything that moves the needle forward. We wanna change that around where if you do invest 10 hours in SEO, like an hour is the learning and nine hours is the doing so that you actually see a result. Chris Badgett: Results working with Pathfinder is we had actual hosts we were working on and [00:49:00] getting, feedback and doing training, like looking at a specific project is, it’s a, it’s applied, it’s project-based learning that makes a lot of sense.  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, it’s a lot more fun. And then there’s a community and and so that’s always just nice to be around others, trying to do the same thing you are and realize it doesn’t have to be confusing, overwhelming, time consuming, expensive that SEO really is real world marketing and and there’s a lot of value in the short and long run when you get going with it. Chris Badgett: This has been great Lindsay. Thank you so much. Go check out pathfinder seo.com. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you or find out more?  Lindsay Halsey: I’m also on some social channels like Facebook and Instagram but yes, our website is the best place and you can always shoot me an email if you have any questions, Lindsay, at Pathfinder seo and and that’s my quickest response. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you Lindsay. We really appreciate it.  Lindsay Halsey: Thanks so much, Chris. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that [00:50:00] 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 AI SEO For WordPress LMS Websites With Lindsay Halsey From Pathfinder SEO appeared first on LMScast.

Andy Jack, a specialist in transforming expertise into engaging virtual learning environments, dives into the revolutionary role of AI in e-learning. He discusses the emergence of personalized learning experiences and innovative applications like AI-driven interview simulations. Emphasizing the concept of a 'Second Brain,' Jack encourages educators to use AI as a complementary tool to enhance learner transformation. He shares insights on effective instructional design, balancing technology with personal creativity, and leveraging audience engagement for course success.

In this LMScast, Founder Karen Wisch of Graphics by Design talks about how she transitioned from traditional graphic design to web development. She began her profession in design when computers were widely used, and once a customer requested a website, she progressively moved into web programming. Karen finally started using WordPress after learning it on her own. She talks about an exceptional effort with the Missouri Credentialing Board, which certifies practitioners in Missouri who treat drug use disorders. About seven years ago, the Board was managing license renewals and continuing education (like the MARS course) entirely on paper. The Board was handling continuing education (such as the MARS course) and license renewals all on paper around seven years ago. The Board selected Karen over larger organizations that wanted a share of their revenue because she suggested digitizing these processes. Karen replaced their traditional, mail-based continuing education and grading method with an online system using LifterLMS. This change made it possible for classes like the MARS course to be fully automated and offered on-demand, transforming a time-consuming, biennial program into a scalable, effective, and adaptable educational experience. She stresses that the Board is quite pleased with the project’s success and that LifterLMS played a key role in it. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Karen Wish. She’s at karen wish.com. That’s W-I-S-C-H, and her agency is called Graphics by Design. Karen caught my eye. She built a really cool continuing education project. Called the Missouri Credentialing Board. We’re gonna talk about that. But first, welcome to the show, Karen.  Karen Wisch: Hi. Thanks Chris.  Chris Badgett: It’s awesome to have you here. And we were catching up before the, we went live here and you’ve been around for a while. You got the lifter LMS shirt in the background. Awesome. Karen Wisch: Swag from you guys, right?  Chris Badgett: Yeah, we do a lot of strategic swag, it’s not, there’s no merch store. If you have an item you’re on the good list and doing awesome stuff. But tell us a little bit about you, graphics by design. How did you get into this space of helping businesses with technology and marketing and sales and modernizing their tech? Karen Wisch: Yeah. I’ve been around forever, so I graduated with a degree in graphic design before there were computers. Seriously I took a. Basic coding class while I was in college, but there was nothing in my field as far as computers. We went through a lab one time and the professor goes, these are computers. We think they’re a fad. He walked on through he was wrong. Over time, I did a lot of graphics for people, a lot of publications and stuff. And then one of the people I did. Graphic design for, they needed a website. And so I started with, oh gosh. What did Word have that they used? Microsoft had publisher what? Not publisher. That was, they had something for websites. And I did that and then I did some HCML forum. And then eventually somebody contacted me through a referral and they said, our site’s been hacked. Can you fix it? I said I don’t know, but I’ll see if I can. And I was able to, and it was a WordPress site. So I got intrigued by that and pretty soon they were coming to me for all of their website needs. It escalated from that is how I got into designing WordPress website. So it was basically there was a need and so I filled it. Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Tell us about the Missouri credentialing board that’s at Missouri cb.com. Yeah. What [00:03:00] what do they do and how’d they find you and what’d you build?  Karen Wisch: They do credentialing for the state of Missouri for people who are substance use disorder professionals. So people in that sector need counselors and people to help with recovery. And I was asked to come and make a bid. They were looking for someone to help them with their renewals. They, their licenses for their counselors for the state of the Missouri need to be renewed and they wanted to put that online ’cause it was a paper document at the time. And this was probably seven years ago. And so I went to a meeting with a couple other people and the other companies were larger. But they wanted a percentage of each of the renewals. The credentialing board wasn’t super happy about that. And I said I think I can do it. Let me see what I can figure out. And I gave them a bid. At the time they also were doing a lot of continuing ed, and one of the things they did was a course that was called the Mars course. And the assistant director was in charge of grading all that. So everything was done by mail. Again, this was seven years ago. So they would send out a program, like a document and a quiz, and then the people would mail that back in. He would grade it manually and then he would mail back the results in the next course. There’s probably 11 different sections to the Mars course and I. He had to manually grade all 40 or 50 of them each time. So while I was there I said I think that we can set this up so this is all automated. That really sealed the deal for them because this was a lot of time for him. And obviously using Lifter, it’s, once it’s automated, it’s all set up. It worked great. It [00:05:00] was a huge success for them. And. As I was telling you beforehand, that’s now, it used to be a class offered twice a year. Now anyone can go on at any time and start the course because it’s self-paced and they can finish it when they want. And it’s all, because it’s all set up with Lifter. It’s a great solution for them. They’re really happy with it.  Chris Badgett: So what were the what are the key parts of Lifter? I noticed they’re selling these continuing education units. And there’s continuing a continuing education credits. Are you, did you set up certificates or how  Karen Wisch: Oh yeah.  Chris Badgett: So what are all the nuts and bolts of it?  Karen Wisch: Okay I’ve got the Infinity bundle and I bought the lifetime access to it, which has been awesome, but then I can use the advanced videos we have videos for a lot of our courses where. So we have it set up, so they have to watch the entire video. They can’t turn it, they can’t speed through it. They have to watch the video. And [00:06:00] I kind of love if you open a different window, you can’t still listen to the video. It’s it’s really cruel. You’re like, oh rats, this isn’t gonna work. But I love it for our people because it’s so easy to get distracted. So they. They watch the video and then they have the, they can then take the quiz, it grades itself, and if they pass it, they’re, they automatically are sent a certificate that I’ve set up. I use something that’s very personal to the credentialing board and looks very official because it is, and it has their director’s signature and everything on it. But that’s all set up ahead of time. Super easy to do and then. They, if they pass they get their certificate automatically. If they don’t pass our, the office gets a notification that they didn’t pass. Their supervisor has to contact and get a voucher for the [00:07:00] second exam because we don’t do the same exam for each effort. So if you. Fail the first effort, you get a second chance, but your supervisor has to get the voucher code for that because we set ’em up so that they have voucher codes, which I am, I’m probably going ahead of where we are, so we have voucher codes. I use Lifter and Gravity Farms forms, together a lot. And they work, they play nicely together. So that works out really well for our people.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I, when I checked, I looked at their site and I think I counted 59 courses. How much? Karen Wisch: There’s 64.  Chris Badgett: Okay. You go?  Karen Wisch: Yeah. Chris Badgett: Did you set all those up or show them how to do it, or it’s Oh, no, I do  Karen Wisch: all of them. Chris Badgett: Okay.  Karen Wisch: They go ahead and they schedule. They set up the videos themselves and they give me the quizzes that they want and then I set everything up for them. They’re very busy doing the other half of the stuff. They don’t wanna mess with this. And I think I could show them how fairly easily, it’s not a hard process, but there’s some, there’s little caveats that we use that maybe not everybody does. It’s a win-win. I take care of it. They don’t worry about it and it works for them  Chris Badgett: yeah. That’s awesome. And it sounds like a great, relationship. Like they’re busy, they just want somebody to handle the website and make sure everything’s good and that’s a great long-term client for you. Karen Wisch: It is it’s a really good situation for me and I have a couple other. Agencies. ’cause I am in the middle of the state. I’m, our city is the capital of Missouri and there are a lot of state associations and a lot of them need CU set up. So I do a couple of different ones beside that. Prior to this, they had used services that cost several hundred thousand dollars to, do you know what I mean? And it’s. We’re not talking tens of thousands even here, we’re, it’s way more reasonable, and again, if I could get the hundreds of thousands, I’d probably do it but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. So Chris Badgett: you can do a lot for what people used to pay 10 times that amount for and stuff like that, without limits, either, like without. Caps on number of students or courses, right? Or teachers or whatever.  Karen Wisch: Yeah. And again, for them, I, before they were having to do the same process every time, and now it I think COVID has streamlined a lot of stuff for people. Like I know we talked before, before COVID, they did a lot of trainings in different areas of the state, and now most of those are done. [00:10:00] On Zoom or whatever, just because it’s easier, it’s less expensive for an employer to give somebody eight hours off during the day and not pay for their travel, and things like that. And we see huge success with that as far as having the Zoom calls with the education, and then following up with the training afterwards or with the. And information afterwards  Chris Badgett: forms you use. I noticed on the Missouri credentialing board, there was like a order form for something that had some e-commerce in it. How do you use Gravity and alongside the LMS and then what other plugins and things do you find super useful when you’re building this type of site?  Karen Wisch: I, my, theme I use is generate press. And then I started with them. I, we talked a little offline and I would say WP Crafter with Adam Preser when I first started learning about what lifter, which LMSS. Software I wanted to use, he recommended you guys and he had some valid reasons at the time. Again, that was seven years ago and I hopped in. I was like, this is a way to go for us. But I use gravity forms occasionally. They’re so blended for me that like sometimes there’ll be something in the course that I use a gravity form for instead, and. Occasionally, I’m trying to, I’m stumped right now as to what, because they’re merged together. But we’re going to have a peer conference in October, and so there’s a registration out there right now that we’re using Gravity forms for, that people just sign up and tell you, give their information. And that doesn’t require a learning management system. But all of our trainings. Do you know, they all end with a quiz to make sure that they’re proficient in the information, if not several quizzes with a series of different trainings within it. I don’t know if that answers your question.  Chris Badgett: People are always using forms in interesting ways alongside lifter LMS, and it’s cool to see what folks are doing. I have to ask you, because you have an agency, the number one question we get for agent from agency folks is how to get clients. It sounds like you have a lot in the Missouri area, like you, there’s a lot of local word of mouth perhaps, but what would your advice be on getting and retaining clients for the long term? Karen Wisch: I would say retention just means you’ve gotta pay attention to your clients. I’m a one person agency, if they call, they’re getting me. I think it, that’s part of why they have me, right. I, it is I tend to respond quickly, which sometimes is like probably the bane of my existence. But I’ve had a lot of referrals. I, I seem to be in the education and prevention and recovery area. Is because that’s where I started. And so by word of mouth, that’s what I’ve gotten. I have some other outta state things, but they were all at one point there was a, an association, a national association, and they I found out. Through the Missouri one that they were no longer going to host everybody’s website, that they all were going to have their own website. So I contacted the head of the National Association and said, I do websites for people and I’m going to contact everybody. If someone contacts you and you need someone to refer them to here’s my information. Here’s some samples of my work. And I ended up with six different websites that way, which was nice. It because they all wanted to be very similar to each other, so they were easy to make. Does that make sense? So I would say I have been lucky with getting information and then. Going after it after that. But most of it, I would say, is referrals from other people.  Chris Badgett: And clients like it when you’re easy to reach and return calls quickly and prove your just your reliability and track record and it’s, you’re always there for them. It’s not that complicated, right?  Karen Wisch: It isn’t. I, one of my clients said before they ought to submit a requisition order and then. In five to seven days, they would get a response and then they, the change would be made. [00:15:00] But, part of it’s price. I’m not charging $200 for 10 minutes of, for a change. Maybe I should, but that’s with a bigger agency you have a lot more overhead too. So I’m sure prices is part of it. 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. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. For the Missouri Cred Credentialing board is there anything you can [00:17:00]say as to the impact that platform is having on the world or people like, do you know anything? Even just roughly, like in terms of, we mentioned I think you said 64 courses. That means that a lot of people are flowing through this thing. What impact is that organization having with these online learning programs?  Karen Wisch: One of their programs, which is the, they have a crisis peer, and these are people who are, you have to be in recovery to actually get that certification and. These are peers, mentoring peers, right? So it, it’s awesome. These are people who maybe if they didn’t have someone else to help, they’d still need recovery, but they’re able to go back after they’ve gone through the process and they can help other people who. Are in the middle of a drug crisis. And I don’t know how much you know about the opioid crisis in the United States right now, but it’s, more people die of overdoses than right in 1 7 47 a day. But nobody says anything about it. And I, if a 7 47 crashed every day, there’d be people paying attention. I, that’s part of why I love what they do. They’re saving lives.  Chris Badgett: It’s a great impact. Tell us more about your learning curve with, learning how to use all this stuff and WordPress. You mentioned following WP Craft or videos and you’re you’re self-taught, it sounds like  Karen Wisch: I am. Chris Badgett: Besides the graphic design, which you went to school for, which is awesome. But but,  Yeah.  Karen Wisch: Yeah. I I would say you guys, your help is awesome. I, when I first started, I needed a lot of handholding and you guys were great. It, I would send you something and it’s like you would, sometimes it was a very obvious thing, sometimes it wasn’t. But between watching the videos and doing that. And now I, now that I have the Infinity bundle, I go to office hours every Thursday with Emily and Kurt, and that’s been very helpful and it’s great to have other people there with problems because sometimes I don’t know I have a problem until somebody else’s problem gets fixed right there. There’s extra information that I’m getting that I wouldn’t get if I wasn’t part of that group. I really appreciate that you guys are very good at documenting things and explaining it, and I would say ease of use is part of why I am still with you guys and why I bought the Infinity Bundle.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. We always feel like support is like a feature of the product. It’s not like a cost that we have to minimize something we invest in and, like you said, your clients like the fact that they can talk to you and call you like, we wanted to make ourselves as available as much as we can and be real humans and help people. Karen Wisch: I don’t know. Yeah, I would say you guys are,  Chris Badgett: I don’t know where I heard it on a podcast like this is 10 years ago. Somebody dropped an idea in my head that. Caused what you’re talking about, which is that the support documentation, it’s part of your marketing content. You should invest just as much time in supporting your customers with content as you do trying to, do sales pages and marketing stuff. And that really clicked for me, and we even for a while. We would have a, everybody came to a Zoom call and would write documentation together for an hour on Thursdays or something. And a learning management system is not an easy marketing website with a homepage and about page and a contact page. It’s got a lot going on. So there’s a lot  Karen Wisch: of bells and whistles, right?  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Karen Wisch: Yeah I would say that most of the time, whatever my problem was. There was a way to resolve it very easily, and if there wasn’t, you guys are like, okay, if I can have access to your site so I can see what’s going on. Because sometimes, the websites act a little swirly. But I would say in general, you are able to fix it or give me a suggestion of something else I. When I first started, I did not have a good host. I didn’t realize that was gonna be an issue, but I didn’t realize how many people were going to be coming to the website, and I think that’s increased in I use Cloud ways now and I’m very happy with it. And that was one of your all’s suggestions at the time. I don’t know if that’s still one of your go-tos, but, yeah. They, because I’m able to scale with them, which is very helpful. As the site’s grown in popularity, we’ve been able to scale the size and manage the workload that we’ve got. Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Yeah. Sometimes, you can start on like a cheap shared hosting account, but if something like Missouri credentialing board starts getting a ton of traffic and a ton of users, you gotta get on something a little. A little goofy. Karen Wisch: And it is if people are required to have a certain amount of continuing education hours, and we’re one of the places that can provide them for them and we do it very reasonably, most of the courses are five or $10 it draws more people to them. But it’s also a nice. Side source of revenue for them. It’s stuff they don’t do anything about. And it continues, they don’t, the selling point for LMS, I think is the fact that once it’s in place, people pay their money. They review the materials, they take the quiz, they receive their certification, and no one in the office has to deal with any of it. They get an email that says, John Smith. Passed his Mars course and gets three units of continuing ed, and a lot has gone on in the background, but they’ve, they don’t have to mess with it. It’s a hands-free thing for them, and yet people are getting what they need and they’re getting. They’re getting all their, the bells and whistles that you guys implement. So you pass quiz one, the, it lights up and it goes, congratulations. You’re through with quiz one. You did it. And you go on to the next place. All that stuff is wonderful and it’s not stuff I even have to think about. It’s stuff you guys thought about you. It’s great. I’m sorry, my desk is wiggling. Chris Badgett: Hearing from this story with this client, I. Is the time saving, like you came in and you were able to automate and time save, like to a level that is exponential in terms to what they were doing before. Karen Wisch: I would say they have grown exponentially, partially because of that. Their staff is much larger. They’re doing a lot more than what they were before. They have several programs that they do now for the state of Missouri and before they couldn’t do it because they’re. It was so much, I wouldn’t say not important stuff, but it was stuff that they had to do, but they couldn’t get it done. Because, they’re grading quizzes instead of working on helping people save people, and now that’s all taken care of for them. They don’t have to worry about it. They can deal with the peers and with the crisis that’s going on. Rather than going, yes, they, they passed this test or not. It’s it’s crazy how automating just this one part has allowed them to grow in other ways. Be, ’cause they have the time to think about it, okay.  Chris Badgett: Buying back your time with automation. It’s what you can do with that time. Once you have it back, you can make more programs, you can help more people, you can scale in other ways. That’s a really beautiful project there.  Karen Wisch: And that’s exactly what they’ve done. They’ve taken that time and they’ve moved on with it, which is awesome. It’s, just having time that they’ve never had before. ’cause they could never get ahead of these quizzes and stuff, which sounds silly, but again, we’re seven years later. The world has changed a lot in the last seven years and I’m sure it’ll change another a ton in the next seven. You just, I, and back to the original reason they wanted me to, they hired me, was so that they could get their renewals done. The people were not ready for online renewals at the time. It just was a epic fail. It just couldn’t do it. And now, seven years later they’re doing it, no problem. It’s just the change in comfortable being comfortable with being online, that pe And again, I hate to give COVID any credit for anything good, but I would say that people had to learn how to do things online in that time period, Chris Badgett: like you said Hey, maybe we should do this by Zoom instead of airplane tickets in multiple days. Karen Wisch: And I, it’s like I have a physician friend and she was like, oh yeah, we used to go to Orlando and sit in a very cold hotel. I never got out of the hotel. I’d much rather sit on my couch and watch the Zoom meeting there and be in the comfort of my own home. It’s a lot easier when I’m not freezing, and have spent the money and shows. It’s not like I ever saw anything in Orlando, but the inside of the hotel. Chris Badgett: Karen Wish. That’s karen wish.com. KAER or sorry, K-A-R-E-N-W-I-S-C h.com. We were talking about the Missouri credentialing board. Thank you Karen, for coming on the show. Thank you for being a shining example of an education entrepreneur, somebody who empowers others to lift up others through education. It sends out a ripple of positive impact in the world. And thank you for sharing your story with us today. Is there anywhere people can go to connect with you besides your website or just karen wish.com?  Karen Wisch: Just my website. That’s all I.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you Karen for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Karen Wisch: Oh, thank you Chris. And thank you so much for getting Lifter LMS together ’cause it’s awesome.  Chris Badgett: You bet. 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 Missouri Credentialing Board Built a Continuing Education Platform With LifterLMS appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Chris Lassiter of LearnAINow joins Chris Badgett in this episode of LMSCast to demonstrate how AI is revolutionizing web development. Chris is now developing online courses that show individuals how to create websites completely with AI without using conventional coding. One of his initial classes covers making a website with a new tool called Bolt.new, buying a domain through Route 53, and utilizing AWS to host a website. Chris provides a live demonstration of Bolt.new during the show, which creates full-stack websites using React and JavaScript utilizing AI agents that are probably driven by Anthropic’s models. The front-end and back-end are automatically built and deployed by the platform, which also has component-based design, light/dark settings, and seamless navigation. In addition to supporting database and payment connections like Supabase and Stripe, it even interacts with GitHub for version control. Chris demonstrates how to instruct the AI to build all the required code and add features like an admin panel or payment site. Additionally, he draws attention to Bolt.new’s next hackathon, which offers a $100,000 grand prize and $1 million in prizes. He encourages developers of all skill levels to take part, including “vibe coders” like himself who use AI rather than conventional coding. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Chris Lasseter. You can find chris@learnainow.ai. Chris does a lot with artificial intelligence. It’s always fun to see what he is been up to. He’s working with agents. He is building entire courses with ai. We’re gonna do some screen sharing in this episode. So if you’re listening on the podcast and you wanna see what Chris is demoing and talking about, go to the lifter LMS YouTube channel [00:01:00] and do a search for Chris Lasseter, and you’ll find it. Make sure you get the most recent episode or the most recent video so that you can see those screen shares, or you can go to the LMSCast website. Which has the podcast on it, that’s lms cast.com. It has both the audio and the video version of the podcast. But first, welcome back to the show, Chris. Yeah, thanks Chris. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. Well, you’ve been busy. You’re, uh, going deep in the AI tools and, uh, you’ve been doing a lot of development. Tell us about what you’ve been up to at Learn AI now. Yeah, so basically we have, uh, been working on courses on the site to teach others on how to use ai. One of our first courses that we’re about to release here in the next week or two is on how to build a website by using just ai. I know you and I, we mainly use WordPress to build our websites. Chris Lassiter: But the way that I’m doing it for this course is I. To show people on how to use AWS to host your website, how to buy a domain through Route 53. And then we use, uh, a new program called, bolt new to uh, build the website. And that’s what we’ll be showing you today. Awesome. Well, what is Bolt new? Chris Badgett: What does it do?  Chris Lassiter: Yeah, so, uh, bolt on new. Basically, uh, allows you to use AI to, to build, uh, a full stack front end, back end of a website, uh, using mainly React and JavaScript. And then you can take, build that project up, and then put it on, uh, like an S3 server for AWS and then bam, you have a front end and a back end of a website. It does it all for you. Wow. That’s awesome.  Chris Badgett: Well, I’m excited to jump into the demo if you wanna show us. And again, if you’re listening, come on over to the video version of the podcast on the YouTube channel or lmscast.com.  Chris Lassiter: Yeah, absolutely. So let me go ahead and click on share screen here. All right, so you should be seeing my screen here in a second, and it should be the bolt new website. Yep. That’s up. All right. Perfect. So right here, it’s really simple. So let’s say we want to build me a portfolio. I am a let’s say full stack developer with a w. Certifications. We’ll just keep it as simple as that. And what we’ll do is we’ll hit go. And so what it’s gonna start doing is it’s gonna start designing you know, the front end and building all the code. And it’s really fantastic. And, you know, something that I’d also, uh, like to point out also if Bolt new right now, they. Here on May 30th, uh, they’re actually gonna be launching a hackathon with prizes up to, uh, a million dollars worth of prizes, and the main prize is a hundred thousand dollars. And I’ve actually signed up for it. So, you know, if they go to hackathon.dev. They’ll be able to register and it’s gonna be amazing. I mean, a million dollars in prizes with a hundred thousand dollars as the main prize you know, they’re not sponsoring me, uh, to say that in this video. I just think it’s something that’s just fantastic and people can really, uh, to do it. And it’s for anybody vi a vibe coder like me. ’cause I, I’m not a coder, I’m a vibe coder, you know, I use AI and, you know, I try to understand what’s going on and, you know, I learn as I go. But this event is for anyone from a beginner to advance. That’s awesome. And as that’s building AI I find a little overwhelming ’cause there’s all these new tools and stuff’s happening really fast. How, how do you  keep up with it all? So actually I have a routine, uh, throughout my day. So I try to stay focused on my projects during the day. And then in the evenings you know, while I’m sitting in bed, that’s when I’m actually going through, uh, YouTube and notifications, uh, you know, from, you know, lifter LMSs notifications on Facebook, you know, or, there’s some people I follow on YouTube and I just start going through, you know, all the new ai, uh, that’s being released. And I just try to, to try to stay ahead of everyone and, and try to remember what’s going on. ’cause you know, if you, if you don’t, if you don’t. Stay ahead. You know, you’re gonna fall behind.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great point. And it’s amazing watching what Bull New is doing here. This would take a developer, weeks, months to do what you’re doing and like a podcast episode, and then not even the whole episode. It’s awesome.  Chris Lassiter: Yeah, so right here, what you see right now, um, is it’s installing all the dependencies on the server. After it, it kind of broke down on what it’s doing. Uh, it kind of tells you how, you know, for the navigation it’s gonna be smooth scrolling badges for AWS uh, it’s talking about the design elements. And then what it’s doing is it’s creating every single component that it needs for this React website. And then once it’s done, it’s gonna show you a preview of it. And that’s where you can actually start, uh, modifying anything that you want changed. And what’s really cool is recently they actually just added a selection, a selector on here. So you can actually select components or elements on the site and actually say specifically, Hey, change this. So that’s really cool. And another thing that they just added is GitHub connection. So once you have this saved, you can actually save it to your GitHub, and then you can take it to another IDE like, uh, you know, cursor and, you know, make changes to it. And then. Push it back to your GitHub and then you could come back to Bolt and then pull it back from GitHub and then continue working on it for the design aspect, if you want. Um, it’s, it’s really powerful. It’s a really, it’s really amazing. I’m excited to, to show you what this is gonna look like here in a few minutes. Chris Badgett: So after the initial build, like if somebody just wants to update some text on the about page, how would they, what would the simplest way to do that be?  Chris Lassiter: No. Yeah, absolutely. So, one of the simplest thing is, is connecting it, uh, to A-C-I-D-I, uh, pipeline. So, for example connecting it to your GitHub, and then when you’re over here, you could say, Hey, make this change to this, push it, and then it’ll push it to your GitHub. And then once you accept that, then in your GitHub. When you have the, deployment, uh, YML that sends it to AWS, um, once, once you accept it into GitHub, it’ll push only those changes to your S3, if that’s how you’re doing it. Oh, I got people coming the house and and it’ll make those changes. So, yeah, great question. Um, you know, we can use, uh, GitHub to control that. So if you see right here, I’m gonna go full screen on this. This is. All built by ai. And so, you know, you got your call to actions right here where it says Get in touch and it works perfectly fine. Um, you know, you got view projects, takes you down here, and it kind of just puts in pretend, uh, view projects here. The live demo, of course, is, is not gonna work right there. But you can, uh, fill that in with your information. But what I wanna do is kind of just scroll down. So if you see here it says, like about me, it talks about, you know, what a, a full stack developer does, and then, you know, you have a call to action here for download resume. But I personally don’t like having those on my website.” So I would actually change those. I, you know, I, I think that’s just, um, you know, whatever someone says, I really don’t like those. Right here, uh, kind of talks about the technologies that, that a, you know, a full stack developer, you know, what would be able to build with and, and what they know about. Of course we talked about the projects here. Then right here we got the AWS certifications. What’s really cool here is you could actually click on this and say, you know, use this badge and, you know, give it a link and it’ll put that picture in there. But right here it’s talking about, you know, the certifications that are available. And then you got your get in touch right here and then, send message. So what’s really cool about this, now that we’re at the bottom. Is, let’s say we wanted this to actually, uh, work, be a hundred percent functional. All we would have to do is, is go back to it. It’s also got dark mode and light mode. See how it already built that in? Nice. Nice. And that’s one of the hardest things too, especially with like, if you’re building on a WordPress, uh, trying to get that to do it without installing like a hundred plugins. Um, you know, it did, it did all of this, uh, instantly for me. But what I wanna show you is take this outta full screen is for example, let’s say we, you know, we wanted to actually send an email. So what we could do is you see the integrations, uh, it can integrate to Stripe, superb base, and GitHub right now. We could say, Hey, uh, we want to connect to super base and be able to, you know, send emails. Um, and it will connect that to the super base, which is, which will hold your database. You can also connect it to, uh, to Google and use their fire base, which I’ve done a lot, especially for the email services. So that’s really cool. But the stripe, uh, this one’s fun. Watch this. So let’s say we want a payment. Portal on here. Okay. So I want people to be able to purchase my resume for $5. Please add Stripe to my website. Make me a backend for admin. And so what it’s gonna do here is it’s gonna go ahead and start integrating the stripe CLI into it. We don’t need to add the stripe key right now, so we’ll go ahead and, and, uh, not do that real quick. Hold up before we, oh yeah, it does need to add a stripe key to it. Actually I wanna show this to you. So let me, let me get a strike key real quick. It’ll be a test one so we don’t have to worry about anyone, you know, using it. So what questions do you have about this so far?  Chris Badgett: I’m impressed at how fast that comes together. So for people watching, this is an AI agent, right? Putting it together or, I mean, it’s a chat interface like chat GPT, but it’s doing multiple things. So does that make this an AI agent?  Chris Lassiter: Yeah, so it is an agent and I believe they have it connected to Anthropic for their ai. I’m not a hundred percent sure on that, so don’t quote me on that. But it is an AI agent, uh, that it’s connected to a Pacific model and, and it’s, and it’s doing all this for you.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s that’s amazing. What, um. What, uh, explain how the stripe works. ’cause normally you, like you, you have your own Stripe account, right? And you’re getting a test API key, so you can show it working. But I mean, like at lifter LMS as an example, we have a Stripe plugin that allows people to be able to connect Stripe. But this is just doing all that is basically writing the code for the Stripe connection and putting it in your website, which is pretty cool. Chris Lassiter: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I’ve looked in the backend, I’ve looked at your guys’, uh, Stripe code and saw all the hard work that, uh, your developers have done on it. And it, it does all that. It automatically just integrates it, uh, into it. It makes you kinda like a little e-commerce. That’s really, really cool. Okay, here you go. I got a strike key. Let’s see here. We’re gonna  Chris Badgett: create one. When you said create me an admin, a backend for admin, explain what that means.  Chris Lassiter: Uh, so basically, um, I can have like a backend to, to be able to see like, you know, who ordered history, uh, things like that. All right, so we’re gonna add the stripe key. That’s fine. Oh, I forgot to add the product. Of course I did. Oh, one second. Let me cancel that real quick. You know what? I actually forgot to put it onto staging mode. So that’s one important, uh, to remember. For those who, uh, are doing this, you always wanna make sure that you are in test mode before you add the strike key because or you’ll have to use a real credit card. So we’re just gonna call this a, I know you guys can’t see it right now but basically I’m just building a product real fast on, on here. So let me bring this over so you can see it. So I’m gonna say a resume, and we’re gonna call this, we’re gonna say it’s $5, it’s a one-off, and we’re just gonna add this product real quick. All right? And then, so now what we need to do is we need to be able to get an API key. And so we will go ahead and grab this. I think it’s gonna want, huh? And this will all change. I’ll, I’ll delete all this afterwards. Okay. Integration for people to buy my resume and that’s wonderful. Spell check. Chris Badgett: How do you do with bolt new, like domain mapping?  Chris Lassiter: Yeah. So, right now, uh, when you’re ready to deploy this, it actually deploys it to a temporary site. So you can view it and then you can domain map from that temporary site by using their service. Or you can actually, uh, you know, download it to, uh, a server already that already has a domain, uh, map to that server. So if you look right here, it’ll say, it’ll say that, Hey, we need to be able to save all this information, uh, into a database. So we need to connect to superb base database. Uh, so what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go ahead and, uh, connect. And so we’re gonna create a new project. We’re just gonna call it a resume, and then we’ll just have it, choose its own password. And then of course, we’ll, you know, change all this at the end and delete this. And so what’s really cool about this is you don’t, you don’t necessarily have to use this database. You can actually use any database that you want to use, you know, you can use, um, you know, AWS, Mongo, you know, what have you. Cause it’s a lot easier ’cause it automatically already fully integrates. All right, so now what we wanna do is. See, I want to change my strike key as I was using a live ’cause. We don’t want to do that. ’cause right now it’s connected to the live side of the strike configuration. So let’s go here. We’ll get a copy of that. All right. Uh, we’ll go to code here and let’s see here. Go to ENV. There’s the super base. Where is the stripe A go. All right. Come on. Should have done that in the beginning. I think I, uh. I think I made it mad. All right, so this is what we’re gonna do then. We’re just going to, since I messed that up, we’re just gonna send it back. So I, I should have given it the right key, uh, in the beginning. So what we’re gonna do is we’re just going to, uh, switch it back, uh, outta the test mode and then a product catalog. Then I’ll create a product real quick. We’ll call it a resume, uh, one off $5, add the product, and then let’s see here. There we go. All right. All right. So right now it’s gonna go ahead and it’s going to, uh, be able to create that, uh, stripe checkout session. Uh, so people can securely purchase it. And then it’s building, those functions within the database. And of course, it’s gonna create those components. Now I’m really happy that this happened. Uh, this will happen a lot when you’re vibe coding. Vibe coding is basically, uh, you know, people who don’t know how to code and they’re just using ai, uh, to create and you’re just vibing along trying to figure it out. And so what I’m gonna do is I’ll apply this, uh, super base migration and then I’m gonna say right here, I need you to go ahead and fix this component. Like I said, happens a lot when you’re, uh, building because sometimes it may add like component that’s not connected to another component. And so you’ll just have to click on it to fix it. So not a big deal. And then normally what I’ll do is I’ll click it like twice. Uh, and if it doesn’t change, uh, what the issue is, I’ll say, discuss problem. And it’ll kind of talk it out. And then you can say, fix the error and it should fix this problem. So, let’s see here. It’s talking about the, about component. There you go. Perfect. All. So we got out of that. So right now we’re in a different one. Discuss problem. So have you used any, uh, you know, vibe, coding tools, Chris? Not yet, but I’m close. You’re getting me pumped  Chris Badgett: to try it. I was talking to my friend Matt Madero, and he was doing a bunch of custom podcasting apps and stuff. Getting me excited about it. Chris Lassiter: Yeah, I have a friend, uh, right now he does a podcast and is 100% all ai. He types it all out and he used his voice and it does it all for him. And I think, you know, it’s fantastic. Uh, it saves him a lot of time. All right, it should have it on there. So now, um, I don’t see the links or anything like that, so let me see on here. I saw it. Download  Chris Badgett: resume. It’s just lower on the page.  Chris Lassiter: Yeah, it said download resume. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna say okay. Create me a, uh, stripe portal to purchase the resume. Uh, give me a backend to see histories and also a customer portal. All right, so it’s gonna go ahead and update the package, uh, Jason o to add any, uh, necessary dependencies. And now it’s gonna start updating, uh, the React app to, to add, uh, you know, those components that we need, those pages that we need for React. So I’m actually learning a lot about React right now. You know, I’ve been using WordPress for 15 years and there’s so much to learn when it comes to coding. The coding is the part that I, uh, don’t understand at all. ’cause I’m a vibe coder, but I’m just really trying to understand, you know, the difference between pages and components and, you know, JS or TX files and just, all the different types of you know, the different types of coding that you can do with React. Uh, but I think that’s what’s, that’s what’s nice about being a vibe coder, you know, even though AI is doing it all for you. I’m learning all of it, you know, while I was doing it, I’m asking the questions.  Chris Badgett: It sounds like, uh, WordPress in a way, like I’m not a developer myself, but WordPress allowed me to like basically vibe code websites like the tools, I’ve heard it called the layers of abstraction. Like we don’t necessarily know. How the machine works at like a mechanical level at the server, but we, we use it to create websites and that’s okay. Chris Lassiter: All right. Let’s see here. Did it add it? Okay, so I don’t see it on there yet, so, uh, I don’t see a way for me to purchase the resume on the landing page. Please update. So it’s taking me, uh, a little bit longer to get through this process because I didn’t, I didn’t actually tell it from the beginning that, you know, we were going to integrate Stripe and super base into it. So I. Normally, uh, last time I built an example it took me like five minutes and I had everything there. So let’s see if it works now. All right, so the purchase resume is there, there’s, there’s some kind of issue. So let’s, let’s see what the issue is. So for your, for yourself, uh, what are you exploring for ai to help you, to assist you with like the podcast?  Chris Badgett: I. As an avid podcast listener, my friend Matt, had built something that helps you like kind of gather podcasts. Like podcast Discovery is actually a big problem, like podcast search, like finding, you know, how like Amazon suggests movies you would like once they really, or, uh, Netflix gets to know you and, and it like shows you, hey, you might also like this other dystopian future movie. Like finding good podcasts and not just like the six that, um, Spotify recommends based on your, what you follow and all that stuff. That’s an area. Um, I like, as a podcaster, I like using AI to do research on guests, and that’s just, chat GPT land. And, coming up with good questions and stuff like that. One thing I’ve been interested in that I haven’t done is sometimes I like to be a guest. I wanna be a guest on my own podcast. I. But I don’t necessarily like to just sit there and talk for an hour, but if I could create some kind of AI interviewer, uh, I think that would be really cool to prepare a show, like a vision for a show. And even if like, not all the questions were, you know, just say exactly this, but if you could have some kind of podcast interviewer that could interview yourself or even other people, I think that’s really interesting. And ideally that would, it would be able to also be a video version and stuff like that. Chris Lassiter: I think we’re close. Yeah, I think we are so close to being, uh, there like that.  Chris Badgett: I mean, you could probably do it now just with chat GPT and the voice mode and, you know, just say, Hey, I wanna record a 45 minute podcast of myself. I’d like to touch on these topics. Interview me and, and then just record that. This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells in guiding users to helpful content. Pub 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 like Google LM too. Have you played around with that or, uh, notebook, lm  Chris Lassiter: I actually, I have not. It’s on my list. I have a little, uh, green book here that I keep on my desk of all the AI stuff that I’m working on or doing, and it’s actually, uh, in there to, to go take a look at it.  Chris Badgett: What I love about Notebook LM is. You know, you can get lost in chat threads and stuff, but, uh, with Notebook, lm I think you can upload up to 50 or a hundred different sources. That could be videos, it could be like a PDF of a book. It could be a URL and all kinds of stuff. And so it’s like you’re consolidating your research and then, um, you can tell it when you prompt it to look at all of it or just these three things and so on, to guide the output. Then it also has a feature where once you’re done with the output, it will, you can ask it to create a 20 minute podcast where two people, two fake AI people talk about whatever the thing is. And it’s actually a really cool way to learn. So I, I, I just find it fascinating. Chris Lassiter: Oh, that’s really cool. Yeah. I’ve actually, I actually, uh, saw something like that the other day on a, on a YouTube channel. I thought it was pretty funny. How, how people are doing that. So while we were talking, um, like I was saying in the beginning, it’s kind of nice to go ahead and give that prompt in the beginning on what you wanna do with connecting to like, a database and using Stripe integration. Uh, so I went ahead and restarted the project and you know, that’s the fun part about it being a vibe code or sometimes you just gotta stop what you’re doing and start over again. Um. Could I have gotten it to work through the other, uh, way I could have. Um, but we just don’t have time in this, uh, podcast to do that today. So we’re gonna try to do it, uh, here in, in like under 10 minutes, try to get this connected to Stripe in a database, which, any, if we were doing this back in the day, I mean, it would’ve taken probably a week to do this. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Easily. Easily. I think that’s a good point. Too about not getting frustrated, like that’s part of vibe coding. You gotta just reset. And just go with the flow. And sometimes you gotta burn your ships and start over because when you have this kind of speed, it doesn’t matter if you, okay, well, I, I took, it took me 10 minutes to learn a mistake, so now I’m just gonna start over and not make that mistake. And you’re literally doing like weeks or months of work and 10 minutes. So it gives you a lot of time. Chris Lassiter: So what I’m doing, uh, right now is I just reset all my keys on Stripe since they were publicly, uh, on the video. So that’s, they’re all replaced now. So it’s very important, uh, that when you are filming with other people, if, if you accidentally show your Dov file or your, or your secret keys or tokens, make sure you always change ’em right away or logins. Yeah, that too. Have you done that before, uh, on a podcast? Have you accidentally like, uh, accidentally showed, uh, like a login or a password or anything like that?  Chris Badgett: I mean, the password managers make it, they kind of know, expect that, so they hide it when you do it. So I haven’t had that problem in a long time. But yeah, there’s plenty of times where I’ve had to edit a video and, blur out a license key or something like that. Chris Lassiter: So as you see here, um, it’s actually doing a really good job. It, it’s showing the, the super base, the stripe integrations. It’s showing the login page, the, the checkin, the checkout. So, um, I think we may get this on the first try, uh, when it’s done here in a few minutes. But, uh, while we’re waiting, I would like to show you, uh, that project I was talking to you earlier about before the podcast, uh, about how I’m using, uh, AI agents to actually build a course for you. Yeah. Uh, inside of WordPress. Uh, can we switch to that real quick? Yeah, let’s, let’s switch over. The agent’s busy.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. So we’re gonna go do something else. This is another cool thing about pipe coding.  Chris Lassiter: Yeah. So, this right here. NAN and what’s really cool, uh, about it is it’s basically just a complete workflow, uh, automation system to connect to like so many different APIs And what I’ve been working on, I’ll zoom in on this so you can kind of see it is. You receive a chat message from someone to say, Hey, build me a course on how to be a lifeguard. What it’ll do is, is it’ll store that into a memory right here, and then it’ll go up to another, uh, agent to understand exactly the course details and what’s going on. And then it’ll have like an if and factor. So like, Hey, did they answer it correctly? Did they not answer it correctly? And then if not, uh, then you know what they’ll do is it’ll go back to the user and say, Hey, I need more answers on this. And then once the chat has everything it needs, what it’ll do is it will it will post it to your site, uh, create the course, create the lessons. Then send a chat back, uh, to the user saying that it’s created. And I actually got it to work yesterday on simple mode. It created, uh, a course on how to be a lifeguard. It created the four lessons that I asked them to create. The only problem was, is I didn’t connect the lessons to the course. Uh, that was my fault on the coding side. Uh, so this morning I fixed that and everything worked out great. But what I’m trying to do right now is, uh, an advanced version of this. And so I added some storage memory for ai. Uh, so it can like, remember. What the AI and what the conversation between the user and AI is, and I changed, uh, a bunch of code responses in here. And so basically at the end, what I wanted to do is to be able to build a web app that users can come in and, they already have their WordPress site up. They have their lifter LMS installed, and they want to be like, okay, hey, I wanna build a course on how to build an airplane. And they can go into my web app online and go to, okay, hey, build me electro MS course on how to build an airplane. I want, 10 lessons within this course. And then just hit send. I. Then, it’ll do all of that. And then it’ll, of course, you’ll have to put in your log informations to your WordPress, you know, like maybe a custom user. And it will connect to securely to your site, and it’ll use this automation and it will build everything out for you. So all you have to do is then go into lifter LMS and go into the course builder. And see that these courses and lessons have all been built and then just start modifying it. Uh, so instead of going one by one and adding everything in there. It’s already there for you. Of course, you’ll have to modify it, add the pictures, videos, or what have you. Uh, but eventually once I get my vibe coding done, ideally it would be great. Uh, for it to say, okay, hey, you know, what quizzes do you want? What assignments do you want are, do you want a video? Okay, what’s the link to the video? And then you put all that in there and it’s done. And then now you’re, now you have a less, a course with a bunch of lessons and everything’s there for you. Chris Badgett: That is super cool. That is super cool. Tell us more about what N eight N is like, what it does.  Chris Lassiter: So it’s an open source workflow which you can, uh, use NAN uh, dot io or you can actually download it onto your computer. And it basically lets you like, build automated processes without writing, uh, a ton of code. It’s just click and go. Uh, it’s really freaking fascinating. It’s kind of like, um, like Zapier but. For me, it’s got like a lot more, uh, connections, and I. I really love it a lot and there’s really a ton of videos out there on how to use it. But what I’ve been doing is I’ve been using chat, CPT and anthropic, and I’ve been going back and forth between the two. Uh, like if I’m working on like, hey, I kind of need step by steps, I’ll use chat, CPT ’cause chat, CCP t is really good at walking you through stuff. But then if you go to Andro, Andro is really good at coding, so I’m working on, for example. Let’s see here. If I go to, was it prepare section data? So right, right here, if you look at this, this is the code saying once it’s created the course, it needs to make sure that the, that the courses, uh, and the lessons, um, are mapped together. I use philanthropic to do that. Um, and that was the problem before. I didn’t have that code in there and so I didn’t connect the lessons to the course id, but now it does. Um, nice. And so and so that’s what  Chris Badgett: I’m using. It’s really cool. This looks like, um, you know, like if you’re building marketing automation and active campaign or something, you can build these workflows and automations that happen through time. So the, the interface looks familiar in that way, and I personally like the visual style so that I can see how it all fits together and not try to hold that in my head.  Chris Lassiter: Yeah. And I’m telling you, if you go online and look at NAN workflows, I mean there are just some crazy workflows. Uh, I could build right now. It would probably take me maybe about an hour. I could build a workflow that connects to my chat TPT account, and when I’m on my phone, I can go, Hey, read me all my emails that I received today, and in the workflow it connects to my, uh, my Gmail account, and then it’ll send it back to chat GPT and then it’ll read me all my emails or I can say, Hey, send an email to, to Chris. Hey, I’d like to be booked onto your podcast today, and it will send you an email on my behalf. It’s fantastic. That’s cool. All right, I think any other questions about this? If not, we’re gonna go back over to the bolt and see the next steps. Let’s switch back to Bolt. All right. All right. It says, uh, we need a new super base connection, which makes sense, uh, because we started a new project. So we’re gonna click on superb base. Uh, we’re gonna call this, uh, resume two, create new project, sorry, resume two. Let it fill its own. Some password in create new project. All right, we’re gonna go apply those changes to the database schema. Okay. And now we need to, uh, be able to. Add the stripe payments into it. While it’s doing that, look, see how it, like, how I like that little animation.  Chris Badgett: That’s cute. Yeah. I like subtle animation like that. It’s good.  Chris Lassiter: Last time I built this, it did like the glass animation where like it lit up in glass mode. It was kind of cool. I could actually add that on there pretty quick. And then there’s your resume right here. There it is. There’s the resume purchase, secure payment stripe processing. So I asked it here to, to add the stripe integration. So I’m going to hit apply. Was it not done yet at there? Let’s try that fix real quick. Chris Badgett: So what is, um, when you’re looking with, working with [00:41:00] tools like NAN eight N and, um, bold new, like how should people think about cost in terms of, uh, you know, AI has a cost, but these absolutely. So how you know, but it is probably not as much as you think, right? But somebody has to pay for the agents and this, the energy required to run all this. Right.  Chris Lassiter: You know, I’m glad you asked that. Let me give you an example. If you take the entire Harry Potter’s series of books, all those words, and you throw ’em in a chat, GPT. It’s about a million tokens. Well, right now for chat, GPT, depending on what model you use, it could be anywhere between, you know, a couple of pennies to 25 cents per million tokens. That’s a whole novel. That’s so much so many characters that you can use. And so yeah, it costs money. I would say I probably spend. I like to pay annually because you save more when you do it that way. But if, if I had to say monthly costs, I pay $20 a month for the chat CPT Pro. Um, and then for Bolt, I paid their, for their annual. So I would say, let’s say annually. So I probably pay about 200, maybe two 50 a year to use all these tools. Which is not  Chris Badgett: much for writing code. That would take no, you know, a month to do, like manually so  Chris Lassiter: I once paid a coder to build something for me. It took him two weeks and it almost cost me a thousand dollars. And that was years, years ago. And now I can do pretty much all of that and it cost me a few cents. Yeah, if you think about it, so right here I clicked on the button to, to purchase the, uh, the email, or I’m sorry, to purchase the, the resume. And so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go ahead and fill this out real quick, uh, on a different screen. So none of my stuff pops up. Oops, let’s bring this back over here. All right, let’s apply the changes. So sometimes when you are trying to register on a site, uh, with the database, uh, there are, uh, security policies, uh, that are in effect. Um, and so I had to update that. So what I did was, is I registered and let’s see if I click on dashboard, uh, here’s like the purchase history. There’s nothing that’s been purchased yet. Now it hasn’t a asked me yet to connect, to drive. Let’s see what happens when I click on this purchase resume. $5. You know, obviously we’d have to, you know, fix all of, you know, the text, make it a little darker or what have you. Okay. Yeah. So as I thought it, it aired out right there because it hasn’t even asked me for my secret key. Uh, so let me, let me do that. So it’s gonna, first, it’s gonna take care of this issue. Let’s see what it was, uh, JSON issue, uh, with credentials. So while it’s doing that, let’s take a look at, see how we’re in the backend, how it’s making all those changes. Pretty cool. Go to the ENV. And then we’re gonna click purchase, resume, proceed to payment. Why do we keep on doing this? All right. We need to connect the stripe. To  Chris Badgett: my Stripe  Chris Lassiter: account. You gotta love that word integration, right? Always spell it wrong. So, yeah, so basically here, uh, it, it’s having a path issue with a superb based database, but I don’t, it didn’t ask me for my secret key. Normally it’s gonna ask right here to integrate with Stripe. I think I might have missed a step there. So, let’s see here. Let’s see what it says. Oh, okay. So it wants me to go to the super based dashboard and then add that under there. Okay. All right. Not a problem. So I’m just gonna bring it over here real quick in a different window. ’cause I don’t know. What it’s gonna wanna show. All right, so let’s see here. So navigate to settings API. Yep. All right. And then click on. Click on environment variables. You know, it’s funny when you go, uh, to a different, uh, website. Here I’ll show, let’s see here. You know, it’s like, oh, you’re following the steps, but it’s like, where’s that at? So project settings and then. Variables. I don’t see it. I’ve been, I, you know, I’ve been in here a a a few times but sometimes I just get lost. Bring this over here. So, let’s see here. So I went to project settings, and then it says, I wanted me to go to variables, but I don’t see where the variables would be. This is making me nuts. So what are your thoughts so far?  Chris Badgett: That’s really cool, man. Like it’s amazing. It makes me wanna roll up my sleeves and commit some time to vibe coding and learning the tech, like you said. If you don’t learn this stuff, it’s changing the world. So like it’s good to do it. What advice would you have for somebody who wants to try their first vibe coding project? I know like, it’s really common for people to do, like a to-do list app is like their first project. So like, go try to build a to-do list app without being a developer and see how far you can get. So what. Would you recommend Bolt New for that?  Chris Lassiter: Oh, absolutely. I think, uh, bolt New would be, uh, one of the first things to start with, especially when you are creating you know, your first website. Yeah, I really do that that, that was a great question. I, okay, so it, we, it should just be in here. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna say. Add the following into my env, and then what I’m gonna do is give my developer information to that. So it should update you see right here. It should update my ENV with all that information. There we go. I saw it happening. Okay, cool. All right, so we’re gonna go ahead and give this information to it. Like I said, these will be reset afterwards. Oh, is it done now? Can I go back in there? Let’s get out of it. Go back in there. All, there you go. I was trying to make changes before, uh, before it was done, and then we’ll take a copy of the secret key. And then we’ll take a copy of this. We should, technically we can get away without wet, get away without doing that. So let’s just save real quick. All right. So let’s go down here and try this. Yeah. ’cause I think it’s storing it in my, my super base. I think it’s actually storing the information there, but it shouldn’t be. It should be storing it, uh, here in my B. So let’s see what it says right here for the checkout page. But, uh, but normally, uh, when you’re using it in the beginning, it’ll ask you just to, uh, connect to your stripe and then you give your secret key. I don’t wanna keep on boring you guys with this, but I did wanna show you something like really cool. So, for example, you see how this like animates right here? Yeah. Let’s say, you know, you want these panels right here to like, to glow. You know what I can do is I can click on this inspector. And then click right here. And I can say, make these panels animate and glow with a glassy effect when you know the mouse goes over it All right. So right here, it’s gonna make a beautiful, glossy, uh, hover effect. So it’s updating, uh, those components. All right, so now it’s done it. So we’ll scroll down and see. Look at that. Yeah. That’s cool. Very cool. That’s cool. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so it’s really cool. So Bold News, it’s one of my, uh, favorite websites, especially when I’m vibe coding. Uh, I really like using them to start an idea. I. And then, take it outside of it and go to, you know, like an IDE like cursor and, you know, just do more, uh, advanced stuff on it. But I have built websites for customers who didn’t want to use WordPress. And we specifically, you know, just I built it here and, sent it to ’em and they were so happy about it. And it was a static, so they didn’t need any changes. And yeah, it does a lot, you know, people are worried about, oh, is AI gonna replace, coders, um, or designers? And, and I’ll go, no, I, I think it, I don’t think it will. I, I think what it’ll it do is it’ll just be able to allow them to work faster, make, you know, make smoother projects and, you know, make futuristic projects  Chris Badgett: and get more people just who aren’t developers getting involved in the space, which is a good thing. Exactly. Chris, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for taking us to school on Vibe coding. I love your style too about like, Hey, it’s, we’re vibe coding, we gotta roll with it. We gotta learn. Let’s fix these errors, let’s reset. It’s something that just like we all started playing around with chat GPT two years ago or whenever it was like, this is the next evolution of that. Start playing around with. Vibe coding and this, these Ag agentic workflows, which is really cool. ’cause automate, it’s all about saving time and extending your capabilities, which is the whole purpose of technology.  Chris Lassiter: Yeah. And you know what I wanna say is, um, you know, if you come to learn AI now.ai and sign up for our first course, we partnered up with Bolt New and you know, they’re giving our customers three months free of their pro account, which is $20 a month. So you get three months free of using Bolt Bolt new by just signing up for our first course, uh, when it’s available here soon. So we’re, we’re excited to do that. That’s  Chris Badgett: awesome. That’s Learn AI now.ai. Chris, thank you for coming back on the show. Keep up the good work. You’re gonna have to come back on again. And we’re gonna see the, um, you know, the, the lifter course builder workflow and how that evolves. That’s gonna be fun. But, uh, keep up the amazing work. Keep innovating and thanks for coming on the show. Chris Lassiter: Thank you for having me. And you know, I’ll be using, uh, bold new to create the front end of that, so I’m excited to show it to you and, um, I’ll see you next time on the podcast. Sounds great. 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 AI Agents For WordPress LMS Websites with Vibe Coder Chris Lassiter appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast, Taco Verdonschot presents Progress Planner, a proactive solution for website optimization and maintenance made just for WordPress users, including developers, agencies, and site owners. Taco makes a compelling analogy when he says that creating a beautiful website is only the first step, much like growing a garden. To remain healthy and functional over time, both require frequent care updates, cleanups, and continuous enhancements. This is the role of Progress Planner, which functions as an omnipresent and persistent setup wizard that keeps helping users even after the initial site creation is finished. Progress Planner helps users properly optimize their tools by integrating with plugins like Yoast SEO to reveal hidden or overlooked options. Through the use of badges and points, Progress Planner gamifies the experience, motivating users to do activities they may otherwise put off. Progress Planner guarantees that websites continue to expand and function smoothly long after launch, whether it is by resolving minor SEO problems or finishing onboarding chores that developers overlooked during initial setup. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Taco Vendor Shot. That’s the best I can do with a Dutch last name. We’re gonna get into how to make your website progress better, get the tasks you need to get done to, to help builders also set their clients up for success. It’s a really cool project. You can check that out@progressplanner.com. But first. Welcome to Show Taco.  Taco Verdonschot: Thank you so much. I’m really happy to be here.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. We were chatting at a WordPress event and you were telling me about Progress Planner. I’m like, oh, this is cool. I build complex sites. Our users build complex sites, and there’s a lot of things that need to happen, even with just regular playing WordPress to get going. But tell us in a nutshell, what is Progress Planner?  Taco Verdonschot: I. So I like to use an analogy and that is where I compare your website to a garden. If you have a new plot of land and you want to build a beautiful garden out of it, you need to spend a lot of time and energy getting it ready, putting in the plans, designing everything. It’s very similar with your website. You need to spend a lot of time and energy to get it up and running. But just like a garden, you can only sit back and relax and enjoy it for so long before little wheat start popping up. And you need to mow the lawn at some point. And with your websites, it’s the same. You can only leave it alone for so long until you need to start doing little maintenance tasks. Maybe update the plugin, revise some content write a new piece of content. It’s those tasks that people oftentimes forget or really don’t like doing. It’s pretty much like me and gardening. I like having a nice garden. I swear I hate gardening, so I need some extra motivation to do those tasks. And that’s where we build Progress Planner to be your little motivator to help you do those little maintenance tasks that weeding on your website.  Chris Badgett: I think it’s really cool. I was thinking about it in terms of the user journey. I. There’s a lot of stuff around like getting people to your site, getting traffic or getting a sale, a conversion. And then but the other half of the funnel is what happens after that. It’s about onboarding, activation. I. Retention, giving them coming back, staying around, telling their friends. There’s like this whole other journey after the beginning of getting the traffic, which you know a lot about from Yost, SEO. Yeah, for sure. And we have these setup wizards as an example, like some WordPress plugins. All right, you got one shot to proactively give somebody some advice. And a lot of times if you’re in a hurry or you’ve been building sites for a while or something, you just close that thing. Yeah,  Taco Verdonschot: whatever. Yeah, exactly. And then later you’re  Chris Badgett: like, wait, what was that thing I had to set up for this thing to work? And you, and then this is like a, it is like a setup wizard that never stops being proactive and working for your best interests. And I find that really cool.  Taco Verdonschot: That’s yeah, exactly that. And so right now we started fairly recently August last year, and we’re still billing new things and new checks and new tools and new tasks for you to do. But one of the cool things that we recently introduced is an integration with another plugin. And you. Probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that Yost as yo it’s a plugin that we know quite well since the majority of our team used to work at Yost. So what we now do is we look at those settings in Yost as yo that were really hard to surface from within the plugin, and we help Yost users to make the most out of their SEO plugin. And that’s definitely something that we want to expand to other plugins as well. We’re looking for next integrations to see which plugins have a need to nudge their users into some of the settings, into workflows that they have in the plugin that their users tend to skip and will happily help them get their users activated to do all of those. That’s awesome.  Chris Badgett: I know as a guy who’s been trying to figure out SEO for a long time, I think I’m pretty decent at it. But it, it took me a while and I remember getting into the Yost tool and you had the workouts and there was some progress bars of Hey, don’t forget about this thing over here. I just found it super helpful. Like you said, there’s buried. Components and pieces that if you miss it, you may be really hurting the success of your project.  Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And those exist in plugins, but also in WordPress core. Yeah. One of the things that we see a lot with sites that have been around for years, that they still have the tagline, just another WordPress site. Yeah. And if your theme doesn’t expose it on the front end. There’s no way you’re gonna see that unless you either dive into that menu and then it doesn’t stand out as being a problem. Or if you look at the source code, because WordPress does output your tagline on every single page, and it’s quite annoying if. You are just one of those, just another web workforce website websites according to search engines, because they do see that output. So that’s one of the checks that we have in Progress Planner where we really find problems that oftentimes have existed on sites for years.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, it makes total sense. I think I just got it naturally ’cause I’m in the LMS space and progress tracking is a big part of what our software does. Yeah. And for most courses you can, you don’t complete it in one sitting, so you need to come back, figure out where you left off. Some people may jump around to different lessons out of order. And need to know what’s done, what’s not done. And if that didn’t, that’s literally the whole point of the LMS and a lot of building a website is just like that.  Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Absolutely. And so the interesting thing is you just talked about onboarding experience in your plugins, what we, and that works perfectly if the person setting up the website has all the information about the end result. But especially if your website’s built by an agency, we oftentimes see that a more technical person is doing the initial setup and installing a set of plugins and all of that, and then later on a content team is filling the website. But if your plugin has shown its onboarding wizards to this developer who has no clue about the. Eventual name of the site about social images, about users, what have you. They’re going to close all of those onboarding wizards. And then typically they don’t pop any pop up anymore because they’ve already been closed. And so you completely missed the opportunity to bring your onboarding wizard to the user who actually should be going through that onboarding wizard, but as a plugin, I think it’s an urban legend that everyone is tired of notifications.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Taco Verdonschot: Probably beyond an urban legend because it’s true. It’s highly annoying if every plugin’s throwing constant stream of notifications at you. So there’s only so much you can do as a plugin to nut your users into the wanted behavior. Now, if you gamify that. And you make people get points when they resolve notifications, all of a sudden they start asking for more notifications. I. And that’s exactly what our users are doing. They’re emailing us saying, Hey, I’ve completed all my tasks. What am I going to do next? I want to get my batch for this month and I need another three or four points. Give me more things to do so we can send unlimited notifications because people are rewarded and are actually asking for them. And that’s also where we can. Be a nice partner for plugins to help get users. Yeah. Reminded about some of the tasks.  Chris Badgett: I love that. And also in the LMS space, like we have gamification and notification, so I get it. Like it, it works. It definitely gamifies, you know what needs to be done and you get the little dopamine hit. And another example I wanted to point out to what you said earlier to. The site builder closing all the setup wizards and then handing it off to the content team. Another one I’ve seen more and more over time is people are building these websites as a service where it is like it’s bundling all these different plugins and themes and stuff together, and the user just gets a site. And what those folks do when they build those setups. Is they often like skip the notification ’cause the notification or the the setup wizard. The setup wizard is waiting for you to activate a plugin one at a time. But in these cases where a website activates all these plugins at once, you can’t run. 10 setup wizards at the same time. Oh, yeah. So I could see progress planner really coming in handy for those kind of setups as well. Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And it’s not just agencies doing this because for example, if you look at what hosting companies are offering nowadays, so even at the lower end of the market where people built their own websites, back in the day, you would get a hosting package. Download WordPress. Install WordPress. You had to manually create a database, enter details. That doesn’t happen a whole lot anymore. A lot of people are using prebuilt packages. For example, blue Host as a whole AI onboarding wizard. WordPress.com has their new AI onboarding wizard. So you don’t touch those first steps anymore, but you start with. Sort of a prebuilt site where you only have to change some content on the site. So more and more people never even touch plugins and don’t know how to install them because they’ve never done it. So that’s definitely a change compared to when I first started in, in WordPress,  Chris Badgett: beyond the the setup in the early month or two of a website. Tell us about like the ongoing challenges, like for copywriting challenge or broken links challenge. How does this stuff work? Yeah,  Taco Verdonschot: In the plugin there’s a lot of recommendations and there are on a more technical level, which is the ones that we talked about before, and there’s a set of content recommendations. One of my. Pet peeves is when I go to someone’s website because I’m interested in their business or buying a product off of them, and I go to the about page and it lists one or two people, even though I know that it’s a bigger company. By now and they’ve never updated it. It’s been sitting there for six years and no one cared to tell, Hey, we’re now a 40 people team instead of just the two of us. So little checks like that when if you last updated the page, is it time to do something new? That’s what we also have in the plugin. But some of the things that you need to do on your website, things that you need to improve are bigger than a five minute task. And that’s where we currently have the challenges. Right now we’re in a side speed challenge. So we had a webinar last week to tell people about, Hey, this is what site speed means. This is what it does for your site, why it’s important and now they have some time to work on it themselves. And we give some extra reading material, extra handholding to help them take on a larger task. Then just the five minute checks that you find in the plugin. And we’ve done the same for broken links a couple months ago. We’ve done the same for copywriting, so how do I write a decent page? How do I write a blog post? How do I write in about page? So that’s what we do about six times a year at the moment as well. Is those sort of focused topics that take a little bit longer than just a few minutes to to do.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m gonna get this thing on my main lifter LMS website. ’cause for example just recently we did, I did a broken links scan. I just, it popped in my head like, oh man, I should really do that. It’s been a couple years. And oh my gosh, were there a lot of broken links and we should have been doing that all along. And yeah, like you, you can’t hold it all in your head, even if you’ve been doing it for a while.  Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And I would say, especially if you’ve been doing it for a while, because then your side grows, you have a lot of content, a lot of posts, and it becomes really hard to. Continue to realize, oh wait, maybe I should go through this and click all the links that I have in my posts and my pages and everything. So yeah, I think everyone. Who looks at their site and throws a broken link scanner at it will come to the same realization. Oops, there’s a couple hundred links that I need to fix. It was more than that. What,  Chris Badgett: You’ve been around for a while, so I have been around for a while and I’m not the only one making content on the site, so there’s a lot of content. What about, in terms of the, you have a free version and a paid version. How should people think about that? Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, so right now we’re heavily focusing on the free version. And to the point where in a couple weeks we’re going to work in Europe and we’re going to not even mention the pro version. So it’s all about, hey. Use this tool, make your site better experience that it works. And from there we’ll see. But for now, full focus on the free version. 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. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. That’s awesome. And you said you’re going to Word Camp Europe. Tell us about first of all, you’ve been around WordPress for a long time, and I wonder this question sometimes, like I didn’t. I just fell in love with the open web and being able to build a website and, display a message that anybody anywhere in the world could see and just magically, I just woke up inside the WordPress world and I felt wow, this software is built for people like me. And I joined the community and did a bunch of stuff and but what was your doorway into WordPress and falling in love with this ecosystem?  Taco Verdonschot: So it’s quite an interesting story. Back in the day and we’re talking early 2013 I was studying computer science as a part-time studies next to a job. I. And one of my classmates for a project that we had to do suggested using WordPress. And I had heard of WordPress before as a blogging tool, but he said no, we can really do this project. It can serve it can, we can create an API with in a and we can do all cool stuff. We started using WordPress, he was quite convincing. Worked on that project for about three months. Got a decent grade and that was was the end of it. Then something changed at the job where I was at the time and. On a morning while commuting to that job, I saw a retweet by the classmate. He retweeted a guy named Joe DeVol who was looking for a developer and said we’re looking for someone to, to train junior developer. They said, hire for talent and attitude, train for skill. I was pretty sure that I did not have any skill. So that was a match attitude I know was fine. That’s not gonna be a problem. And talent. God, if I know. I decided to apply on this train at six 30 in the morning, and to my own surprise, I got a phone call a day or two later inviting me to an interview. And I joined Yosef Falk at his company called Yost owner of Yost as yo, this is also why you should never name your company after yourself. By the way. It’s highly confusing. But I joined the company at first as a developer. Then very quickly we learned about the talents, or lack thereof in my case for being a developer. And I switched roles within the company to to customer support. But in the meantime, there was this event organized in Leiden, in the Netherlands. And it was called WordCamp Europe. It was the first time someone ever organized something like it apparently. And yos yos. Devo was like, okay, you know what? You go and go have fun, go learn things. There’s interesting speakers. You’ll make, you’ll probably meet some people. It’s a nice community. I did meet a lot of people and some of them I still con consider friends today. One of them you had on the show a couple weeks back, Brad Williams had the most amazing event. Ended up with people that I had never heard of, but apparently were known names in the community. Mark Jaqui NAS, I had no idea who these people were but everyone welcomed me and it was one friendly bunch and I decided to stick around and. Here we are 12 years later still in WordPress and still love to travel to conferences and yeah, meet my people around the world. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. What’s the future vision for progress Planner? Like where are you guys going with it? Because it’s newer. I know it has a vision behind it. So what’s big vision?  Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Our ultimate goal is to make the web better. There, the web is an ever expanding collection of information and it should be useful and it should be usable. And having old still websites. Doesn’t help anyone. It uses unnecessary power. It doesn’t add value for anyone. It doesn’t add value for SEO for search. It doesn’t it’s just, it’s bad. So if we can help keep the web better up to date through Pro Progress Planner, through helping people be more active on their website, then that’s what we’re aiming for. And I am convinced that we can do it, that we can integrate with more plugins, that we can have more checks in WordPress, that we can be even more engaging to help people come back to their site, write more content, keep the site online, and then when they decide it’s tight time to retire the website that they. Do so because they are making a decision and not because it’s just lingering somewhere on the web polluting it.  Chris Badgett: I  Taco Verdonschot: love that.  Chris Badgett: I think this idea is as big as the idea of documentation where documentation. Is a reactive, oh, I have a problem. Let me search the knowledge base, see what I can find. And this is like the proactive, it’s like proactive documentation and that’s  anticipating what the user needs next is like really cool. That’s how products should be.  Taco Verdonschot: It’s also challenging because for people  Chris Badgett: to you to be a psychic, you have to be a mind reader.  Taco Verdonschot: Absolutely. And there’s another component to it. We’re super upfront. We help you do those tedious tasks that you’re forgetting about, but that means that people first have to admit that they might not be as on top of their website as they. Want to think they are.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Taco Verdonschot: So in order to get those installs for progress planner, we have to convince people, look, there, there really is a need on your website to install this so we can help you. And that is an interesting challenge that we’re currently facing. And yeah. I hope that all of your listeners now go, oh, wait a second. Maybe there’s some things that I. Haven’t done in the last six months. Let me check. Let me see what progress planner comes up with. And I’m pretty sure when they do, they’ll fall in love. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. It almost seems like the kind of idea that like this is a good thing that web hosting companies should install by default on all WordPress sites, just to,  Taco Verdonschot: yeah,  Chris Badgett: just to be of help.  Taco Verdonschot: If there’s a host that wants to talk about that tackle@progressplanner.com, send me an email. Happy to,  Chris Badgett: let’s go back into Yos history a little bit with what you were saying about what people may have missed. What are some common things when it comes to SEO for a site that, that things progress Planner as an example, would pick up and be like, Hey, be sure you do X. What’s x? Taco Verdonschot: Oh. One of the worst problems that we have in WordPress is a feature called tags, because that sounds like the hashtags that we use on social media.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Taco Verdonschot: And people use them in WordPress as if they are hashtags in social media. Now, the problem with that is that for every tag you create, WordPress creates a page. And actually a couple of versions of that page. So for every tag, there’s several URLs that are created on your site, but if you create a tag for a single post, then that tag page does not have any value for your website. Now, if you add eight different tags to every post. You get a mass inflation of URLs on your domain, that which adds absolutely nothing to your site. They’re all thin content pages. There’s, they’re absolutely useless. But they exist. And so the perceived quality of your website is much lower because a search engine is going to see that only one in every eight URLs has any meaningful content. That’s not a sign of a quality website. So one of the things that Progress Planner does is compare the number of tags that you have to the number of posts. To see if that is a healthy balance. And if not, it will recommend you what to do or even to install one of our plugins called Fewer tags which was built by Yos a while back. And that will help you slim down on those those useless tags. But. In the long run obviously what we hope to achieve is that people understand that the tags in WordPress are not the same as hashtags on Twitter or Instagram or what have you. And that they start using them responsibly so we don’t have to solve the problem afterwards.  Chris Badgett: Just for general education, for blog posts, what’s the difference between a category and a tag? Like how should tags actually be used? If at all.  Taco Verdonschot: If at all is the first one for most sites, you don’t need them. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Categories can organize  Taco Verdonschot: your stuff. If you want to organize stuff, usually categories which are, and this is a word I hate in English. Hierarchical. Hierarchical. That’s pretty good though. Yeah, I just so that’s the main difference between categories and tax categories have that hierarchy and they you can structure them a little bit. Deeper. Tags are just a, hey, this is related to this, and that could be across categories could even be across custom post types in some cases. And so I. For example, if you have a recipe website and you have them categorized in this is Italian recipes, this is Mexican dishes. I like that example. And this is Polish dishes across those categories, there might be recipes that take 15 minutes. That’s where you could use a tag that says, this is ready in 15 minutes. Now if you then go to that tag page, you will get recipes across categories that are done in 15 minutes. So that could be a valuable use of tags in WordPress. Chris Badgett: Another thing I thought of is that, we all know if we’ve been in WordPress for a while to check, but the disabled, there’s one checkbox that says disable indexing from search engines. Yes. And so a lot of times when people are building sites, they have that checked so they can build in private and then they forget or they hand it off to the client and forget to turn it off. That’s a bad one.  Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. I think that if you have any SEO plugin installed, it should already scream in your face like, Hey, you forgot something. But just to be sure, we’ve also added that to progress bladder.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. What’s another SEO? Area that progress planner would pick up on. Taco Verdonschot: So an another interesting one is the tagline that you have in WordPress.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Taco Verdonschot: It, by default it says just another WordPress site, and if you don’t have a theme that outputs the tagline in the front end, it’s hard to spot. You’ll actually have to go into the admin to see that this tagline is set. But it is outputted on every single page in the source code. So a search engine will see that description of your website on every single page. If you search Google for just another WordPress site, you’ll be amazed how many sites show up because they still have that set on their site. So that’s one of the things where progress planner also helps you. Hey, don’t forget about this little thing. And the surprising thing is we saw it a lot on sites that have been a lot online for a long time. So it’s not just post-launch. But years and years in.  Chris Badgett: Since you’re a SEO expert, I have to ask what are your thoughts on AI’s influence on SEO or an emerging new field of artificial intelligence optimization or whatever? Like what? What’s happening right now? What should we be worried about? Not worried about? What are some things we can do as we enter the intelligence age? Taco Verdonschot: I feel that you are asking the Wright brothers just after they had their first successful flights. How big is a jumbo jets going to be in 80 years? Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Taco Verdonschot: I have no clue where it’s going. And that is despite me studying artificial intelligence for a couple of years at university. I don’t know where this is going. What I do know is that for SEO what we’ve always been trying to solve is a user’s problem. Someone has a problem and needs a solution to their problem. And in order to show up. You need to have that information in a clearly written accessible way available for them. And that doesn’t change. LLMs consume your website as well. From what I’ve seen so far, they are. A lot worse at processing JavaScript and stuff like that. So all the complex sites make it harder for LMS to understand your site and its content. So basically we’re back to the early days of 10 blue links in Google where you need to be specific, you need to build an authority in order to show up. In search results and whether that’s an LLM or a search engine doesn’t really matter.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. The human and the LLM and the search engine, they still need high quality content that you made from your original website. Taco Verdonschot: Yes. Anyone can generate anything using ai but the original idea to create something valuable. For now at least needs to come from human input. There’s no LLM that’s going. Haha. I have the next fantastic idea that no one’s ever thought of before. Because the whole way the model works is it just it’s a chance calculation on what is probably going to be the next word after the one I just printed. That’s not generating new ideas yet.  Chris Badgett: I’m curious, and at Yost, how many sites did you say are approximately  Taco Verdonschot: using it? So right now there’s about 13 million websites running Yost as yo. So how do you do  Chris Badgett: support for that many websites?  Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, so me, not anymore.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Taco Verdonschot: But the interesting thing is that the support team at Jost at the time I left last year was about 40 people. So how do you do support? You build a product that’s good enough that most of your users run without needing support. There’s no way to, to answer 13 million questions with whatever size team you can imagine.  Chris Badgett: I’ve been using Yost for, I don’t know, over a decade probably, and. I don’t think I’ve ever submitted a support ticket,  Taco Verdonschot: but, and yeah, that’s as it should be. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And that’s that’s where a progress planner comes in too, is that’s only gonna help too with just helping people figure out how to use the tools they just read about in an article, got excited about and put on their website. Yep. Be proactive. It’ll actually reduce support for plugin companies, theme companies, WordPress core, all of it. Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re aiming for. It should be beneficial for any plugin that we’ve integrated with to say to the users, Hey, install progress planner. It will help you get to that next level using our product. There’s a lot of complicated plugins out there. Setting up an LMS is something it’s not rocket science. It will require some time and there’s some finesses that we probably can help you with by giving the right nudges at the right time. So that’s one of the things that we can do with with progress Planner is help you get those nudges. So maybe we should do integration.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, that sounds  Taco Verdonschot: like a plan. Chris Badgett: It sounds like a plan. And my last question for you, Tako, is. Like who, and there’s a couple characters here. We’ve got the do it yourself website builder, business owner, passion project person. We’ve got the freelancers and agencies. We’ve got we talked about how hosting companies could benefit from this, but who is this for and how and tell how can they get the most value out of it? Depending upon which type of character they are.  Taco Verdonschot: I. Yeah. So I think for the end user, it’s the feedback that no one’s giving them. So the things, Hey, have you thought about updating this content? Have you updated plugins? Now, if someone’s working with an agency, I. That agency might want to receive those notifications and be proactive towards their customer and go, Hey did you know that it’s been six months since you last updated this page? Has anything changed? I. You could package it as an agency. Talking about that, about page again, for example Hey we’ve been working together for a year. Have there been any changes in your team? Is there something that we can update for you? So it helps you ask the right questions to your to your client. And it will make you look good because you’re so on top of what they’re doing on their website. It will also give you some of the nudges on the more technical level. That’s how an agency could benefit from installing the plugin on their client’s websites. Or if an agency goes, what, if I can offload updating some of the content. To the end user and have them do that reminder, then I can use some of the budget that’s remaining to want to work on the fun tasks, because typically updating content is not the most fun to work on. So that’s an agency play. And then as you said, for hosting companies if they install it for all of their clients and this helps their client keep their website more active it means you’re extending your customer lifetime with. I don’t know how much yet, but I’m hoping that will be significant. And knowing the hosting industry, even a couple of months is significant at the scale that they’re at. So that’s definitely the hosting play right there. Awesome. So a lot of things, and there’s something for everyone. Chris Badgett: Awesome Taco. Amazing work. I’m excited to see Progress Planner and where it goes. What’s the best way for those out there watching and listening to get started with it?  Taco Verdonschot: Go to your WordPress website, add a plugin, search for progress planner, and if you see a happy rooster. That’s our friend Ravi, right here. That’s the plugin you’re looking for. That’s where you get started. Install it. It will already run a lot of checks on your site. So probably you get your first badge. Almost immediately. And then there will be a lot of useful checks that you can do so you can keep busy for the next couple of months. And for those who are listening and coming to work in Europe, make sure you have progress planner installed on your site. Come show it to us and there will be a nice raffle just for progress planner users. Nice. Nice. Chris Badgett: That’s Paco. Vander shot, I got you on hierarchical. You got me on your last name, but that’s Taco from WordPress. Thanks for coming on the show, really appreciate it. Go check out progress planner.com and look for Taco at WordCamp and around the internet. But thanks for coming on Taco. We really appreciate it.  Taco Verdonschot: Thank you so much for having me. A lot of fun here. 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 Powering Your Website Progress For Maximum Results With Taco Verdonschot appeared first on LMScast.

Roger Williams, Community & Partner Manager at Kinsta, shares his insights on cultivating thriving communities and emphasizes a culture of genuine connection over mere sales. He highlights Kinsta’s commitment to providing invaluable content that helps users before they become customers. Roger discusses the significance of architecting for scale early on with innovative containerization technologies. Additionally, he dives into the power of LinkedIn for building professional networks, stressing personalized engagement and the rising importance of video content.

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 episode of LMSCast, David Risley from Blog Marketing Academy talks about how his online business has changed over time. In 1998, he started a tech blog called PCMech, which eventually attracted over 100,000 readers. He switched to internet marketing in 2008 and used his blogging background to instruct people on how to launch and expand online enterprises. He first concentrated on marketing training courses and programs for bloggers, but as the industry grew crowded and saturated, he progressively shifted away from that strategy. David switched to a service-based business after realizing the difficulties of growing his company only via content and courses. Through the recurring subscription service Concierge, which he founded, his team offers WordPress site owners continuous technical and webmaster help, addressing difficulties with plugins, performance optimization, and upgrades. He was able to create more steady, predictable monthly earnings instead of pursuing particular jobs thanks to this technique. 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 LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest, David Risley. He’s from Blog Marketing Academy. Blog marketing academy.com. I’ve seen David on the internet for probably over a decade, and I finally gotta meet him in person at a conference. We’re gonna get into internet marketing, David’s journey, what he does now. But first, welcome to the show.  David Risley: Thanks for having me. Good to talk to you again.  Chris Badgett: Tell us about the birth of Blog Marketing Academy. What year was it and what drove you to do this thing? I.  David Risley: It’s been a while, so it, it starts even before that. I, before Blog Marketing Academy, I had a technology blog talking about computers and like building computers, PCs, back when people still built them. And, that space changed a lot. It was becoming something where I was getting tired of it. That started by the way, in around 98, I think it was like way the heck back there before WordPress, all that. And so by the time 2008 came around, 10 years later, I was like, I wanna do something else. I was starting to, research the internet marketing space and all that. And so I started what. It was not Blog Marking Academy then, but it became that started in 2008 and I ran both for a little bit of time. Eventually sold off that tech site. And and then Blog Marking Academy is pretty much what I do now. And what was that? So it’s, I guess it’s been 17 years. Wow. Time flies.  Chris Badgett: That was a fun, that’s when I got into the whole internet thing too, around 2007, 2008. Yeah. I feel like internet marketing kind of had a golden age of around that 2008 to 12. Yeah, it was like early days and there wasn’t that many influencers and people, you could get into the space and get big pretty quick. It seemed but what was your experience?  David Risley: It was, I never was one of the big guys, but it’s funny, the, at that time in the heyday of it, you had the celebrities of that space. Frank Kern, Jeff Walker you mentioned Evan Pegan earlier. Those guys, they were like, they became like. The guy, and those spaces. And I don’t know if that happened so much anymore, just because the space is so much noisier and things have matured quite a bit. But yeah, and I know I went to some other conferences and all that and bought the courses and the whole thing. Nice back when you could still sell a course. I don’t know how well it is now. I’m a little outside the space now, but I remember the what, 1997. That was like the, I always sold the courses. I always ended with a seven, which I thought was funny.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s really fun looking back at that time period. And people still do sell courses for that amount, but it’s gotta come, I’m sure they do coaching and a lot more support. It’s not just the videos. That’s the  David Risley: thing. Back then, you could primarily rely on content, not so much. Now,  Chris Badgett: what does Blog Marketing Academy do today? What do you guys offer?  David Risley: The reason it’s called Blog Marketing Academy is because it started off doing online courses and and some of which are not even there anymore. But I, it was, but it was more toward the new media, like the blogger type, traditional blogger type, but trying to teach them some online marketing skills and it was trying to bridge that gap a little bit. So that’s how black marketing got start. Black Marketing Academy got started. I’ve never changed the name of it. I still have those courses. It’s just that they’re under a membership now that is really super cheap because that’s not really the how I make money now. Now even though I have a service aspect to the business, which is the majority of it, I just haven’t changed the name just ’cause I didn’t want to go through all the work to do it. And it’s got some traction obviously.  Chris Badgett: Tell us about the transition from content and courses to services. It seems like some people are trying to go the other way. Yeah. And you’re going this way. So what, how does, how’d that play out and what, tell us the story.  David Risley: Yeah. Some people do go the other way, but it’s, it’s one of those things to where there’s always been this thing about the time for money idea, and people will try to avoid it, and and but so they try to avoid service work. They don’t wanna work with clients. And then there’s this almost attitude out there with some of the grooves and ah, you don’t want to get into that kind of stuff. And so for a long time, that was the mindset that I have. I didn’t want to get into that kind of stuff. I didn’t wanna work with clients as the online course space, especially in my niche specifically, was just getting more and more noisy. I was like the friction is there. I could either sit there and fight it. Or I could listen to what my students were telling me for years, and I was avoiding because they would go through some videos that I did and go that’s really cool. Now how do I execute? How do I build it? I didn’t really get into the techie part of it so much at the time. But eventually I just started listening to them. I’m good at, I come from a background where I know how to do that stuff really good. And they, and then even just looking internally with me, I realized I really liked working on my own website. I enjoy getting in there and working on it. I’m like, I need to listen to this. And so it’s, it turned into a pivot. It was. Maybe four years ago, and it was much more official about three years ago where I was like, I’m just, I’m going into client services and downplayed the courses and haven’t looked back and I leaned into recurring revenue really early on. And so it’s been a good thing. Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the recurring revenue aspect. ’cause a lot of service work, you think of one-off projects and things like that.  David Risley: Yeah. So I didn’t first for one, I didn’t want to get into the whole, Hey, contact me for an estimate. And it, I, it’s just a pain in the butt. Most people end up really overestimating how long things are gonna take. So what I did, I, and I also didn’t want to always be project chasing. It’s just why would I leave what I was doing in order to get into chasing project work? And I had a recurring membership program before, but it was just more content driven. So obviously I knew the beauties of recurring revenue, I knew how it re removes a lot of the stress out of things. And so with the service work, I opened up what I call concierge now, which is basically, you could call it a maintenance thing, but it’s actually a lot more than that. It’s basically. I’m gonna hand, I’ll be the, their webmaster for all things that come up. And it starts off with a recurring program right off the bat. And and then just over time, that grows to the point where, yeah, I’m ba at a point where I don’t worry about where the money’s gonna come from every month and the project works still happens. It’s just instead of doing the estimate type stuff, I have a credit system on the side. It’s a unique way of doing it. And but almost everybody who’s doing that. Is also on retainer through the concierge. So it works out pretty well.  Chris Badgett: Think back to the internet marketing. I can tell you are a good copywriter. Like the headline on your homepage is be on a first name basis with your web guy, which is like a really good headline that speaks to what people want. They want, like somebody who has their back, who ha has a face and a name that they can talk to and stuff like that. Tell. Tell us how your experience with copywriting and maybe some pro tips, and I think a lot of good internet marketers, like it just becomes second nature and you forget about it and you just do it well. But what’s been your journey with  David Risley: copywriting? To be clear, other than some of those online marketing courses I went through in the past, it isn’t as if I’ve done professional copy. I would not consider myself a copywriter. I will say that I do have a lot of experience in writing, ’cause I’ve been doing it for so long. And so with time and practice you get decent at it. But the other thing too is. N knowing, developing a skill of being able to get inside their head of the, of your target market and knowing what they really want. And one of the things I’ve always found important in any business is the importance of survey now but not survey, which is I’ll fill out this form is really impersonal. ’cause the survey can come in a lot of different forms. And that includes talking to people in person, which is one of the things that so many people try to avoid is they’re like, eh, it’s awkward to talk to somebody. But I, even now, I do what’s called roadmap calls where people can book a short call with me and they don’t pay anything, and I. A lot of it’s, a lot of it is to look, see if we’re a fit and see if they wanna work with me. But sometimes I’ll do those calls and they don’t convert and I don’t view that as a waste of time because I’m still learning what they’re looking for. And so the more you do that, the more writing you do in general, you get to where you can write and you’re envisioning that person you’re talking to as you’re doing it and you’re just trying to, to. Know, make your message meet where they’re thinking already. That’s that’s the 1 0 1 level thing with copy. I don’t have any, courses on that topic or anything.  Chris Badgett: Some markets like it becomes an echo chamber so internet marketing with internet marketers or tech with tech people. But some of the most successful agencies, their target audience is very different from them. Who’s. Yeah. If you were to like, tell us about the avatar or the type of people that are a perfect fit for Blog Marketing Academy Services, who’s, who is this client? ’cause you obviously have a feel for what this person is. I.  David Risley: Yeah, my clients come from all kinds of different niches, but the base, but at the core, they are solopreneurs. And some of ’em are in the very early stages, so I don’t even know if they would call themselves a solopreneur yet. They’re trying to become one, and so I’ve got that too. But most of ’em are, they’re working for themselves. They might have one or two other people working for them. They’re basically in that idea. They’re using WordPress to run the business. And so that’s mainly who I’m speaking to. And I also know that a lot of them are, they’re tackling WordPress and they deal with the frustrations we all deal with. They’re not they have some light level tech skill, but enough to get themselves in trouble, and I also know with me, because of the content with YouTube and all that and the content that I’ve been putting out there a long time I have built up a level of trust. With a lot of these people. So that was part of the genesis for that headline to be on a first name basis with your web guy. And but yeah, that’s who they are mainly. They’re small time solopreneurs businesses of different scales, but they don’t have large teams, frankly. You have to know who you work with the best. And if some big company was coming at me, I probably would straight tell ’em, I don’t think I’m the right fit. I don’t think I would want to do it. So how do you get these clients? Most of them are coming to me. I really don’t do any overt promotion outside of content. It’s the site. I would say in terms of lead sources right now, YouTube is probably the top one of people finding me on YouTube, but a lot of people were on my list. For quite some time to begin with. I do have a weekly newsletter that I send out, so even people who are not doing business with me now I’m I stay top of mind and when they’re ready, they sign up or they book a call.  Chris Badgett: I’m a big fan of YouTube for content marketing. What’s your approach to making videos or deciding what kind of content to make? On YouTube specifically,  David Risley: some of it’s just gut feeling. Some of it’s frankly, what I’m in the mood to make. If anything, I need to become more regular about it. Ideally I’d be putting out something every week but sometimes that’s the balance. When you’re doing client work, sometimes you get so busy with stuff you forget to do it. But it it’s really. I guess it’s the same mentality that would come up when I’m writing my copy. I think about my target market and what they’re looking for. I know people on YouTube are looking for how to do stuff, how to fix problems. They the typical listicle style stuff does work on YouTube. You also look for reviews. I’ve talked, I’ve had a video about. Buddy boss hosting, how what’s, because that can be a little bit of a demanding platform, and so I get people on that or talking about Buddy Boss talking about the fluent line of products. People are looking for that stuff. So I just go and I make it. And I and also my videos are pretty informal. How I’m talking to you right now is how I record a YouTube video. I don’t script them out. I don’t do double takes on anything. I just let it rip.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. And going back to your services. Sometimes it’s, when you’re helping a solopreneur, like you have to set up a scope of work, like there’s the website, but then maybe there’s an email list tool and hosting and other things. Like what’s in your scope of service that you do for these business owners? David Risley: For the most part, I will go where they need to go. That being said, I do have my limits for one thing. With my service work, I tend to stick with the same tools. Most of the time. I can work with other ones, but if I have any say in the matter, I’ll try to get them into the same ones because I’m so quick with them. When it comes to email, I’m a big proponent of fluent CRM myself. I love using that product, and I, on my site, some people they know me because I talk about what I call digital sovereignty. I like the idea of having things in house and not relying on an army of third party services all over the place. And so a lot of, some people, they do join with me because. That’s my philosophy and I’ll work, I’ve got some clients using Active Campaign and stuff like that, but most of my clients are using fluent CRM and we put it all inhouse and I just provide, I, my idea with concierge is to provide the platform so they don’t have to worry about all that stuff. For example, fluent crm. But you need to tap into a, an email service for that. I have one. It’s that type of thing. And then they don’t have to think about it. That’s how I’m approaching it. If they get too far out of my wheelhouse or if they’re, they want something completely and totally custom coded, I’ll probably be like, yeah, that’s not me. Chris Badgett: Your let’s talk first is like a primary call to action on your homepage. Some people, a lot, some agencies like it’s gotta go through a contact form and there’s all this stuff. You go straight to book a 30 minute call. What’s your structure for those calls for talking to clients and figuring out if it’s a fit? And what do you guys talk about on a 30 minute call?  David Risley: So there, so there’s not a lot of stress. It’s not like I go in there with a, an outline or anything. It’s definitely not. A salesy thing at all. It’s really we’re just having a conversation. I, when they go, excuse me, when they book, I do have some questions on the form that makes it clear that it is a thing where we’re exploring working together. So there is that intention when they book, I forgot the questions that I have there, but it’s, these are not people, they’re just gonna come ask me random questions to get a free consultation. They know why they’re there. Once they’re there we’re just having a free flowing conversation. I, it’s not like I’m running the show. I, I, they we both know why they’re there to begin with. I have the summary of what they’ve typed and then we just go to it. Sometimes they don’t even take 30 minutes. Sometimes they go a little longer than that. I don’t worry about it that much.  Chris Badgett: Is, are a lot of people starting with an existing site or they’re starting fresh, or what do you prefer? David Risley: Most are have an existing one and when when they’re talking to me about concierge, most of them have an existing one and they’re probably just tired of dealing with it with. With it. That’s pretty much what it comes down to. But I do have some who come in and they’re, they have a new concept and we’re starting from scratch. And usually with concierge, I’ll make it clear to them right off the bat, Hey, look, you’re getting into concierge, but it’s early and there’s no traffic. So there’s a little overkill there at the beginning, but they think it’s going to. Put light of fire under their butt, so to speak. I was like, I’m, paying every month. I really want to utilize it. And so we go at it. Plus they get a discount on the credits with me if they’re in concierge. So some people do it for that. But most of them, they came in with an existing site like buddy boss element, mentor setups, things that have a little bit more complexity and they’re just tired of squashing little tech gremlins and that type of thing. Chris Badgett: How do you manage the relationship? Like particularly with a recurring plan? Are they, like you said, they wanna get the most out of it. Are you also following up with clients every month or making suggestions or how do you get, how do you keep the recurring situation healthy? David Risley: It really hasn’t been any issue at all. I, we have a communication area in Basecamp. We use Basecamp for project management super user friendly. And it, and then of course there’s the core services that they’re getting, whether they’re. I have a lot of requests or not. There’s the hosting, I use postmark for email delivery. There’s, the malware stuff, all the standard stuff. And then there’s all the plugins. I have agency licensing to the plugins that I put on their site. So there, that is one of the things too, is that they don’t have to go and buy all those things. I’ve already done it. And so all those things are part of the core services. I have a few clients that don’t contact me that much, honestly. Others are more active, and that’s fine. You just balance it out over time. Chris Badgett: And the ones that are more active, they’re also in addition to the monthly, they’re buying credits. Is that right? For actual project work on top of the monthly?  David Risley: They  Chris Badgett: are,  David Risley: yeah. If for, if I’m just answering messages for them I don’t bill for that. It’s part of concierge, but if we’re getting there and we’re, getting more. If I’m having to go on there and do something on their site more regularly, that’s where we do use the credits. The concierge, I have a higher level of concierge called platinum, which does include time. And then we don’t have to use the credits unless we really start using a lot of time. But for the core people, we’re using credits a lot more frequently.  Chris Badgett: How do you stay organized with all this? It’s been a growth  David Risley: curve  Chris Badgett: for  David Risley: sure. Chris Badgett: You mentioned Basecamp for getting the projects in Basecamp, which helps.  David Risley: That helps a lot. It keeps it out of my email. I. Which is important. When I first started, everybody was emailing me and it I dealt with it for a while. I thought about having a traditional support desk on my thing, but it felt a little impersonal. And so I didn’t go that route. And so Basecamp, for me has worked really well. I used it a long time ago, and then I, so I came back and revisited it. It’s just super user friendly. It doesn’t have a really overwhelming interface. They if they don’t want to go into base that often and they just reply to an email, they can still do it. It’ll still show up base. So it’s just really easy to use. As far as managing clients, I’ve done a lot of stuff inside of WordPress admin to be able to manage them from in there. I’ve customized my dashboard quite a bit so I can see my client list and pop into different parts of their profile really quick. So there’s a lot of time saving. And I have for passwords and all that, I don’t keep that in WordPress. That wouldn’t be a good idea. I’ve got a one password for all that type of stuff, but, over. I don’t know, I guess I’ve adapted to that system and when I find that there’s little hitches and I’m wasting time on, on stupid little things, I’ll try to think up some solution to iron out the constraint. 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. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. What about work-life balance? What’s your approach there? ’cause we all struggle with it, when you’ve been in the industry for a long time, you figure something out that works for you. What works for you?  David Risley: So far it hasn’t been a problem. Mean, so for one, I like what I do, so it’s not like I’m feeling like I have to escape from it. But but people know I, I go out and in an RV sometimes I’ve got a family, I work through stuff on the house, so I. A, a lot of it comes down to setting proper expectations when people come in. I I think because a lot of people who work with me have been on my list for a while or what have you they already know little things because I’ll mention at the top of my newsletter, I always mention just little things that are not related to business, so people know about the RV and all those types of things. I have never had anybody, if I go on a little trip, I’ve never had anybody. Freak out about it, and they’re like, have fun. They, they literally try not to be as needy while I’m gone, which is really cool. And and if something happens I’m still monitoring things. It’s just that it’s more if a site goes down, I, no matter where I am, I will try to get it fixed. It’s just. I work with rocket hosting sites, just don’t go down. I, and so it’s it, you’re paying for security with those types of things. But so far I just enforce the balance that I want. And clients don’t raise a ruckus about it. And frankly, if they did, if I had somebody who was getting, who, weird about it, I would look at that as we weren’t the right fit anymore. I’d probably cut them loose. Do you run all this solo right now? I do. I I had I had a developer it was through an agency, so it wasn’t like he was working for me. It was like a separate thing, but it was interesting. I found that I. Wasn’t using him as much as I thought I would. And so that’s probably my fault, honestly. Outsourcing has always been a thing that I can’t say that I’m great at it. It’s I don’t, it’s probably something I need to get better at. I do realize that with the level of what the work that I have, it’s coming whether I like it or not. There are things that. I have a lot of systems in place that allow me to get a lot done, but if I have so many ongoing projects at the same time, people end up waiting. And I’m aware of that, so I’ll have to deal with it. But so far it’s just me.  Chris Badgett: Let’s imagine you got a client who doesn’t have a website yet, and I know this changes with time and there’s multiple options, but what are some of your favorite tools that you like to work with? You mentioned fluent CRM. What else is like a go-to for you?  David Risley: I use fluent most of the, I don’t use all their tools, but fluent CRMs. My favorite fluent forms is where I go to for forms for community stuff. I’ve been definitely looking into fluent community. I it’s true they’re developing that one’s fast. So it’s doing pretty well and I’m. Even though I know Buddy Boss is such a powerful platform, it just comes with so much overhead. I don’t like working with Buddy Boss that much anymore. Yeah, as far as building it out I’m a big fan of the Cadence theme and cadence blocks myself. So that tends to be my go-to. I do have some people who are using Elementor and those types of things, and or Astra and Spectra. If they really like their platform, I’m not gonna try to drag ’em over. But if I’m involved, I’ll usually go with Cadence. What are, I don’t know. I’ve got a bunch of, different ones that I use. I’m looking at my own list here, but those are probably the ones I use most often. Press player for videos, I got some performance stuff. I use WooCommerce, WP Fusion, Jax plugin. Use that one quite a bit.  Chris Badgett: You mentioned what was it? It’ll come back to me, but what was it? You, you said rocket, you meant rocket.net, is that right? rocket.net. Yeah. And I remember what I was gonna ask. You mentioned you, you like to get lifetime licenses, I think, or unlimited, so there’s always this question with the agent when they’re available. When they’re available, yeah. There’s always this question with the agency of do I get the license or does my client get it, or whatever. What’s, it seems like you’ve figured it out. Like how do you think about that?  David Risley: So I think about it in terms for one, it’s one of the value adds of concierge is that they don’t have to go and buy all these plug Yeah. They don’t have to go shopping. And the shopping is not just a matter of expense, it’s also all the time of evaluating, trying to figure out which ones worked, so I’m trying to save them all that hassle. So I acquired the support licenses. If an unlimited is available, that’s usually a good idea. There’s a few that I’ve got on Lifetime that’s even great, but but some of ’em are not, and I just pay for them and, my thinking too is that if I’m gonna call myself concierge, it’s one of those things to where sometimes I have to contact the support people. Like I’ve done it with cart flow several times. I’ve had to do it with Presto. Sometimes I can’t figure something out. I’ll just go to the support people. That’s what I’m paying for, worth the license. And so it’s really, I, the way I look at it, I wouldn’t really be able to provide the. Full level of service needed for concierge. If I couldn’t deal with the support people, if I I was hanging out with Jack at the conference, but for WP Fusion, but if I didn’t have those relationships with these people, I how I’m a little bit stuck on how far I can go with the support. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And that’s a huge value add to just to have all those relationships and be able to, basically get the best support on behalf of the client. That’s awesome. Yeah. You mentioned you worked with a lot of different clients but is there like a main kind, are they kind of content people or are they main street businesses or like what’s the. 80 20 of who is the majority of the clients? Are they doing digital, most digital  David Risley: products, retail? What? What is it? Mostly digital, mostly in the content business. Most of them have membership sites. That’s probably majority of my clients are running a membership site and, if it was just a standard blog, they probably wouldn’t even need concierge. But, mo, most of what I do with concierge is for WordPress sites that actually do work. They’re selling things, they’re, they got plumbing involved and so that’s the average. I do have a few that sell physical product. And let’s see, I’m trying, do I have any, I. Yeah, actually I do have a few locals I’ve got a chiropractor over in the uk. I’m managing three sites for him, and so his sites are actually pretty, no, he is got one that actually is a content driven membership site. Then he is got two first his practices, so there’s all over the board, but definitely the large majority of them are selling like membership content.  Chris Badgett: What’s the. I’ve been obsessed with membership sites. As long as you have yeah, whatever, 17 years or whatever, and it’s changed. It’s evolved. There’s never been more options like now, and like you mentioned, it’s also much more crowded than it used to be. But. What’s working in membership sites with your clients now? There’s courses, there’s community, there’s premium content or digital files, like what is, what does SU successful membership sites have going on these days?  David Risley: Most of mine are selling courses. I do have a few that have communities. Buddy Boss, I think there’s one. She’s launch getting ready to launch up on fluent community. But most are selling courses. But the interesting thing is they’re not in the most crowded niches in the world. Most of ’em. I’ve got one who she literally does handcrafted toys and the membership site is about how to. Craft these toys. I, it’s not something I would know anything about, but that’s there I got somebody who’s selling training on how to play the saxophone, I guess so it’s markets where there might be noise. Honestly, I don’t know that much about the markets, but it’s probably nothing like internet marketing or anything like that either. These are niches where. They tend to be pretty niche, actually. I’ve got one who’s in the doula space, working with family members who are, or somebody’s, on their deathbed. I have those types of people who are running membership sites. I don’t think I’ve got anybody trying to think off the top of my, I don’t think I’ve got anybody in the really big niches. Weight loss or internet marketing, they tend to be in these smaller ones and they’re still doing pretty well, actually. They are definitely making money. When I log into the site, I can see their income figures and it’s working. So  Chris Badgett: yeah. That’s awesome and inspiring and honestly, that’s what excites me. Like I love finding these niches and I see a lifter lms, just like you mentioned, arts and crafts. I can think of 20 different like art and craft things that I never even knew about. That there’s whole, this person has a whole following on. Yeah. Ear. Earlier you mentioned like the. 200 or 100 9990 $7 course or whatever. Sorry. A membership site. You said courses like the the art and craft hobby toys or whatever. Are these membership sites doing like mini courses, like lots of little courses or what? David Risley: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: How do they get, how do they get the recurring revenue to keep happening in the membership? Or is it not always recurring revenue?  David Risley: Most of ’em have recurring or if, or they were. Or they’re gearing up to do recurring. There are some who were selling things one by one, but they’re like I want to have a cash all membership for recurring, which is a pretty common model. You can get a, it’s like the Netflix model, recurring or you could buy the one on one and it just costs more. So a lot of them do that type of a thing. Most of them have several smaller courses, not so much one, massive one. And, personally I think that model works better mainly because of the amount of noise we’re all dealing with online. I don’t know if people have the attention span to go through some big multi-module washing hours of video anymore. The people want the TLDR all the time and so I think shorter actually is a superpower these days. If you can get them from point A to point B and do it in the least amount of time, that’s ultimately what people want. Of the. They’re just one pagers. It’s just, it’s literally we just set up a custom post type. It’s just, we just set up a one pager because they don’t even need all the structure. And and that was actually something with my site that I started doing a few years back, was getting rid of some, or restructuring them so that I could go more towards short form stuff just because. People, even in the past people would buy these big courses and the rate of completion was pathetic. ’cause it’s like people just, they buy the promise and then they’re like, I’m tired of this. It’s too much work. You, so you try as a creator to create stuff that’s A, it’s easier for you to make, but B, it’s easier for them to consume. And that’s the point.  Chris Badgett: As a web guy on a first name basis, and if, first somebody who’s been in the industry for a long time, I imagine you don’t just get tech questions. People will ask you for business advice around, yeah. Things like pricing or marketing strategies and tactics and things. What are you seeing with your folks? What are they coming to you for business advice?  David Risley: Sometimes it’s just for a, somebody to bounce ideas off of. But yeah, sometimes we do talk about pricing. That, that type of one is always interesting to discuss. ’cause every, as I just was going over, I got people in so many different markets and I don’t know anything about those markets. So how am I supposed to tell them pricing information? But we just we talk it out. And what I find for a lot of people is just talking with somebody else. Helps. It’s not oh, it’s like going to the, it’s definitely not that. It’s just more because I have been in the in business for a long time. I’ve seen so many other types of businesses that I’ve had my hands on them. When people talk to me, I don’t think they’re looking for me to talk top down and give them the answers. I think they realize it’s a two-way conversation and things can come out of that. And I will give them my experience on certain things if I have any. If I don’t, I’ll tell them that too. Like these people who are running, my clients who are running physical products, where they’re shipping things, frankly, I’ve never done that. I sold a few physical products back in my tech days, but I used an outsourcer thing and it just wasn’t the majority of what I did. And I could give you what makes sense, but that’s all it would be. And I’m always p upfront with people about what my experience would be if I don’t have it.  Chris Badgett: If your client asks you to help them get more clients, what do you tell ’em?  David Risley: That type of thing. I don’t get into, I’m very, I know where my superpower is and that is the working I say working with the tech stuff, but working with the tech stuff, with a business background. I’m the, I’m one of those kind of guys who can marry the two things together and create a site that’s actually gonna serve your purposes. But that’s where, what I like to do. I don’t wanna do people’s marketing. I don’t wanna run their social media. I don’t want to do SEO. I know enough where I probably could help them with that stuff. I just don’t want to do it. And I, so when people ask, I’ll just tell them I, I don’t do that. I probably need to come up with a list of people that I can refer them to. I haven’t done that yet, but yeah. I just don’t wanna do it.  Chris Badgett: What are you seeing with the membership sites in terms of. Outside of content supporting their members, like with coaching or group coaching calls or email support or community, like what are people doing from the support side for a membership site to support their members in addition to content these days? David Risley: Yeah, community is definitely one. But. I’m also a fan. As you can see, I basically 100% pivoted into it, but I am a fan of the idea of offering services on top of a membership anyway, because, if you’re looking at it at terms of a funnel, you want to have some higher ticket stuff. And I, selling, from what I’m seeing I’m sure that there’s definitely niches where you could sell high ticket content, but for the majority of my clients. It’s not high ticket, the content part of it. And so to, to develop the funnel out, you need higher ticket stuff. That’s where the services, the done for you, those types of things. And you can build them into your membership to where they, maybe some things are included, but then there’s upsells and and I think that. Will increase revenue quite a bit for a majority of memberships because most, even the client in the toy making space, I don’t know off the top of my head if she’s offering a service, but she could almost anything. There’s room for that type of stuff. You just gotta get creative with it, even if it’s just a simple phone call. Chris Badgett: Do you see like any common pricing, and I know it’s a range and it depends, but $30 a month, a hundred dollars a month, $500 a month, what range are people doing these recurring membership sites? What are they charging their clients?  David Risley: I’m trying to remember, I’m looking at my list of client sites right now, trying to remember what they charge. I, but it’s all over the board. I will say it. Overall I’m thinking that recurring prices tend to be lower now than they were a few years back, but that’s just a broad level overview. I don’t have any numbers to back it up. And It’s just what I seem to be seeing. We’re not talking like. Single digit numbers. We’re talking about, still respectable numbers, but the idea of charging several hundred dollars a month, you gotta be in the right business for that type of thing. It’s almost always under a hundred, usually, down to, 10, 20, 30 range. But again, it just, it depends so much on market. Yeah. Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for nerding out with me, David, on membership sites. It’s it’s always fun to run into somebody who’s been into membership sites, into marketing, into WordPress and serving clients and helping.  David Risley: I love membership sites. I’ve been a fan of it for even back in my tech niche days. I was, I probably had one of the first membership sites in that space. It was a little harder space to do because it was so focused on reviews and all that kind of stuff, but. I went for it and I just, I’m a fan of the model. I’m a fan of recurring. It makes for a much more predictable business,  Makes  Chris Badgett: life easier. And there’s so many great tools out there now to, oh, it’s so easy. That I get what you mean by I have fun building sites. Like it is fun. Yeah. And the tools just get better and better. It’s pretty cool.  David Risley: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, David. Blog marketing academy.com. What’s the best way for people to get into your world? Your YouTube channel book a call. What, where would you highlight people to go  David Risley: check you out more? My home base is blog market academy.com. You could book a call if you’d like. That’s more if you want to possibly engage me for I. Some work on the site or look at concierge services. The best way to, if you wanna just keep in touch, is to get onto my newsletter which is the WP Edge it sends out every Monday, and it’s basically the type of stuff we were just talking about. That’s the kind of stuff that’s in my newsletter. It is a, it’s, it is discussing WordPress of course, but with a business slant to it. It’s not, we’re not talking about blogging with pet pictures. These are sites that do things and and that’s what I talk about. That’s probably your best bet. And then if the time is right for somebody, they wanted to come in on the other stuff, they always know where to find me. Chris Badgett: Awesome David, thank you for coming on the show. Really appreciate it and keep up the great work. Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Internet Marketing With David Risley From Blog Marketing Academy 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 Remkus de Vries, a WordPress performance specialist and strongman athlete, combines technical know-how with a holistic outlook on life and health in this episode of LMScast. He talks about his curatorial WordPress weekly, Within WP, and his work on performance tools like as Scanfully. Remkus highlights the need to be genuine online in order to encourage feedback and personal development, in addition to fostering connection in a remote work environment that is frequently isolated. He emphasizes the psychological and physical advantages of strength training and points out that long-lasting habits are formed by constant discipline rather than incentive. He suggests that those who are new to fitness endure whatever discomfort they may experience at first and concentrate on long-term outcomes rather than immediate gratification. At almost 52, he is still dedicated to strength and health as a means of securing longevity and quality of life, serving as a potent reminder that making an investment in one’s own well-being also entails making an investment in the well-being of people we care about. 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 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. I’m joined by a special guest and friend I’ve known around the internet for a long time. I don’t know how long, maybe eight years, something like that. I remember I first shook Rimkus Dev RISE’s hand in, st. Louis, that’s when I first met you in person, I think. Remkus Devries: Yeah. I could be wrong,  Chris Badgett: Yeah. But Rimkus is a WordPress performance expert. He is working on some training, a course about that. He also has a tool to help with that called Scan Fully. So go check out scan fully.com. Also, MKU has one of the few news letters that I moved to my primary inbox. It’s called Within WordPress within wp.com. If you want to keep tabs on what’s going on in WordPress, it’s a great newsletter. We’re gonna get into all that. But first, welcome to show mku. And I pronounce it wrong, it’s D freeze, so it’s you could feel free to correct me if I mess up again, but welcome to the show. Remkus Devries: Thank you, man. Happy to be here. Yeah. I think the first time is probably more than a decade ago.  Chris Badgett: Okay.  Remkus Devries: For 2025. And in 2015 I was aware of you already. I know that for a fact.  Chris Badgett: One of the things about that I remember at that word camp, I took my brother with me and it was the first time that I noticed, like when I first started going to some events. I didn’t really know a lot of people, and then all of a sudden I started realizing that creating content, social media, getting out there there’s people watching and listening, and you it’s just a pro tip to get out from behind the computer, get out in the world, share yourself publicly. But maybe let’s start there. You share your personal life. For example, rems, and correct me if I’m using the wrong term here. I know it’s not bodybuilding. He’s a strong man. Yep. So one of the things I like about REMS is, you can check out social media, you’ll find stuff about performance and WordPress, but you’ll also see him lifting and throwing and carrying heavy things. So you put your whole self out there. Tell us about your approach to like just being you on the internet.  Remkus Devries: So I try not to overshare. Let’s start there. But I don’t know, it’s I think there’s I think there’s value for me as well as for whoever tunes, tunes into me. Understanding what the sort of mindset is behind a few of my choices, the things that I do. Strongman lifting is one of them. But also performance, right? So there’s, for me, it’s not necessarily that I am like thinking about what am I going to share and what’s my story going to be and how am my angles and all that sort of stuff. But I also have realized that if you share, people will listen and people will re will respond and. Since we are sitting in our offices online Sure. But, very isolated. It’s just my home office now again, my, my, my wife is sitting in front of me for most of the time. Not that alone, but you don’t have any colleagues around you, right? If you want to have some sort of connection and. I appreciate connections. Then you have to show that you are there, that you’re available, that you have ideas and thoughts, and the more you share, the more feedback you get. And ultimately that leads to growth. And I like growth. I think I. Personal growth, whether that’s done on the professional side of things or the strength side of things, or the mental side of things, all of these things. I put an effort in. I think they’re important and thus being online for me is a, is essentially a method, a way to do that.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. And since we’re talking about the strength stuff I’m similar in a way that, I do a lot of hiking and running and getting out in nature and it keeps me sane. And when I see somebody else like you who’s like outside throwing really heavy things over these high bars, I know it helps keep you sane. But tell us about mental health and just the value of exercise and getting outdoors and how you balance life.  Remkus Devries: The, there, there’s a saying where where the outcome is the more healthy you are in your body, the more healthy you are in your mind. I think it’s, I think in Latin we say men in corporate Asana, something like that. But the, it’s a symbiotic thing. So the more you are in fact living in your body, less in your mind, the more benefit you’ll see in your mind and vice versa. So it doesn’t matter where you start really. ’cause if you start educating yourself on exercise, you’ll realize that is the one thing to do for longevity, for a better life, for quality, for better sleep, for all of these things. I discovered this decades ago ’cause I can say that I’m past 50. One of the things I realized that I like going beyond limits that I see or feel and lifting heavy weights. Or carrying heavy weights or doing anything heavy for me is one of those things that absolutely forces me out of my mind. ’cause I can’t be thinking about how many plate. If you want me to see me at my dumbest, like my absolute dumbest, come join me in my strongman gym. I can’t even count what plates I should put on. That’s. It’s just too heavy. So I’ll be slow in 1, 2, 3, 4 times 25 kilos is what now? That’s 200. The bar is 200, so that’s two 20. Okay, so then I need two more. Like I can’t do that fast. Like I need to do one or the other. The more I started doing that, the better I started feeling. So I was like, this is pretty straightforward, so why don’t I invest in this? And as it so happens, I am genetically predisposed to be stupid strong. They turned out to be very heavy at the, in the end.  Chris Badgett: What how many days do you. Workout or get exercise. For me, it’s every day. I’m, it’s all varied. Some days of strength running fast, slow hills flat, but for me, I to do it every  Remkus Devries: day, yeah, I’ll walk every day. But working out, I have a minimum of three days a week. But ideally I’m four, maybe five if it depends on the whole bunch of things. I have a home gym, so I have always room to do something. There’s a gym at two kilometers, which is what, a mile and a half away. So I also, I always have a way to do something and I’m of the opinion that even if I am cramped for time 20 minutes spent is 20 minutes well spent. So I’ll prioritize that. I’ll focus on that. And, the. The easy part that comes with it is the more you keep doing it, the less it’s about discipline. It’s just habit. ‘Cause for, let me be very forward and straight on with this. It’s not about motivation, it is about discipline. But if you do discipline often enough, it becomes just a habit. And I think that’s the power of, forcing yourself in your body, finding boundaries and going beyond them. Finding ways, and obviously I’m, I’m also hitting limits. There are certain things I can’t weigh. I can’t lift heavier than what I currently can, and I probably never will. That’s also fine. I chose not to use any form of enhancements. So I am at my natural limits for some of the stuff that I do, but that’s fine. I can play around with the thing, how I do it or how often I do it, but doing it means I feel better. Period.  Chris Badgett: I know for while we’re on this topic, for some people maybe they’ve just haven’t moved in a long time. They’re pretty sedentary and they get the bug, and I know once you get into it, it becomes part of your life. That’s the way I feel about it. But that period between making a change and installing that discipline and habit, what advice do you have to help people get over the initial resistance? Remkus Devries: So accept that you’re going to be in discomfort for about three to four months. That’s a given. That’s a fact. So your body just needs to understand pain, understands recovery, all of those things. And that’s annoying, but it’s how it works. So if you can mentally on motivation or just sheer will power yourself through the first four months, let’s call it that then the benefits start becoming quite real. And the rest is making sure you form a habit. Logging, getting a buddy there’s different ways of using something that helps you keep momentum. So I would primarily focus on finding that thing, that will motivate you. Some people will say, lifting weights or fitness or whatever version you pick it’s boring. It’s just doing the same thing over and over again. What I don’t enjoy that. I don’t think it’s about the enjoyment of the exercise. I don’t think it’s about the reps. You do, I don’t think it’s about any of this stuff. What it, for me, what it’s about is the result. So what does it give me? I’m close to 52 and I can sprint and run and do all the things of guys half my age. Now that’s worth something to me. I saw a very interesting I don’t know if it was an ad or just a, an interesting TikTok, but the gist of it was you say you die for your family, you do anything for your family, right? And then it showed some some family picks and then it said, but would you actually start investing time in feeling healthy and better because that is helping your family? Would you put in, put the time in for that? And I was like, that. That’s pretty much that sums it up. I’d like to have the highest quality of life, not just now, but for the next 50 years. So what’s the best way to do that? And what modern science tells us what the data sells. That tells us. That essentially means you need to be the strongest version you can be. And running is great, walking is great, but strength is where longevity lives. So I focus on strength.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Speaking of consistency and discipline what got you obsessed with WordPress and specifically performance and speeding up sites? Remkus Devries: So the, what got me into WordPress is basically I wanted to share some stuff that I was learning at the time and I needed a platform and I rolled into it quickly, was asked for friends and family. Can you build that for me? And that turned into a career. But the thing that pulled me into performance I think the, I come from an enterprise background. Like I, I used to work at a large insurance company here in the Netherlands. And that gives you a different mindset. And with that mindset, I looked at WebPress and as well as the projects that I was doing, and I quickly, I. Rolled into sort of the more complicated types of sites. So when custom post types and custom taxonomies came around, that was heaven for me. ’cause now I can build anything on WordPress. And the first couple of sites that I’ve built had, some of them had 12, 13 custom post types and about double of that in custom taxonomies and everything needed to work together. And I quickly learned that a lot of optimizations we’ve seen in the last two, three years were not available then. So you needed to work in an optimized version. So the more data, the more complexity, the more. Limits your hitting. So I was forced into looking what are ways that I can do this smarter, faster from the ground up and not after the fact, because building something and having it work great, but as soon as five, six people are on the site and it crashes, you go that’s not really motivating. So I started Interesting. The, if. Being interested in the concept of if you wanna solve a problem, you need to start at the root. And that brings you to interesting discoveries, not just in WordPress or performance, but in life, I’d say. But for WordPress, that meant I needed to figure out how to build smarter. And yeah, once you jump in that road, there’s no way out of it anymore. There’s just a smarter way to build.  Chris Badgett: So what does Scan fully and where did that come from and what does it do?  Remkus Devries: So Scan Fully is a WordPress site, health monitoring and performance monitoring tool. So our goal, and I’m doing this together with Barry Coy, who’s also from the Netherlands. And the problem we want solve is. We want to be the tool that essentially monitors anything and everything that has to do with the performance and the health of your site. And so that’s things like op time and certificate monitors. Sure. There’s we pull in site health, that is present in your WebPress site. We pull that into our dashboard so it’s easier to access, certainly if you have a bunch of sites in there. It’s just easier to navigate in our dashboard than it is to hop from, 30 different WebPress sites let alone hundreds. And, the thing we’ll be adding this year that’s going to make the biggest impact is we’re going to be monitoring for content health as well. And that’s a very wide concept. So that basically means your broken links, your broken embeds images CSS files, JavaScripts, all the logical stuff. But we also include form validation e-commerce optimization and checking. Can somebody add to cart? Can they check out? And does everything work after an update? All of these things we’re going to scan for quite regularly and fully.  Chris Badgett: Nice. You have a course coming too about performance and I know you mentioned getting into the foundations and helping people understand it and all the layers. What are some of the. The first three things people should look at with performance if they want, I want my fa my site to be faster. I know that’s a hard question for an expert ’cause you’re like, it’s a lot of things and it depends, right? Yeah. But I’m going to cheat a little ’cause I’m gonna add step zero.  Okay?  Remkus Devries: So it’s gonna be four things. Step zero is building for performance. Meaning you don’t fix it at the end. ’cause caching is what most people think is the thing that solves performance or produces performance. But caching doesn’t solve your performance. Caching makes an optimized version of your site. And the optimization can be that it’s a static version of the site, meaning full ht ML caching. You can move that to the edge CloudFlare or many of the other solutions, but you still haven’t solved performance. ’cause what does solving performance mean? That means there’s a cash hit ratio of a hundred percent. That’s never gonna happen and in some cases you may be lucky to get 50%. So depending on your type of sites, especially when you are logged in, for instance, with an LMS. Or e-commerce. You are by definition never looking at cache. You may have elements that are cached. For instance, your menu, but your site is onc because you, if you are caching your site for a course, then whatever you just did, Chris will be seen by the next person trying to log in and they’ll see your version of the course, which is obviously a no-no. Step zero means you, you starting building for performance now. I think the key there is, depending on the type of site, you need to be on the right hosting and there’s there’s. There’s a wide range of hosting plans out there for, at different hosting companies. I’m not gonna give you my my preference here, but I am going to say there’s ways of figuring out what per, what hosting company has good and great performance. And spoiler alert, performance has nothing to do with support. You can have wonderful support, but a mediocre product, which is then looks like it’s fantastic. Not in the edge cases, not in really busy sites which I’m sure you’ve seen happen with your your product in many different ways. So that’s step one. Your hosting needs to be perfect. Then step two means you need a theme that is a singular purposed theme. Meaning a theme needs to, he needs to have the base principle of wanting to do only one thing and do it well. That automatically means I don’t like themes that wanna be everything. A lot of the themes, for instance, on theme forest, that’s never gonna scale because there’s no optimization happening in the entire code of that theme anywhere, and they just wanna fix the output and cache, which again, back to step zero, that doesn’t solve performance. And the third would be you have to have the desire to run and lean and mean sight. You have to force yourself to be. Wary of everything you introduce to your site that potentially may slow it down. That doesn’t mean you can’t have 70 plugins. And this may sound weird, but it’s not about the plugin amount, it’s about what they do. I have clients running sites in less than 500 milliseconds, cached and uncashed that are running more than a hundred plugins. So the size, the number of the plugins isn’t the problem, what they do. Is the problem. So a plugin needs to be built in a fashion where it understands that if it’s not supposed to do anything, certainly not on every page load, it’s not doing anything so lean and mean. And how can you stay lean and mean? Make sure you use a scanning tool that does it fully  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us like who’s the perfect fit for Scan Fully, which is@scanfully.com, and who is a perfect fit for your upcoming course and where can they find that or get on the email list to know what. This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Chris Badgett: When it comes out, if you go to mku d.com/courses, you can sign up for, I have a few courses listed, but my site’s currently in the, in, in rebuild, so I’ll have a better landing page there. But there’s a form there where you can sign up to be notified when the courses go live. But the, the ideal customer is essentially boils down to one or two words. Remkus Devries: That’s a WordPress professional, and I know that’s a vague word, but it essentially means anyone that wants to treat WordPress professional. So that’s agencies that, site owners that have sites that make money where you rely on it. Working perfectly or understanding the principle. And the performance course probably is focused a little less on the beginner, but I am covering every single layer. And I’ll explain to you what that layer is. So you have an understanding of what that layer actually in, in, in in its full intent does. So that means. I’ll be throwing things at you like this is your DNS layer, and this is what happens on the DNS layer. This is what your certificate does. And yes, there are a few cases where you get a wrong version of a certificate, your site will become slower and this is why. So you be are better equipped with the knowledge of, making the right decisions essentially. So I probably less about less super beginner. Anyone who regularly builds web sites or works with them, they’ll have a good understanding from both the course as well as using scan fully. And then, and I should mention, the best features of Scan fully are up and coming for this year. But I urge you to get in now ’cause the price is as low as it ever it’s ever going to be.  Yeah, I was looking at that and it’s very reasonable. Speaking of WordPress professionals, one of the things creators. My opinion really need to do is build their audience ideally in advance as soon as possible. The best day is 10 years ago. The next best is today. Yep. You started a newsletter and like I mentioned, it’s one of the few I follow. I just find it really value packed to the point and writing a newsletter. It really, you’re serving your community. You’re also building an email list. I know you have. Pretty high open rates on your newsletter, but what’s the story of that? Why did you start it and what would you advise somebody who hasn’t built a newsletter for their community yet?  The answer to the second question, just start. I. Yeah, don’t wait it out. Don’t think there will be a better time or I’m better well prepared. It’s the same with kids. There is never going to be a perfect time to have kids. Just have kids. If that’s what you want, ultimately go for it. Same for the newsletter. Just make that choice of where to host it. And you can go fancy and go straight to kit, but you can go, you can do beehive, you can do substack. It really doesn’t matter. Just start. And in terms of the first answer. It’s, so I have the natural ability to process a lot of information and deduce from that what the thing is to remember here. Whether that’s a multitude of separate items or bringing back something complex to this is what it is about. And I started sharing this on and off over the last, almost four years ago, five years ago now. And I enjoyed it, but I didn’t have a routine in it. Mostly because it was published on a site and I got less feedback. And at a certain point I realized, oh, people actually like what I digest ’cause it’s essentially my digest of the week. With the focus of performance, security, and just fun tools, like stuff that you can build. Even cooler stuff on top of what Chris with. And I realized I should bring this to a newsletter I did and, what I essentially do is share stuff I think is interesting or has an a, a different angle from all the other newsletters you see out there. So I want to have a particular voice and I work at having that voice. Sometimes a newsletter has a few commentaries on my end, and sometimes I basically have something to say about every single item I add. I’ll tell you why I am adding it or if I think it’s a really good one, then I will say that it’s less of a. There’s a few more newsletters out there that just share. They just post the links and send it out. And I’m less about that. I’m more about quality. And I made a decision to not share specific stuff related to community stuff or drama or any of that sort of stuff. There’s others that do that wonderfully. I don’t need to have that particular type of audience. I’d like to stay positive. I’d like to build. Stuff I’d like to help people understand what they can do with the platform that drives me, that motivates me, and I try to make that quite visible in my in my newsletter. Chris Badgett: You mentioned you process a lot of information. I relate to that. I do that as well. I know there’s like a strength and personality type tool. I can’t remember which one called Input. And you can take a lot of input. Yeah. Of information,  Remkus Devries: I’m an info. Shorter is the best description I’ve had thrown at me at one point. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I think a lot of course creators and kind of content people, but also a lot of people in the WordPress professionals, they take a lot of input. They’re researching technology, they’re talking to clients, they’re just input people. Given all that input. What’s your process from going, from your research of listening to podcasts or RSS feeds or the newsletters you’re subscribed to and blogs and stuff? How do you translate that volume of input into a newsletter format?  Remkus Devries: Diligently. ’cause I have a few systems in place, so it depends on where I see the thing that I find interesting. Yeah. If it’s shared on X or blue sky, I turn it into a bookmark. If it’s A-U-R-L-I see somewhere I have. I prepare all my newsletters in obsidian. So I have a template that is my newsletter, and I essentially copy and paste all the things that I see as I see them. And I, and on Friday I sit down and I take a, an, it’s about an hour, and I process all the bookmarks, all the links that I had in a fashion that it is digestible for someone else as well. Oh and obviously the I’m subscribed to probably 50 plus newsletters, about 150 sites on RSS. And I’ve always done this, I’ve done this since 2007, so I, for me, it’s just normal to check my systems for information and translate that. What I find interesting into obsidian. So I can then copy and paste it from obsidian into kit and it’s marked down in obsidian and Kit when I paste it just accepts that. So it’s very little work. It’s basically just me processing the things that I’ve seen. And sometimes I add something during the week that I, on Friday, go yeah, nevermind. And sometimes even on the Friday, I see stuff being talked about left and right and go oh, interesting. I should add that quick. So it’s yeah it’s a continuous process,  Chris Badgett: so it’s really just you living your life, getting the information you want. And then about an hour on Friday and you have a newsletter.  Remkus Devries: Yep.  Chris Badgett: What about consistency? Do you ever feel like, oh gosh, I have to write the newsletter today, or it’s become a labor of love, or you just enjoy it? Remkus Devries: I enjoy it, but there’s Fridays where it just doesn’t work because so last Friday I was in in Munich and I was busy all day. So that means no time for this, and I don’t prepare them on, like during the week. I don’t prepare, write them. I process it on Friday. So I have my links, I have my bookmarks, but I’m not complete. The next morning, on the Saturday morning, I sent out the newsletter. So I’m okay with being flexible like that. And I’m also okay with skipping a week if it just doesn’t work for whatever reason. And I’ve, I have done that in the last couple of months twice I think. And it’s just what it is. I’m human. I have things popping up on my priority list and there is, there’s companies sponsoring me and I let them know this is the schedule and unless it’s like super important, it goes absolutely out on this day because the campaign is related to it. I’m general as flexible as I can be. That said, for. I don’t know the per year. I missed maybe three, maybe four top. So it’s it yeah it’s more about I don’t want it to be that I feel that I’m forced to do it, so that means I need to have that flexibility to let one go if if need be.  Chris Badgett: So that’s it within wp.com, I highly recommend it. It’s an awesome newsletter. Thank you. And you mentioned sponsorship. I think that’s really cool for a course creator as an example. Sometimes it takes time, as to build a course. Yep. And so if you’re building your email list and maybe generating a little revenue through newsletter sponsorship, how do you get sponsors and what’s your approach to that? Remkus Devries: I don’t approach it.  Chris Badgett: Okay.  Remkus Devries: It just happens. They approach you. They approach me. At a certain point people started asking me can you share some promotional stuff in your newsletter? Yeah, sure. So I sat down and wrote out what I think I’m worth. That’s not right. And I think I’m worth more, but what the newsletter’s worth. Wrote out a sponsor within WordPress page. It interesting to share with my public, then I’ll add you to it. And If you ask me to share something, I will point you to the. Sponsor list. So that means sometimes something commercial is being shared and it’s not sponsored, but it could, that’s my choice. If you ask me, then I choose to ask a compensation for it. Maybe a weird model, but that works in my head. That means I stay true to my integrity and, don’t muddy the water with half type of messages in here. You’ll see me, mentioned plenty of commercial solutions and I’m okay with that. It’s it’s a little bit it makes sense, right? So there’s there’s, there is advertisers or sponsorships where I say no. This is no match for me. Yeah. But we really want to get in front. Yeah I get it. But for me, no, it doesn’t work. So I’m selective. I need to like the product I. I need to like the people even. It’s, yeah. I’m weird like that.  Chris Badgett: I don’t think that’s weird. That sounds awesome. Going back to the personal side i’ve noticed on social media that you like to drive. So when you go to conferences, as an example, I will watch you fly into a town and then drive across the country. I see you driving around Europe and going through, border crossings. I see you, I think you did one with your son. Yep. And you guys had an adventure. What’s the pull of driving? And I just, I relate to it because I always say if I wasn’t in tech, I’d probably be a long distance truck driver and just listen to podcasts all day. Oh yeah. Why do you like it?  Remkus Devries: I’m born and raised inside a family business that had, anything from a gas station to a garage, to a body shop taxi company, car rentals. We did the whole thing. So from the age of three, I know cars and I enjoy a car for what it is. Sure. Transporting from A to B, but I also enjoy the beauty of the car and the, I don’t know the freedom that comes with it. When it comes to road tripping. So I like the idea of, so for instance, last, what was October, November I drove to the Black Sea, and if you look up the Netherlands the north of the Netherlands, and you look then at the Black Sea go, that’s a ridiculous distance. Who does that? But I looked at it and went that’s a stupid thing to do. I should do that. And I enjoyed it. So driving all the way through Bulgaria, ending up at the Black Sea, that’s the largest body of water that I’ve seen. I think. No. May, no. I, no, possibly. Anyway it’s a stupid distance. I was like, that’s cool. Let’s do that. And we, camp Sophia was an option and I was in I applied to speak and I, and they said yes. Good match for Workcamp Europe. The last three editions I drove with my son, so he’s he’s on the photography team. So I drove to Porto with him. I drove to Athens, which also a three day drive and I drove to Torino and we’ll be driving to basel in Switzerland in about yeah. About two weeks. And for me, you can fly. Sure. But I enjoy seeing the roads, the countryside process, the travel and having the freedom to stop wherever I want. So especially in in Switzerland, there’s mountain passes, which I thoroughly enjoy. I’ll drive around. It’s not that I hate flying, but I just like driving more. When we met last at Press Con, I flew to Miami. Got in the car in Miami, went to Key West first, and then back up all the way through New Orleans. Up to Graceland, went down to Texas, saw Dallas Deley Plaza drove down through New Mexico. I. Saw the largest pistachio in the world. Super weird but fun. Ended in tombstone for a night and then drove up to Tempe, Arizona. And that was like five days. So it’s long, but I also enjoy it and I enjoy the alone time as much as I enjoy the the, driving with my son.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. That makes sense. Being a strong man, working out and also just getting out in the world driving, going to conferences, and what keeps, I think this is, these are all important parts of mental health, so  Remkus Devries: Totally get it the alone time forces you to. So I just I just got back this weekend from Minchin Munich. It’s a good day to drive. I can do those long hours driving. And I think I’m used to it. That’s one. But it’s also fine if I drive for blocks of three, four hours. That works for me, but I enjoy the alone time. That’s a dedicated time to think about things. I don’t have to force myself to think about it. But I know it’s gonna happen anyway. You can turn the music on, sure. That’s gonna make it even more pleasurable, but at some point you start thinking about things and that it’s a good way to process thoughts. I do that less in an airplane, for instance. That doesn’t, I’m more like, that’s a lot of noise around me. It’s people way too close. If I can have the comforts of my own car, yes, please. That’s awesome. If I could drive to the United States, I would.  Chris Badgett: You might be able to if you go through bearing Strand.  Remkus Devries: Yeah. I don’t think that is there a bridge or have they talked about a bridge? I think they’ve only talked about it. Chris Badgett: As far as I know, there’s just like a certain part of the winter, there’s a ice road. Yeah,  Remkus Devries: we’re not doing that. There is limits.  Chris Badgett: That’s Rimkus DeVries. You can find them@scanfully.com. Go check that out to speed up your website. Monitor it improve your performance. Also the within wp.com, the newsletter. Thanks for co coming on the showroom. ’cause any final words for the WordPress professionals out there?  Remkus Devries: Final words, I don’t know. Stay fresh. Stay fresh. Start thinking about what your foundation of a fast and perform at WordPress site should look like before you need to build it.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for coming on the showroom kiss. Remkus Devries: Happy to. Thanks for having me. 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 WordPress Performance And The Business of Newsletters With Remkus de Vries 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 “The Future of Online Education in an Artificial Intelligence World,” Bud Kraus examines how the field of digital learning is changing as a result of artificial intelligence. Bud Kraus, who has worked as a WordPress specialist and educator for decades, emphasizes AI as a potent tool that may improve student engagement, automate repetitive activities, and customize instruction rather than as a substitute for instructors. Bud Kraus is a seasoned instructor and content developer in the WordPress community, having taught WordPress and web design in person and virtually for more than 14 years. In this LMScast episode, he highlights how AI may be used to develop learning environments that are tailored to the requirements of each individual student while simultaneously posing significant ethical, data privacy, and digital equity concerns. He also has a podcast channel. Kraus emphasizes the necessity for educators to embrace lifelong learning and responsibly incorporate AI as educational institutions come under increasing demand to modernize in order to maintain online education’s effectiveness, accessibility, and human-centeredness. 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 LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Bud Kraus. He has a podcast over@seriouslybud.com. You can also find him over@joyofwp.com. I met Bud recently at a conference. He’s a course creator. He’s a WordPress professional, he’s a teacher. We’re gonna mine as many tips, tricks, and strategies as we can out of bud. First bud, welcome to the show. Hey, Chris, what a pleasure to be here. Now I have a question for you, which I should have asked before. [00:01:00] Yeah. I know you’re recording this, but video two. Video two and we’re live streaming right now While we’re recording. Oh no. All right. Turn this off. No. Just kidding. All right. Bud Kraus: And I should have asked before, but what the heck now I know. Alright so thank you for having me on too. This is really nice.  Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Absolutely. Take us into your past like you were a teacher and I think one of the things, particularly in the LMS space, sometimes entrepreneurs get excited about information products, building courses, selling courses, and a lot of people pull it off with no teaching background. But teaching and instructional design is like a fundamental skill. Tell us your history as a teacher, some pro teaching tips, and then how you’ve used that when you’ve created courses in your life.  Bud Kraus: Boy, that’s such a great question, and I think that’s one of the fundamental things about before you ever start doing a course, if you can get some [00:02:00] real live in class, that’s a rare thing these days. I know in class teaching experience, I think you’re gonna be. Better off in the sense that when you teach a course, at least my experiences, it’s so important to be prepared that you have a beginning and a middle and an end for the entire course and for each lesson. And that you do this a number of times, meaning semesters or years teaching the same material, tweaking it as you go forward. So that. There is a method to your, the way you do things and that you understand it and that you’ve tried it out on people and you’ve gauged a reaction as to whether or not they’re learning. And once you have all that kind of experience, then I think it’s a good time to do an online course. Now that’s. That’s not how the real world works. I understand that. But that’s how my journey went with online teaching, which is I did things live in class first, and [00:03:00] by doing it, then you really become an expert and authority on the subject. It makes it so much easier to create the content for the course. It really is because basically you already have it and then it’s just a matter of putting it together in however you do this, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. But so I was, I felt very fortunate that I went that way. It wasn’t planned, but lucky that it did.  Chris Badgett: We call that the experts curse, where you got this knowledge, but you need to figure out how to teach it or coach a student and get feedback and improve stuff over time. What was the subject matter you would teach on?  Bud Kraus: The only things I really ever taught was H-T-M-L-C-S-S and WordPress. I never, I taught a little bit of Dreamweaver, but if you can remember what that is, I’m sure you might, but I, I taught a little bit of that, but for the most part it was just good old fashioned coding back in the 2000 OTTs, because that’s really the way people made websites. [00:04:00] And most of my, I was teaching in New York City, most of the students were coming from graphic arts background, so I had to deal with. A group of people who were not believing what the web, what the nature of the medium was, which is not, it’s a text-based medium and it’s really not a graphic medium. I know there’s pictures and I get it, all that stuff, but at the end of the day, when you’re looking at the source code, you’re not looking at pictures, you’re looking at text. So I had to convince a lot of people, Hey, this is really the way to do it. Don’t just insert a flash video here. Let’s do it. Let’s play to the strengths of the medium. I know that, people don’t always, at least in those days, they didn’t really like that. But, I had to convince them. A lot of ’em really were not believers. I was talking about resizing and this and that and, and not pixel. I, not setting things by pixels. And it took a little bit of doing to tell people, no, this is the way to do it. And it, ’cause they just weren’t believers. They didn’t [00:05:00] see, they didn’t understand the medium. And it took a long time for people to. Understand the nature of responsive design is really what I’m getting at. But anyway, that’s neither here nor there. I guess  Chris Badgett: on the other side of teaching is learning and I’ve been around WordPress, I think about 17 years. It’s been a long time and the, it’s changed a lot. And I’m not a developer. I can’t write ht ML and CSS like you can.  Bud Kraus: I felt  Chris Badgett: like when I found WordPress, I was like, oh, this is something for me. I know you can customize it with code, but  Bud Kraus: Right.  Chris Badgett: I could build websites without knowing a line of code and I just fell in love with it. How do you think WordPress is different now in terms of if you’re, if you were teaching somebody how to use it, what would your approach be?  Bud Kraus: That’s a great question. I certainly could go on for a long time, so I’ll try to truncate my my answer here. I think overall, since I’ve been teaching WordPress since let’s say 2012, [00:06:00] 13, I think it was easier to learn then than it is now. Yeah. It’s just become more complex. I know it’s not supposed to be, the idea was make. Complex things simple, and I think they made complex things complex. It just seemed a lot easier to stick a word processor into a CMS, which is what WordPress was in those days. And. Let the user, the creators, decide how to extend and modify their experience. Now it’s, no, we’ll basically give you the experience and you’ll just have to adjust. And that with the block editor, and I understand the philosophy behind all the stuff. So like I said, I can go on for hours talking about this, but as a practical matter, as somebody who’s taught all this through the years, it’s harder for people to learn WordPress today in general than it is. 10 years ago. It just is. And I regret saying that because I don’t think that was the intent, [00:07:00] but as somebody who has seen in the field how this works I think it’s just true. It’s actually harder for me sometimes to work with word WordPress and I forget how things are supposed to work or how they work or they don’t work or, yeah. There, I know this is the year of. Taking thing, no more major releases. And I’m hoping that there’ll be a lot of that polishing, they keep talking about fixing things that need to be fixed before moving on. So hopefully, this will be the pause that refreshes kind of year. ’cause we need it.  Chris Badgett: You’re also a writer. I think writing is a super skill like. It. Communication and writing is everywhere. It’s not just writing books or blogs. Everything’s writing from emails to figuring out a plan, to making a video, it’s all writing. Tell us about your, write your journey as a writer. Bud Kraus: As you say that, I’m thinking like, yeah, but, and here’s the, what the Yeah. But’s gonna [00:08:00] be. I think, up until recently, I would say writing is the number one skill of today in this era of in the age, in the digital age. But now I’m not so sure anymore because of ai and it’s still important. But boy, I use AI all the time for different things, and I’m starting to wonder, where is my future now? I’m not 25 years old, so I don’t have to think about it. A long runway here, but I do write, I write for web hosts like Kinta and hosting, and I’ve written for GoDaddy and others, and we’ll continue to write until they say, we don’t need you anymore. However, I learned recently, they still seem to think they need me, which is really nice. Which, because right now I still think the human touch of writing, you can still read the difference. Okay. I can pretty much tell AI from human and I love it as an assistant. I think as an assistant [00:09:00] it’s tremendous giving me ideas, fixing this better that answering questions, but I can’t. YI, I just don’t want, we’re gonna come to a day where, you’re just gonna you gonna write a blog post. I guess we’re already there. You write a blog post, write a blog post about Bud Kraus and done, I, I don’t know what’s what is the value of that? We, are we gonna lose that too, on the other hand? Who, where is all this ai? Where are they learning all this stuff from people who re, who write. So it’s a, I teach chat, GPT it teaches me. It’s like that we’re in that phase right now. And I am discovering all kinds of different ais, not just chat GPT, I’ve used cursor ai. I am using this video animation AI now. These tools are great, but I fear that they are going to replace us. I’m sorry, I just do [00:10:00] you know, what do you think? Can I ask questions on the show? Is that okay? Yes,  Chris Badgett: you can. This is what happens when you interview another podcaster. They come back around, which is great. Great. Yeah, I’m definitely with you on where’s the source material, as a person who’s been podcasting for a long time, I. There’s 500 hours of transcripts of this podcast alone that wow. An AI could just Sure. Probably already has scanned and put into the language model. I think at least for the medium term writing is still important for communicating to the ai. And I think about the difference between writing a. Prompt that says something like, Hey, make me an online course about x versus going into detail like, Hey, this is my avatar. This is what I already know already want to teach. What are the gaps? And then having an iterative back and forth. You still need to be able to communicate, but I [00:11:00] think it, it does create it does give me concern, but it also, I find myself as a writer. Not being lazy, but there’s like a pool of laziness in the sense of even when prompting, like not correcting spelling errors and just  Bud Kraus: Yeah. Chris Badgett: The desire or the tendency or the inclination for shortcuts is there. Yes. And I think that’s dangerous territory. And like you said, polish, even if AI is helping, like the human polish on top really makes it awesome. But where we’re gonna be in six years? I don’t know. No, I that I’m not even so sure. Bud Kraus: I really can’t tell you in in two years. It’s just I, it’s such a it is, I think to me, and, it is the biggest shift, change, whatever, however you wanna describe it important. Revolution. I don’t know. In my life. And the funny thing is I’ve lived long enough. You could have said television, radio, [00:12:00] no cell telephones. No. I’m not that old. But all these technologies which come faster and faster, and they’re more and more important. We felt like the web was like, oh my God. What could ever be more important than this? Wrong. What’s gonna be more important than a, I don’t know. This sort of seems like the end of the road here, but No, I don’t know. I think, there’ll be human teleportation one day. Okay. That’s big, if that’s possible. Everybody’s, so I’ve heard it’s impossible possible. I think it’s possible, but we don’t know how to do it now, obviously, but, so wouldn’t that be a groundbreaking thing? Yeah, I think so. So you don’t, techno, we don’t reach the end with technology. We’re just, there is no end, but this certainly is like any, and the stakes here get bigger and bigger. Like the web that’s really good. It, but it also could be dangerous. Look at AI really good, but boy, could this thing be dangerous? It seems yeah. You, as these technologies get more pervasive, important, predominant in our lives. [00:13:00] You can easily see that we the good is really good and the bad is God only knows, I mean with ai, cancer, this, that, and then who knows with the bad. So I don’t even wanna think about it. Anyway, where were we? So can we, let’s talk about creating courses. That’s, ’cause we were talking a little bit before and I wanna talk about that.  Chris Badgett: Is that okay? And just dovetailing into ai. Yeah. One of our company values at Lifter LMS is learner results first. So like we build software for people, building sites and stuff, but we always think about the student and their experience. It’s like our primary concern and related to ai yeah. How do people learn? Like I myself find myself using Google less and going to AI to learn something. Particularly if it’s something custom. I think a great example is instead of going to a recipe blog like, Hey, I [00:14:00] wanna make cur curry chicken tonight. And I can go to the AI and be like. I have this much chicken, these are the vegetables I have, make me an awesome recipe. And it’s so custom and customized. I think that the AI tutor is gonna be helpful, but I have hope that the human in the loop will always add value. But our job description might change as course creators or becoming more like coaches, but what are your thoughts?  Bud Kraus: Here’s the  Chris Badgett: thing,  Bud Kraus: and I’m thinking as you’re bringing this up, which is. I like to learn new stuff too. Would I take an online course to learn JavaScript or would I just have, she GBT, teach me whatever I wanna know about JavaScript? The answer is probably the latter. Now, do I need to know JavaScript like a programmer? No. But can I like, just like parachute into part of JavaScript, learn that and pull it out and use it? Yes. So I think that course creation and the kind of things that you do, [00:15:00] that’s. I could see that’s a real problem. If I was creating a course today, you know what the answer is, I wouldn’t probably be creating a course today. Now that’s pr. Now I say this because number one. Everything I could create has been done 10,000 times already. So why do I need to make something that’s been done? The last course I made was on using the Gutenberg block editor. This was about 20, 21 or so, maybe 2020, I don’t know. And I went around to everybody in WordPress. What do you think of this idea? I went around to course creator. Oh, that’s a great idea. We need it. Blah, blah, blah. Nobody needed it. Nobody needed it. It wasn’t, yeah, I didn’t market it very well, but nobody really needed it because they could already Google stuff and they already, before ai, and it was just, and there was, there were also fundamental flaws to what I was doing that really doomed this thing. But as far as creating a course today. I think when I write an article on, let’s say an in-depth look at theme JSO, I think that’s a way, [00:16:00] that’s a form of teaching. So that’s the way I teach today, is I write like a long article for let’s say Kinta, and you’re reaching God knows how many people and hopefully they, they think it’s valuable to their customers. And that’s teaching. It’s different. And you’re probably teaching and you’re definitely teaching. The ais, that’s a really good point you brought up. Made me think are we writing for humans or are we writing to teach or enter, the LMS, the LM ls, right? Learning, is it large? What is it? LLMs large language models. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah are we teaching that or are we teaching humans or we’re doing both, or what? So it’s really a time of such change in the world of education, which is, the broader sense of what we’re talking about. And I just don’t know, i, I, there’s, like I said, for the example I gave is perfect for just a little piece of something, but how about becoming an expert in [00:17:00] something? Would that work? When you have a course, you have guidance, you have somebody who’s thought through the beginning, the middle, and an end. If you’re just using chat GPT. It’s a hit and miss. If you’re trying to learn something big for. I’ll give you a, for example. If you were learning CSS, where would you start? I don’t know. And I give that as an example ’cause in 1998 or nine when I was just first learning it, I dive, I didn’t know where to start, and I dived into the deep end of the pool and I got confused. I got turned off. Of course, the browsers weren’t supporting CSS very well, and I just didn’t look at CSS for another two or three years because. It because I started out at the wrong place. A course online that’s well thought out will guide a user in a way that, a student, in a way that I don’t think AI can do it now and give you the whole picture of what it is that you need to know. So there’s still value, yes, in courses [00:18:00] when I, just thinking out loud here, but as time goes on, I think it’s gonna be tougher and tougher for course creators. It just is. I’ve said to my wife, I don’t even know if I need to have a tea. What’s gonna happen to education? Are we gonna need teachers anymore? When you can just learn a lot of stuff by just learning how to use the learning, how to work with prompts. That’s like ridiculous, again, good and bad.  Chris Badgett: I’m  Bud Kraus: optimistic. It’s extreme. Yeah.  Chris Badgett: I’m optimistic. Because at least in the past, disruptive technology usually opens up new opportunity, but an evolution is required, and this is a very confusing one. I remember when I fell in love with WordPress, just this idea that I could build a website. I’m not a developer, and I could anybody anywhere in the world with the internet connection could see it.  Bud Kraus: Yeah. I fell in  Chris Badgett: love with that idea, but I didn’t at the time know. Oh you can extend this platform and turn it into web applications and all the stuff that happened after that. We can’t always see where we’re going, [00:19:00] but I’m optimistic that new opportunities will be there, but we have to evolve. And the other thing you mentioned, you talked about parachuting in to JavaScript or whatever, right? There’s a framework I, a friend of mine said there’s just in case education and then just in time and. Sort of, there’s an argument. The traditional education is a lot of just in case here’s the library of stuff for you to put in your head. And then there’s just in time, which AI is really good at is Hey, I need to know how to fix this plumbing problem right now. Or it’s like right now, right in the moment. Bud Kraus: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: But also believe there is a benefit to. What some would call liberal arts education with, where you’re like studying broad topics that like, don’t, they might not help you get a job per se, but they’re helping shape your mind. And this goes back to the laziness thing I was talking about. If we, if everything just becomes just in time [00:20:00] prompts stuff and ai, like what does that do to brain for brain development? I. Yeah, if the AI is smarter than us and we get super general, super intelligence and all that stuff, how are we humans gonna feel? And we should still probably develop our minds,  Bud Kraus: that’s the scary part of the, of our, it’s one of the scary parts of the future of this is that we just don’t know. Nobody knows. I don’t care who you talk to. They don’t know nobody. How could you know? Some people seem to know, I. Probably have a better insight than I do, that’s for sure. But with certainty, I know it’s very hard to rethink in a profound, fundamental, complete way. I. The nature of, let’s say, learning and education going forward? It’s, we have, what’s really cool to me is that, your brain can only hold so much data, right? So most of the data we now use and hold is external. It’s outside of us. [00:21:00] It’s like the thin client concept, right? It really is. Do you remember that term thin client where you know you didn’t need a hard drive basically? I don’t hard drive in there. Can you explain thin client? Thin client. Really. I think the first time I heard of the term was I, micro Sun Microsystems was using it in like the 1990s. Okay. And I couldn’t quite figure out what, maybe that was a skinny person or something, but thin client, it refers to the fact that this was really early thinking is that all the data would be online or in the cloud, or however you wanna put it. And not stored in your local computer. Okay. And your local computer is, thin would be just a very small, hard drive. And essentially that’s what we have today. So your brain is like the thin client because you can’t store that much in there relative to what is out there. And knowing that means. I’m conscious of that, so why do I have to learn this stuff? Why do I have [00:22:00] to learn like almost anything now? I could write what’s really cool or maybe not, is that I can get an assignment and I do. I take on writing assignments and I look at this and go, I don’t know how to do, I don’t know how to use multi, I don’t know how to use W-P-C-L-I for multi-site. And then I start getting into it and I say, oh yeah, you do here. Ask check GPT how this works. So I have enough of a foundation, a vocabulary to build to the next step. But what happens if I don’t have any foundation? I don’t know the answers to those questions. If somebody just threw me in and said I don’t know, react, okay, here, do something with react. I don’t know if I could navigate my way through that with ai. I should try that to see I. Can you, can I come up with something useful in a, with a, some kind of programming language that I do not know anything about? I. Huh, I probably could, which is like, why do we need developers? And developers aren’t losing, he, Hey, a really smart guy. Now I give this credit to Marcus [00:23:00] Burnett, but he’s not a really smart guy. So then Marcus and I are very good friends. But said to me, Marcus said quite a while ago, he said, it’s. It’s not, it’s like you’re not gonna lose your job to ai, but you are gonna lose your job to the person who knows how to use ai. Yeah. And then, and Marcus didn’t say that. He said a smart person. I always, and that’s true. I find that right now, if you’re a dev develop, if you’re almost anything in some kind of information world like we are, if you know how to use ai, you’re about to become obsolete right now. If you’re not already. Me going into AI is just a natural evolution, and it’s funny, people my age, they come up to me and they say, Hey bud, you know anything about this AI stuff? What do you think it’s gonna last? Or what? So I just roll my eyes and go, huh, okay. But that’s, I know, but retired people and stuff like that, they don’t need to know. They don’t want to know any of this stuff. I’m just the opposite. I just wanna know [00:24:00] all can me. ’cause I’ve always been into science fiction and technology and I’m not going anywhere anyway. Oh, can I get back to something I was thinking of about, yeah. When we started in the beginning about creating courses and stuff, at least having the experience of teaching and writing, because the first courses I ever created were. There were no videos. Okay. It was all text and you had to write out everything. So it was like making a simple website, and I had to create the entire. Every chapter built on the next chapter and got harder and heard all that kind of stuff. Then there was a project and, but you weren’t there to explain it, so you had to write everything out, which was really an interesting experience and very time consuming. My first course that I taught online was called, I believe it was called Intro to HTML. It was, there was no CMS, it was all whatever I could make by hand. And students would upload their files. They would upload their files in a system that I reviewed the files manually. I would look at the code and say it’s good or not good or whatever, and I got paid. Now that was a tho that course was marketed through adult education systems around mostly New Jersey, New York, Connecticut. ’cause they didn’t have anything else and they wanted to offer this stuff. To their, adult education program. So that was, that lasted a little while. It wasn’t gonna last forever, but the time it took to create that, today it’s just a lot faster to create stuff because we have lifter LMS and stuff like that. So we have a lot of choices now, but before, I’m just, my word of advice to anybody who’s thinking of it. Creating a course is to plan all this stuff out in advance. Don’t start the course first. Come up with your title. Come up with your chapter heading, subheads everything. Just do a huge outline [00:26:00]and then start filling in and know we’re gonna start here and end up over here. What is the goal? What do you want people to be doing during the course? After the course? What’s the takeaway? What are your expectations of a teacher? For what the students should know, not just what their expectations are, what do you expect them to know? And then you can build a course around that. So  Chris Badgett: whatever I think about writing, let’s say writing a book or a blog post or something, right? Yeah. I like to use the framework writing is three parts and ideally equal parts of research, writing and editing. So course creation is the same, slow down, don’t just tell the AI to make me a course about x. Bud Kraus: Right.  Chris Badgett: Do a ton of research. You’ve been doing it your life, if it’s your subject matter expertise, but Right. Dig a deep, see what else is out there. And then creating it, polishing it. And then editing is also, I. Come back and improve it. I’m sure you improved your HT ML course over time, right? Yes and no.  Bud Kraus: And the reason why I say yes [00:27:00] and no is because it didn’t change all that much. Like a tag is a tag and attributes and values, they’re pretty much, after a while, they got pretty well settled out. With this HTML, then we had X-H-T-M-L, back, H TM L. It wasn’t terribly changing. But here’s what’s different now than back in the day, is that we have different ways now to communicate that we really didn’t have. In 2001, 2, 3, 5, 10, whatever. You’ve got video. You’ve got better ways to do screenshots and animation and AI animation. And God, you could do avatars, you could do all kinds of engaging things. Now that I just, I couldn’t do, I would’ve thought about it, but, I didn’t know Camtasia then. I didn’t know. So there’s so many different tools that we have to communicate. To make and I, and it’s it’s now here, here’s the other thing too. If you’re creating a course, you know what I just said might be just totally bewildering, right? What? I have to learn all this stuff. Number one, no, you [00:28:00] don’t learn only what you need to know, but trying to learn something that’s gonna have broad application. So you don’t wanna spend a lot of time learning something that you’re just gonna use a small bit of time that will only do a very small little thing for you. Okay, that doesn’t make any sense. So I always look at something like, Hey, once I master this thing, like I know Camtasia pretty well. What else can I use it for? If I need to do blah, blah, blah, whatever. It’s, oh, I could use Camtasia for that. So you’re building, so don’t try to think of I need to learn everything ’cause you don’t, but choose wisely and stick with industry tools like Camtasia, snag it, stuff that people are using. Don’t try to do like one of these little knockoff things that aren’t really as popular. They’re popular for a reason ’cause they’re really good. Yeah, you don’t, like you don’t have to learn Final Cut Pro and Premier and Camtasia just Camtasia really is as far as screen capture video goes, it’s probably, what do you think? The gold [00:29:00] standard here?  Chris Badgett: Probably. Yeah. Camtasia, the script is coming up with its AI tools. Yeah. I’m a screen flow guy with a Mac oh, yeah.  Bud Kraus: There you go. Screen flow. Yeah. I don’t know it, but it’s certainly well known. Yeah, but the thing is like if you are new, you want to, explore these tools and then settle on one and get a license or whatever. I’m doing that right now with this animated AI stuff, which is I look at a whole bunch and I go, that’s the one I wanna use. And it’s not is it, are other people using it? But it doesn’t, I don’t know. It’s just that you don’t have, don’t worry. You don’t have to master everything. It’s just not, it’s not important. What you do have to master is a really good outline of your course. I think that is so important, and that either you. Here’s another thing, and Chris how many, how does your system work? Do you have anything built in for feedback? That is, is it easy for students to [00:30:00] tell the course creator, Hey, this was good, or I didn’t understand this, or like a whole feedback loop. Is that built in by any chance?  Chris Badgett: We do. We have a lot of ways We do that with like a. Like a private coaching thing where there can be a private conversation we 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 lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, [00:31:00] downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Okay. Comments and forums and, okay. We also do a lot of education showing people how to [00:32:00] use form plugins and things to create feedback loops. We have assignments and quizzes that have remarks and things like that. But yeah, feedback is, I think, such an important part of learning and that’s something that humans. Can do, AI can give feedback, you can have an AI tutor or whatever. But that real, I think that’s the sign of a true master teacher is like realizing that not all students are exactly the same. They have challenges. You gotta adapt. Bud Kraus: Yeah. And the other thing is it’s great to get feedback that says, Hey bud, this course is really great. All right. Everybody loved everybody. Testimonial. That’s a testimony. That’s right. But it’s the ones that dropped out after the first lesson or second lesson. What happened? Maybe it may it may have nothing to do with you. I, my father died. This, that, whatever. But if it is something that, Hey, I got stuck, I didn’t understand. Okay. Was it just, did we market it incorrectly? A lot of times, people say, oh, [00:33:00] I didn’t know you were gonna do the, that’s very important in the marketing is that it’s clear what it is that the person is going to learn. Because I’ve seen where either I took a course or somebody took a course from me and said this is not what I was expecting. Yeah, the marketing is really not just imp not just in terms of getting the information out, but in being very accurate as to what it is, that you’re selling and you are selling, so how do you think I could ask you a million questions? How, if I’m a course creator, I was a course creator, what is the, what’s a good way, do you do anything, does your system have anything built into concerns like social media and marketing, or is that just something that’s totally outside out of the bounds of what you’re, what you offer?  Chris Badgett: We have like viral loops built in where somebody could share like a certificate to social media. Okay. We do a lot of [00:34:00] education around marketing. So like in, in my view one of the best content marketing things you can do as a course creator is help people for free with a free mini course around some topic that really sets ’em up to be a perfect fit for your paid program or whatever. Yeah. And  Bud Kraus: can you do like a, can a course creator do a try before you buy kind of thing? Or not.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, we have a integrated e-commerce system. We also integrate with Woo, but we have our own Stripe and PayPal, but you can do like free trials and set up all kinds of access rules for how long and when and what the payment’s gonna be and stuff like that. And do you,  Bud Kraus: Now I wasn’t expecting, I don’t care. This is the way it goes with me. But do you is this available in the WordPress repository and obviously there’s a pro version or it’s just, pay version?  Chris Badgett: Yeah, we’ve always been big fan. Our company mission is to lift up others through education and to democratize learning in the digital classroom. [00:35:00] So our  Bud Kraus: That’s good for you.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. Our free core plugin is extremely powerful and 80% of our people are just using the free LMS which helps people get started and get moving and Sure. And it’s very powerful. Every time we do a release of updates, we’re always adding stuff to the core and then focusing on some of our paid add-ons and things. Now  Bud Kraus: is there, do you guys have a course. I think you do. Maybe I misunderstood about how to market your course.  Chris Badgett: Yes. We have lots of courses. So we have we have a quick start course, which is how to like it covers like what you’re saying. Don’t teach ’em everything. Like we show the 5% of okay, this is how you set up the site, this is how the system works and all that. We did a web, like a, we brought in some guest experts and did a. And did some content ourselves to help people, [00:36:00] show people how to go from zero to 10 enrollments, because when we looked at the data, we realized that if people had at least 10 enrollments, their platform was gonna stick and they were gonna stay around. So that includes a lot of like marketing help and showing people like what works to get students and stuff like that. Yeah.  Bud Kraus: Because your success is based on their success in the sense that you want them to renew their licenses. Exactly. So obviously and that’s like the way that this works. So you want them to be successful.  Chris Badgett: The, yeah. I think one of the most important questions a course creator can ask is who? Who is this for? ‘Cause we have our subject matter expertise, right? And this goes by many names, like the ideal learner, customer avatar, things like that.  But that who question if anybody is either struggling or has a modest win or a runaway success, I think that who [00:37:00] question is fundamental. Absolutely. So learning about that. I wanted to tie that who question into something you said earlier.  Bud Kraus: Before you do it, let me just stick something  Chris Badgett: in  Bud Kraus: and hold on to that for one second. Okay. That is the who question is the fundamental question, and if you teach it in class, you’ll find out who the who is because you’re, you’ll be talking. Yeah. Like  Chris Badgett: when you were telling me, my course creator, brain’s going okay, he got graphic designers in, they didn’t understand the web. They’re inserting the flash videos like. I just naturally do it. I like form the avatar that Bo was dealing with, but that’s easy to do in a classroom.  Bud Kraus: It’s  Chris Badgett: much harder on the worldwide web. Bud Kraus: Absolutely. And because, I knew it was graphic artist and then eventually it turned into some more writers and then it turned into people who were working in offices. They needed to manage their websites for their boss. And after a while I knew exactly who the, who was that I was creating. Of course. And when you’re sitting writing it, you’ll say does Susie so and so under, she can understand what [00:38:00] you’re talking about here. So you know your audience. Yeah. Okay. What were, what I sidetracked you so I’m sorry.  Chris Badgett: No, you’re good. This is the magic of two podcasters talking to each other. We the danger you mentioned, I think there’s some hope here in terms of what’s AI gonna do, and what I mean is we’ve been through technological revolutions before and history doesn’t always repeat, but it rhymes. And if you think about the industrial revolution, right? A lot of people left the farm and went to big cities with the emerging, industrial jobs and also the beginning of the white collar kind of knowledge economy worker. And when somebody comes off the farm and they show up by you over in New York City, what do they say? They say, oh wow, the world’s moving really fast. It’s really busy. I don’t know how these subways and all this public transport. Yeah. [00:39:00] And it’s like overwhelming. I think that’s where we are with ai. And it’s, it is really busy. Things are changing really fast. But a new economy emerged through industrialization and the rising middle class and the white collar and all that. But here’s the scary part, but also the opportunity, which is junior level job positions are the first things replaced by ai. So we would often use, let’s say a junior web developer at a software company to get on board, learn the ropes and stuff. But a lot of that stuff’s going to ai.  Bud Kraus: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: So what has to happen, if we go back to the who question, like what’s a high school graduate to do these days? They needed a way to figure out how to leapfrog and like. You mentioned you like science fiction when Neo plugs into the matrix and gets the download [00:40:00] about combat. Like you, and also what you said earlier, I’m just tying this all together about, oh, I can, I actually do know how to do multi-site from the command line. I just had to get in here and tinker. And this is a particular learning style. Called kinesthetic where we right now with ai, the people that have a kinesthetic learning style and just kinda learn by doing, they have an unfair advantage to like that.  Bud Kraus: Good to hear.  Chris Badgett: It’s just an observation because that’s what people are doing. They’re just figuring it out. But the point being and this is the challenge. There’s a giant class of education like. Young adults and whatnot that are scared the entry level jobs are being automated. But then I tie it back to history and look at what did the young people do when they came off the farm? In many ways, they adapted a little, maybe easier and quicker to the city than the [00:41:00] older person who lost the job and then had to go figure out how to hang in the big time. But there’s gotta be something with. In education by helping kids just adapt to the new world and and because there can also be, just like with industrial machines, there can be much greater output, but that’s scary and you gotta learn how to. Leverage all these machines and technologies and stuff like that. But you  Bud Kraus: know, as you’re talking, I’m thinking, all of these changes that came about from farm industrial, from agriculture to industrial to information, the pace just gets fast as we know. And these disruptive events, technologies. Whatever be become faster, closer, and closer together, more disruptive. I thought we just disrupted everything with e-commerce. Now what? I’m shaking my head. I can’t, I, and now I have kids that [00:42:00] are, they should, they, it’s no wonder we are. As a society, as a world where we are today with a lot of confusion. Yeah. Because it’s just, this is, a long time ago and there was a book called The Third Wave written by a guy named Alvin Toffler. This is 50 years ago or so, and it’s really funny. My wife isn’t really into this kind of stuff, but when I met her, we were both reading that book and that’s not the kind of book she reads. It’s the kind of book I read and. It was all about where we are today, the inability of human beings to process and understand rapid change. This is what he was talking about 50 years ago. Wow. And 50 years ago or 40 years ago, we didn’t even have fax machines. These things come and go in the blink of an eye. When fax machines came in, oh, this is great. You know this is, could be here forever. It was here for 10 minutes. When you live as long as I have, things come and go [00:43:00] so fast. Now that, you think okay, digital has to be the end here, right? Yes, but I don’t know. When I used to have records and albums and CDs and tapes and all that kind of stuff, I don’t have, and I’m moving, I don’t need any of that stuff anymore. Who I used to collect and who. Who knew we were gonna have digital, you don’t need it. You don’t need any of this junk anymore. So whatever. I think that’s the fundamental. What I’m saying is it’s very hard for people in general and including me, to a adapt to such rapid change and understand your place in the world and how you can be effective. It’s very hard.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. I heard something funny on a podcast the other day. You don’t know much of my background stuff, but I used to run sled dogs in Alaska and I managed a tour business that you could only get to by helicopter on a glacier. Yeah. I was listening to a podcast where somebody was having a [00:44:00] discussion similar to what we’re having about ai and they were talking about what’s the future opportunity. And they’re basically saying human experiences where people go outdoors and, be in nature and remember what it’s like to be human. I’m like, I just, that’s where I came from. We’re going back there and it’s it’s just interesting though. So but there’s gotta be, the human will still need things, but the needs are gonna change. We just gotta figure out what that is. And sometimes it’s analog, like getting back to the great outdoors. Other things might be like psychologists to help people deal with, exponential technology and overwhelm and stuff like that. Yeah, but you’re right. It’s interesting because it think you’re correct. The crux of the issue is the rate of change, not just the change.  Bud Kraus: Right.  Chris Badgett: And what is  Bud Kraus: things is the rate of change, right?  Chris Badgett: And the human processor up here, you can’t upgrade it. Like [00:45:00] it only, it hasn’t, it doesn’t change like technology changes. So let’s just say it this  Bud Kraus: way. The shit stays in the queue,  Chris Badgett: okay? Yeah.  Bud Kraus: Can you swear on the show? I just did. Okay. But yeah, but that’s it. It’s just it’s like a, it’s like a printer, it’s just in the queue and it gets backed up and stuff. Just, you just go on overload and that’s where things are. And it’s, I don’t think we as species can. Comprehend any of this stuff right now. Really. I think we’re all, I’m having trouble just thinking about it maybe it’s just me, but I think we all have, we’re all struggling with this, not just, I know, because I talk to a lot of people and I see that everybody struggling with this Hey, can we talk about my podcast? Is that okay? Yeah,  Chris Badgett: let’s  Bud Kraus: do it.  Chris Badgett: Talks about Seriously, bud. Oh, okay.  Bud Kraus: All right. And you’re gonna be on it. ‘Cause you got some good stuff already with the dogs in Alaska and all that. So seriously, bud is a podcast I’ve launched February 29th, 2000 and [00:46:00] I. 1424, I’m sorry, 2024. And every Friday I drop an episode featuring an unexpected conversation with somebody in the WordPress community. So we don’t talk shop, we don’t talk WordPress, we don’t generally talk about any, it’s really a show about nothing. So we just talk about the guest life, their story, where were they born, what did they d where did they live? What was it like to do so and whatever. And it’s just. It came from when I left Word Camp US 2023. Were you there? You were probably there, right?  Chris Badgett: Which one was that? Where were you? Yeah, I was there. I was there.  Bud Kraus: The freezer bowl. It was really freezing in there. Yeah. Yeah. And the vendors were like, 30, miles away from the Yeah, we know. Anyway when I left that I was thinking, I was in an Uber and I was thinking like, boy, wouldn’t it be great if I could just speak with. Chris badge it a little longer, ’cause I just waved to him and I just saw for a second I thought, that guy’s kind of [00:47:00] interesting, and, but there’s just no time because you’re like in a, you’re like a pinball. You’re just like bouncing from one person to the next, and you’re having a great time. But it’s just like I, and so I thought yeah, why don’t you do a podcast and just talk to them about their life story and not like. Something that they’re marketing and developing. Now that stuff gets in there a little bit, but I just try to keep it out because I, because there’s lots of podcasts that talk about product and marketing and community and stuff. I just wanted to focus on the person that I was talking to, like a real conversation about their life really. That’s what I was looking for. So turns out, I was thinking about it and I said, oh, I don’t think there’s anybody that’s doing anything like this, and turned out there wasn’t anybody that doing exactly this. Maybe something similar, but not exactly. And I never, I, let’s just say this, I never thought I would be a podcaster. The podcast came looking for me, so it [00:48:00] wasn’t like I was sitting around gee. I should have a podcast. No, it didn’t go that way. And I’m sitting in the car thinking like, I don’t even care if I ever get any sponsors. I don’t care if anybody listens to it. I just wanna do this. And then after a while I said, yes, I do care if people listen. Yes, I do care if I get sponsors ’cause it takes a lot of time to do this. And even though I love doing it. I wanna get paid to do it too. And and so there I am. So I’ve to, tomorrow will be episode 58 and I use the script, which is something I had to learn. I didn’t know the script, but a lot of other things I basically already knew because I’d been on podcast before. And the fact though, that I am doing a podcast, go ask Bob WP. Bob Dunn. ’cause for years I would say to him, why would you do a this? I would go up to him all the time and go, pop, why are you doing a podcast? This is crazy. This is I don’t understand why you, why people do this. And then you know, [00:49:00] now you know, I understand why. And once you start doing it, and if you love doing it, it’s just really hard. It becomes your life, and look at how many show, how many shows have you done? Just crossed 500. And Rob Karens, I did his 400th show. And, but it turns out there’s a lot of podcasters in the WordPress base. I’m not. Do you have any idea why?  Chris Badgett: My theory is that WordPress people are above average in terms of creativity content creation. We also work remotely, so like we get a lot out of online media, but also just connecting with humans and we also look beyond. A company, which is what I love about the angle of your podcast. Who are the humans here? What’s the backstory here? I think that’s a wonderful angle.  Bud Kraus: Yeah. That’s what I like. I’m addicted to stories, yeah, we  Chris Badgett: all are. That’s how it makes us human. I have a background in anthropology and storytelling. Is as human as it gets, right? [00:50:00] Yeah.  Bud Kraus: And I had no idea about this stuff. If you told me like what happened in 2018, I’ll tell you a real quick story. I took a trip, a train trip on Amtrak around the United States. I circumnavigated the United States on Amtrak, and I stopped a different cities and. And I was never, I never fell alone because I was constantly interviewing people wherever I went. Now, I didn’t, it was, they were conversations, but I would sit with somebody on a train all night long and talk about their childhood. I. And the stories I heard were on one person to the next were just mindboggling. And I started realizing like, oh my God, these are just regular people. This is nothing like, and they all have these incredible stories. So I didn’t leave the, that experience thing like, okay, I’ll do a podcast. No, it just stayed in my head. And then eventually it met up with this. 2023 thing and I said, oh, do a podcast. You’re ready to do this. So you’re like [00:51:00] made to do this. And it turned out I, yeah, I was made to do this. It’s really funny that at a later stage in life you can find something that is your calling, that you just did not know.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, sometimes it finds you right.  Bud Kraus: Yeah, it, this absolutely found me. ’cause I, like I said, I wasn’t exactly sitting around wondering should I do a podcast? Because if I had done that, I said, no way. So it’s a big surprise, you know that it is. And you’ll be on the show for sure. I can’t tell you what year, but you’ll be on the show.  Chris Badgett: Alright. That’s seriously bud. You can find him@seriouslybud.com. It’s Bud Kraus and also Joy of wp. Any final words? Yeah, any final words for the folks or any other way to connect? Bud Kraus: Joy WP is the business side of me, although the podcast is it’s business too. Yeah. But Joy WP is the easiest way to [00:52:00] reach me, and I hope you will because always like really cool to, meet people this way. And, the really cool thing about what we do is we actually do meet people online. We’re all experts at, I can name tons of people that are friends of mine today that I met online first before I ever saw them in, in person. Which is really extraordinary when you think about it. I think it is,  Chris Badgett: whatever, and that’s just to close it out. And that’s one of those unforeseen things where this disruptive technology actually increased human connectivity in a way, which is  Bud Kraus: amazing. Good point, because I tend to think of social media as not social media. It’s not really social, but when you use it to make strong connections and friendships and business connections and whatever, and then you meet them and stuff, that is that’s the ultimate, or reconnecting with people, that’s the, like all this stuff has such big trade offs, good and bad. So that’s it.  Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, bud. We really appreciate it. Bud Kraus: Chris, thank you so much for even asking me. It was a real, it was a real pleasure. 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 The Future of Online Education in an Artificial Intelligence World With Bud Kraus appeared first on LMScast.