LMScast with Chris Badgett

In this LMScast episode Chris Badgett CEO of LifterLMS will discuss about the LifterLMS Black Friday deal. LifterLMS is currently hosting an extensive Black Friday sale, offering a generous 50% discount on all products, accompanied by additional bonuses totaling $2000. This substantial discount will be applicable throughout the entire month of November, providing an excellent opportunity for every user to avail themselves of this deal. The discounted courses provided by LifterLMS include offerings such as the Black Friday Sales and Marketing Playbook and the YouTube Traffic System Training. This presents an opportune moment to initiate your LMS business with a significant discounted rate. To secure this deal, simply use the coupon code BLACKFRIDAY23 at the checkout. Chris emphasizes the business’s distinctive strategy of putting the client at the core of operations and striving to provide value that goes beyond basic product functionality. 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 State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Will Middleton: And we’re live. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to another episode of the LMS cast podcast. My name is Will Middleton from LifterLMS. And today I’m joined by a special guest, Chris Badgett, CEO of LifterLMS. And we’re going to be talking about the Black Friday all November sale. With 2, 000 in bonuses that LifterLMS is putting out this November, all November. So thanks Chris, for joining me. And are you ready to dive in? Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’m happy to be here and do a little bit of a non traditional episode here, special edition, and talk about all the things happening in the month of November here at LifterLMS. Will Middleton: Awesome. And all November, we’re running the biggest sales event of the year here at LifterLMS. Chris, can you give us some information about what is the sale that LifterLMS is running? What’s the deal? And we mentioned 2, 000 in bonuses. What are those bonuses included along with the sale? Chris Badgett: Absolutely. So it’s a 50 percent off sale. So this is the best time to get LifterLMS at a great price. If you’re an existing customer, you can upgrade to a bigger bundle or getting an additional add on, which you don’t have. So this is a great time of year to pick up the software from LifterLMS at a big 50 percent discount. And all you need to do to get the discount is enter the coupon code BlackFriday23, that’s BlackFriday23, all one word, doesn’t matter if it’s capitalized or anything, just go to the LifterLMS. com pricing page. And go to the checkout and enter that coupon code black Friday, 23. We also have a special landing page. If you’re watching this video version of the podcast, you can see the URL, the link. Below my name, it’s just LifterLMS. com forward slash black dash Friday. And that’ll go into the sale in more detail what’s in it. And it’ll go over what the 2, 000 bonus bundle that comes with any new order. That is purchased during the month of November, 2023. So that’s the short version of what’s happening and how to take advantage of the sale. If you’re an existing customer, by the way, you can get prorated for the value of your existing license. So just shoot an email to help at LifterLMS. com put upgrade in the subject line. And we’ll hook you up with an additional coupon. That’s going to give you the prorated value of your existing license. So you can get an even bigger discount when you upgrade to a bigger bundle and get prorated. So there’s something in it for everybody. Will Middleton: Sounds great. And if you are an existing customer who upgrades, you do get the bonuses, right? If you buy during this period, you do awesome. First and the bonuses, 2, 000 in bonuses. You can find that LifterLMS. com forward slash black dash Friday and existing customers can take advantage as well by emailing help at LifterLMS. com to not only get the 50 percent off, but also get the value that they’ve already got on their current licenses. And so that sounds like an awesome deal, but let’s talk a little bit more high level about LifterLMS. What makes LifterLMS? Unique in the space. Why do people use LifterLMS and what makes it special compared to other ways? You can put your content and courses online. Chris Badgett: I think one of the biggest things that makes LifterLMS unique in the space is that we’re not just a software company where we basically, instead of putting our, business at the center of what we do or our product, we actually put our customer at the center of our pro of the business and whatever they need to support them, we. Deliver that this podcast is an example of how we deliver media and content. That helps course creators be successful, get started, not just with our software, but become better teachers. And I think the bonus the bonus bundle, the 2, 000 worth of bonuses is a great example of that because our mindset is how do we deliver even more value to our black Friday customers on any new order besides just getting a great discount. So I’ll just walk through the bonuses real quick, and then I’ll talk some more about what makes LifterLMS unique in the space. One thing is we, want our customers to get more sales not all, but many LifterLMS users are selling their courses and their memberships and their coaching programs with LifterLMS. And one of the ways to get more sales is to do great marketing. So what we’ve actually done is we’ve open sourced our black Friday sales and marketing playbook. And we’ve packaged that into a course valued at 500. Which walks you through how to leverage an event like the black Friday season to get more leads and sales. So we’re giving you free access to the black Friday sales and marketing one on one course, which is normally 500. And I would encourage you to get on early. With the LifterLMS Black Friday, 50 percent off sale and take that course sooner than later. So you can leverage Black Friday when there’s all that buying intent in the market and get more sales for your courses and memberships. The second bonus is our YouTube traffic system training course. So you might be watching this video version of the podcast on YouTube. If not go to our channel and subscribe. We have over a thousand videos on our YouTube channel. But what, and we do video marketing a lot. We love YouTube. We like video for communication, but I’ve also distilled everything that I’ve learned as a video marketer over the past 15 years or so into, if you could just make four videos on your YouTube channel that are designed in a way to attract leads and help those people seeing your videos by your courses and your memberships, how exactly do you do that without becoming overwhelmed, without becoming a professional YouTuber and using the second largest search engine in the world, which is YouTube to get traffic to your website and more sales. So that’s another course. It’s a 500 value. The third one is we see a lot of unfortunately failure in the space. Which with people trying to make money online or build an education platform or a certification program, and they get hung up on some of the technical and the kind of business banking domain name, tech stack kind of questions. So we distilled like what somebody should do from the very beginning to set their business up for success so they don’t discover these blind spots later where they. Got the wrong domain name or didn’t figure out the banking piece and how to collect money through the internet and everything. And we’ve distilled all that decade of experience down into a checklist to make sure you’re actually ready to go. I call it the online education company, startup checklist, super valuable. It’s another 500 value. In my opinion, it’s priceless because it can make your venture. It can make or break your venture if you literally skip one of the things on the checklist. So that’s, a great resource. The fourth bonus and there are six. So I’m getting there, but I’m almost done. We’re doing a private mastermind event on December 4th PM. Eastern standard time for anybody LMS. That’s normally a benefit that are. Top bundles customers get, but anybody who makes an order during the Black Friday, all November sale, we’ll get the private mastermind event on December 4th. So that’ll be a lot of fun. Bring your strategy questions, bring your tech questions, even if it’s not related to Lyft or LMS, and we’ll help you be successful on that mastermind. You’ll also get to see a lot of other. Course creators in the space and learn from each other. It’s, another thing that makes LifterLMS unique and different is it’s, we’re not just a contact form on the website that you may or may not hear back from us. We actually like to talk to people and our users and like to support them as best we can through multiple channels. One of those being a live. Call like that. So we’ll, and I’ll, just pause right there and pass it back to you. Will, what do you like most about the office hours mastermind event? You’ve been helping facilitate that for a long time and, came to it originally when you first came into the space what, makes it special? Will Middleton: Yeah, I was looking at screenshots the other day from six years ago when I started coming to the Lifter on this office hours mastermind, and I wouldn’t even turn my camera on because I was just new to the LifterLMS space and everything. And I remember Seeing Kurt on there when he was working at his corporate job. Yeah, I’ve been involved with the office hours for a long time. And now that’s a show that me and Kurt run and we bring on special guests to talk about specific topics like AI for course creation or optimizing, adding a CRM to your, course stack and your tech stack. So we talk about all kinds of specific topics with special guests, but we also make space for our customers to ask questions about tech strategy or just general hangout. It’s a. Really the community part of the LifterLMS as a product. And you mentioned Chris, that LifterLMS is not just. A software product. It’s also, it’s more than that. Like you said, the Black Friday, November bonuses and the office hours itself is like the community and the mastermind. And so the really valuable part about the office hours. Mastermind call is connecting with other course graders who are successful at different levels in different industry, what technology tools they’re using. What would recommend you do next for your online course site? Yeah. It really unlocks those roadblocks and provides a community as entrepreneurs. We’re frequently in our own homes, in our own spaces, working on our projects, but this kind of creates that community where we can help each other get unblocked from various things that are stopping us in our business. Maybe we struggle with marketing. Maybe we’re considering using another place to host our videos or something like that. The mastermind is a perfect place to bring any of those roadblocks, help get unblocked other course creators. In our ecosystem. So that’s what I see is like the real value of that call. Chris Badgett: Yeah it’s a fantastic resource. So come check out that, that call. It’s a great bonus. Another bonus we have is the, we, not everybody’s a great graphic designer and gamification is a big part of how to make a learning management system more engaging and sticky and fun for your users. So we designed a certificate background. Set. This is a 200 value so that you can add beautiful certificates when people complete a course and you don’t necessarily have to be a continuing education provider or traditional school that requires a certificate to use certificates. You can also use them in a fun way, and we’ve got some great looking graphic design assets for you. And the final bonus, another graphic design asset is a achievement badge set so that you can add gamification. They’re basically like badges that pop up and you can set it all up and lift your LMS when those badges are triggered. Maybe when somebody passes a quiz or completes a certain lesson or a course, they get an achievement badge. And we’ve got. Beautiful set of those designed for you. They’re really nice. And we went a little over the top. I got to say, we actually put an additional set in there too, that we’re not even advertising. So there’s all kinds of different graphic achievement badges that you can use to add more gamification to your learning management system. So all those bonuses add up to 2, 000 worth of bonuses is probably worth more. Like some of these things are really priceless in terms of the value you get from them. So that’s just a great benefit for any new order. If you purchase. A new order during the month of November and 2023 during our black Friday, all November sale, be sure to enter the coupon code on checkout black Friday, 23 to also get your 50 percent discount and the bonuses literally will come to your email seconds after you buy. So all you have to do is just make your purchase. Check your email. You’ll have an account on liftrlms. com where you can access the software and your license key. So immediately on, after purchase, you’ll have the software and the bonuses will be waiting for you in your inbox. Will Middleton: Awesome. And just to recap those six bonuses real quick. Those are so LifterLMS. com forward slash black dash friday is where those are located. Chris and the 6 bonuses are the YouTube traffic system training course. If you’re trying to start a YouTube channel and build traffic to your core site, YouTube is a great way to do that. And that course will help you kick that off. The 2nd bonus is. The black friday sales and marketing so running a black friday course as a course creator We train you on how to do That’s why it’s an all november sale, because you can pick it up november 1st today Or anytime in november and set up your black friday campaign for your customers. And then the third bonus was online education company startup checklist so avoiding classic mistakes that education companies frequently make and how you can Get around those. And then the fourth bonus is the mastermind along with some graphics. I really like that stack of bonuses that you described, Chris, because it really. helps you get unblocked no matter where you’re at. Maybe you’ve already created your course and you’re struggling to get users viewing your content. So then you dive into that YouTube traffic system, make some of your content public and start getting people into your website. Maybe you’re stuck on the tech and trying to get your certification. That’s part of the instructional design process. No matter where you’re at in your course building process, there’s something in that value stack of bonuses that will get you to the next level. So I think that’s a really awesome stack there. Chris Badgett: Thanks. Thanks for reiterating that. And just to continue on where we were at in terms of what makes LifterLMS unique in the space. I can really, I have a lot of ideas around that, but I’ll also just share what I hear from our customers over and over again. So one of those things is that LifterLMS is the most feature complete, customizable, all in one learning management system solution for WordPress. So if you want the best tools for creating, selling, and delivering online training in WordPress, That’s LifterLMS. And if you get the infinity bundle or everything bundle, you can get that at a great price for 50 percent off right now. And you can basically get everything. The most powerful solution in WordPress. LifterLMS is not going away. We’ve been around for almost a decade now, and I feel like we’re just getting started. So if you’re wanting to hitch your wagon to a dependable company that offers great support that is not going away that has consistently delivered year after year this is a great time to pick up LifterLMS. Our outstanding support is a big thing that makes LifterLMS. It’s unique in the space. People say it over and over again. I don’t know how many emails I’ve seen where somebody’s complimenting Will or Kurt for helping them through an issue or Nadia or Nick helping them with whatever the challenge they were having. So at LFTR LMS support is not a cost to be minimized. It’s a feature of the product and we treat it that way. And then the final thing I’ll just add is that the, brand the, community aspect of LFTR LMS, we’re not just a software company. We’re a community, we’re a media company. We’re in the business of customer success. And we have a mission to lift up others through education. It’s something we care deeply about. And I think that shows through our brand and everything we do. So that’s what makes us unique in the space. Will Middleton: Awesome. And you mentioned LifterLMS has been around for almost 10 years. We had our nine year birthday right in this last October. So this last October LifterLMS turned nine years old. And so Chris, you’ve been in WordPress for longer than LifterLMS has been around longer than nine years. LifterLMS, just the product has been around for nine years. And that’s a long time, and we might have some viewers, people in our community who are building courses, considering building courses, considering creating a side hustle. Or building a platform, building a community, building a WordPress website. LifterLMS has been around for a long time and will probably be around for a long time. But why is now the time to take action on the black Friday sale for anyone listening to the podcast? What do you think makes now a special time? Not only because you can get a great deal on LifterLMS, but is there anything in the current 2023, 2024 Online ecosystem where you see opportunity for course creators to get involved, like with your own mess has been around for nine years. Is it too late, is it too early? Is it just the perfect time? What do you think the mentality should be for our users? Getting into lifter building sites in 2023, 2024. Chris Badgett: Whether you’re a do it yourself course creator or coach or expert, or you’re a WordPress professional, who’s looking to do larger projects and make more money delivering high value platforms like learning management systems. These, this area is continuing to grow and scale. Online education has been around for almost. 30 years at this point, but in my view, it’s still the beginning. There’s a lot of innovation still happening in the space. There’s more and more users coming online. Or if you think about the whole world and access to the internet and you can really build a global company teaching online and as WordPress improves, as video improves, as audio improves, as video cameras and iPhones and everything else improves. You can ride that wave into whatever this multi a hundred billion dollar industry is, and really focus in. And in terms of timing, what we notice is this time of year is when people. Do a lot of building the world’s a big place, but in the Northern hemisphere the winter time, people tend to be in the office a little more. Kids are in school, they’re building their plat their, website projects and their business from home or from the office. So we just see even more activity this time of year. And you also have the opportunity around the new year to really set your goal. And your intention follow the ideas and the online education company, startup checklist, get your business formed. If you’re watching this today or listening today, and we’re broadcasting on November 1st, you could essentially get LFTR LMS, get a great deal, get the bonuses, cruise through those over the next week, and then have your project launched. Very soon, even before the end of the year, or even faster than that, if you’re a pro at building websites. So it’s just a great time of year. It’s a great industry. And the LifterLMS team is a great group of people here to support you on that journey. Will Middleton: Yeah, absolutely. And I think. The question of I used to think it was in a scarcity mindset of thinking it’s too late a lot. I don’t think it’s too late anymore to get involved, but there’s also that question of too early. Maybe my product doesn’t feel ready. I don’t feel ready to launch my online course. The iPhone 15 came out and now I can record and do color grading on my footage. What new technology is going to come out? I’m not ready to make my course. Is it too early? Too late. So I think that makes a great time of year to get involved to get started in the space because I still think that WordPress is. Relatively young as a product and LifterLMS on us as well. So that really speaks to and also the great deal of just getting started. I’m glossing over the fact that the Black Friday sale is 1 of the best sales that we’ve ever run along with the 2000 dollars and bonuses might be like the best and just to get you unblocked no matter where you’re at in that course creation process. And I think. This November would be a great time to put together some YouTube videos, put together launching a course, For my product I would install my LifterLMS. I would record my videos. I’d upload them to my video host and then I would launch my course, make it publicly on sale and then I wouldn’t get very many science to get 5 science, but I was expecting maybe 1000, but really that. That starting, I’m realizing that launching your site is really like starting line and that would be a great point as a new year’s resolution to have like your, site created your WordPress site created. You’ve gone through our video assets and created your course. And then you’re ready to start marketing. Does that seem like a, like a. Good advice, a good timeline. What do you think about those ideas around launching? Chris Badgett: As the starting line to go into the new year with exposure to just so much time in the industry and literally hundreds of thousands of aspiring course creators and coaches and online educators. The thing I see in the ones that are the most successful is they just start. They just make it better over time. And as a technology evolves, as their expertise evolves. As their understanding of marketing and how to get clients evolves, they just keep improving and practice continuous improvement and iteration over time. That’s really the key to success is to just start. So that’s my advice to you at the as we land the plane on this interview, if you’re watching this, if you’re an existing customer and you want to upgrade and get a bigger bundle, just shoot an email. To help at LifterLMS. com and get prorated, put upgrade in the subject line. And for everybody out there, go to LifterLMS. com forward slash black dash Friday. And you’ll see all the bonuses. You can go pick it up. I’d encourage you to do it sooner than later and take advantage of those bonuses soon so you can start getting the benefits and getting rolling with the best software soon. But all this ends at the end of November. So we wanted to take the scarcity and all the, pushy sales tactics out of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and just provide the benefit for the whole month. It’s there for you. So check us out at LifterLMS. com. Thanks Will for collaborating on this podcast. And I hope you have a great rest of your day. 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. 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 Discover the LifterLMS Black Friday All November Sale Plus Bonuses appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Robert Windisch discusses his knowledge of utilizing WordPress to create multilingual websites. Robert Windisch is the founder of Inpsyde, the largest WordPress agency in Europe. Robert participates actively in the WordPress community and is a specialist in the creation of multilingual websites. MultilingualPress is a solution that Robert’s company has created, and because of its scalability and performance, it is advised for enterprise-level projects. He emphasizes how crucial it is to comprehend that there are other ways to get multilingual functionality in WordPress, and the best strategy relies on the particular needs of the project. He suggests using translation plugins like WPML for more basic websites, since they make the process of translating text and managing its surrounding parts easier. Robert recommends utilizing multisite setups where stringent language control and high performance are required. This way, each language version is handled as a distinct site, guaranteeing content separation and offering more control. Additionally, he suggests Multilingual Press, an enterprise-level solution created by his organization, because of its great performance and scalability. 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 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 Robert Windisch. He’s from inside over in Europe. And we’re going to get into talking about using WordPress and multi multiple languages, particularly for learning management system applications, but also in general, welcome to the show, Robert. Robert Windisch: Thank you. Nice for finally being here. I, saw the podcast, I be totally honest. I did not have time to listen to the podcasts, I just typed in there here and there, but I’m so happy to to be here because I, like you are a known person, so that’s why I’m happy, to have a conversation with you. Chris Badgett: Awesome. You’re a known person too. I’ve seen the hat for years, so it’s great to finally connect. Yeah Robert Windisch: I try to, like with this, I try to make it happen to that. People really have a visible, like most people going like the guy with the head. And even in WordCamp US Matt came up to me at the bar, like when we were there, where all people were and were like, Oh I saw you here. And I imagined that WordPress people are here. So I was like, okay, unique identifier where the WordPress people are in a very big, crowded very big area as, WordCamp US was. Chris Badgett: Yeah. As a quick side note, I love walking around the city or wherever and being like, there’s a WordPress person. You can tell you get your cues and stuff. It’s awesome. But you definitely have a good proper part of your stick going there for the uninitiated. Tell us about at a high level using WordPress and multi languages. What’s, going on? What are the pieces that people need to think about? Robert Windisch: So they are There’s different approaches. First of all it’s, it depends. It’s the answer that everybody hates when, I say that, because it’s really about what do you want to achieve and what is the audience and what is the level of of depth you want to go into. So for example the white house, let’s say, that way, the white house currently has English and Spanish as possibility languages. And they are using multi site to separate the sites from each other to make sure they are as fast as as as, close to core as possible. And then you have like normal, let’s say normal sites who are not like that kind of I need to survive like a hit of a few hundred thousand visits a second that are normal sites. We just, someone wants to distribute content to several languages. So data and user currently use a plugin one, one of the plugins to really make sure that they can translate the content and can also can translate everything surrounding this content. Because the problem with multilingual WordPress sites is it’s not done with like simply translating posts and pages, like just think back in the times when we had widgets or for people who are currently using the classic editor. I’m feel so sorry for you to still dealing with widgets. I hated this and I was so happy when they were gone. So, that’s so many, there are so many content surrounding in WordPress that is that is a different thing. Then WordPress like posts and pages. So there’s different solutions who can deal with that. And then you have like plugin translations, you have like seam translations and you have all the, let’s say the hot mess that goes into making a WordPress site run. There’s plugins who cannot be translated because the developer said like meh. And, so there’s so many different ways you can pinpoint that, that there’s sorry, no. Easy to this thing will solve all your problems. It’s really like the plugin space right now. And there is on the horizon, a solution in core. Chris Badgett: Let’s use an example like French Canada, Quebec. If, somebody it’s really common there to have a French and an English version, how should somebody approach that with their website? Like what’s the basic version of that? Would you recommend two sites? Robert Windisch: Yeah it’s really about the so like simply separating the, multisite from a single site approach. It’s for the single, site, as we like normal sites, as normal people would call them. But for us as a multisite solution people, we tend to use this as a normal version. So from a normal installation of WordPress, you simply put a translation plugin on, I can name names if you want to. There, so currently there’s WPML and you have OT and Ang as, solutions. You can take there and all of them has ups and downs that you need to like simply be accustomed to. You need to see, okay, how can you translate a scene? Then what, is the, part where you in the design want to switch over to different content? For example, if you want to have user generated. Comments, for example, or what is the, where are the forms? Like what, is the, as I said before what is the plugin output? Is, the site ready for that? Where do we need to translate that? Is it, was it translated by the plugin auto? And if you want to have, let’s say really fast performance sites and you are okay with the extra work that needs to go in there, then you can really let those two languages have two different sites and a multi site because with multi site they share like the The plugins, they can have a different seam by simply using the multi site feature. They can have different plugins there, and they also have to have the ability to have different users work on them. So you can have people who are fluent in France and French, but not like having good chops in English. They can all only have access to the French side and the other one have only access to the English side. So the benefit of a data is that you don’t need to like tell people don’t touch the other language to use. They simply can’t and they can have their own language, like progressing and they can also like then connect stuff with each other. So that’s the possibility with multi site. But again, this comes with the. Extra amount of the first is you need to understand what you’re doing because it’s, a different, it’s a different starting value you having, because with multi site some things are changing in WordPress in terms of you need to understand that this is now a different site. You’re not switching over with simply on a, on the press of a of a flag and you’re back and you’re not switching over because you need to switch sites for that. So there is upsides to this, but there’s also like the added let’s say. Extra work of understanding what what multisite entails, but that comes with the best benefit is all the current WordPress translation plugins, they need to bend WordPress core. So they need to make sure, for example, when you would hit a French translated page, for example with your example in Canada, when you would hit a French would be the translated page, then you basically hitting in WordPress like a four or four. Like it basically, it hits and goes like someone needs to jump in there and going Hey, if this URL part comes up please ask me. And then the plugins go Hey, this is this thing. You are not a normal post content. That is something we made up. So they need to like, make sure that WordPress knows what to do. And the benefit of having this in a, in the multi site is you don’t need to do anything because when you hit an, a French version of the page, that’s the French multi site and it’s a normal page there. So simply WordPress starts up and there’s no extra plugin going in there and making sure that the site content is, really the content you were requesting. So that’s the benefit of having that. And now imagine having this translation feature on and having a few thousand hits a minute or a second, then you really want to have extra, like every extra not queries thrown. You want to have that you want to have the least queries and WordPress flying around the least like PHP memory use and all of that is the, goal you want to have with a high performance side. The question is. Are you doing a high performance site? Are you doing the site that you really want to have a control over? That was, that needs to be like let’s say enterprise ready. Or that’s like really the customer is someone who really values like, like not doing shortcuts and stuff. So then this all comes in handy, but if you have a, like a normal user site that they didn’t take over and they really are on their own and they need to like work with that, then sometimes the the, other plugins are more useful, like the normal translation plugins. Chris Badgett: And how did the normal translation plugins work? Are they. I guess what’s the difference between that and just letting somebody’s browser handle it? Robert Windisch: Yeah, it D because there is, it’s everything is a plugin solution. Everything in there needs to be a plugin because core currently cannot handle that. So even our solution is a plugin. That the one, there’s one in the white house is our plugin. And that’s the that’s one of the plugins on the multi, site world that you can use. And. Currently it needs to be a block. And so for example, but what, for example, our plugin does simply help you connect things because it’s still multi site, but you need to tell, you need to tell the search engines that you have a French translation of the content. So if, when it’s, when it hits the French content and goes are you cheating? Do you want to trick me that you can tell the search engines? No, On purpose. Like this is the English version of that. And they both are connected with each other. Very cool. Chris Badgett: Very cool. Tell us more about the White House project and what your plugin does on there. Robert Windisch: As a European agency a spoiler, we were not involved with the White House project because. It’s the wider but our solution is let’s say in the in the enterprise agency world and that kind of like professional world our solution is the go to solution for for, translations. And so when the white house was approaching WordPress VIP to go Hey, can we. Like we want to host the site that was the transition site. So it was built back better. So the transition side as you do not want to get DDoS as the future White House, you look for one of the best solutions in the market and the market, like they’re already like used to getting attacks from everywhere. That’s why they they reached out to them. And so when they were going like, and we want to do translations, like then WordPress VIP was like, we have one solution for you, but you can choose from that. You have this one solution, but you can, you are free to choose this one thing. And so they choose then our solution. And we got a like cryptic message in our Slack. Can someone like help them? Or can someone give us some insights into multilingual press for a certain thing? And we were like, That’s a very unspecific request. And and then later we were like, ah, okay, that’s, that was the White House. So, it really is a normal, WordPress site. It’s just like the the doing and like solution is simply from a, like from an enterprise perspective and because performance and scalability is. One thing like you wanted, you want to have as, this very prominent website. That’s why they they were choosing like this solution to really have everything they can, they could have focused on performance. Chris Badgett: Very cool. Let’s look at the LMS niche, particularly one of the challenges they have. is getting there, but if, our learning platform has a lot of video content, how should somebody approach multilingual? Should we do the multi site or how should we think about that? Robert Windisch: The question then is how separated do you want to. Show that to the audience. So if you want to have a so that’s why it’s the question is how, you are like streamlining that and how as one of the platform, do you want to present that to the audience? If you want to have one URL and everything is mixed in there and then you can filter that, then you basically answered your question because then, you don’t want to have the separation or otherwise you need to get everything then to. Back together. But if you want to have focused on several languages and you want to have people like experience this language and everything on the website is then in this language. So it’s the same thing as you can imagine, like the switching over to the content and then for example, depends on how much the translation plugins can deal with your extra content and how they are ready to separate these things in front end. That’s the question you need to be able to answer, like, how can you do, how can you do the separation? And if you want to be like fully seen as a, separate cosmos for, those languages, depends on how much content you basically having. I would guess. Chris Badgett: I have a technical question for you that comes up sometimes with permalinks. If somebody’s Italian, they call it a course is a cursi and they want permalinks changing, but you can’t really have separate permalinks on the same site, right? That’s not even possible. Robert Windisch: I don’t know. Like it, it really depends. If you, because if you already bending WordPress as a translation plugin, Why not bend it more and I don’t mean it in a bad way. That’s the, card that like all the plugins got dealt with while we are snickering in the corner going that’s no problem. Simply have your Slack translated because we don’t like. It’s a different site. So if you, if the site is Italian and you have Italian translation of your Slack, then your Slack is Italian and everything is fine. That’s, us of the multi site solution snickering the corner while the poor, like translation plugins need to deal with Hey, as you said it’s not possible to to translate to have multiple slacks there on, on one page again, like it’s possible. You just need to do extra work to make this happen. I’m going totally like a flying blind here, I’m not sure if they currently do this. But technically if you have a rewrite doing this for one URL, you can also do with, you could practically do it for all translations. I’m not sure if they doing that because again, like me snickering in the corner, going haha. Not our problem. I know that’s very not helpful. What I’m saying. Chris Badgett: No, I just, I think it’s, you’re bringing up a good point, which is it’s complex. And there’s how much do you want to bend WordPress or just do a separate site? Tell us about the phase four vision for WordPress. And if you could just go over phase one, two, and three real quick. So people know what the context. Robert Windisch: Yeah. By the way for everyone who’s currently going like what phases Cochran congratulation, you just won a homework. So there is a state of the word. It’s the let’s state of the union of the WordPress ecosystem. And it’s done by Matt Mullenweg the end of the year. So currently we currently. While recording that we do not have a state of the word this year. So your homework is what’s that from last year or wait till the end of the year to watch this year to simply gives you an insight into where the roadmap of WordPress is, where WordPress is currently at and what was the year and what is the. Outlook we having. So that’s the easiest way for you to be like up to date, what is happening in the ecosystem, and then you can like show, off to other people how awesome WordPress. So that’s a simply a gimmick you, get with that. The phases of the, block editor were introduced when WordPress 5. 0 was released. And the first phase is to introduce the block editor Gutenberg people notice also as Gutenberg introduced that to the WordPress ecosystem. The phase two was bringing the block editor into front end that what we now call full site editing and site editing so that people can really be able to edit the whole experience and not only the post and the page content and the widgets, by the way, and phase three is then collaboration. So basically. That’s just imagine Google drive and those like real time experiences and not going like a Paula just is editing this post. Do you want to take it over or do you want to go back to the main site? So basically imagine what would WordPress backend look like if someone would create it right now. And it’s simply like a editing and what phase three also introduces is workflows. So when someone changes something, then the base workflow system is thought to be in there for other events to happen after that. Just make sure that someone, if they change something, also think about what other things you need to touch. And this comes in handy for phase four, because for phase four is bringing multilingual to core. And the workflows are a very integration part of that because as Matt said it in the Q and a last year in San Diego. For WordCamp US, he was like all WordPress, all multilingual translation plugins are doing it wrong because what he was missing is he said the workflows are missing. So if someone trans changes something in the English side, if we stay on the Canadian example, if someone changes something on the English side, then on the French side, something might need to happen. If someone changes like a very important detail on the English side, then on the French side, this might also need to change. So that’s why the workflows are in phase three and that lead to phase four and making then WordPress going multilingual in core. And now it’s the question that you just ask it like or I, answer you the question that you just want to tell me. Do you want to go forward? Yeah. Yeah. Chris Badgett: That’s, perfect. Robert Windisch: That’s when is the question you want to ask? Like, when is everybody goes okay when, is multilingual Chris Badgett: as a software person, myself, I tend to avoid the wind cause we don’t know sometimes, but do you have an answer? Robert Windisch: I have a rough guess. If every state of the word is a time in WordPress, when the pressure is getting high for the developers to deliver something that WordPress is really like, leaping forward. Yeah. That means for me that faced. Two, a phase three, if we get it done might be in two years in my like, just imagine the rough guessing here. So it would be the the state of the word in two years where we have phase three, maybe concluded. And that means it depends on how fast we get the multilingual then in core, because one of the big things were really like the blocker did or in the past, iterations and like block based seams and all of that surrounding this, so that means for me, phase four is maybe. four to five years like, a way because we want to deliver something really good and we need to really make sure that we nailed on landing when we do multilingual and core, because we cannot simply revamp. The content that we let people create, then like, going a release and going ah, shoot, we have the wrong data structure. Let’s revamp all the content that is currently translated already in WordPress. So that’s why we need to nail the landing. So that’s why for me, it’s like, four, maybe four years is for me the, approach again, like I have no connect, I have no connection in guessing when this is my guessing is best as yours. But for me, it’s for me to experience in the ecosystem, like that is a, for me, a good timing. And if we get it earlier. Yay. Chris Badgett: Nice. I, have a question, which I don’t know if you have much take on or not, but in addition to multilingual is multi currency. So if you’re selling training as an example and you want it to be sold in different currencies depending upon the language, how would one do that? Robert Windisch: So the easy answer. Just give it their own site. Yes. I know. Like I blow this thing out of proportion, then you, because you need to have your store and multiple sites, but currently it’s the you can have currency trends, translations. So you can have like in the checkout, you have a user, have their own currency, and then on the checkout, you’re going like, this was a fun ride. And please now pay in dollar, and that’s, a possibility. And you just need to see if people jump off your store or not. So that’s why it’s a really like we tend to for, example, for our own products, we tend to simply have a surprise multi site and have simply a multiple WooCommerce instance there to, to simply deliver exactly to those users. Chris Badgett: I think that’s a big takeaway. And it’s what we recommend too, that if you’re going to do a separate site or a new, a separate language is basically a separate site. If you really want to deliver the best experience, it’s I think of it you go to a menu, you get a menu in some countries and there’s the stuff is written in multiple languages on the menu and it gets a little complex. Yeah. If you really want to have the best user experience per language, they get their own menu. And maybe the person talking to him can, speak in that language or whatever. Talk to us about translation and WordPress, like the translators, the people that contribute particularly to the free open source plugins and WordPress core itself, how did it, how did translators make the magic happen for all the different languages, not just on the front end of the website, but how the admin screens look and everything else. Robert Windisch: Yeah you, mean you like to translate wordpress. org area, right? To the wordpress is translated. Yeah. Okay. Lucky you’re currently speaking to a locale manager. So I’m, very deep in exactly this, area. I just want to make sure that should I not bore you for 10 minutes about that? So, the best, the most important thing that people might not know is first, everybody can help. Really, I mean that everybody who speaks more than one language, even like several instances of English, they can also help translate this English in English variant for other people. And the most important thing is that translations are reviewed. That’s why you just imagined like, why can I, when I, when everybody can contribute, so I can go in there and post my affiliate link for translation for some weird language, because nobody understands this and goes yeah, sure, that string is fine. No, you have really we, I think we currently have, oh, like rough guess. I’m. Was not looking at that for a long time, 60 to 80 languages active in WordPress. Let’s say 60 ish. Like I totally get like messages maybe right now from other people going Hey, that’s was the wrong number. So it’s really about the active and not so active languages. And and translating a plugin and a seam and like core is basically all the same thing. So we have an interface, we have a software called blog press, which is installed as a solution on translate. wordpress. org and in that you can select the language and then you can, or you can select the plugin and then you can help contribute to this plugin if you speak another language and then someone from this language needs to. Review that’s why you have some languages where you have more strings to review as translations Because like people has no, have no time to review like all the gifts that people giving to this language, because nobody has time to do the day to day work because you need to understand the language and then you need to really commit to make sure this, translations also get reviewed and the right translations gets accepted. And if a plugin reaches like 90 percent translation. Or I think for core, it’s a different thing, but if you reach a certain amount of translation, like a very high amount, then for this translation, you get language files created. And this then gets distributed to the users. So, that’s why you have, maybe sometimes if you have a multilingual backend, you get like update and then you’re going like, but. There’s no update, no plugin, no seam. And then you have Oh yeah, the language was updated because the languages are not connected to the plugins, which was back in the day, like in 2013, when we first discussed like the, language solution it was like, you need to. Have a promo file created as a plugin out or have someone ship you translations that you can add to your zip file, to your wordpress. org distribution system. And then when you had a new version out. You distributed like all the translation files. So you have half the translation because the people that give you the translations were not having the current version. So that’s why we simply disconnected this translation system while having like the translation running on wordpress. org and translate wordpress. org for the wordpress. org plugins and for the seams and for core, and then having the, files, like the, plugin files, not having any translations with them on wordpress. org to be able to simply be updated besides having the translations done by by the translators. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Is there anything that you would recommend for like a plugin author to encourage translation or to recruit people or incentivize, or Robert Windisch: how would, yeah, so there’s a very easy, the first step is check the translation page of your plugin. If you’re on WebPress, Okta, it’s like this plugin can be translated or whatsoever, and then you can jump over. And if it’s. All red. And there is this plugin is not able to be translated. Yeah. Guess why you don’t have any translations because you did not do the work. And the other thing is there is a, there is in the plugin handbook is a is a chapter for internationalization. Because I saw plugins where they were like, yes, my plugin is ready. And I was like, how can you use, how can someone translate this string? Yeah, it’s was in the JavaScript and you can also translate JavaScript stuff because so many things right now on JavaScript for any, some weird reason. I don’t know why, but there are so many stuff now happening in JavaScript and you also need to give this translation like to the WordPress system. To like, to be able to call it in PHP, there’s like a whole chapter in the you don’t like, don’t listen to me, like just go to the translation handbook and, to the plugin handbook and search for internalization. You have there the translation, like the, how can you do the JavaScript files? Then you can simply use in JavaScript, like this variables where you pull this translations in. And so the first tip is to make sure your plugin is translatable. The second thing is check if you already having check your maybe you already know the users you’re having. You maybe have them in the WordPress plugin director in the plugin directory, in the support forums, or you, or they already might have already done translations. So see if you can find them. Maybe you can say them like. Thank you for doing my plugin. You might also have a premium version going or you tell your premium users Hey, you can get a free version. For example, if you help us translate these things, just be aware. If you have random people showing up at translations, they can just submit. Ideas of translations. So you should like, see if you have people who already have translation credits or. They simply onboard themselves to the community, there’s like even a style guide for different languages where people can simply. Understand how to translate the language. Sounds weird. I know you’re going like, but I speak this language. Are you also in writing? You are a hundred percent sure you know how to write in your language. That’s coming from a German, like even I’m going like. I might be not a hundred percent correct with what I translate there. But that’s why I just do the locale part and empower people and not doing my translation by myself. All the time I do that sometimes, but the point is really, do you have the you have different style guides for things in WordPress and there’s even a glossary because if you think what posts means in your language, are you sure that’s the WordPress way of translating things? Because one very important thing for people to understand is for a normal user, the whole backend looks like one thing. So if they stumble onto a very weird translation of a normal word in WordPress post pages. Someone translates this for The word that they totally mean that it’s the perfect way to describing that. If you want to write about like someone in your plugin needs to do something in posts. Then you use the not translated that did not write glossary word for that. You confuse users and they think it’s all one thing that they are in and not like having a. Software stitched together by 50 plugins. Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Thanks for taking us on a tour of that. I want to clarify for the audience. You mentioned the multi site approach. And I just want to make sure, are you referring to WordPress multi site. Or just multiple websites and explain the difference there for people who don’t know what Robert Windisch: multi site is? Yeah. Thank you for this question. I, love this question. So the so the difference is that multi site is a core feature since WordPress 3. 0 and before that it was a fork, so it’s a very, stable feature in WordPress. It’s not a new thing just that nobody, very little people know. That doesn’t mean it is a it’s a feature that is not stable. Because you see it right now working on a site called wordpress.com. So that is a multi-site basically. And what it means is that you can have different. Instances on one installation. They all shared like the same code base, but they are different sites. So what the only thing that they are sharing is users. So every site in the multi site has their own options. User options, posts, comments, pages and like custom post types, WooCommerce products and so on. And LifterLMS courses there. And this is the a base feature of WordPress that everybody could enable on their WordPress site. There is like a thing with plugins that some plugins are so horribly written that they have problems with multi site. That doesn’t mean multisite is weird, it’s just like the plugins do not care how to write real write code. They’re just going yeah, like this works on my machine. Why should it not work on your machine? And normally plugins are ready for that. They are just some, horrible, five bucks plugins on some site that are like not dealing with that because never thought, nobody thought about having this feature on. Which again, there’s a core feature since version 3. 0 and everybody currently guesses which year 3. 0 was. Congratulations. You are old. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to explain it using the wordpress. com example. So wordpress. com is a website. But you can get a free free plan on there and they have other plans as well. But you get your own URL. It’s like chris. wordpress. com if you sign up and you get your own. Then you can map a custom domain if you want to, or whatever, but what is actually shared. Between all the sites, is it, is there really just like one WordPress instance for all of that? Like in terms of, yeah Robert Windisch: Yeah, yeah. It’s, yes it’s technically a little bit more like the, even for example. They use a system where they not all be in one database because that would be insane. Like to have like millions of database tables in one day and one database. They use the system to to split this over multiple database servers. And they even can have there is a this is like open source. You can like. Watch it. You can even install it on your site. It just makes sense if you really are going like into the top numbers of like over a few hundred sites. If you plan with that. Then you would probably look into ludicrous DB or hyper DB is the name of the plugin. I’ve totally butchered the name of the plugin there. That’s from JTJ, I think. And HyperDB is a one from automatic and they simply split the databases of the users. And you then simply reroute the queries to those. To those databases and that you can simply have exactly the same installation part, like for ground base, and then you can scale from that. But I think they also do a little bit more like tricks in there at wordpress. com. But I think the base system is a normal multi site. Chris Badgett: Tell us about your agency, Imp Snide. What is it? What are you guys special in specialize in what could people find over there? Robert Windisch: Yeah. So we are an enterprise agency, which like sounds okay. What does it mean? So we work, we are 130 people. We were founded in like 2006 and we were founded out of the WordPress community in Germany. So we were like the people who are in the German community and like the moderators of the German community. Then we were like let’s try a business. And now I’m here. And the and that’s why we are a hundred percent remote because when you start a forum, you’re not going and we meet. At 7 p. m. at this part in the city. So that’s why we were all remote and we like then simply kept that way. So all our 130 plus people are like distributed over the world because we have like, the biggest brands on the planet as our clients. And for example for We do also WooCommerce we also do WooCommerce plugins. So we are the official vendor, like the official agency helping PayPal, Molly and Payoneer for their WooCommerce plugins. And and for the for the agency like, sites, we, for example, SAP the new site we doing there and then the other names I cannot. Tell you, because I cannot even tell you the industry they are in because your second guess most likely would be already a hit. So, that’s why we are just like one of the, one of the enterprise agencies in the market. And yeah, we are helping our clients since a very long time with WordPress. Chris Badgett: Just to give back to the agency folks, watching out there. How does one move to the enterprise space? If somebody wants to start to try to work with clients and grow their agency into enterprise, what should they do first? Robert Windisch: Have a time machine. So because the the, problem is it’s very it’s Like it’s not a, it’s not a totally crowded space there. But you really need to convince your client that you can make it so that you can really like really deliver that. And one of the things that we, that we did in the early years, we simply like simply, it sounds weird. We raised our price. So with that before that we, might look cheap to some bigger clients. And we were like adjusted, like just a few people, and then we raised our price. And with that, like also raised our confidence. Going yes, we can do those projects because if you want to, if you. For example, when we were like focusing on the German market there and and there were like, we were like going yes, we know WordPress. Yes, we, because we are the people from the community. So when someone knows how to do WordPress and exactly, like multi site was a thing for us, that was like a normal thing we are using in projects. Like even the German WordPress, German needs page was a multi site before it was a multi site. It was multi user was the fork for that. So we were really confident that we can deliver those things. And then when we had conversations with with bigger clients. And we were more than a few people, like one, two, three, more than that. Then we really could tell them like, we have to confidential. We know how, what to do. we were confident in that. We know we know WordPress really good because. You see over there and even with that, like over the years there is there’s a there’s a thing called WordPress VIP. As I already mentioned that was the hosting system that a hosting provider that the White House choose when you are someone really active in the ecosystem, then there is a way to Be recognized. So WordPress VIP came towards us in, I think in 2015 or 16 because they were like Hey, we know, we see what you’re doing. You’re doing good for the ecosystem. So we are visible. We were doing good work and they were like, we would like to fall for you to, join us as a agency. So then we became a part of WordPress VIP as a VIP agency for, automatic, and they also then brought us like bigger clients and also brought us multilingual clients, because that was the, like the niche that we really could help WordPress VIP delivering towards the clients because they have like global brands that have like local markets and that’s where multilingual comes into place. And we. Know this field of work very much. That’s Chris Badgett: awesome. So that’s Robert Windisch. He’s from impside. com. That’s I N P S Y D E. com. Also check out multilingualpress. org. That’s where it’s at. Thanks for coming on the show, Robert. Thank you for taking us on a tour of how to think about multiple languages and what our options are and sharing your experience with us today. We really appreciate it. Robert Windisch: It was a pleasure. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. 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 Learn Multilingual WordPress with Robert Windisch from Europe’s Largest WordPress Agency appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Christopher Stammer shares insights about their specialized online training program, “Level Up,” developed in partnership with TRSA for frontline supervisors in the commercial laundry industry. And they used most powerful LifterLMS plugin for this. Christopher Stammer is  an Entrepreneur, Speaker and Training Innovator. He’s from Volu Interactive. He also has a unique LMS project in the industrial laundry niche. LifterLMS powers this unique training project, which provides supervisors with important skills like as leadership, communication, decision-making, problem-solving, and root cause analysis. When deciding on the best Learning Management System for their project, they prioritized dependability, scalability, and customizability. After thorough research and evaluation, they ultimately opted for LifterLMS due to its robust capabilities and the exemplary support provided by the LifterLMS team. Christopher also emphasizes the discovery of other functionalities inside LifterLMS, such as social learning, testing, and badging tools, which have proven to be quite useful. Their success with LifterLMS is clear, as they have already begun their second batch of training. 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 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 Christopher Stammer. He’s from volume interactive. He also has a cool LMS project in the industrial laundry niche. We’re a training project. It’s called level up in the laundry. com. Welcome to the show, Chris. Christopher Stammer: Thanks for having me, Chris. Chris Badgett: I’m excited to get into it with you. First let’s just level set on what level up the laundry. com is what is that there’s, I find all these interesting niches within training. So what is this niche here?  Christopher Stammer: Oh yeah. This, is about as niche as it gets. Okay. So level up in the laundry is a training portal for a supervisory skills training program that we developed for an one of the. Largest industry associations for the commercial laundry industry. It’s called TRSA. And we have had a relationship with TRSA for 13 or 14 years now. And they had identified a need for supervisory skills training for people that work in laundry plants. These are commercial laundry plants. So imagine like you doing laundry in your house. But like multiply that times a thousand, like hotels and stuff. Would you say so they’ll do the laundry and the garments for hotels, restaurants hospitals if any sort of an industrial. Organization where they have like uniforms that they wear that need to be cleaned on a daily basis. They do it. Chris Badgett: So it’s the management layer that you’re training with the level up the laundry. Christopher Stammer: That’s right. Yeah. Tell us more. Yeah. So it’s the frontline supervisors. Okay. These are the people that are, walking around these plants and. Providing assistance to the frontline workers who are actually doing the work that are manning these stations and these these machines and processing the laundry as it moves through these plants. And as you can imagine, being in a production oriented environment like that is it’s pretty challenging, especially when you’re, up against people that have varying levels of education and varying. Levels of understanding of the English language. So, level up in the laundry provides them supervisory skills training, ranging from leadership, communication, decision making, problem solving root cause analysis literally runs the gamut. Really what we wanted to do is just give them the platform, the starting point for them to develop their skills and to Perform their jobs effectively as supervisors. Chris Badgett: Nice. And in general, how’s it going with the website? Christopher Stammer: The website is going extremely well. And to be honest with you, that was probably one of my biggest concerns. When we when we got into this project about a year ago, right now, it was the platform and it was first of all, what LMS are we going to use? That’s a big question, right? There’s Oh, it’s a huge question. And coming from a situation where I had never deployed an LMS independently on my own, it was literally keep me awake at night, sort of an issue. Chris Badgett: Wow. So what tell us about like the decision matrix journey through settling on WordPress and ultimately LifterLMS. Christopher Stammer: So it was a lot of research and going out and finding out all the different solutions that are out there. And my biggest concern was reliability. I wanted to make sure that we didn’t launch a couple of courses. And then lose everything at some point down the line. Also set my second priority was, scalability. I wanted to be able to allow the LMS to grow with us. I wanted to be able to grow the course and expand the course and, have the LMS be able to accommodate that. So the journey was, is just going out and doing a lot of research. Developing some evaluation criteria to figure out which LMS is going to be the best for us and the best for the, program and. Narrowed it down to two or three and I won’t say the names of your competitors, but there are some, essentially there, there were, there was an option that we were considering that was like a software as a service option where everything was set up. You just plug and play, just put your date, your content in there. And they had all the processing payment processing and all that sort of stuff set up and I eliminated it because it wasn’t customizable. It wasn’t going to have the look and the feel that I wanted for the site to have. And then we looked at another WordPress based solution and it was the same sort of thing. It was cost and, this one was cheaper, but I was a little bit concerned about reliability and, also functionality too, for that one. So we eliminated that and LifterLMS wasn’t the cheapest solution that we were considering. But in terms of the capability. That it had and the level of support that I knew that you and your team were going to be able to provide us in the end, it was a no brainer. And ultimately we went with the, infinity bundle. Awesome. Chris Badgett: So those are those music to my ears, reliability, customizability. And scalability. That’s, awesome. That’s what we try to, that’s what we aim to do here, that’s, awesome. So I’m glad you found us. How did you I see a lot of people when they’re in research mode, they get a little overwhelmed. Like you mentioned there’s, some options in WordPress, but then the greater e learning industry market’s huge, there’s a lot of SaaS solutions. How long was that experience of shopping around and how’d you avoid the overwhelm? Christopher Stammer: I’m overwhelmed every day. Yeah. Yeah. And and the LMS for this project was just like a piece, right? Of course it’s the foundational piece, but it was just a piece of the overall program. And then, you start talking about all the tools to develop content and that sort of thing. And it’s just so, essentially, yeah I was initially pretty overwhelmed because there were so many solutions out there. Then I started getting smart with my searches and tried to, look for like top 10 best solutions that are out there and watch some YouTube videos of people that had actually gone out and experienced trials. Of these LMSs and and, listen, listened and watch these, videos, these YouTube videos, and these, and looked at these reviews with a very critical eye, a very keen eye to see if what that person was looking for was what I was looking for. Sometimes there’s a difference. And when they rank these LMSs their, evaluation isn’t in line with yours. So you really need to. To prioritize what you really want out of the LMS when you start with your search, sometimes you don’t know, you don’t know, but you’ll learn over time and you begin to to understand what, it is you really want. Yeah, so there were just, there was just a ton that were out there and yeah. And, try it out a few as well try it out of the LMSs that were out there and had the opportunity to experience them a little bit. But if you don’t have any content to put in, that can be a little bit challenging. As well. So we went to a lot of demo sites and evaluated the demo sites. And I think when we came to the LifterLMS demo site, I was like, okay, I see how this is all going to work together. And I think this is going to work out really well for us. But then I started to see some of the extra functionality that you had built into the infinity bundle, like social learning. That was huge. The the, testing and the badging functionality of Lifter, that was huge too. And and, I’m glad we did choose LMS or LifterLMS because when I actually started to get into it and use it and start to put content in there, I began, it was like layers of an onion. That started to become unpeeled. And I was like, Oh, it does this. I was like, that’s so cool. That’s exactly what we need for this. And yeah, so now we’re off to the races. We’re in our second cohort. That’s awesome. Chris Badgett: Yeah, the layers of the onion. I appreciate that. I, think that experience comes from the fact that. We just build for people like you and you guys tell us what you want and it’s not, we’re not guessing. So as somebody like yourselves gets into the tool in the early days, they’re like, Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we had some community features? Let’s gamify this more. Let’s extend in this way or that. So that’s, that makes me super happy to say that or to hear that. How about tell us more about the cohort, your cohort model, how does it work for this niche? What, are you doing? Like you get, yeah, just tell me, tell us more about the business model of it. Christopher Stammer: So it’s all driven. The format of the course is totally driven by our users needs. Just like you had gone out and gathered requirements and heard what your customers wanted we had done a pretty comprehensive needs assessment pre COVID on people that were plant managers, VPs of operations, general managers of these plants, and also people that were supervisors. And we said, okay, if you were to have some sort of a supervisory skills training program, how would it be deployed? Like, how would you want to go through it? Going to. A hotel for a bootcamp or a three day weekend or a week long training was not going to work primarily because you just can’t pull your supervisors off the plant floor and say, Oh, go to training for three days, right? Because obviously there is not anybody in the plant to supervise. So they knew that they needed to have something that was remote. They need to have something that could be accessed via the web. But the problem with that is that you lose if it’s totally asynchronous, right? Where you have people just accessing the content at will on demand. That’s great. If it’s one person wanting to learn these skills and develop the capabilities of niche, whatever it is they’re trying to learn. But with this, what we want to do, we want to do something a little bit more community based. We wanted the people that were going through the training together to be able to, talk to each other, to be able to communicate with each other, share lessons learned, and be able to learn from each other. So that’s when we decided that the best approach for the overall training program was going to be distance learning, but have it be a little bit blended with a couple of real time sessions built in, where we could bring everybody together and talk about. What we’re learning through the program and talk about how to apply the concepts of the program to their actual live environment. Chris Badgett: Was that virtual? The get people together?  Christopher Stammer: Yes. Yes, it was. Yup. So I can’t leave the plant. So it was, yeah, they can’t leave the planet. Yup. So it’s, virtual, but in real time live. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. So that was cool. But also with the with the program, we wanted to have applied. Assignments, we want to have what we call action assignments, where once you go through a module that consists of several lessons, there’s going to be an action assignment that they need to take and apply the learned skills in their own unique environment. And we needed to make sure that we’re getting that fed back to us in terms of what it is they’re actually completing. And the results of those assignments. You can only do some, you can only handle so many students at one time. So that’s one of the reasons why we capped off our seats at 25 for each cohort. And so you’ll register for a cohort and they’re a limited number of seats. So you’re in a group with 25 and you go through the training program, all the relative same time, theoretically because as with. With the with prerequisites built in and having the capability to what do you, call it? Trickle you’re learning drip content with the drip content with the drip content. What we’ll do is for each module, we release a new module every Tuesday. It doesn’t mean you have to be a hundred percent finished with the content in the previous module. It just means that. The next module is going to open up and now you’ll have access to it. So some people are falling a little bit further behind others. Some people are like boom, want to get it done as fast as possible and provide us some really good results with the action assignments. Other people are a little bit more. Lacks in terms of their access to the materials. So, anyway, so that’s the cohort model. We found that it works really well. Brings people together, helps develop a network and that’s really what we wanted to do. We wanted to create an ecosystem of supervisors that can get to know each other and as they start to become more involved in industry events through TRSA, which is this industry association, they’re going to be motivated to want to go to some of TRSA’s other events down the line. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I noticed on your pricing for the cohorts, you had a TRSA members only price and then a non TRSA members price. So people just, if they are members, they get the benefit of cheaper pricing, basically.  Christopher Stammer: Yeah, that’s right. They have the privilege of spending less on the program. And we just want to make sure that we’re, incentivizing people to become members of the industry association. So that way they can get preferred discounting, not only on this program, but other programs as well. And it’s, it works to their benefit in the long run because being involved in a member oriented industry association, there are a lot of benefits. Chris Badgett: Tell us more about you in terms of the your niche. And what I mean by that is there’s lots of different people that use LifterLMS and WordPress. There’s course creators, there’s website builders, web developers. Curriculum providers and you’re, I’m looking at the volume interactive. com website and you mentioned the e learning website is just a piece of the stack. So what is your niche in this, in the training world here? Christopher Stammer: Yeah, it’s a really great question. I’m still trying to figure that out. My company started as as voluminant in 2004. All right. And we were we are, I should say, cause we’re same company, just different emphasis, right? We’re a business, performance improvement firm. Okay. So we’ll go into organizations and we’ll try to improve their operation from a strategic. Operational behavioral or information technology perspective. So our relationship with companies, clients is we’ll do a wall to wall analysis, identify areas of opportunity, and then create, construct a project around it to improve the operation as a whole. And that model worked for us up until about 2019 even before COVID, we realized that when we were going in and we were doing these, like these laser focused, Performance improvement programs. 80 percent of the programs were oriented around training, right? It’s not, just about the process stuff is, great, but you know what, anytime you make a process change or implement any sort of a change within an organization, there’s gotta be that, tactical offset. There’s that human element. So most of what we were doing was focused on training and we made a pivot in 2019. We said, you know what? Let’s. We, love the training element because it has an impact on people and you’re engaging with your audience. Let’s just focus our organization on training. So we still do the strategic stuff and the business performance improvement stuff and stuff oriented around project management, enhancing project success. But the bulk majority of what we do is focused on training. So from there, we had already developed a whole slew of training programs that were. Legacy training programs that were either delivered on site live. In person, or we had some online components of those some were blended up blended between those two. And we said, yeah, we should really just focus on these and start to deploy these programs virtually and, shift them away from, there being a live element to where people can just access the content on demand. And that’s another reason why I wanted to buy the infinity bundle is the intent was. Sure. We’re going to launch level up in the laundry, but we also have four other programs that we want to get online that can be delivered through LFTR LMS and that’s where we’re going. And so Chris Badgett: you guys are creating the content, not just the website for the training, right? Christopher Stammer: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. And end to end solution. So we’ll do the needs assessment, develop the content host put the content into LFTR. And with, in the case of level up in the laundry, we, we actually facilitate it as well and administer the program. Wow. That’s, awesome. It’s very full stack. Yep. For sure. Go ahead. Take takes, it’s very, very time and energy intensive. It’s also one of the reasons why we’re in growth mode right now to get a new program manager in for level up in the laundry and get a couple of associates in as well to support that program and grow it. But also to, to expand some of our other programs.  Chris Badgett: So in this model with level up in the laundry was TRSA, the client Christopher Stammer: TRSA is the client. Yep. Yeah. And and, actually the, relationship segue they, initially started as a client and they segued into being a business partner. Chris Badgett:  I was wondering that cause you’re very deeply integrated and helping them improve in some significant ways. Christopher Stammer:  Yeah, absolutely. And it just goes. Back to the, ongoing relationship that my company has had with T R Ss a over 13 or 14 years. And our relationship with the executive team there and also the the, office team there, they’re just amazing, people. And because of that relationship and the trust that they had in us, Joe Ricci, who’s the C e O of T r Ss a. Is trust just trusting blue interactive to to, take the reins on this program and move it forward and to facilitate administer it and also to, market it and, sell it to his industry as well. So it’s been it’s it is a true partnership in every sense of the word. Chris Badgett: Would you consider TRSA an association? Christopher Stammer: Yeah, they’re a professional association. Chris Badgett: Professional association. So I see. And you, said there’s more projects you wanted to get into. Are those with other associations? Christopher Stammer: No, they are. Okay. So the, association world is, a tough nut to crack. I live here in Alexandria, Virginia. It is the association headquarters of the world. Definitely of the United States. And I have worked with, many of them and yeah, the associations are tough because first of all, they operate very lean, especially now, especially recovering from COVID where a lot of their industry events were just, they were cooked. They just did not have them in 2021, sometimes 2020, 2022. And they’re still making up for that shortfall. So for them to invest. If not hundreds of thousand dollars in a training program it’s a big ask at this point. And also a lot of the associations, they operate lean. It’s like they outsource a lot of their work. And I’m not talking about their training work. They’re the, op, they outsource like their admin work and their marketing work. So you end up calling one of these associations and they have Three people that work there full time and they outsource everything else in terms of the admin. So, to go in there and actually pitch a training project is, can be very difficult. We’ve tried, we tried varying levels of success outside of TRSA. That is. You Chris Badgett: mentioned on your website on the volume website, industrial, medical, military technology. Is that where you see a lot of opportunity in those? Christopher Stammer: Yeah. Yeah. So, being here in, in outside of Washington DC, we have access to a huge federal market. And that, too can be a difficult nut to crack primarily because you’re at you’re beholden to federal acquisition guidelines, regulations. And the, the. contracting process to slow sale cycle. It is a very slow sale cycle. Actually I was training last week at the state department and we were talking about the procurement process and the acquisitions process. It’s, clunky. It’s cumbersome but it’s designed for a reason,It’s set up that way for a reason, for fair and open competition for all sorts of vendors, not just the biggest companies and biggest. Contractors that are out there. So yeah, so those are like the four niches that we really are focused on. Primarily because the medium that we use as a company is well suited for those industries. So where we’re going right now is in a lot of interactive multimedia, leveraging 360, leveraging virtual reality, leveraging 3d technology. And, putting people in immersive situations like that virtually. Where you can get Google cardboard whatever on your phones and, leverage some of the apps and some of the programs that we’re developing. Chris Badgett: So like simulations, like virtual reality simulations and things. Christopher Stammer: Exactly. Exactly. So it was really, funny, just a really quick story. As we were developing the level up in the laundry. It was like, January, February, and we were still trying to figure out exactly what LMS we were going to use. And I think we had made a decision to go with LFTR in January, early February, something like that. We finally made the decision. And then in March they had the TRSA board meeting and they wanted me to come in and show them some of the content for this program and stuff like that. I’m like. Dude, this content’s not developed. It’s one of those situations where, and actually fast forward six months, we had the first cohort running and they’re going through module one and two, and we’re developing module four and five, right? Chris Badgett: That’s the classic way to do it.  Christopher Stammer: It’s totally Chris Badgett: classic. You’re one step ahead and you’ve got the validation. There’s a market there and you’re moving.  Christopher Stammer: That’s what the first round’s exactly. And really all we wanted to do with the. First cohort is just get to an MVP, right? And once we got to that minimally viable product, we knew that we could expand on that. We just wanted to have a good starting point, one of good foundation. So anyway, so I’m, I have to stand up and present to this board. And these are like CEOs of allSCO, Unifirst, Sintas, like these big commercial laundry and uniform companies, and I don’t want to bore you with all the machinations, but I needed something to show them something that I could put meat on the bones. So I developed the night before a simulation. Of walking into a commercial laundry facility and walking around and look, and I had 360 degree video on my desktop. So I was like, that’s cool. I had that available to me as a resource to use. So I developed this, simulation where you could walk in and look around and identify what we call variances, things that you do not want to have in your plant, like slip, trip and fall hazards garbage. Cans overfilling people wearing Uggs instead of like steel toe shoes. Yeah. So it enables you, so you go in, you look at the scene and you look around and you click, Oh, I see something. And then it opens up and you score points and that sort of thing. So I spent four hours developing the singular three scenes that you go through and I launched it. And I was, and I showed it to them at this board meeting and everybody’s wow Oh, this is what the program is gonna be all about. I’m sold. I’m in. So yeah, And and that was just, like a BS like app that I developed just to show them what could happen and what the program is going to include at some point, I actually did integrate what I developed into the program, but there’s but, that was pretty much the only. Thank you. Highly interactive component. There’s, going to be more of that stuff coming down the line. And sales. Chris Badgett: I call that a mic drop moment. You just engineered the perfect mic drop moment. That’s awesome. Exactly. Speaking of the layers of the onion as an instructional designer yourself there’s like the e learning website we’ve talked about, like some virtual plant manager virtual meetups. You got some simulation in your view. Particularly in this B2B business to business training niche what’s a stat? Like you’ve got LifterLMS and the WordPress website delivering content that drips out. You’ve got the virtual meetings, you got the simulations, like what’s the perfect training stack for B2B training in your view? Not necessarily brands, but types of things. To really make training work online. Christopher Stammer: It’s a good question. I would say the first, and foremost the, most important thing is you gotta get, you gotta get people to come in and buy the program. Yeah, you have to get customers and the only way you’re going to get customers is if you’re able to Merchandise and promote the benefits of the program. Yeah And that’s got to jump out to them on that front page on that landing page for whatever your program is if somebody is looking at that front page and they, start to scroll down and they don’t see what’s in it for them or how it’s going to benefit their organization, you’re lost. They’re going to, they’re going to abandon the site and they’re gone and they may never come back or worse. They may have a conversation with somebody and go, Oh yeah, I looked at that program and yeah, it just doesn’t, there’s other stuff that’s out there. And, it’s really hard for us, for custom developers, because we’re competing. With what’s right in front of people’s faces every day. We’re competing with LinkedIn learning. And I’ve gone through that and I’m like, okay, and people mention it. They mentioned it on that needs assessment that we did before COVID for level of laundry. They’re like, Oh yeah, we use that for things. And I’m like, really? I’m like, how does that stuff apply to you? It’s like relatively generic. And I, and it admittedly, I haven’t really done a deep dive in LinkedIn learn. And then there are these other sites that are out there. The ones that when you’re on. YouTube or Facebook or whatever they’re right there. They’re promoting themselves because they’ve got millions of dollars of venture capital backing them. You’re watching YouTube TV and there’s, an ad for masterclass or something like that. That’s who you’re competing against, right? That’s who you’re competing against. So the advantage is, that a lot of that stuff. Is like thousand foot level. Whereas if you’re like us, as somebody who’s a custom developer in, and you’ve got a niche or you’ve got a talent that you want to sell it, you’re like 500 foot level. And in order to merchandise yourself, you have to be able to explain to people what the benefit is going to be for them to invest. A hundred bucks, 200 bucks, 500 bucks, whatever in your program. And, you have to be able to do that. So that front page is really, crucial and really important. And, the ease of conversion, being able to go from looking at that, identifying what the benefit is to buying it easily. That’s, crucial. So that, that would probably be the most important thing. Nice. Chris Badgett: What are some of your favorite things about LifterLMS? Christopher Stammer: Oh man. I would say my favorite part about LFTR LMS is, God, there’s so many good things about it. Like literally, like we were talking about it before the interview. There’s just so many things that I didn’t know it had the capability to do so many things that I didn’t realize that I needed when I first was going out and looking for an LMS. I would, you know what, I would say that my favorite thing about it is, and some of you, some people that are watching this may not know that this functionality exists. Maybe they don’t have access to it the infinity bundle. But my favorite thing is, being able when somebody completes. An assignment or a lesson, not only can you automatically send them a badge, right? Or when you approve their assignment, like for us, people will get an assignment back. If they pass with whatever the threshold is, it’s 90%, 85, 60%, whatever we will hit, accept their assignment. And then they get a badge sent to them right away. And also on the timeline, the social learning aspect of the site, everybody else sees that they get a badge, right? That’s really cool. But in addition to that, it’s the email that you can customize and that you can send out and it’s, mail merge. The fields are all in there where you can, it’s all customized. So when people get that email message. They think that you actually put together the email message saying, Hey, great job on putting together completing that exercise or completing the lesson or whatever it was that’s, pretty cool. And the delay that you can put in there too, or you put in a day delay or a two day delay. That’s really cool too, because and I’m not saying we want to like bamboozle people and thinking that the message came, from you and it really didn’t, like it was automatically generated. It did come from you. That message is going out to them, but having it be able to have, and you would probably send a message like that as a facilitator or course instructor, but if you’ve got 500 people going through your course, 20 people going through your course, there’s no way you’re going to be able to reach out and interact with, everybody in your class or within your cohort in this case. So having the functionality for that to happen automatically, I think is really, powerful. The way that we use it is about halfway through the, course, which is a three month course, right? Where we actually have a module released every week over the course of 10 weeks. And then there are a couple of weeks where we have off because we have a live webinar about halfway through when they complete that assignment. Boom. They get an email message that says, Hey, congratulations. We really appreciate. Your level of engagement, the time, effort and energy you’re putting into the class, keep up the good work, we’re halfway there and people are just like, Oh, they’re like, that’s so cool. I just got a message from the person that’s running the program. So I think that’s really powerful. The other thing that I really like is it’s just the reporting capabilities. I also like the integration of the payment process striping PayPal, that’s pretty cool too. Cause that, was an area of concern for me. And to just click a couple of buttons, open up a Stripe account. It’s so easy. You guys have money. Yeah, of course. You guys have made that integration really easy. But, yeah, just. Yeah, that’s, so those are really great, aspects of the program and of Lifter.  Chris Badgett:Thanks for sharing that. I just wanted to ask you’ve, gone into it, but it’s really got me intrigued this idea of if you’re a training provider there’s, and you’re talking to these businesses and there’s the LinkedIn learnings and the masterclass and the high level stuff. And it seems like what you’re saying is that when you focus and really niche down and get to that 500 foot level Oh, I helped this specific industry. The content is not generic about business in general. It’s like super specific. And the platform I want to deliver that on needs to be flexible. WordPress is. And like you said, you built an awesome landing page that really sells the benefits and flows right into the LMS and in your own way, unique for that industry. I guess what other advice do you have for somebody who’s wanting to, maybe they’re just building websites right now, but they’re also really into like leadership and management and they want to add this training piece or they’re, trainers and they’re wanting to move it online and get into the WordPress. LMS side of things tell us more about that sweet spot of B2B niche training and how somebody can really get into that and why use WordPress versus other options. Christopher Stammer: Yeah. So you are wading into a really interesting area here, right? Because it’s like wordpress, a lot of people feel like wordpress is not a stable platform, right? And what I realized as a result of, recently switching hosts to a host that you guys have. I think you have a relationship with them or promoted from another host. That was like one of the biggest ones in the country world, potentially. You need to make sure that you’re with the right host first and foremost. Because even with our other WordPress oriented websites that we’ve developed, not only for our own company websites, but also portals for some of our other training offerings that we have that we developed. I found that. The performance of those, sites was not good because we were using the wrong hosts. So you really need to use a host that’s fast, that’s reliable. And also I had a nightmare story or a nightmare situation where we moved over to another host that was like known as like the best WordPress hosts in the world. And they were terrible. Like they, they ended up like the site ended up crashing. Like we just couldn’t access it one day. And then I went into the admin panel and I couldn’t get into anything. And I. Got on the customer support, which was. Real on the other side of the world and they blame me. They said, Hey, yeah, you went, somebody went in on your side and erased all these files. And I’m thinking to myself, it wasn’t me. And they said they said maybe it was maybe somebody penetrated your website and deleted all your files and, everything. I’m thinking to myself, why would somebody do that? This like little niche y Company organization. Why would somebody do that? But anyway, so we never realized we never were able to figure out what the root cause was. I just bailed. I just said, I’m out of here. I’m going to go to with a different host. So finally, we’re the host. That’s really good. And we love them. And I can’t believe how fast it is interacting with lifter on the back end with that. Like I can have two versions I can have Lifter open on two two which we call it tabs. On Mozilla. And, I can make changes to the site on one and I can see the changes on the other side. And and it’s just reliable and it’s fast and it’s seamless and it works really well. Knock on wood. Just watch what happens this afternoon. Chris Badgett: Do you mind sharing who the awesome host is that Christopher Stammer: you’re enjoying? Our host is Hostinger. Okay. Cool. And and they’re just really, good. And I don’t know what makes them so good, but I also spent the money on one of the premium plans that has some of the fastest bandwidth and, the most capacity, just because I want to make sure that as we get more students enrolled in this program and in our other programs that we don’t lose the data. We want to make sure things are being backed up routinely and we don’t lose the data, which is really crucial. And that was a lesson learned with our last site. So, that, that’s probably the first consideration is, just making sure that the backbone and the platform is solid and good. The other consideration, and the other consideration using WordPress versus some other solution that’s out there is just first of all, LifterLMS, you can integrate it with just about any theme, right? And something like you guys said, when we were first interacting, when we were getting ready to roll out the site, some themes are better than others, but it will probably work. Probably it will work with just about any theme that’s out there. We haven’t tried it with any other themes yet, but what are you using? Chris Badgett: What theme do you like? What’s that? What theme do you like? What are you using? Christopher Stammer: We’re I know, I think we’re using cadence. Cadence. It’s very popular. I know you guys started to push. There’s a new one that just came out. Chris Badgett: SkyPilot is one we make, we’ve always had our own theme Kadence is awesome. Astra is huge. We have a lot of Divi people, but like you said, it can work with a lot of different themes, but Cadence is a great one. Christopher Stammer: So I’m looking to see what we can do with SkyPilot, but you know how the problem how it is with WordPress themes. Like you get to learn one and you get comfortable with it. And then you’re like, Oh yeah, you install a new theme and you have to relearn it all over again so what, I need, we have another site, it’s called industrial athlete university. And this one focuses on it’s industrial skills training primarily for logistics and distribution. Like I’m getting ready to, implement. Or to, install Lifter on that site, right? In that install, but first I need to migrate everything away from our old host over to hosting her. So that way I know that this thing actually works. So knowing that you’ve got a theme that works well with Lifter. And because they’re all going to work, but knowing that it’s going to work seamlessly with Lifter and that the appearance is going to be good is another consideration that needs to be made. But the biggest thing for us with WordPress as a platform and as a starting point for our LifterLMS is just the scalability. And, also the price you look at some of these SAS LMS is that are out there. It’s like a car. It is like a car. And then they start to charge you per trainee and like one, one, one organization we were talking to, they’re like, Oh yeah it’s, something like it’s only 40 per seat. And I’m thinking to myself, 40 per seat. Are you joking? I’m like, that’s crazy. I’m like, there’s just no way. So I wanted to make sure that. When we’re starting relatively small, that we’re not losing our shirt and we can actually get some revenue generating where we can now expand and build from there. So, yeah that was the biggest thing. So it’s like just scalability and price and just the, being able to make it so it looks how you want it to look and it matches. The mission of the program and also matches what your audience expects. Those are key elements. Chris Badgett: And a couple of quick lightning round questions here. For, volume what’s the team size or what are the roles in the company for a company like this to really work? Even just building a website, doing sale, like who’s, what are the roles here? Christopher Stammer: The roles are the number of people you need. Chris Badgett: I like the number of people and then what function could one person do this business? Christopher Stammer: Oh yeah, for sure by themselves. Chris Badgett: I think so. But tell us like where volume’s at today. If it’s, Christopher Stammer: yeah so we have a relatively small team. We’ve got about five people that work within the company full time. And then we’ve got a cadre of developers and subcontractors that we use to really focus on some of the, content. Stuff. And then, as I mentioned to you with level up in the laundry, we’re looking to hire a couple of people to actually facilitate the program and continue to expand on it. Sometimes we’ve got things that we want to do. We want to incorporate into the programs that we just don’t have the in house capability to do and don’t have the time to do, in which case we need to outsource it. I know now there’s like this movement to outsourcing everything to on guru or Upwork or whatever, they’re all these sites that are out there. But the problem with that is now you’ve got to manage all of these people and you’ve got to wait for the jobs to come back and that sort of thing. One of, one of the most important things for me is to. To get as much work as we could possibly can get done here locally. That way we’re supporting our economy and I’m also supporting people that are coming up through the ranks and are starting to develop their skills and want to expand their skills like I was 20 years ago. And where the people that are actually doing the work can interface with our customers. And can, go in and actually have a weekly status meeting with with a customer down the road here, like in the federal government. So, to answer your question if, you’ve got a really compelling, if you’ve got compelling subject matter that, and a good message that you want to train, that you think people are going to want to hear, and there is a tangible benefit to it, then a single person can do this. Now there’s going to be a learning curve, of course, like with everything, but LFTR makes it easy. Just once you get into it and you start using it and you understand how things are structured and how to actually incorporate and integrate, the data into the LMS it’s, pretty easy. Pretty straightforward. And you can create something that’s pretty compelling and that’s attractive. But, the key is to make sure that you’ve got good material. You want to make sure that you know what you’re talking about and you’re presenting it in a way that makes sense in a way that people understand it. And that’s appealing to them. And they’re able to say, ah, yeah, I get it. I know what’s in it for me, I know how this is going to benefit me and make me better at doing whatever it is that. I do, I would say that for, us, that’s like kind of a growing small business. I’m, in a role now where I’m more of, a business development person, like I’m out there in having ongoing conversations with current customers to look at more work, look at other programs just through level up three or four other companies have contacted us and have said, you contacted me and said, Hey, we want you to actually develop our LMS. We want to help. We want you to develop. Our internal corporate training and integrate these modules into. Our, own portal. So that’s pretty exciting. So I’m like the front man that interacts with people, identifies the requirements, and then I’ll work pretty closely, but I’m, I want to delegate the actual development of the, materials and the program itself to, people underneath me to developers and some of the associates we have working with us. It just all depends on where you want to go. The problem with hiring more people and, bringing people into your organization and growing your organization is that now you need to manage those people. And management takes time, right? The drawback is that if it’s just you and I saw a couple of your case studies that were out there. If it’s just you and you’ve got a really compelling, you’ve got compelling content, if that’s all you’re gonna do, you better make sure that you’ve got the revenue to support your lifestyle. If, you’re going to be developing multiple. Training programs you’re, going to get stretched in very, quickly and, then quality suffers or when something goes wrong, you can’t troubleshoot as quickly. So it just really depends on what your mission is and where you see yourself and your organization going over the next. Year, five years, 10 years. Can you Chris Badgett: give us a quick pro tip on how to get clients? You just mentioned it a little bit with going out and connecting and in the associations and doing active business development. But if somebody wants to get into finding a client, like TRSA or like, how does Christopher Stammer: one do that? I, what I would do is just buy a mailing list and just spam everybody. Isn’t that what it seems like everybody is doing now? Chris Badgett: My email inbox is insane. The email spam alone is yeah. Christopher Stammer: Insane. Tell me about it. And I get hit up probably, I get probably get five or six messages a day from these. These agencies, so called agencies that tell me that they’re going to, they’re going to book me five to 10 meetings a month. Appointment setters. And it’s all three mail blasts. So the, common. The common, like the zeitgeist lately has been just, blast emails to people that you think are potential clients. What I found is that I usually sabotage my reputation doing that. I think it’s more of an annoyance than anything else. And I think right now people see through the, merges and in the emails themselves and their names being in the subject lines and. I, think that’s, I think those days have passed. Now you see a lot more people moving to social media to Instagram, Twitter X, whatever you want to call it. Facebook, to a certain extent people marketing through there with varying levels of success. And the, catch here is this, is that it really just depends on the segment that you’re going after. People in the commercial laundry industry and the people that we’re targeting who are like plant managers and general managers of plants, guess what? They ain’t on Instagram, right? They’re not out there promoting themselves and putting pictures online every day. It’s kind. Essentially the best way to reach those people is the old fashioned way is picking up the phone and calling them. And thankfully we have, at least in this case, we have an industry association that has a database of all of these people. And I have not asked. TRSA or the CEO of TRSA, Joe, for that information, when we go out and we do outbound marketing and I call these people I, have a, serve, not a service, I’ve got access to an online resource where I can find what those companies are based off of their NICS codes or the SIC codes. And I see them pop up and I pick, up the phone and I call and I say, Hey, listen this is what we’ve developed. This is what it does. These are the, there’s some of the results we’ve been able to accomplish even in our second cohort how interested would you be in selling and sending somebody to the training program? And then, like you had mentioned in one of your training courses it’s if they’re new, I wouldn’t expect for them to pay full, price. The first time they go through it, you can offer an incentive offering an incentive through couponing or promo codes via Lyft or LMS, which is awesome. Another cool functionality, because we made pretty heavy use of it when we first launched the program. So I tell you what, for this first run, we’ll give you 20 percent off or we’ll do a twofer. Send two people. We’ll, only charge you for one. I just want you to experience the program, experience the benefits of the program. And then once you get them, they’re like, this was, this is if you’ve got a really compelling product, they’re like, this is really cool. Yeah. I want to send more people with the program. So, that’s probably. But, if you’ve got some sort of a product, some sort of a solution or training program that appeals to a wider audience then, you can leverage other tools Instagram and Twitter and do the, outbound blast emails and that sort of thing. We just choose not to do it just cause we’re usually going after nichey. Companies and organizations. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Thank you for that, Chris. I know we’re up on time. I want to thank you for coming on the show and sharing your, journey into building up level up in the laundry. com and what you’re up to it. Volu as a as a training provider, it’s such a cool story. You have my respect and admiration for all that you’ve done, not just in building the website, but doing the sales, doing the B2B, creating the training yourself and helping other companies grow part of what makes me excited and keeps me in this niche is we create a tool that then other people use to send out like this positive impact in the world and in the B2B context also help people make more money and create jobs and all that stuff. It’s, really awesome. Any final words for the people and go check out level up in the laundry. com and volu interactive or volu interactive. com. Any, final words, Chris? Christopher Stammer: No, I, all I can say is thank you, Chris. Thank you to you and to Will and the entire LifterLMS team. You’ve created a really great program. And just as an aside, I was not paid to say any of this. Anybody you’ve created a really great application and platform for, learning. And literally we wouldn’t be where we are with the second cohort if it weren’t for, you and and this, fantastic application, I really appreciate it. So thank you. Chris Badgett: Awesome, Chris. We’ll have to check in down the road and maybe do another one of these in a year or two. Christopher Stammer: Yeah, for sure. There’s definitely more to come. Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, Kim, and wish you all the best on your trip to Asia. I hope you have an amazing time. 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. 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 Use LifterLMS as Training Company Serving Industries appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Sarah Duran discusses her viewpoint on independent employment, establishing goals, and her podcast and newsletter. Sarah assists individuals in developing meaningful, independent job that supports their preferred lifestyle. She’s on the Hustler’s Manifesto podcast, if you’re interested. She may be found at fruitioninitiatives.com as well. She highlights the advantages of working for oneself, like having more control over one’s time and finances. Sarah also emphasizes the value of self-awareness and accountability when working independently. Sarah suggests starting with self-reflection to comprehend one’s aspirations, what they want to accomplish, and why they perform their work. She emphasizes the need of defining flexible, short-term goals, often within a six-month time period. To react to life’s volatility, these goals must be often reviewed and modified. 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 State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Sarah Duran. You can find her on the Hustlers Manifesto podcast. You can also find her at fruitioninitiatives. com. Welcome to the show, Sarah. Sarah Duran: Thanks so much for having me. Chris Badgett: Let’s get into independent work. Why should people work for themselves? So there’s course creators out there, coaches, people who are running WordPress agency, businesses, marketing agencies out there. What is independent work in your view? And let’s get folks excited about it. Really those who are like just starting to dabble as Hey, maybe I can do this on the side. Sarah Duran: So I fundamentally believe that working for yourself is better than working for other people. I’ve worked for myself for going on 10 years now. And before I did that, I felt. Everything that I did in my work life was controlled by someone else. My time was controlled by other people. My money was controlled by other people. What I had to do basically eight hours of my day was controlled by other people. And back in the day, I think pre COVID where I had to do it was also controlled by other people. And that just felt like a given. It just felt like that’s the way things are. You just get a job, you work your way up the ladder, et cetera, et cetera. I, fell into independent work by accident and was incredibly surprised that I could make a lot more money than what I was making before as basically an independent consultant is how I started my business. I was making a lot more money, I was working a lot less time wise and I was able to structure it exactly how I wanted. Now, I think the flip side of that is. With control and with freedom comes responsibility, right? So I also had to make, I was forced to make a lot of decisions for myself that other people had been making for me how to spend my time, how to decide what I charge people how to decide what kind of work I wanted to do. And so it takes a, really high level of personal awareness and personal responsibility to make it work. You have to be able to get super clear with yourself about what you want to get out of your work, whether that’s a business of one solo printers or the primarily the folks that I work with or whether you’re thinking about starting a company. But fundamentally, I think that it leads to, humans that have more self agency and are, which I think makes us a little bit better able to function in the world because we’re better able to take care of ourselves and subsequently better able to help take care of each other. Chris Badgett: Tell us a little bit about your podcast and newsletter before we go more into goals and ideas and stuff. Sarah Duran: Sure. The podcast is really me having conversations with anyone who. works independently. And that can look a bunch of different ways. Let’s for instance, I had you on the podcast a while back. So that can be anyone from, I would say like freelancers, solopreneurs small business owners, coaches consultants. Course creators, I think content creators is this like other category of solopreneurs, where you’re not necessarily providing like direct service based business for your clients but you’re providing a way to access that information on your own. Among the various hats that I wear also have a whole series of courses and content that I use with the freelancers that I work with. And so the podcast is really just talking to people about what it’s like to work independently and. a lot of those themes bleed into the newsletter, my sub stack. So the articles that I write on my sub stack are more like macro level perspectives on all of the topics that are associated with that, whether it’s worth, whether it’s work, whether it’s capitalism, whether it’s money, whether it’s to rest or not to rest all those things that sort of factor into that. And then I also put out Roundup at the end of the month where I’m just giving people a bunch of resources that can help them work independently from across all of the different people that I’m connected to that also operate in this space. Chris Badgett: Awesome. So if you’re listening to the podcast right now, add the hustlers manifesto for a listen. You can find the one that Sarah did with me. She’s got a lot of other great ones on there as well. Let’s go back to goal setting and goals. Like it’s. It’s really liberating to like work for yourself and open the doors to your business, but you quickly learn you, you gotta survive. You gotta not have this end in a failure or without traction or just fizzling out. What is, what’s your approach to goals? As a solopreneur and an independent worker. Sarah Duran: So I trace, I start whenever I’m working on goals with people or working on their business in general, I always start with having people reflect on who they are, what they want to get out of their work and why they do their work. Which I think are three questions that we don’t. Most of us don’t spend a lot of intentional time thinking about and so the first thing for goals is just making sure that you understand the answers to those three questions because I think the first mistake that a lot of us make with goals is that we’re setting goals based on what other people want and not what we want. And so I think getting super clear about what you actually want is a skill that most of us don’t have for a variety of reasons. We get tricked into doing things that other people want us to want or whatever society wants us to want. And so I think that’s the first step is like figuring out what you want so that you’re setting goals based on what you want, what’s relevant to you right now. And then the other key thing that I think is important for goals is making sure that you’re setting short term. Flexible short cycle goals, and so I think we get a lot of advice from business gurus or self help folks out there that are like think long term and make your five year plan and all those kinds of things. I think we’ve learned over the last few years that life is unpredictable which has always been true, but it has really been driven home for everyone more recently, and so I’m a big proponent of short cycle goals, which means you’re really not setting goals any farther than six months in advance. You need to go, you need, you can have a longer term vision based on what I said in the beginning about what you want. But you’re taking like these not baby steps, but these incremental steps to be able to get there. And the key with goals like that is it only works if you have some sort of system for yourself to. check in with them and revisit them really regularly. Because I think the other thing that happens with goals is that we set some sort of year goal and on New Year’s Day or we set some sort of five year plan and then we never look at it again. And then we come back to it. I think this is really common when you work for other people and you like have performance reviews. You set some sort of goal in the beginning of the year, you come back to it a year later. No one’s ever looked at it since then, and most of the time it’s completely irrelevant. Or you’ve blown it out of the water, or it doesn’t matter anymore. Like everything around that goal has shifted. And I think the key with goals is short term, short to medium term, and then making sure that you’re revisiting them super regularly and adjusting as needed. Chris Badgett: What’s your approach with goals that Are aspirational versus ones that like with 100 percent certainty you can achieve. So for example I want to get to whatever, six figures in revenue. That’s an aspirational goal. Whereas I’m going to write six pages of my new book every day or, I’m going to create, I’m going to work on my course business four hours a day. That’s something I can do. No matter what, but it’s on me to do it, but I can’t necessarily guarantee I’m going to hit the six figure outcome. How do you think about that kind of Sarah Duran: thing? So the first thing I would say there is I usually coach people not to set numerical goals. So quantitative goals with numbers and deadlines are not really, the way that I have people think about their future. I think my first answer to that is if you were to tell me you wanted to make six figures by the end of the year, my question would be, what is making six figures by the end of the year? Give you so what does it look like and feel like? What does that number give your life? And that’s your goal. So your goal is the qualitative goal. What is the quality of what that amount of money gives you? Because you might be able to hit that goal in a way that you’re not making six figures, but you’ve checked off the boxes about what it looks like and feels like to get there. I think it also makes it a little bit it makes it more concrete. Isn’t the word. It makes it more relevant and it makes it resonate with you. You’re with yourself a little bit differently when you’re setting goals like that. But the other thing I would say is. When I have people do an exercise around what they want which is directly then connected to these, their goal setting conversations is, I have people think about 10 things. And I think people in the audience would be surprised about how difficult it is to actually come up with a list of 10 things that you want. And so three of those things should be easy, no brainers, gonna achieve them no matter what. Three of those things should be a stretch. Three of those things should be This may or may not happen. Like it’s a big stretch and then one of them should be a miracle. And so what that does is it gives you this range. Because I think the other thing we do is we limit us, limit ourselves in our thinking to what’s possible in the moment. So just going back to the idea that. We and the world around us is incredibly flexible and constantly changing. Things that we thought were never possible could be possible. And I think it’s important to, I think the goal setting the like smart goal setting language is about feasibility. And I actually encourage people to think big. Think big, but think qualitatively. And then make sure you’re having those in, those interim strategies. So I think writing six pages of your book or doing 10 minutes of content every day or something like that’s a strategy. And so if your big picture goal is like, by the end of the year, I want to finish this course. Then the, what you ultimately have to do is break that down into the tiny pieces that have to happen in order to do that. So that’s where like the goal has to and That is where you get into getting more clear with yourself about what is actually feasible short term because long term lots of things could be feasible that you never thought were possible. I, like to say that, which is completely true. The most of the best things that happened in my life, I never saw coming. Like you’re like a year ago, would I have said X, Y, and Z? No, absolutely not. Almost every year I look back and I’m like a year ago, what I’ve thought that I’d be here? No, absolutely not. And if I had set a goal, I would have actually been limiting myself instead of giving myself the opportunity to grow. Chris Badgett: A question around mindset. I’m a pretty, I’m like super optimistic, actually. But sometimes I come across folks and I, have my moments too, where I’m like, I don’t really know what I want, but I just don’t want X. I can want it. I don’t, I want to quit my job or I want to get in a better living situation or I want to get out of this situation. But I, how do you help people focus on and crystallize that, goal, particularly if it’s like less quantitative and how. How you want to feel or be in the world or can you give us some examples of what that might look like and, how to help somebody who’s in a more negative mindset pivot to the positive view or the opportunity view? Sarah Duran: Yeah. So I think having having that juxtaposition is really helpful. So if you can’t think about what you want, thinking about what you don’t want can be a really helpful step to get there. And. So the first answer is like not very concrete and, but I think it’s important and it is that it takes like the more you do it, the easier it gets. Like I said, I don’t think that a lot of us actually, I think understanding what you truly want is a skillset that most of us don’t have and it takes time to develop that skillset. So yeah, that’s what it takes. That’s, so that’s one answer and that’s not like concrete examples. But I would say I’m trying to think of a good example. So for the solo printers that I work with I’ll give you an example of maybe like the type of work that they want to be doing versus the type of work that they’re doing now. And so that’s one example where I think the negative. example is actually pretty helpful where it’s okay, what kind of clients are you working with right now? What kind of projects are you doing? What are the ways that you’re spending your time? And let’s just look at them across the board and see what do you like? What do you don’t like? Another way that I like to do that is have people look back across the year and say, what are the things that you said you were going to do and what happened and what didn’t happen? And then look at those two lists and pull out what are the similarities across the things that did happen and the things that didn’t happen? And in the things that did happen camp, there’s also things that You never said you were going to do, but you did anyway. So they weren’t on your like goal list or to do list, but there’s like this bucket of things that happened and this bucket of things that didn’t happen. What are the commonalities between those two things? And then I see people pull it’s different for everyone, but I see people pull things out for the things that did happen, I wasn’t doing them alone. So I had a partner. I had external accountability. Maybe that’s one of the things. For the things that didn’t happen. It could be that they didn’t actually plan them out. So that’s where like the goal feeds into the plan. So I think some of those types of exercises can be really helpful, which is just, again, like starting to really know yourself and how. your patterns manifest themselves across the things that you do. Because if we’re not taking a conscious step back to look at that stuff, then it just becomes, we get to the end of the year and I’m like, I said, I was going to go do 15 things. I didn’t do any of those things. And oftentimes you, when you examine those things the things that you said you wanted to do, but you didn’t do. You didn’t really want to do them. So when I get to a lot of times I get to that list and I’m like, what would happen if you just stopped wanting to do those things? Like just take them off your list. Like the things that roll over your list year after year, your new year’s resolutions that you never get to, maybe let’s just get rid of them and see how that feels next year. So that is a little bit of a roundabout answer. So I hope I, hopefully that was like an answer. I Chris Badgett: like what you’re saying. How I think there’s. A misnomer that vision, you’re either born with it or not, but you can actually develop it. And some people are just trying to survive and make it through the day. And that’s a starting point but then you can have, I’ve seen people like that transition to having these broad, big visions and making huge impact. How about achieving goals? It’s one thing to have them like business ideas. A lot of people have business ideas, but don’t achieve them. Or don’t even work in them at all. They just have a lot of ideas. And I think goals and vision are the same. Like I would love for this to exist in the world, or I have this vision for my life. Which is cool, but how do we get it done? How do we get there? Sarah Duran: So I think there’s a couple answers to that question. The first one is really centered around something that I refer to as boss mindset, and this is something that is specific, I think, to people that work for themselves. I think a lot of us are not either natural visionaries or natural. planners and doers and executors. Some of us fall a little bit in between. But you can’t, there’s no way that if, especially if you’re a business of one, and I think even most entrepreneurs start off with an idea and they’re like a business of one, or at least when they’re in that ideation phase. You have to recognize for yourself where your strengths lie in that spectrum of vision versus executor. And you have to be able to do both to a certain extent. So you have to be able to push yourself in whatever direction you’re least comfortable in. Because so many, like you said, so many visionaries have the, don’t have the… planning capability or the execution capability to be able to make their dreams happen. And so so many amazing things get lost. I work with, I work as a project manager by trade. I work with tons of people who are like, I see this thing, but I don’t actually know how to get there. And so I’m very much a person that like balances, like I’m like a balancing in both of those sides. Maybe I’m in the middle of that spectrum to a certain extent. The other thing I would say, which is, just goes back to what I was saying before, is that fundamentally, I think a lot of us When you set goals out on paper and then you’re not achieving them, it just goes back to what I said before about that might not be the right goal. So I also think there needs to be a little bit of introspection there about, is that really, the thing you, that you want? So maybe you’re sending out to say I want to create this huge company and you get down to what it actually takes to do that. And you. And you never find yourself doing it or I want to grow my audience, but I can’t bring myself to beat to show up on Instagram or LinkedIn. This is a big one for me where I’m like, I feel like what I’m supposed to have is this like huge audience and I can’t like, I, it is like pulling teeth to show up on social media in that way, in the way that I see other people showing up on social media. And so I had to adjust. The goal. I had to adjust the way that I was approaching that to make sure that it was reflective of my strengths and who I am and what I actually want to be doing with my time. So I think a big piece of that is just like, whether it’s the overarching goal or the tactics and strategies that you’re using, to accomplish it are they actually aligned with what you like and what you’re good at? That’s like a big one. And then I think the other one is just you got to make a plan. So like a goal isn’t going to go anywhere without a plan. And if you’re not good at planning, then you should find someone who is. I think a lot of business owners underestimate the power of high level operational expertise. And so you spend a lot of time bringing other people into your company who are visionaries, just like you, but you’re, and then you’re hiring people possibly at a lower level who are quote unquote doers or executors. You need to have someone on your leadership team, on your, in your inner circle who is an. A doer who is a planner who has an operational brain if you don’t How to Scale a Solopreneur Education Business with Sarah Duran: have Chris Badgett: one. Awesome. You mentioned you had a course in your method, and also just as a coach and helper yourself, you’ve developed like a system and a technique. So let’s get a little meta as I, as I call it instructional design as an instructional designer of creating your methods and techniques, tell us about what it is. Like, how do you help solopreneurs unlock scale and growth and all that? What’s the method. Sarah Duran: Great question. So I actually have a background in current, I have a master’s in curriculum and instruction. So I have an, I have a background in instructional design, which helps me think about this a little bit more systematically, I think. But The way that sorry, a little bit of a twofold question. The way that I approach, I design like a ton of courses for the people that I coach. I have an overarching method and then I have a whole series of, courses that sort of support the skill sets that people need to be solopreneurs. And the way that I approach that work is really just watching my own journey and then paying attention to the patterns that I’m seeing in other solo printers and freelancers. That I work with. So I don’t think anyone is an expert at being an entrepreneur, a solo printer, a freelancer. I think I, what I have that said, that is a strength of mine that helps me do that is I’m just a student of. Process and patterns. I just watch for pattern. And then in terms of the method, it really does center around the first thing I always do with people is those three big questions in the beginning. So people come to a business coach, or they buy a course, and they’re trying to fix. pieces of their business. So they’re trying to fix their systems or they’re trying to fix their services or they’re trying to fix their marketing. And I always take them back to the very beginning where I’m like, why are you doing this? What is your business about? How does it connect, especially for solo printers? does it connected directly to who you are? How does it compliment who you are, does it lean on your strengths? And What do you want to get out of your work and how is your business model structured to support that? So if you want to be making a million dollars in the next year, your business is going to look pretty different from someone who wants to work 10 hours a week. You could totally do both. I think that’s 100 percent possible, but getting clear on the reasons that you do what you do and what your life needs to get out of it is that very first part. And then we’re building your business on top of a foundation. of who you are and what you want out of your work instead of just coming in with banded measures. So here’s how you talk differently to your audience. Here’s how you adjust your sales cycle. All of that stuff is great and important and comes next, but none of that, none of those things are going to work unless you fix the foundation. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tell us about. Getting more clarity on that vision. Cause I we’ve, been there, we’ve talked about a little bit, but I think it holds a lot of people back. Yeah. So just help us even more crystallize our goals and not just borrow one or the, Oh, we heard it’s all about making a lot of money or it’s. Or maybe just give some more examples or scenarios that of healthy visions that work for people that have worked for people. Sarah Duran: Okay, so maybe I’ll give you my example. So when I started my business, it was about, like I said, in the beginning, it was about control. Like I was like, I’m done with other people controlling what I do. And then it was Chris Badgett: also going away from something. Like it was like, I went away from Sarah Duran: that. Yes, exactly. And I was moving away from something. It wasn’t until I was able to step outside of that struggle that I was able to see a new possibility. So sometimes we’re, like, really stuck in these struggle, whatever our current struggle is. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s time, sometimes it’s systems, sometimes it’s relationships, whatever it is. And so I’m a big proponent of you have to get out. Of that current struggle, or you’re not going to be able to see a different way. You’re just going to be stuck. When you’re struggling, all you can see is the struggle. Just turn off the pain. Chris Badgett: Turn off the pain. Sarah Duran: Exactly. And there’s a bunch of different ways you can do that. So getting, so like getting, stepping outside of your current situation, I think is helpful. And that’s not, maybe that’s not true for everyone. Maybe you’re not like, not struggling. I just need to like, get to my vision. So for me, I. Quit my job, I started doing contract work, and then I was, again, I think it all goes back to just being self reflective and paying attention. You just really need to pay attention to yourself and listen to the signs that the universe is giving you for, I know that sounds, Woo. But like you have, a lot of us just aren’t paying attention. Like we’re getting the signals of I should or should not be doing this. Or this is my work to do in the world. And we’re just not listening. We’re not watching it. And so for me, the first five to six years of my business was just about making money. and serving my clients. And I got to a place where I was like, okay, I’ve built this business. I’ve been doing well over six figures for a few years. And I was like, something about this is working. I figured something out here and I like to, and. I realized, again this level of freedom that I have, I think most people don’t even realize that’s possible. If you’re working a 9 to 5 job, you don’t even realize it had never occurred to me that freelancing was even an option. It was just something that I inadvertently started doing. And then… As I did that, I started recognizing that I could help other people achieve, that same level of freedom. And so I was like, and again it’s not, I was being self reflective about it. I did not have a coach at the time. I think having an outside perspective, having a thought partner is really important. helpful for these kind of things. I’m not actually sure that I actually had someone like that at that moment in my life. I definitely did later on. And so I think that’s a, that’s actually a really good strategy is like just having someone that you can have an open conversation with, not who’s going to tell you what to do, but who’s just going to ask you like a bunch of really good questions. And yeah. I, at that point, it was also about passive income for me, so I was like, I’m going to create a course, I’m going to do some things so I can just start having like other income streams where it’s not just my time. And from there, it all just it became more and more clear as I continued to do it. So I also think the other thing is we wait for clarity before we act, and I think that you have to act your way towards clarity. So you actually aren’t going to know what your vision is until you start moving towards it. And the more you start moving towards it, the more you’re gonna realize, and again, it’s both those positive and negative examples. You’re gonna see things, you’re gonna read things, you’re gonna interact with people where you’re like, okay, this is, I’m getting closer when I’m doing this, I’m getting farther away when I’m doing or this idea resonates and that idea is does not resonate. So it really is about just like you need, I sometimes I refer to it as like breadcrumbs, like you like see things or you hear things or you interact with people or you get opportunities and you’re like, okay, I can see the path forward as I’m doing this. And then you follow it. Which is another reason why I advocate for flexible goals, because if you have. Hard goals is really hard to follow those breadcrumbs and listen to those signals as you’re moving toward it. Chris Badgett: How often should we be checking in or like reevaluating our goals? I know constantly is a good idea, but if there’s a cadence to it over the course of a year, what do you recommend? You mentioned don’t plan more than six months in advance. So there’s that, but yeah. Sarah Duran: And I think you can tip what I refer to as milestones a little bit further out, maybe up to a year. I would say you’re reflecting on your goals at least quarterly. So I advocate for a quarterly review and then definitely an annual review. At that annual review, you’re really going a lot deeper. You’re revisiting some of those foundational pieces about Who am I? What do I want out of this? Because all that stuff changes, right? What I wanted 15 years ago is not what I want now. What I wanted before I had a kid is not what I want after I had a kid. The way my time is going to be structured, the amount of money I need, all that stuff changes. So I think it’s not just your goals, but it’s also those foundational pieces. You have to make sure that you’re revisiting them at least quarterly and then doing a much deeper dive annually. And then there will also be moments where just like paying attention, like watching yourself, there’ll be moments where I’m like. Oh, something’s off track here somehow this direction that I started going this is not. Then I will just be like, okay, now I need to sit down and rethink this having those checkpoints. At least quarterly and annual, I think is important. But make sure that you’re also just paying attention to what you’re noticing about the direction that you’re moving. Chris Badgett: You mentioned for you. You got to a point where you were freelancing and making good money and you want to do some passive income projects. And what was in your vision? What was changing? Was it. Was it like who you were working for the type of work you were doing? It was more about diversifying income. Like basically at first you want to control, you got the control, you got the freedom and then what opened up for you next? What, how did your, what was that pivot like? Sarah Duran: Yeah. So I think. Like on a meta perspective, something that I’ve been reflecting on a lot is like the more freedom you get, it just opens doors to higher levels of freedom. And as you realize the amount of freedom that you’re able to have, your own, it’s like a hierarchy, it’s like a Maslow’s hierarchy, like you’re only going higher there’s, no top. And freedom doesn’t necessarily mean money. I think money is correlated to freedom, but in a lot of respects because of the society that we live in, but it’s not necessarily a one to one thing. So for that, it was about two things. I think it was first about that as an independent consultant, I was. You are, you begin to become constrained by the amount of time that you have to give and the amount that you can raise your rates with people. So I was hitting a glass ceiling and the amount of money that I could make the amount of clients that I could take on because it was only me. And there are different ways to address that could have been outsourcing, could have been hiring other people. Then the other thing was I wanted to have a business that was more resilient and had. more different types of income streams than just the client work that I was doing. Chris Badgett: Nice. Sarah, this has been awesome. Tell us about what you offer. You have a 15 minute call. You’ve got your podcast, you’ve got the newsletter. Tell us about your suite of offerings Sarah Duran: there. Sure. Part of my journey over the last year has been getting a lot more focused on my offerings. And so I have a bunch of content and free stuff that I do that anyone can consume from the podcast to my sub stack, to my blog. Then the coaching that I offer now is more specifically focused on, I would say maybe veterans for sure, but I would say at least solopreneurs who have been in business for a couple of years. I’m not focusing my services as much on people who are aspiring solopreneurs. Or brand new solopreneurs, but more people who have been in it for a little while and are coming to what I refer to as a crossroads in their business. So something’s not working. You need a little bit of help of figuring out where you’re going to take your business and your life next. And that’s where I offer a. Coaching program that is a combination of individual and group coaching backed up by, like I said, the suite of courses that helps people get the actual skills that they need in order to take their business to their next phase. Chris Badgett: Nice. And what are the set of skills like, yeah, could you go? Yeah. Sarah Duran: Great question. Yeah some of the courses in, the what I refer to as the academy, I have a course on time, management, productivity organizing your time, rituals, time blocking. I have a course on money, a course on client acquisition. So how are you getting the right clients in the door? How are you structuring your services? A course on design. So how are you using design principles to design offers, to design client experiences a course on business planning. So basically take giving solo printers a structure to create a business plan that reflects who they serve, the problems that they solve for them and condenses down their messaging about here’s what I do and here’s who I do it for. I think those are, that might not be all of them, but I think that’s like the highlights. Chris Badgett: You brought it up. So I have to ask what are some client acquisition tips? A lot of course creators and agencies out there want more clients. What’s your method for getting in there and give some people some tips, some counterintuitive insights. Sarah Duran: My counter, my counterintuitive insights may not apply to course creators because my biggest counterintuitive insight for freelancers is to not use funnels of any type. As a course creator, I do use funnels. So for my coaching program, I think that kind of methodology actually does work. But I would say the thing that bridges both of those is Just getting super clear about who You serve and with the problem that you solve for them, which I think is an ongoing journey. It’s something that is a journey that I’ve been on for the almost 10 years that I’ve been in business for the various pieces of my business. The answer is slightly different, but I wasn’t for a long time. I, for a long time, I did not have a succinct answer to that question. And I think the clearer you are about who you serve and the problem you solve for them, the more that the, your message is going to resonate with your audience. The other thing I would say there is back to some of those design principles. You need to be, whatever the answer is to that question, you have to be saying it in the terms of your audience. And so what, the way you might answer that question, while it is not wrong, may not be the same words that your audience is using to answer that question. And the only way you can know that is to ask them. So having as many conversations with possible as possible with people who are your ideal client and just asking them, not selling them anything, not. Trying to get them to join your program, just literally listening to the problems they’re dealing with, the things they’ve tried before how they think about fixing them, all those kinds of things. I would say that is also like a really good strategy. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Sarah Duran. She’s at fruition initiatives. com. You can find her on the hustlers manifesto. Any other ways for people to connect with you and find you online? Nope. Sarah Duran: I think that’s right. The those are the two places where you can basically find everything that I do, or you can find me on Instagram at hustlers underscore manifesto. And feel free to say hi on LinkedIn at Sarah Duran. And if a quick link just to get to my podcast and my sub stack is just the hustlers manifesto. com. All one word. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you for coming on the show, Sarah. We really appreciate all the knowledge, bonds, and insight. Sarah Duran: Thanks so much 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. 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 Scale a Solopreneur Education Business with Sarah Duran appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Kim Coleman discussed the value of sabbaticals for business owners, especially those in the software and WordPress industries. Kim Coleman is a business partner and frontend developer at LifterLMS, as well as the owner of Paid Membership Pro. She is a WordPress entrepreneur with a strong background in product development, team management, and marketing. Kim leads frontend development for the core open-source plugin and oversees more than 75 Add-Ons. Kim described how sabbaticals provide a significant chance for entrepreneurs to recharge and obtain a fresh perspective by taking a step back from the daily grind. She also discussed her cooperation with Jason, her husband and company partner, emphasizing how sabbaticals may allow for team growth and the testing of their ability in handling business problems alone. Kim also talked about a project she worked on during her previous sabbatical, Site Wide Sales, a WordPress plugin designed to make running sales and promotions on websites easier. Entrepreneurs may benefit from sabbaticals by using them to make important decisions and start big projects without always needing supervision. 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 State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello and welcome back to another episode of L M S Cast. Today I’m joined by a special guest. My business partner at LifterLMS. One of them, her name is Kim Coleman. She’s also the founder of paid memberships pro as well as site wide sales. They started an agency called stranger studios a while ago, evolved into a product company. It’s been quite the journey. I’m super lucky to have Kim, uh, on the crew here at LifterLMS with Jason. Today, we’re going to talk about sabbaticals. We’re going to talk about entrepreneurship. We’re going to talk about partnership. Welcome to the show, Kim. Kim Coleman: Thank you. What a great intro, Chris. That was awesome. Chris Badgett: Thank you. Hey, this is episode 400. I’ve had a lot of reps. It may be even a little higher than 400. You’re getting ready to go on a sabbatical to China, Tibet, and Bali. And give us a high level of how long are you going and what are your plans there? And then we’re going to bring it back to business. Kim Coleman: Sure. Yeah. We leave tonight. It’s my best friend from college and he’s going through a emotional work life balance change. And we were like, we’re better to go than to Tibet to a place where like the homeland of meditation and Buddhism and looking at oneself and one’s place in the universe. So that was the foundation of shaping our trip. So we’ll be spending a few nights in Shanghai. Tulasa and doing a private tour with a bunch of temples and locations and Everest and really cool places. And then we’re going to wrap up the trip in Bali with a week of just relaxation after, well, 20 day, 20 day trip. Chris Badgett: Wow. That sounds super epic. Tell us about, you brought the idea of sabbatical into LifterLMS. I knew what it was, but I took one recently and you initiated, you and Jason kicked off the concept. What does a sabbatical do for an entrepreneur. Particularly software entrepreneur, WordPress entrepreneur? What is it? What are the benefits? Why do it? Kim Coleman: For sure. So for us, we had been, we started our agency, you mentioned in 2006. And from that time until really when I took my first sabbatical last year, was it last year? Yeah. Last summer. Okay. So 2022 summer, I really had no extended break from my work. We were growing our team, growing our family and we got to a place where we really could take that time and step back. We had enough team in place to handle the day to day operations. Things going and all the projects we had and all of our things we were accountable to try to remove myself from all that day to day, which is interesting to do for someone that’s been leading the ship as long as you have been. Mostly working all day, every day, not really taking full weekend breaks and a lot of our vacations not even taking a full break from work. So when I took my first sabbatical, I told myself that I wouldn’t interact with our team, that I would really step back and only be available in case of major emergency. I think it’s unique because I do work with my husband, who I also live with. So he was always there to reach out to me if something was really needed, but He tried not to do that too often, but Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And one of the things of the entrepreneur personality type is that you can’t turn it off and you don’t know how, and I think something about that is you had a project, you were off, but you were working on a project on your last sabbatical with site wide sales. I was working on a book project on mine. And can you tell us a little bit about the project aspect while taking the break? I think we’ve lost Kim for a second. She should be back. No, you’re back. You’re back. It’s good. Hey, that’s what editing is for. And. Kim Coleman: I think it’ll be fine. I hope it doesn’t keep happening. I’m asking Jason to make sure the kids aren’t being crazy. Chris Badgett: It’s hard to share the internet with a family. I get it. I’m just going to step it back and to the last question, which is one of the hallmarks of the entrepreneur personality type is your brain, your desire to solve problems. You can’t turn it off and you don’t know how. So on your last sabbatical, you worked on a project called site wide sales. When I went recently, I worked on a book. And I, I really needed that for me anyways, but I wanted to ask you with the last sabbatical and maybe this one’s different focus, different purpose, but tell us about working while suppose while being off on sabbatical, how was that different? Kim Coleman: I think for me, that sabbatical was a dedicated period of time to work on a product that needed someone. It needed. All of my skills, development skills, marketing skills, all those pieces of things, it had been a product that we started, migrated it to be a little bit more multi purpose. It was originally built as a flash sales plugin for paid memberships pro only. And then we saw like a greater need. So we built it out for Edd and for WooCommerce, and then we just put it up for sale and crossed our fingers and didn’t really focus on it because of how much time paid memberships pro needed. Pandemic took a lot of our effort. doing really well. So we didn’t want to take our eye off of what was the price horse, what was going really well for us. So when I set out to do that sabbatical. It was in response to a lot of people on our team saying, what are we doing with this thing? And, and are we focused on it? Is this still a product we want to sell? And so I was like, you know what, I’m tired of us saying, what are we going to do? How are we going to do this? Let me just devote six weeks of my time to figure it out, figure some things out, get it into a little bit of a better place. And what would that look like? It’s also a hybrid thing because I have been working with my husband for my entire professional career. I graduated college. I started doing agency work and within three months, Jason quit his full time job and was doing that with me. So it had been a long period of time working with someone else who has lots of business advice, lots of business acumen and just like myself, but it was always a exchange for someone else to say. No, we should do it this way, or I veto that, give Jason the CEO role. And I’m like, okay, you manage the business. You have final say of these things. And I manage and run our house in addition to all the things I do with work. So it’s important that we have that division so that somebody can be a final say, or else it’s always a stalemate. But with Sitewide Sales, I wanted a period of time to say, no, I’m going to make whatever decisions I want to make for this product. I’ll consult you if I want to, if I want to get your input, but what does it feel like for me as a professional adult to not have to answer and check things in with somebody else, especially my husband? And what will that feel like for me? So it was a little bit of a life journey, I’ll say, which was interesting. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So that’s like autonomy, some autonomy over the project. I felt the same way, right? In the book. It’s like, I’m just doing this. I’m doing it my way. I get, I totally get that. Tell us just Looking at site wide sales, what’s a flash sale? If somebody doesn’t know, what does the product do? How would you describe it to somebody who’s selling courses, membership sites, e commerce? Well, how could they use it? Kim Coleman: Sure. We showed it to a few of our WordPress product friends and someone was like, remember that like Ronco electric food dehydrator that you just set it and forget it? And I was like, yeah. And they were like, that’s what this is to me. It’s setting up a sale in advance, setting up a flash sale in advance. So it has a few components. One is a banner that it can be placed in three locations on your site. So you’ll see banners pop up at the top of a site or at the bottom or in a corner of the site. And then it offers you to build a landing page. So some people want the banner experience that then goes to a landing page that either has a focused checkout experience or a focused single product, whether that’s a downloadable product. Or a collection or a category of products in WooCommerce. So create some more focused buying experience from your normal websites, buying experience, especially when you’re only putting a few things on sale. And then it has logic related to discount codes and coupon codes and automatically applying them. So you set the start end date or start date and time of your sale and date and time of your sale. It makes your coupon code, do some things on your site. Within WooCommerce, it puts the coupon code can automatically apply throughout the store. So if people are browsing your shop, they can see strikethrough pricing on all the sweatshirt category of things within the normal results of the shop or the category, also on the single product page, and then it carries through that logic to the checkout page. So people don’t forget to apply a coupon code. Yeah. So banners, coupon code, logic, landing pages. Then one final thing it does is Sets up who can see the sale. So I know for membership sites in particular. When you have the sale on membership, some of your existing members are logging in and they might come across the fact that you’re running a deal and then reach out and then ask to have that sale pricing applied to their regular price membership. So people worry that they’ll lose money during a sale by running banners and things. So Sitewide sales hides. Existence of a promotion from logged in people based on their membership level or based on their role in WooCommerce. So it has a lot of functionality. It’s like a Swiss army knife for sales, but the thing we love about it is definitely that setting and forget it pre scheduling. And then for us, we also can look back at all the sales we’ve run for the past five years for our site and we know, oh, like. Next week, there was a sale a week ago, a year ago, we might expect like a higher than normal contact form interactions or higher than normal renewal rate because we had a historic sale at that period. So a lot of things, but pretty cool tool. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And we just used it at LifterLMS for a recent sale and had the biggest sale volume we’ve had since outside of Black Friday. So it’s awesome. If you’re watching this or listening to it, go check out sitewide sales. com. Did I get the URL right? You did good. Awesome. How do you think about this sabbatical? It sounds you’re doing a lot of traveling and this isn’t at home. How are you going to deal with that part of the entrepreneur brain that like likes to work on stuff or will there be so much new and novel things that like the curiosity and the desire to figure stuff out? You have plenty to deal with. Kim Coleman: This one’s more of a vacation. I’ll say more exploratory, but we’re also like incorporating a lot of meditation into our temples and our visits. So I think there’ll be a lot of thought, a lot of thinking. I have a notebook that’s really important to me that I’m bringing to journal. And I’m going to try to just see and witness and have a thought or an idea and not have to travel down it Chris Badgett: too far. We lost Kim for a sec. Hopefully she’ll be back. She’s back. It’s okay. It’s okay, It’s all good. I think it’s part of the universe. It’s part of the meditation. You’re actually in the meditation right now. This is a, there’s a, that’s awesome. So you were saying before you, you were off that there’s, you’re going to be journaling, your brain’s going to be busy basically with all the new things and journaling and meditating. Anything else you want to say about your goals or getting the Kim Coleman: most out of it? I think I’m always a sabbatical is. Like a pressure test on your team and it’s a, it’s a opportunity for them to grow in different ways than having the answer right available to them. We hired a new person in marketing that’s actually starting the day that I’m gone and we’ve been trialing with them. So I relationship with them, but also they’re, they’re being on boarded by someone else in a more deep way. They’re being led and managed by someone else in a way that I would have been more involved in. So I love those opportunities. I know it’s hard, this might, let me paint a scenario. You can say whether this happens to you, you’ll see a conversation pop up in Slack that you know the answer to, and you’re quick to reply. And that’s a great thing because you’re unblocking as quickly as possible for your team. But there might be someone else on your team who has that answer and could get there before you, or even a little bit later than you and fill that gap. And it’s a way for you to remove yourself, step back and not be so like pivotal to every moment in your business. So I love that a sabbatical creates that. What did you Chris Badgett: recommend for setting one up for success? I remember you gave me some advice. You could create a Slack channel to share, to talk across your team and stuff, which was cool. And me personally, I didn’t unsubscribe from all the channels or whatever. I just had some discipline, but I don’t know. What other tips do you have for creating the space and just. Mostly, I think for an entrepreneur, it’s avoiding guilt while you’re gone. Kim Coleman: What do you do? I did what you said you didn’t do and did unsubscribe from the. The day to day channels that our team uses for communicating. I didn’t want to see what was being said or not said or who was checking in or not. I wanted to still have a Slack like experience. So I made a channel just for my sabbatical, just for the product that I was working on. And I invited anyone to come in if they wanted to, and I would post updates as if I was talking to myself. I think I thought that I would need that I would need Slack and I would need those communications more than I really ended up needing. Uh, one thing, one story that I’ve told myself before my sabbatical was that. I like to be needed and what’s fulfilling to me is when somebody proposes something and then I get it done for them. And I really do that fills my cup. That’s still something I really like, but I worried that removing myself from my team and operating in a solo workspace, I would feel unfulfilled by it. That I would feel like. I’m not helping anyone. That’s all I do all day long. I help my team, I help my kids, I help my husband, I help my parents, I help my pets. And I thought that I would feel like a little bit lost and out to sea without an anchor, but I didn’t feel that, but I think having that channel helped. I talked to myself, I also started blogging. Which I don’t Blog regularly, but I tried to journal in a public way what I was doing because I think it’s important for entrepreneurs like you, like Jason’s going to take a sabbatical later this year to share when we try something like that, to make it clear to other people, like nothing blew up our business survived. I learned these things and I grew in these ways. I think too often entrepreneurs feel like they’re the only one in the room that can do the thing. And you might be the one that can do the thing in the shortest time for the least money, the best. 99. 9 percent perfectly, but that doesn’t matter if it’s just like eating you up inside and you’re exhausted and you’re burning out all those things. So I said a lot there, but yeah. Chris Badgett: This time you’re going with a friend who’s in need of some help. I wonder if your next sabbatical might even be a solo one. Just throwing the idea out there. Kim Coleman: I couldn’t go away for 20 days solo. I think I might lose my mind. I’m very much a people person, but. Maybe. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Any, uh, any tips on how you set up your team? You mentioned you had a new team member, so you do a lot of marketing at pay memberships pro and content. Like how did you set that person up? And I know you have other people in marketing there. Like, how did you, how do you walk away with confidence? Kim Coleman: Yeah, I took the month of August before WordCamp US to just be like a content machine and really for the first time ever, we have a six week runway, which for us, we try to, yeah, we try to publish a blog post, a newsletter once a week, and then another team member writes like a code recipe once a week and sends an email about that. So I got us. And now I’m like, wow, that was easy. I could probably once a quarter spend three focused weeks and develop that quarter’s worth of content. And that was also a little bit difficult for me because I’m always one where if the piece is ready to publish, we should publish it. And now I’m learning, no, like there’s value in a runway because I can take this extended break and I’ve already written and approved and gotten loaded into WordPress posts that are scheduled for six weeks out and it’s. I never thought that would be possible, not only to have that content all prepared for our team to market and get out the door, but also that I could withhold pushing publish when something was ready for the world. That’s a growth moment for me and our team will just take the wheel from that point forward. So we did get, yeah, content queue. We have pitches and cycle work. They kept me off cycle work. So that’s a way that development kept me out of the, being needed during that break of time. Having people in a place that can make decisions and has the access to everything that they need is really critical. Chris Badgett: I’ll say when I went, I had a Friday touch point with Jason and you live with Jason. So when you were on your sabbatical, you guys could catch up, but I think that little like lifeline or whatever you want to call it, there’s still that, that connection. So you can always, you can compress everything that you would need to have handled into that short conversation or whatever, which is awesome. Kim Coleman: It was interesting experiencing it on the other side when you were out, because I was within the team and when things came up and it was, there was a few things we did have to go to for, but it’d be interesting if you experienced it on your side, having someone that you need to go to for things being out that perspective was interesting to it. There were times where we just made decisions, rather than interrupt you, that were reversible decisions. We thought would show that extreme ownership, which is a core value here. And I don’t think anything went too far, but it was interesting to watch the moments, like only Chris can do this. What are we going to do? Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s awesome. Let’s talk about like mission vision a little bit. So you wouldn’t have been doing membership sites and being this niche for 12 plus years, if my math is correct. If you didn’t care about the customer, like the niche, the creator economy, helping people. Get paid and build online businesses and express themselves through a website. Where does your passion for the creator come from? Kim Coleman: I think it’s probably from within and my own entrepreneurial nature. I was 12 years old doing catering for my mom’s doctor’s office parties. And I said to myself, I’m going to own a restaurant. I’m going to own a bakery, I’m going to be a caterer. I’m going to do all these things. I made little businesses. I made handmade note cards and I tried to sell. Little handmade cards with punch paper and all this stuff. I don’t know where that comes from. My parents are not business owners or entrepreneurial really, but because I have that, there’s so many moments in life where I see someone stuck in a situation, complaining. Their story, the story they tell themself is that I will always be here. I will always be held back. I will never achieve more. I’m at the mercy of my boss to give me more vacation time or make, give me a raise, recognize me with a promotion or a title. And it was always my attitude to say, what can you do? And I see that in the people using our products, using LifterLMS, using paid memberships pro they’re making a decision, even if it’s two hours a night for six weeks working on their membership site while everyone is sleeping in their home, they’re making a decision to say, I can take something inside. I can control this. I can change the story, I can make a different future for myself. And I love helping people get paid. We have stories of people that leave their day jobs and replace their income and more running a membership site, and they couldn’t be happier doing it. So I love working with the people who decide that they can do it and then make it happen and use open source tools to do it because it’s the right way to do it. I like that. Chris Badgett: The action takers are people that stand up and make a decision to do something. I love that. Let’s talk about partnerships a little bit. You said you worked with Jason for a very long time and I’ve been around you and your team and paid memberships pro senior work in the team at LifterLMS. And you’re great at working with people. Um. I guess, just tell us about that. There’s a lot there’s working with your husband. There’s how do you build a great team, there’s some people want to be solopreneurs and automate everything and not have a team. How do you think about working in partnership with other people at work? Kim Coleman: I think it took me this long to get here and I hope I’m still learning things, but there are some things I think I’ve learned that apply to relationships in general, partnerships in general. And a lot of that is. You don’t have to always chime in. You don’t have to always add a thought or advice or a comment. There’s a lot of people who everyone’s agreeing and saying the same thing. And then they just feel the need to like jut in and say their thing on top of it. Especially working in a team with other managers and with your husband, like sometimes I just say nothing. And I think that’s a beautiful power and it’s almost more powerful than speaking is just silence and accepting and being quiet. I try to do that with our team when people have ideas for things, not jump on it and dump all my stuff on it, just let people have their paths and drive it and feel it a little bit. So I think that’s where you’ll learn something. It’s not like me telling you what I think is going to be the success and fail of what you’re trying to pursue. Yeah, definitely. Working in a team is like being quiet is super important. A lot of our team, I know the team that is with us now has been with us for a long time. We have team members that have been with us. Several team members going on five years, a team member, I think seven or eight years with us. The people who last longest are the people who are like us as owners. They’re very high communication, very talkative. They share more than just their work with us. They share their life. We have a really active water cooler channel and everyone on our team shares pictures and comments. And it’s not just happy birthday. It’s like I made a quilt and all my dog got a blue and like everything. My mom baked this yummy bread. Look at this picture. So it is. I don’t want to make it a toxic work environment. Like we’re all family here, but it’s very close and personal trying to recreate what a, uh, in person work experience would feel like as much as possible people that you want to be around. And I think that’s the people that last longest in our team are the people that we like being with. And you could go to a barbecue on a Friday night and have a great time with these people because they just share a lot of your values. Um, Chris Badgett: Any tips on remote work? You’ve been doing it a while and across multiple time zones. What’s really worked for you? Kim Coleman: Time zones thing. I think you have to adapt a little bit yourself and your team has to adapt a little bit. So luckily we’re not like beyond the, like our farthest team, I guess we’re six hours behind and then we have another person. So eight hours is our largest gap. There’s still times where some people have to wake up a little bit early and come online. And some people have to be on a little bit late in their day. It’s not too frequent. I’m a really early riser, so it works out well for our South Africa team. So if you decide to have a team that’s far outside your time zone, and they’re working their local workday hours, think about how you can come online with them a little bit and show up. Because even though you’re the owner, you’re also like showing them that you care about their work life balance and not constantly asking them to be working after hours. We do a lot of, we do something called a stand up, which I think really helps in remote teams. We have a specific period of time that everyone’s tries to be online and post what they’re either working on for the day or kind of wrapping up for their day. And then has that time to get comments from other people, either it’s redirection of what they’re working on or handoffs or clarifications. Of things. So recreating an elliptical mess. It’s similar. They have the scrum meeting. So there’s a period of time. Everyone’s online together communicating about what they’re doing. Those are important having some social components to working and some meetings that are social only. We have a twice per month fun Friday, which is a games or just chit chat. Actually, our last fun Friday was an hour of just conversation, which hasn’t happened in a long time that we don’t put a game in there in the mix. It was fun. It was just like life catch up for everyone on the team and. Someone had a baby, they brought their baby to say hi. And there’s always a dog or a cat walking by. It brings the humanness to remote work by having some dedicated social time for your team. Chris Badgett: Awesome. A fun one for you. You mentioned people bring their dogs. You love dogs. I’ve seen on your PayMembershipPro videos, you have a demo site, MustLoveDogs. Tell us about your love for dogs. Kim Coleman: Oh, you’re trying to make me cry, Chris. Chris Badgett: No, I just, I love dogs too. So I’ve just want to know more of the Kim Coleman: backstory. I think will be harder than leaving my kids as our dogs. And it’s not, it’s because I can still communicate with our kids. Oh yeah. I had a dog growing up, but there’s something like being an adult and having your own dog, our first dog, it’s just. It’s everything to you, just, they’re so loyal, they’re following you around all the time, they, our dogs always pop their head up and stick their head in a meeting and people just love it on our team. We have a sick dog right now, it truly stinks to be leaving her, but Jason’s supposed to be in charge of it all and taking good care. Yeah. Dogs are amazing. Chris Badgett: Just planting a seed. I know we’ve both had chickens before and I was thinking about, you have a chicken avatar first mascot for the brand. And I was thinking maybe Lifter could have a space Husky and I had a Husky. My wife did. His name was Porter. Just the classic. Blue eyes, laser eyes, kind of sled dog Husky. And, uh, I was trying to figure out how to get a Husky face and a helmet, but I don’t know, maybe there’s something there for a future lifter mascot. Kim Coleman: So I like that idea. Brands merge too. I don’t know. Did, did that Husky like chickens or not like chickens? I, I bet he liked eating chickens. Most Chris Badgett: Huskies do cause Huskies are Wild. Another question for you, just switching back to you. One of the things that really impresses me about you is you’re a polymath. You’re into a lot of different things. You’re a designer, you’re a developer, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a marketer. You basically can move in and out. You’re constantly like improving and then learning and all those things. And you mentioned earlier talking about mission and stuff, people that take action, like you just keep evolving and you have all these skills. Can you speak to that, like in the sense of if somebody’s out there and maybe they’re challenged as a marketer, challenged trying to learn how to code, or they’re challenged because their design doesn’t look as good as what they want it to do, how do you level up across the board? Kim Coleman: I think for me, it’s just been. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Recreating things that you see that work and look good to you. And then the more you’re recreating something else, the more that the principles are becoming internalized to you. Even though you might not realize it. If you’re trying to pixel perfect recreate the Netflix sign up page, you might not realize the things that you’re teaching your brain about line height, about spacing of things, about color choice. So I think find other things to inspire you and copy the heck out of them. And don’t feel bad about that because that’s what everybody does that I talked to. Everybody’s like screenshotting someone else’s page and it’s like, they do that. I want to do that. That looks cool. Definitely. I do say there’s a little bit of fearlessness that comes with all of that. And if you’re a person that gets held back by things that are new and bring fear to you, start there in some small way in your life, because we do this with our own customers. We put out code recipes and we literally say, you copy this, you paste this here. The code just works. There’s no tweaking. And there’s still people that have too much fear when they look at code that they can’t even. Get that past those two steps. And it’s something they do anyway. They probably copy and paste a discount code from a field and paste it. And it’s not like the action is foreign to them. It’s just like the fact that they’re putting a name on it and calling it being a coder and they’re like, I’m not a coder, so I can’t do that. You are, and you can, so be fearless. And those moments and just know there’s always like a way to recover from it. I would say, yeah, I think also, I don’t, I do it in my own life. Like I like repair the toilet. I had to put like a pipe into the, the toilet was like whistling and we had to replace the innards of the toilet. And I was like, okay, I don’t have time to find a plumber, have them come here, have them tell me what’s wrong with it. Maybe they have the part, maybe they have to come back the next day. I don’t have time for all of that, but I do have time to watch a YouTube and try it. And I would, I’m out 20 if I can’t fix it. So I think even that it’s not just my work life, it’s figuring out how to do things in all ways. Don’t tell yourself you can’t and give yourself the grace to screw up a little bit and iterate. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I don’t know if we were on the same wavelength, I just repaired a toilet with my dad in North Carolina. I had no idea. I’m like, all right, cool. Let’s get the part. Watch some YouTube. Hey, it’s not doing what it’s supposed to. I’m like, let’s look at the old one and figured it out. Final question. You were talking about fear. If there’s fear or guilt, or I don’t think I could ever take a sabbatical kind of thinking going on around one, especially to somebody who’s been at it for a while, they’ve been freelancing or their WordPress product company or course creator, membership site creator, and they’ve been in business for 10 years, eight years. What would you say to them to get them over the hump that, yes, you could do it, and Kim Coleman: here’s how. I think you have to start with some lists. You have to make lists of the things that bring you fear. And then you have to decide. What can I do to prevent this from coming true? If this fear comes true while I’m gone, what will that mean? How long will I carry that fear for? If this fear wasn’t present, what could I do? We just got a paper from my son’s counselor about de catastrophizing, I think, or catastrophizing. I don’t know how to say it, but look that up, because that’s a cool worksheet. I think you could use it in this scenario too. It’s What are you worried about? What are you scared of? What happens if what you’re scared of comes true, what happens if it doesn’t? What’s the likelihood that it does? And it’s just a good exercise to take you through like these worst case scenario, best case scenario. Decisions, someone also once told me Arthur from extendify, he said, the things that give you this fear, like build a fence around the people in your team and say, you can operate within this fence, make sure it’s clear to them how much they can do, how little they can do without you around. And there’s a lot of room, make it a big fence. And they’ll only going to come to you when something feels like it’s outside of that space. I think fear can also be like ego, and if you take your ego out of it, if you’re like, Oh, I’m the only one that can do this. No, I’m the only one that can make the SOP, make the fence and give it to my team. And then that is still you. You can still feel proud of yourself for setting those wheels in motion, but it’s not you that has to be the one running it if there’s a process. Make a list, identify the things you’re scared of and best case, worst case, how bad can you recover from it? How will you recover from it? And processize the things that you think your team will need for when you’re away and give them freedom within that space to, to do the thing. Chris Badgett: Amazing. That’s Kim Coleman. She’s got a plane to catch. She’s heading to Asia literally in a couple hours. Thanks for holding the spot for the LMS cast podcast. You can find Kim over at Paid Memberships Pro, LifterLMS, and Sitewide Sales. We’ve got Black Friday coming up, which is a great time to use Sitewide Sales, get organized, get ready. Any final words for the people or any other ways to connect with you, Kim? Kim Coleman: Sure. I’m also on X, whatever that’s called, but I say this all the time. If, especially for the Black Friday sale season, if you’re thinking about running a sale, you don’t know where to start, you have questions. Reach out to us on our contact form. You can use the one at sitewide sales. com. We will talk through your sale with you. I’m not lying. I will take time and I will talk with you about it. Probably not for the next 20 days, but when I get back, I will, I want to see more sites using this product, making it easier to run sales, run them more frequently, do more experiments. So please take me up on that offer. Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, Kim, and wish you all the best on your trip to Asia. I hope you have an amazing time. 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. 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 Take a Sabbatical with WordPress Entrepreneur Kim Coleman appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Matt Pritchett describes the services they provide as well as how SendWP is a transactional email solution for WordPress websites. Matt Pritchett from SendWP. He is a software engineer with more than 12 years of experience developing websites and applications. Matt is also a non profit consultant and business owner. SendWP service is primarily intended to solve the issue of email deliverability that frequently affects website owners and course developers who need to send transactional emails such as welcome emails for new students, receipts for purchases, and customized emails. According to Matt, the problem with emails sent from WordPress websites, particularly those started by activities like form submissions, not reliably reaching their recipients, led to the creation of SendWP. Since many web hosting companies do not specialize in email delivery, it is common for these emails to land up in spam folders or to never be delivered at all because of improperly setup email servers. 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 Will Middleton: We are live everybody. It’s Will Middleton from LifterLMS. I’m joined today by Matt Pritchett from SendWP and SendWP is a transactional email service that you can use in your WordPress website to take care of email deliverability. So this is a common problem that comes up with course creators and course building websites and membership websites is that they try to send emails like a student welcome, a purchase receipts, things like that, that are automatically sent by the system. And you can even create custom emails in LifterLMS. But sometimes. These emails don’t end up coming through. And so today we’re here to understand a little bit more in depth about why these emails might not be coming through and what you can do as a WordPress website owner to make sure these emails come through. They don’t end up in spam, they don’t end up in the junk folder, and we’re not relying on our website host to have just the perfect email sending setup, which in most cases they don’t. But it’s a really elusive topic that I don’t really understand very well, and I think a lot of people in our community don’t have a lot of insight on. So thanks so much, Matt, for joining me today. And helping us figure this out a little bit more. Matt Pritchett: Yeah. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Will Middleton: And so do you think you could fill us in a little bit on just high level what SendWP is and what, kind of services it offers? And so what is the process when someone signs up for SendWP? What are the services that that enables on their website? Matt Pritchett: Yeah. So like you said, SendWP is a transactional email service for WordPress websites. We basically, we noticed a problem where. People’s emails weren’t sending SendVP originated from Ninja Forms a friend of, you guys. And we, noticed that we were having the same problem that a lot of your customers do. Hey, I’m trying to send this email from my forms. It’s not working. What do I do? And… Unfortunately most people like their, hosts, they don’t want to be in the email game a couple of do, but for the most part, like they don’t want to send the emails because it’s difficult. It, it, requires continuous maintenance. Spammers are always inventing new ways to bypass those kinds of checks. So it just takes a ton of effort. And they’re in the hosting game. They don’t want to be in the email game. And so send WP was created to, to solve that problem. We send WP when you register you check out and you connect your website. It’s really quick. In fact, we can, you can get it down to as little as one click. We’re really proud of that. And we take care of all of your email. We, are technically for transactional email. We are working on some marketing email plans, but those aren’t quite ready yet. But we, basically take care of all of your email. So in a normal WordPress site your email tries to go through a function called phpMailer. It’s a package that WordPress uses, has used it for forever. But if that’s not configured on your server correctly, you’re most not going to go anywhere. It’s just going to fail and it fails silently in most cases, meaning it just never arrives. And you don’t know why. So send WP actually bypasses that we send an API request to our servers and we send that email on your behalf in a secure and better way than most servers are going to allow for by default. And so we can help ensure now, no one can guarantee that your email is going to end up in the inbox, but we we do everything in our power to make sure that’s where it goes and that it arrives on time. And without being stopped for spam or anything like this. Will Middleton: Yeah. And you mentioned that there’s like a function that a server has to send emails and it’s not often configured to be compatible with WordPress or not always configured to be compatible with how WordPress wants to send email. And I like to break it down at a technical level. So when we have a website host, like WP Engine or Bluehost or whoever we’re hosting on, they’re configured to deliver web content to deliver our, HTML and our JavaScript and run PHP and stuff like that. And then we have separate video hosts like Vimeo or YouTube that are optimized to deliver video files. But email is itself a separate function of, a server. And so it’s important to understand that a web server can be optimized to do different things like deliver video, deliver web files, or deliver email as a separate thing. And do you think you could explain a little bit about the different types of email? We got the transactional emails versus marketing emails and what would make them different. Matt Pritchett: Yeah. So marketing email. Let’s start with that. Is email that you’re going to send in bulk. It’s something that like, Hey, we have this awesome new promotion. We’re selling our course for 50 percent off for the next 24 hours. You should come check it out. And you send the same email to tons of people all at the same time or within a few minutes of each other. It is doing marketing. Whereas transactional email is, it’s in the name. It’s a, It’s an email that goes out based on a transaction, and that can mean a lot of different things. It could be e commerce receipts, It could be welcome emails. It could be password resets, something that the user initiated an action, and that caused a trigger of an email. A ninja forms users when they fill out a form on someone’s website, the owner of that website wants an email to go out that says Hey, a person filled this out, or, Hey, thank you for filling this out. That is triggered by an action of the user a transaction. And so that, that’s how we think about transactional emails is they are initiated by a transaction and that transaction can be monetary. It can be an interaction, an event, something like that transaction and kind of the broadest sense of the word. Will Middleton: Okay, that, that makes sense. And one of those transactions that’s like the most. Hot button type transaction is a lost password email when, someone comes to your website and says lost password, especially with LMS websites, because people are trying to log in all the time. And we frequently see that where our users will have their, students enter a lost password. The email doesn’t end up coming through, or it goes to the, spam or the trash or just might not come through at all. And so you mentioned a little bit earlier about how spammers are always. Finding new ways to get around spam blocking services and causing issues with the reputation of, web servers. And that’s one of the reasons it’s good to have a third party service like SendWP sending your emails for you because it’s not relying on the reputation of the IP address that your website is hosted on to deliver emails. Do you think you could talk a little bit about the just the benefits of using SendWP and why having Your server sends the like the lost password emails for our website and all the transactional emails is going to be better long term than Even if my web server is working right now, and it is sending these emails. Why would it be better to offload Matt Pritchett: that? Yeah, so spam is something that we deal with All the time. We are literally around the clock looking for new ways that people are trying to send spam. We’re constantly blocking new attack vectors, that kind of thing. We have entire teams and entire vendors that help us just with that problem, because that is the biggest problem in email. And… If you’re using your own server to send email, even if, like you said, it’s working right now, that’s not a guarantee that it’ll work tomorrow or even an hour from now because there, there are bad faith actors out there looking for ways to take advantage of other people we all get spam email and the goal is generally to get a click to get you to give them personal information, money, this kind of thing. If they can get one out of every million people to a million emails they send a click, they’re making money that day. So they are constantly looking for new ways to take advantage. And so if you’re running your own email server or just running your email through your domain server those things are a good vector for them to send that. And so they’re looking for ways to take advantage of that. If you don’t have. Like your DNS records configured correctly, if you aren’t checking your, what are called your DMARC reports, which are just a report of how your email how your email is being used they can actually send an email to look like it’s coming from you, which lowers your domain’s reputation with Google and Yahoo and all these mail providers. And eventually they will say, no, you’re doing this too much. We’re not accepting email from your domain or your IP anymore. And. At that point, you’re out of luck because you can try to go say Hey, I’m actually legit. Please, don’t block me. But for most people, like Matt Pritchett saying, Hey, Google unblock me doesn’t mean anything. Whereas larger companies can say Hey, this was our mistake. We fixed it. Please unblock us. And they have more leverage to, to then get a response. But for your average website owner, you don’t have any leverage. So it’s very difficult to get unblocked once you’re blocked. And so send W P because we work with all of these companies on a daily basis we have a very high reputation from our service. So you, as opposed to an SMTP service or your own server, you are getting a reputation bump from us because we’re sending your mail on your behalf. And so even if you have some slight domain spam, your reputation problems in a lot of cases we can help overcome those and help improve your domain’s reputation over time. Because you’re sending through us using our reputation and benefiting your own reputation at the same time because the more email you send that gets received and opened and clicks and all of this, your reputation goes up when people read your emails, when people click on your emails, Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, all of these places, they notice that and they go, okay, this person must be legit. And When you use our reputation, you can improve your own domain’s reputation at the same time. Will Middleton: And that’s a really important thing, I think, that… I hadn’t thought about until recently is like domain authority and this kind of thing with with search engines. We think about it in terms of SEO a lot. Like, how are we going to rank in search engine? Should we link to this website? Should we link to this other website instead? Like linking to websites like Wikipedia have very high domain authority. So when it comes to SEO, we’re concerned about websites that have higher low domain authority. But a similar thing if I’m understanding it correctly applies to email where like these email inbox providers like outlook or Gmail or Yahoo. Might be tracking in the background, some sort of like a like a, an authority kind of relationship, just like how search engines track like domain authority. We could also have an elusive understanding that, that Gmail is reading your emails, seeing if people are marking them as spam or unsubscribing and building an idea of your reputation. And so even just if your emails are coming through. The just the benefits of having a service to improve your domain authority and establish your domain in the business as legitimate is like there’s a lot of underlying factors there that are beneficial. Matt Pritchett: Absolutely. And it’s not even just your emails is the problem is it’s nefarious actors trying to send like to look like they’re your emails. Then you also have if you’re on shared hosting or even if you’re on dedicated hosting, but you haven’t owned that IP address for a long time. There could be there could have been in the past. Bad actors sending spam from that IP address, either on your shared hosting with you right now, or like I said, with dedicated with a dedicated server, if your IP address has been abused in the past, that IP address has a bad reputation. And so you may have a good reputation, but your IP address doesn’t, and even that can cause the same problem. So most of the cases we see, it is not those users spamming emails. But their I. P. Address or even their domain name or their server host name or something like that has been associated with something bad in the past. And because of that, they can’t get their email out. Will Middleton: Yeah, that makes sense. And there’s not really a way to know that when you sign up for a web host, there’s not really a way to with most web hosts, choose your I. P. Figure out its reputation. You just are signing up for space to deliver these web files. And so that’s just why it’s so important to have that offloaded IP, sending your emails that make a lot of sense. And you mentioned there are things you can do like your DKIM records and send, WP has some interfaces for you to. To enter these records or tell you where to enter these records in your domain in order to verify that you are the owner of the domain. Because like you said, someone can just send an email from will lift or lms. com or whatever, and they just type that in and they’re sending as well, lift or lms. com. But if we have our DK, I am records and some other records verified right? Can you correct me if I’m wrong? That will pass that verification to the inbox and tell them this is the owner of this URL who’s sending this. Is that kind of how that works? Matt Pritchett: Yeah. So SendWP we don’t require these DNS records because a lot of people, like they just connect with us and it works and it’s great and they don’t need anything else. We always want to provide the easiest solution possible and then it’ll give you options to go more advanced and custom from there. And so we support kind of two things two records and then we also, those two records are governed by a third. And so I’ll just talk about those really quick. DMARC, your DMARC policy, which stands for Domain Based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance, which is a mouthful and that’s basically just a way of saying here’s what mail is allowed to go out from my server and then give me a a log of what has come and gone and if it fails or succeeds It is like the control tower if you think in like an airline mentality, it’s the control tower of your email. It’s a place that logs things it, gets reports of if, sending to Yahoo is failing from your address, from your IP, why, that kind of thing. It’s, it is the command to control. And then you have the SPF record, which is your sender policy framework. And this is… From your side, allow, saying these are the IP addresses. These are the domains that are allowed to send on my behalf. And here’s what to do if somebody else tries. So you can add a, piece to that record that says just block them all. If, they’re not in this list or allow them, if they have a good reputation, there’s a lot of different things that you can do with that record. And then finally, we also support the DKIM record, which is. domain keys, identified mail. And these are all very technical terms that to be honest, I have to look up every once in a while because I forget because there’s so many acronyms. But this is essentially like a password for your email that if you don’t have this special key that we don’t tell anybody, don’t allow my email to go out. It is an identifier that says, yes, I am legitimate. Yes this, service has permission to send on my behalf. It is a way, like a lot of people that connect their applications to an email sending service to send on their behalf. DKM records are really great for that because they’re yes, this is legitimate. They have my permission. They can send mail. That mail is from me. It’s just coming from this place. And so those are the, two records and the one policy that we support those covered 99. 9 percent of scenarios and again, are not required, but are super helpful. If, your domain doesn’t need those things and you’re delivering mail just fine, yeah, send a BP by the, by itself will work. But these things we find in a lot of scenarios help increase deliverability to help keep mail from going into the spam folder, the trash folder, those kinds of things. And we provide, Hey, here’s the record specifically how for your domain in your send WP dashboard. So it’s really easy to implement. Will Middleton: Nice. And and the area we’re talking about, if you did ever have to verify any of these records is right in your domain registrar. So send WP gives you the record. Then you go put that in your domain registrar and it verified. That’s good. And I guess we did have a question come in and chat. And so anyone watching live, feel free to drop any questions in chat or topics you want to hear about email and, WordPress. But this was just so cool. Host effects, the deliverability as well as the domain. Yeah when we think about a domain name that’s just basically like a cover for an IP address, right? Is you were just basically reserving the IP address. So LifterLMS. com, when you type that into your URL and hit send, it really just switches it to a IP address and then goes and finds that, website. But then so that there’s one IP address, but your server also has an IP address wherever you’re hosted. So, like the, website domain is going to point over to that website server IP address. And so if there was, I think what Matt’s saying is if there was ever a spammer on that host IP address. Or even if your domain has bad reputation in Gmail, like you could switch from your, website host. If you’re not getting email sent, you switch maybe from, I don’t know, like GoDaddy to WP Engine or whatever, but your email still aren’t coming through. It could be an issue in either place because we’re really dealing with two different IP addresses and their reputation. Matt Pritchett: That’s correct. They’re the amount of things that are checked by, especially by the really big services. Google outlook, Yahoo, these really large email providers. They’re checking the domain and the IP are the main ones. But there are hundreds of factors that they check per email. When deciding do we deliver this? Do we deliver it in the inbox? Do we deliver it in the spam folder? And you have control over a few of those, but a lot of them you don’t have any control over. They’re just, do you have a good reputation? Are you doing nefarious things? Are people doing nefarious things on your IP, on your domain, on your server? And so you can’t control some of those. But our goal is to try to control as many as possible and try to help you improve the ones that you can control. With as little effort and as much automation as possible, Will Middleton: right? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so we’re basically sending from your i. P. Because it’s making like an A. P. I. Call. Let’s send the email through there. That’s correct. Makes a lot of sense. We did have another question come in from Gina. If using email from outlook, do we need to go through the whole authentication process or is it? As simple as the direction say connecting send WP to a WordPress website. I guess I don’t know if I fully understand the question. I’m assuming here we’re trying to send an email from our Outlook email address server. And connecting send WP to a WordPress website. So I don’t know, is there like an authentication process at all to Oh, there was a follow up actually asking as the process to get the authentication from several teams. Matt Pritchett: So we’re not an email provider. So we, we don’t replace Outlook on your behalf. We don’t have an inbox. We’re not like you can’t receive email to send WP. If somebody sends you an email, send WP won’t see that. We are simply outgoing and from your WordPress site. We are actually we, secret, secret sauce here. We’re actually working on some other platforms alongside of WordPress as well, but those aren’t quite ready yet. So right now we only send the email that flows through your WordPress site. And so we’re not going to be able to replace Outlook, replace Gmail. There are really two things we’re talking about here. We’re talking about receiving email and sending email. And we are responsible for the sending part from your WordPress Will Middleton: site. And I think maybe this question I’ve, worked with email sending services before, like SMTP configuration tools that allow you to send your email from Outlook, but that’s not what we’re doing in this case. This case, it would just be sending our email from SendWP, right? It wouldn’t be like configuring it to go through out through some other service. Like SendWP is the service that’s sending your email. You don’t need to connect to Matt Pritchett: Outlook. Yeah, correct. So if you want to send an email with SendWP from your WordPress site you just download the plugin and you go through registration. We we’re, $9 a month. Your first month is a dollar and you connect, you, you check out we send you back to your site, which authenticates you with our servers. And from that moment on, we’re sending all email from your WordPress site. So we we take over the function and, p h p that allow in WordPress that allows you to send email. And from that moment on, all your email from WordPress is, and from your plugins and your theme. Is going through send WP. There’s no further authentication required. Now we did talk about those DNS records, and if you want to implement those, you do have to grab those from your account and then go over to your domain. And those are technically a form of authentication if that’s what you’re referring to. But there isn’t any like you don’t need to go to your I. Team and have them like set something crazy up or authenticate your outlook server. There’s nothing like that involved. Yeah, Will Middleton: and I think there’s also the reply to email address, and so that would be configured from whoever sends the email. So in LifterLMS, when you create a email engagement, it has a reply to email. So you can change that from team member to team member. If you have five instructors on your website creating courses, the reply to email would just dynamically be whatever the instructor Email is for that course. And so when it’s when that information is sent to send WP it’s, going to know who to reply to who the email should go back to because Lifter or WooCommerce or whatever already designated who that would be replying to. So it’ll go right to their outlook inbox. If you have a bunch of outlook. Cool. I guess shifting gears a little bit and anyone feel free to continue to post questions and chat. We’ll, dive back over into those. But a little bit about your, history in WordPress, Matt, you said you’ve been in WordPress for 16 years probably coming on 17 years here soon. That’s so you’ve seen a lot of changes. In the ecosystem from this is a future thinking question that I like to talk about, but you’ve seen like the transition from web one to web two and getting into like web three and we, we talk about the cryptocurrencies and AI integrations and all this kind of stuff. Is there anything interesting in like the email ecosystem regarding web three and like new technologies coming along, or is it basically similar as it has been going into Matt Pritchett: Yeah, there’s been some really interesting discussion. I haven’t seen anything come out of it yet. But at the height of the crypto stuff, there was a lot of discussion about how do we use. The chain, the blockchain to secure emails even better. And I don’t think as far as I’m aware that anyone has implemented anything with that on a large scale. There’s a few startups that have explored it here and there. But some of those DNS records could absolutely be replaced by. A token on the chain which would be really cool but is a massive undertaking to get everyone to switch over. You’re talking hundreds or thousands of companies that all do it slightly differently. I know we are currently exploring some AI integrations to help you write your transactional emails and to add things. One of the things that we do a lot of talking about in our. Our blog and our social media presences is improving your transactional emails. Like your transactional emails, just because they’re not marketing emails, don’t doesn’t mean you can’t market in them. Like your password resets, those are boring emails. They’re super necessary. And if they don’t deliver, people get really upset. But those don’t have to be just, okay, here’s the link to reset your password. Hey, here’s the link to reset your password. And did you know, we have this 10 day course. That you can take to learn how to level up your, business. You can do stuff like that in there. And a lot of people don’t think about that. Your e commerce receipts. Hey, people who bought this also bought these three things, and you’ve just increased your revenue with very little effort. So we talk about a lot of things like that. And what we’re looking for is ways to get AI to understand your site and to inject things like that for you, obviously, with your permission. But to do some of that work for you because I know as a business owner, I don’t always want to write copy like that. I’m not good at it. That’s not my skillset. That’s, there’s a reason I do email work and, software engineering and this kind of thing. But if I had an AI that could help me out with that, here’s what I want to do, make it sound nice. That would be awesome. So we’re, constantly testing things like that. We don’t have anything like. But it is something we’ve played around with a lot recently. We, are very I personally am very much an AI fan. We we’re doing a lot of things on the AI side and a couple of the other platforms that I work with. Awesome. Will Middleton: Yeah, that, that’s really interesting to think about the different avenues and AI in that case is almost helping supplement your like, the business structure, like as an end user is you’re, you have to be less of a salesperson because you can get help from, an AI tool with, making that content. That’s really interesting. I’ve never thought about including some kind of call to action or whatever in like transactional emails like that, like purchase receipts or lost passwords or all that kind of stuff. But that is a great place to to include it. And LFTR introduces a lot of Transactional emails in these engagements or notifications or lesson completed and all this kind of stuff. So there’s a lot of opportunities there to, integrate that. That’s, pretty interesting. And yeah, I think with Gina’s question in chat, we’ll come back to that real quick. The, question was around, when looking at something like WP Male s mtp, it requires authentication through like something like Outlook or whatever. But, in this case, send, WP would be doing the same job as, WP male SMTP plus your authentication. It’s like, in that case, you’re using two tools. You’re using your WP male SMTP to configure it, and then you’re using some other email service to send it. But Send CWP combines that into, Matt Pritchett: one correct. So there isn’t, we’re not using your Outlook. Your gmail. And so that helps explain what she was trying to ask. So we’re not using your outlook or your gmail to send your email. We’re sending that through our own servers. So gmail at its very foundational level is an S. M. T. P. Service. Now it’s one that you write the emails and so they act as an S. M. T. P. Service and an email provider. You are sending through their servers. And so when you want to send from a different location through your Gmail account or through your Outlook account, yeah, you have to authenticate with them because you have to prove that you’re allowed to do that. Whereas with send WP you sign up and that tells us like, Hey, I can send this email and then we behind the scenes intelligently secure that connection. Based on your domain and a bunch of other factors to where we know this email comes from you, from your domain and your domain only. And we can send that out and that’s where a lot of our customers don’t need the DNS records. And so it just works. But there are like, if you work in a very corporate environment or your email is secured really heavily. Which a lot of email providers do something like that. Then that’s where the DNS records we talked about come in. And that’s, those records are basically a flag that says, Hey, this is SendWP. They’re allowed to send on our behalf. And these records indicate that to your Outlooks, to your Gmails, to your Yahoo. And so that’s the way that we, you authenticate with us. Then if necessary, we can authenticate. Via DNS record with your email provider, although that’s only necessary in a very small number of cases. Will Middleton: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you mentioned can we also send email from a different domain? So the domain name might not match if I have I think the answer here would be yes, because it’s still coming from your website, right? Like the, or I guess I would pose that question to you. How would we send email? I’ve got if you’re lms. com, but then we’ve got will at teamlifterlms. com or whatever, and I want to send email from, will at teamlifterlms. com. Is that something I can do through SendWP? Matt Pritchett: You can. It gets a little trickier. You, have to play some DNS games to make that work, but we can fully, we fully support that. There is a slightly larger chance that you end up in the spam folder because of that. But there are DNS records that you can go, no, this is fine. Please, send this. Unfortunately that is one of the limitations of those DNS records is they are suggestions the Pirates of the Caribbean, their guidelines kind of thing. I can’t force Google to do anything that would be hilarious if I could, but unfortunately I can’t. And so like those records. They are, hey, this, we allow this, is allowed, but they can absolutely turn around and go, too bad, we’re not allowing that. Now they don’t, they, they respect them because this is a industry wide protocol that everyone has agreed to. But there are cases that we’ve seen where they’re like, no, this is too weird, we don’t trust this block. But we’re talking out of millions and millions of emails. I’ve seen that five, ten times. So we’re talking a tiny percentage but yes, that is something we can support. It requires a few more advanced DNS records just to prove that we can send that email on your behalf. But it is absolutely something we support. Will Middleton: And, but that, would also be a limitation of any, provider for email, because whether Google trusts the, email or not is like not a decision that you can make on your WordPress site. Matt Pritchett: Correct. I would love to be able to be like matt@taylorswift.com. That is like, why I wanna be able to send those emails like, I’m Taylor Swift. Why, wouldn’t I? But that’s a huge security flaw. And so without those D N Ss records saying, yeah, Matt is a a representative they shouldn’t allow those. So yes, that is the problem that you’re going to have with CWP or with any other service. And if they don’t know how to overcome that, It’s probably not going to work, to be honest. Will Middleton: Cool. Anyone feel free to keep posting questions in the chat. We’re coming close to the end of the show. Let me take a look here at to make sure I covered everything. Matt, have you seen any questions come through around membership sites, e commerce websites, or anything in, the the email sending space that, or advice you have for me? For people who are creating more email intensive WordPress websites that might help them figure out how to navigate the email tech stack. I know we talked about WP Mail, SMTP and SNWP will just handle the whole email thing, but is there any other considerations when it comes to email that a WordPress user would want to consider? Matt Pritchett: Yeah. I, we already touched on my, on the big things. The big things for us are always do, are your emails arriving? If not, let’s figure out why. And our, CWP support team digs into these issues all day, every day. So it’s something we’re really familiar with and we really love solving. But once we get to that point your emails are delivering, you’re happy with that. I, my, my advice is don’t stop there. Start AB testing things like our does this headline work better than this? It’s the same things you do with marketing emails. Those principles can can mostly be applied to transactional, like test what works better. What is somebody more likely to click on? Can you add upsells or cross sells or brand awareness type campaign information to your very simple transactional emails? We’ve seen a lot of success in membership sites and a whole host of other things with, Hey, you want your password reset? You should check this out. We have this course on how to use a password manager. So you stop forgetting what your password was. If you have that course, absolutely put that in your password, reset email. You don’t want to spam people. People are already people that are getting transactional emails as opposed to a cold marketing email. They’re already primed to want what you’re giving. These are people that are engaging. By very definition of a transactional email, they are engaging with something on your site. Now, it might be as simple as a password reset, but they’re already primed to want what you have. So take advantage of that. Like use that. They want to have stuff from you, they want your content. They want your product. Take advantage of that and use that opportunity that they’re giving you where when people first come to SendWP for the most part, we see 90 percent aren’t using those kinds of things at all. And they’re leaving revenue on the table. They’re leaving brand trust on the table. And even if you don’t want to sell, because I can understand people cause I don’t like to be sold to very much if, even if you don’t want to sell simply communicating extra, Hey, we see you’re asking for your password reset for the third time this month. You can store, here’s a article about how to use a password manager, one password, last pass, any of these. That increases your brand trust and you may not be selling to them right then, but increasing your brand trust always increases your revenue over time. Maybe not for that customer, but over scale always increases the amount of money you earn and the amount of content that people consume. So whether you’re increasing brand trust or you’re just getting your name out there, or you’re trying to actively cross sell upsell adding those kinds of things is the biggest thing that we try to. Yet our customers to understand once their email is flowing correctly. Yeah. Will Middleton: I think a lot of that we, we talk a lot of technical terms of like, how would we connect our WordPress website to send WP or even outside of it, like, how would we with. from term again, like how would we configure our privacy policy? So we’re in compliance. Like in, in the wordpress and business space, we talk a lot about technical, how to do various things that you’re supposed to do, but big picture, it’s all about creating the brand trust and doing business like properly in a way that like respects the customer’s data and all this kind of stuff. So if, like you said, if you’re trying to put useful things in emails that will increase the interaction with your emails, which increases your, google and stuff. People are clicking on the links in your emails, opening them and just interacting with your content. And so I think that makes sense. Like big picture, how that that, all comes together in the email space, but also in other parts of WordPress. Matt Pritchett: We we have a, bunch of museums that are customers. We they use us to send like event tickets and that kind of thing when people purchase tickets online. And what one of their, one of my favorite stories to tell Hey, we talked to him about this and they, now they offer the audio guided tour in, in their ticket emails as Hey, here’s your ticket. Here’s your receipt. Thanks for doing this. We’ll see you whenever you come by. That’s what they were sending before, which is great. There’s no problem with that. It’s they need the information. Here’s the information. But they, they, weren’t selling any of these guided audio tours where you put your headphones in and you walk around the museum and somebody tells you all about the paintings are all about the, history. They weren’t selling these and We they reached out to us for another issue they were having and we answered that and they were like, Hey, do you have any ideas? And we were like, Oh yes, you should absolutely offer these guided tours in your ticket emails just as a, Hey, just so you know, for 12 extra bucks, you can get this super awesome. Like here’s the history and it’s not that big a deal. 12 bucks to get like a really elevated experience. If you’re going to come, to a museum is totally worth it. And there, the number is escaping me, but their conversion rate on that went way up. Like it was a game changer for them. And it, took literally five minutes for them to implement. So like little things like that can have huge impacts on revenue, brand trust, awareness, that kind of thing. Awesome. Will Middleton: That’s a great tip. I think we’re coming to about the end of the episode now, Matt, for anyone who wants to learn more about you or send WP or connect offline, where should they go next to take a look at what’s in WP has to offer and integrating it into their WordPress site. Matt Pritchett: Yeah, you can check us out at send WP dot com S E N D WP dot com. That’s where all the things for us are. You can reach out to our team. We’re happy to talk to you about your needs. Any customization you need. Any support you need at all. And you can check if you want to connect with me, I’m m r Pritchett p r i t c h e t on Twitter. And I hang out there all the time. Or X or whatever it’s called today, . I am there all the time, so happy to connect on there, answer questions, hang out whatever, you guys wanna throw my way. Awesome. Will Middleton: Thanks so much, Matt, for joining me. We’ll wrap up the broadcast for today and thanks everyone joining in the audience and asking questions, and we’ll see you next. 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 Improving your LMS Site’s Email Deliverability with Matt Pritchett from SendWP appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Caleb O’Dowd discussed about marketing tactics, concentrating mainly on how to make sales-boosting deals. Additionally, he shares ways to encourage additional purchases. For those who design courses, serve as coaches, or work for organizations that support them, this is very important. Caleb O’Dowd is a marketing expert and entrepreneur, author and founder of Multi Channel Marketing. Caleb O’Dowd underlines the need of comprehending the potential objections that clients may have to your product before developing an offer that does away with those issues. He describes this strategy as making a “mafia offer,” which is an offer that is so alluring that it is difficult for anybody to reject. Additionally, Caleb highlights the need of anticipating objections and tactfully addressing them in your marketing materials. He says that in order to learn more about his target market and efficiently address issues in his offerings, he frequently starts Facebook groups. When it comes to Facebook advertisements and groups, Caleb advises directing visitors to an email capture page and then utilizing a subsequent email to invite people to the Facebook group. 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 State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello and welcome back to another episode of L M S Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Caleb O’Dowd. He’s from multi-channel marketing. Dot com. Welcome to show Caleb. Caleb O’Dowd: Thank you so much, Chris. It’s a, an honor and a pleasure to be here. Chris Badgett: I can’t wait for this conversation. We’re going to go deep on marketing, getting leads getting people to buy, getting people to buy more for the course creators, the coaches out there, and also the agencies that support them. Let’s start at a super high level, Caleb, in your view, what makes people buy or choose you? Caleb O’Dowd: I think a one of the greatest discoveries that I’ve ever made in my career is shifting my focus away from What makes people buy and moving it over to why would somebody not buy? Because if you understand, if you look at your offer, if you look at your positioning, if you look at your offer, particularly I teach this type of offer. I call it a mafia offer. A mafia offer is an offer. You cannot refuse if the Don of a mafia family gives you an offer, you can’t refuse it. So I come at the creation of offers from the perspective of why would somebody say no. So if you are if somebody is looking to acquire a customer and you have a solution on how to acquire a customer. Then at least you’re aligned with what people are looking for. From that point forward, it’s far smarter for you to sit down and think to yourself, why would somebody not buy what it is that I have to offer? Because the answers to those questions, the answer to that question is going to allow you to create an offer that is designed to not get a no. And if you have an offer that essentially removes all of the reasons why somebody would not buy from you. Then you, the only off, the only choice left on the table is to buy from you. So if anybody here knows me or has heard of me or anybody who has studied any of my customer acquisition, advertising, you will know that I create mafia offers. I create offers that are designed to not get a no. And as a result. I’m pretty much known particularly in the webinar industry for creating some of the most successful and highest grossing webinar offers in that industry. And it’s because I come at the question a little differently. I try and think about why would somebody say no? Then I create a solution that definitively overcomes that no. So now my offer. Eliminates that. No, because there’s so many people that come at the creation of an offer from the perspective of, let me just put lots of stuff into the offer so that I end up with 50, 000 worth of value that you can get for a thousand dollars. But people don’t buy because of that people buy because they need. Like fast unique, simple solutions that make it like make getting to the end result fast and easy. So your offer really is supposed to be designed to eliminate all the reasons why someone would say no, and get your prospect to the place of enjoying. The end result as fast as humanly possible. And a lot of the offers that I review for my clients, they’re the opposite of that. The, prospect might look at your offer and say, Hey, this is really great I’m not going to sign up because of like I’m in the advertising space. So somebody might say, Hey, I’m not going to sign up because I don’t know how to create ads. And if I say, oh, okay look, I’m going to give you this book, my latest book, how I went from zero to generating. Like millions of dollars. That bonus doesn’t really overcome that objection that someone has. So by stacking value, which is what I see a lot of people doing, it doesn’t really get the sale. What you really want to do instead is you want to find out why would that person say no. In this example, the person would say, no, I’m not going to order because I don’t know how to create ads. I changed my offer to say, Oh, by the way, I’m going to create all of your ads for you. In this example, I’m talking about one of my offers. So now that person doesn’t have that objection anymore. And as a result, legions, more people buy my offer. So why do people buy? I think it’s going to be the, one of the greatest discoveries I ever made in my career that have resulted in literally me creating some enormously successful offers in hyper competitive niches. The question that I gravitate towards more so these days is why would somebody not buy? Because if I know the answer to that, then I know how to create an offer that is stronger than every other offer in the marketplace. I don’t know if that was the answer you were expecting there, Chris, but that’s where I come. That’s how I come at that issue. Chris Badgett: I love that. Is there any subtle differences to the way… How people would not buy that you would say to the kind of the classic sales training on, Oh you need to handle the objections like somewhere, like, how is this different from objection handling? Caleb O’Dowd: Yeah, I the first and like the, absolute best way to handle objections is to know about them in advance you’re not dealing with these things on the fly. There’s so many different types of objections that people could have based on what it is that you are selling. So the first thing that we like. Do a lot of there’s several things that we do to get really smart on things. Number one, if I’m getting into a new niche, or if I really want to become like very successful in a niche, I’ll usually create some Facebook ads, create a Facebook group, and I’ll put about 500 people in the niche into that group. I’ll drip content on them and I’ll ask them every question under the sun and I will attempt to get all of the objections, all of the insight that I can get from that tribe of people as fast as humanly possible. So that when it comes time for me to actually sell, I’m so up to speed that my offer contains. Rebuttals to all of the major objections so that by the time I actually get to close the person. There’s very few objections on the call. They’re more so minor type of like objections like in my world, I get like the most common thing that I get is Hey I, we do a lot of live trainings. I can’t attend the live trainings on that at that time. So there are more minor objections because I’ve done all the work to overcome the major objections in the actual advertising itself. And that comes from being super well prepared. It becomes, it comes from really understanding your prospect at a very, high level. And Taking the time to figure out what the objections are and creating an advertisement that systematically and strategically overcomes them so that there’s no really no bumps on the road to taking out the credit card and buying. So I tend to address those issues long before they arrive. Best case scenario. And one of the ways that I do that is I, create a Facebook group. I get exactly my prospect in there, about 500 of them. Asked him a ton of questions. I figure everything out and I get to know them intimately. A lot of what I will do as well is I will create A group using traffic sources that I ultimately intend to use to sell so that the people that are coming from those traffic sources. I actually know those people. I know what they’re interested in. So that when I comes back time for me to create my offer, I have created an offer that’s customized to those traffic sources, which gives me again a higher likelihood of succeeding. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. A quick tactical question. You mentioned Facebook ads and Facebook groups. I may be wrong here, but I think you can’t do an ad that points directly to a Facebook ad that points to a group. So how did you, let me understand how you think about that and how do you fill the group? Caleb O’Dowd: Very simple. Just send them straight to an email capture page. And then on the thanks page, you have a little two minute video that moves them into the group. Then you have them on email, and then you’re just moving them into the group from email from that point forward. Chris Badgett: Brilliant. So you are using the ad to build a group. They’re just going through an opt in first and you handle the actual like button to join the group on the thank you page or in the reply or the confirmation email or whatever. Exactly. Caleb O’Dowd: Exactly. Chris Badgett: That is cool. And you mentioned multiple traffic sources to like the same traffic sources to build the group is the ones that you would use to sell to later. Can you elaborate on what those traffic sources are or what types of. Caleb O’Dowd: Yeah on Facebook, we do a lot of it depends which niche we’re in but like on Facebook, like we do, we do a lot of advertising on Facebook, primarily for the niches that we operate in. On Facebook, a lot of actually the, advertising is moved away from. Targeting specific interests on Facebook, and it’s more so about teaching the pixel to bring you back exactly who you’re looking for. But we do interest targeting. We might target a guru. We might target a specific topic. Might target a specific page and stuff like that. But what I will do is I’ll go out and research all of the interests where it’s clear that my prospect should be there. And I will also rely on training the pixel a lot to bring me back exactly who I’m looking for all of those people from those audiences are coming into my group, and I’m getting to know people from those traffic sources. So I, find out what their problems are. There’s, essentially. There’s essentially eight things that I want to know about every prospect before I get into creating a piece of winning advertising. The first and foremost thing that I want to know is what is the seed reason why they’re in the niche? What caused… What happened in their life that caused them to want to be in this niche? Because if you know that, then you know the driving force of what’s actually going on in their head. You know the core reason why they’re here. What it is, what is it that they’re trying to actually accomplish? Every one of us had some stuff that happened in our life that caused us to embark upon This endeavor. Okay. So what is that? Because if I know that I can tell you from experience nine out of 10 of my competition, do not know that. And that allows me to speak in a very penetrating manner to the people that I’m serving. And it makes them feel like, wow, Caleb knows me more than anybody else that I’ve ever encountered here. This guy really, knows me deeply. So number one, I want to know what is the seed reason why they’re here? What happened in their life that caused them to want to be here? Number two, I want to know their dilemma. What is the rock and a hard place that they’re caught between right now? What’s going on in their life right now that is, causing them pain? Where are they stuck? What is the issue that’s, causing them to be in pain or causing them to search for a solution? What is the issue that is the stone in the shoe for them right now? Those two things are very, important, really, in my experience, not worth moving forward with any level of advertising or spending a penny on advertising until at least those two things from there. Then it boils down into classic kind of Tony Robbins psychology. Human beings take action for two primary reasons the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. So in the category of the desire for pleasure, there is three reasons why people are taking action. They have a want, they have a need, and they have a desire. So I want to know what is the wants, what are their needs, what are their desires? Then on the pain side of things, the avoidance of, pain side of things, there’s again three categories, and that is fears. Frustrations and problems. So I’ll spend pretty much 60 days, 90 days talking to these 500 people or so. And I’ll want to find out what’s the seed reason why you’re here. What is the dilemma that you’re experiencing in your life right now that’s causing you pain. And then I want to know your wants, needs, desires, fears, frustrations, and problems. Once I know those eight things. Then I have essentially figured out everything that I need to know to create at that point in time, elite level marketing and advertising that positions me very powerfully in the marketplace, because more so than any tactic or strategy if you are able to speak to your prospect in a way that makes them realize that me better. Then anyone I’ve ever spoken to about a solution here, you’ll get the Chris Badgett: business. It’s as simple as that. I love that framework. Can you dig in a little bit on why these people would want to join? What’s their motivation to join the group as you’re going there and you’re sussing out these eight factors. But why, what compels them to opt in and join the group? Like, why do they want to join a group, a Facebook group? Caleb O’Dowd: You can rest assured that like a lot of the the reason why they would be interested is inherent. In the niche itself. So if you are if you wanna lose weight, if you are a prospect in the diet niche, you’d be very interested in joining a group that you know is going to be a educational slash support group on how to lose weight. If you are a coach or a consultant, you would be very interested in joining an educational slash support group that would teach you all about how to generate clients and become a successful coach or consultant. And it goes on along those lines. Depending on the nature of the niche, I will just create a very simple land. It just talks about hey, putting together a community of dieters, we’re putting together a community. Coaches were putting together a community of affiliate marketers, whatever dog owners, Labrador, dog owners, and going to be sharing a lot of like secrets and tactics and strategies, which I do. It’s not just about getting them in there and asking them a bunch of questions about getting them in there, educating them and giving them value. Supporting them, finding out what’s the challenges that they’re having, like getting into dialogue a lot of the, challenges that I see with struggling marketers on the internet, whether you’re a coach or, whatever it may be, we’re all internet marketers at some level, one of the biggest challenges that I see, and maybe said another way, one of the biggest holes in everybody’s game is just how disconnected we are from understanding the people that we serve. If you’re not having, especially early on, if you’re not having, if you’re not entering into daily dialogue with your prospects and potentially customers, if you have them, then how in how would you expect to to, know enough about the people you serve to. So it’s about getting into conversation, it’s about jumping on Facebook lives, jumping on zoom calls asking questions, sharing value, getting into dialogue as the more dialogue you can get into with your prospects and customers, the more empowered you will be to succeed, because you can rest assured that the vast majority of people on the internet Fact, vast majority of marketers do not do this stuff. And that’s why the vast majority of marketers really don’t make a lot of money and they don’t grow businesses that are very successful. It’s because they’re entirely disconnected from who their their, customers are. I don’t want to harp on too much about this, but I have a really, good, short little story to emphasize the power of this here. I had a client. Who got into this was a few years back, got into the paleo diet niche and built up this Facebook group and was attempting to sell paleo related foods on Amazon as an affiliate and no one was buying. Came to me and he was like, I just can’t figure it out. Like I built this group. It’s a paleo diet group. Paleo dieters need to eat paleo foods. I’m like promoting paleo foods. No one is buying the paleo foods. Like I just can’t figure it out. And I said why do you think that they’re why do you think they want to buy paleo foods? And he’s it’s obvious around the paleo diet. Paleo dieters need to eat paleo related foods. You can’t eat non paleo related foods and be on the paleo diet. I said, look the answer here is you need to get into dialogue with these people. And I empowered him with a, like a whole bunch of questions there and reported back in a couple of weeks and he was like, Oh man, you’re never going to believe it. I said, what? He said, they’re all brand new to the paleo diet. They’re not even on the paleo diet. They’re wanting to learn. What is the paleo diet? They don’t even know what it is. I targeted a group of beginners that don’t even they, want to be on the paleo diet, but they don’t know anything about it. They don’t know what foods they should be eating. They don’t know how the diet works in particular. And I said, wow, that’s very insightful because of course they’re not going to buy paleo foods. If they don’t even know what foods they should be eating, they don’t even know what paleo meals they should be eating. And this is a story that is representative of so much marketing that’s going on these days. People have assumptions. They make assumptions. They think, Oh, this is what I project to be the reality of what this other person is thinking, what this other person is going through, but the prospect on the receiving end of your advertising and your marketing and your strategy is like, what is this person talking about? This is not relevant to me at all. And you really have to. You really have to get past that. You really have to get clear on who your prospect is, what’s going on with them, so that you’re aligned with and talking about and offering solutions to exactly what it is that they really need. And I can tell you that This stuff gives the inexperienced marketer a competitive advantage over very experienced marketers, because even the very experienced marketers don’t actually have a lot of this information. And this stuff matters more than a lot of the other stuff, like a lot of savvy marketers have bells and whistles and everything looks great and everything, but actually you can. You can compete with those guys if you focus in on this stuff. If you get to know your prospect intimately and you take the time to deeply understand with great clarity those eight things. Because the conversation that you will have with your prospect, once you know those eight things, your words will land like lightning in the hearts and souls of the people you’re communicating with. And you can rest assured that no other competitor’s words in the niche will land as powerfully as Chris Badgett: yours. Amazing. Whoever’s closest to the customer wins as I like to say. Fabulous. Same. And the, other thing of you know, don’t build the product you want to build. Like it’s for them, it’s all about them. It’s not about you and your experts. Exactly. Whatever, . Caleb O’Dowd: Exactly. I love it. We’ll come back Chris Badgett: to marketing. I want to come go shift over to product a little bit. Yeah. So like high ticket offer construction. Let’s imagine that we’ve. We know the seed inciting thing that wants them to join this niche or, get involved in this niche. We figured out their dilemma. We’ve got their their pleasure, their desires or wants their needs and their fears, frustrations, and problems figured out. And we have a short offer statement, like an elevator pitch. Like I held this type of person overcome this pain and achieve this. Outcome. How do we build a high ticket offer? Something that’s over five or $10,000 a year or whatever versus a $30 course or a hundred dollars course or a thousand dollars course. Like what? How do we construct the high ticket version? What would be in it? Caleb O’Dowd: Yeah it boils down to really like the, if you can imagine there’s a line from left to right, and that line is the journey from where your prospect is right now on the left painville, as an example, and all the way on the right is solutionville. So the more money you charge, there’s many ways to think about this. And what I’m about to say is most certainly not the definitive way of, thinking about this, but it is a very powerful way to think about this that, absolutely creates incredible solutions. And that is the more money you charge, the faster. Your offer should get them from where they are paying bill to solution bill number one, and the more money you charge, the less responsibility should be placed on your customer’s shoulders, and the more should be placed on your own. So I’ll give you a great example of this. I have an offer where I teach people how to get high ticket clients using short I call them mini groups. These are Facebook groups that they’re just alive for 12 days. They exist for 12 days, they’re switched on and then they’re turned off. And during that period of time, all kinds of wizardry takes place that acquires high ticket clients. So I could create a 500. I could create a book. Okay. I could create a book, sell it for 7, 10, 20 bucks, and it would tell you the strategy I could then charge 500 for a video training that would show you essentially how to go and implement this all on your own. Then I could create a two and a half thousand dollar or a three thousand dollar six week group coaching training program that would not only show you how to go and implement it, but actually give you the support. That you need all of the Q and a all of the problem solving on live calls that you need in order to assist you in implementing yourself. I could then I could then create a solution where I would charge you 5000. whereby you get your own mentor that will like jump on the phone and be available to you each week and guide you through the process of on a one to one basis, implementing it yourself. Or else I could go and charge you 000 and I would have my team of people do it all for you. So the difference between the book versus the 10 or 20, 000 completely done for you service is the book. It’s 100 percent your responsibility to take action. On the book. It’s your responsibility. It’s entirely up to you. You’re left alone. You got to figure it out. You got the information. No more for me. The 000 solution. It’s entirely on me. I’m going to build it for you. Going to get you there in the fastest time possible. I’m going to remove all of the risk, all of the commitment, all of the obligation from your shoulders, and I’m going to apply it on my own. I am going to, I’m going to take it on board myself. So that is one kind of linear way to think about it. Creating your own solutions there. And the various different types of, price points that you can and should charge for various degrees of service and solutions there. That might not always be relevant to a lot of different people, but if you go niche by niche, the answer can it can change radically. Based on what’s being sold, but at least that’s a good kind of general guideline. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s come back to marketing. What is multi channel marketing? Caleb O’Dowd: Multi channel marketing is essentially this concept that. The more ways that you have to communicate with the people you serve, the more penetration, the more attention you can gather around your advertising, but also the more importance that you can assign to your message. So let’s just talk about what is multi channel marketing. Multi channel marketing is essentially. different modalities, different ways in which you can get in contact with your tribe. So you can have an email list. If you have a thousand people on your email list, as an example then you send them an email. Really good result is that you might get 200 of those thousand people, 20 percent to open your email. If you’re promoting an offer, then out of that 200 people who opened your email, maybe let’s just make it up. Maybe 50 people saw your actual offer. So out of, from an email perspective, 50 people saw your offer. Okay. So that’s, if that’s all you had, then you just had 50 people see your offer. Now let’s say you send them an SMS. Now, 70 percent of people will potentially open your SMS, maybe that’s 700 people open your SMS, maybe now 200 people of the 200 of those people will go through and see your offer. So now you have 250 people that have seen your offer. Let’s say you had all of their home addresses. Let’s say you took. Your offer, put it into a, printed direct mail sales letter and you mailed it to their homes. Now you have essentially 900 people that would open that and directly see your offer. So now you’ve essentially got, because of multi channel marketing, you started off with 50, but now you’ve gotten your message into the hands of 900 people. So now because of multi channel marketing, you’ve gotten a much greater reach and it’s just three channels we use. Many channels. We use ringless voicemail, direct mail, outbound telephone calls, SMS email chat we use I can’t even think of the model. We use loads of them so that anytime we promote something. Chris Badgett: Social media as well, of course. Social Caleb O’Dowd: media. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Retargeting unit. So now when we promote something, not only are we getting maximum reach into our audience beyond the scope of what a single channel could get us. We’re getting our offer into the hands of the maximum quantity of people in our audience. But because we’re coming at them from so many different ways, they get an email, then they get an SMS, then they get a phone call, then they get a voicemail left on their answering machine. Then our ads are following them around the internet. Then when they go online, our Facebook posts is there then they go to and we’re everywhere. So what happens is people start to realize is this compounding effect. Oh my gosh, this is really important. Very few people understand that just how difficult it is to penetrate a person’s mind. Somebody might open an email, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve paid one bit of attention to anything you said in that email. That doesn’t mean that they have paid attention, that they’ve read it, that they even know what you’re talking about. So if you come at it from all of these various different ways. You’re hitting people at different times in different ways when they have different levels of attention span and there’s this compounding nature to it. And as a result, it’s been definitively and unquestionably proven. To be more effective by multitudes of response to do this stuff. And I feel like more so than any other time in history, it’s more needed now than ever before, because the level of advertising is particularly on the internet. Is so astronomically high that people are literally just becoming immune to it. Just like furniture in your living room. You just don’t pay attention to it anymore. It’s there, but you have, you’re just so accustomed to it that you don’t even pay attention to it anymore. That’s what advertising has become on the internet. So a lot of what we’re doing here is we’re trying to get people in many ways off the internet. You send somebody. If you, excuse me, if you send a direct mail sales letter to somebody, it’s a very different experience than an email you have to, somebody has gone to their letterbox, they’ve picked something up. It’s tactical. It’s visceral. They’re holding it and they’re looking at it. And they’re involved in the experience. That’s very different to seeing a retargeting ad or getting an email on the internet where it is like a hundred flashing things going on, same with a a post on social media or something trying to get impact with people and that’s really what multi channel marketing is to me. We use multi channel marketing to optimize our customer acquisition to optimize our customer monetization and to acquire customers in a multitude of different ways, because we have just literally found that to be significantly by many. multitudes greater than doing it any other way. Chris Badgett: A quick tactical question for you, Caleb, how do we get the phone number and particularly the, mailing address, the direct, or the to put a letter in the mail, how do we get those things? Caleb O’Dowd: Phone number is very easy. It depends how you are acquiring leads as an example. But a lot of what we do, it’s interesting I moved away from lead magnets because they used to be for me very ineffective. And all of these years later, I’m now back using lead magnets because they’re the most effective. And it’s not that the lead magnet is effective in and of itself. It’s that how I use the lead magnet is very powerful. And that’s a great potential. I don’t know how much time we have here, Chris, but that’s a very interesting topic. That’s time. We’ll go there. I use lead magnets to acquire leads and on the opt in I give people the opportunity to give me their phone number to have the lead magnet delivered to their phone so that they can read it on their phone. And I get about 86 percent of people giving me their telephone number that way. I how to get someone’s direct mail. Primarily I only want. A buyer’s home address. I only want a buyer’s home address. A lead is not qualified enough for me to invest in sending them a direct mail package, but a buyer is. And one of the things that we teach people to do is anyone who buys from you. Send them a gift and usually what we do is we gift them like a hat. And so if you buy something from me on the confirmation page there’d be a little box. Hey surprise gift. We want to send you we want to send you like a really cool hat and a really nice welcome aboard package and enter your address there. We will then. Follow up on email with that. We usually get again, interestingly enough, about 86 89 percent of people giving us their home address. We don’t need to do that. The only reason we do that because we capture their home address anyway on the order form. The only reason we do that is because we want to confirm their mailing address. is the same as perhaps maybe their billing address. But anytime someone orders from you, you should capture their address so that you have it. And then what we do is we send them a little package with a hat in it. In my case, the hat says alchemist, and I have a little one page letter that talks about hey, what you’re about to discover here for me is, the fine art of alchemy taking raw materials and turning it into gold. And I have this really nice letter and along with that hat and that little welcome letter is an eight page sales letter that sells them on my, like my highest level service. That is extremely powerful and extremely effective. And from that point forward, then I have their home addresses. Chris Badgett: Let’s go back into the lead magnet. You left them, you’re back, tell us how you use them. And you’ve got a great one on your site at multichannelmarketing. com. I was looking at that as you were talking, I saw how you get the email and the phone number. Caleb O’Dowd: That is, that’s a very different type of lead magnet per a completely different strategy. But the, cold traffic. advertising strategy for acquiring leads that I employ. I figured out a long time ago. And again, another major discovery for me and everything that we do here is that not everyone in the niche is a buyer. Very important thing for everybody to understand. It might seem obvious, but it’s, the devil is in the detail. I would go as far as saying that perhaps nine out of 10 people in the niche are non buyers. They’re either never going to buy, or they’re just not in a mentality right now. So, important for you to understand that because a lot of people, how they generate leads is they go out and they cast the widest net. They try and get everyone back in and the metric that they use to measure their success is cost per lead. And if you’re getting a really low cost per lead, you’re doing great. And if you’re getting a high cost per lead, you’re not doing great. That’s that’s really the wrong way to go about it. What I figured out is that it’s really only about 10 percent of people in your niche that are ready to buy now. That’s the only quantity of people that I want to pay money to make my offers to. I only want the 10 percent of people who have two things. Number one, they have the money. And number two, they have the intent to spend it. So if I only target people who have money in the intent to spend it, and that’s the only people that I bring into my business and present my offers to and no one else, then the likelihood of me generating sales skyrockets, absolutely skyrockets. My conversion rates go through the roof. So the question then becomes then how do you use lead magnets to essentially do two jobs. Number one, I view it as like the bouncer at the door you want to, keep the riff raff out and you want to let all the cool kids in. So I look at my lead magnets in that way. I want my lead magnet to do two things. I want it to exclusively attract people with money and the intent to spend it. On exactly the type of solution that I’m looking for that I have to offer that’s job number one and then job number two. I want that lead magnet to repel everyone else. And how I do that within my world is I do it essentially around three. strategies. Number one I do it around a financial qualifier. I actually I’m using this example lately because it’s just such a brilliant example, but I do the same just in a different way. There’s a marketer out there who teaches people how to invest in luxury watches. And his ad says, if you have 5, 000, a smartphone and you live near a post office, I can show you how to invest in luxury watches. And essentially what he’s done is he said, this offer is only for people that have 5, 000. If you don’t have 5, 000, then no point signing up. Because this is completely irrelevant to you. So the people that are broke, the people that don’t have any money, the people that don’t have an intent to spend or invest 5, 000, they’re not signing up for that, but the guys that have 5, 000 that have the intention to invest it and are interested in the topic, those people sign up and not only do those people sign up, they sign up with a buyer mentality. They’re saying, yeah, I’ve got five grand and I’m willing to invest it in. In learning how to invest in luxury watches. So when that guy makes an offer, I’ll show you how to invest in luxury watches, and here’s how much it costs, that person is significantly more likely to buy. That’s a financial qualifier. I use financial qualifiers in almost everything I do to acquire leads. I’m always teaching people how to make financial investments and get a return on those on that financial investments. Therefore, anyone that I attract into my tribe is somebody. Who has agreed that they have that money to make that financial investment. So now I’m targeting, I’m only making my offers to people that have that money, have an interest in what I have to offer and therefore have an intention to purchase. And my conversion rates go through the roof doing that. And yes, it’s true. My cost per lead is a little higher. But my conversion rates are massive in comparison to what they are. If I’m getting leads for two bucks a pop and no one is buying I also I tend to target people who clearly have money like I have a client who is gives investment advice and we talked about the very best prospect for that person for him to target. And the very best prospect for him to target is accredited investors. So if you create a lead magnet targeting accredited investors is someone that has significant disposable income to invest. So if you’re targeting someone who Like it’s evident that person has money and because they’re accredited investor and they’re interested in making investments with the money that they have, then if you create a lead magnet specifically targeting those people, then of course you’ve got someone who has money and the intent in this case to investors. Again, conversion rates go through the roof. The third way that I come at this is depending on the niche. Like I’ll give you a really great example. The weight loss niche. Weight loss niche is a vast niche and a tremendous amount of those people are not buyers and, or else tremendous amount of those people just don’t really don’t have the money or they’re on lower income. They’re in a lower income bracket. So can’t really target them. You can’t like it doesn’t make sense to target like a rich overweight person, so to speak and it doesn’t make sense to use a financial qualifier to target them either. In that case, what we do is we say, look, what is it that we know that these people are spending money on? What do we know for sure that these people are spending money on? We definitely know as an example that they’re buying weight loss supplements. We know that for sure, We can. It’s a billion dollar industry. If you go to any Walgreens, any CVS, weight loss pills one of the biggest selling health supplement categories in the planet. So we know. that dieters are buying weight loss supplements. We also know that dieters are buying diet books because we just know, it’s again, one of the biggest selling book categories on the planet is, diet books. So if we’re to create lead magnets around a diet pill, as an example I have an example of a lead magnet. That the, whole concept for the lead magnet is the number one most highly rated weight loss diet pill for brides to be who need to lose weight on time for their special day. So anyone who signs up for that? Yeah, that’s a buyer, right? That’s someone who says, I want a diet pill. I know diet pills cost money. I have that money and I have the intent to buy it. So now that person, you’re not attracting a prospect. You’re not attracting any old person. You’re attracting a buyer, someone who has buyer intent. So I moved away from lead magnets long ago because I was doing the whole checklist. Yeah, checklists are good, just not for this. They’re good for I use checklists, as in the website there, but it’s, for warm traffic. It’s for people that are warmed up in that case. What I’m trying to do is capture the most amount of warmed up people humanly possible, but that’s a very different strategy to going after a cold lead that doesn’t know me from Adam. So when I’m going after a cold lead that doesn’t know me from Adam. I only want to have people who have the money and the intent to spend it. I only want people with buyer intent and the cash to buy joining my my email list. Is that a very long winded response there? Chris Badgett: I like that. We’re running out on time, but I would love to get your thoughts quickly on just some ideas around closing these leads. Maybe just coming out together with a strategy we can do like sales letters, we can do calls, we can do webinars, but at a high level, what do we need to do to close these qualified leads that we’re getting? Caleb O’Dowd: Everything. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Multi channel closing. Caleb O’Dowd: Everything. The thing about it is, that marketing. Is not an event. It’s a never ending parade. And you’ve got to be relentless. You’ve got to be relentless. Chris Badgett: What’s the name of your book? Is it out yet? Or it’s almost out. Caleb O’Dowd: It’s not out yet. It’s not out yet, but it’s, coming here shortly, but we’re recording this August of 23. Chris Badgett: So if you’re watching this later, it might be out. It’s relentless, but go ahead. Caleb O’Dowd: So the, whole idea is that. You must understand that the vast majority of people are not paying attention to anything you’re doing, and therefore you need to hit them, you need to hit them with a VSL, you need to hit them with a webinar, you need to hit them with a free report that goes to a video sales letter you need to, we do mini groups, you need to get them into mini groups, you need to send them direct mail you cannot view your marketing as an event. It’s not any one thing. It’s a collection of repeated attempts. So as long as you are like, I have never ever, seen money problems with stand the relentless onslaught of offer making. So you must understand if you’re not making offers, you’re sinking. The more offers you make, the more different ways you reposition what you’re doing the more ways you deliver your sales message, the more money you’re going to make. It’s as simple as that. You’ve got to have a relentless attitude. There is there’s no one thing. Of course we could talk about any one of those things, but, you know what you want and I’ll tell you something from enormous like experience as well been doing this for 19 years the what you want is a is an automated. Monetization machine so that every time someone joins your tribe, they go through at a minimum, 90 days of automated offer making. You’ve got emails going out, SMS is going out. Think of it as an auto responder. You’ve got to have, you need to be making offers. Every day, every week, because if you’re not, and you need to be doing it via giving value, it’s not just about relentlessly and aggressively advertising to people. That’s not it at all. You need to be giving value, giving solutions, making offers, being cool, building a relationship, fostering a bond with the people that you serve, but constantly selling all the time. Because if you’re not doing that you can rest assured that your people are buying from someone else. Chris Badgett: Let me ask you a question from our audience here that’s live on the call. Angela, who’s a LifterLMS customer. She helps house cleaners start and grow their company. She has a huge YouTube channel, but she’s asking when you say relentless marketing, are you talking paid or organic? I know she’s really good at organic through YouTube. I’m not sure what her situation is with paid traffic, but what do you recommend in terms of a mix between organic and paid? Caleb O’Dowd: I do very little organic and almost exclusively paid. So Chris Badgett: when you see somebody who’s, good at organic marketing, what do you think, or do you see like, missed opportunity on the paid side or what do you see? Caleb O’Dowd: I see first of all. It’s fabulous. There’s there’s if you’re doing organic traffic and you’re succeeding and you’re growing your business and you’re making good money, then there ain’t nothing wrong with that. You’re kicking arse and taking names. Right now, with that said, you. What you can accomplish in a year with organic traffic, you could probably accomplish in a month with paid traffic at a tenth of the effort. So it requires the same level of blood, sweat, tears, savvy, and trial and error to make organic traffic work as it does to make paid traffic work. I really don’t. You’re, talking to somebody and the question is Hey, what do you like more apples or oranges for me? I like apples more. I like paid traffic more because paid traffic is scalable. It’s reliable. I’m in total control of my own growth. I’m not an organic traffic person, but that doesn’t mean that there’s a problem with organic traffic. If you’re smart, smarter than me, you would have organic traffic and paid traffic working for you. But most certainly paid traffic is where I choose to specialize. I have a lot of experience doing that. And you want to be acquiring customers in multiple channels, but once you have prospects and customers in your ecosystem in your business, you want to be making those people relentless offers just more and more offers. That’s really what it’s all about. At the end of the day, this business, if you can take a page and draw a line down north to south on the page title, the left column acquisition title, the right column monetization, internet marketers have completely and utterly forgot about monetization. They think the entire business is all about acquisition. But where all of the money is, in the monetization. It’s in making repeated offers to new and existing prospects and customers. You will make significantly more profit by making more and more offers to existing prospects and customers than you will on acquiring new customers, so internet marketers have forgotten all about monetization. They’ve forgotten what it’s like to Fully monetize an email list and fully monetize an audience and make relentless offers to those people. Because that’s where all the money is. You make very little money acquiring the customer, if any money at all, but you make a lot of money monetizing existing customers and prospects. Chris Badgett: Significant. I love the saying my friend Dan Martell says you get bored of your marketing before your market ever does. So just because you’ve made the offer a million times or. Several times doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be making it all the time. Caleb O’Dowd: I, was speaking at webinar con last, I don’t know, anyway, a while back. And I used the case study there. I created an offer, wrote a VSL, mailed it to an email list that I have. I made 150, 000, I repositioned that exact same offer. 12 more times and generated 1. 9 million in doing so. The 12th time, I made the exact same offer, just repositioned. I made more money the 12th time than I made the very first time. Chris Badgett: Which is counterintuitive. Yeah, that’s awesome. Completely Caleb O’Dowd: counterintuitive. Now I repositioned that offer. It started with a VSL. I then turned it into a webinar. I then turned it into a free report that went to a VSL. Then I did a mini group around it. Then I made a direct mail package around it. So I, I repositioned and represented that offer in new and unique ways so that it was 12 unique. Presentations of precisely the same offer, but this idea that you need 101 products to build out a back end. It’s not true at all. Chris Badgett: One quick question from Angela is if she’s new to paid traffic, which platform in 2023 is the best platform to put your money on it? And she’s on YouTube and she’s serving house cleaners. Small business owner, house cleaner types. Caleb O’Dowd: It’s, a combination of two things. Number one, it’s a combination of what the first and most important. is you, go where your, people are. I don’t know anything about house cleaners. I actually had a discussion with my wife. My wife was like, I can’t believe how busy house cleaners are where we live. You need to go where the house cleaners are, wherever they’re hanging out. If it’s Facebook or YouTube or somewhere else, that’s where you need to go. And the second answer. Then is you really, it’s about figuring out your speciality if you’re really good with video and you’re really comfortable being on video, then, and YouTube is where you can find all of your your, cleaners. And that’s a great place. I specialize in Facebook, but we do YouTube. We do plenty of various different traffic sources. We do a lot of JV and stuff. I love Facebook for my niche. I just find it to be the fastest, simplest, easiest way to drive traffic. So you, Facebook is my go to. For my particular niches, but it’s really about first and foremost, where is your prospect best reached? And from there, then it’s about getting clear on do you have any specific. Skills that lend themselves better to one platform versus the other. Chris Badgett: She’s already crushing it on YouTube organically. They probably start there and there might be a, some experimentation on Facebook as well. Yeah. Caleb O’Dowd: Yeah. Yeah. If you’re getting your customers and your prospects from YouTube and that’s working for you, then that’s where you should double down on. Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s Caleb O’Dowd. He’s at multichannelmarketing. com. Go check out the website. Any other ways for people to connect with you and, things they should know about you before we go? If Caleb O’Dowd: I don’t know what they should know about me, but if this was enlightening, then you can join my tribe and hear more of my mess on multichannelmarketing. com. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for coming on the show, Caleb and dropping. Thanks so much for having me, Chris. Caleb O’Dowd: Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over 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 What Makes People Buy Courses with Caleb O’Dowd appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Morgan Gist MacDonald covers a variety of topics related to content development. On the basis of long-term interests and market demand, she highlights how crucial it is to decide whether to write a book or create a course. Morgan Gist MacDonald is an entrepreneur, investor, author, and the Founder & CEO of Paper Raven Books. The have a self publishing guide as well: https://paperravenbooks.com/ready Morgan also highlights the need of systematic content preparation, which begins with a list of ideas from a brain dump that may be subsequently efficiently arranged. She advises using a linear strategy when it comes to content organization, especially for book chapters, to maintain a logical and sequential flow. Morgan advises using narrative, quotations, true tales, ideas, and practical strategies to engage your readers and make your material more accessible and interesting. You may also find market gaps and make sure your work delivers a distinctive and worthwhile perspective by investigating comparable titles in your field. 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 LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Morgan Gist McDonald. She’s from Paper Raven Books. We’re going to nerd out today on creating books, how to figure out what to write about, the writing process, editing, publishing, launching. It’s going to be awesome. If you’re creating courses, you’re perfect material to also create a book. If you haven’t already, like most people, you probably have a book inside of you and it’s, you just need a little help getting it out. Morgan, welcome to the show. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Chris, super excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to dig in with you today.  I’m going to, the first question is going to be a hard one because there is no correct answer. But what do you think is harder writing a book or creating a course? Morgan Gist MacDonald: People ask me that question a lot too. Okay. I know I want a book and a course. Which one should I do first? And I will admit I’ve done it both ways with folks. I’ve personally, I wrote the book and then I created a course. But we’ve definitely worked with folks who already had a course and they wanted to use the book to, to get the most of the content out to folks and then bring people. Into the course you can do it either way for folks who think in terms of PowerPoint slides for some reason, you open up PowerPoint or keynote and you start rearranging slides like that might be where you start, but then you can use that same. Structure for a book and then instead of talking it out, you’re really writing it out. And gosh, we could, if people want to talk about how to use ChatsGPT or things like that to help just get a lot of words on the page. That’s certainly much more doable these days than when I started 15 years ago. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us about, before we get into the writing process and everything, tell us about Paper Raven Books. What is it? Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. So we are a self publishing services company, which means we help people to truly self publish such that they have You know, the rights to all of their intellectual property, the books are in their accounts, so they have the legal access to everything. And then the royalties go straight to them. So there are a lot of publishing companies out there that just they say they’re self publishing, but they put the. Authors book files into their own accounts. And so for us, it’s really important that we’re helping folks to truly self publish so that you can set it up on Amazon sales on demand. You can set up your own book funnels, print your own books, fulfill your own books or even get them into bookstores. So all of those options are possible for you with this kind of method. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Go to paper raven books. com. I was there. I was looking at the books and I started scrolling and it just kept going. There’s a lot. You guys have helped a lot of authors publish a lot of books, both fiction and nonfiction. I was really impressed. And then I went and I looked up some of the books on Amazon and they had a lot of reviews. Like I was like, that’s what, so I’m like, all right, this is cool. And like niche topics, like really niche specific topics, which I think that’s really the last part of the process is launching and getting reviews, but let’s start at the beginning. When somebody is an expert is trying to focus in on a topic and their body of knowledge and their life’s work, even how do they figure out? Whether they’re creating a course or creating a book, what’s marketable, what’s the market, where can they make profit?  How can they be intelligent? Cause once you commit, you’re committed, but how do you gauge that demand or help focus the topic? Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. So I would say a little bit more broadly is for you personally, as. The author, the course creator, like, where do you want to go in the future? Like when you think about what you’re building, what you’re creating now, and you fast forward three years, five years, is this still what you want to be talking about?  And the reason that I even bring that up is because I talked to a lot of folks who they have lived through something and feel some kind of like obligation. To write out their expertise are like, Oh I figured out how to do Six Sigma project management. So I should write a book on that so that I never have to talk about it again. I’m like as the author of a book and the creator of a course, you’re probably going to be. talking about this topic for kind of years to come. Let’s face forward and where do you want to be going? And a lot of times just that conversation will help people decide between two pads. So then, okay, we’re face forward. We know we want to be talking about this topic. Generally speaking I would say For anyone who’s doing the whole like blogging thing and course creation, y’all know about Google keywords, right? That’s nothing new how to go into the Google keyword planner and put in keywords and figure out what people are searching for on Google and there are similar. Software is for Amazon because users actually use Amazon differently than they do Google. And so for instance, there’s publisher rocket is a software by Dave Cheston that we use that helps you to see what are people searching for in the Amazon bookstore specifically, not just amazon. com. But when they’re in the bookstore, maybe they’ve clicked on a book title and now they’re technically in sort of the Kindle store or the bookstore and they’re using that search bar. What are they searching for? That can at least help you say, okay, these are folks who they’re looking for something about this topic. And then the other thing that we always want to look at is comparable titles which is just the publishing word for other books that are selling and authors are often really, or before. Writers who are going to be authors we’re often really nervous about reading other people’s books because they’re like, Oh what if somebody already wrote the book that I want to write? And so I’ll we’ll often do is we’ll gather five comparable titles and we’ll say, look, this is these are some books that are around the same topic that you want to be writing about. They’re selling pretty well again, publisher rocket that software I mentioned, you can see sales data they’re selling, a thousand bucks a month in ebook sales or 2000 bucks a month in ebook sales, read them read them, see what they’re talking about. Look at the table of contents. And 99. 999 percent of the time the author’s Oh, there’s a whole chunk of information that this book didn’t talk about that. I would definitely talk about, or my story is totally different than their story. And so it, it ends up being that you want to be in a market where people are already selling. This kind of product. But you guys talk about that in relation to, of course, creation too, right? You don’t want to be the only weird person who is talking about this totally niche thing. You want to sit in a market where there’s already people who are making money with this with this type of market, this type of topic. Chris Badgett: We’ve got our topic. How do we chunk the outline? It seems like it’s so critical. And for somebody who’s not experienced in instructional design or whatever the writing equivalent of that is, how do you chunk down an outline out of the writer’s Morgan Gist MacDonald: blockhead? Yeah. So I personally have never loved mind maps. I know a lot of folks really geek out on mind maps and for whatever reason I put together a mind map and I’m just more confused than when I started. And so how I developed methods, cause I was, I’ve been a writing coach for book coach for 15 years. I’m coming out of grad school. I was just working with folks in the trenches of writing books. And back in those days, self publishing was not nearly as popular. So we would write books and then just send them on to the publisher to, to get published. And so that’s where my origins really started. So it was a lot of time with authors. Staring at a word doc saying what are we going to write about? So the method that I ended up developing for myself, as well as for clients is let’s just sit down and just do like a brain dump list, like just no order, no organization. What are the things that you think might be included in this book? And just it can be bullet points or not bullet points. Like it doesn’t matter. Like at this stage, really just seeing what are all the ideas that we have going into this book? Because sometimes we think like when it’s all trapped in our heads, we think it’s going to be like thousands and thousands of ideas, and then when we actually start listing it out, we’re like, Oh.  This is it’s a lot it’s 115 kind of ideas, but now that I see them all on a list, I can rearrange them, group them together. And so that, that whole process, I call it a linear brain dump because we’re just. It’s a linear experience, top to bottom. And we’re really just reorganizing things and eventually this, I would recommend you spend a couple of days. You do the first sort of brain dump, take a break, come back, revisit. Is there anything else I want to add to this list? Okay. Take a break come back. Do I want to. Move the order around, put some of these in different sections or start to group them together, group like things with like things. And eventually what you’re creating from the ground up is is the structure. But instead of starting with chapter titles, we’re just starting with the raw material. All the stuff that I know I’m going to want to include in the book. And the reason I like it to be linear in this way is because the book is linear, right? A book is chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four. That’s just where it is. So we might as well start with that and just know that we’re going to be fashioning it into a linear experience. Chris Badgett: What about at the, like the less or not the lesson on the course creator at the chapter level?  Is there like a structure or I’m sure there could be lots of different structures there’s certain elements that could go with a nonfiction book chapter like Maybe a quote, maybe a story, maybe some theory and then some tactics or whatever. How do we, I found for me, writing is a lot easier if I have a, not what I’m going to talk about, but how I’m going to talk about it framework to follow. Is there any recommendations you have there? There Morgan Gist MacDonald: are some folks who will say, here’s your template. Every chapter needs to have a quote, an introduction to a story, your main argument or point or topic, and then revisit that story and then offer data to support that story. There’ll be people who have here are the five or six things that need to be. In every single chapter. I personally have not found that to actually I don’t know, Chris, you just said that before we hit record, you’re like, I just wrote a book. So I’d be curious to know how what worked best for you. And I think if someone were to come to me and say, okay, but I want to make sure that I’ve got principles or like frameworks, like the nonfiction gut material, plus stories from my.  Maybe they’re my case studies, maybe they’re my personal story plus data points. Like maybe that’s important for my book. I want to make sure I’ve got all these data points. Then the way that, again, I would approach it as then let’s just make lists of the things you want included. And for some people it’s quotes like let’s make sure we’ve got a huge list of quotes that you want included in the book, because what we’re going to end up doing is matching them up. together, right? And so it can be a little bit difficult to say I know chapter one is going to be about we already use nutrition. I know chapter one is going to be about macros. And so let me find a quote for macros and a story about macros and conceptual information about macros in that. I have most people who I’ve worked with that works fine for a few chapters, but you run out of steam and get frustrated in the process because you didn’t do the earlier work of, I got to dump all this out of my head and really just say, here’s all the. Pieces I want included in the book and then work the framework going up that way, which I don’t know, it’s to some extent like writing a book, they’re going to have different philosophies. We’re talking about a philosophical divide here. There are definitely folks in my space who are like, you need 16 chapters and each chapter needs six elements. And we’re going to do this over a three day event and now go write your book. I have just found that hasn’t necessarily worked for me or the folks who I tend to work with. And if y’all are here and you’ve tried the template formula and it didn’t work for you, I just want you to know you’re not weird. You just might need a different Chris Badgett: take at it. That’s awesome. I see it with course creators too. There’s it’s like different personality types, like somewhat like lots of structure. So I’m just like, just cut me loose on camera and I’ll do my thing or whatever. It’s a wide variety. I’m going to ask Morgan Gist MacDonald: you, Chris, I’m going to put you on the spot if that’s okay. Yeah. So you said that you took a sabbatical and wrote a book. Would you like to share with us a little bit of what your experience was? Chris Badgett: In terms of the structure and Morgan Gist MacDonald: stuff? Like at what point did you go into the sabbatical knowing you wanted to write Chris Badgett: a book? I did. And I didn’t spend, it wasn’t like a full time job. I traveled and spent, did a lot of other things too. But I think a lot of people have had the idea to write a book for a while, and they just never get around to it. I think like 2 percent of the books you see out there, there’s 98 other people who really want to write a book and for whatever reason it got in their way. But in my mind, I’m like, all right if I’m going to do it, like I’ve been thinking about it for almost a decade, I’m going to do it now. Yeah. So for me, just a little bit on the process I wanted, it’s about online learning and creating courses. That’s my niche and my subject matter expertise. I I like structure. I’m more on the structure end of the spectrum. So I’ve spent a lot of time on the outline like you I am a mind mapper, but what I try to do is once I get the mind maps out there and I’m like, that looks terrible, that’s disorganized, like what goes, so then I, and then I move it over, I move it from the right brain to the left brain. And now we’re like. Same for creating a course, same process for the outline or curriculum level. And for me, I was not, I wasn’t trying to write a super long book as minimalist in nature. It’s. I think it’s about 20, 000 words. I don’t know if that’s where that stands in my mind. I’m like, is that long enough? Oh, that’s Morgan Gist MacDonald: almost exactly what my book is. Oh, awesome. I think mine’s 22, something like that, but it’s a five by eight. If that helps you imagine it. Oh, Chris Badgett: nice. Yeah, that definitely helps. You just made me feel a lot better about myself. I’m like, Oh no, it’s too short. But for me, I wanted a little bit of a structure for the lesson so that I could just, I only had a limited amount of time and I, it helps me stay focused to have that. So I had I did have some quotes to go with each one. Personal story, customer story, principles, strategies, action steps, and I even a little drawing for each chapter that, you know, like a visual aid thing. Yeah, so that was it. And right now I’m in the editing process, but it was yeah, and it wasn’t a full time job for me. I found that thing where. I’ve heard writers say you can’t do it or some say you can’t do it like eight hours a day. You only have three certain amount of good hours for me that was around. I couldn’t really do more than four and three was even pushing it sometimes to really get in a zone and do that deep work. But how’s that for you? What do you think is Morgan Gist MacDonald: There have been folks who I’ve worked with that did it in very crunch time. Like Stephanie, stephanie Reinold was approaching having a baby and she owns a business and she was getting onto like early maternity leave. And it was like, I want this draft done before the baby comes. Like that’s a pretty extreme kind of circumstance. And she just chugged through and she got her first draft done and two weeks, but yeah, she was doing six, eight hours a day and it was the first draft. Then it moves through the editing phases that you’re experiencing. But I would say most of the people that I work with, like we’re all writing on the margins of life whether we are working or taking care of family or growing a business or maybe even full time authors. They’re marketing their first books they’re marketing the books that are already out and still trying to come out with the next book. So we’re all writing on the margins of life. I would say something like eight to 10 hours a week can get you a draft done in a couple months. That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s, if you’ve done the structure ahead of time, which you pointed to, I do agree spending a couple of weeks, really thinking about the structure, whether you’re going to go, if you already have a course, you’ve already got a lot of this thought out, you know the, what those, the lessons are more or less going to become chapters you’ve done that hard thinking already. If you don’t have a course on this yet, then maybe you want to start from the ground up and just mind map or list out all those ideas and let that structure emerge. But that’s going to take, I don’t know, a couple of weeks to really get solid and good on that. Now you begin writing. Yeah. I think something like two, three months is is very reasonable. Chris Badgett: And just to answer my question earlier, now that I’ve done the book thing a little bit, I think you make a better course if you do the book first, it really sharpens your thinking in a way that getting on camera, you can do that, but it’s just the book really forces you to get it perfect or at least closer to perfect.  You Morgan Gist MacDonald: spend more time thinking about it because you have to write every word, right? Chris Badgett: There’s no shortcuts or Morgan Gist MacDonald: yeah, or even if you’re feeding it through chat GPT to get some of that initial raw material, you’re still going to be rereading it, refining it. I want to say it this way, not that way. So there’s that mental clarification process and you will nuance your own frameworks because you’re thinking. And about it in a much deeper way. Chris Badgett: How should people use AI? I found myself at first, I was like I’m not going to just be like, Hey, AI, write the book for me. It was, but I found myself like, Hey, I need a quote that like is related to these three things. And boom, it gives me five. I’m like, wow, that’s awesome. Or. Hey, I’m having trouble saying this. I’m trying to say this and this, and I would write it in terrible English and then it would give me something and be like, I can work with that and I’ll let me make it half as long. And in my voice and all that, but how, what do you recommend? Yeah, Morgan Gist MacDonald: I like chat GPT for kind of a sounding board partner. In a lot of ways. So at the very beginning of the process, if you’re still working on your structure, you’re still getting your list together, which is going to become your outline you could even go to chat GPT and say, Hey provide a table of contents for a book about this topic. And just see if chat GPT comes up with something that you forgot. It’s Oh, I totally forgot to explain the difference between. Passive income and active income if you’re talking about real estate or something like that and so chat GPT might prompt you to maybe remember something that you didn’t think about.  And then, yeah if you get stuck on something, I think it’s very helpful to at least have chat GPT to go to and say, how would you explain this or come up with. Yeah, a quote or provide an article that references this idea and then ChatGPT can go and find some sources for you. Or if you’re like wording and rewording a paragraph and it just does not sound good, you can feed it through ChatGPT and just see if it gives you something else interesting. I have not really been seeing anything super compelling like. Come out of chat, GPT, the first go round, if you said, write a, I’ve seen people who are like, write a chapter about this and yeah, it writes 5, 000 words or whatever, but maybe not even that much, maybe it’s 1500 words, but it’s like not exciting writing. Relatively clear, grammatically correct, boring. So it’s a good sounding word, good research partner good if you get stuck. I just, I don’t, and obviously you can use it for proofreading later find any grammar errors, although I would use grammarly. For that but yeah it’s a good sounding board partner. Chris Badgett: Part of writing is like beginning with the end in mind with Oh, what do I want this book? What job does this book have to do for my business? And for course creators they probably want people coming to the website or Yeah. Going from the 7 book to the more expensive course or whatever. What’s, what have nonfiction authors do these days to really bridge that gap without being overly salesy, but at the same time using the book as a solid tool for their business? Yeah, Morgan Gist MacDonald: you definitely want to include at least one freebie in the book. And certainly you could do more if it would, if it felt helpful to the reader.  I always recommend putting a freebie in at the very beginning of the book. The first 10% because that’s where the Amazon look inside is. So if someone finds your book on Amazon, they click look inside. Amazon’s going to show them the first 10 percent of the book. And specifically this is going to get a little bit in the weeds.  But I would have a preface in the preface. I would put the freebie. In fact, in the table of contents, I would list Preface, Chris Chris Badgett: is Morgan Gist MacDonald: right, in the table of contents, Preface is the first thing in the table of contents, you provide the rest of the table of contents. And then the first section is Preface, where you’re giving them a free bonus. And the reason is, this is relatively recent. Amazon has changed its Look inside behavior such that as soon as you click, look inside, it takes you to the first section. As identified by the table of contents, so it skips all that front matter and gets you to preface definitely works. I think we’ve experimented with introduction would work. Author’s note would work. But I like preface because that gives you a little bit of space just to say, Hey. Reader. Here’s the amazing benefits you’re gonna get from the book. In fact, I have a free gift for you, snappy name for a free gift, and then a QR code. QR code that goes to the landing page with the free gift. And the reason for the QR code is because another recent Amazon change, they disabled the clickable link from look inside. However, I don’t think they can disable a QR code or at least not easily. So we’ve switched everyone over to QR codes in the preface, make sure the preface is in the table of contents. So you’re just using that Amazon traffic to try to build your list. Even if people don’t buy the book, you still want to get as many people as possible onto that email list. And then now you can follow up with all of your typical email marketing strategies. You can also You know include resources throughout the book. So like Chris, you mentioned there were like different drawings and diagrams. If you wanted to include a little QR code and say, Hey, would you like the full package of all the drawings and explanations, scan this QR code, take them to a page, you get an email address and say, we’re going to send you the full PDF guide of the visual guide of this whole process. And you could link that. Every chapter, if you wanted to, or where there’s a visual in each of the chapters. So fast fast action fast track companion course could be a good one. Any if your course is going to include any guided meditations or things like that you could include just the links to those guided meditations.  Any PDF workbook, I would just include it as a free workbook, a free guide companion companion guide, something like that throughout. Then you can reference that throughout the book. If you want Chris Badgett: pro tips right there, that’s awesome. Another hangup I just, I’ve seen in others and I see it myself.  Was I guess, concerns about plagiarism though, not directly. It’s more just I want to write this so that I don’t necessarily need to have footnotes. And I might mention I’m combining ideas and I might mention people and stuff, but at what point do you really need to like cite a source in a nonfiction book and have footnotes? Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. If you’re using a direct quote from someone, you would want to be able to cite that. It does not have to be a footnote on the same page. If you want it to be clear like a nice reading experience, the there could be a reason for you to drop a footnote and then you actually put it at the end of the book. Their end notes at that point that’s an option. Another a lot of people, they just want their name referenced. So if you’ve got an idea from someone and you say, Hey, I worked with so and so for years and this was a great idea. I should probably do that. I worked with Chandler bolt way back in the day. And we had a bunch of ideas for like freebies for books. Like you could reference it conversationally like that in a lot of. Like folks aren’t going to sue you if if you’re at least giving them credit in the book itself. But a specific quote, like if you are quoting their book or quoting their website or something like that just drop a footnote, but then put the reference at the end for end notes. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s say we made it over the hurdle of outlining and writing and we get to editing. There’s different types of editing. Like how would you describe I feel like when I write a blog post as an example, like I do like content edit and then I do A grammar edit, then I do an edit for SEO and I’ll have all these like layers that I have to go through for a nonfiction book. What are the layers of editing Morgan Gist MacDonald: that needs to happen? Yeah. So we would look at a developmental edit, which is the big structure are the chapters in the right order within each chapter are the sections in the right order. Does anything need to be rearranged, added to, or clarified or trimmed out? Cause it’s It’s maybe a bit of a rabbit trail. So those are our big three questions in a developmental edit. Same thing needs to be rearranged, added to, or trimmed out. So we’re just trying to get the content all we have all the content and it’s all in the right order. The next level of edit would be a copy edit or a line edit, depending on… Your vocabulary. They’re more or less the same thing. That’s when you’re starting to get into the wordsmithing. You’re going to go in paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. Does this sound good? Sentence variety. Do I use the same sentence structures over and over again? Is there more clarity that needs to happen because the way I explain this is a little bit fuzzy. So that’s copy edit or line edit. And then the third level kind of zooming in here is more word by word capitalization, hyphenation, italics, bold just consistency, internal consistency, punctuation, spelling, that kind of stuff. So a lot of times what we’ll do with authors is before we even jump into any level of edit we will do a manuscript review. Just to assess, just to do a read through all the way top to bottom, and then we can come back and say, okay, actually Chris, your structure’s really great. Here’s two things that we saw that you should you should adjust on the structure level. But after that, it’s ready to go into copy editing or whatever.  And the reason why we’ve found it’s important and why we recommend, even if you’re not working with our team, like whoever you work with, get a manuscript review. We’ve seen a lot of folks who they hire an editor And they don’t even know to ask the editor, like what type of edit are we doing? So you’ll bring an editor in and they’re going to charge you whatever thousands of dollars. And they are starting with a copy of it and you get it back. You’re like, wait, don’t we still have this other big Developmental question mark and they weren’t looking for it because they weren’t doing a developmental edit. So just using the word like editor is not really sufficient to know what level of editing they’re doing. So ask for a manuscript review and and then discuss with your editor, what makes sense developmental copy proof. Chris Badgett: The next part with the interior design. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Oh yeah. You’re like way in the weeds. Chris, this is fun. Chris Badgett: Oh, I have your website up. You should, you out there listening, go to paper, Raven books. com. Your publishing success program, like infographic is very is good. It’s wow, there’s a lot of value you guys add. And but it goes over the process of how it works, which is awesome. But what’s the, I guess book cover design. I think everybody gets, but the interior design, I think there’s probably a lot of gaps in knowledge out there. What happens with that? Yeah. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Cover design, we like to use 99designs. com. There’s a lot of platforms out there where you can just get someone to do a cover design for you, and then you want to use some of those elements from the cover in the interior. If your cover has typography, that is a lot of sans serif, let’s say where it’s like straight letters. There’s no little curvy decorations on the letters. It’s very modern usually. Then you want your interior fonts to also be more modern, right? You don’t want to use the big flourishes inside. For most people, you’re going to tend that way anyway, but just something to be aware of. A couple of softwares, if you’re DIY doing it yourself we really like Atticus, A T I C U S. Atticus is another Dave Chesson software that’s really good for formatting or the interior design. The other one is Vellum, V E L U M. And that’s Apple only, unfortunately, but it’s a really good kind of DIY interior design and it will help you find all of the elements and what decisions you should make on each element. Your chapter font is going to be an element. Maybe there’s a chapter main title and a chapter subtitle, need to be a font and they need to be positioned. Top of the page or bottom of the page, middle of the page or to the, in the corner you get to decide your spacing are you going to have tighter margins or wider margins?  How close to the edge of the page are you going to get? And then also the spacing between lines, how close together are the lines going to be or spread apart? And then character spacing. I don’t know if this is helpful for people or not. But I was going to, I can just show a quick picture. Like Chris Badgett: if you’re listening on the podcast, jump over to the LFTRLMS YouTube channel and you’ll see what we’re look for Morgan Gist McDonald. And you’ll find the video if we’re going to do a show and tell here. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yes. We were doing a show and tell. So y’all go ahead and pop over. Okay. So here’s, this is my book. So you can see there’s like a chapter title and then a little design element. And then there’s it really is just the chapter number written out. And then this is the, you can’t do this backwards. That’s the title itself. And then you got to think about like your, bullet points, like I put some extra spacing between bullet points. This is all about the writing the book process. So if you want to know more about that, you can grab your book’s name. Start writing your book today. Awesome. It is very straightforward. What are some other. Some of these things like for sections sometimes you can just start with a bolded sentence and that’s like the beginning of a section.  That’s a technique that helps with nonfiction sort of skimmability. Oh, the running heads. So the top of one page is usually the title or the chapter title. And then the top there’s a chapter title. So book title. chapter title. So we’ve got a lot of this actually. You, let me drop a link in the show notes. Cause we have, we just put together like a free overview of the like DIY publishing process. So if you guys are thinking about what’s even involved we just, we have a community in circle. That’s our kind of like. Learning platform. And so we just put together a free preview. So let me get you a link, Chris, for everybody so they can get that preview. And it has like the timeline and some of these tools that I’ve mentioned as well. Chris Badgett: Awesome. And I just want to. Agree with that strategy of when you give somebody like a full process and I’m particularly talking to you, agency people out there who are watching this, who build sites for clients, when you detail out your whole process, once somebody gets into it, they think they’re DIY and then they’re, then some of them will be like, wait a second, I think I just want to hire you to do it for me. It’s a really good strategy. So if you’re hung up on what to write about. Don’t be shy and just share your process. Cause it’s actually some of the best marketing you can do. Yeah. Morgan Gist MacDonald: It’d be good just for like meta. If people want to see what we’re doing for the free preview. Cause exactly what you’re talking about, Chris. Like we know that if we share here’s the 12 major. You’re going to go through and writing and publishing and marketing your book. Then we have a 15 page master checklist, every single little step. So again, this is in that free preview that we’re going to drop a link to in the show notes, but like you can just see how we’re doing it. And one, it’s helpful. Like we get a ton of questions about this stuff. And so now we can just point people to the free preview. And then, yes, to your point, like the folks who are out there shopping and looking around and who am I going to hire? Like they are probably going to hire the people who give them the best information and help them make the best decision.  Right on. On the same track as you. Chris Badgett: Can you gimme a quick tip on how to work with like pictures, little diagrams and stuff like that’s, it’s on an iPad now, but how does it end up in the book? Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah, so you do wanna create those as separate JPEGs or p and gs? Yeah. And then they get put into the formatting later. Yeah. So what we typically do is in the Word document or the Google document where the text is all the words are, we’ll just put like a little placeholder note. That’s this is going to be image 1. 1 or 1. 2 or 1. 3 make a naming convention there. And then we actually create each of the images separately. And I think for printing purposes, it needs to be something like 300 DPI, which I’m not. I’m not a formatter or a designer, so I don’t entirely know what that means. But certainly the software, as I mentioned, Atticus and Vellum will help you to make sure that those are of the highest quality. A lot of our folks will either design them inside of InDesign itself, or. Keynote or power note and PowerPoint can do them as well. Canva is a great software, but you just want to export those as individual images, put a naming convention on them. And then once you actually get to the formatting phase, you’re putting everything into Atticus or vellum or InDesign, that’s when you’re starting to slot them into the interior itself and you want to mostly wait anyway, because I mentioned when we first started, Chris, are these two different sizes? This is, nope, that’s another size. They’re different sizes. Sorry, stepped away. So here’s three different books, technically three different sizes, right? And so each page is going to be a little bit different width, a little bit different height. So I would not get super worried about it until you actually have something that’s like exactly five by eight with your bleed set and then start playing with the sizing and the layout. Chris Badgett: Awesome. And from the what’s the path from the interior design tool, like vellum or Atticus, is that what gives you the export that then goes into Kindle direct publishing? Yeah, exactly. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Exactly. Yep. So those softwares in particular will export for the ebook. And the paperback and the hardback although really most, most people choose to have the paperback and the hardback the same size it’s five inches by eight inches or six inches by nine inches are a standard size and so therefore you’re using the same PDF file. For paperback and hardback but yeah, you need a KPF file for Amazon and a PDF file for also Amazon or IngramSpark, but that’s getting into kind of a whole different tangent. Most folks were recommending Amazon, KDP for eBooks, KDP print for print books. They can do paperback, they can do hardback.  And then if you later want to add on bookstores Ingram spark would be who you’re looking at for a printer. Chris Badgett: How do you do audio books? Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. Audio books. So typically we’ve just hired narrators to do audio books. You can also do it yourself, especially if you already have like your mic set up and all that. You would want to still hire someone to do the editing of the MP3 files and you have to, each chapter is its own MP3 file. And then you upload everything into ACX for Amazon it is separate. It is a separate thing. It’s a separate, like ACX is its own login interface, but it indexes to Amazon such that you upload it to ACX, but then it populates on your. Amazon sales page. Chris Badgett: Awesome. We could go for three hours, but I gotta, Morgan Gist MacDonald: and you need a square, you need a square version of your cover for a c x for the player or whatever. Why it has to be square . Chris Badgett: What can you tell us about your five day online book launch process? What is that piece of the pie? Yeah, Morgan Gist MacDonald: so we have. Found that there’s a couple of things that you have to solve for very quickly when a book is launched. And the reason there is a bit of a time urgency on it is because when you upload an ebook specifically to the Amazon platform, you have about a 30 day honeymoon period where the algorithms crawling through the product page and trying to match who are the best types of folks to, to buy this book. And so what we’re doing is we want to. Set the keywords. This is very similar to any other Amazon product, right? You want keywords that people are searching for attached to your book. You want categories that your book can compete in. And it would be very nice if something like. 20 to a hundred sales. You can be number one in the category. That’s very helpful and visibility in the bookstore. And then the third thing is reviews. So getting reviews on the book as quickly as possible does help with overall visibility in the bookstore. So what we do is we get everything all set up and get the ebook files uploaded, we have the keywords, we have the categories. We have a launch team of people who are ready to leave a review on the book and we tell everybody, hold on, wait until X date. And for us, it’s five days. We say Tuesday through a Saturday Tuesday, August 8th through Saturday, August. Whatever. I don’t have a calendar up . Saturday, August 12th, right? And during those five days, we are sending a bunch of promotional traffic. We’ve set the ebook for free. We’re driving as many people through that sales page as possible in a short amount of time while our launch team is also leaving reviews. So we’ve told the launch team Tuesday, August 8th. Download that ebook. It’s free and leave a review. So we’re trying to get eyeballs onto that page as many conversions as possible. Even if they buy a free ebook, it’s still a conversion. And so you’re still going to pop to the top of those categories. You still if you hit a hundred or a few hundred free ebook downloads, you’re going to hit. Number ones and categories and your book launch team is downloading your ebook and leaving leaving reviews all at the same time. So we’re just like giving it a big push, a big lift in a 5 day window so that by the time that 5 days rolls off. We’ve driven thousands of people to that page. We’ve probably had hundreds, if not thousands of people download that ebook. It gives the algorithm what it needs to know who to show the book to. And we’ve got reviews stacked on. So we want to aim for at least 20 reviews in five days. Sometimes they don’t all come through at the same time. Like Amazon will hold them.  But still we’ve got enough to get that initial lift on the book. So that five days rolls off and now it’s being shown in the bookstore. Is the idea Chris Badgett: and is that during that first 30 day window or right after that? Yes. We, so it’s during that initial calling period. Morgan Gist MacDonald: We hold the ebook until we know we’re ready to commit to those launch dates. Awesome. So you can upload the paperback, upload the hardback, no problem. Those can be up and live and available for as long as you want. But hold that ebook, download or hold the ebook files and hit upload like about a week, seven to 10 days before your launch dates. And that way you’re getting to take advantage of that 30 day period Chris Badgett: and you recommend.  Making the ebook version at free at first to just maximize exposure and reach, which makes sense. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. There’s definitely different camps on that. Some people will say you should do a 99 cent ebook so that you’re hitting the number ones in like the paid store. But I haven’t found that Amazon particularly cares whether it was number one in the. Quote unquote free store or number one in the quote unquote paid store. Where the reason I came down on free is because we can get so many more conversions with free. Like for instance, scribe is a, I guess was a big competitor of ours and they always ran the 99 cent eBooks. And they would get. Maybe 150 to 200 downloads of the 99 cent ebook, which was enough to pop it up in the paid store. Whereas we will hit a thousand, 1500, 2000 ebook downloads, pop it up in the free store. And even after the promotion rolls off, it’s probably still selling. So it’s it might still sell in the paid store, but what we’ve just done is given it like. 10 X the number of conversions. Wow. You think about seasoning a pixel, that’s how we want to season a pixel with 1500, 2000 downloads would be ideal. So that’s how we think about it. Chris Badgett: We’re running up on time, but I want to ask you as we land the plane here, like what’s your advice just at a high level for evergreen marketing beyond the launch?  Do we do a podcast tour? Do we like how do we just. Not just launch it, have a bunch of excitement, but continually to drive traffic to it and give it some extra love after the initial launch. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. I want to share a perspective first and then some tactics that I really like. So a perspective, anytime you launch anything. It’s a spike and then it comes back down. That is pretty much the definition of a launch is you spike it and then it comes back down and it settles on a baseline. So what I recommend to our authors is every quarter, think about another promotional event or several promotions that you’re going to stack together to create that spike again. And then it will come back down and we’ll settle on a baseline and that baseline should be higher than the previous one. So we talk about the 90 day relaunch kind of rhythm. So every 90 days we’re thinking about relaunching for folks. I’m a little bit lazy about some of these things for me. It’s like at this point, I just set my ebook for free every 90 days. Algorithm brings some traffic through it. I get some free downloads and it pops the book back up and visibility. I did not mention earlier, but it would definitely be important for this long term sort of marketing strategy. Remember when we talked about getting people’s email addresses in the book, scan the QR code, provide your email address, and then you can give them the free thing. You could also follow up and ask for reviews. So give them the free thing. Seven days later, say, Hey, hope you loved the book. If you wouldn’t mind, please leave a review on Amazon. Here’s the link. To leave a review 21 days after that. Hey, hope you had time to finish the book. If you haven’t left a review yet, really love you really appreciate leaving a review. Here’s the link to leave a review. And what that means is every time that someone downloads a free resource from your book. So that’s a huge part of how myself and our authors continue to get reviews long after they launched their book is because every single time they do a promotion, they’re also getting more email subscribers, And more people seeing those emails asking them to leave a review. So I like to set my ebook for free every 90 days. I get a new influx of people and then more folks being asked to leave reviews and that sort of adds to the visibility. Just remember it’s always like a launch promotion event and it comes back down to a baseline. So we just want to keep launching and resettling on a slightly higher baseline. And that’s how we think about incremental growth over time. There’s a whole like. Backstory from the publishing industry about like, why people don’t talk about books this way. And it’s all because of the publishing industry machinery. Like they don’t promote backlists. They never have. It’s all about the new releases, but that’s totally the choice of the publishing company. The author keeps promoting their backlist, but publishing companies almost entirely focus on new releases and nothing else. But most of the authors that I work with, we sell more books. Now than we did the year before. So every year my book sells more like in 2023 than it did the years before. So it’s definitely possible to do the incremental increase. Some tactics that I like podcasts. I love podcasts. They’re so great for being able to, just like we’re doing now, Chris, right? Add value to your people and some folks will come and check out my book and that’s a great way to really. Build relationships with folks and serve and add value and get in front of potentially your good readers. I love podcasts, do as many of those as you can. And then I also really like book awards, which are a little overlooked, often forgotten. But the benefit of a book award is not just that you get the shiny sticker on your book, digital sticker, right? Because everything’s digital now. But. When you submit for a book award, even if your book doesn’t win, let’s say it’s a finalist, they’re still going to email their list and say, Hey, here’s all the finalists for this book award and the winners for this book award. And you’ll get an honorable mention, even if you’re just a finalist and. Even if you’re not a finalist, you will often get a professional review. So someone who was one of the judges for the book award might say, Hey, here’s some nice things about your book. Sorry. You didn’t win. Take the nice things, put them on the Amazon sales page, put them on the website put them in the front of the book.  So book awards are great because they have big email lists and they. Email out the winners and the finalists. You got to think about that one ahead of time, because you can only submit for the year or maybe year after the book publication date. But those can be really fantastic. And then also I don’t mind just paying for some traffic every now and then. So a good source for paid traffic is cravebooks. com, C R A V E books. com. You can, they have lists of readers. You can select nonfiction readers, self help readers, professional development readers, sorry. And just let them know, do a book promotion. Chris Badgett: One just lightning round question before we go here. Why does some books just hang on the New York Times bestseller? And not that like everybody should aspire to do that or whatever, but something like Atomic Habits by James Clear is an example. What nerve did he strike with that book?  He’s a great marketer and a great writer, and I love the book and I’m a big habits guy. It makes sense to me. But why does some really just. Get exponential results. Morgan Gist MacDonald: I do think like in the instance of James clear specifically he had blogged for 10 years. Yeah. Like sometimes we forget that Tuesday and Thursday, James clear blogged and released the blog to his newsletter. Yeah. For 10 years. Yeah. Like I definitely did not do that. I didn’t have that kind of platform coming into the book. And then I think the other thing that he did well, he, so he had an existing platform. Number one. Number two, he had. Just an amazing Rolodex of contacts, right? When James Clear wanted to get on a podcast, he didn’t want to do just one podcast, right? He was going to do like hundreds of podcasts. And so I think a lot of it was just that brute force of gathering all of that promotion together. If someone wanted to do straight up pr. There’s no, there’s nothing wrong with getting a PR rep. I don’t think he got all of that coordinated for free.  I think he and a lot of the folks who end up popping to the New York Times bestseller list, they they’re selling out big cash to even just coordinate logistically getting onto as many media outlets as possible in a short period of time. The other thing is most this, I won’t go too deep into this, but the publishing industry in its relationships with bookstores, Barnes and Noble, your local indie bookstores, they have, because of their distribution relationships, those bookstores will actually take pre orders. For months before the book actually is quote unquote released and they will hold all of those pre order sales until a specific launch date. So for instance, I have a friend who is launching her book next week and she’s signed up with Simon Schuster and she’s making a run for the New York times. She has spent four months selling that book week after week, event after event, pre selling the book, offering bonuses, and every single sale is pending.  They’ve taken the credit card, but all the sales are pending until next week. They’re all going to release on the same day. It’s going to pop to the New York times bestseller list, and then it gets to be a New York times book. Now, how many weeks does it hang on? That’s a different question, but that is how traditional publishers do it. And that is. Not available to Amazon. Amazon does not play that game. Amazon’s you bought that book on May 29th. That sale went through on May 29th. We’re not holding it until August so that’s just something to be aware of that. There are certain mechanisms that are available to traditionally published authors. Right or wrong. Does it really matter what I would say for any of us who aspire to something like New York times, get those, that first book or two or three out, really build your audience, build your platform. Go ahead and do the podcast interviews, build your network. And that, that is something that you could achieve with a traditional publisher.  And it may not be your first book. For most folks, it’s not their first book that hits the New York times. So even for my friend, I’m speaking, that’s not her first book. So for a lot of these James clear, that was his first book. Chris Badgett: I’m not sure. As far as I know, but I’m actually not sure, Morgan Gist MacDonald: but he wrote a heck of a lot. Yeah. Chris Badgett: Yeah. He did his time, Morgan. This is awesome. I feel like you’ve dropped like so much valuable information here. I really appreciate it. What. Is the name of your book again, and tell us what people can get from your services at paper, raven, books. com. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. So my book is. Start writing your book today. Very straightforwardly titled. It’s on Amazon. Also there’s an audible version if you’d like to listen to it read. And you can find out more about me and my team at paperravenbooks. com. We can plug in and help you where you are. If you are just thinking about a book and you want maybe to be a part of a group of writers that are going through this process together, we have coaching and mentorship. We walk you all the way through writing, publishing, launching your book. If you just want straight up some services, you’re like, I got a manuscript. I want you guys to review it and advise me on what publishing could look like. We also do that. So you can find out more about all that at paper, even books. com. And I will make sure Chris, that you, your folks get the link to that overview. Of all the phases and the big checklist of what it would take to DIY self publish your book. There’s some great tools out there that we recommend that you guys check out. So definitely doable and best decision I ever made in my business. Chris Badgett: Morgan, thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Thank you, Chris. Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Morgan Gist McDonald. She’s from Paper Raven books. We’re going to nerd out today on creating books, how to figure out what to write about the writing process, editing, publishing, launching, it’s going to be awesome if you’re creating courses. Your perfect material to also create a book if you haven’t already, like most people, you probably have a book inside of you and it’s, you just need a little help getting it out. Morgan, welcome to the show. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Chris, super excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to dig in with you today.  I’m going to, the first question is going to be a hard one because there is no correct answer. But what do you think is harder, writing a book or creating a course? Morgan Gist MacDonald: People ask me that question a lot too. Okay. I know I want a book and a course. Which one should I do first? And I will admit I’ve done it both ways with folks. I’ve personally, I wrote the book and then I created a course. But we’ve definitely worked with folks who already had a course and they wanted to use the book to, to get the most of the content out to folks and then bring people. Into the course. You can do it either way. I, for folks who think like in terms of PowerPoint slides, like for some reason you open up PowerPoint or keynote and you start rearranging slides like that might be where you start, but then you can use that same structure for a book and then instead of talking it out, you’re really writing it out.  And gosh, we could, if, That’s You know, if people want to talk about how to use ChatsDBT or things like that to help just get a lot of words on the page. That’s certainly much more doable these days than when I started 15 years ago. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us about, before we get into the writing process and everything, tell us about Paper Raven Books. What is it? Yeah, Morgan Gist MacDonald: so we are a self publishing services company, which means we help people to truly self publish such that they have You know, the rights to all of their intellectual property, the books are in their account. So they have the legal access to everything and then the royalties go straight to them. So there are a lot of publishing companies out there that just they say they’re self publishing, but they put the. Authors book files into their own accounts. And so for us, it’s really important that we’re helping folks to truly self publish so that you can set it up on Amazon sales on demand. You can set up your own book funnels, print your own books, fulfill your own books or even get them into bookstores. So all of those options are possible for you with this kind of method. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Go to paper, raven, books. com. I was there. I was looking at the books and I started scrolling and it just kept going. There’s a lot. You guys have helped a lot of authors publish a lot of books, both fiction and nonfiction. I was really impressed. And then I went and I looked up some of the books on Amazon and they had a lot of reviews. Like I was like, that’s what, so I’m like, all right, this is cool. And like niche topics, like really niche specific topics, which I think that’s really the last part of the process is launching and getting reviews, but let’s start at the beginning. When somebody is an expert is trying to focus in on a topic and their body of knowledge and their life’s work, even how do they figure out whether they’re creating a course or creating a book, what’s marketable, what’s the market, where can they make profit? How can they be intelligent? Cause once you commit, you’re committed, but how do you gauge that demand or help focus the topic? Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. So I would say a little bit more broadly is for you personally, as the author, the course creator, like, where do you want to go in the future? Like when you think about what you’re building, what you’re creating now, and you fast forward three years, five years, is this still what you want to be talking about?  And the reason that I even bring that up is because I talk to a lot of folks who they have lived through something and feel some kind of like obligation. To write out their expertise or Oh I figured out how to do Six Sigma project management. So I should write a book on that so that I never have to talk about it again. I’m like as the author of a book and the creator of a course, you’re probably going to be. talking about this topic for kind of years to come. Let’s face forward and where do you want to be going? And a lot of times just that conversation will help people decide between two paths. So then, okay, we’re face forward. We know we want to be talking about this topic. Generally speaking I would say For anyone who’s doing the whole like blogging thing and course creation, y’all know about Google keywords, right? That’s nothing new how to go into the Google keyword planner and put in keywords and figure out what people are searching for on Google. And there are similar softwares for Amazon. Because users actually use Amazon differently than they do Google. And so for instance, there’s Publisher Rocket is a software by Dave Chesson that we use that helps you to see what are people searching for in the Amazon bookstore specifically, not just amazon. com. But when they are in the bookstore, maybe they’ve clicked on a book title and now they’re technically in sort of the Kindle store or the bookstore and they’re using that search bar. What are they searching for? That can at least help you say, okay, these are folks who they’re looking for something about this topic. And then the other thing that we always want to look at is comparable titles which is just the publishing word for other books that are selling and authors are often really, or before. Writers who are going to be authors we’re often really nervous about reading other people’s books. Cause they’re like, Oh what if somebody already wrote the book that I want to write? And so I’ll we’ll often do is we’ll gather five comparable titles and we’ll say, look, this is these are some books that are around the same topic that you want to be writing about. They’re selling pretty well. Again, publisher rocket that software I mentioned, you can see sales data. They’re selling, a thousand bucks a month in ebook sales or 2000 bucks a month in ebook sales, read them read them, see what they’re talking about. Look at the table of contents. And 99. 999 percent of the time the author’s Oh, there’s a whole chunk of information that this book didn’t talk about that. I would definitely talk about, or my story is totally different than their story. And so it, it ends up being that you want to be in a market where people are already selling. This kind of product. But you guys talk about that in relation to course creation too, right? You don’t want to be the only weird person who is talking about this totally niche thing. You want to sit in a market where there’s already people who are making money. With this with this type of market, this type of topic, Chris Badgett: we’ve got our topic. How do we chunk the outline? It seems like it’s so critical. And for somebody who’s not experienced in instructional design or whatever the writing equivalent of that is, how do you chunk down an outline out of the writer’s blockhead? Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. So I personally have never loved mind maps. I know a lot of folks really geek out on mind maps and for whatever reason I put together a mind map and I’m just more confused than when I started. And so how I developed methods, cause I was, I’ve been a writing coach for book coach for 15 years coming out of grad school, I was just working with folks in the trenches of writing books. And back in those days, self publishing was not nearly as popular. So we would write books and then just send them on to the publisher to, to get published. And so that’s where my origins really started. So it was a lot of time with authors. Staring at a word doc saying what are we going to write about? So the method that I ended up developing for myself, as well as for clients is let’s just sit down and just do like a brain dump list, like just no order, no organization. What are the things that you think might be included in this book? And just it can be bullet points or not bullet points. Like it doesn’t matter. Like at this stage, really just seeing what are all the ideas that we have going into this book? Because sometimes we think like when it’s all trapped in our heads, we think it’s going to be like thousands and thousands of ideas, and then when we actually start listing it out, we’re like, Oh.  This is it’s a lot it’s 115 kind of ideas, but now that I see them all on a list, I can rearrange them, group them together. And so that, that whole process, I call it a linear brain dump. Cause we’re just. It’s a linear experience, top to bottom. And we’re really just reorganizing things and eventually this, I would recommend you spend a couple of days. You do the first sort of brain dump, take a break, come back, revisit. Is there anything else I want to add to this list? Okay. Take a break come back. Do I want to. Move the order around, put some of these in different sections or start to group them together, group like things with like things. And eventually what you’re creating from the ground up is is the structure. But instead of starting with chapter titles, we’re just starting with the raw material, all the stuff that I know I’m going to want to include in the book. And the reason I like it to be linear in this way is because the book is linear, right? A book is chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four. That’s just where it is. So we might as well start with that and just know that we’re going to be fashioning it into a linear experience. Chris Badgett: What about at the the less or not the lesson? I’m the course creator at the chapter level.  Is there like a structure or I’m sure there could be lots of different structures there’s certain elements that could go with a nonfiction book chapter, like maybe a quote, maybe a story, maybe some theory and then some tactics or whatever. How do we I found for me writing is a lot easier if I have a, not what I’m going to talk about, but how I’m going to talk about it framework to follow. Is there any recommendations you have there? Morgan Gist MacDonald: There are some folks who will say, here’s your template. Every chapter needs to have a quote, an introduction to a story, your main argument or point or topic, and then revisit that story and then offer data to support that story. There’ll be people who have here are the five or six things that need to be. In every single chapter. I personally have not found that to actually I don’t know, Chris, you just said that before we hit record, you’re like, I just wrote a book. So I’d be curious to know how what worked best for you. And I think if someone were to come to me and say, okay, but I want to make sure that I’ve got principles or like frameworks, like the nonfiction gut material plus stories from my.  Maybe they’re my case studies, maybe they’re my personal story plus data points. Like maybe that’s important for my book. I want to make sure I’ve got all these data points. Then the way that, again, I would approach it as then let’s just make lists of the things you want included. And for some people it’s quotes like let’s make sure we’ve got a huge list of quotes that you want included in the book. Because what we’re going to end up doing is matching them up together, right? And so it can be a little bit difficult to say I know chapter one is going to be about we already use nutrition. I know chapter one is going to be about macros. And so let me find a quote for macros and a story about macros and conceptual information about macros in that. I have most people who I’ve worked with that works fine for a few chapters, but you run out of steam and get frustrated in the process because you didn’t do the earlier work of, I got to dump all this out of my head and really just say, here’s all the pieces I want included in the book. And then work the framework going up that way, which I don’t know, it’s, it, to some extent, like writing a book, they’re going to have different philosophies. We’re talking about a philosophical divide here. There are definitely folks in my space who are like, you need 16 chapters and each chapter needs six elements. And we’re going to do this over a three day event. And now go write your book. I have just found that it hasn’t necessarily worked for me or the folks who I tend to work with. And if y’all are here and you’ve tried the template formula and it didn’t work for you, I just want you to know you’re not weird. You just might need a different Chris Badgett: take at it. That’s awesome. I see it with course creators too. There’s it’s like different personality types, like somewhat like lots of structure. Some are just like, just cut me loose on camera and I’ll do my thing or whatever. It’s a wide variety.  Can I ask Morgan Gist MacDonald: you, Chris? Okay, I’m going to put you on the spot if that’s okay. Yeah. So you said that you took a sabbatical and wrote a book. Would you like to share with us a little bit of what your experience was? Chris Badgett: In terms of the structure and stuff, Morgan Gist MacDonald: like at what point did you go into the sabbatical knowing you wanted to write a Chris Badgett: book I did, and I didn’t spend it wasn’t like full time job. I traveled and spent did a lot of other things too. But I think a lot of people have had the idea to write a book for a while and I just never get around to it. I think. Like 2 percent of the books you see out there, there’s 98 other people who really want to write a book and for whatever reason it got in their way. But in my mind, I’m like, all right if I’m going to do it, like I’ve been thinking about it for almost a decade, I’m going to do it now. Yeah. So for me, just a little bit on the process I wanted, it’s about online learning and creating courses. That’s my niche and my subject matter expertise. I I like structure. I’m more on the structure end of the spectrum, so I’ve spent a lot of time on the outline. Like you, yeah. I am a mind mapper, but what I try to do is once I get the mind maps out there and I’m like, that looks terrible, that’s disorganized. What goes, so then I like, and then I move it over. I move it from the right brain to the left brain, and now we’re like same for creating a course, same process for at the outline or curriculum level.  And for me, I was not, I wasn’t trying to write a super long book as minimalist in nature. It’s, I think it’s about 20, 000 words. I don’t know if that’s where that stands in my mind. I’m like, is that long enough? Oh, that’s Morgan Gist MacDonald: almost exactly what my book is. Oh, awesome. I think mine’s 22, something like that, but it’s a five by eight if that helps you imagine it. Chris Badgett: Oh, nice. Yeah. That definitely helps. You just made me feel a lot better about myself. I’m like, Oh no, it’s too short. But for me, I wanted a little bit of a structure for the lesson so that I could just. I only had a limited amount of time and I, it helps me stay focused to have that. So I had I did have some quotes that go with each one personal story, customer story, principles, strategies, action steps, and even a little drawing for each chapter that, you know, like a visual aid thing.  Yeah, so that was it. And right now i’m in the editing process, but it was Yeah. And it wasn’t a full time job for me. I found that thing where I’ve heard writers say you can’t do it. Or some say you can’t do it like eight hours a day. You only have three certain amount of good hours for me. That was around, I couldn’t really do more than four and three was even pushing it sometimes to really get in a zone and do that deep work. But how’s that for you? What do you think is. For writing time. Morgan Gist MacDonald: There have been folks who I’ve worked with that did it in very crunch time, like Stephanie, like a three day thing, right? Stephanie Reinold was approaching having a baby and she owned a business and she was getting onto like early maternity leave and was like, I want this draft done before the baby comes. That’s a pretty extreme kind of circumstance. And she just chugged through when she got her first draft done in two weeks. But yeah, she was doing six, eight hours a day and it was a first draft. Then it moves through the editing phases that you’re experiencing. But I would say most of the people that I work with, like we’re all writing on the margins of life whether we are working or taking care of family or growing a business or maybe even full time authors. They’re marketing their first books marketing the books that are already out and still trying to come out with the next book. So we’re all writing on the margins of life. I would say something like eight to 10 hours a week can get you a draft done in a couple months. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. That’s if you’ve done the structure ahead of time, which you pointed to, I do agree spending a couple of weeks really thinking about the structure, whether you’re going to go. If you already have a course, you’ve already got a lot of this thought out. You know the, what those, the lessons are more or less going to become chapters.  You’ve done that hard thinking already. If you don’t have a course on this yet, then maybe you want to start from the ground up and just mind map or list out all those ideas and let that structure emerge. But that’s going to take, I don’t know, a couple of weeks to really get solid and good on that. Now you begin writing. Yeah. I think something like two, three months is is very reasonable. Chris Badgett: And just to answer my question earlier, now that I’ve done the book thing a little bit, I think you make a better course if you do the book first. It really sharpens your thinking in a way that getting on camera, you can do that, but it’s just the book really forces you to get it perfect or at least closer to perfect. Morgan Gist MacDonald: You spend more time thinking about it because you have to write every word, Chris Badgett: right? There’s no shortcuts or Morgan Gist MacDonald: yeah, or even if you’re feeding it through chat GPT to get some of that initial raw material, you’re still going to be rereading it, refining it. I want to say it this way, not that way. So there’s that mental clarification process and you will nuance your own frameworks because you’re thinking. And about it in a much deeper way. How Chris Badgett: should people use AI? I found myself at first, I was like I’m not going to just be like, Hey AI, write the book for me. It was, but I found myself like, Hey, I need a quote that like is related to these three things. And boom, it gives me five. I’m like, wow, that’s awesome. Or. Hey, I’m having trouble saying this. I’m trying to say this and this, and I would write it in terrible English, and then it would give me something and be like, I can work with that and I’ll let me make it half as long and in my voice and all that, but how, what do you recommend? Yeah, Morgan Gist MacDonald: I like chat GPT for kind of a sounding board partner. In a lot of ways. So at the very beginning of the process, if you’re still working on your structure, you’re still getting your list together, which is going to become your outline. You could even go to chat GPT and say, Hey provide a table of contents for a book about this topic. And just see if chat GPT comes up with something that you forgot. It’s Oh, I totally forgot to explain the difference between. Passive income and active income. If you’re talking about real estate or something like that, and so chat GPT might prompt you to maybe remember something that you didn’t think about.  And then, yeah if you get stuck on something, I think it’s very helpful to at least have chat GPT to go to and say, how would you explain this? Or come up with. Yeah, a quote, or provide an article that references this idea and then ChatGPT can go and find some sources for you. Or if you’re like wording and rewording a paragraph and it just does not sound good, you can feed it through ChatGPT and just see if it gives you something else interesting. I have not really seen anything super compelling, come out of chat GPT, the first go round, if you said, write a, I’ve seen people are like, write a chapter about this. Yeah, it writes 5, 000 words or whatever, but maybe not even that much, maybe it’s 1500 words, but it’s like not exciting writing. It’s like relatively clear, grammatically correct. Boring. So it’s a good sounding board, good research partner good if you get stuck. I just, I don’t, and obviously you can use it for proofreading later find any grammar errors, although I would use Grammarly. For that. But yeah it’s a good sounding board partner. Chris Badgett: How do you, part of writing is like beginning with the end in mind with Oh, what do I want this book? What job does this book have to do for my business? And for course creators they probably want people coming to the website or. Yeah. Going from the 7 book to the more expensive course or whatever. What’s, what have nonfiction authors do these days to really bridge that gap without being overly salesy, but at the same time using the book as a solid tool for their business? Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah, you definitely want to include at least one freebie in the book.  And certainly you could do more if it would, if it felt helpful to the reader. I always recommend putting a freebie in at the very beginning of the book. The first 10% because that’s where the Amazon look inside is. So if someone finds your book on Amazon, they click, look inside. Amazon’s gonna show ’em the first 10% of the book. And specifically this is gonna get a little bit in the weeds but I would have a preface in the preface. I would put the freebie. In fact, in the table of contents, I would list preface Chris’s Chris Badgett: writing in Morgan Gist MacDonald: the table of contents. Preface is the first thing in the table of contents you provide the rest of the table of contents. And then the first section is preface where you’re giving them a free bonus. And the reason is this is relatively recent. Amazon has changed its Look inside behavior such that as soon as you click look inside, it takes you to the first section. As identified by the table of contents. So it skips all that front matter and gets you to preface definitely works. I think we’ve experimented with introduction would work. Author’s note would work. But I like preface because that gives you a little bit of space just to say, Hey, reader, here’s the amazing benefits you’re going to get from the book. In fact, I have a free gift for you, snappy name for a free gift and then a QR code. QR code that goes to the landing page with the free gift. And the reason for the QR code is because another recent Amazon change, they disabled the clickable link from look inside. However, I don’t think they can disable a QR code or at least not easily. So we’ve switched everyone over to QR codes in the preface. Make sure the preface is in the table of contents. So you’re just using that Amazon traffic to try to build your list. Even if people don’t buy the book, you still want to get as many people as possible onto that email list. And then now you can follow up with all of your typical email marketing strategies.  You can also include resources throughout the book. So like Chrissy mentioned, there were like different drawings and diagrams. If you wanted to include a little QR code and say, Hey, would you like the full. Package of all the drawings and explanations, scan this QR code, take him to a page to get an email address and say, we’re going to send you the full PDF guide of the visual guide of this whole process and you could link that. Every chapter, if you wanted to, or where there’s a visual in each of the chapters. So fast fast action, no fast track companion course could be a good one. Any if your course is going to include any guided meditations or things like that you could include just the links to those guided meditations.  Any PDF workbook, I would just include it as a free workbook, a free guide companion companion guide, something like that throughout. Then you can reference that throughout the book. If you want Chris Badgett: pro tips right there, that’s awesome. Another hangup I just, I’ve seen in others and I see it myself was concerns about plagiarism though, not directly, it’s more just like. I want to write this so that I don’t necessarily need to have footnotes. And I might mention I’m combining ideas and I might mention people and stuff, but at what point do you really need to like cite a source in a nonfiction book and have footnotes? Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah, if you’re using a direct quote from someone, you would want to be able to cite that. It does not have to be a footnote on the same page. If you want it to be clear like a nice reading experience that there could be a reason for you to drop a footnote and then you actually put it at the end of the book. Their end notes at that point that’s an option. Another a lot of people, they just want their name referenced. So if you got an idea from someone and you say, Hey, I worked with so and so for years and this was a great idea. I should probably do that. I worked with Chandler bolt way back in the day. And we had a bunch of ideas for like freebies for books.  Like you could reference it conversationally like that in a lot of. Folks aren’t going to sue you if if you’re at least giving them credit in the book itself. But a specific quote, like if you are quoting their book or quoting their website or something like that just drop a footnote, but then put the reference at the end for end notes. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s say we made it over the hurdle of outlining and writing, and we get to editing. There’s different types of editing. Like how would you describe I feel like when I write a blog post as an example, like I do like content edit and then I do a grammar edit and then I do an edit for SEO and I’ll have all these like layers that I have to go through for a nonfiction book. What are the layers of editing? Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yeah, so we would look at a developmental edit, which is the big structure. Are the chapters in the right order? Within each chapter, are the sections in the right order? Does anything need to be rearranged, added to, or clarified, or trimmed out? Because it’s it’s maybe a bit of a rabbit trail. Those are our big three questions in a developmental edit. Same thing needs to be rearranged, added to, or trimmed out. So we’re just trying to get the content all we have all the content and it’s all in the right order. This, the next level of edit would be a copy edit or a line edit, depending on. your vocabulary. They’re more or less the same thing. That’s when you’re starting to get into the wordsmithing. You’re going to go in paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. Does this sound good? Sentence variety. Do I use the same sentence structures over and over again? Is there more clarity that needs to happen because the way I explain this is a little bit fuzzy. So that’s copy edit or line edit. And then the third level kind of zooming in here is more word by word, capitalization, hyphenation, italics, bold just consistency, internal consistency, punctuation, spelling, that kind of stuff. So a lot of times what we’ll do with authors is before we even jump into any level of edit, we will do a manuscript review just to assess. Just to do a read through all the way top to bottom, and then we can come back and say, okay, actually Chris, your structure’s really great. Here’s two things that we saw that you should adjust on the structure level. But after that, it’s ready to go into copy editing or whatever.  And the reason why we’ve found it’s important and why we recommend, even if you’re not working with our team, like whoever you work with, get a manuscript review. We’ve seen a lot of folks who they hire an editor. They don’t even know to ask the editor, like what type of edit are we doing? So you’ll bring an editor in and they’re going to charge you whatever thousands of dollars. And they are starting with a copy of it and you get it back and you’re like, wait, don’t we still have this other big Developmental question mark and they weren’t looking for it because they weren’t doing a developmental edit. So just using the word like editor is not really sufficient to know what level of editing they’re doing. So ask for a manuscript review and and then discuss with your editor, what makes sense developmental copy proof. Chris Badgett: The next part with the interior design. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Oh yeah. You’re getting like way in the weeds, Chris. This is fun. Chris Badgett: Oh, I have your website up. You should, you out there listening, go to paperravenbooks. com. Your publishing success program, like infographic is very is good. It’s wow, there’s a lot of value you guys add. And, but it goes over the process of how it works, which is awesome. But what’s the, I guess book cover design. I think everybody gets, but the interior design, I think there’s probably a lot of gaps in knowledge out there. What happens with that? Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. Cover design, we like to use 99designs. com. There’s a lot of platforms out there where you can just get someone to do a cover design for you. And then you want to use some of those elements from the cover in the interior. If your cover has typography, that is a lot of sans serif, let’s say where it’s like straight letters, there’s no little curvy decorations on the letters. It’s very modern usually. Then you want your interior fonts to also be. More modern, right? You don’t want to use the big flourishes inside. For most people, you’re going to tend that way anyway, but just something to be aware of. A couple of softwares, if you’re DIY doing it yourself we really like Atticus, A T I C U S. Atticus is another Dave Chesson software that’s really good for formatting or the interior design. The other one is Vellum, V E L U M. And that’s Apple only, unfortunately, but it’s a really good kind of DIY interior design, and it will help you find all of the elements and what decisions you should make on each element. Your chapter font is going to be an element. Maybe there’s a chapter main title and a chapter subtitle. need to be a font and they need to be positioned. Top of the page or bottom of the page, middle of the page or to the, in the corner you get to decide your spacing are you going to have tighter margins or wider margins?  How close to the edge of the page are you going to get? And then also the spacing between lines, how close together are the lines going to be or spread apart? And then the character spacing. I don’t know if this is helpful for people or not. But I was going to, I can just show a quick picture. Like Chris Badgett: if you’re listening on the podcast, jump over to the LifterLMS YouTube channel, and you’ll see what we’re look for Morgan Gist McDonald. And you’ll find the video if we’re going to do a show and tell here. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yes, we are doing a show and tell. So y’all go ahead and pop over. Okay. So here’s, this is my book. So you can see there’s like a chapter title and then a little design element. And then there’s it really is just the chapter number written out. And then this is the, you can’t do this backwards. That’s the title itself. And then you got to think about like your, bullet points. Like I put some extra spacing between bullet points. This is all about the writing the book process. So if you want to know more about that, you can grab your book’s name. Start writing your book today. Awesome. It is very straightforward. What are some other? Some of these things, like for sections sometimes you can just start with a bolded sentence and that’s like the beginning of a section.  That’s a technique that helps with nonfiction sort of skimmability. Oh, the running heads. So the top. Of one page is usually the title or the chapter title and then the top, there’s a chapter title. So book title, chapter title. So we’ve got a lot of this actually you, let me drop a link in the show notes. Cause we have, we just put together like a free overview. Of the like DIY publishing process. So if you guys are thinking about what’s even involved we just, we have a community in circle as our kind of learning platform. And so we just put together a free preview. So let me get you a link, Chris, for everybody so they can get that preview and it has the timeline and some of these tools that I’ve mentioned as well. Chris Badgett: Awesome. And I just want to agree with that strategy of when you give somebody like a full process and I’m particularly talking to you, agency people out there who are watching this, who build sites for clients, when you detail out your whole process, once somebody gets into it, they think they’re DIY and then they’re, then some of them will be like, wait a second, I think I just want to hire you to do it for me. It’s a really good strategy. So if you’re hung up on what to write about. Don’t be shy and just share your process. Cause it’s actually some of the best marketing you can do. Yeah. Morgan Gist MacDonald: It’d be good just for like meta. If people want to see what we’re doing for the free preview. Cause exactly what you’re talking about, Chris. Like we know that if we share here’s the 12 major. Milestones you’re going to go through in writing and publishing and marketing your book. And then we have a 15 page master checklist Every single little step and so again This is in that free preview that we’re going to drop a link to in the show notes but like you can just see how we’re doing it and one it’s helpful, right? Like we get a ton of questions about this stuff. And so now we can just point people to the free preview. And then, yes, to your point, like the folks who are out there shopping and looking around and who am I going to hire, like they are probably going to hire the people who give them the best information and help them make the best decision.  Right on. On the same track as Chris Badgett: you. Can you gimme a quick tip on how to work with like pictures, little diagrams and stuff like that’s, it’s on an iPad now, but how does it end up in the book? Yeah, Morgan Gist MacDonald: so you do wanna create those as separate JPEGs or P and gss. Yeah. And then they get put into the formatting later. Yeah. So what we typically do is in the Word document or the Google document where the text is all the words are, we’ll just put like a little placeholder note. That’s this is going to be image 1. 1 or 1. 2 or 1. 3 make a naming convention there. And then we actually create each of the images separately. And I think for printing purposes, it needs to be something like 300 DPI, which I’m not a formatter or a designer. So I don’t entirely know what that means. But Certainly the software, as I mentioned, Atticus and Vellum will help you to make sure that those are of the highest quality. A lot of our folks will either design them inside of InDesign itself or Keynote PowerPoint can do them as well. Canva is a great software. We just want to export those as individual images. Put a naming convention on them. And then once you actually get to the formatting phase, you’re putting everything into Atticus or Vellum or InDesign. That’s when you’re starting to slot them into the interior itself. And you want to mostly wait anyway, because like I mentioned when we first started, Chris, these two different sizes this is, nope, that’s another size. There are different sizes. Sorry, I stepped away. So here’s three different books, technically three different sizes, right? And so each page is going to be a little bit different width, a little bit different height. So I would not get super worried about it until you actually have something that’s like exactly five by eight with your bleed set and then start playing with the sizing and the layout. Chris Badgett: Awesome. And from the what’s the path from the interior design tool like vellum or Atticus? Is that what gives you the export that then goes into Kindle direct publishing? Yeah, Morgan Gist MacDonald: exactly. Exactly. Yep. So those softwares in particular will export for the ebook. And the paperback and the hardback although really most, most people choose to have the paperback and the hardback, the same size it’s five inches by eight inches or six inches by nine inches are a standard size. And so therefore you’re using the same PDF file. For paperback and hardback but yeah, you need a KPF file for Amazon and a PDF file for also Amazon or Ingram spark, but that’s getting into kind of a whole different tangent. Most folks were recommending Amazon KDP for eBooks, KDP print for print books. They can do paperback, they can do hardback. And then if you later want to add on bookstores Ingram spark would be who you’re looking at for a printer. Chris Badgett: How do you do audio books? Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. Audio books. So typically we’ve just hired narrators to do audio books. You can also do it yourself, especially if you already have like your mic set up and all that. You would want to still hire someone to do the editing of the MP3 files and you have to each chapter is its own MP3 file. , and then you upload everything into a c x for Amazon Spotify. So it’s separate Chris Badgett: from Kindle? Morgan Gist MacDonald: It’s separate. It’s a separate thing. It is a separate thing. It’s a separate, a c X is its own. Login interface, but it indexes to Amazon such that you upload it to ACX, but then it populates on your Amazon sales page. Chris Badgett: Awesome. We could go for three hours, but I got it. Morgan Gist MacDonald: You need a square version of your cover. For ACX for the player or whatever it has to be square. Chris Badgett: What can you tell us about your five day online book launch process? Like what is that piece of the pie? Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. So we have found that there’s a couple of things that you have to solve for very quickly. When a book is launched. And the reason there is a bit of a time urgency on it is because when you upload an ebook specifically to the Amazon platform, you have about a 30 day honeymoon period where the algorithms crawling through the product page and trying to match who are the best types of folks to, to buy this book. And so what we’re doing is we want You know, set the keywords. This is very similar to any other Amazon product, right? You want keywords that people are searching for attached to your book. You want categories that your book can compete in. And it would be very nice if something like. 20 to a hundred sales. You can be number one in the category. That’s very helpful and visibility in the bookstore. And then the third thing is reviews. So getting reviews on the book as quickly as possible does help with overall visibility in the bookstore. So what we do is we get everything all set up. Get the ebook files uploaded. We have the keywords, we have the categories. We have a launch team of people who are ready to leave a review on the book. And we tell everybody, hold on, wait until X date. And for us, it’s five days. We say Tuesday through a Saturday, Tuesday, August 8th through Saturday, August. Whatever. I don’t have a calendar up.  Saturday, August 12th, right? And during those five days we are sending a bunch of promotional traffic. We’ve set the ebook for free. We’re driving as many people through that sales page as possible in a short amount of time. While our launch team is also leaving reviews. So we’ve told the launch team Tuesday, August 8th, download that ebook. It’s free and leave a review. So we’re trying to get eyeballs onto that page as many conversions as possible. Even if they buy a free ebook, it’s still a conversion. And so you’re still going to pop to the top of those categories. You still if you hit a hundred or a few hundred free ebook downloads, you’re going to hit. Number ones and categories and your book launch team is downloading your ebook and leaving leaving reviews all at the same time. So we’re just like giving it a big push, a big lift in a 5 day window so that by the time that 5 days rolls off. We’ve driven thousands of people to that page. We’ve probably had hundreds, if not thousands of people download that ebook. It gives the algorithm what it needs to know who to show the book to. And we’ve got reviews stacked on. So we want to aim for at least 20 reviews in five days. Sometimes they don’t all come through at the same time. Like Amazon will hold them.  But still we’ve got enough to get that initial lift on the book. So that five days rolls off and now it’s being shown in the bookstore. Is the idea Chris Badgett: and is that during that first 30 day window or right after that? Yes. We, so it’s during that initial calling period. Morgan Gist MacDonald: We hold the ebook until we know we’re ready to commit to those launch dates. Awesome. So you can upload the paperback, upload the hardback, no problem. Those can be up and live and available for as long as you want, but hold that ebook download or hold the ebook files and hit upload like about a week, seven to 10 days before your launch dates. And that way you’re getting to take advantage of that 30 day period. Chris Badgett: And you recommend. Making the ebook version at free at first to just maximize exposure and reach, which makes Morgan Gist MacDonald: sense. Yeah. There’s definitely different camps on that. Some people will say you should do a 99 cent ebook so that you’re hitting the number ones in like the paid store, but I haven’t found that Amazon particularly cares whether it was number one in the. Quote unquote free store or number one in the quote unquote paid store where the reason I came down on free is because we can get so many more conversions with free. Yeah. Like for instance, scribe is a, I guess was a big competitor of ours and they always ran the 99 cent eBooks. And they would get maybe 150 to 200 downloads of the 99, 99 cent eBook, which was enough to pop it up in the paid store. Whereas we will hit a thousand, 1500, 2000 eBook downloads, pop it up in the free store. And even after the promotion rolls off, it’s probably still selling. So it’s it might still sell in the pay store. But what we’ve just done is given it like 10 X, the number of conversions. Wow. You think about seasoning a pixel. That’s how we want to season a pixel with 1, 500, 2000 downloads would be ideal. So that’s how we think about it. Chris Badgett: We’re running up on time, but I want to ask you as we land the plane here, like what’s your advice just at a high level for evergreen marketing beyond the launch do we do a podcast tour? Do we like how do we just. Not just launch it, have a bunch of excitement, but continually to drive traffic to it and give it some extra love after the initial launch. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. I want to share a perspective first and then some tactics that I really like. So a perspective, anytime you launch anything, it’s a spike. And then it comes back down, like that is pretty much the definition of a launch is you spike it, and then it comes back down and it settles on a baseline. So what I recommend to our authors is every quarter, think about another promotional event or several promotions that you’re going to stack together to create that spike again. And then it will come back down and we’ll settle on a baseline and that baseline should be higher than the previous one. So we talk about the 90 day relaunch kind of rhythm. So every 90 days we’re thinking about relaunching for folks. I’m a little bit lazy about some of these things for me. It’s like at this point, I just set my ebook for free every 90 days. Algorithm brings some traffic through it. I get some free downloads and it pops the book back up and visibility. I did not mention earlier, but it would definitely be important for this long term sort of marketing strategy. Remember when we talked about getting people’s email addresses in the book, scan the QR code, provide your email address, and then you can give them the free thing. You could also follow up and ask for reviews. So give them the free thing. Seven days later, say, Hey, hope you loved the book. If you wouldn’t mind, please leave a review on Amazon. Here’s a link. To leave a review 21 days after that. Hey, hope you had time to finish the book. If you haven’t left a review yet, really love you really appreciate leaving a review. Here’s the link to leave a review. And what that means is every time that someone downloads a free resource from your book. You’re also asking them to leave reviews. So that’s a huge part of how myself and our authors continue to get reviews long after they launch their book is because every single time they do a promotion, they’re also getting more email subscribers. And more people seeing those emails asking him to leave a review. So I like to set my ebook for free every 90 days. I get a new influx of people and then more folks being asked to leave reviews and that sort of adds to the visibility. Just remember it’s always like a launch promotion event and it comes back down to a baseline. And so we just want to keep launching and resettling on a slightly higher baseline. That’s how we think about incremental growth over time. And there’s a whole like. Backstory from the publishing industry about like, why people don’t talk about books this way. And it’s all because of the publishing industry machinery. Like they don’t promote backlists. They never have, but that’s totally the choice of the publishing company. The author keeps promoting their backlist, but publishing companies almost entirely focus on new releases and nothing else. Most of the authors that I work with, we sell more books. Now than we did the year before. So every year, my book sells more like in 2023 than it did the years before. So it’s definitely possible to do the incremental increase some tactics that I like podcasts. I love podcasts. They’re so great for being able to just like we’re doing now, Chris, right? Add value to your people and some folks will come and check out my book and that’s a great way to really. Build relationships, the folks and serve and add value and get in front of potentially your good readers. I love podcasts do as many of those as you can. And then I also really like book awards, which are a little overlooked, often forgotten. But the benefit of a book award is not just that you get the shiny sticker on your book, digital sticker, right? Because everything’s digital now. But. When you submit for a book award, even if your book doesn’t win, let’s say it’s a finalist. They’re still going to email their list and say, Hey, here’s all the finalists for this book award and the winners for this book award. And you’ll get an honorable mention, even if you’re just a finalist. And even if you’re not a finalist, you will often get a professional review. So someone who was one of the judges for the book award might say, Hey, here’s some nice things about your book. Sorry. You didn’t win. Take the nice things, put them on the Amazon sales page, put them on the website put them in the front of the book.  So book awards are great because they have big email lists and they. Email out the winners and the finalists. You got to think about that one ahead of time, because you can only submit for the year or maybe year after the book publication date. But those can be really fantastic. And then also I don’t mind just paying for some traffic every now and then. So a good source for paid traffic is cravebooks. com, C R A V E books. com. You can, they have lists of readers. You can select nonfiction readers, self help readers, professional development readers. Oops, sorry. And just let them know, do a book promotion. Chris Badgett: Awesome. One just lightning round question before we go here, why does some books just hang on the New York times bestseller?  And not that like everybody should aspire to do that or whatever, but something like atomic habits by James clear as an example, like what nerve did he strike with that book? He’s a great marketer and a great writer and I love the book and I’m a big habits guy. It makes sense to me, but why does some really just, Get exponential results. Morgan Gist MacDonald: I do think like in the instance of James clear specifically he had blogged for 10 years. Yeah. Like sometimes we forget that Tuesday and Thursday, James clear blogged and released the blog to his newsletter. For 10 years, right? Like I definitely did not do that. I didn’t have that kind of platform coming into the book. And then I think the other thing that he did well, so he had an existing platform. Number one, number two, he had. Just an amazing Rolodex of contacts, right? When James Clear wanted to get on a podcast, he didn’t want to do just one podcast, right? He was going to do like hundreds of podcasts. And so I think a lot of it was just that brute force of gathering all of that promotion together.  If someone wanted to do straight up pr. There’s no, there’s nothing wrong with getting a PR rep. I don’t think he got all of that coordinated for free. I think he and a lot of the folks who end up popping to the New York Times bestseller list, they they’re selling out big cash to even just coordinate logistically getting onto as many media outlets as possible in a short period of time.  The other thing is most this, I won’t go too deep into this, but the publishing industry in its relationships with bookstores, Barnes and Noble, your local indie bookstores, they have, because of their distribution relationships, those bookstores will actually take pre orders. For months before the book actually is quote unquote released and they will hold all of those pre order sales until a specific launch date. So for instance, I have a friend who is launching her book next week and she’s signed up with Simon Schuster and she’s making a run for the New York times. She has spent four months selling that book week after week, event after event, pre selling the book, offering bonuses, and every single sale is pending.  They’ve taken the credit card, but all the sales are pending until next week. They’re all going to release on the same day. It’s going to pop to the New York times bestseller list, and then it gets to be a New York times book. Now, how many weeks is it? Hang on. That’s a different question, but that is how traditional publishers do it. And that is not available to Amazon. Amazon does not play that game. Amazon’s you bought that book on May 29th. That sale went through on May 29th. We’re not holding it until August so that’s just something to be aware of that. There are certain mechanisms that are available to traditionally published authors, right or wrong, doesn’t really matter. So what I would say for any of us who aspire to something like New York Times, get those, that first book or two or three out, really build your audience, build your platform. Go ahead and do the podcast interviews, build your network. And that, that is something that you could achieve with a traditional publisher.  And it may not be your first book. For most folks, it’s not their first book that hits the New York Times. So even for my friend who I’m speaking, that’s not her first book. So for a lot of these, James Clear, that was his first book maybe. Chris Badgett: I’m not sure as far as I know, but I’m Morgan Gist MacDonald: actually not sure. But he wrote a heck Chris Badgett: of a lot. He wrote a lot. . Yeah. Yeah, he did his time. Morgan, this is awesome. I feel like you’ve dropped so much valuable information here. I really appreciate it. What. Is the name of your book again and tell us what people can get from your services at paperravenbooks. com. Morgan Gist MacDonald: Yeah. So my book is. Start writing your book today. Very straightforwardly titled. It’s on Amazon. Also there’s an audible version if you’d like to listen to it read. And you can find out more about me and my team at paperravenbooks. com. We can plug in and help you where you are. If you are just. Thinking about a book and you want maybe to be a part of a group of writers that are going through this process together. We have coaching and mentorship. We walk you all the way through writing, publishing, launching your book. If you just want straight up some services, you’re like, I got a manuscript. I want you guys to review it and advise me on what publishing could look like. We also do that. So you can find out more about all that at paper, even books. com and I will. Make sure Chris, that you, your folks get the link to that overview of all the phases and the big checklist of what it would take to DIY self publish your book. There’s some great tools out there that we recommend that you guys check out. So definitely doable and best decision I ever made in my business. Chris Badgett: Morgan. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Morgan Gist MacDonald: Chris. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over 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 Become a Published Author as an Expert in Your Field with Morgan Gist MacDonald appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Sarah Noel Block shares her experience in marketing and also discusses marketing strategies for course creators. Sarah Noel Block is a marketing pro that focuses on assisting companies, especially educators and online company owners, establish successful marketing strategies. She is From Tiny Marketing. She is well-known for her proficiency in content marketing and digital marketing. Additionally, Sarah has served as the host of the “Tiny Marketing Podcast,” where she offers insightful marketing advice. She underlines the significance of developing a clear customer avatar at the outset, which entails knowing the precise issues your course solves and identifying the audience who constantly faces these difficulties. Additionally, Sarah emphasizes the need of choosing the appropriate marketing channels for your niche, whether through content marketing, social media advertising, or other strategies, with a focus on testing and experimenting. 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 Sarah Noel Block. You can find her@sarahnoelblock.com. That’s Sarah with an H. She also hosts the Tiny Marketing Podcast. Welcome to the show, Sarah. Sarah Noel Block: Thank you for having me and accepting me in the cave that I’m living in right now. Chris Badgett: It’s all good. I’m in a cave too. . So we’re gonna nerd out about marketing one of my favorite subjects. I get a lot of course creators and coaches who are trying to get clients. I have agencies who support that industry. They’re trying to get clients. Everybody wants customers and clients. Marketing is the way before we get into some strategies and whatnot. What makes, why did you add tiny to your brand? What’s tiny marketing mean? Sarah Noel Block: Yeah. So I’ll go to my like superhero origin story and I started off as a one person marketing department for a seven company group. So I had to learn how to market when I had no resources, no budget. And that’s why I support now. I use the frameworks I learned then when I was in the trenches to help them figure out how to market in the most streamlined way that still works. Chris Badgett: Tiny teams. That’s awesome. Yeah. So like you don’t have to have a giant budget and a giant team to do effective marketing. That’s what you’re saying. No. Sarah Noel Block: And I’ve actually worked like when I’m partnering with agencies, I’ve worked with giant companies, international billion dollar companies. And I feel so much more comfortable when my. Resources are restricted. That’s like my comfort zone. I like scrappy. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Marketing, there’s a lot of pieces to it and you’re obviously good at a lot of different parts of it for a course creator type person who’s, let’s say they’re new.  They’re just starting to build an audience. They’ve got their first course ready to go. Where do we start? Figuring out marketing, especially if we have no background in it. What do we do first? Sarah Noel Block: Yeah. Who’s your person? Who is it that you’re selling to? So the first thing you should be thinking about is this is the problem that I’m solving and who the heck needs that? Just really narrow it down. And that will make marketing so much easier. If you know exactly who has this problem consistently. Chris Badgett: The customer avatar. I see a lot of people struggle with this in the sense that. Like I may teach a certain thing and I call it a mechanism, but there’s like this way I teach this thing. And my market is P they’ll just say, my market is people who want that thing. It’s not really an avatar. It’s just, their avatar is people who want what I’m selling. But how do we like more, better crystallize avatar? Sarah Noel Block: How do you sell to generic person who has this problem? Yeah. Figuring out that problem that you solve is the first step because then you can start to think about who are the people that consistently have this problem? So for example, in, in my experience actually we’re talking about courses today. So I will talk about. The course that I had, what I did is I thought who needs to learn how to do content strategy? So I started making a list of who are the most common people who would have that issue? Maybe marketing leaders that don’t have a team. They don’t have a strategist. It could be content writers who. The AI has taken over their job and they need to learn a more strategic approach to content marketing. So I made a list of all the people who have my problem, and then I did a beta test. And I sold to them just very generically because it was a beta. I was figuring out who actually cared about this and it turned out it was business owners that have like solo entrepreneurs that don’t have any team that were the most interested in learning how to create a car, a content marketing strategy, but doing that beta test is a great way to figure out. Who did I enjoy working with? Who was like received the most from that? And then you can start narrowing it down and it will be so much easier to sell once you do that. But a data, a beta test is always helpful. Chris Badgett: How do you beta test? Let’s say I sell meditation. I train people in mindfulness and meditation as an example. Maybe there’s stressed out parents. Maybe there’s entrepreneurs, maybe there’s vets coming back from the military. Like how, if we have these three very different groups, how would we do a beta test? Sarah Noel Block: Yeah, I would start off with creating a masterclass or a webinar around. The challenges that they are experiencing and keep it high level. These are the challenges you’re experiencing. This is how to solve it and see who signs up for that. Put it out on advertising, put it out to your email list. Oh, and your email list is obviously the easiest place to sell. So who’s on there that would make sense to sell to, but start with that and see who you attract with it, because data testing is a great opportunity to learn who actually cares about your thing. So I would start there and then segment, and then you can test out who’s buying it and who’s a great student who cares. Chris Badgett: What what what are all the details that go into a really well crafted avatar? What do we, how do we it could be like a certain type of, you mentioned a business owner, but that had no team that was, had to figure out content.  What else do you know about that avatar as an Sarah Noel Block: example? Yeah. So I love building out customer avatars and honestly, I’m. I’ve changed. I’ve evolved over time because I used to hate them. I used to look at them like those little fake pictures with the fake names and random things like they love dogs. I was like, who cares about any of this? None of that matters. I’ve evolved over time, and I’ve just realized that those things don’t matter. Your customer avatar should focus on, think story brand. What are the challenges that they’re having? What triggers them to start looking for a solution? And then understanding those elements, then you can go a little bit deeper.  What size does the organization have to be able to afford my services? Who did I enjoy working with? And those are ways that you can start to build out who your customer avatar should be about. And then focusing in on, these are the things that matter for marketing. Where do they hang out online?  How is it that they research how to solve their problems? That will give you a really clear Line of how to market to them. And what is it that looks like success to them? So you can even start this by using chat GPT prompts to just get it started. And then start interviewing your customers and verify the assumptions that you’re making. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I have actually experimented with chat GPT for avatar and it’s, it is quite a helpful resource. It’s not going to, I wouldn’t count on it a hundred percent, but it’ll definitely give you a solid first draft Sarah Noel Block: to start. Yeah. It gives you a great Assumption customer avatar, but then you need to verify those things like one time. I was doing one for a customer that didn’t have they haven’t sold to this audience before. So I started with a foundational A. I customer avatar that I built through prompts. But then I went to their online watering holes, and I started talking to these actual people and surveying them. And through those conversations and those surveys, I was able to verify and tweak that profile. So it made sense and it gave me a really clear idea of their journey. And what they do when they’re trying to find a solution to their problem. Chris Badgett: What’s an example, like prompt language. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but like for chat, GBT or BART or whatever, that somebody could type in to, to get it, to spit out a starting avatar statement. Sarah Noel Block: Yeah. So start with what let’s say your favorite customer was. a marketing director, and you know the size of their company, you know what industry they serve. Put in that information first and then ask them, chat GPT is a person chat GPT, like what challenges are they experiencing? What triggers them to start looking for a solution? Where is it that they spend time online? And those are some good places to start and ask them to spit it out, spit out that answer in the form of a customer avatar, because then it really does fill in all of the gaps on those trigger points and how you can market to them. And then another great ad is if you use being a I after that, you can go there and say, where does what events would this customer avatar go to that are happening in the next six months and because being a I uses actual Internet searches as part of it. You get real time information and you find out exactly what events that they would actually go to. And you can start building out what kind of networking things that you would go to, or maybe what podcasts you would want to be a guest on because that’s what they’re listening to. Chris Badgett: That is awesome. I want to ask you about social media because we get a lot of questions about that. And in my opinion, a lot of people, they miss what social media is like the two parts. It’s You got to have some media, some content ideally. And then you have to actually talk to people, not just like posting content. And it’s not just. Engaging in replies or something like that. So what is social media marketing today and how would you encourage somebody to approach it? Who like maybe has a Facebook account and a LinkedIn and that’s Sarah Noel Block: about it. Yeah, it’s not working online is what it is. You want to actually build those relationships. So I hate social media. I don’t do it for fun, but I show up every day and I actually set a timer. For 15 minutes at this time and 15 minutes at this time, I’m just going to engage on posts of people who either they’re really supportive of me, and they’re always commenting on my stuff, or I would want to work with them in the future, or maybe I would want them to work with me and meaning I would want to hire them. So I spend 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes at lunchtime engaging on those. And it’s always best to do this around the time that you’re going to post too, because then you’re on the feed right around when you’re posting something. So people are more likely to pop over to your profile and engage with you too. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What like, how would you translate that to in person events? You mentioned going to like, where does my avatar hang out? Perhaps at a conference or trade show or whatever. How would you approach the event differently or the same as regular online social media? Yeah, Sarah Noel Block: well with social you got to think of it like little watering holes where you’re going to post that other people who care about the same thing as you. Who have the same problem that you solve are going to be hanging out and engage on it. And the same thing you want to do in live events, too. You’re going to an event where these are people that would buy my service or my product, and you just have normal conversations with them. Be natural. Don’t try and sell to them right away because when you’re just starting to build that relationship, that’s all it is. It’s authentic relationship building. It’s not about selling, but. This is all I do. I hate selling, and I’m not good at it in a direct fashion. What I do is, I make friends with people, and then when they hear about someone who has a problem that I solve, they’re like, oh, Sarah. Sarah’s the person to go to for that. So it feels more natural to me to… Just make friends with people instead I was talking the other day on someone else’s podcast. I’m like, do you remember how we met? Because I just stalked you online and commented on all of your stuff and just chatted with you until you finally reciprocated yeah, you were pretty persistent and I did. I’m glad you were because eventually we became friends. That’s my awkward way of making friends online, I guess Chris Badgett: I totally relate and have done the same thing. How about more like partnerships or leveraging other people’s audiences? How do we do that and actually make it work? Sarah Noel Block: Based on the way you phrase that, then you probably saw that I had recent content about that, but like that was the name of the episode of tiny marketing. I love partnerships. And that is how I built my business. When I first started, I had no audience, just like everybody else. So I partnered with product companies that had the same audience that I serve. And I partnered with other service providers and we would do joint webinars together, or we would do newsletter swaps where I shared their lead magnet and they shared mine. Or actually, when I first started, like now, Tiny Marketing is primarily a podcast, but when I first started, it was a live stream show. So I met a ton of people that way, and that was probably the best decision I ever made because a lot of my work came through the people I met, who I just interviewed, and that was not intentional, that just looked out that way. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. How about content? You mentioned sharing content on social media and posting at certain times and stuff, but how do we actually come up with a content strategy and avoid the burnout for avatar? And actually create the stuff. Sarah Noel Block: Yeah, I feel one, if you just have three pillars that you consistently talk about, that’s the easiest way to do it. I always start off with these are three topics that I talk about, and here are a bunch of subtopics that would make sense for it. And you could just create a mind map around that. These are topics that make sense and you could batch it, which is what I do for my clients is I spend it a week just working on their stuff, heads down, and then we can schedule it all out ahead of time. And that’s like the easiest way to do it because you’re in that mindset and you could do it all at once, but if that’s not how you flow, if that’s not your work style, then one thing I did is. Like early on, I was using Trello and anytime I had an idea, I would just pop it into Trello and I would just create it then. So when I was ready to post, I would have it already. Now, I’m even lazier and I just use my Apple Notes. And anytime I have an idea, I start typing it away. So I have… a big ol notebook of ideas for when it’s ready. And if you struggle with Okay, great, I have those pillars, but what do I talk about within those pillars? Again, you could just go to ChatGPT, throw your pillars in there and say, Give me 20 topics that XX audience would care about within this pillar, and there will at least be a couple that you liked in there. Chris Badgett: Any other tips on working with AI, what to do, what not to do? Sarah Noel Block: Ah clearly I love AI. It saves so much time. Yes, I do have tips. The biggest issue I see with it is that people, the copywriting, it’s all generic and sounds exactly the same for everybody. So if you use it for copywriting, I haven’t seen great stuff from that. So if you are not a writer and you want to do that’s cool, but go to the hooks and the closes every single time and make sure that. It is an actual hook that you would say and read through it. Look for your voice. Make sure it’s there. Make sure you have a good closer. That’s not some read this post, blah, blah, blah, instead of have it more personalized. And then I think it works if you do a lot of editing to make it sound like you, cause you don’t want to sound like everyone else, but. In my to do category, one thing I love to do is I do a lot of copy for my clients, and so I will write it out and then I’ll ask chat GPT to grade me, I’ll put it in there and I’ll say this is meant for this audience and I want them to take this action. What should I do to improve it? And what do you like about it? Because I need a little compliment from my AI.  It gives you really good advice. So it’s almost like having a beta reader or a secondary editor on your work. So I really like that. It’s you should actually have more testimonials here because it would show your authority. You’re right. You’re right. Chris Badgett: For the people who haven’t heard of it before, what if you have some kind of content framework, like there’s a hook and then there’s the main content or story, and then some kind of close or call to action, what’s the structure there and can you explain a hook and what the call to action should look like Sarah Noel Block: and stuff? Yeah. Every single piece of content you create should have a hook at the beginning, and that is something that draws the audience in. It could be a question, a bold statement that might push people the wrong way, but push the right people the right way. Or like some interesting fact or statistics, something that draws people in, and that’s the hook. That’s what gets people excited. It could be a story too. And then the body of your content would be the meat. It is what you’re teaching, just a little snapshot of your lesson that you’re teaching. And then the close will give them some sort of action to take. On social media, it works best if you do your close in like a PS. PS, and then the action. If you want to read more about this, or if you want to listen to the whole episode, the link is in comments. Or, PS, if you like this, then you would love this workshop that I’m putting on, and blah blah blah whatever action you want them to take next. Chris Badgett: Awesome. And what do you recommend?  What would you recommend for a course creator or coach for a lead magnet one and then number two, some kind of sales conversion event to close the sale? Number two. Yeah. Yeah. Sarah Noel Block: So I have found with courses that video content as a lead magnet works best, some sort of masterclass or a webinar. If you’re just starting out. I love a live webinar because that is the only type of content that I can think of that can pull people in as a top of funnel lead and bring them all the way through to a sale within 30 minutes. It’s the only thing I’ve ever experienced that does that because like content marketing is know trust. That’s your goal for every single piece. And A webinar is the only way to get that know trust happening all in one piece of content. I like that best. They have an opportunity to actually get to know you. You want them to learn something. You want them to have some sort of win by the end of it. But also, a little bit more but I… I need more to be able to get to the finish line on that. And that’s how you actually sell the courses having that, but I need more feeling at the end of it. Chris Badgett: What’s the the key parts of a webinar? If somebody is okay, I got to choreograph this thing or outline it and I’m a little overwhelmed. Like what are the main components of a webinar? Sarah Noel Block: If you, are you talking about just the presentation or the whole process? Chris Badgett: I was just talking about the presentation. Maybe we’ll start there. Sarah Noel Block: Yeah. So I love webinars. They are my absolute favorite thing to do because I feel like, I don’t know, I work from home. I need a need to connect with people that gives me that opportunity too. But you want to start with the foundation of it should be An easy win and it needs to be super simple with the title to know exactly what you’re going to get from it. Numbers work well. So if it’s three challenges that course creators experience when they are launching their first course. As an example, I’m just pulling that out of the air and how to fix them in parentheses. This tells them exactly what, one, it tells us who the audience is. This isn’t seasoned course creators that we’re talking to right now. This is newbies. And we’re going to be talking about the challenges that you will be experiencing once you hit that, once you start that launch, and how to fix them before you fall. So that’s a great example of a topic that would make sense. And then you want to break it down into easy challenge solution format. So they’re learning a little thing. By the end, you want them to have one thing that’s tangible that they had at the end of it. Like maybe you gave them a template for solving one of those challenges you discuss. And an opportunity maybe to do a little upgrade and work one on one with you to complete that template. And then at the end of it, you’ll want to make sure that you save that time to be able to actually pitch the course and tell them how they can get the rest of the solution. So that would be the basic framework. And I would keep it within 30 minutes if possible because people have limited time and… Brain ability to stay with Chris Badgett: you. That’s awesome. And what were you meaning with outside of the presentation, there’s the more of how does it fit in? Sarah Noel Block: What does it mean by that? There’s webinar. So you’d want, you’d need at least two landing pages. You would need the one that brings people in and has them sign up for it. No, you would need a thank you page after that gives them additional information on what they would need and then the actual page where the webinar will exist and then you need an email series before and after it sounds complex, but really, you could sit down for a couple hours and put the whole thing together. Chris Badgett: Awesome. And is the before to just reinforce why they should come and show up live? And then the after is to follow up on the value and encourage the call to action. Is that basically it? Sarah Noel Block: The first is to get people in the door. It’s get people signed up for it. And then so You want that first, you need people to actually show up. And then once people sign up, yeah, sending a couple additional emails about the importance of signing or showing up live is so important because it’s a lot harder to sell if they don’t actually show up. So I like to add a little incentive. If you show up live, you get this bonus bundle that you wouldn’t get. If you watch the on demand version. That usually helps us giving them some sort of bonus for attending live. And then the after emails would be, yeah, here’s the replay. And then you can move them over to the sales sequence on selling your course. It’s a nice little funnel. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned copywriting and. For people that aren’t trained as copywriters or haven’t invested the time, I think some people get scared by it. How would you, what tips would you give to ease somebody into copywriting and help them get started? What should they focus on first to, to develop their copy, to increase their marketing value? Sarah Noel Block: Yeah. So if we’re talking course creators and. What they would need to do first to copyright for themselves. I would start with frameworks because courses all of the copy that you need is very framework based. You’re sending very similar emails in the sales sequence. You need to talk about the same. Sequence of things on the landing page, the sales page. So starting with frameworks will make it so much easier and just keep your voice active. That’s the biggest annoyance that I see when copywriters are using a lot of passive voice and then make sure your headlines really pop because people are scanners. So as long as your headlines are really good, then you. We’ll keep them engaged and pulled through on that sales page. And you don’t need a ton of copy. If you just have short sentences and short paragraphs that are talking about the important things, the things within that framework, then that will work just fine. You don’t need to be a brilliant copywriter. Chris Badgett: If somebody is putting together a course landing page or sales page, what are some of those key pieces in the framework of a decent sales page to focus on? What are the components? Yeah, Sarah Noel Block: I was actually writing a sales page this morning, so I’m gonna try and Fast forward in time to remember what I was doing with that So the first thing is like a eye catching headliner that talks about The problem that you’re solving, and then the subheader should be the transformation that you’re promising. Those are the first two things that you want to talk about. And then give plenty of buttons to be able to move straight towards the purchase on there. You want to include the challenges that they are experiencing. This what their life could look like. I like to do this in bullets. So bullets. These are the challenges that you’d be experiencing bullets after that. This is what your life could look like once you have solved those challenges. You want to make sure to have, who is this right for? Your customer avatar that we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, put all of those pieces in the, who is this right for? Just bulleted list. And then, who is this wrong for? Which is important, because you want to attract, but you want to repel. You’re not selling to everyone. So put in the people that you don’t want buying the course. Now, I’m not saying, Jack, I don’t want you buying the course. I’m saying, Hey, this course is actually meant for… Entrepreneurs, solo entrepreneurs. It’s not meant for enterprise at that level. This isn’t what you would need, something like that. And we’re back with Sarah Block from the tiny marketing podcast for part two of the episode. We had a little technical difficulty, but we are back and we’re going to keep this marketing conversation going for course creators and agencies. Sarah. You mentioned on your site that you’re very cognizant of doing marketing without burning out. Chris Badgett: What, what causes people to burn out when doing marketing for their courses or their agency and how can they avoid that? Sarah Noel Block: Yeah I have 100 percent experience burnout before and in my experience, it’s always been because I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I didn’t have a plan, so I was trying a little bit of everything. And I was doing a lot of testing and that really burned me out because I was like, I’m just going to try these things and see if they work. So what works best for me to avoid out is having that strategy in place, a plan in place and breaking it down into quarterly tasks. This is what I need to do to move the needle and meet these goals. And then it feels really tangible. Like I can do that. This I can do. And then I just set up batching. I set up batching times to do it. And I even do that really with my client work. I set up intensives for them. So I’m batching all of their work and I batch my own, this week is reserved for Sarah stuff. This is operations and marketing week, and then I’ll batch all of my marketing then. And that really helps. But also, just having a system in place is a great way to avoid burnout. If you have your project management tool and your automations set up. If you do pretty consi let’s say you have a podcast, for example. The same tasks are involved in every single podcast. Set up the template so you can automatically have all of those things set up in your project management tool, assigned to the right people, the due dates are correct. You can do that all in your project management tool. And it’s a, it saves you so much time, makes it a lot easier. Chris Badgett: What about repurposing? Let’s say you do a really good webinar, you have a podcast or you’re you’re creating videos, how do you actually repurpose all that stuff or not let it just die on the vine and disappear Sarah Noel Block: forever? You gotta repurpose everything. So my rule is have one core piece of content you’re willing to commit to. Let’s say we’ll go back to the podcast example. Let’s say you have committed to doing two podcasts a month, bi weekly podcast. I can handle that. Enough good, but take that video from the podcast and repurpose it. You can use tools like Descript, which will, be super easy because you can make, you can take a little sound bites and create social media graphics from it. You can quickly turn it into reels or tech talks just by changing the orientation of it. Can also use tools like Opus AI, which actually takes AI. You just put your video in there and it will find the hooks for you and it will create everything for you. It’ll even add graphics and it’ll add your You’re what you were saying, closed captioning right in there. So within five minutes, you’ve repurposed your podcast into 12 new videos that you can use to promote that main podcast. That’s the point of repurposing, by the way, it’s all about distribution, getting everybody to that core piece of content. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And you said Opus AI, that’s O P U S. Yeah. I was just pulling it out. So many AI tools out there. Sarah Noel Block: It’s so awesome. Oh my gosh. And trust me, I am a chronic beta tester where I have tested them all. Chris Badgett: So on that note, what are some of your favorites? What do you use? Sarah Noel Block: Toasty AI. I love, so I’ve tested a lot of AI around podcasting because well, that’s my core piece of content and I want to do it as quickly as possible. So I’ll take my podcast and I’ll put it in there and it will create an article in my voice from the content on there. Yeah, it’s good. It’s good. It will create the show notes page for me. It’ll create social media posts for me, and it also has a chat GPT function where you can ask it to do additional things.  Oh, I forgot the best part, the timestamps and highlights. It’ll tell you the timestamps and highlights that you should put in your show notes page. And it’ll also give you the transcript for your podcast. And it takes five minutes. Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s really impressive. That Sarah Noel Block: podcasting repurposing AI. Chris Badgett: That’s toastyai. com. Any other AI tools you love? Sarah Noel Block: There is another one I love. It’s pad something. I have to look it, but so I don’t like it as much as Toasty, but the thing that it does that Toasty doesn’t do is It finds all of the resources that you mentioned in the podcast, which is really helpful because I’m always like, what, sometimes I’m like, cause I batch record my episodes, I’ll record an episode in January and it doesn’t go live until August. What was in there? What resources did we mention? And that tool, I think it’s Podbean, I’ll have to look it up. But that tool finds the resources that you mentioned. And then earlier I was talking about Bing AI, which is a totally different world than ChatGPT, because it’ll do internet searches. So all of the information is researched that you get from it. So I really like that. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tell us if people want to connect with you, tell us more about your podcast show. And then if people want to work with you on marketing, what does that look like and what, where should they go? Sarah Noel Block: Yeah. So my podcast is the tiny marketing show and it’s everywhere that you’re listening to podcasts. And you can go to sarahnoahblock. com to work with me. You, if you reached out to me, then you would find that the first thing that we do is we work on a workshop together to build out your brand messaging on a page so we can get started there. And then next up is your strategic story where we build out your entire strategy and the execution plan. So I don’t leave you high and dry. Your strategy collected dust on your drive. You actually get execution too. Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. So that’s Sarah, Noel block. com. Check out the tiny marketing podcast. Sarah, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you for adding so much value on this episode. We really appreciate it. And we’ll have to do this again sometime. Thank you. Thank you. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over 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, Christiaan Pieterse shares his journey and importance of Maxi Blocks. With stunning templates from Maxi Blocks, you can build websites more quickly. Christiaan Pieterse is Co-Founder of Maxi blocks. It’s a page builder and template library. Maxi Blocks helps to add amazing templates to your website and with the help of page builder , there is a option to modify those templates. He and his wife overcame the difficulties of remote web design work over time, finally switching to a white-label web design strategy. They streamlined the process by serving as in-house web designers for other companies in this model. Maxi Blocks is subsequently created as a response to further simplify web design, providing users with a library of patterns, blocks, and icons to personalize and construct full websites. Maxi Blocks, which are built on top of Gutenberg, offer building blocks that may be joined to create patterns, which in turn comprise full web pages, improving accessibility and effectiveness. 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 State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello and welcome back to another episode of L M S Cast. Today I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Christian Peters from Maxi Blocks. That’s it maxi blocks. com maxi blocks is a page builder. It’s a template library. It’s super cool. I’ve got members on my team raving about it. I’m really excited to chat with you today. Welcome to the show, Christian. Christiaan Pieterse: Thank you. Happy to be here. Chris Badgett: So how do you describe maxi blocks to somebody? What is it? Christiaan Pieterse: I would say it’s first and foremost, a template library. So a fully functional web design template library. And then secondly, a page builder, which you can use to customize those templates with Chris Badgett: Awesome. And tell us why you decided to make it. I mean, there’s, there’s page builders and the starter sites and all kinds of stuff out there. What. What inspired you to go to all the work to create this beautiful design template library in MaxiBlock? Christiaan Pieterse: We’ve been doing web design for a long time. So my wife started as a, she’s my co founder as well. She started web design in 1998. When she started out, it was all HTML and Dreamweaver. I mean, the websites were so basic at the time. It was a huge amount of work anyway. So she has a lot of experience working in agencies and working with customers. So in, this was in 2012, we made the decision to start a small little web design agency while we were in Asia and. At the time, we identified WordPress as being a good solution because doing an HTML site at the time was impossible for people to update. And if you, if you’re working remote you, you can’t always get to help people update their sites. And it was a thing. So we had to enable people to be able to update their websites. So we identified WordPress. This was in 2011, and we started working with that and then built websites that way. We slowly progressed up. I’m giving you a long story now, but it, it lays the foundation of, of where I’m coming to. Then we started serving customers remote. For web design specifically and eventually what we found was it was extremely time consuming to get find the customer in the first place. Then you have to train them on how to. Do a website, how it works, how to hand it over, all the basic things with design and working remote and sitemaps and all of that other stuff was difficult for people at that time. So we decided what can we do to make it easier that we don’t have to keep training our customers.  To do the web design projects. And then we thought why don’t we do white label web design, where we act as other people’s in house web designers. In that case, we work with an experienced salesperson inside of that company who knows how the systems and the processes work. They have their customer, they know us, they know what’s necessary. And that’s how it developed from there. We then built up a client place over a period of time until about 2015. And that’s when Divvy came on the scene for us. We started looking into Divvy specifically because we made so many sites. We were a small team at the time we built about 60 websites in one year.  For a small team of five and it was a lot of science. I mean, we were so tired and exhausted. I mean, we, we just, we just couldn’t cope. So we, we were thinking, how can we simplify it to be able to reuse existing things that we do and just to modify it. And that’s when we identified that. And the main thing that they innovated was the ability to export sections and layouts and reuse them elsewhere. That was like, that was a big thing. I mean, there was no other service at the time that could do this. So we were like, okay, that’s our thing. So we started, we literally overnight we switched to, to using Divi. And then we started developing sites for customers and that went really well and smoothly. And it was so challenging to to deal with customers. It takes a huge amount of time to deal with customers and making sure they’re happy and doing the handovers, doing reviews and all of those processes. So we thought to ourselves, is there some way that we can make a transition to a membership model or to have products also at the time, one of the changes that happened for our white label with design pitch was Previously it was O Desk. I don’t know O Lance. E Lance and O Desk. And they got bought up and then they turned into Upwork. But when those guys came on the scene O Desk. They were advertising fully functional websites for $250. Now this was remote and we were out there trying to sell, you know, $1,500 website or $3,000 websites here. All of a sudden, SSK is advertising $250 websites, and I think they damage the market in a big way, especially for people that work remote. And there’s a. There’s a, there’s a point where a customer, they’re not willing to pay you more unless they can see you in person, they can walk into your office and go, Okay, I know you, I see you, I trust you, and I can you. So that happened, that market change, and then we were like, it’s the, we couldn’t go lower because we couldn’t afford it. We couldn’t go higher because we, we didn’t want to do customer facing. So we were stuck between a rock and a hard place. And then we thought, Hey, why don’t we make templates for these 250 web designers out there? Because they don’t necessarily have the experience. And we had a lot of customers come back to us and say, Oh, I used Odesk and Elance and it was a nightmare. Please fix it for me. And so we thought, Okay, let’s make, let’s make templates for them. And that’s what we did. We made the switch on. We started designing templates. And so previously for Kyra, it was Kyra being the designer she always had a creative brief to be able to make a design. And now when you’re designing templates. There’s no creative. So it was in the beginning, it was extremely difficult for her to, you have to guess what you’re trying to design or you pick a niche or a template or a homepage or, you know, like a thematic relation. And then you have to design something that works roughly for everybody. Anyway, we progressed onwards. That business that we have is still going. And that’s been going since 2018. Over the time we’ve built 2000, almost 2600 patterns and pages that’s available through a plugin that you install and then a cloud template library. You subscribe to the template library and then you click on it, you download the item, and We updated. We maintain it. So all you have to do is install it, download it and use it on. That’s how we made the switch to getting into him. Wow, that’s very cool. Long story, but I think it gives context. Chris Badgett: It does help. And I’m looking on on the template library right now, and there’s 15, 157 items that people can pick from, which is amazing. Can you describe? The difference between a page and a pattern for somebody if they’re not if they’re not used to Christiaan Pieterse: patterns. Sure. The, the template library you’re looking at now is our new MaxiBlox template library. The one I was just explaining for the 2500 was in the previous niche in Dewey, which is still operational. In 2020, we made the decision. Okay, we have to do our own thing. One of the one of the challenges we had in support in dealing with customers, we’ve had over 20, 000 support conversations of customers using patterns, layouts, templates and the things they struggle with. And we paid very close attention to those things to reduce our support, and we started MaxiBlox to try and deal with those specific issues. So getting to that was first when we started with Gutenberg. Gutenberg as the, as the base blocks that were there in 2020, we just couldn’t build the designs that we knew we could make. And eventually we were just like, okay, we have to start building our own blocks and our own stuff to, to actually build something that’s, that we know that we can build with CSS and animations and responsive and all the other stuff that goes with it.  So we started doing that and then. Coming back to the Denver library that we have now, first we had to build the product, the builder and the blocks in order to make the library to prove that the library works and in order to have a library to launch with at the time we launched the product. So it took us two and a half years to build the product, in which process we were constantly designing the patterns and having different ideas. To get it all together. So it was a very close development process between the designer, the library guys building the patterns and the developers giving them all the necessary tools to be able to build it. So getting back to patterns, blocks, you have to have those are the core Gutenberg blocks. These are the foundational elements that come together in order to build a pattern. You, you combine those pieces. In a group arrangement that will make a pattern and a pattern comes together to make a complete page. So a pattern could be a hero, it could be a testimonial, it could be a menu, etc. And that’s how they fit together. So the 15, 000, the number at the moment, we’ve got 1, 600 patterns. And the 15, 000 are the icons that Kyra drew single handedly over the course of three years. In SVG format, so they’re really small, they’re completely adaptable and scalable. What happened was, she, she did some research, because we’ve been in web design for a long time. So she did a little bit of research, and she asked herself, what are the basic things that every website needs? If we’re going to make a template library, we have to include the basics that everyone struggles with, or that everyone needs. And this is one of the common problems we found in support as well, is that people struggle finding the right icons. They either have to install the script or the the style isn’t right, or they spend days and days and hours trying to find the right icons and they don’t fit, or they’re not right, or they’re not the right size or the right format, or they don’t have the software program just to change the color, or they can’t change the full or the outline or the background. There’s so many permutations that you can think of. And then Kyra said I’m gonna, I’m gonna design all of these icons so that we solve that problem for people completely. So she went ahead and over the last three years, she’s designed 13, 411 icons. That’s Chris Badgett: amazing. I’m looking at the… Education ones right now, Mitch, I know well, and there’s 117 here.  There’s ideas on how to find ideas here. It’s awesome. Christiaan Pieterse: Yes. I mean, and she what’s nice about them is they’re not just icons. They can also be. Anywhere on the website as a layer or as a background, even as a hover. If you, if you go to the if you go in the patent library, then you go to, and you just open it myself. For those Chris Badgett: of you listening, when you have a second, go to maxi blocks. com and you can see a demo of everything. Christiaan Pieterse: So if you’re on the template library, maxi blocks. com forward slash demo, you can go to you just. page that opens up for you. If you go down to the team patent, you’ll see we’ve got 226 team patents. If you continue scrolling down a little bit, you’ll see some examples. I’m trying to find one for you. And everything is searchable, by the way. So for example, let me, if you just type in Thank E. T. M. L. Bro. 46. That’s a tough one. You can, you can actually actually click on it and open it. And once you look at the preview, you’ll see the hover. So these are fully functional previews. What you look at. This is exactly what you get when you install it on your site or when you install the button. So you’ll see with the hover. It gives you an interesting result. That is actually a shape or an icon, and when you load it onto your page yourself, you can just go in and click and replace it to any shape that you want. It automatically takes the right color. Of the pattern that is there, we’ll get to the style cards a little bit later. That’s another cool innovation that we have, but that’s the beauty of it. So you never have to struggle to find icons. You can just go into the icon library and search for anything that you want.  Do this one. When you did in the icon library, search for arrows, arrows, search for the word arrow. Chris Badgett: There’s 528 interface, 121. Yeah. Christiaan Pieterse: Yeah. That’s a lot. I mean, people need arrows, like there’s so many arrows and, and these, you can use them for buttons. You can use them for, you can overlay them. You can use them anywhere on the side for an arrow, like a down button or a return to top or. There’s so many permutations that you can play with. And, and the nice thing about the icons is you can set the line width. You can adjust the line width and the fill. All of those things are adjustable. You can change the colors individually or all inside the editing experience of the builder. Chris Badgett: Amazing. You mentioned style cards. We’re going to get into that. They look like, they’re like design palettes. Can you explain? What a style card Christiaan Pieterse: is, how it works? Sure, so a style card is like a skin for your entire website that relates specifically to MaxiBlox. This won’t apply yet. To the other blocks inside of your name on your website that integration we still need to do that’s probably about three, four months away when we can focus on that integration. The whole full site editing thing is in a lot of flux. It’s moving around quite a bit. Whatever development you do can be replaced quite quickly and you have to update it again. So we have to take it at a, at a pace that we can manage. Anyway, so style cards affect every single maxi block and button in the library. And the idea behind a style card is that there’s a light tone. And the dark tone for a block or a pattern on that includes everything from headlined text to icon. Colorful line. It’s includes your links, your link, others, your buttons, your button hovers. your backgrounds, your outlines in a light style and in a dark style. So light tone, dark tone. Now what happens is when you install any of the patterns from the library, you can go into the Styleguard editor. Browse around for the style card that you like and the little thing that you were referring to the little card that you look at is a visual, a quick visual representation of what your patterns are going to look like on the rest of the website once you apply that style card. So the style card affects roughly 30 different design elements. And all of those have been coded and built in so that when you activate the style card, all the patterns on the page and on the website takes those new styles. And you can go in individually to the style card itself. Save as new and create a new style so you can make an adjustment. Maybe you want to change the font or you want a different other color or, you know, different H one color and you can make that update, save and apply. You can even export the card if you want to use it later or on a different site. So that’s how the style card works. It’s a quick way to customize templates. And once you’ve picked your style card and it’s applied, any pattern that you load from the library onto the page automatically takes that style. So it saves you a huge amount of time going through every single item and having to click it and update it. So it’s a page building machine. Chris Badgett: That’s amazing.  How do you recommend a non designer approach working with MaxiBlox? Should we start with patterns? Should we start with full pages? Like how to what’s the best way for somebody to get over the blank screen and get going and build the website They generally have in their Christiaan Pieterse: mind. Okay, I would say At the moment, we still busy adding pages. We we’ve just in the last day or two we merged in development cycle just some missing pieces, which is advanced custom fields. We’ve just merged that in for dynamic content. We also have a repeater field. Sorry, these words might be quite technical for some people but it will allow us to build the pages. And the point I’m trying to get to is for new people starting out, probably the best way to go is to load a whole page from the library, and then just Start clicking around and update what you want to click. It’s a, it’s a visual editing experience. It’s built on Gutenberg. So we have a custom instance of Gutenberg, and we have our own custom blocks, like many of the other block plugins out there. And you just install the pattern and then start clicking on the items you want to update. If you want a different style, you can go to style cards, you’ll see a toolbar inside of the editor where you can click on a style card, it loads the library, you click the item, download it, activate it, and then your style is there. So that would be the simplest way to get started is to just… Load a page and start playing and once you get more familiar with it, then you can go, okay, cool. I’m going to build my own page. I’m going to add a header and I’m going to add all of these pieces together, but we find through experience that most people prefer to load a complete page and then remove sections or swap out sections to do what you needed to do. It’s complicated to design a page. If you’re not familiar with it, if it’s new, if it’s new to anyone, it’s a challenge.  I mean, there’s so much knowledge involved in all the things that need to go into this small little page. If you, if you’re not familiar with it, it can be quite a challenge. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You mentioned it before the when you were starting to design all these patterns and pages that it’s hard with the blank screen, how did you overcome that? With your designer and the design challenge of creating this massive library, how did you decide what to focus on or what components or patterns we needed to make or which pages should we make? Yeah, tell us about your design Christiaan Pieterse: process there. Yeah, this is, this is Kyra, our designer at Minecraft Founders. She’s been doing it for so long and also we have the experience from the previous leash with, with Debbie and having already designed 2, 500 patterns and it’s over 500 full page layouts that she’s designed over there. So she had a, she had a good foundation to start with. The thing about Divi is that there’s a limitation in what you can do because you have to fit inside of what Divi is able to provide.  So many times we had to add a lot of additional CSS and coding in order to get a nice hover or a nice background or a nice text animation or, you know, and obviously Divi has improved over time. But this is what we do different in that niche. So taking it the next step is we, we, with Kyra’s experience, she just went through and thought it through. What do people need? What do people need? And she just… And so we’ve been working through in that process and taking examples from before. One of the challenges that we had was mixing and matching patterns can be a challenge for people. I mean, especially if you have different styles. In our other niche, we have different collections. And what happens when you want to combine this collection with that collection? And then you put them together and you go, Oh, okay, but the font’s different, or the batting’s not the same, or, you know, the margins are different, or it’s got a different stylistic element, for example. So the, that’s where we came up with the idea of doing style cards. So that all the patterns in the library can be mixed and matched with each other. And all you have to do to get them to look the same is apply a style card. Wow, that’s really good. Yeah, so we did a lot of coding to, to… I mean, at one point with responsive, we had to go back to the drawing board. We, we were developing for three months and then we like. Got stuck and we’re like, okay, this isn’t going to work. We have to find a new way to do this. We stopped everything and we rebuild. Our own responsive framework in CSS, and we included Flexbox, and we’ve got six different breakpoints for all the different devices. We deal with 4K screens. Many websites, when you look at them, they’ll have a 4K, they’ll work on a 4K screen, but the max width of the page is 1, 600 pixels. So there’s a lot of margin on the side that just isn’t dealt with. And that’s the nice thing about our patterns, is that it’s been designed for 4K screens. It looks really nice on that, too. So all the way through from the biggest screen to the smallest screen, they look nice on those items as well. Chris Badgett: I’m looking at your headlines, and there’s 60 different patterns. And in my mind, I’m like, okay how many different ways can we do a Christiaan Pieterse: headline? A lot. Have a look. And, and I think these are even let me go and click on the patterns as well, because the library is quite big. We spend a lot of time naming, like we’ve got a huge spreadsheet. Every single product is named and labeled before it gets built. Because we knew the library was going to be so big and you need to be able to search for it that we can’t be in a scenario where we named something wrong and you can’t find it or you can’t update it or so this is again from our previous experience. So we work from a very specific spreadsheet, everything goes in there, it’s decided beforehand and once it’s in, that’s what it’s called. Chris Badgett: How do you describe the story mix patterns? Christiaan Pieterse: Those I think probably I would say that’s a combination of icons and headlines and images. I’m trying to think what else in the, in the WordPress library or space would, would be similar.  Look, I would just say it’s, it’s a piece, like it’s a content piece that exists on a page that you create. And that’s. for you to be able to continue to tell your story. It’s, it’s just a name that we came up with that, that described what it’s doing. I like it. Chris Badgett: It’s yeah, it’s, it’s a new, it instantly made sense to me by the way, when I saw it, I’m like, I just wanted to ask you like how you thought about it. Cause I think it’s a really cool content type. And a lot of the other ones we’re looking at here, like accordion, call to action, headlines, hero, icon. images. You have 246 options, which is obviously websites are visual. This is a key pattern area to focus Christiaan Pieterse: on. Yeah. And for for people images can often be a challenge to find the right images. I mean, I asked our designer the other day. I asked her how much time do you spend when you make a design? How much time do you spend finding images? And she looked at me and she went at least 50 percent of my time is spent finding images, just different frames, different angles. It’s crazy to think how critical the image is as part of the design process. So that’s why we have so many. Obviously you have them in different configurations. And on that topic, now that we’re talking about images, One other thing that’s nice about our template library is the ability to switch between the light and the dark tone. For example, if you, if you, anyone on the library, when you get to it, if you go to maxiblocks. com demo and you load, you click on image in the left sidebar and you can click on any of the items there. I’m just going to click on the first one that’s visible. When you click on preview. It will load the item for you, and then you can hover on each of those. It shows you the hover interaction. You can switch between mobile and tablet views. Those are the actual results that you get when you install it on your page. So this is an exact representation. And then on the top left hand corner, you’ll see the option to switch tone. And pay close attention when you switch the tone, the images change as well. That’s really cool. And because it looks weird when you change the white tone and the dark tone and the image doesn’t change. It just doesn’t match. So every single pattern in the library that we have has a dark tone and a light tone. And you might ask yourself, okay, so why would you have a light tone and a dark tone? I mean, that’s cool, but you know, how is it useful? So the way that it’s useful is when you build a page let’s say you’re building a homepage.  Often you’ll start with a header or a hero section, you’ll go down with a story mix, you’ll have some testimonials, and so you go through each of those different sections in order to get contrast between them, you will often have a light Tone on the one section and a dark tone on the next section, which gives you the contrast so that when you read down the page or you scan down the page, it’s easy to distinguish between the different sections. Now what happens is you, you install the template, you’ve got the different tones, and you decide to change the image. of one of the light tones. And the only image you can find is a dark image. Now, all of a sudden, that pattern that you had there, that’s a light pattern, needs to be switched to a dark tone pattern because the image is dark. Great. You just click on the top there, inside of the editor, you’re able to select the tone, and you just switch the tone, and then it comes to a different color. But now what happens is, all the different sections below it… are all out of sync. You have to go to every single one and change them. Otherwise, the entire page doesn’t work because you’ve changed the contrast of the one section with maxi blocks. All you do is go through and switch all the times. Obviously, if you have to change the image, you have to change the image, but it saves you a massive amount of time not to have to physically go in and change every single bit. And inside of the style cards, there’s a light tone variant and a dogone variant in the styles. So when you switch it, it immediately looks right without you having to do the physical work. Wow, Chris Badgett: that’s, that’s amazing. And not only that, like you’ve also, I mean, a lot of times we’re gonna switch out the image with one of our choosing, right? We’re usually not gonna leave the one in there. But because your examples are so strong and good, it helps. Someone with less design skills realized like, Oh, I need a dark image. That’s not too cluttered for this thing to really work. That’s a, Christiaan Pieterse: that’s very good. Can I, can I add something else to that? You’ll also see in the library, not in the demo that you’re looking at, that’s just a live demo, but when you are in the visual editor inside of WordPress and Gutenberg and you’re on the page editor, it’s called the editing experience. When you are in the editing experience, I forgot my point. Chris Badgett: What was it about switching images out? Cause I was, I was Christiaan Pieterse: saying that yes, yes, yes. I remember. Okay, perfect. Thank you. When you are in the editing experience inside of the library pop up, there’s a little check box, which allows you to click the check box. Which loads placeholder images instead of images into the library. So every pattern in the library can be a wireframe, a fully functional wireframe. You just have to click the button. One, one of the upgrades that we’ll make in, in the future, hopefully in a couple of months is. Along with the ability to switch the tone when you are in the library to view it when you load the pattern, we’re gonna make the ability to load the pattern as a wireframe. Oh, wow. So you click load as wireframe and it inserts the pattern without the images. So the images don’t. load into the library, but the pattern itself is fully functional with the same hover effects and the same styles. Everything’s there except minus the, this is Chris Badgett: really cool. You’ve taken basically the complexities of web design and made it more accessible and in many ways, protect. The website builder from themselves, if they’re not a great designer, like you’re, you’re, you’ve got their back. It’s, it’s really cool. Anything else exciting coming for maxi blocks in the coming years? What, what what’s your vision for the project? I know you already have a great product and, and it’s an awesome tool. What else was, what’s coming in the future? Christiaan Pieterse: I would say what the missing piece for us now is the full side editing theme. And there we are busy making the final bits. We’ve just merged the necessary things today. Actually, if you go to the plugin repo, you’ll get the latest version there. If you just go into the repo and search for maxi blocks, it will come up in the WordPress repo.  Anyone who wants to download will we’ve added a repeater field and what we call a context loop. These are the necessary pieces in order to be able to build a blog and make everything dynamic. So the idea, the, the, This is the missing piece that we need in order to take the patterns and complete them into pages and then extending those into a fully functional website that performs like a blog, where you can pull in custom posts and headlines and blog posts and galleries. All of those things you can then pull in, and I hear the way that we’ve designed it is so that you can take any pattern from the library and turn it into a dynamic pattern or take that pattern and turn it back again into a static back. So that’s we’re trying to make it as flexible as possible. Without, you know, driving ourselves crazy. If I can put it that way. And you’ll also see the, the items that we’ve run in the library now. If we’re talking about patents specifically. There’s the 16, 000. We started building those in February this year, and we’ve had a lot of stops and starts in between. We’ve had rebuilds. So it goes really fast. Once you once you learn how to use it and you get familiar with it, if you if you get familiar as a experienced visual builder, then it can go quite quickly. And there’s custom CSS, there’s all kinds of stuff. I recommend anyone just to try it out and see, see how it works. Okay, sorry, I’m going to continue. Yeah, go ahead. Are we still okay with time? I don’t know. Yeah, we’re totally fine. Yeah. So the theme is the next step. for us. And there’s, there’s one more update that we need to do specifically for speed and being able to take the styles and transfer them down to a block level so that when you use a block as part of a custom field or as part of a template inside of the theme that the styles always. And that specific block, and that will take us to the next step, then we can do. We already have the theme. It’s already full site editing in able. We just haven’t pulled all the pieces through to make to make all the blocks and all the patterns work inside of the theme and with the style cards. That’s the next step. So you’re saying you’re saying Chris Badgett: you’re saying that you’re Phil, you’re launching your own theme. Yes. And it’s doesn’t it’s not out yet. Christiaan Pieterse: Not at all. We have a theme that’s out already. It’s called the maxi blocks theme. It’s not in the repo yet. Oh, I see. Yes. So the thing about the thing about a theme, at least when we started three years ago a theme, you have to say, okay, I’m using a theme and I’m replacing my site and now I’m using a new theme. So it works for a certain audience, but for, for another audience, like agencies or developers, as an example they might already have a theme that they prefer to use. And they’ve got all the pieces they’ve got to customize exactly like they want and from that perspective, how would they use our plugin? Or I mean, how would they use ours? They wouldn’t use our theme. They would want to use it as a plugin. All right, so the plug in gives us much more flexibility to get things done. So we set out building a plug in with the purpose of integrating that plug in with a theme and and full site editing has developed to that point over the last three years that you can put the two together. So that’s exactly what we’re gonna do is the plug in itself, maxi blocks and then the maxi blocks team and they will play together to Give you everything you’re looking for. Chris Badgett: That was awesome. Christian, thank you for coming on the show. Maxi blocks looks awesome. I’m looking forward to playing around with it more myself.  Kurt on our team raves about it and yeah, it’s really cool to get into it and learn the story behind it. Any final words for the people? Before we go today? Christiaan Pieterse: No, I would. Yes, actually, I would say no. I say yes. I have some words for you. Go to the wordpress repo, search for maxi blocks, install it the entire plugin and all the page builder functionality, the blocks all the block functionality, the style cards, everything is free.  There’s over 700 threads. Patterns that you can use. That’s free as well. We don’t restrict anyone so you can build everything yourself. You completely own it, etc. And then what we do is we have a library upsell. which is a pro library component, which you can subscribe to if you want, which then allows you to download and use all the pro patents that are inside of the library.  The beauty about it is that we, we don’t lock you in. So there’s no restrictions on domains. There’s no API keys that you have to install, which is often a pain point for some people. That means you can install the plugin, build whatever you want to build. It’s always free. It will always update. If you want some extra and you want to save some time, you can upgrade to the pro library, install the site. At the end, you can just sign out of your cloud account and the website over to your customer. And it will always continue working and updating as expected. So just give it a go. That’s Chris Badgett: awesome. Thank you, Christian. Appreciate that. And thank you for your contribution to the WordPress community. That’s a lot of value you’re giving away for free and helping people build sites faster, more beautifully. It’s awesome. It’s great to meet you. Thank you for coming on the show. Christiaan Pieterse: See you next time. 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. 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 Increase Your Website Building Speed with Beautiful Templates by Maxi Blocks appeared first on LMScast.