LMScast with Chris Badgett

In this LMScast episode, Derek Ashauer emphasizes the need of maximizing WordPress LMS websites and Tracking conversions. Derek Ashauer is from Conversion Bridge, a platform that integrates with various analytics tools and WordPress plugins to streamline the process of tracking and improving conversions. From his vantage point, a sale is any activity a user plans to do such as clicking on an icon, email subscription, purchase of goods. Starting the process, he advises using a privacy-oriented data tool like Plausible or Fathom or a Google data tool depending on this. By tying to many WordPress components, his response, Conversion Bridge, streamlines the procedure. Derek discusses conversion funnels websites’ tracking of user behavior and identification of spots where people often lose interest. Privacy issues make it somewhat difficult to keep an eye on certain people throughout many sessions. However, looking at the bigger picture, group trends can be incredibly helpful. He suggests trying out multiple iterations of a page using FunnelKit and AB testing to boost response rates. For smaller websites, a method that is done by hand might also work well when changes are made and the results are tracked over time. Focusing on and improving key points in a user’s journey can help website managers get more users to stay on the site and make more money. 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 Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to 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 Derek Ashore. He’s from conversionbridgewp. com. We’re going to nerd out today on analytics, conversion tracking. What is a conversion? Why does that matter for online course, websites, coaching businesses, even LMS is doing internal training for a company. We’re going to go deep today, head on over to conversionbridgewp. com so you can see what we’re talking about today. But first welcome to the show, Derek. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it, Chris. I’m excited to nerd out with you a little bit on conversion tracking. It’s a big topic and I think the base level is people want to know where what caused a sale, whether they’re selling courses or memberships or whatever, but just at a kind of fundamental level. How do you define conversions to a beginner? So they really grasp the concept. Derek Ashauer: So conversion is just when someone does, takes an action that you want to keep track of. It could literally be anything from clicking a button or even just visiting a page. As simple as you know that signing up for your email newsletter. Making a purchase, there’s submitting a form. Those are all pretty common things that we want to track on a website. Chris Badgett: Awesome. And what do you think is like the first place, if somebody wants to get set up for conversion tracking, like what are the fundamental pieces that they need to put together to make it work? Do that. What do they need with a WordPress website? Derek Ashauer: The WordPress, the first thing is getting an analytics platform. So the most typical one that people have heard of for over a decade now is Google analytics. But these days there’s a lot of other options that are privacy focused ones because of all the EU privacy laws. There’s some great ones that are out there. Plausible, Fathom, Persh, UserMaven ConversionBridge itself integrates with 13 at the moment, different analytics platforms beyond just Google analytics. Chris Badgett: And what like for the WordPress people out there, what plugins can ConversionBridge support? Bridge track conversions four. I know there’s a long list, but let’s expand the scope of what’s possible here. Derek Ashauer: Yeah, so of course there’s lifter, LMS is one of ’em, but at the moment of right now recording this, there’s 51 different plugin integrations. So there’s all the form plugins that you can think of WS form, gravity forms WP Forms all those, all the ones that you would expect. E-commerce platforms, WooCommerce, easy digital downloads. There’s what else? There’s a bunch of newsletter ones like groundhog or CRMs and newsletter ones, groundhog, for example. Those track when they people sign up for your email newsletter forms are on there. Yeah, there’s just, there’s a whole bunch of them. I’m trying to, I’m trying to go there right now to even remind myself there’s so many let’s see. We got some page builders. The big page builders are on there as well. Beaver builder. Let’s see, beaver builder bricks. Elementor so that you can makes it really easy. Simple toggle to set up conversion tracking on a button on there, even for modules or widgets, whatever one they call it, call the actions and things like that. So it integrates with. All those things. Yeah, there’s just so many of them. There’s even some pop up integrations pop up that show up so that when you show a pop up, do they subscribe or do they click on the button within that pop up that could be another great one that you’d want to keep track of there’s even file downloads. So there’s a couple of plugins that are built specifically to help make to organize file downloads so you can track one of those. Maybe you offer a white paper and you want to track whenever one, whenever someone downloads one of your free white papers on your website as a lead magnet or something along those lines. So those are all a bunch of different, different types of plugins and things that you may want to be tracking conversions for. Chris Badgett: Love that. And let’s zoom out even more and let’s actually use that white paper ebook download example. I think it makes sense that you would want to track like, Oh how many opt in conversions, email addresses, or am I capturing that from people that want the ebook? But what if they land on a page to download? And then they don’t actually download it. What if I knew that conversion point? So you start chaining these things together. What are some of the most popular, ways to think about conversions and like situations that people would want to do without I want to track everything. You don’t necessarily want to track everything. What are the important things? Derek Ashauer: So what you started describing is called a funnel. So you get them to visit your homepage, your website, you then get them to go to another page that maybe talks about their email newsletter, get them to subscribe. Then that gets them to a page where they download. Those are funnels. And so that’s a common thing is to track where do people do, how many people complete an entire funnel? Where do they exit that funnel? And so you’ve got to track when they take each one of those steps. And then you set up your funnels. Some of the analytic platforms are better than the others, but you’d want to set up your funnel homepage, visit newsletter, subscribe visit the download page and then actually download the document in the end. And you can track, of the 100 percent of the people that visit my homepage, 50 percent of them landed, hit this one page that I want them to visit of those 50% 30 percent of them subscribed of those X amount did this. And if you notice, there’s a huge, massive drop off at one point in that funnel, you can say, Oh, there’s something wrong with this page. What am I doing wrong? What could I improve it? Maybe, you got a whole bunch of people to that download page and nobody downloads it. There’s a technical issue. Or maybe you just forgot to the, download button link just doesn’t exist or it’s hidden or it’s hard to find, or there’s some wording that doesn’t make it clear what they should do on that page so you can really determine how to improve your conversion rate on that page. Chris Badgett: Let’s educate you out there watching or listening on there’s the perfect funnel, like where somebody goes through that flow, you mentioned of homepage opt in download, and then maybe they purchase a product, but oftentimes that doesn’t happen on one website visit. Or maybe they don’t go through the thing in a certain order. And so how do you help people understand conversion tracking? Is it staying with them? Even if that whole process takes 30 days and then they. Maybe they did some other stuff on the website and it just didn’t perfectly go through the funnel. How does that work or how should people think about that? Derek Ashauer: Yeah that’s, a challenge in modern websites with privacy stuff. It becomes harder to do that to track an exact user or across this how do you tell someone maybe they subscribed while they were on their computer? And then the next day they get the email and they’re using it on their phone. And unfortunately there’s not the, a great way to connect that same person. Because they’re on different devices and now that counts as a whole separate person. So a lot of the conversion stuff, you’re never going to get 100 percent accuracy of this exact person who’s that Jane Doe who sat down on this one device and then maybe use another device or that kind of stuff. It’s not going to be perfect. But you go with generalizations in some ways, like 30%, roughly 30%. We never go 32. 339 percent of people did this. It, there’s no way to be perfect with it. So that’s why when we’re looking at our analytics, we just tell how many people hit this page. X amount of people left or this amount of people converted. Now when they downloaded, how many are they, once they opted in, how many ended up clicking on that link and going to the download page? And we mark that as a conversion and things like that. And we just do it on overall numbers, of traffic and conversion bridge itself does have a conversion journey tool to it. So what that means is that if it is the same person using the same browser because that’s how it’s tracked, it’s uses the other browser and some other stuff. And anonymizes it so that we don’t have any personally identifiable information, but then keeps track of that person so we can see what exact pages they did view throughout the entire journey. But like I said, if they jumped to a mobile device in the middle of that journey, that does count as a whole separate user and view and stuff like that. But yeah, I lost track of the original question. Chris Badgett: No, you got it there. It’s there’s converged, there’s these conversion points. And then conversion bridge has calls it a journey, which is like a funnel. So like the individual elements and then that path is the funnel or the journey. So you look at metrics over time, what happens, you mentioned if they’re in the same browser, but let’s say it’s. They did each stage of the funnel a day apart, meaning the computer closed and got turned off and opened again. Does it still know anonymously that user is the same person? Derek Ashauer: It depends on the analytics platform that you use. Google analytics will be better. There’s some plausible and some other ones. There’s a handful that take privacy very seriously. And to their credit, they’re very serious about that. And that it it doesn’t track a user, and across multiple pages. What it basically does is just tracks how many people in general came to a page. It doesn’t know that they went from one page to the next. And and that’s what. Most analytics is. So that’s why we’re playing this game of how do we determine what steps does a one specific user take a lot of the more privacy focused analytics and even Google analytics is having challenges with this to also obey all the privacy laws is what step by step, what did that person do on your website? Conversion bridge itself does, like I said, adds a little bit. That in between it does add that. So it does have the conversion journey. So when someone does do a conversion, make a purchase, sign up for something, you can then see what was the first page they hit. What was the second, third, fourth, fifth, and all the steps that they took in between, but when you’re looking at just your analytics platform, that data and that exact journey, you’re never going to get that. You usually get maybe an entry point where they started. And then where, and then that they actually did a conversion, but that’s about the most. And that’s also another area where conversion bridge itself helps, give you some extra data to learn. Oh, I’m noticing people are going from here to here. All of the people that convert and buy something on my website or signed up, I noticed that a lot of them are going to my about page and then my services page. And then they buy or whatever that flow may be. And you can start to learn a little bit about what is important to your users and what, and to keep improving that content or making that content easier to get to in some ways. Cause you know that’s the content that really gets people down that path to ultimately converting. Chris Badgett: Love that. Let’s talk a little bit more about conversion rate optimization. Cause it’s really easy to get really busy in marketing, doing a lot of different things. But if you have this journey, like homepage or visit the site, downloads the lead magnet the opt in newsletter, whatever, and then buys like a cheap product, maybe it’s a trial or a little mini course or something like that. And then they buy the big, product or the membership or the signature course or whatever. That’s four steps. And if you. Like just build your marketing and allocated your time around optimizing those. It makes a lot of sense, but what kind of things can people change or work on to test a theory on, Oh, maybe if I do X, I can increase my conversion rate at all those stages. I think the. There’s like a one in marketing circles that has been around forever, which like, Oh, maybe you should change the button color or something like that. But what else can people do? Derek Ashauer: Yeah. Yeah, that was a big thing of what I think, like orange or something like that, it was the best buy now color or something like that. And Chris Badgett: everybody had orange buttons. I still have orange buttons on my website, but yeah. Derek Ashauer: Yeah. There’s. Yeah, you could literally change every last little pixel on your page. It could be down to copy to placement of that button. What does that button text stay? Does it say buy now or purchase now try now? There, you could literally put any word on there and see what. You know what that does to your conversion rate. It’s a challenge because if you have a small website, you have to let that run for a while. You need a lot of data. And so what we’re talking about right now is what some people might have heard. It’s called like AB testing ABC testing. You can run unlimited different. Tests on a page. And usually you only want to make one, maybe two changes to a page. You don’t want to, you could have two wholly separate designs two versions of that page, but then you don’t know what about that is what actually caused. An increase or decrease in your conversions. So making small changes at a time, and it depends on your traffic. If you’re only getting 20 people a day to your site, you might have to six months to a year. To get enough data to even see if that’s enough. But it’s worth playing with those things to try it, give it yourself a little bit of time. I think some people get impatient and think that after a a week or two, they’ll have enough data, to make a decision, but, but yeah, you can play with everything the headline at the top is that getting, is that telling people what they really need to know about your product or service in order to convert? Where’s that button on the page? Is it right underneath the headline? Do I need to list the price next to the button or do I make a little more vague and say, buy now, and there’s no price included, all those are different kinds of things you can try. Chris Badgett: So there are tools for A B testing, split testing. I’d be curious if you know any that you might recommend for WordPress websites, but I’d also like to say that. You can do it the more rough way and just okay, I’m going to change this for a month. I’m not going to change a million other things. Wait another month and then make sure the traffic was more or less equal and get a, you don’t have to get into these fancy tools of AB testing, but is there, how does one get into the AB testing where it literally splits the traffic 50 50 with different paths? Derek Ashauer: Yeah, that used to be done. There used to be a Google optimize. But unfortunately they shut that down. So that’s not really available. Yeah, there’s, I think it’s funnel kit might have an AB one. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Derek Ashauer: AB tool to it. Yeah, there, there really isn’t one. And, Yeah, that is something that is in the back of my mind and is in regards to conversion bridge itself, honestly, you honestly wasn’t planning on talking about that, but it is, it’s on a. It’s on a list for conversion bridge is having an A B tool. So yeah, because it, when Google optimize disappeared that, a lot, everything was, there was so many tools that were built around using Google optimize and Google analytics as a way to do A B testing. And now that’s gone. So there really isn’t too much. It is significantly harder these days to do A B testing. Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about analytics platforms. A lot of people get frustrated, myself included, with Google Analytics. It’s hard to figure out. The interface changes a lot and getting the right report I want to try to see is a little difficult. But it’s not always the case that you should abandon ship and go somewhere else. But what’s your advice to somebody who’s I’m feeling a little overwhelmed with Google Analytics. What should they do to either know they should stay or check out these other tools? Derek Ashauer: So one great thing about conversion bridge is that it integrates with 13 analytic platforms right now, and you can enable all 13 of them at the exact same time. If you wanted to, I do it while I’m testing. Honestly, it’s not that big of a deal. The analytics platforms themselves are very lightweight JavaScript that gets added to the page. I’m sure your theme probably adds. 100 times more javascript than these analytic platforms do. So it’s great. You could test multiple different analytics platforms at once and while maintaining your Google analytics, you’re not losing any of your Google analytics data, but you could try say, fathom plausible, perch user, maven any of these other great tools. They also have many of them have free trials or they’re free while you’re under a certain amount of page visits. So you could run it for a few weeks. See you and then see and test and see what you like about these other analytic platforms. I agree with you. It’s one reason why I created ConversionBridge is because When GA4 came out, I was like, what do I do? I don’t understand where did all these simple reports go? When I was doing sites for clients, I could often set up Google analytics and say, here you go log in. And they’d be, Oh, this is great. And they could figure it out pretty simple. I never had to walk through Google analytics itself to explain what it was and what the data meant. And now with GA4. Even I, as someone who’s been making websites for 20 years, I’m like, I don’t, what that was my first, I I spent a while and I still struggle to figure it out. I I doing conversion bridges forced me to take the time to do that, but something that requires a week long course to use, I think is, Like Google analytics to just look at basic traffic data is over engineered. If you go to any of these alternative analytic platforms, it’s a single page. It’s incredibly easy to digest and understand. You could send it to any client or anyone I think could figure out what the data is and what it means within a few minutes. Yeah, I would recommend trying some of them out. Pretty much all of them have a free trial at this point. Chris Badgett: I know conversion bridge is impartial to like, Which one you choose. Derek Ashauer: Yeah. Chris Badgett: But sometimes it’s helpful for people to know if you’re frustrated with Google analytics, maybe try brand X next, like maybe it’s like pretty popular and a lot of people like it. Is that like fathom or. Derek Ashauer: Oh I think, each one has its pros and cons. If you have a blogging site, fathoms a great one. And you just have some information new, you have a newsletter sign up when you, some of the other ones, like maybe user Maven or perch are better. They have, they’re improving a lot faster and have a lot more robust reporting tools and funnels that you can set up and things like that. And those are great if you’re doing more advanced things like an e commerce website where you want to send in more complicated data. Plausible is another one that can accept that. And what I mean by complicated data is for example, say you’re selling widgets you have a 5 widget and a 500 widget and and you go there and you say, okay, this ad that I ran on Google ads, it gave me 10 sales of my 5 widget. Or this ad led to two sales of my 500 widget. You want to know which one’s getting you more money, maybe not necessarily more sales. So in some platforms, it’s very simple. It’s you just get the number of sales because I can’t as conversion bridge, I can’t send the data about how much the sale was worth, but in other platforms I can send that data in. So that is that’s a good important metric that you would want to keep track of. And if you go to the conversion bridge website. On the bottom, there’s a link to a comparison of all the different analytics platforms. And one of those is the, does it have advanced e commerce, tracking and abilities. And so that’s if your site is doing that, then that is important. If you’re only doing like a blogging site and maybe you’re doing a newsletter subscribe, you could probably work with any of the analytics platforms. Cause all you care about is did someone subscribe? Did someone read a page? Did someone do that? So on and so forth. And so those lower level Or more simplistic analytics platforms would be perfectly fine. Chris Badgett: Let’s speak to the non developers out there who are busy doing a lot of things and setting up an analytics platform, it often is okay, here’s this code, install it, or give it to your developer. And that creates a lot of friction. So how does a conversion bridge like talk about the setup and how people get started with it? Derek Ashauer: So if you install a plugin, like you would with any WordPress plugin. And then there’s first thing you do is you select your analytics platform. All you have to do is toggle a little on switch for which analytics platform you’re using. Then each platform gives you a unique ID. Each one calls it something different, but there’s some kind of unique ID for it. And you just copy and paste that unique ID and you’re done. It’s added all the track, the core tracking code to the website. So there’s no where do I add the code? How do I add the code? Code, there’s no get, those plugins that where you, do insert the header and footer and all that kind of stuff, you just have to cut and paste that random character string that identifies your site and you’re done. You now have your analytics tracking code on the website. Next step, you go to the integrations tab. In conversion bridge and there you’ll see a list of all the plugins that you have installed that conversion bridge works with so very simple outlines. Here are the ones. Here’s the ones that I can add conversion tracking for. All you have to do is click a toggle and you are done for almost every single for Every integration. Some integrations require a little bit extra one extra step, for example, like forms. Because conversion tracking can be enabled on each individual form. Maybe some forms are just internal thing or using it for something obscure. You don’t really need to get conversion tracking on it, but maybe there’s more public facing forms. So that’s why conversion tracking allows you to enable tracking on a perform basis. But when you go to edit your form, it’s the same thing. It’s just toggle and that’s all you got to do Chris Badgett: right on. Yeah. That’s a huge time saver. I think we lost your video, but yeah, it’s cool. We can keep going. I’ll switch to, Oh, there it goes. What, I know there’s a lot of stuff in the news you mentioned earlier about. Privacy and if you’re selling to an international audience, or and I, know the other, there’s two parts to this question. Another part is I think Apple and certain browsers take like a different approach. Just what should people know if they’re trying to sell to the whole world, they don’t necessarily care what browser they’re on, or if they’re on a iPhone or something else. Other device like do privacy focused analytics platforms track better or are mostly just like respect better or respect privacy more? How does how? Let’s dig in a little bit on privacy. Derek Ashauer: Yeah, so those alternative analytics platforms by their nature. Our privacy focus. That’s why they were all developed was to solve that problem that Google analytics was causing for a lot of people who lived in countries or got traffic from countries where they really needed to respect the privacy of the users. So those are. Inherently private. It does come with the downsides that that level of detail that Google analytics used to be able to get because they could just violate that user’s privacy and just keep tracking them no matter what. It comes with some trade offs. So that’s why earlier when we talked about the exact user and all this kind of stuff. So yeah, so that’s, what’s great about those is that you don’t need a cookie banner for any of those alternative platforms. That’s another reason why. Okay. I got into this realms cause I did not want to have cookie banners on my website. And so I started investigating alternative platforms. Chris Badgett: Oh, that’s super cool. So if you don’t track them with cookies, then you don’t need that opt in thing. This Derek Ashauer: is cookie. This is my current understanding. Again, I am not a lawyer to preface, but this is my current understanding. Just because you have cookies doesn’t mean you have to have a cookie notice. If you’re tracking personally identifiable information, then you need a cookie notice. Personally identifiable information is stuff like IP address, their browser, their city. It doesn’t have to be their name and email. It could be even something as vague as some of those other things. So that’s what these alternative analytics platforms are doing, is that they are tracking in a way that doesn’t grab personally identifiable information. And thus, they Then you no longer need to have a cookie banner on your website. There may be something else on your website that is causing you to need to get a cookie banner. And that’s something that you have to research on your own. But but using those you’ll see the plausible fathom, all those ones they’ll specifically say, you do not need a cookie banner by using our, because you use our product. Do you have, Chris Badgett: you’re back, do you have a, Like a take on, when, I’m trying to remember my thought there was a, it’ll come back to me, but let me see if I can grab the thread of where I was thinking, oh, conversion value. So like sometimes like in Google analytics, when you set up events and you’re like, Hey, what’s a, like at Lifter, for example, we have a free plugin, download, page, which has a form and an opt in and let’s say in our view, based on looking at the data, that’s, I’m just pulling a number out of the air. That’s like worth 20 or an email subscriber is worth whatever 4 is that. Can you help unpack that the theory behind assigning values like monetary values beyond outside of e commerce, why some people do that? Derek Ashauer: I think it’s, I struggle to find use cases for it, to be honest as well. Because you go, you can do the math yourself honestly, and a lot of that stuff you go, okay I got 57 email newsletter subscribers. It’s which one has better value to You Do you sign that’s a value of one? I just know that newsletter subscribers are usually worth about 1 a piece. So conversion version makes it available. You can put in a value for every single conversion, a custom value, whether they submit a form, sign up for an email newsletter, all that kind of stuff. If it’s a purchase, the value is the value of the purchase itself that numerical number. But, But yeah, I don’t actually have a great answer for you on that one. Chris Badgett: I think it comes from when people get into paid advertising and they’re not going straight for the sale, they’re like, okay I want them to book an appointment and there’s like a six week sales cycle and my, I know my appointments convert at this rate. To tell if I can get row as or return on ad spend, I need to, they put that value in there to make sure their ads are running profitably. I think that’s where that comes from. Derek Ashauer: Yeah. I still feel like if I I ran this ad for we spent 5, 000 on this ad and we got 500 email newsletters, subscribers, you can just go, was that worthwhile? Cause I know how much an average newsletter subscriber is to me. You know what that, what that monetary value is. Like I said, that one I don’t have a great answer for you, but conversion bridge makes it available if you want to, if you want to do that. Yep. You need to go that. Chris Badgett: Is there any more you would like to say on ads? Cause I feel like ads is where people really get focused on conversion. Cause especially if you’re going to start shelling out, 30 a day or 300 a day or 3, 000 a day. You don’t want to just have a blindfold on and then be like, I hope this is working. Tell us how to think about ads, analytics and conversions on our site and how they work together. Derek Ashauer: Yeah. So in my latest release, 1. 3 it was a big update for to work better with Google ads. Especially for those who are not using Google Analytics. Everyone kind of makes the assumption, I’m doing Google Ads, I have to use Google Analytics. ConversionBridge makes it very easy in a no code way to track those conversions even if I was using an alternative analytic platform. So ads it’s very similar to what we were talking about earlier with kind of A B testing. Your webpage is you on a bunch of ads and you want to see what actually gets people to take an action to convert, whether it’s newsletter signups or purchases, whatever that, or fill out, filling out a request for a quote form. If you’re like an agency or something like that. Yeah it’s important to track all those you gotta do that. And what’s great is also by converting those ads, Google analytics say you write 10 ads, sorry, if you write 10 ads and Google ads, you can Set Google ads to automatically optimize those, which ads they show based on which ones are performing better. You have to tell Google ads, which ones are performing better by telling it, which ones are converting. So that’s what conversion bridge does. It says, Hey, this person bought something. Tell Google ads, Hey, this we got a conversion, we got a conversion and Google ads. Okay. Okay. Who is this person? They’ve been tracking it and then they say, all right, we know that, we can tie this back to this ad type thing. Chris Badgett: So it’s not just like building a bridge that goes one way from your website to the analytics platform. It can, they’re they can communicate both ways. Maybe that’s a bad metaphor, but I’m going with the bridge there because that’s cool. I didn’t even realize that I didn’t even really realize that part about doing Google ads and split testing over there and optimizing because it knows the conversion. You Derek Ashauer: want to see which ads are performing better. So you can get a better idea of, Hey, I’ve ripped. It’s always great to write a whole bunch of different variations of your ad and then run them and see which one gets better performance. Chris Badgett: But you can do that with, even if you’re not using Google analytics for your conversion tracking. Derek Ashauer: Correct. Yeah. Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s pretty cool. Derek Ashauer: Yeah. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Cause if you fall in love with a different platform. But you still want to use Google ads. I didn’t even know that you’re, I thought you were just married. Okay. I’m in Google. So I Google ads, I need to use Google analytics. I didn’t really Derek Ashauer: and Google purposely that. It’s not. Chris Badgett: what what are some of the common, like of the people who were coming into conversion bridge? What, are some of their most common, like first steps? When they get started, they’ve installed the plugin. They’ve been, they’ve chosen their analytics platform. It’s syncing correctly. What’s, what would be like step one, two, and three from there? Derek Ashauer: From there is just checking it every once in a while to make sure that you’re, confirmed that when you get a purchase or whatever conversion that you go into your analytics platform and make sure that they’re there. And then from there, it’s what we talked about as well. You just let it run for a while, get some good data, say you learned that for every 100 people who come to this page. 3 percent of them convert, and then you can go what can we do to try and improve that? What and I know a common question that people ask is what’s a good conversion rate depends on what you’re trying to measure. Every single thing is different. Every single industry is different. It’s the goal is to just get better than what you had last month. So it’s, hard to say and there’s so many factors that can affect that. So then at that point, it’s, once you start having some data, it’s. Doing the conversion rate optimization. It’s playing with your content, playing with your website design, playing with your pricing playing with your placement of things like that. And just trying different things and see if there’s stuff that you can do to increase that conversion rate over time. Chris Badgett: I love that. So if you are flying blind without conversion or analytics for your website this is like marketing is, Artistic and creative, but it’s also very scientific. We’re on the scientific side here and you can use art and science together to grow your traffic, increase your sales, improve user behavior on your website, whatever you want them to do. This has been a great chat, Derek. What’s the best way for people to get started with ConversionBridge? Derek Ashauer: Visiting the website, there’s conversionbridgewp. com you can go in there and learn about all the different integrations and analytics platforms, learn about like I said, there’s a comparison table with some, I’ve started to write some reviews about each of the platforms themselves, so you can take a look and give it a shot and, Give it a go. Chris Badgett: Thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. I, in my opinion, everybody should set up their analytics integration with their WordPress website from the very beginning, it’s like part of the launch of the website. So if you haven’t done it yet, don’t feel bad. But let’s get it done. Head on over to conversionbridgewp. com. Derek, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash 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 Track Conversions on Your LMS Website with Derek Ashauer from Conversion Bridge appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Sandy Ellingson talks about her path from early childhood development to becoming a significant person in the RV business in an interesting conversation with Chris Badgett. Sandy Ellingson is a vibrant professional with a broad background in technology, finance, early childhood development, and the recreational vehicle sector. Sandy describes how she moved from technology and banking to facilitating better collaboration between RV manufacturers and parks, particularly during COVID-19. She highlights the need of providing correct information and fostering a sense of community, mentioning how she uses LifterLMS to create online training courses that are both scalable and effective. Sandy demonstrates how LifterLMS’s group and permissive user privacy features foster innovation and teamwork within the sector. She also commends the platform’s help staff and the insightful conversations she had with other users during live calls. Sandy’s narrative demonstrates how she strategically used community development and technology to address industry issues and promote the expansion of the RV business. 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 Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to 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. Her name is Sandy Ellingson. She’s from the outdoor hospitality hub. Dot com that’s outdoor hospitality hub. com. Also check out the hub for RVers. com with dashes between each word. Welcome to the show, Sandy. Sandy Ellingson: Hey, thanks for having me, Chris. I’m excited to be here. Chris Badgett: I love meeting with people that are using LifterLMS, getting into technology, marketing, building community, and all these things. It’s always fun. And I enjoy these conversations and really those people that are making that impact and putting out a positive message and helping people in their careers and their industry, just being a force for good in the world it’s, a lot of fun and an honor to chat with you. Let’s start a little bit with your story. How did you get from early childhood development into all this techie community building, RV industry, building online training and all this what was the story there? Sandy Ellingson: I graduated high school at 16 and I graduated college at 18 and in Georgia, you couldn’t teach until you were 21. Chris Badgett: Okay. Sandy Ellingson: I couldn’t be a teacher. So I went in, I was already working in banking, so I stayed there for 10 years. Then my kids started coming along and I decided I wanted to stay home. And it was an accident that my brother called me one day and wanted some help. And he was running about a 2 million business on paper. I said, I think I can figure this out. So I taught myself networking. I built the computers. I taught myself accounting, I brought in the accounting software. And basically it was just, that was the start of my career in technology. And so from there I ended up going and working for an accounting firm as a consultant, then starting my own firm. Then a few years ago I retired and we were going to hit the road as RVers and just enjoy life. And we, I started helping campgrounds along the way because I did love what I was doing. Before you knew it, I was helping a hundred campgrounds. My husband said, honey, turn around. You’re not retired. I was doing what I love, but not making any money at it. It’s just been a series of being at the right place at the right time. And I was very blessed to end up connecting with a lot of people in the industry side. So up until a few years ago, you had the industry side, which is the manufacturers who make the rigs and all those suppliers. Campgrounds and they never really connected because one was manufacturing and the other was hospitality and because of what I had done with technology and building communities. I saw that there was this gap and there needed to be a connection. And so I basically spent the last 4 years. learning about each of the communities and then in my head, figuring out how we proactively connected them so that they were working together. And that’s what the result of the outdoor hospitality hub is. It’s really a way of connecting the industry with campgrounds so that they can proactively make better decisions. Chris Badgett: That’s it. There’s a saying that one of the hardest things to make is like a two sided marketplace. What were some of the challenges with getting campgrounds and RV manufacturers to sync up and help each other? Sandy Ellingson: That was the biggest problem was they didn’t see what they had in common. And so I would talk to a campground and they’d say, why do I need to have anything to do with a manufacturer? They’re manufacturing, we’re hospitality and vice versa. And then COVID hit and COVID showed us that we had to work together. There was so much going on and there were things that were innovating because of COVID that, but nobody was talking to each other and it could have worked better if we’d worked together. Yeah. That’s when I started getting involved. And there were about five industry challenges that we identified that I felt every one of those could be solved in a campground. So I started saying, look, we can work with campgrounds to do this and solve this problem. And we started doing that. They said how do we it’s okay to do this 1 to 1, but that takes forever. And that’s, I kept thinking, I know I can do this. There’s got to be technology out there that I can use to build this bridge so that it’s not a one to one connection. A couple of those is we have only 1 technician for every 4000 rigs on the road. And there’s an amazing school called that’s trying to train technicians, but then getting them out into the campgrounds are getting them out and getting them experience once they graduate. Was a challenge. Now we can place them in a campground and they do what we call tech camping, where they work in conjunction with the campground. The campground can market that they have a tech, the tech gets the experience and everybody wins. And so there’s several all, five of those issues are that way. It’s a partnership where we all win. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And as an RVer myself, I was always amazed at when I go look at a YouTube video, like how to winterize an RPOD 179 or whatever I had, there’d be this video with a hundred thousand views. Can you tell us a little bit about like the size and the scope of the RV industry? Sandy Ellingson: It’s one company is over six billion dollars, and that’s just one of the major companies. It’s big and thousands and thousands of units sold every year. Actually, what we’ve done with the Outdoor Hospitality Hub is going to solve another one of those problems where we have on YouTube is like the wild West, right? And we have a lot of new RV years that came into our ecosystem during covet. They don’t know a thing about camping. They’ve never been in a rig. And then they go to YouTube and they’re watching a video on how to do something that is somebody that has been camping for two weeks, but everybody wants to be a YouTuber, right? So what we’ve tried to do is make sure that there’s, the social side of our site and then there’s the educational side and everybody that is providing any kind of education or acting as a subject matter expert has to be vetted. And we only have content inside of our system that we know is accurate. There’s some actual dangerous stuff out there, especially when you start talking about propane and some of those things. If you don’t know what you’re doing and you think it’s you’re just doing this YouTube to try and get click clicks, or you do worse, do click bait. And, Mislead people that doesn’t help the industry overall. So we hope that by having this inside and that was 1 of the reasons we added on the RV portal is because we had such demand over the last 60 days with saying, we don’t know what to do. There’s videos out there, but how do we know if they’re accurate? And so this will give them a place where they can go and know they’re getting accurate information. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I like to use the phrase trusted advisor. Like people are looking for a trusted advisor. There’s a lot of content on the internet, but they, what they really want is that kind of brand that they know they can trust what you’re building. How, do you get RV manufacturers or campgrounds or. Our viewers themselves onto the site. Like, how do you get traffic? How do you think about just growing the platform? Sandy Ellingson: So it’s actually just in a soft launch right now. We don’t do our full launch until June the 15th, but what’s been interesting is. I have been encouraged and even pushed by those entities to do this. So it’s not like I’m having to go out and do a lot of marketing. One of the things I like to do on the campground side is work with the state associations. A lot of people don’t really understand the value of their state associations. So the first course that I created was called understanding the benefits of a state association. It even blew my mind. When I started doing the math, and so it was a lot of fun. So if I get the campground associations involved. Then all of their parks come in. So I’m not just going after an individual park. And it’s the same thing with the industry side of things. There’s a lot of Hot buttons that they have needs they have and all I have to do is give them That opportunity and they’re ready. They’re jumping in and I just left a big national rally Last week that was in indiana And there were about a thousand people there, and I was inundated with requests for, can I download the mobile app yet? And of course, it’s not ready, so I had to throw up real quick a page that said, here, give me your name if you’re interested in being notified. And before we left the campground, I had over 500 names on the list. It’s that part of it has been really easy because the need is so great. Chris Badgett: I love that. I like to say you really got product market fit when they’re like the, your audience is like pulling the product out of you. You’re not pushing it. And then also that kind of one to many approach you’re doing. If you get an association, they’ve got all their people, one campground, and they bring all the others and all that, stuff. It’s very scaled out way of thinking and tapping a river of demand and meeting the needs that they’re desperately looking for a solution for. That’s, awesome. How did you get into WordPress? Sandy Ellingson: Years ago, I thought I could be a web developer. Actually it was funny. I started playing with websites in Drupal. Chris Badgett: Me too. Sandy Ellingson: That is I thought when you learn that way, you don’t realize how much more complex it is than WordPress. And so then I would hear people talking about WordPress and I go that’s the kindergarten version, right? If you can do Drupal, you can do anything. But then of course as WordPress took off and was so great for smaller companies and people that wanted to learn it themselves working with nonprofits, which is what I did a lot. It became a superior option for me. And so I wanted to learn enough about it that I could talk the talk, right? Don’t I’m a functional girl. I’m not a pretty girl. Okay. I can make things sing on the back end, but I do not make things pretty. And so I learned my where my weaknesses were, and then I went out to find how I could to, could fill those gaps. So I got involved in a design conference called Creative South. Every year I was got to be with thousands of designers and make friends and mama them. So I pulled in and found people that could do what I couldn’t do. Started partnering with them. And so that’s when I started really, a lot of them were using WordPress, right? And so that’s when I started really loving WordPress. So I’m, I am maybe a hacker, but I can hack enough to get it going. Chris Badgett: You sound like a lot like me. A lot of people think I’m a web developer, but I can’t write a single line of code I’ve, but I learned how to work with people and get on the mission vision and do the parts that I do well. And, build the team around you. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that. It’s a lot to where as an education entrepreneur, to be a technologist, an entrepreneur, a community builder. An instructional designer or teacher and do all these things like in one person, some of the most successful projects tend to have multiple people involved. Why did you choose LFTR LMS for the learning management system? How did that happen? Sandy Ellingson: I had worked with mighty networks for a while and so I knew they were out there. They are perfect for some of my small churches and some of my nonprofits, they were very easy for them to adopt. And I knew a sort of about the LMS is, and then I had a client that used can jobby and she liked that. And she kept saying, you should try this, but I didn’t really have a reason for it. But then when this came up, I knew that the demand was going to be much greater and even in, in talking to them, they were like, we don’t think we’re going to be able to handle it. I really believe that. 18 months from now, we’ll have 100, 000 users hitting the system at any one time. And so they just did not feel like they could scale to that. So then so nothing against them. I think they’re great, but not for this situation. And I built my career on not standardizing with just one thing. I would never represent software for commission. I wanted to make sure I was representing them because I believed in them. And then we actually found another software. And we thought we were going to go with it. It was very complex. And we liked it, but then they had a limitation. They could meet the demand, but they couldn’t meet some of the other things. And I’m still searching and found Lifter LMS in a Google search and started watching you guys videos and stuff. And I was like. Oh, my gosh, this is amazing. And the more we got into it, we did the free trial. And the more we got into it, it was like. This is awesome. And so it was just basically through trial and error and Google searches and we didn’t know anybody else using it or anything, but I do have a gift because of the last 10 years of my career, I worked with venture capitalists to see what they should invest in and what they shouldn’t. So I look at things with a very critical eye and I can almost look at the front end of something and tell you what the back end is, what language it’s written in, what database they’re using. You look at so many, you just get used to it. Yeah. And I kept trying to find a flaw and I’m like, little things that I might tweak or do differently or functions that I would add, but for the most part, I couldn’t find one. And everybody on my team was raving. So we knew this. We found the right one when we found Lifter LMS. Chris Badgett: Awesome. What, do you know what, like Lifter LMS add ons that were important to you? I’m just curious, some of the stuff we have e commerce related or. Integrating with the email marketing or like advanced videos or groups, social learning, things like that. Like what are you using or excited about? Sandy Ellingson: All of those things were important to me. We’re not going to have a store right now, but in the future I do see that. So all of that was important. I loved that the integration with buddy boss for the expanded social side. So we my elevator speech is we do, we connect. We communicate, we collaborate, and then we innovate, and it happens in that order. And for me, when we’re using, we connect and communicate first, and then LFTR LMS handles the heavy lifting, which is the collaborating and the innovating, because we use the groups extensively. And we’ve even come up with a really creative idea of how to use groups. So we are using groups as what we call opportunities. So let’s say somebody in the industry wants to connect with some parks, then they create a group that’s a category of opportunity. And so those show up on 1 page. And then we notify the campgrounds that are within the parameters And so we can restrict the group by saying we only want 50 people in this group, but they can say, look, we’re looking for 50 parts who are interested in storing the most common failure parts that we we need and we want to have a conversation about it. They can then permissively join that group because it’s really important to me that everything is permissive inside the hub. And and their name might be Sandy Ellingson, but it also might be Sparkle right from inside the hub. So when they join that group, they’re still not giving away their identity. And then beyond that once they start communicating, if they choose to identify who they are and go outside the ecosystem, that’s fine. But I love all of that. The ability to protect and be permissive. I look for that a lot as an inbound marketing certification person. I want to know that we’re being permissive and that people aren’t getting spammed. And so all of that was really important to us. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What’s your experience with Lifter LMS? Support I’ve seen you on some live calls and stuff. What would you say? Sandy Ellingson: Oh I, love the way you guys do things. I join, usually I try to join both the calls. There’s two every week. But the Thursday call, I really enjoy. I have learned. You need to be prepared. Otherwise, we will have some fun conversations, but not necessarily learn as much as I want to learn. I’m the check every box kind of girl, right? And Curt and Will, they see me coming and they’re like, okay, Sandy’s already ready and posted all her questions, but I am also really impressed by the people that join the calls. These people know their stuff. stuff. It’s amazing. And so I learned just from listening to the other people. And then anytime I’ve had to send in a support ticket somebody messages me back pretty much 24 seven. I’m hearing back within a reasonable amount of time. And it’s always, Hey very very polite. When I’m asking a stupid question that I probably could have Googled and found the answer to. But I just didn’t see me. Here’s the reference. We’re so glad she contacted us. It makes me feel good about being a newbie in the system. Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. Yeah. We’re, we know a thing or two about building community here as well. And like you said, even just being in a community of other education, entrepreneurs, or service providers who are working in the industry, you just learn through osmosis, that’s one of the biggest benefits of community. What other technology is important to you? Like you mentioned a buddy boss. What do you use for web hosting or what do you see is like your super critical tools to pull off the outdoor hospitality hub? Sandy Ellingson: I chose to work with 1 of the experts that you guys recommended for to find the right hosting. At some point, there is a data center when we get super large that I’ll probably move to that I’ve worked with in the past. And they’re, huge. They. And work with Homeland Security and all that. So as we go international, I’ll probably move to that. But for right now, we’re really happy with the hosting company that he recommended and I do. I love the, expert that we’re working with. He’s really good about letting us do what we can do and then picking up the ball when we can’t. Can’t get beyond that, or we need it and just saying, I can do that quicker for you, or you can spend 4 hours pulling your hair out. And I’m like, thank you very much. Take it right. But very respectful of our budget. So that’s important is to have those experts for when you need them, but somebody that will let you do as much as you can do. And not just run away with the budget. So we love that. And then I’m using several other CR in a plug ins here and there. We’re just now getting ready to implement fluent CRM and so we haven’t gotten that yet. It’s not as important immediately. And I really want to implement an SMS system. So having something like that is going to be important because I still think email is Very difficult to get the responses you need. And so for, especially in our industry, people really like the text messages. So we want to do that Chris Badgett: on the text messaging front. Lifter LMS does have a Twilio integration, which does some cool SMS stuff. That’s awesome. And I go ahead of Sandy Ellingson: the software companies that I work with that does prop property management. He’s written this whole module for Twilio, which basically, It allows my parks to do marketing and use different telephone numbers so that they can even track the success of traditional marketing You know like a billboard or whatever because it has a unique number that they’re calling into And so i’m thinking there’s you know a future there with maybe looking at some of that as well Chris Badgett: Tell us some more data points. I’m just interested you mentioned you’re forecasting like a hundred thousand users in a future How many courses do you plan on? You’ve made some courses. Like how many we’ve talked a little bit about the scale of the RV industry and the campground industry and just RVers, what are some like what do you see in the data? Like just around. The outdoor hospitality hub. Sandy Ellingson: I think it’s going to be huge because we’re, we’ve already signed contracts with about 31 subject matter experts. These are the people that will be creating our, primarily our content. We haven’t started teaching them how to do it yet because I’m still playing around with it again. I like to learn it myself first. And there’s some things that I want them to be able to do on their own, but a little bit easier. So we’re playing around. Like I messaged you guys about cloning and some things like that. How do I make it easier for them to create the different types of content? And because my background is teaching, I want to make sure that we’re using all the different kinds of learning. And I really would like to have to create some templates, whether we do that with our The person that’s working with us, and we do it outside of what you guys have already done make it a little bit easier. But ultimately, I think that by the end of the year, we’ll have at least 1000 lessons. I don’t know how many courses that will be. And then we’ve got some really great CEOs in the industry that they’re going to they’ve already given me 52. Lessons they’re gonna do once a month. Once a week, I’m gonna interview them like this. It’ll be an 8 minute in out kind of thing. And then the next 1 will drop the next week and then the next week. But these are amazing. CEOs of big companies who having the ability to connect with somebody at that level for all of my parks and my other people is huge. And so we’re doing culture and leadership with one of them. We’re doing all these different types of things about financing and how to grow your park and, what, things should you be looking at for KPIs based on today, not Five years ago when the old content was written. So that’s some of the things we’re like a thousand lessons is our goal. We hope to exceed it. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to double click on the subject matter experts. I’ve heard a lot of folks with goals to build the training platform that’s bigger than one individual. What are some tips you have and things you’ve learned on recruiting content creators to help make courses or other content on your site? How do you make that happen? Sandy Ellingson: I think that we’re a little bit different from a lot that I’ve seen in some of the case studies I’ve read in that. The hub is set up so that you cannot do commerce inside the hub. I don’t want it to be a place where people feel they’re inundated with sales pitches. But you can establish yourself as a subject matter expert and to teach others about doing that. We, that’s why we have 50 that we’re bringing in as our initial subject matter experts and they are an extension of us and they sign an agreement that says we agree not to do certain things. What’s nice is that these 50 people are very passionate about what we’re passionate about. So they they’re doing this. As themselves with no financial benefit to themselves. And so I’m very fortunate in that situation. Now, our 2nd tier, where we have other people that are suppliers and people that basically do sell to parks and things, they’re still coming in and they can establish themselves and get involved and have conversations and build relationships. But if they want to start, if they. If somebody asks them, hey, can we buy your product? They have to give them a link inside. And then we give them a disclaimer that says you’re now leaving the hub to work with one of our premier providers, but we are capturing no data. And anything you decide to give to them is you’re, giving it to them because I think it’s really important for us to stay Switzerland and to not, I don’t want anybody thinking, oh, I’m getting a piece of the action. I think in that situation we’re very different and it makes it easier to invite people and get them involved because everybody I am working with is about creating education and improving the ecosystem as a whole. Chris Badgett: I love that. I’m a big fan and community building of giving before you get. So if you have this real strong mission, like kind of value community, no pitch zone where it’s the focus is on the community, the sales will come later. And people get to know and trust you and that makes selling easy. Sandy Ellingson: That’s why it’s taken me four years to get here because I had to earn, the trust of the people. I really quick, funny story when I got introduced in the industry to all the big people, there was a gentleman that he’s known as the person that if in the industry, everybody listens to. So we’re at this nice dinner and he’s behind me with his back to me. And I hear him say, Oh, she’s just a flash in the pan. She won’t last. And I turned around and said hello. How are you? And his face was blood red because he knew I had heard him and I did not bring it up. I just had the conversation with the people that he was there. And then as everybody started to walk off. I leaned close to him and I said no he, said I was the flavor of the month. And I said, you know what? I might be the flavor of the month. But I’m chocolate or vanilla because they can stand the test of time. He started cracking up laughing. What was funny was he became my biggest advocate. So that’s what I feel like. If you treat others the way you want to be treated, I’ve developed this with my hands wide open. Everybody that’s involved, and there’s a lot of big organizations. I have gone to them and said, is this going to be in conflict with you, right? If it is, I’ll give it to you, right? You can have access to it for free, or if you’re not doing it, do you want to work with me? And because of that, I think that people understand my real motivation, which is to improve our industry. If we do that, then You know, there may be money that comes along. And you know what? Honestly, if we don’t, I don’t care because I’m not motivated by money. I’m motivated by making a change. So Chris Badgett: I love that. I have a similar story. I won’t get into where someone said, Oh, you shouldn’t get into software. That’s really hard. And it’s just funny how it works out. So we were talking a little bit about like data numbers and figures, but qualitatively, I’m also Not I guess the word would be scared of retirement. Like I like working. I like community. I like helping people I like being creative. But what do you see as like the kind of qualitative benefits of this project? Sandy Ellingson: So are you talking about the long term kps? Is that what you mean, Chris Badgett: Not non Data, but like just like more like sense of fulfillment or creativity you know meeting amazing people like more What what lights you up and what are the benefits of this project for you that have nothing to do with money or the eyes or anything? Yeah. Sandy Ellingson: Yeah. That’s exactly what I was saying. I established my personal mission statement when I was 26 years old and it has not changed. And it is, I want to make a difference with people who make a difference doing things that make a difference. And as a consultant, every new client I got, I said, can I make a difference? Are the people I’m working with, can they make a difference? And then the last one was where everything would either rise or fall, because are they willing to do the things that make a difference? Because a lot of people are afraid of change. And I know when I can make a difference. It’s a gut feeling and I’m committed. I’m I am going to stick it out. It might take me 10 years, but I’m going to succeed. I will not give up. And but there’s times when I’ve had to give up on others because they were not willing. To do those things, and for me at the end of the day, if I’ve established relationships with people, and I’ve been able to help them grow, and I’ve been able to ultimately help the industry. That’s gonna be the reward for me. But the other thing, too, is, of course as my heart being teaching love mentoring. I was I’ve always been a mentor in the technology industry. So we have what we call we have. It’s called the hub, but we have spokes on the hub and you have to fill out an application to be a spoke on the hub. And you have to tell us either what industry problem are you solving? Or how are you innovating? And so I’ve got 17 applications right now of people wanting to come into the hub after we launch that these are their businesses and they are for profit businesses. These are things they’re going to do and they are going to be changing the industry. And so I love that model to think that I helped to launch something else with some young person, right? That sets them up for their life, doing what they love. That’s what’s going to motivate me to keep going. Chris Badgett: Can you share your mission statement again? Sandy Ellingson: I want to make a difference with people who make a difference doing things that make a difference. Chris Badgett: I love that. I have a similar thing with where I, my life mission and my company mission are the same. to lift up others through education. That’s what lights me up in my personal life, my business life. And it’s fulfilling to have that peace of mind and that compass and being like a hundred percent alignment with it. So I’m really happy for you that you found out and you’ve been, just, it hasn’t changed and you just, you found your calling. Sandy Ellingson: Yep, I do too. I think it makes it so easy. And I can’t imagine having gone through life without it. Because then how do you measure up and know there’s opportunities everywhere, right? How do you know which ones to go after if you don’t have something to measure it by based on what you want to do? Chris Badgett: Said what? Like when you sat up in the RV and you were like. I guess, I’m not retired. Sandy Ellingson: No. Chris Badgett: How long? I think I know the answer, but how long before that moment and then this project that you knew it was going to work. And I think you would say I knew I already knew at the beginning, but like, when did you really get the signal? Like how much time passed where it was like, you know what? My vision is coming true. This is going to work. Sandy Ellingson: Wow. Really, the year before COVID hit. I started making some headway, but it was slow progress. But then when COVID hit, that created all of these opportunities. I had to work with new people. Because initially campgrounds weren’t seen as essential businesses. So they were closed. And we had to fight to get get our campgrounds open again. And that’s when the industry side started going, Oh, wow, it is important for us to to be working with campgrounds. Obviously, if the campgrounds are closed. Nobody’s buying an RV, right? And so suddenly it was like, glaringly obvious we needed to do this. Since COVID has, we’ve come out of that. And then now we’re in this recovery process that the doors are much easier to open. literally it’s just been in the last probably six months where I’m like, not only is this going to succeed, it is going to succeed above my wildest dreams and expectations. And it’s not me, right? I’m just that vehicle that sticks it out there. It’s like you said. It’s the industry that is clamoring for this and wants this right now. And so I’m just super excited, but it has been in the last six months where I’m going, wow, this is going to happen. Am I ready for it? Chris Badgett: Amazing. Anything else you’d like to share about the project? Or just where you’re at and what’s happening. Sandy Ellingson: You guys just keep an eye on me and watch out on the 15th. There might be a lot of support tickets that come in. Chris Badgett: We’re ready for it. We’re ready for it. Awesome. Sandy. I want to thank you for coming on the show. This has been an awesome conversation and talking to education entrepreneurs like you, you’re just a shining example of what lights me up. And I’ll see you next time. Helping people make a difference and all that stuff, create value in the world. It’s, really inspiring. So thank you for sharing your story with us today. What are the best places for people to go check out what you’re up to? Sandy Ellingson: So outdoorhospitalityhub. com is the industry side. So if you’re a campground or someone working in the RV industry as a whole. Then the hub for RVers with the dashes in there is a place to go for campers if you’re interested in connecting. And the most important thing to know about that is this is a unique space. It’s, we’re not trying to replace Facebook and we’re not trying to replace YouTube. We’re trying to meet a larger need for campers and give them the ability to connect. With the industry and permissive ways to get problems solved. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Sandy Thank you for coming on the show I can’t wait to do a follow up with you in a couple years and see where we’re at and Yeah, thanks for all the great work you do. I really appreciate it Sandy Ellingson: Thank you so much, Chris. This was a lot of fun. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash 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 Creating Niche Industry Online Education and Community with Sandy Ellingson appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Jason Coleman discusses insights into entrepreneurship, starting a consulting business. Also shares about important ideas from his company’s journey route map. In 2006, he and his wife Kim started their own consulting business. Jason Coleman, CTO of LifterLMS and co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro. At first, they focused on e-commerce solutions, but later they switched their focus to Linux. Because of this, they made Paid Memberships Pro, a membership tool that became open source in 2012. By 2016, they were handling a virtual team of 15 people thanks to the help of this plugin, which helped them become a plugin-centric organization. Jason looks at the value of open source projects, their involvement in the PHP community, and the inspiration behind PHP e-commerce development. Apart from the difficulties working with a partner, he looks at the need of reaching harmony and using effective communication. Their commitment to innovative ideas and community involvement has been crucial even if keeping competitiveness in an industry that is always changing and controlling their development presents difficulties. Jason counsels budding business owners to start small, experience real-world challenges, maintain a tenacious and strong attitude while open to honest criticism. 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: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a very special guest. He’s a friend. He is co owner of Lifter LMS with his wife, Kim. He’s the founder, co founder of Paid Memberships Pro. We’re going to have an awesome conversation today. I know Jason really well. I think the world of the guy and I’m excited for you to listen in to our conversation. Welcome to the show, Jason. Jason Coleman: Thank you, Chris. I I’m happy to be here. I don’t know why it’s taken so long to get on this podcast, but hopefully this breaks the seal and I can be like your most frequent guest. Chris Badgett: That would be fun. Jason and I have played around about starting a separate podcast by the way. And so we want to hear what you think about this episode. But getting into it for those that don’t know you, at the beginning of 2023 you and your wife, Kim Coleman joined LFTR LMS as owners. You’ve been helping in the business. If you out there listening or watching is a user of LFTR LMS, and you’ve seen a lot of the great innovation and stuff that’s been happening over the past couple of years, Jason and Kim have been a huge part of that. But I know Jason from back in the day when I first started using WordPress and I needed a membership plugin and I installed paid memberships pro, which they created. So give us the high level story of paid memberships pro where that started and what year it was and how that began. Jason Coleman: Yeah, totally. So you’ve mentioned Kim a couple of times and. It’s really Kim and I are married, but also business partners and been in business together since 2006 or so we started out as consultants building anything, lots of prototypes in the web 2. 0 era. And then we solely focused on WordPress and then focused on e commerce and then focused on membership sites. And we. Back in 2010 or 11, we had four customers that needed membership functionality, excuse me. And we, didn’t like the plugin options that were there. We also saw how, building open source tools and making your code available and inviting other people to contribute and share and hosting your plugin on the wordpress. org repository, that was a way to you don’t get more exposure for the software and more people involved. So we build a membership plugin for our four customers and open sourced it around 2012. Sometime in 2016, we were able to switch from being like a consultant company with a plugin to like a plugin company that only sold support and updates and, stuff around the plugin. So since 2016, so now we’ve been growing just slow and steady every year. And at this point we’re about 15 people on the paid memberships pro side. And we all work remote updating the plugin, maintaining it, taking care of our customers. Chris Badgett: One of the things I love about Jason is he’s a very humble dude. And so I always find out things like, Oh, wow, this guy’s really good at investing, which we’re going to talk about later. But back in the day, you had an investing blog and you had a wine blog Gary Vaynerchuk, tell us about that, like your blogging era there. Jason Coleman: Yeah that, and it’s turning out that like that’s like a magic moment of the internet where, like when blogging was taking off, that people were interested in things could write about it. And that, that was useful. It wasn’t like right nowadays, there’s so much Content is automatically generated and generated for business. And now AI is generating content and social media is so fast. We there’s some blogs around that still work, but we, really don’t have the attention for the, I don’t know the golden era of blogging. So we had a investing blog with a three friends. I think I met Gary. I. We had a site wine log, which was like a kind of social network for wine drinkers to keep track of their notes and things. And Gary advertised on the site. And I remember giving him a hard time. Like he, I forget what it was. He was like going to pay me 600 bucks and I forced him to pay me like whatever the industry standard CPM was. And he’s like, all right, man, you’re driving a hard bargain. He’s you might regret this. Cause it’s more important, the biz dev than the 600 bucks. But but. He pay for the ad. That’s funny. And so at different conferences, I used to run into him back in the day when he was doing the wine library TV thing. Chris Badgett: And then the Jason Coleman: investing blog, like what happened there? Yeah, that was interesting. Like I thought we did, a good job. So it was just me and two friends. Like we newly out of college, we had like 401ks, but we didn’t know what they were. So writing about something forces you to learn it. I was really interested in it. And so it was as we invested and thought about investment, we just wrote about what we learned. And part of me regrets because we, it got pretty popular was like one of the top whatever, what was the site that used to like rank. Blogs, but we were always fighting for the top five investing blogs. And I think the three of us had different separate ways. I tapped my table. Sorry about that. And and so we never really got to lean into it, but it’s always, so it’s been a hobby of mine, but that really is like the first time I used WordPress was for that investing blog. And it’s still around that one. Investorgeeks. com has the old content and it’s like a lot of it holds up. As the economy goes through a cycle again, like the last time, like the yield curve inverted, I was like, Hey, what does this mean? What’s the yield curve? It’s Oh, this old Jason kind of is pretty smart. He did some research. So it’s funny. Chris Badgett: One of the other stories I love that I don’t think gets enough attention is you created possibly the first e commerce transaction on WordPress. What was that about? Jason Coleman: Yeah. It’s like hard to claim that. When I’ve, I was talking with you about that. Made me think, is there a way I could validate this and I’m certain I wasn’t like the very 1st, but definitely 1 of the 1st. Kim actually was still in college and she went to a business school and had to like, start a business in a quarter and they started a laundry service. And so it was a website. Built on WordPress do something maybe, or like 2000 four ish, and we embedded PayPal into it. And then after that we, got other customers and we embedded like OS commerce was a open source. It’s still around, I think PHP based we embedded OS commerce into WordPress. And then sometime around 2006, we were like, we should build like the e commerce directly into WordPress instead of taking another tool and swapping it in. So we built like an early e commerce plugin, but we only managed it for like our four customers that were doing e commerce and they integrated with PayPal at the time was like the only gateway really in town. And so we saw it was awesome. It had like integration with FedEx shipping. And I always thought the way that we did options was pretty clever. But it, yeah, it was, so that was back in like 2006, we were building e commerce in the WordPress. And we saw how the open source version of that WP e commerce was like the first big one. There was one called shop with two P’s. And then later Jiggo shop. We’re like, it’s like, Oh, like you could build this in an open source way and share it with everyone. And other people would use your tools and that helps build a better tool. But also I, feel good that we can enable people to make money on the internet without having to be like they’re single developer on a single site. Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s, awesome. Piece of history there. And I’ve heard you interviewed before, so we don’t have to park on it for long, but people always ask you and Kim, what’s not, what’s it like to work so closely with your spouse, but you guys do a really good job and I’m sure you have family stuff and whatever, but if somebody is like thinking about working with their spouse or trying to make it better, what. What’s the big lesson that you’ve learned there, one or two things that like make it, Jason Coleman: man, I, don’t know if it’s something you can learn. So it’s you have to try it. I suspect definitely not every couple can do this, but if it does work, it’s awesome. Cause you get to spend Kim and I get to spend tons of quality time together. And actually now that the business has grown, we have different. Areas that we have to manage. We don’t work together as much. And it’s man, can we just like work on a little project together? That’s really fun. First like just managing different teams and, bring in each other, like the headaches that come up in like normal course of business. But I guess like some tips, we were both the type of people that work through problems and don’t take things personal. And so we’re able to get heated, about work things and then separate it as good as possible. It doesn’t always sometimes it bleeds over into the personal life. But we’re good in general. Outside of business, when there’s conflict between Kim and I or things coming up We talk and communicate well and solve it. So that, like the, fact, if you can manage that part of your relationship well together, that’s like an indicator that you can manage those same kinds of issues in business. And then like it is, it’s good to, set time for each other and the typical things of Hey, we’re not working now, but it’s harder, especially like you work from home in the home business. And you were so when we hang out, we go out to dinner, we’re talking about work. It’s interesting. Yeah. And we, try to make time for other things, but we also don’t get too hard on ourselves. I think Alex or Mazzi had, or Layla they’re another like couple that work together and they, say we just we’d doing the work, like I don’t feel guilty about it. So that’s good too. I don’t feel guilty. Like we got to dinner and we talk about work. It’s fun. Like we’re enjoying building stuff together. So we, don’t feel guilty about it, but we do try to make safe spaces where it’s like, Hey, we’re with the family, with the Chris Badgett: kids, we’re doing all this stuff. Speaking of building stuff together we’re part of the creator economy. We create software, we’ve done blogs, we make content. What’s your view on how the creator economy is, what it used to be and where it’s going, it seems like it’s having a moment right now where like creator, it’s like, there’s a lot of desire and drive. For people to build creator businesses, but it’s always been around change. What’s your perspective there? Jason Coleman: We are riding a wave of people selling themselves online in some way, creating courses, content. And so that’s been interesting aspect of the business. And it, feels like that kind of thing is. Going to continue that, we’re building all these tools for people to start these online businesses. They’re going to use them. What, one of the most important things about this is just I even don’t really understand it as the scale of the internet. So there’s so many people out there. And, so when you sell a course or some content online or a membership site. Your total addressable market is huge. Even it’s just it’s not just like the little town you’re in. It’s like all of America, but also all of the world. And I think so some stat is like for every 22, 000 people in the United States, there’s a McDonald’s. So if you like, that’s like a unit of a metric. And so if there’s a McDonald’s, there’s probably like a law office, like a garage to fix your car like all these services that a dentist for every 22, 000 people. So if you imagine like the 22, 000 people around the McDonald’s is closest to you could you sell your course to 1 of them? Okay, cool. Now, There’s not 22, 000 people in the world. There’s 3 billion people on the internet. I did the math earlier. It’s 150, 000 times more people on the internet than like around your local McDonald’s. And so it’s 150, 000 is like a huge number. So if you could sell one person at the McDonald’s, like over the course of a week, there’s 150, 000 people like that person in the rest of the world I don’t know if the math works out. And it’s that’s just why, and that’s, I think that’s like the, one of the secret sauces of why. This career path is so successful is that if you really can build something that people need in one. There’s, you can find the audience online and that’s not easy. That’s work sometimes. But if you do there’s tons of money to be made and also you’re making a bigger impact. If you are in the education space and you’re teaching people. Like it’s very admirable to be a teacher at a school and you get like a classroom every year, 30 or so kids per year. But if you’re teaching online and you can hit 150, 000 people every year, it’s just like a bigger impact. So I think that’s why people are drawn to the space. Chris Badgett: One of the core missions of paid memberships pro is helping people get paid. Where does that where did that mission come from? I can see it in the thread of your story, like, all right, I’m deleting commerce. On WordPress and figuring that out and helping facilitate the money to go through you’re trying, you’re, you built your own creator career, but where does, what’s the genesis of helping people get paid? Jason Coleman: I remember I was on a, like a radio show in the Philly area. And the interviewer kept pressing me like, what did your parents teach you about business? And at first I was like, nothing, man. I’m my own, I’m self made. Like they had nothing to do with it. I did this all myself. And I I was like, I don’t remember that as childhood. Like I this is my adult life. Why are you keep pushing me back to my childhood? He’s there’s something in your childhood that did it. So it forced me to reflect. And I was like, they’re absolutely right that when I was a child, like my family had money problems, I came from like a middle class maybe like lower middle class. And when my parents got slightly better jobs, moved up a little bit family and like money was tight. I saw money problems. And my dad would talk to me very openly about it. And he was optimistic about he’s you don’t want to work in a factory like I do. You should be a doctor or a lawyer, or you could do more. Like he was, he opened my mind to like entrepreneurship, even though he didn’t do it himself, he knew it was an opportunity. And so as a child, he’d have these conversations with me and he always encouraged it when we did it as kids, like we were selling newspapers on the side at school, we got in trouble. Cause it was like a underground newspaper verse, like the official school newspaper. And like selling candy to your friends and stuff. Like I was always doing these entrepreneurial things and my dad He saw that like I was a path and so instilled in me that if you have money problems, you actually can address them. You can take control of them. And, I took that in my childhood and whenever it’s you got to get to college and you need, how do you get scholarships for this? It’s figure it out. You want to get a car. So I, and, and so I saw the flip side of that, both like the people who don’t have money, and then people also who feel like. They don’t have the power to do anything about it. Like they feel victimized by it. So I was like, Oh, like it’s, it feels good to build these tools to help people get paid and then also teach them how to use them so that they can. Take care of themselves and also like associations and charities that use our tools collectively use the money to like, to do good in the world that that they want to do Chris Badgett: speaking of building tools, why open source, like, why is that important to you as a engineer and entrepreneur? Jason Coleman: Yeah, so part of that was that story of when we had basically a closed source solution for our four customers, they were the only ones who could use it. So I see it as a way of putting making it public and available for others to use. And then I also feel like it makes the best software. The more people who use it, the more people who get involved, the more kind of incentive and motivation it is for a random consultant implementing it for one customer, finds the bug and helps you patch it. So I was It seems like the way to make the best software. And then I think I there’s also like this kind of like business model, like the business model aspect of it, of giving it away for free and just charging for the services that for some reason that bothers me, like when a business model feels like a tall. I think I, I developed this like watching the MP3s Napster music industry phenomenon. And there’s a version of that going on with AI content too, where like the technology Is moving in a direction and it’s get on board or there’s like a physics of it of information is free. And like the cost to clone an MP3 and give it away is free. So it has to happen. Like people want it for free and they don’t want to pay for it. And you set up a toll. It just, it doesn’t feel right. So I kind of business models like that where like software is you like charge for it and you only give it to people if they charge. Like it, it just feels. I’m fighting against the physics of the information of the internet. And so I was more inclined to like, hey, give it away for free and then find ways to build businesses on top of that get people using it. And then if I’m helping people make money and saving time and stuff I’ll find ways to make money business. On top of that, Chris Badgett: you’re probably one of the biggest champions of open source. I know. And in some ways you take it the challenge to be even more open source than WordPress itself. What does that look like to you? How do you think about that? Like, how can we be even more open source? Jason Coleman: Yeah. Like one kind of specific way is that the code that we write all, we make all of it publicly available on GitHub. There’s some internal tools that aren’t. And sometimes when we’re starting a new project, we keep it private for a little bit until it’s ready to go. But otherwise all there’s 198 repositories or so stranger studios, every line of code is on GitHub. So people can. Interact with it, but also use it like it’s easy to like, you download a zip file, you install it and run it like there’s no kind of complication. There’s no service required to get it running. The same exact plug in that you would get off wordpress. org. Or if you come to our site and give us money or go to get hub, it’s like the same exact plug in. And as a developer myself, that just enables so many things like weekly, I’m working on something. Just today it was or I was building something and I know that this other company has a similar thing. And I’m like, I wish I could just look at that code and see how they do it. And I know I can get it. I can go to find someone who has it or buy it from them or GPL vault. It’s like weird that I have to go through these hoops to gain access to the code. Because what we’re going to end up doing is is building a better thing. So I don’t want. That friction on our, software. They’re still like putting the code away for free. And I feel like when automatic bought WooCommerce a few years ago, I know WooCommerce had closed repositories for their plugins and be at that time, most of the WordPress plugin type stuff automatic did was on. org and open. And so I was like, what’s going to happen here? We’ll like the automatic influence over WooCommerce and their plugins will get open or will. The WooCommerce kind of business aspect, charging for software. Influence automatic. And I think the latter happened, like you still, the extensions. And as I’m talking about this, I’m not judging. I’m just saying what I see out there. Cause there’s very valid reasons for doing things the way that they do they, and they have business relationships with all the developers who made those extensions and they feel that keeping the code hidden will drive more revenue. What I’d like to do a naturally lifter could be an example of this. Also has Extensions that aren’t fully open on GitHub is we can test that because I saw it with our own plugins that it doesn’t seem to have an impact on revenue with some of the sand hill stuff that they did before the awesome mode of acquisition. I think they’ve had repositories that went from private to public, I believe, or either the other direction. They didn’t see any change in sales. And so I think we can make money off, other things than just keeping people from using the tool. And I, also, it’s we’re motivated to get people to use the tool. Like I, if someone uses our plugin and makes money off it and I’m not involved I’m like, that’s great. That’s actually the goal is Like I’m doing well, we’ll do well enough. We’ll make enough money to maintain the plugin. Like my real goal is to get as many people using the software as possible. And that’s not the goal of every business out there. There is like a weight of a user who’s not paying you and you have to support them and stuff like that, and it’s fair that businesses make business decisions to not support people that aren’t giving them money. But it’s weird. I I was watching a Sam Altman interview. It’s like weird to compare myself to him. He’s like the most popular person in the planet right now, but, but something that rung true with me that he was talking about how, when, they did some kind of reformation of open AI, he didn’t take any equity in the business. And people were like, why not? He’s I’m already a billionaire. I don’t need any more money. And they’re like, so why are you doing this? He’s I want to build AGI and give it to humanity. And everyone’s yeah, but what do you really want to do? What’s your real goal? Like people don’t trust that’s his incentive. And everyone. He said on an interview, something like, if I just took a bunch of money and said, I’m trying to make as much money as possible, they’d be like, oh, okay. And then he can make the money and give it away or something. It like society and the business partners and everyone would accept it. More readily than him saying I’m just trying to make cool software. So I feel like I’m in the same boat. It’s a different kind of thing. Like we’re making a membership plugin and he’s making like AGI, but I’m like, I’m really just trying to like, that, that is the goal. And I struggle with it. Cause it feels like you’re fighting, like going uphill. It’s, like, it’s similar to that, like the physics of the information. I’m trying to like, go with that wave, but there’s this like capitalism saying nah, man, like people understand when you’re asking for money. People understand when business relationships are incentivized by the money involved. It is like the common currency of like how deals get done. And I don’t I know it’s a strain that I got to work out in the business. Chris Badgett: And that’s not a magic trick. There is value for paying for the software and accessing the support team and having automatic updates. Like it’s not like a win lose scenario. My big takeaway from listening to you is there’s the physics of innovation. And if you really care about that and care about an open source and decentralization and empowering people, that can work with greater velocity if you are truly open source and you can still build a business around at the same time, it’s not mutually exclusive. Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. It’s you don’t want to fight those factors. I think maybe like a tip that helps like the course creators and content creators out there too, or if you believe in this thing I’m talking about, it’s similar to that MP3 analogy where Spotify is the way people get their music now or similar tools. And it’s all about the easing the delivery like they they, I’m grasping at the words here, but it’s not the actual music that they deliver. It’s the, the ease of use, they make it easier. They package it better. They, bring it to all the devices where you want it, They make it as fast as possible, all that stuff. And I think there’s a similar thing in the content space where I’ve often told people, and I’d like to like, hands on feel this experiment. Cause, To know that it really works, but a lot of people are scared to put their content out there, or they have free content and they want to make paid content. And now they feel like their paid content has to be better. And it’s no you already have the awesome video that teaches someone how to stop, quit drinking or how to build something or how to connect this tool. You don’t have to make a better version of that. You just have to, ease the delivery package it up in the right way that the people want, find the customers where they are and put it in the format and everywhere they want it, like just value in that. So that’s very similar in terms of like music. It’s all about delivering it to them in the way that they want our plugins with delivering it to them in the way that they want. We make it easier for them. They’re happy to give us some money to do it. So they don’t have to download it off, get hub and figure it out on their own. And the course content that we give them, they can find the same stuff in YouTube or ask chat GPT, but. If we deliver it exactly where they want it in the format that best works for them. And, also maybe like we segue to the AI conversation, like with the human touch people, you can ask chat GPT about things and it’s getting more and more knowledgeable and smarter and able to browse the web and figure things out and reason, but people still like learning certain things in particular from human, other humans. And they, like chatting, I think like communities becoming more popular. It’s that’s like a, that’s a thing that you. Putting these people of like interest in the same chat room to talk with each other and facilitating that is that’s something that, you that’s valuable that people are willing to pay for it. And it can’t be automated yet. Maybe that’s an opportunity to automate it. But, Chris Badgett: Yeah, you have a lot of experimentation with AI and have studied it and language models and all this. And you’re definitely on the front end of all that stuff. What, how can course creators, people building coaching programs, membership sites, just building websites in general, what are some of, what are some of your principles around AI and where it’s going for the creator? Jason Coleman: Yeah, it, for myself, I’m, trying to have an AI first mentality when I’m solving problems or doing work where. I might like struggle through a first draft on my own and I’m like, man, the AI is really good at taking my notes and turn it into a first draft take my notes turn into a first draft. And so that’s 1, 2 is if you really embrace the tools and use them, it can speed up a lot of things and it can get you over these like creative humps that you have. And it’s It’s very similar. It’s like writing in particular, but there’s analogies to video production and other things is it’s easier to make a bad first draft and then go into edit mode and edit it. And so using the AI, it’s like good at both those things in different ways. It’s it can help you get that bad first draft more quickly and it can also help you with the editing. So, like embracing the tools is good. I do think like in terms of the type of content the creators are making, AI is going to have an influence. So in the short term, there’s going to be this phase where humans plus AI will make better content than AI alone or humans alone, even, and that’s similar to what happens in chess and poker and other places where computers got really good at playing those games. If you think of course, creation as a game the computer is getting good at it. I don’t know how long that phase is going to be, but say it’s 5 years, you got to so embrace the tools and try to use them. You’ll be able to make better stuff than without it. But again back on that, like the type of content, I think, there was a kind of content that was mostly informational, It was like how to pass a test and, the language models have a lot of this even built in, or they can figure it out, they find it. And I think they’re only going to get better. Like the, it’s just like the MP3 world, like the data’s out there. Even if the LLM in some way is going to consume someone else’s old course, regurgitate it, you can’t stop that from happening. Like the information, so courses that were informational I would fade those. They seem less useful because people are going to have these answers, like really good versions of the answers at their fingertips, but there’s other kinds of courses, like I said, like community type stuff, bringing humans together, stuff that’s like IRL in the real world, almost what are the best places to eat in Paris is like a better course maybe in the future than how to pass X, Y, Z test because people want a human to answer obviously the LLMs can’t eat yet. But like people, they can aggregate reviews but like people, even if you could get like the aggregated reviews and you get like the human aspect, like people want that content from a human. So I think actually ask that question, what kinds of content, what kinds of interactions do people. Yeah. Want to do with a human, I think like art is big. So even though the generative models are good at writing, they’re good at painting and making images and stuff. There’s something like human about art that like, it, like it devalues the art when you can just ask the computer to generate a painting and you’re like I’ve seen this in my, I felt it. Other people probably interact with these tools. They’re like, yeah, so what big deal. And you’re like, so you’re not amazed by the awesome painting of a dragon in space and like neon colors, but like art, like the story of the art, the connection to humanity, the connection to your own story, like all that stuff is real and you can’t, you can’t make, it’s not artificial. You can’t make it. So that kind of stuff will have value. So I think like communities, stuff that’s in real life, stuff related to art, people are going to value, like learning about that stuff from humans. Chris Badgett: What’s your take as an engineer and a developer with AI? If you’re, let’s say customizing, you want to write a custom plugin for paid memberships pro or lift your LMS and you’re not a developer. Can AI do that? Maybe not now, maybe in the future. Like how do you use AI as a developer and where do you see it going? Jason Coleman: Yeah, it feels like the tools now. are really good for experts and also good for training, but like a little dangerous in the tools in the hands of a beginner. And I get in certain contexts that’s okay. But if you’ve never programmed before you like 90 percent of the time, it’ll be like 95 percent of the time, maybe 99 percent of the time you get code that works. And that’s exactly what you want. But that 1 percent of the time, like if you don’t understand. And it’s more than 1 percent now, but this stuff will get better. But it’s often making like little mistakes, adding S’s to the end of something that totally breaks. And so people using the tools, it’s good. I tell my teams, it’s you have to check every single line that of code that the AI writes. And you, have to understand every line of code. So it speeds up the process, especially for some like tedious things that when you’re programming, there’s like tedious things that you do. And the AI is just here’s a pattern and then you, similar to like writing content, it helps you get over that hump it gives you bad code and then you fix it up. It’s really good at if you know how to, so if you know how to program one language, it’s really good to help you learn another language. And so that’s good. Like when the world is changing and it’s like, Hey old, timer. Now learn, react it’s shoot. And it doesn’t feel like starting at square one. It feels like you get a couple of steps ahead. Cause the, the co pilots and things like that, help you pull it up. But if you have enough programming knowledge to know, like when something is wrong, It helps a lot. It saves time. I it’s, almost, it’s almost, it’s like calculators in school. There’s a reason to learn it’s hard. I think education is tough with LMS. Like you, you have to not have that tool. So you learn how to do it with your human brain and appreciate it. And then okay, here’s a tool. And you’re like, oh my God, now I can do so much more. But these language models and AI now, they’re also good tutors. Like they can watch you, what you’re doing and help you learn. So there’s such a temptation, like it can just do it for you, but there’s still value in learning how to program, I think. And you want to try to use the tool to help you learn rather than just like leaning on it to just give you the answer. It’s tough. I don’t know. Chris Badgett: Crossing back over to the human side, if or one of the things I love about working with you and Kim is. You’re positive people, right? And you treat people well and, but you navigate complex and situations, sometimes conflict. What I’ve learned is I know you have as well when you’re reaching, this, those so many people, the one out of 22 at every McDonald’s around the world. You’re like interacting with humanity at scale through the internet. Sometimes you get treated, a little nasty, let’s say, like in a support ticket or, just some kind of communication or a review of your software. Even just more broadly, like working remotely when you’re not like in an office together or whatever, like sometimes people behave differently than when they’re in person, pressing the flesh, how, and it can hurt people especially if you’re sensitive and empathetic. And somebody treats you nasty when you’re trying to provide this tool and you’re genuinely care about helping them. And how do you, how have you, it’s not just like building thick skin or whatever, like how do you navigate negativity when you’re operating at scale on the internet? Jason Coleman: Yeah, this is, important to me. Cause I like, two reasons. One is, like you said, it’s not just developing a thick skin and getting over it I don’t know, you can’t get your skin thick enough for those negative interactions to not ruin your day. Like the first time I I yelled at my kid cause I was like, In a mood, because I was talking with a bad customer in the morning, it was like, wow, this is wrong. I have to get a handle on this so that the negative stress of work doesn’t bleed into my, the rest of my life. And then I also, I talked to other creators, people building products, you want to sell things and they’re like, oh I would, do that. I’d rather sell to a small number of people. Cause I don’t want to deal with the backlash or I don’t want to go on Instagram. Like people are gonna make fun of me or talk this, or I don’t want to do this. Cause these people get upset. So people are making business decisions based on like their perceived inability to handle the negative feedback in certain cases. So I, there’s a, I’ll talk about this. I have a blog post called dealing with haters on the paid memberships pro blogs. So if you search for that, you might find it. It lays out a lot of this stuff, but, there’s some things like you can do some things to prevent it. If you have a all money guarantee give them their money back and get them away from you as soon as possible that can diffuse it. So you don’t even have to deal with it. You can, process your refunds quickly every time someone gets upset about something like we often end up adding a line to our terms of service or tweaking on this line here. Like famously someone said you said this would be easy. And I was like, who said business would be easy. I was like, so I was like, told the team. Scrub the word easy from our website, which is it’s like inverse marketing. Like everyone’s like the easiest plugin. And I was like, this stuff ain’t easy. And I was like, we got to find like other messaging. That’s not easy. Cause of course we’re trying to make the software as easy to use as possible, but dude you’re, building a business. Like it’s not, going to be easy. So yeah, like up to Managing expectations helps, but you can’t avoid it because as if you go from 30, we went from consulting the products. So we had 30 customers a year, maybe. And you could deal with it. And then actually like the way to deal with it, it’s different. Like when, you’re in consulting, you go above and beyond and someone’s getting out of line. You would just find the time poured on them over deliver. Clear your conscience and then stop working with them, but you really could pour on the love and give them some good stuff to smooth it over but you have 30, 000 users, like you just can’t do that. And there’s so many more people who are just having a bad day. There are raids, they’re having to fall in through the cracks. They’re upset. And they lash out at you. So so it’s like finding, so some tips too, is look for that criticism. So like I said, update the terms of service and your expectations and your copy is there positive feedback in there? Can you like pull your most, not get defensive and be like they have a point we messed up here so you got to look for those, you can like a trick I do is like you write a draft. So to get the energy out someone calls you an asshole, try delete the email address or whatever it is. So you don’t actually accidentally send or maybe copy it into a notepad and then type up like what you really want to say to this guy. A couple of those leaked out and got out when I’ve done that in the past. Usually I get it out of my system and then you okay, I got it off my chest. And I can try to respond to them in a What’s best for the business and them and everyone else spectating sometimes in public forums on this stuff. I also like, yeah, just always. Reply professionally you don’t want to get involved. You don’t want to lead them on. There’s the isolate. Isolation that’s important in a number of ways. 1 is, like I said, make sure that you’re not answering customer support from your phone at the dinner table, where your kids are around do it at a time when you have time before and after. To transition, so try to like, if you’re doing that activity, don’t just do it whenever it comes up, schedule it so that you’re doing a certain time. Also we get the higher folks to handle the support and I always try to monitor this. I feel like I’m like, putting them on the front lines of a war to like, deal with this negative energy. Some people are just better at doing it. So they’re okay. They’re also like, they don’t take it as personal. I assume they don’t take it as personal because they’re not invested in it. Like we are. Or sometimes you’re literally saying like Jason I’d want to punch Jason in the face. So if you’re not Jason and you read that it, it, hits different. But so we gotta take care of those people cause they but you can hire people to insulate you from it. And then so you’ll get the stress from these things. I think also like, I think I’m gonna say is you I said, you can’t avoid it. It’s going to happen. And there’s different people who said versions of this, but like anything that’s useful and beneficial to the world is going to have people who hate it and fight it. And you don’t want to like, you want to listen to it as much as possible, but you’re like, like you can’t avoid it. So you have to deal with that stress. And I started meditating. As a practice really helped a lot to separate and slow things down. So I’m not as responsive. Another tip then in isolation, buddy system, having people help you. Another one is like engaging with happy customers. So we’ve done this almost as a cleansing, you get a bunch of 1 star reviews and you can, if you have access to your community through a newsletter or slack space, You can just be like, Hey do you all mind writing a positive review over at this place and just send them the link and you’ll get a few, or ask for feedback from your happy customers that like you, and you’ll get some of that. So that’ll help warm your heart and counterbalance the negativity bias that we have in dealing with these things, Chris Badgett: so many good tips. If we shift back to helping people get paid or just thinking about money in general, one of the things just watching you operate over almost two decades, is that’s two decades. You’re in the long game. There’s this thing with creator economy, get rich quick, or if you’re building software, build it up and scale it and sell it as fast as possible. But you tend to, you’ve shown like. Long game chops, like playing the long game. What are your thoughts? Or, and I’m not saying that get rich quick is even a bad thing or scaling and starting software, scaling it fast and selling it as a bad thing. But what’s, your take on the long game versus the short game when it comes to making money on the internet? Jason Coleman: Yeah, I think there’s many paths. And so there are those other paths, but. They’re very shiny. So people are aware of them. And maybe it’s not as shiny to just have a business that grows 2025 percent per year for 20 years. But like compounding interest, you’re like, oh, that goes from making 150, 000 a year to making 2 million a year over a few years. And so My personality is like conservative with money in a sense. Like I didn’t like taking loans or pushing for like huge wins in a sense, I we, really just always, we have an old spreadsheet when we did consulting that was how many customers, what’s the average price how much money can we expect to make? And then the fun thing is we’ll try to grow 25 percent per year and you drag the Excel sheet down. And then you’re like, I don’t know the money we make. But the hard part of that, so that’s easy. You’re like, cool, the number moves. And I like that target. The hard part then is it forces you to figure out okay, how do we actually do that? How can we actually make 25 percent more money? We’re either raising our prices, getting more customers or selling more stuff to the same people. And, that’s how we operated. And I guess we started there at the business. We were just Let’s try to grow. How are we going to do it? And at some point it made sense to flop from like consulting the products. And maybe at this point in our life, we’re we still set those growth targets, but we struggle with do we really need to grow? Cause we’re, but, yeah, so maybe it’s just my personality. I think, yeah, like it’s good to know it’s an option and there, there are returns in this. I think I’m benefiting in ways and I’ll continue to benefit that. Becoming an expert in the same thing and kind of driving home the point and working on the same thing over so long. You become an asset to the world as long as that thing is useful still. And all the people who are in it for the get quick, rich kind of bounce in and out. And I think probably our plugins are in a phase where. There’s a lot of consolidation in the WordPress space. And this happens like in other spaces too. But we, if we’re well run profitable businesses that don’t have these issues, cause we didn’t like swing for the fences and waste a bunch of money. And so we can just sit around and as the competitors fall, we can hopefully we can pick them up, but we compete with these giant public companies. It’s easier for them to pick up the pieces. So that’s something I have to figure out, but yeah. Yeah. So it’s like sticking with it. It, yeah. Compounding. Like it makes sense in investing the compounding interest is hard. I used to, but it also happens in terms of like your skillset and your ability to influence the world that compounds to, if you stick with it. When around investing, one of the things I did on the investor geek site was like a spreadsheet where it was like, if you you could buy a brand new car now, or buy like a used car. And I forget it was at the time, if you save like 10, 000, all right, now invest that 10, 000 in the average stock market returns. And then in 25 years, you’ll have a hundred grand or something like that. But I remember like enough money to buy a sports car when you’re going through your midlife crisis. So it’s like you’re fresh out of school by the use car. Now put some money away in, in an account, let it grow. And when you have your midlife crisis, you can buy a Porsche. And so like that, like spreadsheets can show that compound growth when we don’t really feel it. It’s hard to delay gratification that way. And I, for some reason, it’s easy for me with money and things like that. It’s harder with eating the best food in the restaurant. It’s hard for me to eat a little less to delay gratification into my old age. Chris Badgett: But yeah. Speaking of compounding, I think it was Warren Buffett who said the eighth wonder of the world is compounding. It’s one of those things like. The scale of the internet is really hard to comprehend. The power of compounding is really hard to comprehend. One of the things I look up to you with is your experience and skills and advice and investing. And we could do a whole episode about investing. So just to frame it in for the creators out there, or if you build websites for clients, or you’re getting you’re getting paid and you’re able to like you’ve got your cost of living down and you’re thinking about what should I do with this money? How do you think people that are new to investing should think about getting in the game and you know You can invest in your business. You can invest in yourself and your own education There’s stocks, real estate, crypto collectibles. There’s like all this stuff. And like how would you advise like an, a newer person to investing to start making some smart moves? Jason Coleman: And yeah, maybe so a fun, maybe a fun, humble brag story to set the tone. I guess people understand investing is important. But we’ve always, we’ve worked, Kim and I have kept our expenses lean. And, always have been like set targets to invest. So it was there was a time when it was like all the money went away, we run through that and then we were lucky enough to have this skillset that we could sell. And we we became, Hey, we can live and eat and do things. But then we operated lean so we could always save money. And so we’ve always been saving like 10 or 20 percent of our income over time which is a lot. Not everyone can get there, but we, kept that as like a, as a goal and I made some good moves in Bitcoin and Netflix and Tesla and whatever. But the power of that is that like recent, like a few years ago, there’s this consolidation and WordPress space and people are trying to buy the plugin. And I was like, we should talk to them like this March, let’s talk to everyone and hear their best offer. And they’re making offers and they’re like, dude, this could be life changing money for you. This could be life changing money for you. And I remember talking to Kim, I was like, what’s your number, like what’s your number that like you would need to sell the business and get out. And she gave me a number and I was like, We already have that much money. Like we’ve invested well and sure. It feels good to have a lot of money, but it was like, I have the freedom. I didn’t have to sell my business to someone to make that money. Cause I want to send my kids through college or cause I don’t want to work. I, have the free, like Kim and I have the freedom to choose to show up and do this instead of being forced to, and that’s partially due to saving. Being disciplined about money, saving money and letting it compound over 15 years, but so that’s it. It’s you want to, save, you want to get to that spot. If you have to spend all your money cause you’re you’re. You’re only making enough to really sustain yourself where you’re living. You have to get there first. And then it’s you want a skill that the world values, you can parlay that into making money. So you want to set aside a big chunk. It helps to like, do it first, have a separate savings account. Like when the money comes to your check ins account, always put some into the savings account, that’s that’s the money to save. And there’s a number of ways to do it. Like you should invest in your 401k or IRA. Most people should just invest in like total market funds, like the VTI, the NASDAQ funds, like technology. That’s like maybe one tip if you want to be like a little risky is put half your money in the QQQ, the NASDAQ has most of the tech companies. And if you’re optimistic about technology, like I am, like they should outperform, like they continue to outperform like they have in the past. But, If you start picking stocks and things, I do that because it’s fun. I realized, it’s in my wheelhouse and especially the technology stuff that I have an understanding of how it all interplays in the players and the companies and what they’re doing. So when I hear Microsoft say, we’re going to make AI that will change the world. And Facebook says, we’re going to make AI that will change the world. I can judge who’s really going to benefit from that. In other areas where I don’t have domain expertise, like, the energy sector or in pharmaceuticals, I, they all say the same thing. And I was like, I can’t pick which pharmaceutical company is going to outperform. But, you want to keep it simple. And there’s different ways, the, what’s that little book of invest in John. Bogle is like invest 60, 40 portfolio, something simple. There’s timeframe ETFs. You can just you can buy like a I’m going to retire in 30 years and they just generally invest in the stock market. So specifically what to do, like you should do that. So it Hey, make enough money to get by as soon as you do set up an account. That’s separate from your main checking account. So you can hide the money away and you don’t feel it. And whenever you get a raise or you make more money, set aside a certain percentage of that goes into the investment account and then regularly move that money into a very generalized, Investing scheme. And that’s probably like the number one thing you can do is then as your income grows, as you’re going, like you’re continually setting aside certain amount into investing. Chris Badgett: How do you think about time horizon for a beginner? Yeah. Jason Coleman: For, of investing time horizons. Chris Badgett: Yeah, I heard this advice once, think of it as being a collector, not an investor. Long time horizon. Yeah. You can day trade and have short term stuff that you do, but if you’re investing for your future, just start as young as possible and forget about it, put it, Jason Coleman: but what would you say? There was like Robert Kawasaki, rich dad, poor dad, that, that book is decent, especially if you. Come from a poor dad. That character Kawasaki is a problematic these days, but, but I remember he had a game that like you would play, it was like Monopoly, but it was a little more real world and it was all about building assets versus expenses. So it’s like you go on vacation, all that money leaves. If buy a stock, you get a return every year on that. If you buy a treasury bond, you get a return, or if you buy a business, it probably has a return or, that’s like a way to I just like that book talks about that, like building assets. There’s also a good one called like Phil town has one called rule number one and then one called payback. And that’s interesting. Cause rule number one is he’s introduced to day trading and swing trading. I think actually he’s swing trader, which so swing trading is like over. You hold a investment over the course of a week or a month instead of a day. So he’s all in and he has really good advice on picking stocks and then learning technical analysis. And his second book, he’s I was all wrong. Like I was, Investing way too active. The people who are really, rich, they just own the stock and hold it forever. And so that’s like that idea of collecting these assets over time. I definitely have that. I think most, like I said, most people should just buy the ETF and maybe you can try to get as many shares of the VTI. It’s hard to personify like an ETF, the same way you can like net, like if you’re investing like companies, you’re like, I’m on team Facebook, I’m on team Apple. And you can, make room for making individual investments like that. I do, when you do that, . And I do recommend you want to think of it as like you’re owning a business. You can even just take apple and chop off whatever it is, like six zeros. It’s oh it’s a company that has about 300, 000 and makes about 500, 000 a year and has about. If you are trained it’s if you’re buying a laundry mat. First buying Apple, you can make like an investment in the stock with that same mindset. And if you’re not thinking about price going up and down, you’re just it is a superpower. If you’re investing in individual stocks to have a five year timeframe. Cause no, no one does really like you, like managers have a yearly timeframe. They have to deliver. The fund managers who buy most of the stocks they have to deliver every year. And so they’re making moves and you’re like, only Warren Buffett is the guy who’s buying and holding stocks forever. And so you have an advantage if you can sit out the swings, but it’s hard. You have to be able to, met like when stock you buy goes down, see it as a positive, if you really feel invested in the company, like I know it’s temporary. It’s easy though. It’s easier to hold that stock and you want to buy you like it’s on sale by more. If you’re thinking 5 years out and you have some kind of model saying it’s going to be worth 2 times 5 years out, you don’t mind that it dips 10, 20, even 50 percent now. I don’t know. So yeah, just rambling about the way that, yeah, having that five year timeframe on those kinds of investments, no one, because no one else is thinking on that timeframe, it’s a superpower. Like you’re, it gets a little technical, but there’s things like, I always lose like options trading, like when options expire, that’s like a gamble you can say I think they’re going to win. They’re going to lose. There’s like literally super computers that are analyzing all the trades and then they just figure out how to suck up all the money. Like they’re just Oh, like they have enough money that they can like manipulate the market. It’s like tinfoil hat stuff, but it’s effectively happening. They can manipulate the market to have a stock go down. Everyone, like the most amount of people lose money on their options, then the stock goes back up and they get in. And so it’s like, when you’re. It’s like playing online poker and you’re playing with bots that are superhuman. If you’re, but if you’re investing on a short timeframe you’re literally investing against computers that are superhuman on it, but the computers aren’t investing on the five year timeframe. So it’s like a different game. You’re like, you get to go hang out with the old guys at the poker lodge and they’re playing Omaha and they never even read a book, so it’s I’d rather be in that poker game that then a poker game with a bunch of computers that are better than I am. I’m Chris Badgett: sure you’d agree with me that if you must be a gambler or a DGN do it with 5% or some smaller percent or after a certain threshold. Like you don’t Yeah. It’s not like you have to choose to you can split that focus and like still feed that need to pick stocks ’cause they’re fun or try something risky, but Yeah. Yeah. Don’t bet the farm, Jason Coleman: right? Yeah, I think so. That’s like common advice I don’t know where it’s 10% or 5% you want. It’s good. You, I always treat it like, like it’s educational. And even, like I said I, always lose that, that options trading thing. I still do it from time to time. Cause it forces me to interact in the market in a way I don’t usually. And I learn a lot and I lose money, but it’s a relatively small amount. It’s less than 10 it’s like less than 1 percent of what I have invested. I’m making bets on stuff like that. So yeah, if you have that mindset of it’s a small amount of money, I can lose it, I’m going to do this investment. I’m going to learn. In the process, like you can’t lose, even if you lose the money, you’re like, okay I’ve learned a new way to lose money and I’m glad it was only extra cent and not everything. And I think that’s good. Cause sometimes I think there are opportunities. If you really understand the business well. And the stock is on sale, if you had bought individual stocks before, you’ll feel more confident to be able to do it now, so you won’t miss those opportunities if you, educate yourself on that. But I struggle with that because I’m like a nerd about this and I spend like hours every day interacting with it. And I’m like, if I didn’t do that, I don’t know, like, how it. But if, yeah, if you are going to do it, it’s good to do it. Like with that mindset of I’m going to learn and it’s a small amount of money. Yeah. Chris Badgett: That’s Jason Coleman from paid memberships pro and partner at lifter LMS with his wife, Kim Coleman. Thanks for coming on the show, Jason. I really appreciate it. I’d encourage you to go check out paid memberships pro as a paid memberships pro. com. They also have a feature for using LMS together called streamline. So you can actually use both tools side by side if you want, and it’s great to be on the journey with you, Jason. Any final words for the people as we say goodbye or other ways that people can track you or connect with you on the Internet? Jason Coleman: That’s good. I am on X Twitter, Jason underscore Coleman. That’s a decent way to follow. My occasional posting and get in touch with me by DM or something there. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on the show and I look forward to doing it again with you sometime. Jason Coleman: All right. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, everyone. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Entrepreneurship Money and Life with Jason Coleman Cofounder of Paid Memberships Pro appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Will Middleton talk about his path from high school dropout to successful solopreneur by the time he is 22. Will Middleton is from WP Course Guide. Will talks about how he first felt unsatisfied with regular schooling and how he decided to become an entrepreneur because he was afraid of living an empty existence. His introduction into the WordPress community happened when the CEO of LifterLMS extended an opportunity to him to work as a freelance copywriter. Will developed his own firm and produced instructional material throughout the years, going from a beginner to a WordPress guru. To foster development, he underlines the need of always learning, adjusting, and facing personal anxieties. His capacity to relate to consumers by discovering their problems and offering customized solutions is essential to his success. would counsels business owners to meet customers where they are, provide relevant material, and interact with them in a way that would draw in new business. His experience emphasizes the need of tenacity, compassion, and interpersonal relationships in creating a profitable internet company. 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: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s been a while since Will’s been on, but we’ve got Will Middleton. He’s from WP Course Guide. Will has a fascinating journey and story. We’re going to talk about how will by the age of 22 build a successful one person web development solopreneur business how that started how it’s going and the journey along the way I think you’re going to find this a lot of fun. Welcome to the show will Will Middleton: thank you. Yeah that journey that was That’s a really good journey to be talking to you about yeah dive in i’m happy to be here Chris Badgett: Life is a journey that, it’s always a process of becoming and changing and all that stuff, but just to frame it in for you out there watching or listening what was your first step into the online business world? Can you set the stage for us of where this journey started? Will Middleton: Yeah. So being a kid in high school, like really discontent, not liking the system, not believing in a future where I had like college and a high school diploma. I don’t know, I was just lost. I didn’t really know what I was going to be doing. And so I I was like, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m going to take the ACT SAT and I’m going to get into a college. I’m just going to go to college and be like not interested in high school anymore. Just go into college. But then I’m like if I can get into college without a high school degree, could I get into my career without a degree? Could I, Maybe not go to college because what do I want to go to college for? When I sit down and ask that question, I really just don’t know the answer. And so I am in this position of being a 15 year old, having a midlife crisis as 15 year olds usually do. And then I’m like, okay, the solution to my life now is to be an entrepreneur. I’m going to drop out of high school and then just start being an entrepreneur, whatever that means. And then The CEO of the company, my mom worked for at the time. Cause I was in Boy Scouts and stuff. So she’d talk about me, here and there. And so CEO knew I existed and was like, Hey. Does we’ll want to position writing for our podcast is regarding marketing entrepreneurship courses. I sounds like that’s what we’ll try to get into. And yeah, so so I got hired into that. And that was at Lifter LMS. That was the LMS cast. That was you hiring me into being like a freelance copywriter. And this is before I had really opened WordPress. I probably opened WordPress before, but I like I’m like, I don’t know. I added a page and I don’t know what to do. Like I’m just gonna do this in HTML. And then to eventually becoming like a WordPress expert, full time WordPress person, and now business owner. Chris Badgett: And so that was seven years ago and tell us where you’re at today. Will Middleton: Today is very far from the beginning. It’s like today is. I’m like a developer running my own agency, creating my own knowledge based business content working with clients mostly with Lifter LMS, but just really anybody who uses WordPress, I’m just doing that thing. And so basically just the, I don’t know, work from home, be your own entrepreneur person, that’s what I’m doing. And I’m. Just experimenting with creating different kinds of content. I’m experimenting with what it means to take content to a higher level. Some course creators might be in that position where they have a course and they’re like, I’m not really proud of this, but my customers tell me they like it and that’s the position I’m at where I’m like, I look at my content and I’m like, Whoa. That wasn’t like wonderful quality. It’s like how I look at my videos from years ago and they’re like useful and stuff and they get a couple thousand views, but it’s like how to do this, how to do that in WordPress where I feel like I could create something more interesting or high quality. So it’s I got some validation with my courses and stuff, and now I want to take it to the next level. In addition to running an agency, that’s where I’m at. Chris Badgett: Nice. A lot happened in that time period. One of the things I’ve always admired about you is. You have an extreme growth mindset and an ability to learn on the fly, continuously improve, try on different things. I’ve seen you be a writer, a designer, a website builder, a developer, a manager of people, and the list goes on and on, an entrepreneur in your own stuff, an affiliate, like you do, you like, Try the whole menu and then you keep evolving to the things you enjoy where you create the most value and all that. But at the core of that, that enabled you to try on so many different hats and evolve as your own entrepreneur. What was the underlying motivation that, you wake up every day. And what motivated you and still does to this day. And maybe those motivations change as you go, but tell us about the motivation. Will Middleton: I totally think they change. I think the motivation has changed a lot, for years I’d been chasing things that were like external of me of Oh, I want to be an entrepreneur. And I want to have a cool car because entrepreneurs have cool cars I want to have but I now have a Honda element. And that’s like the coolest car I could imagine, but it’s not the Ferrari I was thinking of. So I did absolutely have external goals along the way the whole time. But I think the real motivation was like fear. If I’m being honest, like it’s the fear, like I was zooming back to being in high school and being like, I don’t want to do this. Like my fear is like that I’m not going to live a fulfilling life if I don’t go for this. I’m not going to like. I don’t know what am I going to do with my life? I have no vision for my life, I have no goals. And I don’t see myself anywhere 10 years from now, I feel bad about that. I know that I don’t see my future and I feel bad about it. And so I was very afraid. And so I left high school and I’m like, I’m going to pursue any other life. Then, so I’m like, the only way that I’m ever going to work this math out where I’m happy in life is if I take action today, I’m going where I want to go, where I say I want to go. And so fear asked me to leave high school. And then I. Was super excited, super motivated. I remember when my, I first asked you in like an email of Hey Chris, do you think you could meet with me once a month for an hour while I figure out how to be an entrepreneur? Like just for six months, timeframe, six meetings. You’re like, yeah. And I was like jumping around my room because I’m like, okay, I’m really afraid of high school and I’m really pulled towards this future. And so then, and then I go into it and I start doing lifter things. I start building sites for clients, start learning how to use LFTR. I built my own online course that completely flopped, but it was the experience of learning how to use the platform and learning what failure felt like for the fifth time of just trying to be an entrepreneur, trying to create new projects, trying to put myself out there. And it was in the LFTR space where I found a lot of success with things where I was talking about Elementor I’d go into the Facebook group and I would, answer questions about like someone would ask a question, I would copy and paste it into the title of the video, make the video, post the video, reply in the comments of the video in like under an hour. And I was like, so proud of myself. It was like a game. And then I was manning the Lifter LMS sales chat. You’re like, Hey, how about like a commission sales basis. And I’m like, sure. So I started selling Lifter products in the chat, answering questions, fuels that to fuel my experts program where I was doing like copy and paste content entry, site migrations, quality checking on websites was doing those things. In addition to doing things in Lifter side by side. And so I was like afraid of okay, I’m doing content entry. I’m afraid if I don’t grow my career, like I could do copywriting, I can do. This and that, if I don’t grow though, in this world where growth is happening so fast, how am I going to get to the next level? So I’m always focused on trying to learn something new and it’s like a problematic pattern, but it’s also like helpful, but it’s also problematic. It’s I don’t know. Yeah, so I’m always growing of I know, caught writing. Let’s learn how to build sites, let’s learn how to like just build sites from scratch. Let’s learn it, learn how to do consulting, troubleshooting errors, developing code and the billion things that are in between. Just learning new things and trying new things all the time. It was all out of fear. And so then I’m like, how am I going to live a life that I’m not really afraid of? It’s I got to lean into my true, like passion and authenticity and whatever. I don’t know what any of that means, but I’m trying to figure it out. And so figuring it out through creating things in the world. So that’s how I got from like where I’m at to where I’m at now, like out of fear. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. One of the things that really impresses me about you that I noticed very early in your career is your ability to work with human beings, because in the online business world, there’s all, there’s this myth of like money coming out of the laptop, you like set something up and money flows into your bank account or whatever. There’s like hardware, software, and then what I call wetware, which is the human beings. There’s still human beings involved in this process. And there’s clients that want things done. There’s software users that have real feelings, emotions, wants, goals, needs, and so on. Like selling and is like a very human thing. Like when you’re talking to people during a sales process, you naturally, Were a natural at talking to all different types of people from all kinds of different backgrounds with all kinds of different needs Where do you think that skill comes from and where do you? What are your thoughts around the human part of online business? Will Middleton: Yeah, I always think about humans. I can’t stop thinking about humans like all the time. I like your term wet where but where’s the human part? That’s what I would say if I like peed my pants during a client meeting. But I think where I God so I was always trying to read people as a kid and figure out like, if I could, I was like always seeking validation because I’m like, Oh, the adult, I was like a only child. And so I’m like, always looking for attention of adults. All the people I hung out with were adults, but I was a kid and I wasn’t an adult. So I was like, they were writing shopping lists and I would see they’re writing a list and I didn’t know how to write or what words were, but I was like, take a, took a pen and was like forming lists, just mimicking what other people were doing. That’s always what I’ve been doing, where I’m like, I see something, I want someone I like, and I go try to figure out how they do what they do. And so in that process, when people ask questions, I have this idea of what’s going on in their brain. That’s like mostly wrong, but I’m like, what. What would be the perspective of this person asking this question as the best response they could get? So maybe a video, like in the Facebook group, people go to the Facebook group because they don’t want to read the documentation. And we’re the code, right? They’re clearly in a place where their, whatever solution they were looking for didn’t answer their question even though it might have answered the question if they looked closer. What I’ll then do is create a piece of content basically exactly answering their question exactly where they’re at. Instead of being like, oh, we’ll go cite this material elsewhere because you haven’t done enough work into this. But I’ll try to meet people where they’re at. And so with that idea of meeting people with her at mentally, that’s where I got into that idea of trying to connect with people and trying to really understand what people’s problems are in addition to also like secretly manipulating myself and other people in negative ways. But that’s what I’m working on now. And like figuring out how I can like actually be authentic, actually have fun without trying to dress a certain way or act a certain way or speak a certain way to make somebody else think something specific of me, because it also develops that problem too. Like imposter syndrome with online course creation is do I really have the expertise to put this out there? Do I really? Because I go into that right to yes, last night where I’m like making this membership is this really high quality enough? Does this really feel good enough? But it really feels good to me. And so what I’m doing is basically making content to answer other people’s questions directly. In addition to making content to answer my own questions regarding getting more social media engagement or whatever problem I’m working on. So that’s how I try to meet people where they’re at. And also use the telepathy to try to read the Chris Badgett: universe. All right. I’ll ask you one of the most popular questions that people come to this podcast for whether they’re building websites for clients or they’re building courses, coaching programs, memberships. A lot of people want to know how to get more clients. One of the things I’ve noticed with you, we have a thing called the lifter LMS experts program. Will’s on there with a bunch of other people as well. You can find them at WP course guide. com by the way, if you want to reach out to him, but. Some people in the experts program tend to generate a lot more client lead flow and whether it’s the experts program or anywhere on the internet, what have you learned in terms of how to get more. Clients, how can people get more clients? What have you thought about what you do that actually generates a client, a lead, and then ultimately a sale? It’s two step process. Will Middleton: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. It’s like the answer to the last question is the meeting people where they’re at is I think a lot of business owners don’t try to meet people where they’re at. I think they try to make people come to them, especially when they’re starting out, that can be a huge, complicated thing because you don’t even have the identity or thesis for what your business is going to be in the longterm figured out, or maybe you already have. do have it figured out and it’s been working for you for years, but now it’s no longer working and it’s time to pivot the business model to start like producing milk chocolate because online courses are declining and milk chocolate is gaining. It’s just cause you’re looking at like the online course industry inclining every year is like a good reason to get into it. There’s like a lot of other people who are doing that. A lot of other people at different experience levels who are doing that. And WordPress as a whole is interesting because it’s like. software that anyone can use to make website. You don’t necessarily need to know how to code. So it’s just lowering the barrier to entry like Lifter LMS and all the plugins of the WordPress ecosystem that are free like Lifter LMS is you can just get those plugins, put them on your website and start to build something that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to build without like higher levels of experience. And sure you could take a computer science course and learn to code. It’s ah, that’s going to take you like three years. It’s taken me about eight so far and it’s still like amateur, not done, but like However long it takes you to learn things, you’re gonna have to go through some kind of learning journey. And the more you can compress that learning journey for people, even though there’s already content on the internet that’s out there that can answer their questions probably more concisely and better than you can, but that’s okay because you can also answer the content and put it out there. And whether you’re creating a course or whether you’re, like, being an expert trying to get more clients, It’s the same thing about meeting people where they’re at and trying to answer their, the questions they have. If you’re a developer who likes to build your own plugins from scratch, but most of the demand for projects is like, Hey, I just need this small customization. I just need a little PHP snippet or something. I’m not looking for a whole custom job, I’m not looking to get into a three or 5, job. I’m just looking for like really relatively basic thing and a plugin that’s going to be easy to edit. And WordPress is becoming more easy to edit. By more people. The more that happens and the more you can ride the wave of like really meeting people where they’re at instead of just trying to be where you’re at. Your solution. Chris Badgett: Yeah, that makes sense. Part of your journey that I’ve found fascinating is just your relationship with technology. So what I mean is you mentioned earlier you were making content about Elementor and I’ve seen you, get into cadence. I’ve seen you get into full site editing. Lifter rolled out a new theme, full site editing theme called Skypilot. And you really mastered that. Development houses, all its tools and tooling. And there’s some of, for some folks that can be overwhelming. Like it’s a moving target and tools are changing. What the market wants is changing. But you seem to just do dance with the tools and just go with the flow. What is your approach to. Technology tools in a way that doesn’t create overwhelm. And I’m sure you do get overwhelmed sometimes about whatever, learning something, but you tend to evolve with the market and just keep upgrading yourself and trying different things and using what works best for you. How do you do that? Will Middleton: Yeah. So I think Kurt, who’s not on this call, but is on a bunch of other calls will completely agree with this. And I’m going to. I’m going to put words in his mouth in this situation because I’m confident this would also be his answer. And also your answer, right? Is you just, I go, maybe I go into things I’d like. It’s have you seen those game shows where there’s like pad, it’s like a Ninja warrior, American Ninja warrior, or, but like the ones where the props are moving and stuff, some people just completely eat it. And some people like gracefully move through it, but nobody could gracefully move through it the first time. Like the first time to go through an American Ninja warrior course is to go like smash your face in. on the second jump into the little course is or to practice slowly over time. I’m not really a fan of practicing slowly over time. I’d rather just get into the Ninja Warrior stuff and just work on each individual skill until I could get it. And so it’s like going into those obstacle game show courses where you get knocked down, you build a course site, nobody shows up, you, you like try to generate an interest list and nobody’s interested, but it’s it’s free. I’m making a free program. All my content is free on the internet and nobody cares. That’s like getting hit. with a some moving piece of plastic and falling into a bucket of water it like feels terrible and you don’t want to get back up again you don’t want to try again because you just got humiliated and physically hurt at the same time but it’s like you can you can get up and do it again and Develop an interest in that and then it’s like you will just get to the point where you can do what other people perceive to be complicated in a graceful way. A lot of people in the audience can already do that because if you’re like experienced with life, when he or beyond or whatever, you could your daughter made a course when she was like really small. It doesn’t matter how old you are. If you like have any life experience or have learned to do anything or learn to change in any way. Or have changed in any way. There’s something there that you can do gracefully that other people admire. And that’s like what you would tap into for learning technology, learning marketing, learning photography, and teaching a course about it, learning how to even do instructional design and what to create a course, how to help people learn, like anything can be done gracefully if you just spend enough time with it, I think. Chris Badgett: I’ve watched you go through three distinct kind of. Milestones when it comes to becoming a solopreneur developer. The first stage at the beginning is you learn how to talk about the product, like you were doing pre sales before you were listening to other people on the podcast, talk about what they’re doing and stuff, Will Middleton: and then Chris Badgett: you get into the build phase where you start building websites and this is what makes WordPress and tools like Lifter LMS and everything so awesome is that anybody can build with this, you don’t have to be a developer. But then there’s this third phase where, Oh, I’m 95 percent happy with the website I’ve built, but I need a, I need some custom code, like something custom developed. And you’ve learned how to do that. How have you what were the key things that got you from one phase to the next? Will Middleton: Like I talked about earlier in fear and it’s like going into your warrior course where you’re going to get knocked into the water. But like the fear of not moving becomes so great at some points in time. I think if you’re listening to this podcast right now, you’re either an entrepreneur or you Are considering being an entrepreneur, right? Or you’re trying to maybe incorporate online courses into an existing business. So you’re an intrapreneur at that point, right? You’re doing things that most people aren’t doing as if you’re listening to this. And so in that. There’s automatically this kind of person who likes to improve themselves or improve other things. They’re trying to take action that’s different from what the world is doing in some kind of way, whether it means starting your own business as an entrepreneur or working within someone else’s business in unique ways as an entrepreneur, whatever you are in the spectrum, being here means that you like to upgrade in some way. And the fear of not changing as you’ve experienced in life becomes so great that you need to change. You need to Figure things out in a new way. Like life becomes so painful and the fear becomes so great that you need to change and move on to the next thing. You need to navigate to the next stage. It’s like Angela Brown, someone who has a wonderful LMS cast. Podcast episode here. And she talks about that change of I’m in the middle of my life. I have this skill and I need to learn a bunch of digital skills to upgrade my business. Chris Badgett: She became a builder. She learned how to put the site together by watching videos. Will Middleton: Yeah. And it’s there’s that kind of personality that I think people watching this. People watching other episodes, reading case studies can tell that everyone in the community has this kind of idea that they’re trying to affect the world in some way. That requires just sometimes leveling up or changing what you do entirely. Chris Badgett: Yeah, going on a quest. And sometimes you don’t have to become the developer too. You don’t have to learn how to write code you can hire somebody like will at wpcourseguide. com but at least getting Like at least learning some of the basics of hey, how do websites work and what? What is the plugin and what is the theme and all this stuff? If knowledge is power, right? Yeah. Will Middleton: Yeah. And so get this, I have all this expertise and I’m a genius, but if you know how to open the WordPress editor and go to the WP admin and log in, things that some WordPress users don’t know how to do seriously, I’ve been on a lot of calls lately where I’m like, how do you log into WordPress? Is it a WordPress. com or WordPress? Free open source software on a hosting company. Some people don’t know the answer to that question. If you don’t know the answer, that’s okay. But they’re like, I don’t know. I log into my hosting or and I click log in, it just sends me and it’s we don’t know what the WP admin is like. No. And maybe you’ve logged into WordPress just once and understand the WP admin because you’re interested in the open source software piece of it. But even now that’s open source hosting companies still just give you auto log in links. Even if you use those links, or have used the links, and you learn that there’s a WordPress admin, you can make a video and tell people, Hey, here’s how you log into WordPress. It’s different than Squarespace. And guess what happens when you back, log into the back end of WordPress? There’s more customization. You can do all these plugins. Isn’t this crazy? There’s a lot of people here contributing to them. You know so much that you can communicate. gracefully then you need to make content about it. That’s a much, as much knowledge as you need to make content about how to build things in WordPress. So I always had this perception that like I needed to be a developer or I needed to be a better salesperson or a better marketer or a better customer success for something. I just needed to upgrade my game in some way in order to be good enough. But I think with what you do know now, you are definitely good enough, even though it doesn’t feel like it. And trust me, I’ve been not feeling good enough for eight years. from day one. I’m like, I don’t know enough. And now it’s day later. It’s sometime in the future. And I’m like, I still don’t know enough. And I know that in the future, I’m going to feel the same way. So I’m like, just make the content with the knowledge you have today. And don’t be ashamed of clicking the publish button. Chris Badgett: One of the things that. I’ve seen you do well. And this goes back to working with human beings. One of the challenges of let’s say a business owner and a consultant or developer website builder is getting on the same page with communication. Sometimes the client doesn’t have a fully formed idea or maybe they’re. They got some quote, bad advice or like over focusing on this one piece when there’s like a lot more things we have to consider here. What advice do you have to create like a winning relationship between a web developer and a client? But speaking to both sides of the table, what would you tell the aspiring solopreneur developer? And what would you tell? a client to put them at ease about your expertise and being like a trusted advisor in the consulting process. Talk to both those people. Will Middleton: Yeah. I think there’s a level of like where a client comes to you and you clearly know how to do everything they’re asking you to do. And so then you just yeah, of course we could do that. There’s no problem there. It’s only a matter of seconds. Don’t worry about it. And so it’s like way over, and so you’re going to undersell your jobs there though. You’re going to undersell the value. You’re going to undersell the fact that the person came to you with questions. There’s an aspect there that I missed for years about the fact that you’re coming to me with questions, I want to thank you for, and I want to make you feel good about the fact that you came to me for questions. It’s not what are you, did you seriously. Book a 30 minute call with me to ask me about this thing that there’s documentation about or this thing I did a video about that’s don’t do that. I was in that for years where it’s like, Oh, I want to give people the most useful solution possible. And I know what’s best useful for them, but that’s not really true. And so sometimes people will come to you and you will know everything about how to do the project up front, but really taking the time to be intentional with the process is going to unlock a lot of insights with those projects. Maybe everyone in the audience already knows that, but it took me years to figure that out. That’s when customers come to you with jobs that you already know everything to do, I think a more complicated situation is when people come to you with jobs and you’re like I know how to do 30 percent of that. And I speculate about the other 70 percent about that this might be able to be done. And the more tools you learn, the more you learn WordPress, the more you learn more plugins, the more you’ll have in your toolkit to do. to build with the 30 percent might become more like 70%. But in some projects you’ll still have an under unknown degree amount of stuff. You want to figure out it’s complicated emotional experience, but I think presenting it to the client saying Hey, okay, this is what I’m confident on. And this is what I still need to figure out. Going and figuring it out or it, okay. So if going and figuring it out is something that’s going to take too much money, don’t be afraid of a discovery process. I just started doing discovery processes for, With project work lately, not people are doing how they work, but like project work. And it’s cool. It’s cool as hell. I’m like, you know what? Give me one hour, give me two hours of time, give me 150, 300 bucks. We’re going to figure out the scope. These are, I’m going to use this time to figure out what we don’t know now. Chris Badgett: And it’s not fully formed Will Middleton: It’s not fully formed. And people lie about it being fully formed. They’re like, this is where projects get tangled up. They’re like, yes. I know how to use a REST API. I can do this. The REST API doesn’t have the right endpoints. What am I going to do? And so you need to make sure that you’re communicating 100 percent truth. And you might know everything, but maybe then you want to communicate more of like, why did someone come to me with questions and how can I best help them? You might come to you with unknown information and sometimes they’ll come to you and 100 percent of the project, like I have no clue how to do that, but I’m excited to figure it out. And then if you tell them that they might still hire you. But yeah, that’s my opinion on that. Chris Badgett: It’s funny. I love that way you describe that because If you look at, agency websites or solopreneur websites on the internet, everybody knows how to do everything. But the reality is that, it’s usually like, all right, I think I have 60 percent I’m rock solid here. Maybe there’s some unknowns, maybe there’s a new skill I have to learn. Maybe I have to like, Hire an outsourced person to help me fulfill this complete scope. Yeah. What do you think is a healthy what’s it, what would you say is an average healthy percentage that like you should feel super confident with as long as you have the ability to learn and, figure out the pieces. Cause I think some people oversell and what’s more common is people undersell or don’t believe in themselves and their ability. And their resourcefulness. So what is it like, as long as you’ve got like a 50 percent lock on it, you’re probably good. Or is it more like 60 or 80 or, should you probably stay away from projects where you know how to do 10 percent of it? I’m sure that’s an, it depends answer, but what would you say? Will Middleton: Never. Always take every project. I think if you’re looking for projects, if you’re looking for new projects, if you need new, if you don’t really know what your, it depends on where you’re at in your career, really, I don’t think it depends on whether you know a certain percentage of the project. It’s like, where are you at in your career? And like, where are you looking to go next? If you don’t know these things, take everything that comes in the door and figure out how you feel about it. But if you’re like at the point where you’re like, oh, okay, I know what I want to do. I know what’s next for me to develop in my life. And I want to align my money and my personal development with the same thing so that I can build the life I want to, you might be at either stage. You like, I think at different times we’re in either stage, maybe I get married and have a kid and I like now change the part of my life. I’m in dramatically into I’m back in scarcity. Just trying to make money. Like it could be that But I think the percentage of confidence you need is 100 percent confidence that you’re telling the truth and that everybody knows the truth because if you’re a handyman and you’ve had no experience with sinks ever, you don’t, you’ve never opened the bottom of a sink, but you’ve replaced toilets, then it’s you could communicate that to the person be like, look, I have no clue how to operate on a sink. I’ve never installed a garbage disposal, I’ve never cut pipes. I’ve done what’s what I think is easier things. Up to this point, but I’m totally willing to give it a try. This is what it’s going to look like for me to maybe I could figure out sync by watching a YouTube video. Sorry. There’s a siren in the background. Can you hear that? Chris Badgett: It’s not very loud. It’s very faint. I think it’s Will Middleton: going to get louder. That’s okay. I think Chris Badgett: the noise canceling is working. Okay. Will Middleton: Noise canceling technology, the future. Yeah. So if If you’re up front about not knowing how to work on things, but you’re like saying, okay, give me an hour to figure it out. They might go with that. Or you could say I don’t, I’m not going to be able to figure this out until I get into it. So then you’re like but guess what? I’m going to communicate with you. The whole time about where I’m at, what I’m thinking and where we’re out on price. And then if I can’t do it for you, I’m, I’ve got a recommendation of where you can go next. Fiverr. com go back to the Lifter LMS experts page. Maybe you actually do know somebody who might be an upgraded service who could help them. But as long as you’re honest up front, I’ve had people willing to pay me what I thought was a lot of money, like sway way so much money at the time. I was like, it was like 50 bucks an hour. Cause I was like, like a 17 year old kid. I’m like, Oh my gosh. And so then I’m like, 17 year olds are teenagers, not kids, specifically different category. But they, cause I hate it when people call me a kid and now I call everybody a kid. I call people like 70 years old. I’m like, Hey kid. But sorry that’s a rabbit hole. But yeah, I think that people would pay me just to figure it out because they’re like, Oh, this is a bright kid. I want to invest in their future or whatever. And you could be a kid. Like I said, up until you’re about 70 years old. So it doesn’t matter. Yeah. What you know or don’t know as long as other people are honestly communicated about it and you’re like Willing to work together. It’s just what do you feel good about really figuring that out? Chris Badgett: What would you say about niching? I mean for you just based on your journey You ended up in this e learning niche and you were there for a very long time and you’re still there And some people who want to become web developers, they’re like, I don’t really have a niche. I like to write code or I like to build websites how, and it’s not like you don’t have any interests outside of e learning and you’ve built stuff outside of e learning, but you’ve done a lot in the e learning industry. How much of that. Just niche focus, do you think contributes to your success as a builder? Will Middleton: I don’t know. I don’t have any clue at all. Actually. The I was, I don’t, I really don’t know. It’s like I was answering the questions that were in front of me. The people who had their ears open, I talked to them. And so those people are in the flow of Chris Badgett: demand. Will Middleton: In the flow of demand, wherever you are in the flow of demand is where you start. That’s what I think a lot of people don’t go with online courses, entrepreneurship. I didn’t years. It’s I’m always trying to resist it. Okay, how am I going to get to, how am I going to get to Vegas? And how am I going to make a billion dollars? And how am I going to be in cool hotels all the time? It’s no, I’m not there. I’m in Minnesota. And I’m figuring out what I can do with the opportunities in front of me right now. And so that approach led me to a very niche community because we’re at a time in the economy where niche services are popular. It’s very popular with forum questions about very specific questions because AI and all this stuff is becoming better at like generating generic answers that like more specific answers are just becoming higher demand. These terrible videos I made that are outdated from years ago are getting more views than ever because I’m like, I don’t know. It’s very specific and AI is getting so good at being generic with people and it’ll get good at being specific too. So then we’ll have to do something else like being beef farmers, but, like something else to stimulate the economy in a way that robots can’t. But while you have an opportunity to answer questions in front of you in a way that could potentially lead to making money or having an offering, I think you’re good to go. Whether those questions are generic, whether it’s like your grandma asking you how to connect to the internet, and so then you make a YouTube video about how to set up that kind of router, Or like you’re trying to fix the box fan in your room because it has too much lint on the freaking blades. And I don’t know how to take the box fan apart. I’ve looked it up on the internet. There’s no video. So then Will records a video about it, puts it on the internet. No matter where you’re at in your learning journey, fixing a fan, connecting to the internet, or learning very weird, complicated WordPress things, whatever questions people are asking you, answering those will be the path to unlocking your community. Chris Badgett: One last question for the. Agency folks out there for your clients that you’ve worked with long term. What do you see as the keys to like long term client relationship? Will Middleton: Okay. I like this. This is a wonderful question. I think having just an awesome time. That’s what I think it is like the experience matters. Yeah. Experience does matter. But sometimes you don’t have experience. Sometimes you’re going into a space where you’re like, Oh because I think you need this is a fun framework. I like this framework. You need to be able to get jobs done fast. You need to be able to get jobs done cheap or you need to be able to get jobs done with high quality. I think you’ll need two of these three things. I think two of the three things are very important, right? Get a high quality job with a lot of money, high quality job, very fast. Yeah. That’s going to cost a lot of money. But then you get the one that’s a cheap job and it is high quality, but then you sacrifice time. It takes a long time to get that job done. It’s an Angela Brown story where you learn it over the course of eight years or like my story, it took a long time. Or you could get, what’s the third permutation? Time and quality is expensive quality and time is quality and cheap is longterm. What is cheap and quality. Okay. No cheap in time. If you get it, if you get it fast and cheap, it’ll be low quality. Yeah, if I was drawing this on an iPad, this would be so much easier. But yeah yeah so we need some combination of those skills to be able to offer services, but you might not have. Quality, you might have time because I show up to my calls on time. I’m available tomorrow. I’m available today, but very fast, very cheap, but I have no clue what I’m doing and you can still make it. I’ve had clients. I still have clients. I talked to today at 150 an hour rates that I was talking to at 30 an hour. Like I, most of my money comes from clients on repeat. And that’s scary. But it’s good. And so it’s like the more you can optimize the honesty and what you can help people with, and you’re continuing growing, no matter where you’re at in your journey, building products, starting from nothing, you will make it to where you want to be by just focusing, or you won’t make it to where you want to be by not focusing on it. Chris Badgett: I like that. And over time, you build trust because you’re honest. The experience of working with you is great. They know that when you’re like, I’m 80 percent on this one, but I got to figure this 20 percent out. They learn to trust that, that your ability to figure it out. And That’s awesome. This has been a great chat, Will. I really appreciate it. You can reach out to Will at WPCourseGuide. com. Do you have any other final words for the people or other ways they can connect with you? Will Middleton: I think the way you said to connect with me is the perfect way to connect with me. I think that if you’re listening to this podcast, then you know the moment to start is now. Chris Badgett: Thank you for coming on the show. We’ll have to do another update in another eight years and see what you’re doing. Cause like I said, you just have a, you’ve demonstrated tremendous growth and just continuous improvement and just you’re basically like a learning machine and like a problem solving guy that does great work with people. So it’s great to be with you on the journey. Thanks for coming on the show. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Create a One Person eLearning Web Developer Business in Your Twenties appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Christian Taylor from Craylor Academy discuss his path to YouTube, which began as a pastime when he was roughly ten years old. Christian describes his present arrangement as a primarily single creator who receives help from two independent contractors, a creative director and a video editor. He discuss about Monetizing YouTube channel with online courses. Christian methods of monetizing YouTube are sponsorships, affiliate links, and ad money. In addition, he is investigating course development; he started a free course to establish his platform and is thinking about offering paid courses in the future. But because courses must be updated frequently, particularly with regard to technology-based material, he finds the process more difficult. The discussion then turns to why Christian decided to build his course platform with WordPress and LifterLMS rather than hosted SaaS options like Teachable or Kajabi. Christian appreciates WordPress’s flexibility and control, particularly with relation to price, data ownership, and independence from a single provider. He likes that WordPress is open-source, so he can move his content around with ease if needed and stay independent of possible platform changes or shutdowns. 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 Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to 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 Christian Taylor. He’s a YouTuber. You can find him at Craylor made on YouTube. He’s also a course creator, which you can find his work over there at Craylor dot Academy. Welcome to the show, Christian. Christian Taylor: Thanks for having me, Chris. Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to talk to you because you make such good videos, your YouTube channel successful, I think with almost 50, 000 subscribers, something like that. Some of your I was looking at some of your most popular videos that have over 400, 000 views, and I love how engaging your content is. It was fun to run across you at a WordCamp for the first time, but I’m excited to get into it. A lot of course creators either come out of YouTube. Or they want to get into YouTube because they know they want to do some content marketing that way, maybe generate other streams of income, but let’s just start at a high level. You’re a YouTuber first and foremost, I think you probably categorize yourself as a creator. Tell us about that moment in time and life 10 years ago or whenever it was. Where you decided I want to be a YouTuber. I have kids like the most, the things people want to be when they grow up as a YouTuber, you’re doing it successfully. What was the genesis of that for you? Christian Taylor: Yeah, that’s a great question. So creating videos has always been a hobby for me, a passion from Pretty much about 10 years old, I think around then is when I started playing around with video and it was really about learning to edit. When I started, I was fascinated by the idea of using windows movie maker. My parents had this big, like chunky desktop super low power. But it had windows movie maker on it. And I remember there was one day I went to the library, checked out a book, and I had this little Kodak point and shoot, and I took pictures of all the pages. And made a slideshow of the book in windows movie maker and looking back on it. It’s hilarious. It’s like the pages were reflecting the flash. So you couldn’t even see what was on the page really. And like, why would you photograph a book like that and make a slideshow? But for me, it was just capturing content and having something to edit in windows movie maker and learning about that process. And then I was hooked. I remember one year for Christmas, I got an iPod Nano and it was one of the few that had a camera on it, terrible quality. It must’ve been probably 480 P it could record about five minutes of video at once before you’d have to copy it, delete it, start over. I made it work. I’d record for five minutes, copy it. Record another five minutes. And I know at the time it was really about me learning editing. I started getting into a little bit of motion graphics, text just learning how the software’s all worked. And then as I started watching other creators on YouTube really inspired me. Probably when I was like 12, 13 years old just being like, Hey, I want to do what they’re doing. So YouTube has been a hobby for me most of my life, but. I don’t know that I expected it to become a full time job. It was more just a passion, something I love doing. And right about the time I graduated high school, that’s when it coincidentally became a full time job. So I was very fortunate with the timing. YouTube is all I know since I’ve been doing it for over half of my life. So for context, I’m 22 years old. If that gives you an idea of like timeframe and all that, but yeah, that’s that’s what got me started. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You sound like Mr. Beast a little bit, like it’s, you’ve been doing it so long. It’s half your life started young. That’s incredible. I’m like you in the sense that I was always into video cameras and stuff. I even used to carry my dad’s VHS, big shoe box, size camcorder around, and then the cameras got better and smaller. And it’s amazing the tools that people have today, but sometimes video just calls people. And I don’t know why that is, but I had that same calling. At a really young age. We’ll get more into like how you evolved, but let’s just give people, you start a snapshot of where you are now. You started at 12, you’re 22. Now it’s been 10 years. What does your like YouTube business look like? Are you like a solopreneur? Do you have people that help? How do you monetize and have this career? What’s the current state today? Christian Taylor: Yeah. So I’m mostly a solopreneur. I do have two freelancers that helped me. I’ve got an editor and that’s been a more recent addition, but love not having to edit my content anymore, which is a little ironic because I know I just said I started with a passion for editing, but we can drill into that later if you want. But freelance editor. I’ve also got a creative director that helps part-time with ideation, brainstorming, just working with the packaging of videos, the title, the thumbnail. He also makes the thumbnails as well. But I would still consider myself mostly a solo creator. And as far as monetization there’s, a couple of different ways I do that through YouTube. Obviously I think most people know about the YouTube ads that play before you watch a video, the 15 second ads, or now Google is getting more and more annoying and they’ll play two ads back to back before content starts, but that’s one revenue stream. And YouTube pays creators a 55 percent cut of that ad revenue. So that one’s nice. It’s not very reliable. It’s all over the place, but it’s nice in that you don’t really have to do anything but get views and YouTube just takes care of the rest. So that’s one revenue stream. Another one for me is affiliate links. So someone watches the video, they like what I talk about. They buy the product. I get a commission. I, think most of your audience would know what affiliate links are, but I always explain it when people ask how I monetize, cause some people aren’t familiar with the term, but YouTube ads, affiliate links, the third would be sponsorships. So companies just. Working with me directly saying, Hey, we want to promote our product. We have a message we want to get out and paying for either an ad slot in the middle of a video where I read the ad or collaborating on a full dedicated video. So that’s how I’ve monetized YouTube. I am in the middle of working on diversifying a bit. So for me, I think that’s getting more into courses. I just launched a free course, but that’s a way to build my course website, start getting a bit more comfortable with it. And hopefully a year down the road, two years down the road, max, I start watching some paid courses and. Growing some revenue there as well. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. We interviewed on this podcast many years ago. It’s one of my favorite episodes with Sean Cannell. Is that how you say? Yeah. Christian Taylor: Oh, wow. Yeah. You’ve interviewed Sean. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Oh, that’s Christian Taylor: incredible. Chris Badgett: He’s a great guy. And I think he does a good job of YouTube channel and I should say channels cause he has a couple and. He had has a signature course. I think he calls it the creator Academy or something like that. And I can’t remember. But it’s often, I’ve wondered why. I know a lot of YouTubers do courses, but why do you think it’s like, how do you feel about course creation? Versus making a video for the channel. Like, how does that sit with you? Does it feel a lot harder? Is it, Hey, this is old hat. I know how to make videos or what’s your experience there. Christian Taylor: Yeah, for me, it feels a lot harder. I’ve had a love hate relationship with the idea of making courses. In fact, while back, I think it was 2021. I decided, okay, I’m going to launch a course because this is the next thing to do. And I don’t think I really wanted to launch a course, but I just felt this pressure of like, all right I’m doing everything I can on YouTube. I need to diversify. If I want to scale my business further, I need to launch another product. So I reluctantly launched a course and to push myself or motivate myself, I made maybe a quarter of the content. And published it and started selling the course and did that model of Hey, I expect it to be done in a month or two. You can buy it at a cheaper price right now, if you’re willing to wait, like you already unlock access to some of the content, all of it’s coming in two months. And then I just got super overwhelmed by having to deliver on that promise. So in the end, I just refunded everyone and said, nevermind sorry, I ever brought it up. I’m not launching a course. And so I think for me, The idea of creating a course is a little bit scary because of the obligation to support it long term. So any course that I would make would likely be based on software like WordPress doing a tutorial. And I think If I make a YouTube video, I put the video out and it’s done. And if someone watches a tutorial on WordPress four years later, they’re going to understand there might be things about this tutorial that are outdated. Some of the screens may not look the same. It may be completely irrelevant altogether. If I make a course on WordPress, especially if I’m selling it, I then feel like I’m on the hook because courses have that lifetime access model, most of them, of Creating this monster that I have to keep updating every year I have to re record all the videos because the UI changes or something changes. So I’m a little, I’m really interested in like the subscription model for software based courses, because I think that might be a little bit more fair on the compensation side, but yeah, long story short, I definitely find creating courses more difficult than a YouTube video. Chris Badgett: That makes sense. And because your YouTube videos are so polished and highly produced, I could feel the pressure that is for making like a 20 lesson course or whatever. I love that you’ve launched a free course to get started using a free course to build an email list. I think particularly for a YouTuber to get the email address and really know who their people are. It’s been one of the largest drivers for us at Lifter LMS. We have a quick start course on the Lifter LMS Academy. It’s free. I ran into the same problems that you did where the interface changes, WordPress changes. So I’ve reshotted about five times over the past 10 years. But I take the pressure off in the sense that I’m just showing you the 5 percent of the tool to get the most value and keep it really beginner focused. And lately I actually, the last time we reshot it, I actually got some help from the team to record different lessons and stuff. So it wasn’t as much on me, but that is definitely a challenge with technology courses because things change and courses go out of the date. However, if you look on somewhere like Udemy, some of the top selling things over there about how to use technology. So people people do figure it out, but it is a, you’re right. A big commitment. Tell me about the decision. YouTubers in general, aren’t necessarily like. WordPress people, even though it powers 42 percent of the internet or whatever, what draws you to WordPress and Lifter LMS to, publish your course, as opposed to something like Kajabi or Teachable. I see a lot of YouTubers using things like Teachable. Particularly in the technology niche, if you’re good at technology WordPress gives you a lot more customizability and power and stuff. But like, why did you choose WordPress over a hosted SaaS solution for courses? Christian Taylor: Yeah, there’s a couple of reasons for that. One would be I make a lot of content on WordPress. So I, wanted to practice what I preach. I did think about using Kajabi or some of those other hosted tools, but I thought I, I just really want to practice what I preach here and show my audience that I’m using WordPress. And I guess if we step back and ask. How did I even get into WordPress over other website builders? I think it’s, always been a cost thing since I started exploring technology when I was young, like 10, 11. I think I was like 11 when I got my first laptop and. Just started tinkering online with Wix and Squarespace and Weebly, just all these website builders. Cause I, I always thought that was interesting. But the power that you can unlock with WordPress for a much lower cost than Other platforms. That was a big thing initially for me. So that sort of got me on the train of being used to using WordPress to build all my sites. And then when I was evaluating that decision for where to host my course of course Kajabi is expensive. So that was definitely part of it. I look at the pricing table and cry every time, but I think it was more about In recent years, I’ve started to have some issues with Google, specifically the AdSense side of things on my channel. And just really get that sense of, I, I don’t want to be tied to a particular company more than I have to. Like I, I hate being reliant on YouTube and Google for the core of my business. And I just don’t want some SAS company that could one go out of business abruptly say Hey we got acquired. We’re sun setting in three months. Your decision is either to be part of our new parent company. Like maybe there’s a pricing change there or something, or get out migrate everything, have fun. See you later. So that, that’s a concern. The other concern, which to be honest, is not really a concern for me, but it’s still a core principle I’m passionate about is not having a company be able to say Hey, we don’t like you. We don’t like your content. We’re kicking you off of the platform. So WordPress being open source really gave me that confidence that the worst thing that could happen with the second example is, One web host says, Hey, we don’t like you or Hey, we’re shutting down. And to me, it’s much easier to migrate a WordPress site to a different host than it is rebuild my course on some new platform. So I think just having the technical flexibility, the lower cost and that full peace of mind that I have a lot more control over. My data, my site, my platform, those all kind of led me to using WordPress and LifterLMS. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s go back to earlier in your story as you’re turning 18 or graduating high school or whatever, that age. There’s a lot of pressure on young folks to go to college and you went full time YouTuber and pulled it off. What was that time period? Like in terms of having the confidence to move forward and finances or at least having some signal that, Hey, this is working, I can afford to live and stuff like that. Christian Taylor: Yeah. So you’re right. I definitely felt that pressure to go to college. I think most people do. And honestly, I think even the past two or three years, it’s becoming cool to some degree to not go to college. More people are starting to speak out about that idea. But even when I graduated high school, it was that assumption of. Like you have to go to college if you’re going to be successful in life. And I always knew I didn’t want to go to college. I tinkered with the idea. I had this like plan B in my head. If I go to college, I’ll probably go for computer science. Cause I was also interested in becoming a developer at the time. So I, just. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew I didn’t want to go to college. So my parents were very generous. They let my brother live at home free when he was going to college for four years. And they told me, Hey, you can live at home for free for the same four years. As long as you’re being productive, like you’ve got to be. Working, doing something, as long as we can see that you’re being productive and doing something to further your career, we’ll give you that same opportunity. So I looked at it as, this is great. I have four years that I can not feel the pressure of overhead. I don’t have high school anymore, so there’s no homework. That’s not tying me down. I can really hit the gas and go full speed ahead on YouTube. I was pretty confident that within those four years, I could make it full time. Cause right when I graduated, it was making just enough to be a decent part time side hustle. I guess if someone was working a fast food job at that time and life, like for me, it was exceeding that. So it was like, okay this is. Not enough to be like a full time serious career yet, but more than I’d make it a fast food job, so I can’t complain. And really, it was within that first year that things Skyrocketed significantly. And actually I, was able to buy my house and the, room I’m in now is technically the master bedroom, but for me, it’s like my studio. I was able to do that two years into that four year period. So it was a pretty quick progression of. Seeing things take off with revenue, just being able to save a ton of money for a down payment, start investing as a result of not having that overhead. And yeah I, guess I just had the no plan B, no turning back mentality over that period. Chris Badgett: I love that. And that’s such a great gift your parents gave you. And it’s the same thing as if a parent is going to pay for college. Yeah. If they provide the space for you to develop as an entrepreneur, as a creator for literally less money it’s, cool, but it’s like a, it’s a mindset change on what careers are and how they work. And obviously the. The world is changing and opportunities are different and stuff like that. What going from doing better than fast food income or around their side hustle style. Can you pinpoint like one video or one strategy, or I think they probably a lot of things started to snowball at once, but what really helped you go from side hustle to homeowner? Christian Taylor: Yeah, there were a couple of things there. One was, if you look at my channel, you’ll see. In the very early days, I was making whatever I wanted. So it, at the time it was a lot of what I thought were comedy sketches. I go back now and I’m like what, is this? But at the time I was like, Oh, this is hilarious. I’m a comedian. Then I started to solidify my interest in tech, but it was. Consumer tech hardware. So I wanted to be the next Marquez Brownlee. That was my dream as a teenager was doing the iPhone reviews, the accessories, getting all the tech before it comes out with the press embargoes and all that. And I started to figure out somewhere along the line that software content is a lot more profitable. And I didn’t just pivot because it was profitable. It was also something I was interested in. But I, at one point, I wanna say 2017, I experimented and made a video on the ble, the best place to buy a domain name, and that became the video that really took off as far as views and revenue to get me to that sort of part-time better than fast food income. So I started to clue in that. Okay. Software is that’s what’s profitable. I can get views that way. Why am I spending all this money buying technology to review it? And I’m not making any money doing that. It’s way more competitive. Let me go all in on the software. So that was 2019 when I made that pivot and all of 2019, I started making a bunch of comparison videos on domain registrars, web hosting. WordPress themes, just all sorts of different things. And I remember, I think it was about October, 2019, maybe a little earlier, maybe September, 2019, I got an email from a subscriber and he said, Hey, love your content. Have you ever thought of making a VPN comparison video? And I replied to him, I was probably like way too open and honest at the time. Cause I just told him everything I was thinking. I was like, Hey, thanks for reaching out. That’s a great idea. Actually. I have thought of that. I’m interested in VPNs, but it’s not really my niche. I don’t do cybersecurity content, so I’m not going to make the video. Chris Badgett: And by the way, this is the top performing video on his channel. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So Christian Taylor: don’t know that I would. Say it like that today, but I was just like super direct. So he replies and he goes, okay, yeah, like I completely understand where you’re coming from. My brother has a YouTube channel and his niche was skateboarding. And one time he made a video that was completely unrelated to skateboarding and it was the top performing video on his channel. I don’t know. I just think you should reconsider. And I don’t know why I listened to this guy, but something in me was like, huh? Okay. Yeah. Maybe I should make a VPN comparison. And one of my struggles being an entrepreneur is I’m. I’m a visionary person to where I can sell myself on just about any idea. And then I lose that pulse of, is this objectively a good idea or a bad idea? Like I can get excited about anything. So I convinced myself it was a good idea. Then it was like, yeah I’m, excited about this. I’m going to make the video. So I made it, I released it November, 2019. And it already started doing very well over the next three months. So I already had considered it a success, but then when COVID happened, lockdowns hit March, 2020. The video absolutely blew up and I imagine it was just everyone starting to work from home. People thinking, Oh, I need a VPN and searching for it. I’m still to this day, scratching my head, trying to figure out like, why did it blow up then what happened? Cause spoiler alert, the VPN comparison content is not really performing anymore. So I’m still like, You know what happened? Why did it do well in that period? I don’t really know. But that one video alone is, or was responsible for the majority of my financial success over that two year period of being able to invest save a down payment, just really get myself in that full-time income position. Chris Badgett: A couple of quick questions on that. How long did it take you to go from idea to video published for the VPN video? Christian Taylor: Probably about four weeks. Cause I, had decided I was going to make the video in September and I think I had a couple of videos I was already working on ahead of that. So I think I spent about a week reaching VPN companies, asking if they would provide test accounts allowed about a week for them all to get back to me. And then probably two weeks of testing the VPNs, collecting data, speed tests, all that and then about a week for the actual video production and turn around. Chris Badgett: Is that like an average for one of your videos, like about four weeks to go through that process or what’s it like now for. Idea to publish. Christian Taylor: Now it’s much more organized. So my, creative director and I will have monthly meetings where we plan out four videos and my content calendar is always two to three months ahead. So right after we have that meeting, it’ll be three months ahead. And then I make a month’s worth of content. It starts to get down to 2 months, and then we meet again at the top of the next month, and then it’s 3 months out. As far as the actual ideation, knowing what content we’re making next, those are scheduled 3 months out. As far as Like actually starting on a video, sometimes I might start some of the research four to six weeks out if it’s some kind of comparison where I really need to give it time to evaluate a product, or if it’s a topic that I’m already very familiar with, it doesn’t really require testing or research ahead of time. Sometimes I’m scripting the video 2 days before I shoot it. And we shoot videos two weeks before they come out. So I guess that would be anywhere from two weeks to six weeks, as far as pre production time. Chris Badgett: Quick question there. Do you use a teleprompter or do you have like bullet points that you riff off of for the script or how do you do that part? Christian Taylor: Very chaotic. I do not use a teleprompter, I used to, but I wanted to get away from that. Because I could always tell you can see yourself looking at the camera and your eyes are like bouncing around it. And I just was never fully happy with how that looked. So I got away from that, but I’m a very long winded person. And when I script my content. No matter how much I try to just stick to basic bullet points, I write full sentences. So I end up writing a word for word script, and then I treat it like bullet points. I’ll just like glance down at my script, look at the next few sections. You’re like, okay, that’s what I’m going to say. And then look at the camera and do that section. Most of the time I end up sticking to the script pretty closely, but I also try to remind myself, this is just a guide. I don’t have to follow this word for word because sometimes I’ll stress out about, did I say that right? Did I get the right word? And unless I’m saying something that would make the technical terminology inaccurate, would like somehow make the statement untrue I, try to give myself that flexibility and say, I don’t have to stick to it. Word for word. Chris Badgett: That’s a pro tip right there, where correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re like, you have your script outline, you do a sentence or a paragraph or a segment and then you look down. And then you look back, re engage for the next section. And then you just edit that stuff out in the post production and it’s, it makes a great video and you maintain the eye contact or attention with all that editing, but you don’t have to like edit as you go. Christian Taylor: Absolutely. Yeah. And one of the biggest tips that I can give that’s worked for me is I will always record something in sections until I’m happy with it, And I at least make sure that the first sentence I say is the same every time. So I don’t edit my videos anymore, but when I did edit, it was really easy for me to quickly go through that footage and I would just go to the last time that I say something. So I would, I just keep re recording a section until I’m happy. The last one I know is the one that I’m happy with. Cause that’s the one where I just stopped and moved on to the next one. So if I’m saying like next let’s talk about pricing. If that’s the top of a section and I record several paragraphs after that, I’ll just skip in my timeline when I’m editing till I stopped hearing next let’s, talk about pricing and then I know, okay, that’s the one delete everything before it then I’m not like watching six different takes going. Okay. When do I need to make this cut? It’s just a lot more evident and speeds up the A roll edit quite a bit. Chris Badgett: Just for inspiration and just reality check. How many videos did you make approximately before the VPN video until you struck pay dirt or really had a, takeoff success? Oh, Christian Taylor: how many years? How much? Yeah. So that was 2019. I started my channel in. I would say the first probably three years of my channel, it was a very loose hobby. Like I had no upload schedule. So I’m not sure if I’d really count that time. Cause I was still just figuring out if that’s something I wanted to do more. So if you factor out those three years, that would be, what is that 2014 Yeah, so like 2014 to 2019, that five year period of just making consistent content for most of that five years, I was uploading once a week, definitely from 2019. And now I’ve been uploading just about weekly with a couple exceptions. So it was probably four to five years and I would guess. At least 300 videos that I made before I really started to see that traction. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Awesome. Tell us about your audience or like your avatar, your ideal learner or subscriber. What are they like? Who are you making these videos for? Christian Taylor: That’s been a, an ongoing debate for quite some time, but I believe from the polls I’ve run and the people in my audience I’ve talked to, I’ve It seems to be a mix of both small business owners and tech enthusiasts, which is a weird mix, but half of it is these small business owners, like freelancers, local think like bakeries, landscapers business owners that. Maybe don’t have the resources to hire someone to build their website or they’re like, I need a custom email. I don’t really know what to do. They find my content and they learn about how to build their website, how to get a custom email. The tools that they should be using, and they may not necessarily be that passionate about tech or even really care about tech. It’s almost a necessity to them of, I have to do this DIY because I can’t afford to hire someone right now. So that’s probably half of the audience. The other half would be tech enthusiasts that just like geeking out about comparing different tools. And it’s been interesting for me to capture both of those audiences where both the small business owner can walk away from a web hosting comparison and say, thank you so much. Like you, you really helped break it down for me. I feel good about the web hosts that I chose because of your video and the tech enthusiasts can go I think they can see like the, internal geekery that I have. So they know that even if I maybe don’t go super in depth on a particular section of the video that like, maybe they would go a little deeper on. They still respect my opinion. They think it’s interesting to know what I think about different products and services. I’d guess that’s the core of my audience and what my avatars look like, but I know it’s two very different crowds. Chris Badgett: How do you make a good comparison video? I was impressed when you said earlier, like with the VPNs, you did a bunch of research and looked at things, but if you’re comparing like WordPress plugins or themes or hosting companies or domain name registrars, What’s the key to making good comparison content? Cause a lot of people go to YouTube to be like, help me figure out which tool I’m, solution aware. And then there’s these products. How do I pick one? How do you make good content in a comparison? Christian Taylor: My ideology has always been approach it with a consumer first mindset. There’s way too much comparison content that treats it like a spec sheet. It’s just, Oh, we went, yeah, we went to the pricing table and this company gives you this much storage. And this company gives you this much and blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s like anyone can go to the landing page and make those comparisons. So I don’t find that very useful. My mindset has been really put myself in the shoes of the consumer. And that often includes. The setup process of a tool. So what are they going to experience from day one? The actual usage of the tool customer service. That’s a big one that I’m passionate about as well is when I’m testing a web host, I’ll act dumb and reach out to their customer service and be like, how do I migrate my site? Or like, how do I connect my domain? And then they’ll Oh, point it to our name servers. Oh, what is a name server? I don’t know these terms. So just really trying to imagine what would the average user be doing here and what experience would they have? And there could be a case where a host has really poor responses with customer support. They’re just not helpful at all. And for me, that may not be an issue because I’m relatively tech savvy, so I could be like, Hey, I know what they mean. I know what they’re trying to say. Or I don’t even need their help to begin with because I’m pretty self sufficient with going in the panel, doing what I need to. I can also be objective and see the average consumer would be really frustrated. They would be confused. They would be. At the point of wanting a refund, just being like, I I don’t understand, like they’re, not being any help. I’m so lost. So by really putting myself in the shoes of the consumer, that’s helpful. The other thing I would say is I’ve tried to cut out. Any part of the comparison that is redundant as far as features. So if every web host has 99. 9 percent uptime, I’m not going to waste time being like all naming out five different web hosts, they all have 99. 9 percent uptime because I feel it becomes irrelevant if they all have it. I’ve approached my research and scripting from the basis of point out the differences rather than the similarities. And people can figure out what the similarities are, or that kind of becomes obvious when you’re doing a little bit of research, looking at all the landing pages. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tangentially related to that, how did you overcome imposter syndrome, i. e. fear of being on camera is 1 aspect. When you’re doing comparison posts if it’s a giant company, like Chrome versus opera, another one of your top performing videos, it’s like a big faceless org, but comparison content, you maybe you’re talking about smaller companies and stuff like that, and maybe you’re like, oh, they might not like my video. And, or I know some people that work there, whatever. How do you get through all that imposter syndrome and just confidence in having an opinion on something on the internet? Christian Taylor: For the being on camera side, I think it’s just many years of doing it. I, don’t think there was ever a time in my life that I felt really nervous on camera, but. Definitely when I started out, it was a little bit more awkward, a little bit uncomfortable, but I think just doing it for so long, I became more and more comfortable on camera. And that’s never really been a big issue for me to overcome, which I know that’s not the case for everyone, but I guess I was somewhat natural at it from day one. Now, as far as Being worried about offending companies. I think I, I also started making comparisons before I was at the stage in life of understanding, like networking and humans behind stuff. Obviously like I didn’t think robots made stuff, but I, just didn’t quite get that yet. And I think that actually worked out to my advantage because that allowed me to just be brutally honest about what I thought with the product. And then. Getting to that place later in life of being like, Oh, there’s real people behind these products and now I have these relationships, honestly, that didn’t happen for me until about three years ago, that’s when I first started going to events and meeting people. And sometimes meeting team members at directly competing products and being like, wow, they’re great people. They’re nice, they’re great people and they’re nice. Now, this is weird because I feel like I’m, pitting the 2 companies against each other. I’ve learned that if a company is worth working with, having a relationship with, they’re going to be open to honest feedback and they’re, going to want that. And if they get upset by something you say they, disown you. They’re like, ah we want nothing to do with you then. I probably don’t care to work with them anyway. So I’m fine burning that bridge. I, have tried to be a little bit more careful as the years have gone on to make sure that everything I say is true. I don’t want to accuse a company of something that’s not true. Or pick on them just to pick on them. I’ve done that a little bit in the past. You can probably see in my top videos, there’s one particular company I’ve never been fond of. But yeah, I think just realizing, okay, if a company is worth working with, they’re going to be open to that feedback. And I also tell companies, Hey. You can always sponsor content like, okay, qualifier here. Cause I don’t want anyone to think I’m like a sellout or something. I will only work with a company on a sponsored capacity. If their product is good enough that I can recommend it in some way, but for. No product is 100 percent perfect. So for every product, I’ve got good things and bad things to say. So if a company has already been vetted as a product that I could recommend for certain people, and they’re like, Hey, how can we get content on your channel? That is Just presenting our product in a positive light. Then I tell them you can sponsor some content if you want, because that gives you the control to say, Hey, we’re paying you to share the message about our product, and then it’s going to be presented more from a brand awareness perspective of, Hey, I want to talk about the sponsor of today’s video. Here’s all the positive things instead of. Hey, you’re in an organic comparison and you’re getting free press, but that’s going to include both the good and the bad. Chris Badgett: Awesome. As a podcaster, I try not to ask two questions at once, but just to set it up, if somebody wants to make money online from YouTube on one side, let’s imagine, and I’m speaking to like the course creator audience here. One person like wants to get into courses, but they actually want to start with a YouTube channel and figure out how to monetize it. Practice being on camera. Really monetize the YouTube channel. So that’s like question one advice to get started in terms of monetization and what to focus on first. And on the other side, you have people that have already created a course. Or a coaching program or a membership site. And they’re like, I want to do marketing on YouTube. I still want to make money online, but I want to get people on YouTube over to my to my website for my courses and coaching and community and all that stuff. So what would you advise those two different segments in terms of getting started with YouTube fastest path to revenue monetization traffic? It’s a big question. I know. Christian Taylor: Yeah. For that first person, I would push back just a little bit. If whenever someone comes to me and says, Hey, I want to start a YouTube channel. I want to do this for a living. What advice will you give me? I push back and say, that’s great. Like I’m all for it. I love what I do, I want other people to do the same thing and enjoy it. I would only get into this if you’re willing to commit to it for two to three years and not make a sense. If you can put up with that, great. Then I’ll give you some advice. If not, if you’re looking for some way to fast track and Oh, there’s gotta be some magic formula where in six months I can be profitable on my channel. Don’t do it. You’re just going to waste three months of your life. You’re going to get frustrated and quit. And I’ve seen that cycle so many times with beginners where they get this kick of inspiration. They make content for three months and they say, Oh, no one watched my stuff. I didn’t make any money. Yeah, you did it for three months. So Mr. Beast always says, make your first hundred videos before you ever judge analytics revenue. Anything like you don’t have a license to judge that or say, oh, it didn’t work until you’ve made a hundred videos. So that’s the preface. Once you’re past that and you say, okay, I’m willing to make that commitment. I’m in it for the long run. It really is just about repetition and. Not being afraid to experiment heavily with both topics in formats. A lot of creators, new creators think they have to find a niche from day one. And like they, they have to be tied down to this one specific strategy. And I think that can be. hurting them more than helping them because they’re not allowing the freedom to explore to find the thing that actually works. Like for me I, pivoted a lot over my YouTube journey and found something that really worked well. But if I had been really stuck from day one, like imagine I started doing comedy content and that’s. All I ever did, because in my head, I was like, that’s my niche niche down, everyone tells you niche down. So I have to be fixated on that. And that’s going to be the secret to growing. My channel is sticking with that. I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today. So yes, it is important to niche down at some point, once you start getting traction and say, okay, this is a path I’m comfortable committing to, but when you’re making those first hundred videos. Just explore, make videos on content that you’re passionate about. Try different things. If you want to make something that’s completely different from anything you’ve ever made, as far as topic, do it, try it out. Maybe it does really well. And maybe you decide. Hey this is something that I want to stick to because once you find something that works, you start making views, you start getting some traction. The revenue will come with it naturally through both AdSense. If you’re talking about products, affiliate links honestly, like the, only practical tip. I could give as far as making revenue would be put affiliate links in your content from day zero. I slept on that for way too long. And I wish I had started putting them in my content earlier. Cause you never know when a video is going to take off. So don’t wait till you’re getting views to sign up for affiliate programs. They’re super easy to get into most of them, at least sign up from day one, put affiliate links in your content. As you grow, if you’re interested in getting into sponsorships, I would look into Justin Moore. I love his content. He’s the sponsorship coach guru, has his own course as well. Of course who doesn’t? That’s a guru. But I’ve learned a lot from Justin as far as Negotiating with brands, landing bigger brand deals, stuff that’s a bit more sustainable rather than the one off content pieces that are like that’s what I’ve done for the past couple of years before finding Justin’s content is like one video here for a brand, one video there, just very all over the place. So definitely recommend Justin Moore’s content and also not thinking you need a hundred thousand subscribers or a million subscribers to make money. That’s one encouragement that I would give a beginner is you can monetize earlier, depending on the niche that you’re in. Some are more profitable than others at the small channel level, but I really was able to start seriously monetizing around 10, 000 subscribers. And I think that can be true for a lot of channels. The YouTube ad revenue can even start at a thousand subscribers. So stick with it for the long run. Explore your interests. Don’t be afraid to try a bunch of things till you find something that works. Then the monetization falls into place. Now, for that second person, the course creator that wants to use YouTube as a lead gen strategy, I would just shoot for search on YouTube. If you already know SEO strategies, Choosing a focus keyword, optimizing your title and description for those keywords. If you’re comfortable optimizing a blog post for SEO, it’s a very similar strategy on YouTube. There’s a couple of tools out there like TubeBuddy and vidIQ that you can use to analyze your title and description and say you’re doing well, or you need more keywords, but. I think when you aim for search, you’re going to capture that audience who’s ready to make a purchase decision. They’re ready to solve a problem. If they’re searching, how do I build a WordPress site? And your video comes up, they watch it. They go, this guy knows what he’s talking about. I want to enroll in his course. That’s probably a more valuable lead gen strategy than trying to do the sensational Mr. Beast type content. I built a hundred WordPress sites in a hundred hours, shocked face in the thumbnail you can try to go the more entertaining route, but. I found that it just doesn’t convert as well with educational content. Chris Badgett: Solid advice. Really appreciate that. Last question, Christian, what’s your vision for your academy at Craylor dot Academy? I’m asking like, it seems like there’s a fork in the road. Some YouTubers that monetize with courses create a signature course. It’s like their main thing. And it’s just and maybe they redo it every couple of years or whatever, or. They do a lot of like mini courses or a membership with okay. This is a focus, like how to build a yoga website, yoga studio website with cadence course. And then there’s another course about how to build a restaurant site with online ordering. And it’s, they’re like these many courses. Are you more signature course guy, or do you envision like. A lot of courses. Christian Taylor: I see myself going the mini course route. And furthermore, I even see a world in which I treat my website almost like its own YouTube and maybe launch a membership because there’s oftentimes people in my audience will ask, Hey, can you make a tutorial about. Insert random niche item. I don’t know, like how do I set up email hosting with this very specific email host? And I think to myself, okay I could sit down and start screen recording and make that video and probably 20 minutes. But if I upload that video to my channel, it’s going to bomb. It’s going to drag everything down. It’s way too niche, It’s it’s not going to get enough views. And if I produce that video to the level that I do content on my channel. It’s not going to be a 20 minute process. It’s going to then blow up into a two to six week process. So I’ve, been on this thread of I want to help my audience. When someone asks that I would like to sit in front of my computer and just record a quick 20 minute video and something that would be highly valuable to them. But I can’t upload it to my YouTube channel. So I just don’t make it, but in the future, I would love to have some kind of membership program where people can join and I can say Hey, you’re in the 10 a month membership program. Cool. I’ll make a video. I’ll put it on my website. Hope it helps. And then there’s they’re getting value out of it. Maybe it helps solve a problem that they were feeling overwhelmed by. For me, it’s something that I can justify because I’ve got this base of members that are paying to be part of the site. And I don’t have this pressure of the YouTube algorithm of if I make a video and it doesn’t perform, I’m damaging my channel in a sense. I don’t really have to care about that cause it’s my own website. So if the video gets 10 views and helps 10 people, then great. Chris Badgett: Nice. I love that. That’s definitely a pro tip and I hear it throughout your story that, and this is the story of lifter LMS as well. The audience literally pulls the product out of you. And that’s, a great way to think about a membership. Just take common questions and make many courses or tutorials for those people. You can’t not be successful that way when they’re literally asking for it, particularly when there’s several, you’ve heard the question so many times. You’re like, I think I need to make that email hosting video. I love that. That’s Christian Taylor subscribe to his YouTube channel. That’s Craylor made. And also check out his Academy at Craylor dot Academy. And thanks for coming on the show, Christian. We really appreciate it. Keep up the great work and it’s great to be with you on the journey. Is there anywhere else you want to send people or any final words that you’d like to say? Christian Taylor: Just thanks for having me. And the craylor made. com is probably the best place to go to find links to my channel, the Academy, everything. And I’ll just spell it out. It is C R A Y L O R Craylor. I only spell it because people often ask me like what, are you saying? Or how do I spell that? So for all the audio listeners out there, you go. But yeah, thanks for having me. I’ve. Really enjoyed our conversation. Chris Badgett: Thanks Christian. 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 at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. 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In this LMScast episode, Mihail Stoychev explains that NitroPack began in 2013 with a focus on optimizing websites for the OpenCart platform. Mihail Stoychev is the co-founder of NitroPack, a company focused on website optimization. The spark was a request from a big e-commerce business that was losing customers owing to sluggish website performance. Recognizing the necessity, they created an early plugin for image optimization and simple caching, resulting in a considerable increase in site loading speed. The term “NitroPack” was inspired by the notion of speed in the “Fast and Furious” films, in which hitting a button reveals hidden power. NitroPack expanded over time to include over 35 optimization algorithms in a single service. They switched to WordPress, the largest platform, with the goal of making website optimization easier and more accessible. NitroPack is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that allows you to control optimizations with a single button push after installation. They stress simplicity and usability for non-technical people, with the goal of removing complexity from the optimization process. 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 Badgett. 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 Michel from Nitro Pack. That’s it. Nitro Pack. I love McHale’s mission to make the internet faster. We’re going to get into what NitroPack is, how to speed up your website and a little bit of McHale’s story, which is awesome. But first welcome to the show, Mihail. Mihail Stoychev: Pleasure. Thanks for having me, Chris. Chris Badgett: I’m, excited to chat with you today. Everybody wants a fast website. Everybody there’s so many, there’s a lot of different web hosts in the WordPress community and also different setups and plugins and different types of websites. But this episode is about for people building learning management system websites, they all want a fast website. Let’s start at just a super high level. How, Mikhail, do you make the internet faster? Mihail Stoychev: Thanks. That’s a great question to start with, Chris. Actually if I have to think as to how did we start NitroPack? So first of all, we started NitroPack back in 2013 for another great open source platform that was Going after e commerce merchants back in the days. It’s called open cart. I think they’re still running well, so we started nitro pack in 2013 that was two years after we created our first plug in for open cart and We had a pretty big merchant from the Middle East and they were absolutely horrified and terrified by how many customers are actually churning and dropping because their website was not performing well enough. So they came to us and said, Hey guys we have this huge problem. Is there a solution that you can figure out for us? So back in the day, so we were junior entrepreneurs it was your number two of our journey. So we started digging around and of course we will answer. Yes, of course. We’re experts into this. So we figured out a way that we can actually optimize images, which was one of the. challenges. And back in the days, we didn’t have the amazing formats that we have today, which compress a lot of data. And back in the days, the internet was nowhere as good as what we are seeing as the norm today. So what we did is we created this initial version of our plugin. And since we really created a 50% improving their site loading speed it was back in the times where fast and furious were just going very hard and those super nice racy cars, they will have a special hidden power that exerts you press like a red button and then you go. And that was called nitro. So they were using nitrogen. And since initially what we developed back then was a collection of different features. We decided to call it nitro as in fast and then pack. Okay. So we started with image optimization and some basic caching. And today we have over 35 three, five different techniques that we bundled together and that we serve as nitro pack and our Initial thoughts when we decided to go after WordPress and deliver this to WordPress was open car is not big enough to have a massive impact. We were helping tens of thousands of merchants, but we were like, it will be logical to go after the biggest. So the biggest the biggest markets back in the days I think it’s still today is WordPress. So the market share is just over 40 percent of the internet, which is crazy. Shout out to Matt and everyone else who worked on this absolutely stunning project. And we made nitro pack. In a completely different way. So we decided that NitroPack should be a software as a service and that all the optimizations should be controlled by a single button. Remember the reference I did with the speed up. So what we did is essentially you install the plugin, you enable it, you press a button, which is selecting your mode, like the shift of the car. You go into drive and then you can choose port. Comfort or economy. So once you install nitro pack, you select your mode, then press a button and you’re off to a good start. So on the back, we will do all types of settings, which we believe are good enough and stable enough for your website. And we, the reason why we took this approach is that we believe that most of the folks want the complexity out of their life. And while they’re very tech savvy guys who want to go and tinker with the settings, the majority of the people who want to. You know run their own blog or go into a different type of a Entrepreneurship journey won’t as little of technical challenges as possible So we got inspired by this You know as minimalistic as possible as easy to use as possible. And I think this is something that we’re keeping Today, as our cradle on how we’re building things and how we want people to perceive our our solution. Chris Badgett: That’s Mihail Stoychev: awesome. Chris Badgett: I just keep getting this image of nitro pack is like the Vin Diesel fast and furious. He just has to press one button and then it’s off to the races. Yeah Mihail Stoychev: Making it a little bit making it a little bit simpler than it is really. And the, tech team probe wouldn’t, like this as they put so much effort into developing it, but listen, the user has to be able to press buttons and see value. And this is what we’re up to. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. 2013. That’s actually when Lifter LMS started and here we are You know, many years later over a decade or whatever, and it’s amazing when you stay married to 1 problem, like speed up the website for us is teach online. And it’s amazing what you can accomplish over all those years and all those learnings. And. So congratulations on that, and I know you and it’s cool to come from outside. So you mentioned coming from the open car community and then seeing the opportunity in WordPress. And I know you’ve done some stuff with Shopify as well, and you get to take all that learning and just. Continuously improve the product and the user experience, making the complex simple, which is like a great path to be on. Mihail Stoychev: Yes. First of all I, now it’s a pure coincidence, though. I’m so happy. We started our, businesses around the same time. And I couldn’t agree more. I think one of the beautiful things about being able to develop for different platforms. Is that you’re able to see the good and shiny things about them and the not so good and shiny things about them. And then at the end of the day, share with the community. So whatever we learned in open card was very beneficial for us to start on Shopify and whatever mistakes and things we headed in open card, we found less and less on Shopify. And now we’re in the opposite situation. So we’re seeing a lot of things which are way better in WordPress than in Shopify. And it’s so empowering to be able to share the good stuff that we took out of Shopify as a platform and see which ones are applicable for the WordPress community. And I think just like when you go and visit different cities and different countries, you enrich your culture. In the same way we enrich our technical knowledge and our platform knowledge and we can get all the jewels put them into work and hopefully be able to create a good product that’s users will be able to enjoy and if they enjoy, they’ll go and they’ll recommend it to some of their friends. And if they don’t enjoy it they can go to some of the other alternative solutions. Like I said before, our mission is to make the Internet faster. So the more people can plunge and see what the difference is from a performance website versus a non performance website, not only from user experience standpoint, But at the same time of churn rates, at the same time of SEO ranking, as long as they have are using something we’re happy. Our mission is complete. Whether they go to us we would love for them to come to us, but it’s it’s a free it’s a free market. And there are other great solutions that I want to give a shout out and respect to. As long as you’re doing something performing a performance base for your website, as long as you’re looking into Core Web Vitals, as long as you score good on page speed for mobile, if the majority of your user base is coming on mobile, or, Vice versa. If they come from desktop, then I think you’re off to a good start. Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s, awesome. One of the things about WordPress is the community aspect, like you mentioned. And I think we’re in agreement here that part of being a member of the WordPress community is about contribution. And you have a free NitroPack plan and a free NitroPack plugin. Can you tell us, which I think is great, and I’m a big fan of the freemium model. How does how do people get into it and get started and just tell us more about what’s, available for free? Mihail Stoychev: Sure. So you go to wordpress. org or directly to nitropac. io or nitropac. com. You go and you hit pricing, or if you go to the org, you just have to download the plugin. You quickly create an account and you’re off to a flying start. We’ll ask you, which plan would you like to take? Of course, freeze the default one. Be our guest to try before you buy. And when I’m talking about the free plan, this doesn’t mean that it’s a free trial. It’s a forever. It’s a proper forever free plan. So as long as you don’t reach the quota, which is number of page views or CDN. Then you’re off to a flying start. You can use it forever. We have customers using us for what is it? Four years now since we launched in 2019 for WordPress and we don’t want to bother them with upgrading if it’s Suiting the size of their business. If they’re happy with the performance, then we don’t want to sell ice to the Eskimo. So we want to go after the customers that we believe we really can make a difference. And of course, with more page views with a different mission critical businesses that they might have, for instance, they can be a big publisher or they can be a big publisher. software as a service company, or they can be like someone on the verticals a specific WordPress website, which is very, competitive in the industry that they’re running. Let’s say plumbing, for instance, I’m just, or someone going for puppy food. So if they really need this extra boost and extra difference, then we would always recommend them to go with one of the paid plans. Yes. And all of those come with a 14 day free trial and a money back guarantee. During those 14 days, they can see the difference. We can promise them that there will be a difference. And to take a step back, what we actually offer is a base layer. So over those past couple of years, we were able to select I would say the most necessary features for you to be successful with the business. And we’re giving those out for free. Again, part of our pricing strategy is being able to differentiate based on page views and based on CDN. So we’re starting with, I would say, a myriad of different features that you’ll be able to enjoy for free, like different caching mechanism, minifications. And I would say one of the main differences of NitroPack when it comes to all of our competitors around is that whatever version you choose, you always get a free CDN and you always get. A free tool that optimizes your images. So there are plenty of ways that different companies market this. I would say that more often than not, those would be two services you have to buy on top. But with us, since it’s a pack and since it’s a nitro pack, you get everything in the in, in one single foot. In one basket. So at the end of the day again, our mission is to be able to provide you with a good base layer and a good base there for us means a good grade of CDN and really powerful image and gift and video facades, optimization features. And we believe that this is going to be able to not only boost your score, but increase your chances of essentially passing Core Web Vitals and putting your business at a much higher SEO position that initially you came with. I don’t know if this answers your question, but this is like my, answer to what it comes with as as default features. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Awesome. Those of you out there listening and watching, go try out nitro pack, try out the free plugin, sign up for a free plan. And that’s an incredible amount of value you’re providing for free. I’m a big fan of supporting the startup when their business starts to get more page views or traffic and they’re ready to then it’s time to perhaps upgrade to a plan, but while you’re validating and you just want a fast website and you’re, just speeding things up and getting started. It’s that’s a great contribution you’re making there. You mentioned earlier, like that speed helps reduce churn. But there’s a lot of, I think it’s important for people to know why does speed matter? Could you unpack that a little bit? What do you get when your website is much faster, particularly as a business owner or somebody teaching online? Mihail Stoychev: Yeah, sure. Just going back to our initial story We, as everyone else in the industry, just decided that if you’re able to bring and show something fast, then the user will be more likely to make a decision of whether they like it or not. Whatever website you had, just being able to make it load as fast as possible and all of the content to be available would essentially be a deciding point of whether the user will stay and consume and the amount of pages that are they going to open subsequently or not. Afterwards, Google were like, all right it’s great that your site loads fast. It’s great that you have a high score on this. synthetic lab test which is not how the real users are actually experiencing your website. So they came up with a concept called Core Web Vitals, which is once the website is loaded, how your users are interacting with the websites. And then they will break it down into did the content load fast enough? Did any of the content move or flicker? Is everything on the page the way that it should be? And is there anything else that’s preventing the website from loading as good and as efficient as possible so the user can have as good and positive experience as possible? So we would measure the amount of pages that they would see once they, Are on the website. And of course, the way that Google measures this is via their chrome browser. So all of the chromium browsers are essentially reporting data back to them as to how users are experiencing their website and Google have a strong conviction that if you pass Core Web Vitals, you’re more likely to retain this user and to take them through the funnel, whatever it can be. Sign on flow or buying this purchase or reading this next article or calling via contact page, whatever. So the way that we can compare today how solution A is ranking against solution B is there is this thing called Google Data Studio where they take all of the folks That we have sufficient Core Web Vitals data for. So if you’re a very small store, it wouldn’t make sense for Google to collect data because you don’t have any traffic. If you don’t have any traffic you might have a very fast website, but if no one has heard about you You’re are not the main pain on the map. So once you get sufficient amount of traffic on your website, what you actually do is little by little, Google starts collecting data as to how your real users are essentially experiencing your website. And all of this data runs not only the platforms, WordPress, OpenCart, Magento, Drupal, yada yada, hosted as well. BigCommerce, Shopify, but they also rank different hosting providers. Again, we would start from hosting A to hosting Z, and then they would start and rank also speed optimization tools like ours. The goal is to give a map, a 360 map I would say, is cool. is with Google on this mission to make the internet faster, who is performing the best. And at the end of the day, the big price you don’t get like golden you to play if you have optimized X amount of websites. But what you have done is essentially giving Google enough data. And telling them, Hey, listen, we’re doing something right. Those folks, after they consume our solution, are experiencing the websites way faster. And as a result of this, we’re bringing ABNC to this brand. And we have a lot of data of some of our larger customers. Which shows exactly how a bit of a improvement in the load speed, a bit of a, so the LCP largest contentful paint. So a little bit improvement onto this, a little bit improvement onto the IMP. And there are actually six metrics in the Core Web Vitals. There are three and then three more, sorry. So six in total. As long as we improve and bring improvement to those Core Web Vitals metrics and If you pass two of them, you fail, you have to pass three of them in order to fail, which means you have to perform 70 percent or better. So we took, we take always the 75th percentile as a gauge. And luckily for us, and thanks to the hard work of the engineering team NitroPak today is at the top of this report for the good stuff and at the bottom of this report for the bad stuff. For instance, a good stuff is how many websites using NitroPack would essentially pass Core Web Vitals. Versus competitors, how slow the page will load and how quickly the time to first bite will load essentially. So there are different types of metrics that pretty much measure this. And I can say that this is a good enough cue and Google have confirmed it that recently this became one of the good ranking factors when deciding which site will go. Bob whenever someone is performing a search and getting the blue links out of a Google search. Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s, awesome. Congratulations on, that. Tell us a little bit about, let’s imagine we’re talking to somebody who’s Not super technical. They have a WordPress site and they want to get a baseline of how they’re performing now in terms of speed, what should they do? Mihail Stoychev: So the easiest thing that they can do is go to Google page speeds and just entered their websites, get a view of how fast they’re performing, get a view of actually. Whether they pass core web vitals or not. So whenever you’re seeing a score there again, this is a lab test. Lab test means that a server somewhere is simulating a user going to your website. It actually doesn’t mean a lot. So the real deal in our sector is how the real users, so your users are experiencing your website And not how a lab test performs So don’t fall into gauging and measuring number a versus number b because it doesn’t have Absolutely, or it has very little effect to your overall performance and there are plenty of ways that you can inflate or fake this score, so I would say Just see your Core Web Vitals metrics. Make sure that those metrics are good. And then I would say install NitroPack, install another tool. If you want to compare us, see which one brings you a better bang for the buck and a better score. And at the end of the day, you can make your decision, which one to choose for your performance. Optimization strategy. I just want to say that unlike other things, those are not great to mix and match. So don’t try to create a cocktail of, I’ll use a little bit of this plugin, a little bit of that plugin, There are plenty of good solutions around the market that go for very budget price. And if you’re serious about your business, you can consider some of the paid plans. And I think that this is where you would see the most value. Especially if you’re a revenue generating business and even a 0. 1 second improvement of any of the factors can bring you way more than you imagine that you’re living on the table right now. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s educate folks a little bit on speed and let me see how I’m going to frame this question, but. Who’s responsible for speed? Is it like plugins? Is it WordPress, Is it web hosts? And is it speed optimization tools? Like nitro pack? I think the answer is we all are, but help people understand help people understand what WordPress is doing for speed, what web hosts are doing for speed, what plugins do for speed and what NitroPack does for speed. You mentioned the CDN, the image optimization, and there’s literally 35 different levers you’re, pulling to speed up the website. Give us a tour across those different categories and how they impact speed in terms of plugins, WordPress, hosting, NitroPack. Mihail Stoychev: Sure. So I would say the biggest impact that you can have. For WordPress, in my opinion, is WordPress itself. This is why they have a performance team. And this is why they’re working really, hard in order to make WordPress faster for everyone else. We see that this is a topic in the latest conferences as well. And we couldn’t be happier for it. Because, again, this is part of our mission. It’s part of Google’s mission. And this is pretty awesome. From there on, we obviously have the hosting providers. I think most of them provide some level of optimizations. Usually what they will do is the so called backend or server side optimizations. And this is great. Some, hosting providers even have even have solutions and they have servers, which are, for instance, Lightspeed is a good example that you get the Lightspeed servers. Then on top of that, you can have their. their solution as well, which works good. But where we excel is we don’t touch the back end. We don’t touch the database. We don’t play with it at all. It’s very dangerous. We don’t want to be blamed for screwing up something like that. So we would only work on the front end. And we believe that this is where we can make the biggest difference for. We believe that already the majority of the hosting providers have some form of caching. They have some layer of optimizations going on in the back, and they serve a good purpose. So they’re a good ground. WordPress, good going great. Hosting providers, good going great. Someone going great squared. And then I would say that optimization Performance plugins like ours. What we do is we come and we actually deploy the final and most important step. The one that really, makes the difference from good to great as the book is. So what we Really in power on is those optimizations which are safe, which pretty much speed of the front end, which actually improve the experience because the user at the end of the day is interacting with your front end. And yes, some queries might be slow. Yes, some buttons might be loading a little bit slower might, have huge requests that go back to the server. But I think in modern, Website building. We see this less and less often. So we believe the biggest impact can be done on the front end. This was part of our DNA from the get go whenever we started the company and Up until today and for the future, I would say that we wouldn’t be interested into tinkering whatsoever with database or doing any sort of server side optimizations. Rather than that, we would like to focus and stay on the front end and we would like to continue being the best inbreed at that. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s ask about hosting because I get this question all the time, and I’m sure you do too, but we’re not hosting companies, but people ask for a recommendation, particularly concerned about speed and performance. And different website builders have different budgets and the website maybe isn’t making any money or what we’ll never make money. It’s more content, but then some people have a robust store or LMS or whatever, and I’m not asking for to name names or anything, but how do you think about. advising somebody on a hosting solution from like the shared hosting, the most economical stuff the, kind of mid middle of the road manage WordPress hosting. And then there’s like really expensive high end plans. Where, should somebody start if they’re genuinely concerned about speed? Mihail Stoychev: So you, pointed it into the right direction. Obviously, if you’re A weekend warrior or someone that tries something as a side hustle. I would say try to be as budgeted as possible. So there are always great deals on the long tail side of the costing providers. Pretty much for a few bucks a month, you can get a decent posting and that would be fine. If you’re still trying to figure things out, there is no need to go ballistic and spend your budget on a hosting provider. Maybe some people will hate me for saying this, but in my opinion, you can make a much larger impression by making a decent website. And also let’s not forget how much money you have to spend in order to drive. Leads to the top of the funnel. In my opinion, I would run hostings as Very good. I would say that probably 80 percent of the business of every single hosting I talk to is running WordPress. So by the time I think that the competition there is pretty fierce for anyone to be left out in a mediocrity. So I think whenever you have a strong and and very resilient competition, you have great companies being born. I would start with shared hosting or with something cheaper than I would graduate. So make sure the hosting that you choose can actually, you can grow with it. I’m pretty sure the majority of them, you can, and then if you’re it’s important where the servers are, I would say the majority of the hosting providers now, nowadays are using cloud for all this, so they’re distributed and accessible from anywhere. But in the end of the day you have to also try to see what other folks are doing. You have to see what type of Solutions the hosting provides. So a lot of hostings are building equal systems around themselves. And within those equal systems, you have quick installs from anywhere in their panels. For instance, we where we work with any hosting around. So we’re compatible with all the postings in the wordpress equal system. But we have direct integrations with a few ones. The main name drop I’m going to use this Dow EP engine. We work with them for the past four or five months, and we already are sharing a pretty good amount of customers that are enjoying a very fast page speed. Ever since we created a solution for hosting providers, services which we call NitroPack OneClick. Essentially, we were able to onboard a few more hosting providers. It’s not like you cannot install us if you’re not part of this program, but if you are, then a user will be able to access NitroPack within a single click of a button. Again, talking about ease of use, I just think it’s the right way to go. At the end of the day, we are slaves to our user base and to our customers. And we need to work our asses off to make their life as easy as possible. And so they trust us with their money. I would say posting go whenever your heart is. And if you if you’re in doubt you can just test a few, just like with everything else. Chris Badgett: Awesome. You’re obviously obsessed, Mikhail, with Speeding up websites and you’ve been doing it for a long time. And you, have this strong mission to make the internet faster. Tell us what in your crystal ball for the future and how nitro packs going to continue to, innovate and WordPress. What do you see in your crystal ball for speeding up the internet? Mihail Stoychev: That’s a great question. Essentially. What we’re doing today is again, focusing on front end optimizations. So for us, we want to find more ways that the users can interact in a predictable and fast way with their websites. This is the number one priority. Another strong domain for us is essentially being able to gauge what is the real user value of browsing the website. Again, we were talking about lab tests, about synthetic tests, and then we’re talking about how the real users are essentially experiencing the website. And what and how does this relate to exactly the service that we’re bringing to the table? So not like going. Yo, come to our website. Okay, you installed the plugin, now go and do a test, then come back, then see what’s wrong. But being able to provide a 360 picture of where your website is, where it used to be before, how good it is now, how many interactions did we help with, how many of those were prolific, let’s say, and reach the final goal. By the way, what’s the goal? How is the user experience? How is the different use case going to differentiate from, let’s say a publisher to an e commerce website to let’s say a platform, which is on a mission to transform education and help users create educational content. So all of those are different use cases and what we’re trying to create is. A very simple way for us to essentially show exactly where helping, who are we helping to and if there are problems, how those problems can be pinpointed and addressed with a single click of a button so that you excel and you’re successful Way ahead of your competition. So my dream would be for someone let’s, say, not just starting out because that will be unrealistic, but let’s say a small and medium enterprise. To be able to do something better than this fortune 500 company, not having this big budget, just being able to use this as like a gorilla secret if type of a tool and being able to win. So being able to arm the, let’s say growing up guys into believing that they can compete with the big wells in the blue ocean. Chris Badgett: Awesome. I love that. Yeah. I feel the same way about helping the little person or the startup succeed. If somebody has questions, this has been a great conversation and they want to explore NitroPak or connect with you or your team. What’s the best way for people to connect with NitroPak? Mihail Stoychev: So they can connect with NitroPak by going to our website. Again I don’t know if I mentioned this, we do have 24 seven support. If they want to reach out to me, I’m always available on LinkedIn or they can email me. I’m at if you see my first name, it’s Michail. So I’m at michail. nitrofac. io. So if you have any particular questions, you can reach out there. We have a Facebook page. We also are on Twitter. One of the few European companies trying to be on Twitter. So we, we, try to be as as, as open and available as possible. And either me or someone from the team would be able to to, get your questions answered. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you for coming on the show, Mihael. I really appreciate it. I want to encourage you out there listening or watching to go install the free nitro pack plugin. And really don’t wait to speed up your website because only good, things come from doing that, but thank you Mihail for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Mihail Stoychev: Thank you, Chris. 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 at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Increase Your Website Speed with NitroPack appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen delves into the intricate process of migrating from traditional SCORM-based learning systems to more agile platforms like WordPress integrated with LifterLMS. Kurt is a LifterLMS user and LifterLMS expert. His expertise includes handling SCORM content and migration initiatives, in addition to dealing with platforms such as WordPress and Lifter LMS. He describes the difficulty of balancing large expenditures on historical SCORM material with the requirement for modernization, emphasizing the unwillingness to throw away priceless assets. Kurt suggests doable migration tactics including separating out older information into legacy repositories and reusing content by exporting it in web-compatible forms. He emphasizes WordPress’s adaptability by explaining the several ways that SCORM material may be displayed inside the WordPress environment, such as embedding, lightboxes, and independent tabs. Kurt’s observations essentially highlight the need of strategic preparation and utilizing WordPress’s features to enable a smooth transfer to contemporary learning management systems. 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 Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to 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. It’s Kurt Von Ahnen. He’s back on the show and Kurt works with us here at LifterLMS. And he also has an agency specializing in learning site builds. Today, we’re going to be talking about how to upload and track SCORM content using WordPress with Lifter LMS. This is going to be a discussion, particularly if you have a. Big catalog of SCORM learning material that you’ve been building at your company over the years and how to get onto a modern, more affordable, more powerful WordPress based learning management system with Lifter LMS. We’re going to dive into it today, but first welcome back on the show, Kurt. Thanks, Chris. It’s good to be here, man. It’s always fun to work with you. I’m excited to dive into it with you. We’ve been getting more and more inquiries about SCORM content and working with it, with LifterLMS. And I wanted to make some content together to help people that are looking at a move to understand the key variables of what to consider when LMS, like LifterLMS, but let’s start with. What’s the biggest challenge somebody has when they’re thinking about the move? Let’s say they’re an enterprise. They’ve got tons of money invested in the SCORM content library, and they’re trying to figure they want to modernize, maybe they’re having security issues on their old system. They want to get to something in the, that’s a lot easier to run and, scale and own the asset of the learning management system website itself. What should they consider right off the bat? Kurt Von Ahnen: I think one of the biggest things to consider as we have this discussion and we think about who the actual audience is, Chris, I think of these enterprise type businesses that are large in scale compared to what you and I usually think about with presidents and vice presidents and committees and all of these. Departments and divisions. And when you look at the size of these organizations, typically the training departments been left behind. It’s an afterthought and it’s you say it out loud and people say, oh, that’s not true. But it is companies generally focus on sales. Marketing and they’ll say sales is what drives the business. And the way that they scale their internal staff is based on the actual sales and revenue and all that stuff that comes in through the front end of the business. So in a lot of cases scorned 20 years old. And so they may have made that decision two decades ago and invested a ton of money and assets in that direction. So I think one of the biggest obstacles. To your question is, Oh my goodness. Like, how are you the vice president or the president of this big corporation? And you’re about to say, Hey, go ahead and push the delete button on that 1. 6 million file over there. It’s just not, it’s not a reasonable ask and it’s, really hard to get them to, when I say get them talk to these types of enterprise clients into using a different learning process, a different educational builder. So they, a lot of them will stick with the SCORM generating tools because they made that decision so long ago and they’ve invested greatly in it. And I think that’s the biggest obstacle because after that, they become convinced over time. That they need a special website that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain and host, and it just becomes this never ending black hole of spending that a lot of these companies get locked into. And then when I started with Lifter LMS, we used to get 1 or 2. Queries a month about SCORM and now we’re getting these questions every week. So I think there’s like this giant awakening. I think the timing is really good to hit the subject matter. And LFTRLMS is definitely a great place to put your SCORM and keep your legacy content alive. Chris Badgett: Why do you think people are with, whether they’re an enterprise and it’s a training thing for their, SCORM content, or maybe it’s a curriculum provider of some kind with a catalog that they license out? They’re clearly already looking at WordPress and tools like Lifter LMS to make the move. Why do you, so they’re already interested. They’re, it’s not about convincing them to Hey, check us out this alternative option. They’re already looking. Why do you think that is? Kurt Von Ahnen: I’m just going to be blunt cost my corporate training background, Chris when you and I first started working together, I was amazed at what I could build in WordPress as far as capability and scaling went. And I think a lot of people at that time, because we’re going back more than half a decade. A lot of people didn’t think of WordPress in those terms. We thought of WordPress in terms of like brochure websites or the independent course creator or the new startup or the entrepreneur. And. I think the more that we began to recognize that you can scale in WordPress and you, can bring that content over. I think the more we recognized it, the more other people started to wake up and recognize it too. So we’re starting to see people look for the option. I can’t tell you how, much money people spend corporately on this type of, endeavor. It’s Always a six figure conversation. Every time you sit in the conference room and have a talk or a meeting about it. And when you get into WordPress, you’re having talks about tens of thousands of dollars instead of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that changes the whole scope of the project. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I think that’s interesting. Sometimes it’s just the extreme affordability of WordPress and lifter LMS, and even professional agencies like yourself at Manana web dev studios, we’ve worked on with some SCORM. Projects in a way, sometimes in sales, it’s like this thing is so cheap. It can’t work. Even if I bring in this agency and stuff, it’s still way under the old way of doing things. But I think you’re right. There is an awakening there. And I want to provide a little context in terms of what WordPress is and what. A learning management system on WordPress does. And I actually got this insight from a SCORM and XAPI expert who said, do you realize that you don’t just have an LMS with Lifter LMS, you have an LCMS. And I was like what does that mean? WordPress is a content management system or CMS. Lifter is a learning management system. LMS. But what, when you put all this together, you have a learning content management system. It’s not just about putting e learning in an LMS. You can do that. And that’s what we’re talking about today in terms of uploading and SCORM and tracking the your, users and getting all the reporting and everything, but WordPress itself, anything on the internet, you can create that type of content and WordPress natively. Or embed it from another service or tool or file library or whatever. But I think that’s like a key thing you have to get is this is, you could use a WordPress LMS, like Lifter LMS without a separate e learning authoring tool, because you can create all the learning content, the videos, the quizzes, everything directly with Lifter LMS and WordPress. But we have an issue here, which is if we spent two decades investing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in this catalog of SCORM content, we’re like, I’ve heard this in talking to people transitioning SCORM to WordPress is they say that’s cool. I want to do the new way of doing things going forward. But I’m not ready to just disregard all this other work and convert all these SCORM content into web content. So there’s that’s a challenge. So how do we deal with that? What do you recommend? Kurt Von Ahnen: My strong suit when I talk to people, Chris is just problem solving. Each whenever I consult with a company, each one has a unique use case, right? So what a lot of people don’t recognize is when they make SCORM content, if they use a course authoring tool like Rise or Articulate 360 or one of these, what they’re high dollar tools too, right? Articulate 360, last time I checked was like 3, 000 a year for individual license. So if you’ve got a team of five people in your company using this thing, you’re already out 15, 000 for the year just for software to make the courses. So just you have to keep that economic scale in mind when you think about all this stuff. But a lot of people don’t recognize that when they export the scorn package, it’s exportable in multiple ways. And this is where I think a lot of companies made a big mistake. They subcontracted. Some instructional developer to make their scorn package and they got a zip file that they could put into their custom LMS and it worked, but they never kept the original authoring files to alter or to re edit or republish or update content and that stuff. Tends to get lost over the years. And so these different SCORM authoring tools have the ability to export the material to display on the web, like directly. So a lot of people with SCORM authoring tools, they’ll say, Oh this doesn’t work with SCORM. And it’s wait a minute. You can, if you still have it, you can export that package to be displayable on the web. So you can say export that as an HTML file, export that used to be able to export them as flash back in the day, but export as an HTML file or export as a zip file or export as, so you have the options. So that’s one thing. If you have the original files, you can repurpose that content, republish it and use it on a standard website. The other thing that you can do, and this is what I did at Suzuki. When I worked at Suzuki, Suzuki had this amazing catalog of SCORM content. And it went like way back, like just quite honestly, millions of dollars of content. But it was old. It was really old. And to try and get a new technician coming into the field, like to say in order to be certified, you have to know how to work on a 1978 GS 1000. That’s not realistic anyway. So when I redesigned the learning platform for Suzuki and that interface for students, we took everything that was three years and newer. We put that on our new interface. Then everything that was four years and older, I put into a legacy kind of repository. I was like, we didn’t waste it. We didn’t hit the lead. We didn’t, it didn’t to the vice presidents and presidents. It didn’t feel like we were throwing away their investment. But we took all of that content and we literally just dumped it into a repository that was accessible by a search link and people could always pull that, resource up, but we didn’t have it on our forward facing learning site, cluttering up the works for the new technicians. And in a lot of cases. When I consult with a company, especially a large company with a large library of content, that discussion has to happen where you’re like, Hey, let’s just be real. Nobody needs to learn about Lotus 1, 2, 3 anymore. No one needs to learn about Netscape. So let’s take that old content out. And if you want to save it somewhere, make it accessible somewhere, we can do that. But let’s focus on what the needs are today. And how we’re going to keep you modern and light moving forward. Chris Badgett: Those are great points. Yeah. Migration of learning management system isn’t necessarily, it doesn’t have to be a switch you flip where you just turn it on. There can be a period where you have your legacy platform, you’re building out the new platform. You’re moving users over new people are coming to the new platform only. You’ve still got the back catalog if you need it. Let’s talk about taking the SCORM content and putting it onto the WordPress website. There’s tools like GrassBlade, LRS. There’s other ones out there as well. So this is not like a new problem. People have been working on this for a long time. Grass blade as an example, directly integrates with Lifter LMS. So when they complete the SCORM package, it completes the lesson, feeds into the reporting and so on. So if your goal is just to take what you have and move it all over, you can. But tell us more your, what people should think about or understand around just putting the SCORM content on WordPress. And I know there’s you taught me some things about, Hey, we’ve got light boxes. We’ve got opening a link over here. We’ve got. Embed in the page and there’s all these you have a lot of options and it can look really good. Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, then that’s the other strange part. Just as I said, a lot of people in the corporate space aren’t aware of all the export options and their course authoring tools. A lot of them aren’t aware that SCORM can appear. Almost any way that you choose for it too. I, say that in a way. I try I, wish I could say that better. We rewind, redo, . You have options when you put it into a WordPress website that you don’t natively think about if you normally work with scorm. So if you have one of those corporate websites where SCORM pops up and it’s like a popup on the page and it’s its own little box. That’s called the light box option. So a lot of custom LMSs are just built with that light box option. So every time someone is managing the LMS for the company, they upload the zip file, and then they go to review those zip file or the page, and it just pops up like a light box. And so for the instructional designer, they come over time to just think that’s the way SCORM works. You know what I mean? Like it just becomes that’s the method, but in reality, it’s content. And you mentioned it earlier it’s a content management system. So how do you want to display that content? Do you want to embed it in a page and have it work inside the page, like page content, but it stays interactive. So if you have buttons to push or options or Moving images or quizzing as part of your SCORM package, it still operates, but all within that embedded part of the page, you can do that. You can do the standard light box option where you have that standard kind of launch button or some kind of trigger on the page that launches the light box. But my favorite option, Chris and I think this was a surprise when you and I were doing a demo with web dev studios recently you can have it open in a separate tab and then that SCORM content. It becomes well, and this is just me. It’s my favorite way of doing it because it makes the SCORM content feel like it’s like living and breathing inside the site. It fills the whole tab of the page, It seems more modern. It seems it’s more responsive because when it’s in there and you look at like on tablet or mobile, it seems to size better. I just, I really enjoy that option. And a lot of people don’t recognize that’s there. One of the ops obstacles, and you mentioned this is you mentioned grass blade or other tools. And so people start thinking, Oh man, I got to add more tools. I got to that’s a subscription that’s 99 a year. That’s 150 a year. And, but in the grand scheme of things, we already talked about these projects costing over six figures every year to maintain and manage. And now we’re talking about an extra tool that costs 150 a year. So I don’t even really give that credit. It’s yeah, you have WordPress, you get Lifter LMS, you put in grass blade and it just, And I’ve tried a handful of other different tools and you can get them to work, but I found the most consistent so far for me has been using grass blade in the grass blade. LRS. Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s great. And I like that. You mentioned the content just to put if you work at a company and you have a bunch of SCORM content, know that WordPress as a content management system has been around for 20 years. Lifter LMS has been around for 10 years. We’re really good at content. And for us, SCORM is just another type of content and it’s not a video. It may have video elements and so on, but text images, interactive stuff videos, audios, PDFs, PowerPoints, all these things are just types of content that WordPress has been dealing with and Lifter LMS has been dealing with for decades. That should hopefully put people at ease. In terms of score, SCORM is just another kind of content that we play with in this ecosystem and make work for learning needs. Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah It’s, unique, but just to jump in a bit, I remember when I got the job with Suzuki, right? This is like a story that’s. Not related, but I was a power sports person and the Marine people, cause it’s a there’s Marine automotive and motorcycle and the Marine people would always say, oh our outboards are so technical. Our outboards are so technical. And then when I went to Japan for the training and they pulled the cover off of one of the. Outboard motors because I had to work on it. I was like, that’s it. It’s an engine on a stick. That’s not overly technical. If I can take apart a motorcycle, I can take apart that. It looks like an engine out of your Volkswagen shoved on top of a stick. And I know that I have a tendency to oversimplify things. But what I just described with that Suzuki experience is what happens in our world with content management versus SCORM people in the SCORM world, because that course authoring software has lots of hoops and things to jump through to make the end product. They come out of that experience and they go, Oh SCORM is just so technical. I don’t think it would work in a WordPress website. And it’s like. Why do you think WordPress is different from anything else that shows up on the internet? Other than the fact that you own it and it’s open source and all those things. But to you and I, like you just said, it’s just content. Once it’s authored, it’s content. It’s like you can edit a video with your iPhone or you can edit your video with Adobe premiere plus. It’s exponentially more complicated, but when the video is done, you’re just embedding a video in your website. Chris Badgett: Yeah, a hundred percent. And another thing that comes up is scale, like training organizations or big corporations that have training needs. They want to make sure it can scale. Just to give you an idea of some of the organizations that use WordPress, we have NASA, we have Taylor Swift. We have the United States government, and there’s many, more WordPress powers around 45 percent of the internet. And a lot of sites are small business sites or whatever, but there’s a lot of enterprise WordPress, very high traffic, very big needs on the hosting or the server for resources or interactivity and concurrent logins. and things like that. So this is not a new issue, but I think WordPress has a like a perception problem. Oh, that’s a blogging software. It’s it is, but that’s 5 percent of the features and it can scale to the largest newspapers in the world. If you’re just talking about blogging or articles but it can also scale as LMS, it can scale in e commerce. There’s very large. e commerce sites on the internet powered by WordPress that have a lot of needs. So anything else you would add on to scale? Kurt Von Ahnen: The, biggest, the absolute biggest component of e learning for a lot of these enterprise organizations is scaling. So you mentioned scaling, but you’re talking about scaling the amount of users or bandwidth or maybe security, or we’re thinking in those terms, but in the SCORM world, when you have a custom built learning management system, the providers that provide these custom websites at these huge dollar amounts, they have, costs that are based on active enrollment, right? And so if I’ve got up to 500 students, maybe it’s this much money. If I’ve got over a thousand students, if I have over 2000 students. And so once you start growing your enterprise to where you have 2, 500 active students, Chris you’re, spending as much on the per student licensing as you are for the original hosting and maintenance of the site. It’s, just the way that they. License the product for you to use to teach your, circle, your community. That pricing model is really outdated. We’re going back 15, 20 years when they started putting these things together, but those pricing models in those custom LMS verticals of the internet, they haven’t changed and so when you transfer over to the WordPress model and you look at a tool like Lifter LMS. A common question we get from people switching their SCORM into WordPress will say how many students can I enroll in my courses? And, we’re confused. We go, As many as you want, how many you got? Chris Badgett: And how much more does it cost per student? Nothing. I think this is why people are coming over as they’re realizing that whether they’re using a hosted LMS Canva and talent LMS, and you, could probably rattle off some more names. Oh, Kurt Von Ahnen: SumTotal, Bridge, LearnUpon all of those that I still remember. I think they all still charge based on active user counts and licensing per user. Chris Badgett: And, Lifter LMS has none of that. It’s there’s no limit on number of courses, number of instructors, number of students, number of admin users, or all these different user roles on your site. If you’re selling access to your SCORM content there’s no, you’re not getting we’re not charging you more for that. So it’s, I think it’s that unlimited nature and people are getting used to that or they’re starting to discover like, Oh, I don’t need to pay 30, 40, a hundred thousand dollars a month for an LMS when I could buy LFTR LMS, everything I need. For 1500 bucks, which also comes with unlimited sites, number of websites you can use it on. And you can even get a lifetime license and never have to pay LFTR again and fix your costs. So when we talk about scale, LFTR LMS and WordPress are infinitely scalable out of the box. Your web hosting is where there is some scaling costs, but even that is far more affordable than the traditional way of doing things. And there’s great companies out there. Convessio is one that comes pops to the top of my head. We just did a blog post with them about scaling and there’s, a lot of great. Web hosts that people like NASA, the United States government and Taylor Swift use, and it’s fine. And it’s still like way, cheaper than the old way. Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah. And when you mentioned those famous people, it’s like when I was talking to Vic Dorfman about that project we’re working on, he was like, oh yeah, we have the website for the beast. And you think about the millions of users that follow that cat and you go, man, that’s there might be more people going to that website than the NASA site. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the scale concern it’s, basically handled, get the best software. If you’re all mess is the best in the WordPress learning management system ecosystem, there are several great there’s literally hundreds of web hosts out there, but if you’re a large organization, there’s a short list of probably about 10 of the top for that do the large sites and make sure it’s just a seamless, easy experience with a hundred percent uptime and all that kind of stuff. Kurt Von Ahnen: And that’s, let’s just do the plug while we’re here. If you go to liftorlms. com right at the top menu is the recommended resources and you can go to recommended resources. And there’s a list of themes and hosts and tools and everything in there for people that are just checking it out. Chris Badgett: Let’s, think about sometimes with WordPress and Lifter LMS as an example, when it comes to a big company adopting. It seems like there’s usually an evangelist within the company and innovator. Maybe it’s the, C the CEO or the owner is trying to cut costs. It’s a technical person who’s Hey, we really need to modernize our tech stack. Maybe it’s an instructional designer. Who’s you know what these. I want to try to do something with native web content using WordPress. They do everything our e learning authoring tool does. Maybe we should look at this. How do you help somebody who is excited about this kind of sell it to their organization in terms of, could be a technical person, could be a person who’s keeping track of the money and expenses that could be an instructional designer, it could be. A teacher, like how do we get everybody on board and excited about the opportunity here? Kurt Von Ahnen: This takes me back. I think it was four or five years ago. You and I did a podcast and you were like, how did you get WordPress into Suzuki? And I was like, I didn’t ask for permission. I just did it. Chris Badgett: They just wanted the outcome, right? They just wanted a solution. You found the best. Most economical solution made it happen. Kurt Von Ahnen: And then when you show it to them, like you put it up on the screen in the conference room you put it up on the big screen and they go, Oh, this is nice. When did you make this? I made it last weekend. How much did it cost? Nothing so far. Oh, we like it. We like it. So the best advice for people in the learning space, honestly, Dude, sign up for the dollar demo, right? You get yourself a dollar demo. It’s good for 30 days. You go in, you put in the company logo, it, the rest of the sites populated with content and you get used to seeing where things are. This is groups, this is forums. This is that. Cause the demo has all those. Premium tools on it. And then maybe you, look at maybe putting grass blade onto it, if you really have to show off the scorn, you put grass blade into that demo site that you’ve got for 30 days. Anyway, schedule a meeting with your VP or your director of it get them in a room, shut the door. And go, Hey, I did some quick research and I see that we’re paying our, current provider 497, 000 this year for our e learning platform. I can build us a duplicate of that learning platform with extra features, right? For 58, 000 and, don’t worry about my salary. Cause I’m already on the clock. And it’s really hard for somebody in corporate to go, wait, I can say 400, 000 this afternoon, Chris Badgett: you Kurt Von Ahnen: know, and say, no, they’ll at least let you explore. Chris Badgett: And just to empower, if you’re watching this and you are in one of these organizations, you’re interested in SCORM as a training arm of your company, or as a curriculum provider, and you want to look at the WordPress and Lifter LMS. We have a detailed blog post on our blog. Just Google Lifter LMS blog SCORM. You’ll find it. We have other videos on our YouTube channel about working with this content. We have the dollar demo, so you can start playing with it and see what it’s like to work with a learning management system and WordPress. And you can build up a proof of concept, like you’re saying with GrassBlade and even just reach out to us. If, you’re looking for a demo, we host live calls typically on Thursdays where we can just open up and show you what you’re looking for with a screen share. There’s a ton of resources here that are visual that you can read about. That you can view on a video, get a live demo, get a sandbox trial test site to test. You’ve just got options here. So this is a podcast. So we’re talking a lot, but I just want you to know there’s all these other resources to help you make this decision and move forward. Kurt Von Ahnen: And at the risk of patting myself on the back. A lot of enterprise clients aren’t looking to have a new project in house. They just aren’t so they’re thinking I can’t give up my provider. I can’t give up having a reliable, sustainable source outside of the office to do this. Lifter LMS has a whole list of vetted. Experts I’m on the list web dev studios for enterprise work is fantastic. Codable is an option. There’s just a ton of experts available through the LFTR LMS ecosphere that can help you with these kinds of projects. And I know that Manjana Nomas is always open to this kind of stuff. That’s right in our alley. Chris Badgett: Absolutely. And it’s a skill set to really have that knowledge of SCORM, corporate, WordPress, Lifter LMS, hosting, when you host your own website, and yeah it’s, there are peop one of the great things about WordPress is the community of people. Agencies and people that can help support your project. So if your concern is like in your mind, you’re thinking like, I don’t know if my it person can do this. I talked to them and they’ve never heard of WordPress or they haven’t used it. And in a couple of years you can hire, bring somebody outside to build it and you own the asset. It’s your website. You’re just bringing in somebody who’s an expert at all these layers. Has the overlap with WordPress, SCORM and LFTR LMS and hosting and can really fulfill the project for you and potentially train your team so that they’re one of the cool things about WordPress is it’s empowering. Once people learn how to drive it and you learn how to create a course in LFTR LMS and put your SCORM content in there, go native and WordPress. It empowers your instructional designers or your content people to, you’re not going to be caught infinitely outsourcing. Or hiring agencies, unless you want to, you can do that, but you can also upskill your team in house. Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. And most providers would offer some kind of tutorial or training service to show you how to use the platform once it’s built anyway, and that’s part of the deal. When you, mentioned an interesting thing, and I want to make sure people don’t get confused or think it’s not possible. So you were saying you could upload SCORM or you could do work in the native course builder kind of environment, right? So the native course builder in Lyft or LMS allows you to put in text, video, pictures, any kind of file, PDF, PowerPoint. You can just. Cram, anything that works on the web, like Chris said, can go in there, but don’t think that you’re limited. Don’t think you either have a SCORM LMS or a native LMS. That content can be completely hybrid. And what’s really cool is, let’s say you have multiple SCORM pieces and you’re used to your system only playing one SCORM package per page, With Lifter LMS, you can actually stack those SCORM packages in the same page. Like someone could literally go chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, or however you label yours, modules or whatever. Sometimes our lingo is different, but the overall features and benefits. Are of the same theory, right? So we have a course hierarchy with lessons and courses and sections and memberships, which for you, you might think in terms of modules, pages, and chapters, but we’ll figure all that out. We’ve got people at Lyft Rail MS that can help you line up your lingo and make sure that everything matches up for you. Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s a good point. I want to encourage you if you’re watching this and you have more questions. You can always email us at Lyft or LMS. You can find that wherever, if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can drop a comment down below. We have a community calendar on our website that you can find on the main menu that has our live events. If you want to come and ask personalized questions as you. Evaluate Lifter LMS and WordPress for your LMS. We’re here for you. And there’s a whole community, like we’ve mentioned of like agencies, Curt’s agency, which is separate from Lifter LMS, Mañana No Más. If you’re looking for that person to come in and build it out help you develop a proof of concept, even to sell whoever needs to sell, like there’s talented people out there that knows the hybrid tech stack here. And I love what you said about. Clarifying that WordPress is a content management system. Lift lifters, learning management system, that content can mix and match and be as variable as complex or as simple as you want. So there’s really no limit to the customizability there. And you get to own the asset that you create with your own learning platform, which is. Super valuable, especially in today’s world where you don’t want to get caught just renting access to everything. And you don’t actually own the asset, particularly as a curriculum provider. You want to build your, asset and your content is just a part of the asset, but the platform. Is really valuable. One thing we’ve seen people doing with SCORM and WordPress and Lifter LMS is they’re like, I want to have multiple websites for different clients. That’s all possible too. And again, this goes back to the unlimited thing with Lifter LMS, with our top license, it’s unlimited sites. So you’re not going to get charged anymore. You can just build one for this division or this state or this client. And you can work with your like core content. There’s course importing and exporting and. There’s all kinds of stuff you can do to do a really large multi multiple website thing if you want to, or you can keep it all in one. It’s completely flexible. Kurt Von Ahnen: One last thing, when we talk about enterprise projects and SCORM sites, and you touched on this, Chris, but I want to make sure we’re clear. A lot of these companies have. A dedicated CRM tool, then they have their learning management tool, then they have a sales and marketing website, and then they have an inventory site. That’s on an S 400 server somewhere. They have all that stuff and. If they start with moving the training content over and they get that proof of concept working in that WordPress space, that WordPress site has the ability to adapt or adopt the other requirements. So you can begin to say, Hey, what would it look like to migrate our CRM into that page? Into that page. Into that setting. So then you get rid of that tool that’s costing you thousands of dollars a month. And now you’re running something in your site. Hey, can I run inventory? There’s e commerce tools and all kinds of things that support inventory actions. So you can go, okay now we can start supporting our inventory inside the site. Then you start looking at your other things. Before you know it, you’ve been able to streamline your whole tech stack. Now I T people are going, Hey, dude, I need my job. But realistically, you can consolidate these things in the one central kind of tool. And some people might say, Hey, if it’s a real enterprise project, I still want to keep things separate on subdomains, or I want to there’s, different strategies for different companies and use cases are always different. But I find a lot of midsize companies do really good with just consolidating everything, simplifying everything. And then giving all of their employees, all of their internal users, the ability to take their actions inside that site and use it as the communication portal for the whole company. Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. And that’s just, that’s a great way to paint the picture of what an in state could be. You could end up there. But all you have to do in the short term is take the first step, get a proof of concept focus on the LMS. You don’t have to kill your back catalog. Like we discussed and you can move forward. You don’t necessarily, you can start your new LMS and get going while maintaining the legacy one. You have a lot of options. It’s all about just moving forward with the right people, the right tools. The right vision you have in your company and clearly communicating what you want. Cause this is an opportunity for innovation where workflows can be improved. Things can be automated. Tooling can be upgraded while also saving a ton of money. So it’s a, it was a good conversation. Curt, I want to thank you for coming back on the show. Did you have a final thought there? Kurt Von Ahnen: No, I was going to apologize for getting off track. Cause I get excited. Chris Badgett: That’s not off track. I think that’s perfect. Cause that’s the ultimate vision of not only are you cutting your costs, consolidating tools, modernizing your tech stack Upscaling your organization and modernizing it, but that’s all like a a golden path that you can just start walking towards, but I think that’s the important part is begin with the end in mind and just start, walking. Cause if you’re, and I think that’s what people are doing. That’s why they’re looking at these tools. Cause they’re like, I want to move in this direction. I’m not sure what the first step is. It’s seen, we have like decades of like legacy decisions and content here. So I get that it’s a little bit overwhelming, but all you have to do is start and if you’re investigating and you’re watching this video, you’re already on the path. Just take the next step. Reach out to us at Lifter LMS with questions. Come to our live calls. You can ping Kurt over directly at his agency, Mañana No Más. And we’re excited. We’ve been doing this for a long time. We’re not going anywhere. WordPress isn’t going anywhere. Our mission is to lift up others through education. So we’re just here. This is what we do education, whether that’s in a company or lots of different ways that education is done. And we’re democratizing that we’re making it more affordable. We’re making it easier and more to use more powerful, more customizable. We get to benefit from the WordPress ecosystem, which isn’t like one company. It’s like literally because it powers 42 percent of the internet. There’s literally like hundreds of thousands of professionals who build tools and have services and agencies that can help you. So that’s what it’s all about. Thank you, Kurt, for coming back on the show. Really appreciate it. I know you get passionate about online education and solving business problems at scale. So it’s, really fun to have this discussion today. Thank you so much for coming on. Kurt Von Ahnen: Ah, thanks for having me, man. It was great. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 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 The post Upload and Track SCORM Content in WordPress with LifterLMS appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Zack Katz shares a comprehensive overview of GravityView and its associated plugins developed by GravityKit. Also he shares how to create a app for your LifterLMS website with GravityView. Zack Katz is the founder of GravityKit. He is a prominent figure in the WordPress community. In this episode, He highlights how Gravity Forms can be used for more than just standard contact forms; they can also be used as entry points for other kinds of apps on a website. Zack also emphasizes the contribution GravityKit makes to the functionality of Gravity Forms by way of plugins such as GravityView, GravityCalendar, GravityCharts, GravityMath, and others. Gravity Forms data may be efficiently organized, migrated, edited, and visualized by users with the help of these plugins. GravityView makes it easier for form submission data to be shown on the student dashboard or LMS website, allowing for functions like report viewing, submission grading, and score summaries. Zack also covers practical uses for Gravity Forms and related plugins, such creating expert or instructor directories, exhibiting user-generated content, organizing event calendars, and automating processes like vacation requests. 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 Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to 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. He’s back on the show. It’s Zach Katz from Gravitykit. com. We’re going to be talking today about how to use GravityView, which is a product that GravityKit makes that deeply integrates with LifterLMS so that you can display submission form data in the student dashboard and in other parts of your LMS website. We’ll get into all that. We’re also going to do a live demo of that, but first welcome back on the show. Zach. Zack Katz: Thanks Chris. And thanks for having me. Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s good to chat with you again. I’m a huge fan of Gravity Forms and GravityView. Let’s start with some basics for people, because I know in my journey, It took me a while to realize that the internet is mostly powered by forms and what that actually means. And then that’s only half the story, collecting data through forms. Then you might want to use display that data somewhere. So take us down to the fundamentals and talk to us about Gravity Forms and then visualizing data, Zack Katz: right? So Gravity Forms, best WordPress form out there. Sorry, everybody else, but you’re not as good as Gravity Forms. I’m coming in hot Chris. Gravity Forms is the best way to create little miniature applications. So forms aren’t just. contact forms anymore. There are really entry points to applications and to jobs to be done for your business. So a form could be a checkout form. If you wanted to sell something, a form could be a student article submission for, their end of year project. And all these different entry points currently sit in Gravity Forms, and you can connect it up to other places. If you have Gravity Forms add ons, you can get an email with attachments. You can submit it to Google Sheets and stuff like that. But what GravityKit does is we try to take all that Gravity Forms data on your website so that you can create applications for yourself to make your flow work the way you want it to. Students submit reports, and the teachers log on to your own website. The teachers have can create, you can create views for the teachers to view reports of their own students, grade the submissions right there, view charts of submissions over time, summarize the scores, like all this types of stuff is possible inside your website using Gravity Forms and GravityKit. And we try to take whatever you’re trying to do for your business. There’s so many different flows that are available to be converted from something where you need to go somewhere else. To, process a an assignment process a log. And instead we can take that internally and you can create powerful integrations with other tools like Lister LMS and create dashboards for your own data that facilitates people in the organization and outside. You can have it be internal only private to you, or you can have it be public, have people be able to browse this data publicly as well. Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And I’m a GravityKit and Gravity Forms user. I’ve been using Gravity Forms for over 10 years. And two of the ways we use it on the LifterLMS website is we have an experts program where people ask us all the time to refer them to freelancers and agency folks. That have experience and skills with LifterLMS. So we created an experts program. If somebody wants to get that business and generate client leads from LifterLMS, they go through our little application form and a lot of the data that they’re submitting, like their profile picture, links to their website, their contact information and stuff like that. GravityView, once we approve the submission, then turns it around and publishes all those experts in a directory. And we actually have it on randomized order so that the order of people that show up is always random. That way somebody who, joined a long time ago doesn’t just end up always at the bottom and alpha, alphabetizing isn’t always fair. So we, we use the random feature. And we do something really similar with pictures that people submit and website links of websites, they’re proud that they’ve built with lifter LMS. We call that a showcase. It’s also randomized and it allows us to create user generated content by our users that we can then approve and display on our website. And I just want to put another for the LMS user out there. We get a lot of people who want to build. a Udemy clone or a course marketplace or certify certain professionals. And these are places where a directory becomes comes in handy where if somebody wants to teach on your LMS platform, they can submit an application form. And with all the details you need that later displays on a like an instructor’s page that has all the people or all the people that were certified to this program. Really, the options are completely limitless and what I’m most excited about is it takes away, you can build all that kind of content from scratch using WordPress or page builders. But if users just have the stuff and you’ve got the layout set you’re, literally automating so much quote, busy work, building out like a nice looking page of teachers or certified professionals or businesses or so many different ways to use it. Zack Katz: Yeah. And one of the things we offer is GravityCalendar, which is a way to display Gravity Form entries on a calendar. And that creates a calendar feed that you can subscribe to on your apple calendar app, for example, or Google calendar. So for one way that you could use this is for teachers to submit events for a school and the school could have a form where you teach to submit events and all these teachers, once it gets approved. Can submit their own events to the school, people can subscribe to the school calendar, and voila, it takes care of it all with, just with Gravity Forms and GravityCalendar, you can bypass so much complexity and have teacher, give teachers the power, and administrators have an easy time setting up the functionality. And then you can embed a calendar on a page that shows upcoming events you can click into it and see You can embed GravityView views inside the calendar itself to show people who have signed up for different events. It, you can build out applications one step at a time, drag and drop, no code required. It’s really powerful for educators. And we have a ton of people who are using GravityView and our other tools for educational purposes. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You just gave me another project by the way, cause we have a community calendar at LifterLMS. com and what you just described is way better than how ours works and in our case, like different team members need to add events to a calendar that the public needs to subscribe to and all that, and that is That’s really cool. I’m going to have to dig in on that one. Zack Katz: And I have a we have a team vacation calendar that we have internally that people submit vacation requests and I subscribe to that on my Apple calendar so I can see what team members are taking off on the weeks coming up. We, love that functionality as well. Chris Badgett: Perfect. Perfect. Let’s double click and go a little deeper on what you were just talking about in terms of. view is one product within GravityKit. Can you just describe and explain the main products in the suite that makes up GravityKit? Sure. Zack Katz: We have a bunch. Our goal is to allow the, allow you to view, export, edit organize, migrate all your Gravity Forms data. We have different ways to view your data like GravityView and GravityCalendar and GravityCharts that we have an easy way to create charts from Gravity Forms data. So if you Will also I’ll show you that later in this broadcast But we have you can embed a chart inside lifter now with this new GravityView integration we also have GravityMath to do calculations like advanced summing, dividing, like all sorts of algebra with your Gravity Forms data and arbitrary numbers. So if you ever need to do calculations with Gravity Forms, that’s the way to go. And we have easy ways to import and export using Gravity, import and Gravity, export and Gravity migrate to move. If you have multiple sites writing a whole bunch of Gravity form stuff, and it’s frustrating to have to recreate it on each site, we bundle it up into one thing and you can migrate it all at once. That makes it really easy. Then bulk actions with Gravity actions. If you need a way to see all the changes that you’ve made over time, like track changes, but for Gravity Forms, we have Gravity revisions. And then if you need to make easy changes to your data, gravity edit. So Chris, we’ve got a lot of add ons, but they really come together. We’ve created each one of these add ons because we’ve identified a need that our customers have for an additional. important part of their toolkit that they don’t have. So we built an out on and now they all work together really nicely. And we find that people can create incredible applications that power entire websites that some of these replaced their software that they said they were paying 120, 000 a year. For this software, for this custom education software, they’ve built out some,GravityView that do this functionality instead. That type of power powered by your own website data you own and control. That’s what you get with Gravity Forms and GravityKit. Awesome. Chris Badgett: And you, have some fans live with us here today. James Tryon says, hi, Hashim says he loves that GravityView original theme song. Yeah, Zach and his team. There’s a lot of great creativity and the way they do their marketing and branding is awesome. So definitely go check out GravityKit. com and you’ll see what I’m talking about. One just kind of base level question. If somebody is new to this and I realized this with lift your LMS as well. Is it takes a moment sometimes for somebody to understand the difference between a website and an application, like with Lifter LMS, you’re actually building a web application. Yes, it’s a website, but it’s an application that does all these things, but maybe you can help me describe, help somebody grasp that concept of what makes an application different from just a website. Zack Katz: Let me come up with a metaphor on the spot. You can have a house is your website and then you can bring running motor into your house systems. Yeah. So like you, there are multiple systems inside your house your furnace and that could be an application in your house, which is your website and your house can contain multiple systems. Maybe that’s a metaphor. I like that. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Cause it’s really going beyond just content management, which in itself is an application, but the It’s not a static website. You’re building like learning management systems, directories, some e commerce application using Gravity Forms and Stripe or whatever. So it’s really amazing what you can build on a WordPress site. Zack Katz: Yeah. And if you see people advertising a feature that can like an LMS, for example, that’s an application, like not that an LMS is a feature, it has many features, but Your, site can run multiple applications at the same time. Chris Badgett: Kind of like your phone and all the apps. Chris, that’s a much better metaphor. Yeah. I didn’t even think of that example until we talked about it. That’s how we learn in community, as they say. So one of the cool things that you’ve done with your LifterLMS GravityView integration, Lifter LMS has a concept called a student dashboard. Student dashboard. And in that dashboard, a user has their own unique view of the courses they’re enrolled in, their progress, their grades, their order history, if they’re making purchases. And there are certificates and all kinds of things. But now you’ve integrated GravityView into the student dashboard. And before going into that you can display GravityView anywhere you want on your website. Can you talk like with shortcodes and stuff? Can you tell us how, just the basics of to get a view somewhere on your website. Zack Katz: Sure. Yeah. To create a view, you have a preexisting Gravity Forms form that collects the data, and then you create a view from that data where you drag and drop the fields that you want to display. And say, if you have a contact form with name, email, phone address, but you only want to display somebody’s name. And if you want to, if you click the name, then it goes into a full profile. That is something that you set up with GravityView And so those, once you create a layout of fields that you want to display, you save it and you can embed it on a post or a page using a shortcode or a block, or you can also just link to it directly where it’s a custom post type of people know what that is. It’s like a post or a page. but often people choose to embed it in existing content. So embedding it in existing pages and that you can do no problem. But what we were finding is that people wanted to have this data for the currently logged in user. They wanted to show only that logged in users data inside Lifter LMS. So they could say I have this person who uses Lifter who submitted a bunch of school reports, for example. But. there isn’t a way to display GravityView inside Lifter without customizing it. And so what we did is we developed this integration where you can choose the display to display multiple views if you want inside a LifterLMS student dashboard. where you can choose to display the current user, current logged in users entries. You can display the role of the current logged in user. So if somebody is a teacher or if somebody is a student, you can choose to display different data based on their role. You can customize it however you want now with GravityView having its own tab and you can rename the tab as however you like. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s, jump into a demo. Cause I know we’re throwing around a lot of jargon and words and stuff here. What if if you’re watching, I just want to encourage you to, go over, or I’m sorry, if you’re listening in your earbuds and the podcast app for this segment of the episode, I encourage you to go to our YouTube channel and just look up GravityView Zach Katz. Podcast. You’ll find it. And and you’ll be able to see what we’re talking about here. But if you want to guide us through a demos act, that’d be great. And and we’ll and do your best to, do it in a way that if somebody’s just listening, they’ll pick up what you’re laying down. Zack Katz: Yeah. That sounds good. All right. I am now selecting my screen to be shared. All right, we good? Yeah, we’re good. All right. I am showing my website. Actually, we’re Chris Badgett: We’re getting the stream yard from your share. I think you shared the wrong tab. Let me know. Okay. Stop screen. Zack Katz: Sorry about that. Chris Badgett: It’s all right. It’s live. This, we always have little hiccups with live technology. Zack Katz: All right. I’m showing my entire screen this time. Can you see that? Chris Badgett: Let me put it up on the screen and as we’re recording, I can hear my wife firing up the chainsaw outside. So that hopefully that’s not coming through. But if it gets really loud, let me know. But yeah, we’ve got we’ve got a chart GravityKit website and a chart up. Is that the right screen? Yep, Zack Katz: that’s Chris Badgett: the right screen. Cool. Zack Katz: So I have a Lifter LMS site. Lifter LMS is running. I have multiple courses that I’m displaying and one of the courses that I have subscribed to that I have enrolled in is a seven week fitness challenge. And in Lifter LMS you can embed a form inside each of the courses. And we have done that so that you can In this one week, for example we have a form that says log your workouts for this week and the form has a date field, a day of the week, a length of the workout in minutes, workout type, strength training, cardio, yoga, Pilates, describe your workout, how did you feel? So this is activity tracker. And As you can, as you continue throughout the course, you would submit your workouts for the lesson and you go to the next lesson. So each of these submissions then becomes a, an entry in Gravity Forms. And we want to display those entries for each student and embed those inside their LifterLMS student dashboard. So I’ve created a view to show that data where I have embedded a chart and I’ll show you how to create that. I’ve embedded two different actual, two different types of charts. And I’ve want to show the day of the week, the length of the workout types. And these are all fields inside GravityView, configurator, where I can add different fields to show different content. I saved that view, and then I chose to go to Lifter LMS settings, the integrations tab, and there’s a new option here that says GravityView. So this is the GravityView integration that appears when you have GravityView installed and activated. You’ll see it under Lifter LMS settings, integrations, and click GravityView, and you can see that you get to enable and disable the integration. Choose the name of the menu in the Lifter LMS student dashboard. You can change the endpoint slug. So if you want the URL to be different, so you can say slash my hyphen workouts, which is a nice thing you can customize. And then you can also change you can choose which views to display inside your LifterLMS dashboard. Right now I’ve chosen only to display the workout log. I’m clicking now to show the tab in LifterLMS, where you have a dashboard for the courses that you’re currently enrolled in. And there’s a new menu item in Lifter LMS, it’s called workout log. It shows a dashboard that you, that we just created in GravityView. And this is all powered by the data for the current user in terms of their workouts that they’ve submitted inside Lifter LMS itself. So you can see a chart, a bar chart of workout minutes per day. You can see a pie chart showing different workout sessions workouts by types of like strength, training, yoga, Pilates, cardio. And also there’s a table of workouts that have been logged showing organized by date and you can click into those and right inside left or LMS student dashboard. You can see each of the entries. that you’ve submitted and you can give your users the ability to edit their own entries. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Build an eLearning App Without Coding Using Gravity View appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Alex shares information on Siren Affiliates, a platform made to enable collaborations outside of conventional affiliate networks. Alex Standiford is owner of Siren Affiliates. He highlights how adaptable Siren Affiliates is, able to work with a variety of collaboration models outside of affiliate marketing. It facilitates content programs, for example, in which partners produce material directly on the platform to impact visitor engagement and generate revenue depending on particular criteria, such as views or interactions. Alex talks about the value of creating dashboards that are easy to understand, customized for each partner’s position, and tightly integrated with current systems like WooCommerce or LifterLMS. Through this connectivity, partners are guaranteed to have easy access to pertinent performance data without having to deal with intricate back-end processes. Last but not least, he stresses the significance of beginning small when introducing a platform of this kind, first interacting with a chosen set of partners to obtain input and improve the offering. 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: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special repeat guest. His name is Alex Standiford. He’s from siren affiliates. You can find that at siren affiliates. com. This is a product that’s coming out or has just come out. For affiliates and all kinds of innovation around what partnerships are and how to leverage them on your WooCommerce and your learning site. It’s, super exciting. Just all the innovation and Alex’s thoughts around creating effective incentivized partnerships, but first welcome back on the show, Alex.  Alex Standiford: Hey, Chris, I’m glad to be here. It’s been a minute. I’ve the weather is a little different than it was last time.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s a little different. What you’re building here with siren affiliates is really at the heart of online business. In the sense that we, as creators, we make things, we sell things, we create digital products or physical products, content, we’re creators. So anybody listening to this episode, if you’re watching us they have a desire to create, but then what happens with the artist, the creator, is they have to sell and then they do as best as they can, but then they want to look for partnerships and they want help with content and they want technology to be able to facilitate or help facilitate all those relationships and contributions. So I’m super pumped about siren affiliates. At a high level or sorry. Yeah. Siren affiliates. com. I checked myself because you’ve often said in our conversations, it’s not just affiliate. There’s more going on here. So give us that broad, high level view of your vision for siren affiliates.  Alex Standiford: Yeah. Okay, great. You’re right. It was with great difficulty. I had to go with siren affiliates because I just couldn’t think of a term that people would instantly latch onto, right? It’s the de facto online partnership that people think about in this context. So siren affiliates is an affiliate platform. But unlike your typical 1, it doesn’t look at an affiliate program as the only program you can possibly create an affiliate program is 1 of many different types of programs that you can make as long as you can track. As long as you can measure a person’s performance, you can pay them based on that performance. So I think of it as a pay for performance platform more than anything. I’ll give you, I’ll give you a more solid exam, a couple of solid examples here. An affiliate program is one, right? So you pay, you have a special affiliate link that an influencer or maybe some kind of content creator, whatever they are, they have a link that they give to their people. You’ve heard these, right? Like use coupon code, blah, blah, blah at the checkout. They want that because they want to get credit for those sales. But what if I am a content? What if I want to have people write content on my own site instead of their site? So I could maybe create something like a content program where you publish content through my site instead of your own. Maybe, you’re finding people who don’t have an audience or something like that, but they’re good writers and you just need content on your site. So you could create a writing program where anytime somebody visits that specific post, maybe that’s a trackable event, right? Somebody visited this specific post, so you can associate that person with that visit and then turn that into a sale or into a referral or something like that, just like you did with the influencer or the content creator that’s outside of your site. So that would be a whole different program that could work in addition to an affiliate program. So you could potentially stack. Different programs together, or mix them together in different ways. Another possible option could be something like this is this is right up your alley. Of course, creation set up. Maybe maybe you wanted to create a a learning site that is built by several course creators, and maybe you want to manage all these course creators. And help them provide them with a platform to publish their content. It would be Siren makes it, will make it possible to set it up so that those people can earn a percentage of your profits based on their courses performance. Maybe it’s based on the number of people who complete the complete courses. It could be based on how many minutes people spend watching those videos. It could be. Based on anything. If it’s measurable within say lifter it would be integrated in a way that you can track that and reward those people directly. Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. One of the most popular videos on our YouTube channel is how to build a Udemy clone, and you’re essentially saying if you want to do that this is siren affiliates. It’s the best I’ve ever seen and how you’re laying it out to manage all that. Cause it sounds easy. Oh, I want a website like you did me, but there’s a lot going on there and you take it, you always take it even further, like not just revenue share, but how do we get those creators on our platform, helping bring traffic, pay for performance on that. Create content, pay for performance on that. And what is the conversion? It’s not just a sale. Like you said, it could be a view or a time on the side or whatever. There’s like lots of options there.  Alex Standiford: Yeah, exactly.  Chris Badgett: Tell us, you’re also innovating around, we were talking about money, like affiliate commission or incentives. But you’re also thinking about award awarding partners with things like credits or cash, tell us how you envision the reward program or the award program.  Alex Standiford: Yeah. So any given affiliate or any given reward program pay for performance program at all, is. It really is broken down into a few things, right? It’s broken down into what is the thing you’re tracking? How many, how much is that thing worth? So if you have a visit, that’s worth maybe let’s back to that blog example. Maybe a blogger writes a post. Maybe a visit is worth 1 point and maybe a comment is worth like 10, right? So you’re able to like, track multiple things and assign a value to those things. And based on that value, you can then determine what the payout is. But the payout doesn’t have to be money. It could be store credit. It could be cash, right? It could be high fives whatever works for you. Maybe you have some kind of internal system where you are like a big company or something like that. And you have a support setup like this. I see this a lot for like bigger corporate companies where They have an internal reward program, where if you have so many points, you can go and spend that on a 25 Starbucks card or something like that, right? This system could also work with those internal teams, like a support team. You could set up a program where there’s a specific pool of points that your team can earn based on their respective performance. Whoever gets the most good high reviews or the best feedback or the satisfaction rates high, or maybe it’s based on the number of sales. They the people they convert or something like that in those sales. There’s so many different ways that this can be approached. Not even just in terms of you do a thing, I give you a dollar. It can be. You do a thing and I give you store credit. I give you some other currency. It can be anything.  Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s, super cool. Talk to us about the dashboard experience and, also you’re, launching this with a focus on WooCommerce. So WooCommerce has a dashboard, but the, whole. Affiliate or partner program. It needs its own dashboard stuff. So what’s going to be possible there?  Alex Standiford: Yeah. That’s actually going to depend a lot on the integrations. My goal with this is to make it so that the collaborators, I call them collaborators, affiliates, or whatever you want to call them, right? The, your partners. Is to provide them with an interface where they can have. Clarity and on the statistics that they need, but depending on what integration you’re using, that can vary. An affiliate doesn’t necessarily need to see their list of courses. But they, because they don’t have any, but they do need to know how many people have. Visited the site as a result of their link, how many people have converted and all kinds of other statistics. And affiliates. Okay. Dashboard might look completely different than a course creators dashboard. And I am setting this up so that the dashboard will integrate deeply with those different things with the expectation that. You won’t even have to those people don’t even necessarily have to see the WordPress dashboard at all. With lifter, for example, 1 of the, 1 of the simple the clear ones is for a course creator program. You can the, affiliate dashboard would include a list of their courses that they have and then they would have the opportunity to view that course or edit that course. And once they click edit, that would take them into the the, LMS lifted LMS is course editor. For their content.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I know people get really focused around affiliate programs in terms of following the money. Can you give us a little more, like how it would work? Like, how would, what are some ways you could set up the money flow, particularly in the Udemy clone example, what are some options around how that works? Alex Standiford: Okay. So One of the challenges, one of the, years that I’ve had whenever I’ve built programs like this, because like, all of this is coming from a decades worth of knowledge for me building these programs in my own agency. I didn’t have the software to do it. I was modifying existing affiliate solutions to make this work. But one of my biggest fears was always. Now, I never wanted to decouple the money that’s coming in from the money that goes out, right? Because you don’t want to accidentally owe more money than you’re paying out. So there’s a little bit of a danger there, right? Because if you have an affiliate program and maybe you’re paying like 40 percent on that and a content program, and it’s maybe it’s paying 40%, these are really high percentages. I’m just giving you an example. And then maybe you also have a sales program that’s like separate from your affiliate program. And it’s also 40%. If all three of those can stack, you’re paying 120%. You’re going to end up losing money on that. So you have to be thoughtful about the, out in the end. And in order to solve that, I’ve created different ways to allow people to, make the payout methodologies work. So you can obviously do a percentage, right? You can also do a fixed amount, just like you can with any other affiliate program. But there’s two other ones that I’m really excited about. One of them is they’re both profit shares. So one’s a weighted profit share and one’s a basic profit share. And this is literally what you’d companies like Udemy is doing. They, if you go and you look at their terms, they literally say, we take all of our profits and we take 25 percent of that. And we give it to all of course creators that money is the pool that is available among all course creators. And the amount you get for that is based on how much your performance, right? How much traffic you’ve driven. So this is literally just doing that exact thing. So you can create a weighted profit share where you say. This month, my, my memberships earned me a thousand dollars or something like that. I am paying out 25 percent of that amount to all of my course creators. So I would have a 250 pool available to all of them. And it’s just based on how much. How their performances, right? I was saying earlier, a comment or a visit was like, worth 1 point or 5 points. You could translate that into course content with every time a student completes 1 of their courses. They get a few points or something like that, and maybe it’s every time a video is completely viewed or 80 percent viewed or something like that. Maybe it’s like a 10th of a point for every like minute watched or something like that. There’s, you can create this holistic way to measure the health and the effectiveness of a course creator around multiple different statistics, not just 1 and then use that in combination with the different payout methodologies. That allows you to make sure that you are not only paying them based on their performance, but also making sure you’re not inadvertently paying out more than you’re bringing in.  Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Very cool. Yeah. It’s, like creating a course. Like you really have to do some. Design time and structure time and make sure you build, you think through all the cases, like what, if somebody is an affiliate, a creator and all these different things, what challenge I see in the space, or it’s more of an observation is that there are affiliates that are classic affiliates. They may not even be a user of your product. They’re trying to make money online through affiliate marketing. And some like at Lifter LMS as an example, selling software we have some affiliates like I just described, but then there’s also some of our users become affiliates to develop another income stream. And then there’s this. Other thing where somebody just, it would be called a referral program where maybe they get some points or credits based on their referrals, but they’re actually not that interested in affiliate marketing. They just want to refer it’s like the same folks who would leave you a five star review on a review site,  Alex Standiford: your biggest fans. Chris Badgett: Yeah, but they’re just not really interested in becoming affiliate marketing or becoming affiliate marketers. As I think through having an option for everybody, maybe somebody just wants to write content for your blog and they have a different thing or motivation. And then maybe you have that power user that wants to do all of that. A super fan. How do you think through, or what would your advice be in terms of as a platform creator educating people about all your different programs and Basically, it’s one thing to build the programs. It’s another, the pay for performance programs. It’s another to get people really using it. And yeah. So what are your thoughts around that?  Alex Standiford: So I actually did an email series. I have an email series that’s related to this, but basically I, whenever I’m starting a program and I’m going to do exactly this with siren, I’m starting. Small and private, you have to treat this almost in the same way. You treat a product launch, right? You’re in a lot of ways. This is a product launch. You’re launching an offering to the public. You have to treat it like that. Do you know what I mean? So you, start with your existing contact list, your existing contacts and you, start. Trying to find interest engage how much how many people would potentially sign up for something like that. Obviously, you want to have something prepared ahead of time, but you wouldn’t just email your entire list with a program without you wouldn’t email your entire list. That you have a course that’s ready if you never looked at the course or made sure it worked. So why would you do that with a program like this? So you would want to test it a little bit. Make sure it’s working. Make sure it’s effective. Make sure it’s. Helping, and in order to do that, you you want to do almost like a private. Smaller launch where you have. Maybe you’re testing it out with 10 or so people that you think are really going to be a great fit for this and you start there. You work with them very closely. You have meetings. You get feedback. You talk to them and you work with them to succeed. And with all of that information, you now have, you’re now going to be properly equipped to actually be able to, others succeed at a bigger scale. So once you have that initial logic and then initial information, you can educate at scale. Even if it’s a court, it could literally be a course, right? It could actually just be a course on how to sell your product. But it, the important part is you have to look at these people as partners. And like customers, and you were in a lot of ways, their coach, right there, you’re helping them succeed. They’re not helping you succeed. And once you flip that mindset, and you think about it like that, it really changes things. There’s a lot of people out. There’s a lot of affiliate programs out there that. All they ever talk about is how do you get 100 affiliates? How do you get 1000 affiliates? And almost every time I’ve ever spoken with somebody who has an affiliate program that’s actually bringing in a meaningful amount of money, they will always tell you. Oh, yeah, like 90 percent of it comes from a handful of my affiliates and the rest of them don’t really do much. So why are you worried about getting 100 affiliates when really all you need is 10 really good ones. So start there, start finding the really good engaged ones, run with them, work with them, figure out what’s working for them and for you, and then try to scale that up to set up success for everybody else.  Chris Badgett: I think at Lifter LMS we have around 1500 affiliates and just to confirm what you were saying about 30 of them really move the needle. Yeah. So why not just focus on the 30 not exclude people, but like when you think about it, think about quality over quantity.  Alex Standiford: Yeah. And even dig into meeting with them and talking with them and treating them. As like super affiliates partners. Exactly. Chris Badgett: I also agree with what you said about the courses. Like we actually, I think we’re about 60 days into a new free course we made on our left rail mess Academy about how to become an affiliate, understand it. These are the players. This is how it works. This is how to join a program. This is how to promote and actually investing in training your people to be good partners is a really good idea. One of the areas I got into trouble. Earlier on as a course creator, essentially building a Udemy clone, I had a organic gardening and permaculture site, and I would partner with these. This is before Lifter LMS. I would partner with these some really amazing experts. People would fly all over the world to see these people talk. And. And I would show up with my video camera or hire a videographer, like basically record the content, do the add them to the website, do all the tech stuff, promote it. As a bootstrapped entrepreneur, one of the ways that I was able to do that with very little resources is I gave away, I just kept it simple and did like a 50, 50 partnership. On the revenue through those programs, and there was an affiliate program on top of all that as well. But what I found over time is that the partnership ended up being skewed in the sense that, of course, they’re the experts content was really valuable and important and key. But I was doing all these, this work ongoing for marketing and growing and maintaining the platform and administration and all that stuff. So you mentioned it before, but I just wanted to dig in a little bit. Do you, in your time in the industry, what do you see as like good partnership percentages? And I know that’s an, it depends answer, but I think the classic question is. If I do an affiliate program, what should my percentage to affiliates be? Do you have any advice around that?  Alex Standiford: Do that for me, I based that entirely on my profit margin.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Alex Standiford: And how many different programs I want to have and the different roles that I want to create in my business. Because I really, that’s what I see this as I see these partnerships as. An encapsulation of a role in my business, right? So the sales program is for myself, the sales people that I want to have in my business the, content writers has a program. I’m actually going to do a bug bounty program in siren. That’s for developers. Like my, a lot of my solution for hiring and outsourcing development. Is going to be through siren using a program. It’s programs all the way down. But the for me the, rate to charge depends. Of course, it depends on what your competitors are charging and what they’re offering and all of that stuff. But it also depends on what your profit margin is, right? So if you’re. If your margin is 50% or something higher like that, then you can probably get away with doing as much as 30 percent of that going into your affiliate rate or something like that. But if you’ve got like a 10 percent or lower rate, which I’m sure most of your customers don’t have because they probably don’t have a lot of overhead because it’s a digital product. Then you’ve got to look at lower, really low rates. And actually at that point, it might be hard to even compete and create a competitive affiliate program. But that doesn’t mean that just means that an affiliate program may not be right for your specific business. That doesn’t mean that other programs aren’t right. It’s just, you have to like reframe what are your partnerships? What are the things that you need in your business? So if you looked at your Company structure, even if you are just a single solopreneur, or maybe it’s just you and a partner you look at what are all of the roles in the business and every 1 of those has an offer. Probably has an opportunity. Not all of them, but most of them have an opportunity that they can be done either as an with an employee. With a freelancer or with a program that somehow incentivizes people to do it. The program may not 100 percent replace an employee or something like that. But for me as a solopreneur, if I can get two thirds or even a third of my content on my site written by somebody else who’s being paid based on their performance that’s, a big deal, right? I’m, able to cut back on how much time I’m spending on this Without necessarily spending more money on it today.  Chris Badgett: I love that. That’s a really good reframe to think of it as a team member, independent contractor, and literally in the U S and this is not tax or legal advice. You, if an affiliate makes over 600 a year you’re, that’s an independent contractor, 10 99 form that has to be filed and stuff like that. But yeah, thinking about it as a team makes a lot of sense. And pay for performance is a powerful way to create a great product or service. Because instead of the team member or partner having the mindset of I have a job, this is how much I make every two weeks or a year. It’s I get paid on results. And that’s why like real estate agents as an example, have a commission that they make if they sell the house. And that’s, we see this a lot in sales, but it can go to other places as well, which is one of the amazing things that’s so innovative. With siren affiliates tell us more about pay for performance, like some other ideas for people. Alex Standiford: Sure. And the  Chris Badgett: impact of it.  Alex Standiford: And also it doesn’t have to be 100 percent that, right? So you could, this could also be something that augments a an existing, like employee or something like that. So maybe you have a  Chris Badgett: Bonus Exactly.  Alex Standiford: Yeah, precisely. You can use it to incentivize People for those kinds of things. And I don’t necessarily know if it would help you get a better rate or anything like that, but it certainly is. There to help incentivize people. If you’re trying to, if you’re at a point where you are trying to, if there’s like a specific number or some kind of specific statistic that you really need to work on, maybe your churn rate is really bad or, something like that, like in software, that’s what we deal with right now. I guess you’re guys, your customers do as well, right? They have to deal with churn because they have memberships. So you can look at that and say, what do we need to do to fix that? To improve this, right? And one of the things you can do is build a program, around that for the people who can actually make change in that regard. So you can, instead of spending money on more marketing and exclusively on more marketing and more things like that to improve that you can take that and then reinvest in your own people and not and it’s a win because not only are you giving them something to focus on and something to a motivation, but you’re also You’re instead of taking that money and then giving it to some other company or some other entity, you’re keeping it in house, right? You’re not you personally aren’t getting that money, but I think it’s cool to be able to improve the welfare of the people who work with me by directly giving them. A reward for having an improved impact on the things I care about.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s, dig in a little more on WooCommerce specifically. WooCommerce is, there’s a lot of sites out there that use it. There’s a lot of them that want more sales and maybe you want help creating products and programs. What could a WooCommerce user do regardless of whether they’re using an LMS or not?  Alex Standiford: Woo. The there’s the affiliate program. Of course, there’s also the sales program, which this is interesting because it is different than an affiliate program in my head. Whenever I say sales program, I’m thinking more of the traditional sales person, right? The person who actually reaches does like the outreach and things like that. They’re usually the closers right there. They’re the ones that actually complete the conversion or something like that. Particularly if you’re selling like higher priced things. A salesperson can make a lot of sense, even if they’re working in conjunction with an influencer or a, content creator, I keep saying influencer cause it’s anyway. So maybe the content creators are bringing the people to the site and then that is somehow setting up some kind of flow elite, it’s just coming in as a lead. And then the salesperson takes that lead and they’re able to you To convert that. And if that salesperson converts that sale, they get a cut. And the person who actually made the original referral also gets their cut too. So what’s really interesting about that to me is, and that’s distinctly unique about Siren and the dynamic of creating multi platforms like this, is those two people now have a vested interest in working together. So instead of it being affiliate, an affiliate program, which is inherently competitive imagine a scenario where two affiliates. Can actually work together that it doesn’t exist because of the very nature of the fact that there must always only be one winner In every affiliate program that is not true with siren You can have a salesperson who helps you close You can have an influencer who brings in the traffic and they both get their own credit and what’s really interesting is even with that from a woocommerce standpoint is You can actually set up an affiliate program so that multiple affiliates From the same program, get credit so you can set it up so that instead of only the last affiliate who for the traffic gets all the money you can set it up to where the last one gets half of it. And then the person after that gets 25 percent and the person after that gets 12 and a half. And it goes down. You can divide it evenly among them. With that kind of stuff and with the ability to make it to where multiple people can actually earn commissions from this. You’re setting it up so that these people can actually collaborate and just imagine the possibilities of having two influencer type people who have big audiences that don’t necessarily overlap, or they collaborate together to create some kind of specific funnel that allows them both to be able to end up bringing in more than they would have otherwise been able to do on their own. Chris Badgett: Man you’re the guy for this. Just, I love how clear your thinking is like nerding out on last touch attribution and an affiliate marketing. And the problems with that and making it more collaborative and share the wealth kind of multi partner approach is really cool. It’s really innovative and it’s really strong. And I love seeing the innovation that you have here. So go to siren affiliates. com join the email list if it’s out go ahead and buy your copy today and start innovating and growing your revenue and your partner community. What other final words for the people do you have Alex and, how else can people connect and learn more about siren affiliates? Alex Standiford: I can I’m, in the, Littler LMS communities too, so I’m, in your spaces. I’m around there. So if. I happen to see any questions related to this. I’ll probably just jump in and answer. But in addition to that, you can find me. At Alex Stanford dot com, and you can message me directly on there with any questions. There’s also a chat bubble on siren affiliates. If you have any questions, you can post them on there. And please, by all means, I welcome and want questions. I want to hear. What people think of this, because there is some novelty in this, right? There’s a lot of things. There’s new concepts and new innovations. And I, I really am interested to hear and what people are what’s exciting people about this kind of technology and what kind of things they would like to see more of. And I’m in a very, and especially if you sign up for that, the email list to get early access to this. You’re going to get early access to it, but you’re also going to be on the ground floor with me on this where we’re able to you’re going to be able to really directly influence some of my. Decisions on how I proceed with this.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So talk to Alex and I just want to affirm what he’s saying there. Alex interviewed me and some of the team, I think three times, like really digging into the course creator, the membership, the course marketplace, challenges in the space. And as a guy who’s been around a lot of product founders and stuff, the best ones do that sort of thing. Who’s ever, whoever’s closest to the customer wins, as they say. And you’ve definitely demonstrated that through the whole journey of siren affiliates. So go to siren affiliates. com. We’ll have Alex back on, we’ll do a live webinar when the Lifter integration rolls out. I know the WooCommerce integration is rolling out first, and there’s a lot of WooCommerce users out there watching and listening to this, so get ready. It’s almost here. And it may already be out. Just go to siren affiliates. com. Thanks for coming on the show, Alex. Go check out our other episode with Alex. And head on over to siren affiliates. com. And I can’t wait to reconnect down the road and explore this further and be a user of siren affiliates, myself. Alex Standiford: Look forward to it. 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 at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. 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In this LMScast episode, Kay Peacey discusses her knowledge and perspectives on creating and managing the Active Campaign Academy, an online learning environment that teaches users how to make the most of the Active Campaign marketing automation platform. Also she shares about the Masterclass presentation. Kay Peacey is an Entrepreneur and educator. She is from Active Campaign. Her experience in education led her to naturally gravitate into teaching, even though she began her career as an Active Campaign consultant. About two and a half years ago, Kay made the decision to launch a membership-based Academy in place of regular classes. She can support small teams using Active Campaign globally thanks to this membership model. She finds it fascinating that companies of all sizes, from one-person operations to multinational conglomerates, frequently confront comparable difficulties and need comparable training and direction. Kay stresses the value of having autonomous instructors and technological platform specialists. Kay lists LifterLMS, Divi for WordPress websites, WP Fusion for connectors, WooCommerce subscriptions for pricing. And Circle for community involvement as part of her tech stack. Kay concludes by outlining the elements of her educational program at the Active Campaign Academy, which consists of live calls (office hours), resources, courses, and a community platform. 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 Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to 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 KPC creator of active campaign Academy. We use active campaign at Lifter LMS, and I’ve learned countless things from Kay. She’s literally probably the most power user of active campaign in the world. She’s an educator, she’s built an online education. Business around her active campaign knowledge and helping business owners and active campaign users get into the tool, grow, scale, automate. Welcome back to the show. Okay. Kay Peacey: Oh, thank you for having me back again, Chris. It’s just such a pleasure sharing the journey with you. It really is. Thank you. Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s so great to have you always love our conversations for those who don’t know what it is. Can you describe what? You’ve built with active campaign Academy, which you can go find over at Kay’s website, slick business. co. Kay Peacey: Yeah. I started out some years ago doing consultancy in active campaign and found that most of the time I was actually teaching people because we all like to be in control. We want to be in the driving seat of the powerful tech that we own. And. Because I have teaching skills. I started out as a math teacher for teenagers way back in the day. So I have the teaching skills and it seemed to me like a very natural fit to fill that gap when nobody was really leading the way on how do I use this incredible marketing tech email automation platform, active campaign. And so I decided rather than going down the courses route, because I love courses, but tech like active campaign, that is a big landscape. There’s a lot in there. My feeling was very much that it needed to be a membership. And so I created the active campaign Academy around two and a half years ago, and we’ve been serving members ever since we serve small teams from all over the world. And. One of the chief pleasures I have with it is that the literally the only thing they truly have in common is that they all use this one piece of tech, which is active campaign and the, what it’s fascinating to me, the commonalities that occur from a tiny one person business right up to a big global corporation actually need the answers to the same questions and the same teaching the same nurturing. It’s just, it’s a great way to spend my time and it’s made me very happy. And I hope it’s made other people very happy as well. Chris Badgett: I’m sure it has. I’ve been in your community and I’ve seen people getting their challenges solved and, growing their business. One of the things I’ve noticed after over a decade in the online education space is that with software particularly, it’s often not the software company itself that makes the best education. There’s a very old episode of LMS cast where I interviewed a guy that I forget his name, but they, he teaches how to use a book writing and publishing tool called Scrivener. He doesn’t work at Scrivener and he, Has done a fantastic education business of his own, and he teaches Scribner better than you can learn on the Scribner website. Kay Peacey: Yeah. Chris Badgett: And I’ve, so just for anybody out there who’s trying to figure out a course topic, if you’re a power user of a tool, do it. And even I, hope somebody out there, there are people that train people how to make use Lifter LMS. There’s people that have YouTube tutorials that are better than ours, and that’s just, yeah. The power of community around a tool, but any other thoughts on that? Kay Peacey: I’m so, with you on that. And I, actually, it’s one of my soap boxes because my feeling is over time. I see it again and again, where customers of a tech platform will go and ask tech support of that platform to help them with something that is actually strategic or that involves other tools in their ecosystem that are outside of that tech company’s responsibility. See. And or beyond their remit to solve my feeling is that as customers, as consumers, we often ask too much of the companies who are providing the tech because their job is already huge. They have to dream it up, build it, maintain it, service it, make sure all the buttons are working and deliver it in real time to thousands of customers every day. Their job is not to teach you how to take this Ferrari tech machine. and go pull a wheelie down the highway. That’s not what they’re for. They are there to build the machinery. To sell it in the market, to service their customers and make sure the billing works. They have so much else to do, right? They’re not there to tell you how to use it to grow your business. That’s what I think. You can see I got a bit soapboxy there. So anyway, in a nutshell, the Ferrari showroom is not the place where you go to learn how to speed your Ferrari down the motorway. You have to have a driving instructor. And if you’re really smart, you get an advanced driving instructor who really knows what they’re doing and knows how to teach you to drive better. And that’s where someone like me comes in. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Just to reiterate. Like business owners have used lots of different tools and you can’t expect like one of those tools to have the answers about how to integrate everything together. They, try, but the best expert, like you said, as a driving instructor who not only understands the car, they understand the road, they understand the rules of the road. And whatever they understand how to get gas and all the other things you’re going to need to interact with to drive, right? Kay Peacey: Yeah. And also I think who’s in a position where they’re independent enough to say, actually, this particular bit of tech isn’t the right tool to do this thing that you’re trying to do. Yes, theoretically we could do it, but it’s a round peg in a square hole. So actually let’s join it up to this other thing. That’s going to do a great job of solving that problem in your business. Chris Badgett: And Kay Peacey: there’s this very human element that you need to have there of being able to understand the real question that someone’s asking you or the problem that they are looking to solve, which is often not the question they ask. And I’d also argue that tech support teams do not have the time to, to spend with you on that. They don’t have time to get to know you over time to get to know the tech stack in your business and what skills you have in your team, what budget you have in your team. There is so much going on there, right? To find how should I do this one thing? You need a human who knows you and understands you and has with whom you have a relationship and you can trust them. That’s big ask for a support desk. That’s not fair to put that on them. Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s, a great point. And we’re going to get into the main segment of this show, which is how Kay grew her audience by 60 percent doing a masterclass. But before we do that, I want to just get a little more context for people out there watching and listening. So with your online education platform, what are the main tools in your tech stack? Since we’re talking about using different tools to make it come together. So you teach online through a membership. What are the key components of your tech stack? Kay Peacey: I love this question so much. Lifter LMS obviously has been with me right from the start from when I made my very first free training, which is called accelerated active campaign. And that is still available for free. And it’s like core active campaign know how that you just got to have. So lift has been with me right from the start. On top of that, I use a Divi to make my WordPress websites with WP Fusion, which is the secret source of everything. And that ties up WooCommerce subscriptions, which is how I’m running the billing and things. It, I have two domains that talk to each other through ActiveCampaign, and then we run our community on the Circle platform, which I’m extremely happy with. I know there are lots of options for community. I have found that The Circle platform has really served our particular way of doing things, which is we deliver a lot of technical stuff in a short space of time and Circle has unleashed us to be really fluent and fast solving problems just day to day. So I’ve really enjoyed bringing that into the tech stack. It’s, just, it’s a dream team. You put them together. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. And let’s talk about another stack, which is the offer stack. So when somebody joins active campaign Academy, like what is the package of the learning offer? What do they get? Kay Peacey: Yeah, cool. Okay. So they get courses, resources, calls, and community. And so the courses of the standalone they, pull together as a coherent learning unit, and that’s what I’m doing in lifter every time. The resources is the stuff that tends to live in the circle community. And that’s more like short tutorials that answer a very specific question, or it’s a screen grab with annotation. We run office hours, calls twice a week, every single week. And that’s the, ask me anything. And it really is. Those are amazing because you can ask me literally anything related, even tangentially to active campaign. And we can answer it right there. And then it’s super powerful. I love that bit. And then the community where we’re just hanging out together and it acts as a kind of a library as well as a place we can chat, share news, announce stuff, the whole package together is it pulls together very, nicely. And we have two levels of membership as well. We have an essential level and an advanced level, and that comes back to the fact that active campaign has this big range within it, you can be on a plan, which is incredibly capable on a lower budget, right up to enterprise where they’ve got huge teams. So we actually put a split in the middle so that our more starter users are not going to get completely overwhelmed by hearing about webhooks and API calls and all that crazy stuff that they just do not need to know. Chris Badgett: I love that. So like beginner and advanced levels, two, two plans to choose from. It’s not over complicated, quick side question you brought up and I’ve watched you execute well, which is I see a lot of education entrepreneurs have a desire or a dream to build community. You’ve built. Built community successfully. People show up to your calls. You’re asking me any things I’ve interacted in your community with other users and stuff like that. What do you think makes your community work? Cause sometimes people build a community and it doesn’t work. It obviously takes like actual management plan, time investment and stuff, but why does your community work? As part of your education offer. Kay Peacey: That’s such a thought provoking question. I was heavily into community from the very beginning because the first place I started to connect well with other active campaign users was in their Facebook global group as a community. And so it became very visible in there and connected with people. I then started my own Facebook group where I had ownership of it and I could lead on the tone. I’m a strong believer in we set the tone for the communities that are under our leadership, and it’s our responsibility to look after those people. And right from the beginning of that, that my open face group, so that’s not even my paid offer. That’s an open group. We have led with value, integrity, and just being really human. We have never allowed the spam bots in there. Nobody disses anyone. You’re not even really allowed to dis active campaign. Like you can criticize it and say this bit is a bit sucky right now, but we’re not in there to be negative about the world. So we set the tone. And that tone then for me carried into my private community. When we moved to the paid membership, that tone was already established because our founding members had all seen how, we are in the world. What are our values? How do we interact with humans that was already in place. And so we had a really wonderful call from when we launched the academy. We had about 125 founder members. And so our membership community had that lovely tone right from the start and honestly, I cannot tell you how much I value Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s a little master class on building culture and community And I love how you got your first, users off of the facebook group that you own But you were helping in other groups as well demonstrating your expertise Kay Peacey: and I still do that I’m a super user in that active campaign global community. I probably answer four to five questions in there every single day You And honestly, I’m obsessed with active campaigns. So I’m doing this like I’m on the sofa having a cup of tea in the evening and watching TV with my kid. I might be answering your question at the same time because that’s where I live. And as a subject matter expert, that’s I think that’s what we do as educators. We, That’s going to sound really cliched, but we do live to serve. That’s how we get our kicks. All right. So selfishly I’m doing it because I like the feeling of, ah, I just solved that person’s problem. Look at that. That’s cool. Chris Badgett: I love that. That is part of wearing the expert hat is you actually have to love and be passionate about. Your subject matter expertise, just because you spot an opportunity somewhere doesn’t mean you should build an education company around it. You really have to live and breathe it and enjoy it. Kay Peacey: Yeah, I don’t think you could, I don’t think you could do it to this level of expertise and it’s like immersive. Immersive expertise and know how and, the, and it requires, and I’m going to use the word love. It does require love to lavish that level of attention and care on your learners. But for me, that’s what fuels me. It fills me up every day. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And love requires commitment. And like you said, every day helping out and serving. Kay Peacey: Yeah. Chris Badgett: Shifting gears, the number one or one of the top questions we get from people building membership sites, courses, coaching programs. So how do I get clients? How do I get customers? You re recently did a masterclass that grew your community by 60%. Can you tell us first what the masterclass is? Kay Peacey: The masterclass was called be your own, how to be your own active campaign superhero. So the kernel of the idea is something again, that I feel very passionate and very certain about, which is that any person can. Be the master of their own tech and learn to drive the active campaign Ferrari. You do need some teaching. You need someone to point you in the right direction and tell you what’s possible. The biggest thing I always hear is you don’t even know what you don’t know about active campaign until someone unlocks it for you. So I wanted to showcase in a very powerful way, but in a short space of time, and I wanted to establish Us as the, accepted leadership, the voice in active campaign education. So the masterclass came out of a desire to do that. And what we did was we cherry picked four things that could be done on any active campaign plan from light all the way up to enterprise that would make you more money in a very short space of time, because that’s what every single business needs, including mine. We also need to make money. The passion is great, loving it. That’s great, but it also needs to make revenue. So we focused it in very tightly on make more money in less time. And we chose an item from each of the four stages of the customer journey from brand new customer to a hot lead. Now they’re a customer. And then what happens at the end of the journey when they’re just moving on from your world as well. And pulled out four processes and what I did in the masterclass, we delivered it three times across different time zones. We called in all our partners to help us promote the masterclass. That was the first time we’d done that. It was the first time we’d really had the confidence to say we’re doing this. It is going to be killer good. Get your people here. And here’s our affiliate link that you can share with them as well. So we really called in that support and community around us as a business and, me as a business person. And the show up rate was incredible when we did the webinar, it was like a 55%. Show up right to the master classes. And I was just so happy with that. We got a huge reaction to it and people were very excited just to hear. There are these very simple ways that you can explain in 10 minutes that you can use active campaign to make more money in less time. So that was the class. We showcased those four things. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And can you give us any like metrics or just quantitative data about like how the masterclass went? You said 60% like anything else you can, you’d feel like sharing? Kay Peacey: Yeah we had, I think we had a target of registering 300 people for it. So we looked at the statistics from when we launched. Originally with a much smaller audience overall, and extrapolated that into our audience as it is now and the reach that we have now through our partnership. So we were aiming for 300 people to register and we got, I think, almost 400 registered. So we were exceeding that target. Our target overall, the big goal was to increase revenue into the membership. And we needed that so that we could focus on doing more growth activity and serve more people because we’re not reaching everyone out there who needs active campaigning help that would benefit from us So we need to be more visible to do that. We need more revenue. So the target was to boost the revenue I think by 50 We then worked really hard on getting the people who registered to show up to the webinar And for that we leaned heavily on a very You Coherent combination of social channels, posting and emails that were going out with a countdown timer, really creating that you are going to show up to this and here is what you’re going to get from it. I am going to be teaching these things live. We were sharing testimonials. We just threw everything at it, but in a really coherent way where we hit up all of the problem points that we know that people have in active campaign, our messaging, Was very clear. Everyone can learn to do these things in active campaign. Come along to the masterclass. We’re going to show you how to do four of them to make more money in less time at the four stages of the customer journey. Come along and see what the conversion rate off of the back, off of the back of that was just ridiculous. 16%, 16 percent of people who attended that masterclass immediately bought. Bought a membership and we typically keep them as members for around six months. Many of them stay for upwards of two years. We’ve still got some of our founder and beta members are still with us so that turns into quite a lot of revenue and more importantly than that, it turns into helping an awful lot of people. Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s amazing. Tell us a little bit more about how you prepared for the masterclass and how long did that take and what did you put together and how’d you keep figuring out all your partners and all that stuff? Kay Peacey: Okay, that’s a great question. I had a lot of help from Melissa Love, who I know you’re familiar with already. Because she’s a close business friend of mine and she lives just down the hill. So we can literally go sit on the bench down by the Harbor and she can calm my fears. And actually Melissa was the one who made me set the date because left to my own devices, I would probably have been here thinking I really should do a masterclass and get some more members in because we’re really good at this, but I might not have done it. I needed a push and Melissa gave me the push. So we set a deadline and then it was a countdown from there. I think I had a six week run in from deciding the date and we published the dates to figure it out. Sorry. Say that again. Chris Badgett: Six weeks to figure it out and yeah. Yeah, that’s good. That’s not too long or too short. That’s. It was Kay Peacey: enough. And for me, it was based on knowing myself better than when we first launched. I know the amount of pressure that I can cope with, the amount of time and space I need in which to be able to do my best work. But also I know that I do need a time pressure. Because otherwise it won’t get done. So as soon as we’d set the date, we put it out there. And once people have put their name down and said, I want to come to this, which they did very, quickly, we had a wait list or, a show a hand razor, list, and that just got piled on very, quickly. And I, need that in my world to fuel me up to be like, okay, I’ve said, I’m going to do this and all these people have said they would like that. Okay, now we’re going to do it and we’re going to deliver. And once I’m on the path, I deliver. I, my execution’s really good. So we had an air table. I don’t know if you’re an air table user, Chris, I’m a huge fan of it. Yeah. So I use that to organize everything that’s in my head. So we planned out the stages from belief, believing that you can work active campaign evidence that we’ve already taught people how to use active campaign, helping people desire the things that we wanted to deliver in the masterclass. Doing the countdown, showing the testimonials, lots of evidence and proof that we are the masters at this. And usually you don’t want to miss this masterclass. And then, yeah, I think prepping the, content of the masterclass itself, that was amazing. That was one of those opportunities as a teacher, as an educator that you just, you can dive into it like whole body. I am all in on this one. It was a great piece of work, very carefully crafted to 10 minutes. And it was leaning into teaching the what, are we doing? Why are we doing it? But of course it was missing the element of exactly how would you do that? Like exactly. So we talked about active campaign features that were necessary to put together for it. So we would say something like, Oh, and we would use a saved response. We would use a form and a pre fill throwing in all these words. That’s the driver then to get the conversion is, and we are going to teach this in the academy coming up in the next few weeks. And that was the real conversion moment, I think, was we showed that it is possible to use Active Campaign to make more money in less time, right across your customer journey in these four very specific ways. We talked about the elements that you would need to put together to do that. And then we invited people to join the Active Campaign Academy to come and do that with us right away, immediately. And then in the Academy, the course is there. We have four courses teaching those four things and the results we get from those are extraordinary, really impressive. Chris Badgett: So did you have those courses already ready before you did the training or they came after like you taught them Kay Peacey: live? They came a little bit after. I I, it was a balance because I would have loved to get them taught. I would have loved to get them ready before the masterclass, but it just wasn’t possible in that timeframe. And what I’ve learned as an educator is that. The teaching is better if I can talk about it first with people, see their response to it, listen to the questions that they ask, and then the job of the training, the specific course, needs to have all of those elements in it. So I often find that if I talk about something and have a bit of a delay while we chew it over and then make the training is better. Yeah, that’s Chris Badgett: awesome. So we did Kay Peacey: some swift tutorials to get people who really wanted to just crack on and who already had the skills. We were like, okay, this is how you would put it together. Here’s the map. But then the courses with all the step by step detail took a little longer. Chris Badgett: Can you share just high level, even if somebody’s not using active campaign, just the concept of one of the stages of the customer journey? What’s an example, one of those? Kay Peacey: Yeah, sure. One of the ones that landed really beautifully with so many people. And it’s based on a strategy that we developed for ourselves. I call it first look fandom because I like a bit of alliteration you’ve got to give it a good, give it a cool name. So first look fandom is for the very first step of the customer journey. Someone has just found you and Oh my God, here’s Chris Badgett. He knows all about lifter. I love him. I’m going to fill out the opt in form. And get on the mailing list here for Lyft at LMS. And there’s always a burning reason. Someone does that. They always have some question that’s in their mind, some problem that they want solving that they think you have the answer to. So here’s the sneaky move for first look fandom. And this, by the way, converts 10 percent of those brand new first look leads into buyers with one click. 10 percent of them convert to buyers with one email in the space of a week. It’s, extraordinary. So here’s the trick. They’ve just filled out your opt in form for this person. They’ve just coming into your world on the thank you page where normally you might say, thank you for submitting the form, or maybe you’ve gone a little bit further and you’ve got some links and a picture of you great instead of that, or as well as that you put in an open question field. They don’t have to fill in their email again. You just ask them a question, say, Oh, while you’re here, tell me what, is your most burning question about XYZ right now? And you don’t have to promise to answer it. Just ask the question. 80 percent of people who fill out the opt in form will likely fill out that burning question. And hit submit. So immediately you have got gold on your hands because now what their burning question is for 80 percent of your people, the second they land into your world, every marketer’s dream, right? And then it gets better. What you do is you stash that stuff wherever you. Keep it, you can stash it somewhere, get it to pass in front of your eyeballs so that you notice what people are saying. So you’re learning all the time. You have to learn from your, potential customers, and then you cherry pick the ones that you have the answer to in your existing services and you give them a personal reply very quickly. And there are tools in active campaign. There are features of active campaign that make this extremely fast and fluent to do. That’s the bit I teach in the academy, right? I, we can talk about the strategy, the actual mechanics of putting that together so that it works really fluently and fast for you in active campaign. There’s some subtle stuff going on there, but once it’s built, you have a system where every single lead is invited to ask you their burning question, open text, and boy, oh boy, they tell you stuff in there. It is enlightening. Then they, you have them pass in front of your eyeballs. You pick a few of them every week. It takes two minutes maximum to answer one of those burning questions. If you have your tech set up properly, you dispatch the answer and 10 percent of them will convert to a buy within a week. Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And now that you’re saying that, I remember that from your presentation and that’s it’s pure gold. I remember. Your presentation, let’s talk about the actual masterclass. I’m remembering like a vertical slide thing that was scrolling or something. Can you tell us a little bit, and it was very well designed and your, presentation was just tight, but what, was that tool you were using and tell us about how you structured the actual Kay Peacey: presentation. I love that you asked that because that, so that tool, it’s a, it’s actually like a whiteboarding tool and it’s called miller note. Chris Badgett: Okay. Kay Peacey: Millernote. And the original story of Millernote for me is I hate slides. Yeah. I loathe them. My design eye is just shockingly bad. It’s awful. And I’m, just chuckling at the fact that he just said it was really well presented because it’s incredibly difficult to put together visuals that don’t look like a 10 year old child. On a bad day did them. So Miller notes is my solution to that. It has a nice soothing color background in our brand colors. And the actual items that I put on there, there’s very little formatting choice on there. So I can’t wreck it. I just need to make sure it all lines up vertically. And then while I’m on, while I’m doing my presentation, I use e cam, which is a wonderful bit of tech e cam films me and puts me in front of Half of the presentation. So I’m right there on screen. It’s like putting yourself into your presentation, which I really love because I talk with my hands. You may have noticed that there’s a lot of hand waving and expression going on, and that’s really important. And with the, by having Milanote beside me and I’ve got my scroll wheel, so I can scroll through it exactly the pace I want to, I can literally point at the things that I’m talking about and it just works for me. So I developed it purely because I am terrible at slides and I hate them. So it was an avoidance strategy that somehow turned into something that actually looks really nice and a lot of people ask about. Chris Badgett: Awesome. I remember too, from your masterclass, there was a lot of engagement in the chat. Like how, would you advise somebody who’s doing a masterclass to really make it interactive and immersive and get people, get the community talking? Kay Peacey: Great question. First of all, I had a head start because we have a very engaged community already. And that comes back to our earlier, your earlier question around the Facebook groups. We have fostered that for years. We go out of our way to connect personally with people that first look fandom thing that involves me personally, emailing people who’ve just signed up to my email list. So we have a very connected community already, and you can’t magic that up. Just for a one off masterclass. That’s not going to happen. What we did was we primed the pump by specifically asking our, existing academy members to come to the live webinar and to support us. And I was completely honest about it. I was like, I’m going to be absolutely petrified. I would love to see some friendly faces in there to make me feel better. can you come and give me a wave in the chat? And that’s true. Seeing those familiar names in the chat was for my benefit, really. And we also had a couple of team members who were entirely dedicated to watching the chat, grabbing screenshots of great things that were people were saying that was a smart move, by the way, have someone in your team ready to grab. Something brilliant that someone says about your presentation from the chat. We use that the next day on social posts, and that drove a whole ton more signups into the second and third runs of the same webinar. Very good strategy. So their job was to do engaging with people as well, because if you’re delivering the presentation, you can’t be talking in the chat. You can’t even be looking at it. Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s good stuff there. I know some people at the end of a master class or a webinar get a little bit of cold feet around transitioning to the pitch or making the sale. What did you do at the end to really position the offer? Maybe you did it not just at the end. Like, how did you quote sell from the master class? Kay Peacey: Good question. I’m trying to remember. We definitely had a spin to win. Chris Badgett: Okay. Kay Peacey: So that was, so our spin to win, I think came after the pitch. So the spin to win is something I love to roll out just because it’s really good fun. We do a spin to win, put everyone’s names on the wheel and one. Two or three winners, whatever we’re doing, we’ll get a one to one session with me, which you literally cannot buy. I do not do those. So that’s an, that actually, now I come to think of it, that’s our incentive for getting members to turn up live. Cause we were like you, can join this draw as well. If you win that’s yours. One to one for an hour with me. You can’t get that anywhere else. And that happens Chris Badgett: at the very end. Yeah, we do that Kay Peacey: at the very, we do it before the Q and A. So the structure was intro, Presentation, then into a pitch section, then the spin to win, then Q& A. And our sticker, our rate of people sticking around was really good. We’re very happy with that. I think the pitch, I don’t find the pitching to be a problem anymore, because I think I finally got comfortable with that notion that if I don’t tell people what we do and how we can help them. They’re not going to buy it and then they’re not going to get the help and they’re not going to get the good things for their business. And I don’t feel, I don’t feel bad about saying that anymore. I feel like something shifted in me this year to be absolutely fine with saying we are the best in the world. I am the best person in the world to teach you active campaign. This is where you can buy my services. This is how much it’s going to cost. You can buy monthly so you don’t have to be committed for a long period of time. It doesn’t have to cost you a scary amount of money like a consultant and we see a lot of people spending crazy sums on consultancy and then coming out of it worse than they were before. This is an alternative. Here is how you can try us out. We do a refund guarantee, so there’s no pressure selling. Yeah, I just, I feel very strongly that what we offer is really, good. And I’m happy to talk about that now. Chris Badgett: I love that. The first sale you make is to yourself. And if you really believe in your product and your mission, selling gets really easy because you’re just, you almost feel obligated because you want to serve and help all these people. So yeah, Kay Peacey: absolutely. And Melissa used to call me about it all the time. She would call me on it and be like, what? Nobody’s buying that thing you never told them about. Go figure. I should probably talk about this more. And I think another tipping for me was the valid tipping point for me was the validation that I got from around this time last year when ActiveCampaign created their first customer advisory board. And I was their first call to be on that. I, have stature and status within the ActiveCampaign community. I have the respect and value from ActiveCampaign themselves. Invite me into their world to help them with how to serve their customers better, how to make the platform better, how to engage better with users, how to teach active campaign. If they’re asking me, then I need to get over myself and stop being weird about saying, this is what we do. Here’s where you can buy it. It will cost you this much. And it’s really good. Chris Badgett: I just want to highlight that strategy of a customer advisory board. This is commonly known in software businesses where you have some of your users and customers that you meet with on an ongoing basis or kind of group in a little community where you. Open mindedly listen to their feedback, ask for help and stuff like that. I think more course creators, coaches, and education entrepreneurs could do that strategy because you don’t have to figure everything else out by yourself on how to make your offer better. Or the customer experience better. And when you find those customers and users or students or members that you love working with, and you’d like to get more of them by talking to them, you remove a lot of friction and get a lot of good ideas. It doesn’t mean you can act on everything they want or recommend or agree with everything, but it’s such a valuable resource to listen and get feedback in that way. Kay Peacey: So much. So much. And hearing you say that takes me back to when we were in when we were in our beta phase for the Active Campaign Academy, which was about two and a half years ago, and I invited 13 people to come in as beta members. On their, contribution to the form that the academy takes is just enormous, absolutely enormous. It was the, structure that we have now of the calls, the community, whole courses, and specifically lots of little tutorials that are done in a fluent, fast fashion, that whole structure came from listening to what they needed and when they needed it and what, how they wanted to consume it. It all came from them. Chris Badgett: Pure gold right there. Kay Peacey: Sorry, I’m just going to say one more thing, which is that you have to let go of your vanity as an educator. You have to let go of that feeling that you, know better than them about how to do this. Yeah. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Great business isn’t built in a vacuum for sure. Last question for you, Kay. So you ran your masterclass. What’s your plan for the future? And what would you advise people? Is this something that you do once a year, twice a year, four times a year? What do you think you’ll do going forward? And what would you recommend to people? Kay Peacey: Okay. I think doing for me, it’s going to be annual at the moment. I have some disability issues, I have family to raise, I have limited energy for me and I think once a year feels right. I’m certainly not going to leave it two years again. It’s going to be once a year because it rejuvenated the business and it establishes our place very publicly of we own this space. You need to be here. I definitely want to be doing that once a year. I think probably we all should in terms of in between that, we are working towards sales cycles where we will have focus topics within the membership. We’re going to do that because it serves our existing members primarily. But we’ll also act as a sales driver. So for example, right now we are having a very big member mission about deliverability, everybody’s favorite, sexy subject, email authentication, deliverability, engagement, and re engagement. And this is feeling really good for us because it drives things in three different places. It drives our members to stay and to consume content because they can see exactly what they’re doing. And if everyone’s. Doing the same thing at the same time that builds your sense of community. That is a driver on sales because people who’ve been sitting on the fence or who left some time ago, this may now be the driver that gets them back in through the door because they can see us talking consistently about this thing, showing our expertise and giving them reasons to join the third one, which was my unexpected kicker was that it has made me. Turn up and create the best courses I’ve created in a long time. Not that all my courses aren’t fabulous, but I just rocked one out on re engagement and it’s so good. I’m genuinely excited to get it out there. And if we hadn’t been doing this focus on deliverability and engagement, I don’t think I would have gotten around to doing it. And I certainly don’t think it would have been as good as it is now. So it’s a push on all fronts, very healthy. Chris Badgett: I think once a year makes sense, especially when you get partners involved, because the partner can only do so much and they have other things that have to do. But like once a year and you get a system and everybody’s happy, that’s becomes a, something you can just repeat in your business. Kay Peacey: And we banked how we did it for that masterclass. We have stashed everything that we did. And I know that next time we’ve got the recipe there, we’re also going to turn that into a course. How do you automate a fantastic launch event or masterclass using ActiveCampaign? And then we’re going to evergreen a funnel that leads to that course. Now, so there’s lots of repurposing you can do from that one event a year. I’m very confident that we will get a year’s worth of value from doing one big event. Cause it takes a lot out of me. I think I can only really do that full on once a year. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Kay, this has been a masterclass and in marketing and sales and just doing great work as an education entrepreneur. Thank you for coming on the show. I want to encourage you out there listening to go to slickbusiness. co check out active campaign Academy. If you’re looking to increase your automation capabilities and, really leverage a powerful CRM, check that out. If you don’t have a CRM yet, the what’s the quickest, what’s the free course called accelerated? Accelerated action campaign. See, you did the alliteration, which I like to do too, because it’s Lifter LMS. So it helps people remember the name of your products and business. Any other ways for the people to connect with you or last parting words here, Kay? Kay Peacey: I’m always delighted to, connect with people on LinkedIn, particularly fellow, fellow educators, people who are passionate about that learning experience and how we do better. On that all the time as the technology moves, as we mature, how are we doing that? Anyone can come and connect with me on LinkedIn. And there’s also my Facebook group, which is called automate your business with active campaign. And that’s open to anyone, probably better if you’re a bit obsessed with active campaign. But if you’re into email marketing, we talk a lot of that in there as well. Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s KPC slick business. co. Thanks so much for coming on back on the show. I can’t wait to do it again in another couple of years. Kay Peacey: Thanks, Chris. Delighted to be 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 at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash 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 Kay Increased Members in Her Membership by 60 Percent Using a Masterclass Presentation appeared first on LMScast.