LMScast with Chris Badgett

In this LMScast episode, Vova Feldman shares his experience about the WordPress products and this Industry. He also discussed about his new podcast channel plugin.fm. Vova Feldman, the founder of Freemius, a WordPress company. He is a passionate entrepreneur. He talks on how many profitable businesses that deal with software products typically have backgrounds in business or marketing, which enables them to give priority to factors like price, marketing, and customer service. Vova also discuss about a problem that he frequently runs into: software product creators and developers undercharging for their goods. He says that this underpricing frequently results from elements like geographic location or a lack of faith in their products. Also he recommends these companies to think about other price structures, such memberships and free trials, to boost their revenue potential. As this dynamic market necessitates ongoing learning and modification, he urges software product firms to be open to experimenting with new techniques and strategies. 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 Vova Feldman. He’s from FIUs. He also has a brand new podcast coming out at plugin fm, which we’re gonna talk about in a second. If you’re listening to this on your podcast, it’s already out. Go check it out. If you’re watching the live or the replay of the live. The podcast launches on June 6th, right before WordCamp Europe. Vova, welcome to the show. Vova Feldman: Thank you so much for having me, Chris. Really excited to be here. Chris Badgett: Yeah, I, I love interviewing other podcasters ’cause it’s just super easy and and WordPress entrepreneurs like yourself because I really kind of know or just live in the same world or similar world to you.  But tell us about the story of Plugin fm, the new podcast. What’s it about? Yeah, who’s it for? Tell take, take us to school. Vova Feldman: Absolutely. So I’ve been just creating an intro episode yesterday, so I’m pretty fresh on the materials. Basically it’s something we, we wanted to launch for many years already.  And we’ve been looking for actually the right host. I’m not going to be the host of the podcast. We got Patrick Roland, who is an e-commerce and product marketing veteran. Many people know him from Linda. He is doing some courses there in the space. So it’s been making for many years. It’s goes, you know along with our content, what we’re producing already on freemiums.com/blog.  The focus is on providing educational, you know, content, super focus. The developers and software product companies. And we wanna, you know, and every week we’ll basically have a guest that has something unique in their experience and something that, you know, I personally love to learn. And if I would have a personal conversation with that person, I’ll probably dig about that topic. We dive like deep into into the topic, discussing, you know, the journey, the learnings, the insights, everything that person had gone through, and, you know, to help the listeners other, in the developers software, product companies, basically to implement those strategies. Learn from the mistakes that have been done already and launch and grow their software product business. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m really excited for it because you have a proven track record of making great content. So the ed free I remember participating in a series you did, I think around it was with CEOs or well, was you did one on acquisitions and experts. Corner Vova Feldman: experts points. Chris Badgett: Yep. Yeah. You guys, you don’t just make content, you make really good content and like you said, thank you. You, you, you’re interested and you like learning. So if we’re making content that we also like to listen to, you’re definitely like hitting a nerve there. For those that haven’t heard of FIUs, can you tell us what FIUs is? Vova Feldman: Sure. So FIUs is an e-commerce platform for selling software online, which means that we provide the entire infrastructure for. The developers and product makers that selling software to take, you know, so they can focus on their product. And we take care of everything else, which means payments, subscriptions, licensing, distribution, marketing automation, affiliate platforms.  And we also act as a merchant of records, which means that we ca take care of all the sales taxes, the global sales taxes, which is. Pain in the butt to deal with these days, different regulations and liabilities. This is something on us and this way, you know product companies can focus on their product rather on the, rather than on the e-commerce infrastructure. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s a valuable resource. I highly recommend it. If you’re launch, thinking of launching a plugin business, you have so much to do. To figure out all the licensing and the e-commerce and everything else, it’s you’re providing a valuable service to the community and that’s much appreciated in the space. I wanted to ask you, because of your optics on at FIUs and with all the great content you guys make, what patterns are you seeing that successful companies do across sales, marketing? Basically, if you could share some things, I know this is a broad question, but what, what works well? What patterns do you see in successful companies that are using freemium? What are some trends? Vova Feldman: Absolutely. It’s pretty common question, you know, and I think this is one of the things that we’re trying to kind of educate partners who work with. I would say, you know, it depends on the background of the people that running that plugin theme SaaS. There is a spectrum. Many times it’s a developer that it’s, they’re very like feature and product driven. And on the other side of the spectrum there are people that are, you know, coming from the business background, maybe there are marketers, whatever. And 99% of the times the people who are coming with a business background are more successful. As simple as that, because the developer kind of persona. They’re not spending enough time on thinking about, you know, the parts that actually make a difference in terms of the bottom line. And they’re more driven to create new features, so new bugs, you know, because that’s their passion. So as part of what we do is we’re trying to encourage developers kind of, you know, get out of their comfort zone a little and start to think about other things that maybe they don’t like doing. That’s what actually makes a difference and making money. You know, I’m kind of preaching to the choir here, but it is important for everyone because in the end of the day. Your customers will benefit from that. You know, the more successful your company will be, you’ll have better support, you’ll have more staff you’ll add more features, long term, et cetera, et cetera. You know, the company will be sustainable, you know. Many times we’re hearing from. What I call them, the basement developers, those that, you know, just wanna build features is that No, it’s this is probably too, too much to, to charge and all of that. And they’re kind of afraid to take money from people because they don’t want it to be perceived as, you know, doing something that, because we’re also in the open source ecosystem, so money and open source is kind of it, it gets this conflicted kind of feelings.  But again, this is kind of part of our role to explain them that it’s actually good for them to make good for them and for their users and customers if they will succeed. I love that. Do Chris Badgett: you have a story you could tell maybe from one of your interviews or just your time in the community where a certain company or founder or marketer is doing, you know, is embodying some of the. The business side that you’re talking about and did a good job making money or making more money or figuring out how to scale their business? Vova Feldman: Yeah, we, we had many times where we identified developers and products that were significantly undercharging for various reasons, either because the geolocation of the developers in the country that, you know, it’s not in the us it’s not in Europe, and from their perspective, It sounds that they’re like charging enough, but looking on it from like the western eyes, it’s like undercharging and they actually hurt you because, you know, sometimes, like you, you are, you get some perception when you look on numbers, right? So encouraging developers plugin orders to increase their numbers many times, does the job. This is one thing that we’re seeing You know, moving, obviously moving away from like lifestyles, life lifetime sales, to also doing subscriptions, annual or monthly, encouraging developers to do trials. I mean, they’re pretty, pretty much kind of known best practices, how to sell online, and specifically how to sell software, and what are the mechanics that are working. And we’re bringing them, you know, and sharing them with the developers to kind of open their eyes and also explaining them, you know, and adding some data because we have access to data, why we think it may work for them. And we can really know for sure. You know, there’s no guarantee in this stuff, but if you don’t experiment, if you don’t try you won’t win. You know, so you, you have to. All this stuff are always dynamic and you have to keep experimenting and see Chris Badgett: what works. If you were advising a new plugin company or theme company or soft indie software company, but let’s keep it in WordPress. Sure. What would be like a floor price point you mentioned, you know, someone might come in out of the gate and charge $29, which is probably too low. Like what in US dollars? What do you see? I know it really depends on the product, but what’s a good floor? Vova Feldman: So actually the 29, 29 point 99, that’s the minimum amount. Yeah, we recommend for annual subscription. Okay. Yeah, because if you put it below, you’ll like, it looks as if there’s like a catch, you know? Exactly. Something is wrong here, like someone is trying to rip you off and you know, will disappear or something like that. So yeah, but again, it, it depends on the type of the, you know, the products that you’re selling. The billing cycle. So for monthly 29 99 sounds legit already, right? Yeah.  But if we’re looking, for example, like a new industry that is developing is like template kits or all, all around, you know, those static designs. There are not like themes, but there are like designs. So those, because there’s no like dynamic code there. It’s like static json and typically there’s no like support load there. So you would expect to pay like lower price ranges there. So I would say that it depends on a product type. But I can also tell you, and this is kind of interesting, I tweeted about it. I think in the beginning of the year I ran some analysis for the year in review and I kind of checked, you know, what is the highest annual subscription of a plugin that we sell in freemium. And, and there are like pretty big numbers. I know that also, you know, I. LifterLMS is also pretty big. But I, I don’t remember the exact number, but I think it was like five K either per month or for a year. I don’t know. And usually the people from what we’re seeing that are able to charge significantly more. They’re not selling, you know, features or products that are selling solutions, and this is how they treat when they’re selling, you know, the entire value proposition is wrapped into a solution. Like solution for realtors, solution for dentists, and it’s a combo, can be a plug in the theme or a combo, whatever, but the entire mindset is like solution and value proposition, you know? And, and the pricing is based on the value that could, that you get rather than the features that you’re seeing. Chris Badgett: I love that. I think a lot about that, like selling a platform more than like a utility. If you can sell a whole platform for realtors or dentists or course creators or coaches or whoever that’s really valuable. And it’s okay to have a point solution like a utility that does one thing. But yeah, keeping the focus on the customer and what they want and the value of that outcome makes a lot of sense. Give us some other marketing advice that for you, and also just based on what you see within the community of entrepreneurs that you serve, what’s, what works like either content or copywriting? I know it all works, but like what’s, what’s working for WordPress companies these days? Vova Feldman: Yeah, I, I think I would start with what I feel is really hard to crack, which is paid ads. You know, like I talk with, I think from the entire kind of business community, and I know many people, only one or two people are able to actually make it work with paid ads, right? Yeah. So definitely the majority are failing. I think that like you need a lot of budget, a lot of time investment in order to make it happen and actually someone to do it in a full-time capacity. Not, you know, the founder that’s sitting and trying to figure out, like spending an hour or two every week and trying to make it work. Usually this is not happening and you’ll need to spend a lot of money until it works. So that is not working. Obviously, you know, content is something that we all kind of preach here in the workers ecosystem. But it’s a long-term game and today it’s harder to do that. You know, there is so much content and now with AI and J G P T and just like you, you don’t know where it’s going. You know, it, it’s already exploding. And like I, I can tell, you know, from our perspective and FIUs, we’re investing tons of resources into content. We’re not getting, you know, the the amount of eyeballs that the content deserve. Mm-hmm. Because they’re, the attention span is not there. So this is why we moved into video. So this is like a tip that I would say video, you know, if I would need to choose these days what to start with, or probably start with video and then move to content a second, or take the video and you know, just. Basically change the medium to content and not that way, you know, content to, to video. Definitely video is already the past. It’s not kind of future. And I think, you know, companies that are playing hard in video, they have competitive advantage. I’m not sure if this is like a marketing tip, but you know, optimizing your pricing page I think is something that. It’s an opportunity that I would say 90% of the products that I’m seeing are not capitalizing on. You know, they’re like knowing practices of what to do in pricing pages, and so many people are ignoring those. This is like one of the, usually write one of the pages that has the highest traffic on their website and people are missing that opportunity. I’m not seeing enough companies that are doing like success stories in our space.  They’re investing time. Like especially if you have a, you know, a plug in a theme, usually you have a bunch of customers, right? Yeah. So it’s, it should be relatively easy to get them, you know, to do like success story to. To explain what is the case study, right? Who they are, what they do, do some profiling on the person.  It’s also relatively cheap content. I would say not cheap because it doesn’t have value, because you are relying on existing. You don’t need to come up with a story, you know, story is there. You just need to write it. So those are the things, you know, that come to my mind. Chris Badgett: I love that. And a pro tip for you out there listening, we do case studies. We start by interviewing the person on our podcasts, which then gets all the raw material and then we can write from there and kind of get the two birds in the sense that we get the, the video, the YouTube, but then we get the raw materials. ’cause if you just email a customer and you’re like, Hey, I’d like to do a case study, can you answer this like 30 question questionnaire? It’s a lot of work to them like getting on a call for. 30 minutes or an hour, they’ll, they’ll, they’ll tell everything. And then it’s on you to, to write it up in a way. Absolutely. Vova Feldman: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think, you know, another benefit of mixing video and written content is ss e o. Mm-hmm. You know, when you, when you place the video on the same page, like close to the title, usually Google picks that up and it also increases exposure in the search engine results page.  Because you see the thumbnail of the video. And, you know, you can optimize the for ss e o, the title of the video as well, et cetera, et cetera, but definitely something that, you know, worth doing. Those case studies. Chris Badgett: If you were to kind of go rapid fire and, and list off like five to 10 things software company could do to optimize their pricing page in general, what would those some of those items be? Vova Feldman: Whew. We actually written a, a blog post about that they called the Pricing Anatomy. Okay. Which covers I think, like 20 items. Oh, awesome. And we also, Chris Badgett: the show notes, but what are the Vova Feldman: highlights there? Awesome. We, we also provide like a blueprint actually that, you know, kind of covers every item. I think from the top of my hand. Okay. So one is people assume that if you land on the on the pricing page, you already know what is the product about, what is the value proposition and all of that. So you think many times you just get to a pricing page, you see pricing numbers, right? And that’s kind of scary if the person still didn’t, you know, invest enough time to kind of research what you’re doing. So I think. Mentioning what is the unique value proposition? A little short description of what your product does. Social proof, you know, how many people are like, how many websites, how many stores, how many, whatever. You know, give some kind of magnitude of how big and how can I trust you, right? Including also maybe some popular logos of brands that your specific niche is familiar with. So if you have some known customers that’s worth mentioning, definitely do that. Includes some quotes also from people that maybe are influential in your industry. And when I say in your industry, I’m not saying that if you are plugin developer then put, you know, another plugin developer that’s saying something you know good about your product unless your product is for other plugin developers, right? Find someone, let’s say you’re selling a solution for weddings. Find some megastar, I don’t know podcasts or whatever in that industry, and try to get them to say something good about you. That adds a lot of credibility. Adding those we’re at four, three. How many we’re counting here? I, Chris Badgett: let’s get Vova Feldman: two more out of it. Okay. Okay. The getting, like if you have moneybag guarantees, make sure that you surface that, you know, and not down below, but actually put it next to the numbers, like when people are seeing the numbers. I would say this way, you know, like the pricing page, you want to take your potential buyer through a journey.  So you need to think about it as a journey and make sure that the ux ui support that journey. Telling some sort of story, you know, this is what we do, this is why you can trust us. You know, you don’t worry. Like worst case you don’t like something, you can get the money back. You know, this is the value that you get for those prices.  You know so basically think about it more as a journey and experience rather. Details page. Chris Badgett: I love that. And I just wanna confirm what you’re saying. I think our pricing page is our second most trafficked page. Page on our website. So at LifterLMS. So it’s super important after the homepage. After the homepage, right? Yeah. You mentioned challenges with ss e o, and ai. What, what’s your take on where we’re going with AI as and its impact on SS e o, and how should content creators think about. The tool in the context of trying to get traffic. Vova Feldman: Yeah. Honestly, I’m like watching updates every week and it, and it’s going crazy, you know? Yeah. I don’t know, it’s like going to disrupt so many things that it’s kind of hard to imagine the future. Mm-hmm. But I would say that anyone who is in technology on the web, like you should start playing with ai, you should start feeling the product. See what you can do it’s kind of funny, but I’m, I’m founding myself spending more time talking with shed G p t than with my, my wife, which is kind of crazy, you know, and I’m discovering like, new use cases and things, oh, let’s try see if it can help us, you know, and, and it, it, it, it is the more we use it the more we realize that it, you know, it’s going to save us so much time and already saving us a lot of time.  I don’t know. It’s, it feels that there’s gonna be explosion in any type of content, because if you can generate it, you know, by just giving some instructions, and I’ll give you an example of how we started to use it for plugin f fm. In the beginning, we, we were doing a lot of research about the interviewees and writing, you know, very handcrafted questions that are specific for every person and. Creating like a narrative and story for every episode that, you know, will make sense. And there’s a lot of investment going on to that. And then we realize, let’s see if we can, you know, produce that level, you know, that quality level. We change G P T and it’s amazing, you know, I mean, it does require half an hour, maybe an hour to fit in the information about the person, about their company, about the podcast, like what we’re trying to get there. The narrative that we wanna hear, but it, it, it like does it on the spot, you know? So it, it, it, it’s maybe an hour of work, so there is still work to get it done right, but otherwise it can take, you know, 4, 5, 6 hours plus reviews here and there. I think it definitely a tool that we all should start exploring and using in. Any content efforts, like it’s so good in copywriting, like GT is amazing in copywriting. Yeah, I’m starting, you know, mum’s topic. Yeah’s a big topic. It’s a big topic. Chris Badgett: Exactly. Yeah, that’s, that’s good stuff. Switching gears completely. What’s your story of becoming an entrepreneur in the WordPress community?  You kind of popped on my radar. I I think I first met you at Word Camp us in St. Louis or, or somewhere else. I can’t remember Vova Feldman: exactly where. You’ve been to our party in St. Chris Badgett: Louis, I remember. Yes. And I’m aware of MIUs. I know a lot of people that use it, but how did you get into this whole scene? Yeah, I’ve been Vova Feldman: doing startups for, I. Like 13, 14 years. Okay. And around 2010 I was doing like a, a hobby thing, something computer vision, and I wanted to write a blog just to share kind of my findings and what I’m learning. As part of that, I built some web widgets. Okay. And I didn’t write the blog in the end. I was not aware about WordPress. I was like very developer. You know, if something needs to be developed, I’m just developing that, like writing the code behind the scenes. So I developed this widget as a side thing. I’ve been super busy with my startup, but I published it to the world, created a website, and people started to using that.  Start to receive feedback and I start to get requests, Hey, maybe you should wrap it because it was like a SaaS and you need to inject like job script or website to make it work. And people start to ask me, Hey Volvo, you know, please create a plugin for work rest, please create a plugin. Like I basically guys leave me alone. You know, it’s a size thing. And then after I heard enough, you know, I said, let’s check what WordPress is, you know, and this is how I got kind of exposed to the whole WordPress ecosystem. I ended up building a plugin for WordPress and then a bunch of plugins, apps, whatever, to, to various set of solutions like Shopify and Wix. I think I was actually one, maybe the first app on the Wix app store. For many others. So I kind of, you know, had the feeling and understanding how those ecosystems are working of like extensions in those marketplaces. And then I was still with my startup, but then I, I I left the company in mid 2013 and I decided to see what’s happening with this widget that I have here. And I realized that I have a lot of users. Maybe I can do something with that. So I started to grow that, actually thought about turning that into an EdTech company. I was living in New York back then, start to meet investors, talk with founders of big companies at this, share this share aholic, all of those. I was in that space. But then I realized that EdTech is not my cup of tea. And I prefer to work on things that actually creates value rather than the entire, you know, like retargeting and all this stuff that didn’t feel kind of exciting for me. And I turned that into a subscription a freemium solution, and it worked pretty well and. Then it kind of hit me that it took us to build the entire, kind of converted into a commercial solution like 10 times more than what it took me to build the, the widget itself, you know, the widget is something that I as a developer built like two weekends of my spare time, but then to build the entire, like commercial infrastructure, it was me and another two guys and it took us a year. Wow. So this like huge disproportion between the time kind of got me to realize, Okay, something is wrong here. You know, it shouldn’t happen this way. And this is how we kind of started with freemiums basically. And the idea was to create something that people like me, you know, will be able to transition from product to go to market in a matter of minutes. This house freemium started this. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Briefly in there you mentioned freemium. What are your thoughts? And we were talking about pricing. What are your thoughts on free? Freemium in, in a pricing model for a business? I have Vova Feldman: many of them. Okay. Good or Chris Badgett: bad or both? There’s an Vova Feldman: article about that, you know? Okay. So I think there’s no good or bad, it’s just different models. I think if you are new and you’re just starting out with something, it’s easier to start with freemium because people don’t know you yet. And like you need to get some distribution and busiest way to, you know, get people to know you somehow is to offer them something for free to try it out on the other hand, right? If you’re a Google or Microsoft, that’s the other extreme. Like you’re already have well established brand company, distribution communities, all of that. So you don’t have to go that route. So I would say that it depends on your background. What are you trying to achieve? What is your business model? And, and then you can choose, you know, go with freemium or premium. But obviously, free is great because, you know, it helps you to get a little feedback. Like the, the benchmark of freemium software sales on the web. It’s like between 1.5 or 1% to 2%. Meaning that if you go with freemium you have another 98% that potentially can provide you feedback and you can learn from how to use the product, improve it, re shape it, et cetera.  And I’m seeing for example, this is kind of something fresh and what is this? Yeah, there is this Mecca client for Gmail called Mindstream. They’ve been running for free for three years, right? Learning, improving in better mode. And they just launched their like paid version. It’s paid only right now, so they just transitioned for free to paid only everyone been using. And it’s pretty cool because you know, they got I don’t know, 200,000 like free users hooked. Been using that platform for three years. Now they’re like requiring everyone. They do offer like 14 day trial, but now they’re suddenly transitioning to, to paid only. I’m sure they’re gonna lose a bunch of, you know, users on the fly. But that’s also an interesting kind of approach, you know, running for free, then transitioning completely to premium after you get to a certain level of maturity. Awesome. Chris Badgett: Let’s look into the future. We’ve kind of looked into the past a little bit. Where do you see WordPress going? You know, we’ve talked about ai, we’ve talked about you know, how fast things are changing, but also WordPress has been around for a while where we just celebrated 20 years. Do you have any vision for the next 5, 10, 20 years for what the opportunity or challenges of WordPress are? Vova Feldman: You know, I, I, it was This week in a conference called Press for Web in Israel. Okay. And it was, it’s called Press for Word previously, which is like the biggest Israeli WordPress related event. It’s not a word camp. It’s like a commercial event. Yeah. And we’ve been talking about the stuff I like. I’m friends with the Elementor founders and and Miriam, and we’ve been talking about this because we are like, We don’t know. You know, and we’re kind of concerned with everything that happened with ai. And also, I don’t know if you watched some of the stuff that happened in the Human Made AI conference that happened. I watched some of that. It was great. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s, I mean, it’s clear to me that, you know, AI will, will integrate closely. With what happened in WordPress. I’m also seeing, you know, that in the past few months we have dozens of new plugins that related to ai, a new one coming every day selling on the platform.  And I think it will become much easier to create websites which is great seeing, it’s fantastic, it’s making more, you know, things more accessible. But I’m also a little concerned. Because you know, that new audience that we’re trying to bring in, and maybe AI will bring in that they’re not necessarily familiar, you know, with the war’s backend and the WP admin and all those technical things also. Yeah. Full all this stuff and, and it feels that there are like currently multiple experiences that you have to be familiar with in order to be able to use WordPress. So I think, you know, something need to consolidate. I mean, it’s clear that, you know, the leadership of workers is betting on the, you know, Gutenberg the visual editor and all of that.  And yeah, I think that like right now, the, there is like this, there, there’s the visual editor, which, but those, you know, people who are not technical wanna work with. The weeks kind of audience, the Squarespace audience. But then in order to access it and use it and modify it, you still need to be the technical WP admin guy.  So there is some mixture and I think, I hope that there will be like two modes, I would say. You know, easy mode. Exactly. Yeah. Something like that. The AI mode, easy mode and technical mode.  So just some thoughts. You know, I have no clue what’s gonna happen. I hope WordPress will keep growing with a no. It is a little concerning that it’s, you know, stagnating right now. But it makes sense, you know, there are new platforms coming in. I, I, I think that also WordPress will need at certain point too. I mean, it’s one of its powers, the backward compatibility, but it’s also, you know, one of its weaknesses because we always kind of slower it than other platforms, other solutions that are, you know, especially if they’re a SaaS, that they can just deploy features very quickly and they don’t need to hold like entire community on their back. An entire like plugin ecosystem. And it like, there are a lot of things happening in workers. I don’t know. We’ll see. I hope the community, you know, will win. That’s usually what’s happening with WordPress. And we’ll figure Chris Badgett: it out. Do you have any thoughts around the open source nature of WordPress and AI and how those come together in the sense that, you know, the WordPress code is open, but a traditional software company, that code is closed, it’s proprietary, or it’s hosted somewhere? So how can AI and WordPress, those two things, work toge and open source work together? Vova Feldman: Man, you are asking hard questions. Chris Badgett: I think that is a hard question, but I think it’s a really important one for the next five years, and I’m still trying to wrap my head and get into that too. I, I know it’s hard. Yeah. Vova Feldman: I mean, I, I think and hope that AI will help with security. When it comes to WordPress maybe like automation of various things. The reason I mentioned security is just because it’s like one of those weaknesses in our ecosystem ’cause of all the moving parts and, you know, the review process and there’s one person barely the reviewing plugins that go to the repo while you have the entire community that is trusting that repo. Even there, you know, there’s no proper review of anything that’s happening there. Again, I’m not, you know, pointing any finger at something. It is just very kind of tiny group. There’s not a lot of resources. So I think that in general, even though it’s kind of against the ethos of, you know what, Matt is pushing the community. There needs to be some money paid to people, you know, and it can be completely kind of, Volunteers driven, even though I know there are like many volunteers that are actually paid employees and sports sponsored by companies. But I think the attitude is different. You know, and I, I don’t know how those companies actually evaluate the performance of those employees, right? Because in the end there’s limit to what they can do because it’s not really up to them. There’s like a whole community that needs to agree. I mean it’s, we all know that as small as a smaller, an organization and a team, the more efficiently, quicker, better you can move, make decisions. And right now, I mean it’s great that there’s a lot of discussions and thinking, but I feel that there is like missing this like SWAT team. The workers ecosystem that can move faster and make decisions. You still need to involve the community, understand the dynamics and, but right now I feel that there is like too many kind of people involved in processes and this is kind of slowing us back a little. It has nothing to do with your question probably about ai. Chris Badgett: It all matters. It all works together. I appreciate what you’re saying there. Yeah. These, these are gonna be interesting times for sure. And one of the things I’m excited about is for, I’m not a coder or a developer myself. A lot of people don’t know that, but this is why you make Mangan. Yeah. To your point. But, and, and I’m not, I’m gonna tie it in my, to my last question, which is about what you see inside teams of successful companies, but. I just wonder with WordPress and AI can, non-developers like me, which was the whole reason I kind of got into WordPress in the first place, is ah, I can build a website. And I kind of fell in love with WordPress and became a power user, but I’m not a coder and I’ve done amazing things with it, but also in great partnerships with other talented people and developers and designers and all that stuff. But can AI further amplify what power users can do? I find that question really interesting.  I was impressed with for example, you mentioned the Human made AI conference. The, the demonstration of what Cadence is doing with AI for websites I thought was really cool. For someone like me who’s a power user, I’m like, or as an agency person okay, we’re gonna talk to the AI and explain what the business is and the template’s gonna start. Writing copy and writing, inserting images that are relevant and stuff like that. That’s pretty cool. So I don’t know, that’s, that’s something I’m excited about. Any other thoughts about that before we move on? I Vova Feldman: think that AI is like a superpower, you know? Yeah. If you’re a marketer, it can help you with your weaknesses, which is technical stuff. So I don’t know if you saw like Elementor demo, right? Let’s say you’re a marketer and like you are editing a page. Now you want the title to look in some way. You can really configure an elemental, right? So you can just tell the ai, explain how you wanna make it look, and it can produces the c s s for you. So you can plug it in where if you wanna write some custom capability the p h p and you don’t know p h p, you can go and use Jet G p T for this small stuff. Another example, our video editor. ’cause not a developer is now creating different scripts because many of those, like video editing tools, you can actually code, you know, create some things that are like repetitive stuff and code us. So if you start to like code for video editing, nice. On the other hand, if you are a developer and you’re not a marketer, not a copywriter, now you can create a website and use AI to superpower your lack of. Copywriting capabilities. I want a title that it’s snappy, it’s cool, whatever that talks about this and that and, and it can help you. So it’s like a super, super friend. You know that it’s there to help you succeed in different tasks. I love Chris Badgett: that. My last question for you, VVA, we’ve talked a lot about community, but if you look at the community inside of a business or a company, What, what do you see that makes a great team in your experience as an entrepreneur, but also in your observation of successful technology companies, small ones, let’s say indies. You mentioned like engineer and sales, marketing, kind of, those are two kind of critical roles. Business, business and engineering. But if you were to expand it out to, let’s say a, you know, five to six, seven person team, what kind of roles. Mix. Do you see really working these days? Vova Feldman: Yeah, it’s another tough one. I would say, I think again, it depends on kind of your industry and your product and, you know, many other things. I think let, let’s leave the roles aside for a second. You have to have quality people that care and that are leaders. And what I mean by leaders, not necessarily leading other people, but they can lead processes that are proactive. They care, you know, that are starting initiatives. So I think this is the key, you know, in having great team and obviously there should be some cultural fit. People that believe in the same values and working, understand the mission of the company, that’s also very important. And being, you know, believing in that mission actually when you’re starting the day, that makes a big difference in terms of the roles.  Like you said, there is the engineering. You know, obviously if you’re building a software product, you need to have proper engineering in the level of what your product needs. Business, whether it’s, you know, marketing or something. In that space, you wanna sell your product, so you need business people. I think design is critical because branding is really important for any company. We have design. If you are in a content space when it comes to marketing, ss e o today, it’s. More important than ever because just by writing content and like for many years, my approach to content was, let’s write quality content, you know, self working. I mean, it’s great, you know, people appreciate that, but it is not getting exposure, not enough exposure. You do need to do the proper research and use the tools, and it’s always, you know, stay up to date on what’s happening. So s e o is another role. So we are four right now. I mean if, it depends if you as a, if the business guys can, is also a finance driven or not, but you know, it’s a business so it makes money and someone need to count the numbers if you know what’s happening in the company and budget and things like that.  So I would say that’s another role. But, you know, depends on your size of your, you know, customer base. What is your product? Or it’s B two C, B two B. How big is the ticket that you’re selling? You know, if you’re selling products for thousands of dollars per year, that maybe you need, obviously customer support. I totally forgot. And that’s essential. Obviously you need to support your audience. But maybe you need, you know success managers and things like that, account managers. If the sales are bigger, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Chris Badgett: Awesome. And I’m gonna throw one more bonus question at you. Since we’re getting ready to meet up at Word Camp Europe. How do you as an entrepreneur, indie maker, think about going to a conference like that? What do you, what’s your goal at a conference? How do you operate at a conference? Yeah, Vova Feldman: it’s a great question. Particularly at Word Camp. Yeah. Yeah. It, it, it actually evolved over the years when I was kind of new to the ecosystem.  My primary goal was to go, And meeting as many people and tell them about frees Chris Badgett: right hand out business cards. Yeah. Vova Feldman: Exchange and, you know, connect and all of that. Expand my network and make sure that people know what frees is. Yeah. Today we’re in different position. People know who we are. So it’s more about, you know increasing the depth of the relationships, still meeting new connections, new people.  I am, like, I’m spending a lot of time preparing for the conference, honestly, like reviewing all the attendees, you know, seeing who I wanna meet what are the opportunities that are out there, trying to prepare as much as possible in advance. We’re also having our makers meet up which is something that again, we’re, you know, investing a lot of resources into, so inviting the people, getting the right crowds It’s all like-minded and people enjoy from the event. It’s part of our branding, you know, part of what we do, like creating that community that helps each other grow. So yeah, I think that that’s a lot of things that happening. Also, like in Bangkok for example, we went there with most of the team. So there are a lot of like team activities because we finally met, you know, we’re like working. Yeah. Across the globe from like a bunch of different continents. And it’s the first sign that we’re seeing, like we had a guy from Argentina, two guys from South Africa, India, Philippines, like all, all over, you know, Israel. So it was pretty exciting. And we, we invested in team activities because that was like really important for us, obviously. So I would say it varies. But, you know, I, I, I wanna meet as many people as I can kind of. Have meaningful conversations with them. Do a bunch of selfies posted on Twitter, right? Yeah. Awesome. I’m also volunteering this sign okay, cool. Yeah. Chris Badgett: Very cool. I look forward to seeing you there. For you out there watching, go to fius.com. Check out the plugin FM podcast. Can you tell us one more time what plugin FM is all about? Vova Feldman: Sure. Plugin fm is a Value First podcast about business and product marketing targeted to lifestyle product makers and software companies. In every episode we’re going to interview a guest and focus on a single topic, dive into the, you know, the story, experiences of the person trying to entertain, educate, and just have a great conversation for everyone to learn from. Chris Badgett: So go check out plugin fm. Vova, thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom with us today, and I look forward to connecting with you in Greece. Thank you. That’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to Lifter lmss.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Selling WordPress Products with Freemius Founder Vova Feldman appeared first on LMScast.

​In this LMScast episode, Pua Pakele shares her experience about how to sell coaching services online and course business in 2023. Pua Pakele is an expert at course Creators, website designer. She is from RBL Media. Pua creating websites and graphics since 2014 for entrepreneurs who are building, and scaling their small enterprises as well as those who are developing online courses. She had previously worked as a consultant in the corporate productivity sector due to her engagement with a podcast on health and productivity, but she soon realized that she wanted to help entrepreneurs who were passionate about what they did but feeling overburdened. After having a poor experience with a web developer and a $8,000 website they couldn’t manage, Pua decided to enter the field of course development and web design. She made the decision to learn web design on her own, comparing it to online interior design. She developed a fondness for the course developer community while working exclusively with coaches and admired its driven and brilliant people. 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 L M S Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Pua Pakele, and she’s from Rebel Media. That’s RBL media.co. She’s an expert at course Creation marketing, helping people build brands. I’m really excited to get into it with you today. Pua, welcome to the show. Pua Pakele: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Chris, Chris Badgett: tell us how you got into this whole world. ’cause it’s an interesting world to find yourself in a niche of course creation. And I know you’ve done a lot with Kajabi and marketing and branding, like how did this all happen? Pua Pakele: Yeah, it, it’s a really interesting niche and I, I, it almost happened by accident and in fact it did happen by accident.  I had a business previously with a business partner, and we started that business as a podcast actually, and it was just a podcast and it was us just talking about nothing and everything, and it was just literally two friends who worked at a gym. And the whole reason we started it in the first place was. We were doing a lot of research for our clients who were following the prescription that we gave them, right? Come to class five times a week, you know, eat more protein, eat less carbs like it was. It’s, it’s somewhat outdated advice at this point, but back then it, it seemed like it should work, and it didn’t, it didn’t work for everybody. So people would say I’m really frustrated because I’m, I’m coming to class every day. I feel better, but the results that I’m looking for are not happening. And so we did a lot of just research around like sleep quality and how that affects your health and your stress levels, and. Do you even wanna be your high school weight? Is that even healthy? Right? All of these things that we didn’t necessarily feel like we had a script for in the gym. And so we were like, let’s do a podcast so we can talk about all the stuff we’re learning. So we got really into the health, wellness, and productivity space. Like how do you create more time to actually do the things that are going to benefit your health, sleep, enjoy time with your family, get to the gym, prepare healthy meals, and we started to get.  Contacted by organizations here saying, you know, could you come in and do like a, a lunch and learn, or a half day workshop or a weekend? And we got into the corporate productivity space and we did consulting in that world for a little while and realized, oh my gosh, I don’t wanna help people who hate their jobs. To work more and get more done like that just didn’t feel good. So we shifted to supporting entrepreneurs who had the exact opposite problem. They love what they do and they work way too much. And so the productivity space then was helping them to be more efficient so that they could step away. And in that long explanation, the way that I got into the course creation space, in the web design space was when we started our podcast, we hired somebody as a referral to build a website for us. It cost us $8,000. We had all these things that we wanted, and we got none of them. And we had a site that we were essentially locked out of. We couldn’t make any changes and they disappeared. So we’re out eight K. We’re a brand new startup and we have a website that we hate that we can’t do anything with. And I was like, screw this. No one deserves this. I had dabbled in web design in previous jobs, and so I was like, you know what? I’m just gonna learn this. And this was, maybe, this was almost 10 years ago at this point, so I’m completely self-taught and I just figured it out and I loved it. Like web design is it’s like interior design online. And so now I get to build people’s digital storefronts and digital spaces and allow it to feel like a really exciting, aligned experience. And so that’s how I got started and why I provide the service in the way that I do. I always wanna teach people how to make updates if they want to, if they don’t want to. I’m always here. I never want anyone getting stuck. And the reason why I’m in the course creation space is through that business that I had with a business partner. We worked primarily with coaches, so they were all looking to scale their business without having to do more one-on-one coaching. So they were in doing group programs, they were doing courses, and I just fell in love with the course creator. Space in general. I think it’s brilliant. I think the people who do courses are really interesting and smart and motivated. And yeah, I just think it’s a fun place to be. Chris Badgett: I love that story. And I particularly like what you said about kind of the pivot to working to, with people that love their work versus, you know, hate their job. And I never really thought about it that in that way, but a friend of mine once said, and another podcast name is Dane Maxwell. He said that I. You know, you don’t wanna serve everybody. Like even if you want to help everybody, you really don’t and you can’t. And like the way you told your story there, I was like, yeah, that makes sense. Like having clients who hate where they’re at isn’t necessarily fun to work with or doesn’t get you super excited. Pua Pakele: Yeah, that’s, that’s really interesting. And it was hard to leave. I don’t mean to cut you off. No, go ahead. It was like when we made the decision to switch our target audience, we were like, God, but people are still contacting us. They still want and need help. And it was a very difficult thing to switch because we knew that we could help them and we were like, there’s, we had to realize that there are people out there. Who really want to help those groups of people and to let them do that work that they want versus us doing it because we feel guilty. ’cause we know that we can help them, even though we don’t get super excited about it. I, it’s a shift worth making, but it, it was difficult. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you mentioned like getting in with the coaches. Are these like health and fitness coaches or business coaches or life life coaches, or how did, how did you find yourself within coaches? And if there’s somebody else out there who’s trying to, you know, work with clients in the coaching industry, how do they, what advice do you have for them? Pua Pakele: Yeah, I mean, the answer’s yes. All types of coaches typically, and this was about. I would say six years ago-ish at this point where the online coaching industry, so specifically like business and life coaches, was becoming very, very popular. And it was like the wild, wild west where people would hear that coaching is kind of an interesting, lucrative industry and everyone was trying to get a little piece of it. And so there, there was also a lot of. Information out there about how to scale coaching businesses. And so that’s, I think, part of where we were able to step in and say okay, if you Google this or go on YouTube and look for how to scale your coaching business, you’re gonna get all of this data. Here’s what we’ve seen work for, you know, a handful of clients, what we believe could work for you. So it, it was like a good time to get into that space as well. Coaches in general sort of start their business because kind of the same as everybody else. They find themselves in having a specific set of expertise that they can teach, and a lot of traditional coaching was done one-on-one. They just, you know, jumped on a Zoom call, went to lunch. It was like, you know, essentially. I’m gonna get reamed for saying this, but it was almost like therapy where you have a therapist and you see them individually. Right. And to move from that into group coaching or into courses felt like a reduction in the quality of service.  And which is not true at all. So it was also teaching them the mindset around allowing you to serve more people. Where they’re at, right. Sometimes people can’t afford one-on-one. Sometimes they don’t necessarily get the best experience out of one-on-one, and they prefer having a cohort or a group or an asynchronous learning platform where they can just go through the material at their own time. If they’re like really busy, maybe they have young kids. So there was a lot of training just around the. Potential and the capacity that online courses and group coaching could offer to people who were just doing only one-on-one coaching, and it could have been anybody, fitness coaches, life coaches, business coaches, and the fitness coaches really, really joined the game in 2020. When they were used to doing personal training or even group fitness at a location, then they couldn’t be there anymore. So when Covid hit, that’s when a lot of the fitness coaches joined this industry. Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s, that’s cool. Now, if you could wave a magic wand, you know, you, you help with websites, online courses, logos, branding, marketing.  You mentioned sometimes people start with a doing one-on-one and then we gotta figure out group coaching and then maybe package it into a course. If you could put all those things in a certain order of there’s some, a fresh fitness expert who wants to do a, you know, a kettlebell thing online, what, what order would you advise them to kinda, if you were to lay out the blueprint of where they might travel over the course of a year, what would that look like? Pua Pakele: Ooh, I love this question. So I talk a lot about creating an ecosystem because essentially what you wanna do is attract your ideal target audience, the people who you think that you could serve best, and provide each person an entry point to your business. Some people are only gonna consume the free stuff. So have have some good free stuff. There’s a online programming, like a CrossFit program called Street Parking, and it’s they, if you pay for their membership, they give you like daily daily workouts. They have an online community. They have meetups. It’s really cool. And before you become a member, they have all of these ways for you to try their stuff. They have Instagram where they post random workouts. They have a podcast, they have, I think it’s a set like a week of workouts. That’s just a sample week that you would get if you paid. So it’s, you know, all of the different modifications, everything that you’d get, it never changes. So that free week is always there. And then you’re like, okay, I think I like this. I think I wanna give it a try. I’m gonna jump in at the monthly because I’m not sure if I wanna do it long term. Then you can upgrade to annual. You could do, I don’t know if they have one-on-one coaching, but they have an upgrade to like a nutrition program. So they have all of these stepping stones for you to enter at wherever you think that you need to be. Some people know already, they either were referred or they’ve been following you for a while and they’re like, give me the biggest and best thing that you have, right? And so having an option for people to opt in at the top as well is really important.  But to go back to your question, I would say start with what you have and figure out what the challenges are for you. And that will dictate the next step. So for many coaches, what they already have is a one-to-one setup, and their challenge is they’re, they’re maxed out. They cannot bring on even one more one-on-one person. So they have a wait list. You could either keep that wait list and nurture that wait list and just wait for a space to open, or the logical next step for that would be to create a group program. The difference between creating a group program and an asynchronous course. Is it’s like this big, it’s just the live component, right? So the easiest way to go from group program to online course creation is to record the content that you’re teaching to the group and build it into a course that does not have that live component. I would say if you do that, be mindful of the sharing that comes in from the group. So some people, you know, if a group program. Is a safe space for people to share. You have a, a community that feels comfortable with each other and they’re sharing things that they may not want, you know, Joe Schmo course student to see. Consider editing, consider having people sign some sort of consent form or waiver. But you could essentially create them both almost at the same time. So I would say for coaches, decide what? Your goal is, and if you think that you are just not even able to do a group thing, you don’t wanna commit to that, that regular engagement, whether it’s weekly calls, monthly calls and you’re like, I just wanna do the course, get it out there, and just have course and one-on-one and I’ll do group later. Totally fine. The thing about creating course content is it will add more work to your plate before it takes it away. So just be ready for that temporary increase in time and energy that you’re gonna spend creating the course content, knowing that it is temporary if you finish the course, which is like so many people start courses and they don’t finish creating them because of that. So I would say just plan. Well have a, have a good schedule in place and just commit to finishing it. Chris Badgett: That’s great. What, with all your experience and time in the coaching industry, what do you see? And we all want our clients to be successful with their courses and their coaching programs. Marketing always comes on the table.  What do you see working for coaches these days in terms of generating leads and you know, a steady flow of leads that doesn’t cause them to burn out so that their business can, you know, survive and thrive. Pua Pakele: Yeah, great question. And this is something that comes up. I mean, I’m guilty of having something to promote and not, and having like cold audiences that I’m promoting it to, and I’m like, oh, that’s why there’s no action.  You know, it can feel nurturing. Your audience can feel like it’s unimportant. Until you need the audience and they’re not there. So most importantly, it’s create time. Ideally every day, like 30 minutes. Every day, every week at bare minimum, once a month, send an email newsletter like I. That should be the least that you do.  But having an audience that is used to who you are, because as a coach, people aren’t just buying into the information that you’re delivering. You can get that anywhere. They’re buying into your teaching style, your energy, the way that they resonate or don’t resonate with you. And I think that’s equally as important and not talked about enough. Give people a chance to get to know you and decide whether or not they like you. If they don’t like you, give them the opportunity to get out. Unsubscribe, don’t buy you. Do not wanna sell to everybody. ’cause that’s when you get really, really unhappy Clients, really stressful situations, refund requests. We want that filter. We do not want everybody to buy our stuff. Unless it’s like everybody can buy a water bottle. If you sell water bottles, go ahead market to every human on the planet. But if you have a coaching program, you want the people who already know that they, they like you and they trust that you can provide whatever solution or transformation it is that you promise. I love that. Chris Badgett: There’s a quote, I give him credit, but I don’t know where it comes from. Which is your vibe. Attract your tribe. Yes. And I, I love that one. ’cause it gives you permission to just hey, just, just be you and the people that show up at your door are going to be good people to work with for you. Pua Pakele: Absolutely. I think I didn’t answer your marketing question ’cause I got. Distracted by that. That’s, that’s Chris Badgett: part of it is your vi your bu show up, send newsletters like you need to build an audience. So tell us more about how to build an audience, especially if we’re starting at zero. Pua Pakele: Yeah. Great question. So again, this sort of comes back down to the ecosystem and the best way to build an audience is to provide something of value. At this point, if you’re listening to this, you probably have heard of offering a freebie on your website. And as a course creator, having your freebie be a mini course is like I. That, that to me is the pinnacle freebie opt-in because people are gonna see the inside experience of working with you before they actually buy. And it doesn’t take very long to put a mini course together. It’s, and you could even repurpose some of your actual course content. But it allows people to experience you in video form, right? Do they like the sound of your voice? Because that’s really important. And do they appreciate the user experience that you’re providing? So the other part of this is making sure that that experience in your mini course is also the same or a similar experience that they’re gonna get in your paid. Programs. So don’t put all of your effort into your mini course. Make it this amazing thing. And then they get into your paid course and it’s, it’s a letdown ’cause then you’re, they’re, yeah. Chris Badgett: Anyway so that to me is, can you give a can you give a like a mini course? Like just flesh it out a little bit. What would one look like? How long would it be? Yeah. And that kind of stuff. Pua Pakele: Great question. So you, the goal is to provide a mini. Result or a mini transformation because if somebody can get a little taste of the solution that you offer, they’re gonna want more. So for the like fitness coach example, you could give a, I’ve seen like a five day sugar detox where you have them take measurements at the beginning of the mini course. Then maybe it’s a three to five video course, and every video is a. About five minutes and you’re just talking them through, maybe you know what to expect when they’re detoxing from sugar and maybe your weight will go up before it goes back down. So don’t weigh yourself every day. Just you are providing your expertise and your personality in these little clips.  And if you really wanna go above and beyond, you’re also gonna do like a, a worksheet or a download to go with the mini course. And then, you know, it gives them something tangible to say, oh my gosh, this was free. I did it in a week. I lost two pounds. Epic. What else do you got for me? Right? So I’d say focus on the mini transformation and don’t give everything away in your mini course. I love that. Chris Badgett: What else? What else? In terms of growing our community and filling our ecosystem with happy folks. Pua Pakele: Yeah, providing value in something like a download, a worksheet, a checklist, and another strategy that is I would say it’s kind of losing steam at this point. And I don’t know if it’s outdated, microphone is slipping or if it’s. Changing platforms, but what used to be really popular and actually really effective was like a Facebook group or some sort of online community that was free. Free community. So many coaches. Yeah. Free community. And you talk about it everywhere you, that’s your call to action on your social media, your podcast. Here’s the link. Join my community. Join a group of like-minded entrepreneurs who are also creating courses. The challenge with that is you gotta show up there going live on Facebook, posting questions, answering questions, being there, allowing them again to get to know who you are. And that can be a little bit of a heavy lift, and I think Facebook groups are somewhat dying out.  And it, it’s a lot to do with the algorithm. Like you can have a thousand people in a group and three people will see your post. So it is it, yeah, I see people doing it in Slack now. I see it in Discord. And you know, you could do workshops, like free monthly workshops to teach a little morsel of whatever it is that you offer.  So there’s a lot of ways to nurture audiences in an organic way. So not paying for advertising, which is another can of worms, totally legitimate. Involves a little bit of a investment and time. ’cause you have to spend time to test the ads and create the ads and adjust the ads and dial ’em in and all the, all those different ways. So yeah, lots of options. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s, let’s put our instructional design hat on and if we’re gonna actually design a course and you know, figure out what the course outline is. Do you have any tips for that? And I guess the same thing would hold true is what’s your process for a group coaching process? Like, how do you, how does, how does an expert organize what they’re trying to teach into something coherent that the, their target audience will love? Pua Pakele: Yeah, great question. I’m gonna do the course design first and then mm-hmm. Tackle the, the group coaching. So I like to look at course design as entertainment, and I don’t mean to diminish the, the actual information that you’re teaching, but the idea behind information delivery is to actually allow it to be consumed and to get people coming back for more. So I like to teach, like creating your course content in sort of a story arc where you kind of get them hooked. You give them a little, just like your mini course, you’re gonna give them little quick wins along the way so that they wanna come back for more, so that they are almost like healthily addicted to your course. Is is the goal, like Netflix, right? If you just binge watch a series, it’s because right where that episode ended. You can’t not keep watching. So that’s the idea behind the course and thinking about what your transformation is at the end. And working backwards from that is also a great place to start.  Because you’re going to wanna lay, it’s, it’s very complex. I’m trying to like, figure out how to answer this in a, in a quick and succinct way. But I would say first and foremost, always think about that, that hook and creating a little bit of entertainment value in that story arc as you’re creating your content.  But from an actual information delivery standpoint, you wanna start to train you clients to almost like you. You’re creating almost like this little cool club. So you’re gonna use create language for yourself and teach it in the first few modules. Allow people to understand the bigger concepts by teaching them in bite-sized chunks early on.  For example, if you’re a realtor and you wanna teach people how to buy their first home, You’re gonna wanna define language that all realtors are using in that space, but also creating little like easy to remember maybe acronyms or language that is unique to what you are teaching. Because then it becomes this like space where you know if you know, you know, and people like that. So there’s, those are just like little tips to get people coming back. Invested in you and setting yourself apart from all of the other people who are trying to teach the exact same thing. Does that help? Chris Badgett: That does help. That’s awesome. Can you tell us the client’s story about I’m on Rebel media.co, that’s rbl media.co. And I see all these wonderful faces. Tell us a story about one of your clients. Give it, entertain us with, with a ooh, a story about what they did or, or what working with you and what, what they accomplished with their, their website and their business. Pua Pakele: Yeah, so I am gonna, I wanna, I’m going around media.co right now too, because I wanna make sure that this person is actually on there so you guys can all check them out. They’re a newer. Oh, I need to add them. Okay, I’ll tell you about ’em anyway. Okay. ’cause this is a course that is coming soon and the website is go kindling.com and they created an incredible product. It’s a, it’s a course for young adults. To teach them essentially all the things that we didn’t learn in school. And this program was created with a group of 12 young adults. I think they were aged maybe 18 or 19 to their mid twenties. And all different backgrounds, different fields of study, different aspirations, career goals demographics, and they. They went through all of the course curriculum together, filming in like a warehouse, and it was, it was really, really cool to be a part of the creation of their digital space, their marketing materials, and the course platform itself, because we could take the footage that they captured with all of these young adults and create a story around each one. So not only are you investing in the. Like the information that’s being delivered, but you’re also investing in the storyline of each of these people that allows, you know, so you can go to the website and then about three quarters of the way down the homepage, there’s squares of each of the young adults and it features a video of each of them. So you see what their interests are, you see their age, and it allows the young adults that this particular company is targeting. To identify with whoever they feel like they resonate with most. Brilliant. I mean, I, I can’t, I don’t take credit for all of this. Like this was definitely collaborative with myself and the client, but I just think it was so smart to be able to offer such a wide range for people to come in and say, I look like you. I sound like you, I aspire to be what you aspire to be. I feel the same way that you do about networking or interviews or financial stuff. Right? It gives you so many. Like entry points to be able to say, if you can help this person, I feel confident that you can help me. So yeah, I’m stoked for this one. Chris Badgett: I love that. Can you say the website again Pua Pakele: for that one? Go kindling.com. K I N D L I n G. Chris Badgett: Awesome. You also do logos and branding and I came from a background of like direct response marketing, copywriting, that kind of thing. But over time I, I fell in love with branding, like brand drives demand and you know, either there’s debate like, oh, you just need this kind of marketing or that kind of market. You need All of it is my, in my opinion, but Talk to us about creating great logos and exceptional brands that we love, that attract wonderful people to our, our products and programs. Pua Pakele: Mm, I love this. So I think branding, strong branding can make your business and your ideal client. It, it can close for you like. It literally is the thing that can make or break your space, your digital space. And I was gonna say, your business, I don’t think I’m gonna give it that much credit because I think people can override bad, br bad branding, but it definitely matters and it hits on that subconscious trust level that people don’t realize that it’s happening. And I just experienced this. Myself, I, I rebranded about two months ago. It was about a month ago, and not that my old brand was like horrifically misaligned, but it was definitely a little bit chaotic and just having, you know, three brand colors instead of 10 because I had a gradient in my. My logo, like who does that?  And you know, having very specific energy and a specific vibe around the content, the copy, the images, all of that came together and people are like, wow, I love your new brand. Even you said it to me. I was like, I’m pretty much using the same stuff. But the brand itself, the energy is more aligned, the actual logo is more aligned.  And the thing about subconscious. Consumption of like digital content and branding and all of that is people don’t notice when something’s right. And that’s what we want. We want the experience to be something that they experience, like we just want it to be enjoyable. We want them to say okay, I feel like I know you. I feel like I trust you. I don’t know why, but I do. People will notice when something’s off and they’ll leave, so they’ll say, oh God, that picture’s blurry. Oh, I can, I can barely read their logo, you know? Or who made their logo? Was this made in 1986? You know, it’s just like people will feel the misalignment and they will notice it right away. We don’t want anyone to notice when the alignment is perfect. We just want them to enjoy. And so having consistent branding is important for that. And if you are ever gonna hire anybody to build or create anything for your business, ever, ever, ever, Giving them a brand guide is gonna save them time and save you money, period. Tell us about that. You don’t want anybody guessing. Yeah, so anybody that gives me their a brand guide that was created by a professional when they hire us to build their website. They get super aligned colors, they get aligned fonts, they get, you know, logo versions that are created for specific uses menus, dark backgrounds, light backgrounds. Your brand designer is gonna give you all of this, and it is a roadmap for creating consistency across everything that you have. That consistency is going to be like the biggest trust builder for people who are visiting your site. Cold. If you have a friend and the friend, they know that you do good work and that you deliver on time and blah, blah, blah. They don’t need to see your branding. It’s the people that don’t know you who need to say, okay, you are consistent. You are predictable. In this case, being predictable is a very, very good thing, right? They wanna be able to say okay. If you can be consistent with all of your stuff across the board, I know that you’ll be consistent with your service, your products. Again, it’s subconscious. Nobody actually says this stuff, but that’s the game that we’re playing. If you don’t have this, your designers, your service providers, they’re just guessing and they’ll probably guess wrong, and then you’ll say, oh, can you revise this? This doesn’t really feel like me. And they’ll be like, oh, but. This is what you wanted. And then you’ll say, oh, but the color, I don’t really like that teal. I kind of like a little, like a mint green. If you give them an exact color code, they’ll nail it every time. Chris Badgett: So is this. Is this something you really recommend people hire to get the the brand guide created? It’s not something you can create yourself if you very, you’re very unlikely to create it yourself if you’re not a designer. Pua Pakele: Yeah. It depends. I feel like there’s a lot of resources out there that can guide you, hiring a professional for this can be costly. And I get it. Some people are just starting out. They don’t, they just don’t have the resources. And I appreciate that, I think that’s, you know, when you’re just starting. You do what you need to do in order to get to where you need to go. And I would say having a brand guide that you’ve created from a template that you found on Google or in Canva that has specific colors and color codes. A logo of any sort that works on, you know, a dark background, a light background. The colors are aligned. You have a heading font and a body font that you’re going to use for all of your things. Those three things are the minimum that you need to have a brand guide, and having that created by you is better than having nothing. When you’re ready, upgrade and get it created by a professional because they’ll be able to provide things to you that, you know, vector files that maybe you can’t create on your own without specific software or they can give you like guidelines of how to use the logo, different color options, mockups for apparel or, you know, the list goes on. And I think. You will know when it’s time to upgrade. You know, you’ll feel like, okay, I really feel like this logo is just not working for me, or I, I feel like my digital space is not quite where I want it. That feeling will start to show up and it won’t go away to the point where you won’t be able to ignore it anymore. Then, you know, you can, you can reach out to an expert and there are platforms like 99 designs where you have options. I think it’s two or $300 for a logo with, you know, revisions and multiple options. It, you can, there’s, there’s like a bunch of designers that submit their, their logo designs to you and you can ask questions and yeah, so there’s that. And then you can get a brand guide created for a little bit more money, but it’s not as much as hiring like an, you know, a single designer. So there you have options, but it is so crucial. If you’re gonna have, I would say every business needs one period. I. Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. And we, by the way, at LifterLMS hired 99 designs to do our logo when we redid it several years ago. And it’s great. 300 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. Pua Pakele: They’re great. And they’re so talented. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit more about technology. I see a lot of coaches and course creators get a little. Overwhelmed or, or, or over-focused on technology sometimes. And they, they, they’re not spending as much energy on like actually creating the course or building community or whatever.  If you, if we’re, if you could wave that magic wand and you’re kind of talking to a, a course creator or coach person, what, what are the key technology pieces and what should people be wary of in terms of over-investing or over-indexing in such a good Pua Pakele: question. This is all you need. Chris Badgett: For those of you listening, pu just held up her, her iPhone. I believe so, yeah, Pua Pakele: that’s it. I mean it’s every, every cell phone at this point can take good enough video to create a course. Yeah. We can dive into the nitty gritty. Like you can get a microphone, you probably actually should get a microphone. And I can talk about what you might wanna use for your phone, but, People spend so much time getting ready to record their course and buying all the stuff that they never Chris Badgett: actually do it. The greens green and the Yeah. Right. Pua Pakele: Yeah. You know, at this point, use everybody’s on Zoom. Use zoom to record it. Blur out your background. If you don’t have a nice background, just get the content out there. My C p A just told me last week, he’s I forget. He was in a program and they said, J L Ss. The PG version of that is just launch something. Oh, get it out there. Yeah, you can. Yeah. And I, I think it’s so true because we put so much pressure on ourselves to make sure that it’s perfect, that if you buy your $250 Sure. Microphone and your. $300 headphones and you’re make your space all crazy. You get your uplights in the back and your huge lights in the front and whatever, and then your course content sucks and nobody buys it, then what? Right. It’s so much better to have your content out there helping people. Nobody actually cares, actually. Like if, if I wanna learn how to paint I don’t know, a. I, I don’t know what I shouldn’t have used that. If I wanna paint a tree and I’m buying a, an online course on how to paint a tree, all I want is for somebody to teach me how to paint a tree. I’m not gonna say, oh man, this person’s audio. You know, we’ll talk about audio in a second, but I’m not focusing so much on the technology that they’re using. I’m focusing on the result that I’ve invested in. With that being said, Audio is kind of important and I would at the very least, recommend like a $20 lavalier mic from Amazon to plug into your phone if that’s what you’re gonna use. And a tripod phone, lavalier mic tripod. Chris Badgett: Nice. And just to build on what you were saying, I was in a a five figure a year coaching program for software founders. And I didn’t a lot of the, and there was a ton of content material in there and almost all of that, I listened to, even though there were videos while exercising or doing things around the house or whatever. So I didn’t even, I couldn’t care less about the quality of the video. It was all about the ideas and learning, getting better, having fun during the process. Yeah, that’s the other thing people, so when I tell people to use their phone, they say, oh, but the video quality’s not good. Most people consume course content on their phone where the video is smaller and that, you know, high definition quality or four K, it doesn’t even matter. Pua Pakele: And I, to your point, I bought a $15,000 course a few years ago. No, no video at all. It was all audio and they had like subtitles, so for like accessibility, all of the transcripts, all the content was, yeah, transcripted on the screen. But I listened passively. What was way more valuable from that course. Were the downloads that I used to actually do the work. So I would say put all of your attention into creating good content and good resources like downloads or PDFs or whatever and focus way less on the tech. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Pua tell us about Rebel Media, RBL media.co. What you do and what kind of the ideal person to work with you is yeah, so we just, I say we, it’s me, but I like saying we, ’cause it makes it feel like there’s a whole bunch of us. And there will be. So I recently shifted into what will soon be a digital media agency for course creators. And I did this for all the reasons we talked about today. Before this shift, I was offering web design and online course design for people who I. Pua Pakele: Basically could come to me with everything put together already, and they just needed it built and beautified. And so I was like, you know, you have to bring your content, you have to bring your copy, you have to bring your branding your course videos, and I will build it all for you. Maybe 50% of the people actually had all of that. So what I wanted to do is to be able to offer. All of that and more under one roof with people who are aligned with the way that we build, with the sort of concepts that we teach, the mindset. And that includes coaching around creating your content, around creating marketing materials and funnels and even marketing strategy.  And I hope to soon also social offer, social media strategy, although I don’t have that yet. But yeah. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Go check out Rebel media.co. Rbl media.co. Any final words for the people pah? Any words of wisdoms or tips for the course creators out there? To the counterintuitive words for the people insight? Pua Pakele: Yeah, just, just launch something. Yeah. If you’re like, so many people are like, oh, I wanna do an online course, same thing. Oh, I wanna start a podcast. I wanna write a book. Do it and do it. Do it imperfectly like crawl. Get a podcast recorded and I want you to record and release something that in a year from now you will listen to it and you will absolutely cringe.  That’s where you should be when you’re starting out. Maybe a book you can have like an editor. ’cause you can’t really, yeah, a book. Maybe polish it a little bit more but start writing it, you know? But I think if you look at any creator out there, any YouTube person that you follow, that you think has really, really high quality, great content, spend a little bit of time looking for the first few videos that they released. And then tell yourself that you can’t also do that too. So just launch something. Chris Badgett: I love that. And after watching many, many course creators, I’ve noticed that as the, the ones that make it take quick, imperfect action, and they get better over time. It’s a, it’s a long game. Yeah. But perfectionism is the, is the enemy in a, in a lot of ways. Absolute pua, thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate you sharing all your wisdom with us today. And is there anywhere else people can connect with you besides RBL media.co? Pua Pakele: Yeah, my social media platform of choice is Instagram, so you can follow me@rb.media and yeah, shoot me a message. I love connecting with people there. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you Pua. Pua Pakele: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Chris. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of L M Ss 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. Dot com slash gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Start an Online Coaching and Course Business in 2023 with Pua Pakele appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett shares about the valuable business tips with Internal training. He shares about LifterLMS new add-on that called “Private Site“. Private Site is a valuable tool for businesses Chris Badgett is the CEO of LifterLMS, a learning management system, and has over 15 years of experience with WordPress. He talks about how this premium plugin may protect sensitive data by locking down a company’s online training materials behind a secure login, highlighting the plugin’s function in building internal training portals. Chris Badgett emphasizes the significance of capturing systems, procedures, and playbooks, pointing out that doing so improves staff onboarding and uniformity. He emphasizes that having a well-documented business operation increases its overall value greatly, especially in the case of future acquisitions. He highlights the modernizing of documentation practices and the potential for long-term success in business operations by employing the private site function within LifterLMS. Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Will Middleton: Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of L M S Cast. Today I’m joined by a special guest, Chris Badgett, usually the host of the l m s cast. We’ve been mixing it up a little bit. I’ve been doing a few interviews with Chris, and today we’re gonna be talking about LifterLMS private site and how it can help you on your LifterLMS website and what benefits it has to offer. But first, Chris, thanks for joining me. How are you doing today? Chris Badgett: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on the show. Will, I’m excited to talk about helping businesses become more valuable and, and more frictionless.  Will Middleton: Awesome. So I guess let’s just dive into it. So the first question is, is what is LifterLMS private site for people who are stumbling across this webinar? Checking out LifterLMS, they haven’t checked out LifterLMS for a while. What is LifterLMS private site? What does that offer for lms websites? Chris Badgett: LifterLMS private site is a new add-on, a premium plugin that LifterLMS makes. We just released it. And essentially what it does is it allows you to lock down a hundred percent of your L m s website behind the login so that you can control what users get in. People can’t access any part of your site. Even the header and the footer goes away. The menu’s gone. There’s just a login and it can be used to create an internal company training portal, or really any kind of e-learning website that requires a hundred percent privacy. So Lifter already has all kinds of cool access controls and drip content and prerequisites, membership to bundle courses and all this. All that’s still there. But the private site is all about just locking down a site a hundred percent. The most common use case for that is for a business that is documenting its systems and processes and procedures so that employees can better onboard and excel in their roles.  Will Middleton: Okay, okay, so what happens if someone tries to view one of the, the course links or the the page links or just visit something on the website and we have LifterLMS, private site active because we’re trying to lock things down. Like what happens when they visit via a direct link,  Chris Badgett: all they get is a login. Okay. That’s it.  Will Middleton: Oh, so it just completely locks down the entire website. So it’s only gonna be for users of the website, like you have to have a login in order to get in. Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s there used to be a term, there still is a term called a intranet, like a private, in like internet or website for a company. It’s basically that, but it’s on the open internet. It’s just totally secured behind a login, which is good. It makes it easy for employees and team members, especially in our remote work world, to be able to log in and we use it at LifterLMS ourselves and have been documenting our systems and processes across. Things like engineering, marketing, sales, operations, customer success, and so on. Over the years and over time. It’s become like a super valuable resource for our, our company and different people contribute to it. So it’s become part of our culture as well to basically have playbooks for our business so that we’re not always just winging it or it’s. You know, new people don’t know where to go. Like we, we’ve documented a lot of things to make working here easier.  Will Middleton: Okay, cool. Cool. And, and you mentioned like the concept of winging it versus having things documented. Can you speak a little bit to the benefit of documenting processes and having stuff in a playbooks and even having an intranet for your organization and what the benefits of that are? Chris Badgett: The highest benefit probably for any business owner is it makes your company more valuable. And that’s because when you sell a business, if you ever do, it’s what are you selling? You’re selling the assets. Selling the intellectual property. You’re selling the, the team that knows how to do the work and is skilled at what they do or whatever.  But the whole operating system of the business, like how it works. If that’s not documented Either the co whoever’s gonna buy you is not gonna buy you. Or you’re gonna get a lot lower valuation because that acquirer knows that once they get the business, it’s gonna be chaotic because there’s no documented systems. And some companies, you know, do that kind of thing in, in Google Docs. You know, in an actual physical manual or whatever. But You know, just modernizing that whole concept with a L M S like LifterLMS, to create an internal training site with WordPress is the way to go these days. And you know, you can use courses in creative ways, like we use them to capture playbooks and there’s a course for each department, but also in our private site. We have other policies and procedures. Our employee manager review system is housed in there. Our. You know, statement of benefits and, and time off systems and all that are, is inside the private side as well. So it’s, it really becomes like a website for the company, but mostly around this idea of helping team members be successful in the work that they do. Will Middleton: Yeah, and  I think sometimes slowing down is hard to do. Like when we’re in the flow of doing our job, we have so many tasks to get done. And this applies, you know, to course creators or really any business. Is there any like thing you could say to speak to the value of taking the time to slow down and create this documentation about the processes that we do day to day? Because I think when, one quick thing is when I. New people come into an organization. A lot of times the way they learn is by shadowing somebody else in the organization. Because the documentation and processes aren’t created for them to learn themselves. They kind of have to just hang out with someone for a while and learn how things go. And that’s kind of a disorganized way to run an organization. Is there any tips for slowing down and taking time to create this value? Chris Badgett: Yeah, I would say just be like Nike and just do it. And I, I say that in jest because Yeah, it feels painful. Like when to create a playbook or document, a process. You often have to get a little bit more behind in. What you’re doing to actually take the time to make it. But it pays dividends like tenfold in the future. In the same way, if you use a, a tool like Help Scout or some kind of text expander tool to like create. To make emails easier to respond to with some canned replies or whatever, you have to slow down to create those. But once you have ’em, You’re like 10 times more efficient. It’s that same kind of thing. And if you know, this business LifterLMS is eight plus years old. And if I could do it all over again. Like if I were ever to build another company. I would create the private site and the documentation or the, the, the playbooks from the very beginning day one. I would slow down and just have that be how we. How we create, you know, or, or the first time I wish I had one, I would make it right at that moment. Will Middleton: So cool. Cool. I mean, that, that makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. So how do you build the, like an internal training website with LifterLMS, with other documents inside?  Chris Badgett: The first thing I would do is I would. Just create a website for my business with WordPress. I’d put LifterLMS and install private site on that right away. And and that would just lock it down. So I would start with that. So now I have a website that only I can see. And then I would add, I would just start adding pages or, and lesson content that Y you know, makes sense for my business. And I like to chop a business up into, you know, departments. So marketing and sales. Sometimes people put those together. Those are obvious. One, like technology or engineering is, is one or customer success is one. So at a minimum I would have three courses. One of ’em would be around like, The product or service we offer. One of ’em would be around sales and marketing, and the third one would be around delivery or customer success. So that’s the. The fundamental stack I would do in terms of getting started. Will Middleton:Cool. Is my audio still coming through? Chris Badgett: It is. Your video’s froze on me, but I can still hear you just fine. Will Middleton: Awesome. My, my Google Chrome’s kind of freaking out, but it’s great that you can still hear me. Yeah, I think that’s, that’s a really great. Rundown of, of LifterLMS private sites. And I love the term intranet. Like that’s a term we used to throw around a lot with creating a private organization internal training. And it sounds like LiferLMS private site is a really awesome way to create an intranet system and create some internal training for your, your organization. What would you advise to people who are interested in creating an intranet and interested in trying out LifterLMS private site? What should they do next? Where should they go? Chris Badgett: I would just head on over to lifterlms.com and go ahead. And get Lifter in private site and just start setting it up. If you want. You can demo it on our demo servers. The Try LifterLMS for a dollar. You can kind of take it for a test drive if you want, but it does exactly what we say it does here. It, it locks everything down behind a login screen. So really step one is like coming up with your idea of what do I want to document on my private site? And what’s my plan for creating business playbooks to make my company more valuable and make it easier for team members to work with me? You know, another benefit is the, the price you pay for not documenting how you do things sometimes is you, it makes it harder for people to work with you. And it makes it harder to find people that are capable of working in a business where it’s chaos and nothing’s documented. The benefits are just there. And, and I think like every entrepreneur, I, I could wish I could go back in time and start from day one and do this, but the reality is most businesses I’ve seen back into this idea of documenting their processes and procedures after they’re already in motion. So that’s okay. Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s not too late. Just get WordPress. Get LifterLMS, get private site and get started today.  Will Middleton: Awesome. Thanks so much, Chris for joining me on this episode of the L m S Cast. And thanks everyone for listening in, and we’ll see you in the next episode. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlmss.com slash gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Make Your Business More Valuable with Internal Training appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Donata and Hans share insights about privacy and legal issues that need addressing in website policies, particularly in relation to an eLearning business. They discuss how to protect an eLearning business from fines and provide valuable guidance. Hans Skillrud and Donata Skillrud , the founders of Termageddon, a tool for managing privacy policies. Termageddon assist companies in creating privacy rules for their websites and products. This tool makes sure that companies have the proper disclosures and legal terminology in their policies, assisting them in avoiding fine and legal problems associated with privacy laws. They highlighted a few key points about the privacy and policy such as Updating Policies, Legal Disclaimer, Accuracy and Customization and Understanding Applicable Laws. The discussion focuses on the necessity for organizations to develop policies in accordance with the privacy regulations that apply to them, avoiding the risks of adopting templates. To ensure that rules accurately represent a company’s particular practices, accurate customization is essential. 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 two very special guests. We’ve got Hans and Don. They’re from Termageddon. That’s T E R M A G E D D O n.com, which helps you stay compliant. With your terms and conditions and privacy policy, super important. Whether you’re building a website for yourself or you’re, you’re a WordPress professional, that creates websites for clients. We’re gonna geek out on some legal, some privacy, some terms issues, and demystify and help, help find a way forward. Welcome back to LMScast U two. Donata Skillrud: Thank you Chris. Glad to be here. Hans Skillrud: Yeah, I had imagine everyone listening couldn’t be more excited to learn about website policies today. Chris Badgett: So I think, I think you guys make it fun and it is actually super important. I remember the first time I had to create a privacy policy or terms and conditions. I, I went to a famous internet person that, that I was sure followed, had a lawyer and just kind of modeled theirs or whatever. But that’s not the way to do it. I guess before we dig into the, the details, what is term mageddon and and we’ll, we’ll kind of tour around these, is these issues of legality and, and privacy. Hans Skillrud: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s probably good being the husband to an attorney. I will do wanna note, please note nothing in this podcast will be for. Legal purposes. It’s not legal advice. Always speak to your attorney before you make any legal decisions. So Termageddon is a website policies generator. So what’s special about our tool is kinda like two things in my opinion. Number one, it’s a, it’s a series of questions that help you identify the laws. That apply to you specifically. And then the questionnaire adapts to provide the disclosures you specifically are required to make under your own policies. You then, after you generate your codes with termageddon, you copy and paste our codes into your website, and that’s what allows us to push updates whenever new disclosures become required. A lot of people are surprised to hear that additional updates need to be made to a privacy policy. But that’s simply the world we live in. Three days ago at the time of this recording, yet another state passed a US privacy law that could require website owners to make new disclosures in their privacy policy. So I like to think of term, again as a, a strategy to keeping your policies up to date over time with newly required disclosures, helping you avoid fines or lawsuits. Chris Badgett: So if somebody’s a, a course creator or coach, or we’re building a site for a client like that, and let’s say they’re teaching online yoga, what? And they’re not a law, they’re not a lawyer. They know they need to have this on the bottom of their website. What’s the most important things for them to know about, to do it successfully? Donata Skillrud: Sure. So the first thing that’s really important to know, and Hans kind of alluded to this a little bit, is that your policy needs to be based on the privacy laws that apply to you. And that’s because each privacy law has its own set of disclosures that re it requires privacy policies to make. Are usually different from other privacy laws. So if you’re buying a template or something like that, it’s not gonna be compliant because it’s not based on those laws. And also don’t assume that, you know, if you get a template that’s G D P R compliant, that you’re automatically compliant with other privacy laws because those disclosures are different. For example one of California’s privacy laws koppa requires you to disclose how your website responds to do not track signals. And G D P R doesn’t require that disclosure. So your G D P R template won’t comply with other laws. And then second you wanna make sure that your privacy policy is accurate to your actual business and privacy practices. Chris, like you said, like the first time that you had to create a privacy policy, you went on somebody else’s website and kind of copied and pasted it and adjusted it. If you do that copy and paste method, that policy will be based on their privacy practices, which means that it won’t be accurate to yours, which means that it won’t be compliant and you’re not alone. Hans Skillrud: Chris, for the record, prior to marrying Donata, I used to copy and paste privacy policies whenever my clients would ask. So you are not alone. I assure you. This is a global. Trend. And it’s a trend that I think is decreasing over time because people are seeing changes in privacy and I think it’s good to, you know, take that yoga example and kind of share some insights, which is that. People’s personal information is what’s being regulated under these privacy laws. So what it means is governments all over the world are regulating data like this to protect their people’s data. What that means is there are certain people around this world who have a right to owning their name, their email address, their phone number, that is their property, and business owners have to respect that. So if you have a website offering virtual yoga classes, I would imagine they would welcome business across state lines. Not all, every, not everyone in those examples, but I’d imagine a lot do. And therefore since you’re collecting personal information from across state lines, either when people register or make a purchase or just submit an inquiry or just if you’re collecting IP address behind the scenes for analytics or security purposes, you need to find out if those. People have privacy rights and if those laws apply to you because only then can you find out what disclosures you are required by law to make in your policy. Donata Skillrud: Yeah and you don’t have to be located in those states or those countries for those laws to apply to you. So for example, we’re located in Chicago, right? We’re not in Canada. But because we collect the personal information of residents of Canada, Canada’s privacy law, Pipee still applies to us even if we were not located there. And we never actually set foot in Canada. Chris Badgett: So can you speak a little more to the whole jurisdiction or location thing? If let’s say we’re in the United States. Mm-hmm. There’s the states of the United States and then there’s other countries. How do we think about being and we wanna sell our, our courses and coaching programs and, and online learning all over the world. How do we think about it? Seems a little overwhelming to be compliant everywhere. What do we need to actually worry about the most? Or do we need to be compliant in every country in the world? Donata Skillrud: So no one is compliant with every country in the world. Even companies that have billions and billions of dollars in resources are not compliant with every privacy law that’s ever been passed. So I don’t think we need to think about it that way. I think we really need to think about whose information are we collecting. So who’s submitting forms on the website, who’s being tracked through analytics or similar services? And where we’re doing business. So again, going back to the yoga studio, let’s say I have Stripe and I can see that 50% of my customers come from the United States, 25% come from Australia, and 25% come from the uk. I can clearly know that I’m doing business. In those areas because I’m receiving transactions from there. So I should make sure that I’m compliant with those laws, at least to begin with. And I think when it comes with jurisdiction, a lot of people are confused about that because they think I’ve never been to California, let’s. Say, why would their privacy law apply to me? Or how could they get to me if I’m located in Chicago and not in California? When you’re doing business in state, certain states, so for example, I have transactions with consumers from California, or I’m targeting those residents, or I’m. Keeping their personal information, things like that. I’m actually interacting with that state, and that’s sufficient to provide jurisdiction because if you have revenue from that state or you have visitors from that state, that’s sufficient to establish a connection usually. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s talk technic technicality. So if somebody fills out the form so that term can figure out the right. Policy to generate. How does it actually end up on the WordPress website? Does it create a short code, a block or something? Like how do they get it on there and then, and then, and you’re saying it stays up to date as, as you update the underlying data set. Hans Skillrud: Yeah, so after you go through the questionnaires each policy has its own JavaScript embed code. That’s a lot of fancy talk for something. You just simply copy and paste into the body of your policy pages, and that is what allows your website visitors to visit your privacy policy page on your own website. And sure enough, the privacy policy will populate. But behind the scenes, that data, that, that content is coming from Edin. So we control what that content says. And I don’t mean to sound like a control freak. You have all, you can fully customize it however you wish. But why that’s important is so that when new laws go into effect, like the four new laws going into effect in 46 days, at the time of this recording, we are able to notify our customers of the changes, ask any new questions that need to be answered, and then push the updated. Disclosures directly to the client sites. Just in time for when governments can start enforcing the law. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s, let’s talk financials in a little bit in the sense that like we’re we’re, I know ’cause I’ve hired lawyers one-on-one before, they can be very, very expensive. I. You know, many hundreds of dollars an hour and, and even more sometimes. How were you guys able to come up with this concept of taking almost democratizing access to quality legal help, guidance documents? Donata Skillrud: Sure. So we’re not a law firm, so we don’t actually provide like legal advice or anything like that, which helps us keep costs down significantly. And at least. My reason for starting term EdDin is before term EdDin, I was in private practice. I. So I had some clients and they would get, you know, new websites being built or whatever, and they would ask me, Hey, do I need a privacy policy or do I need a terms of service? And I really noticed that at that time, you know, before these new privacy laws passed, I was kind of asking them very similar questions what data do you collect, where you do business? You know, who do you share it with? Things like that. And I thought to myself, Hey, there’s gotta be a way to automate this because I noticed that a lot of these people that were coming to me could not afford. The cost of having an attorney create their policies in the first place, much less continuously monitor privacy laws for them and keep them up to date. And I really thought it was one of those things that could be automated. So that was my thought behind try mcg getin. Yeah. Hans Skillrud: And and, and I’ll note, you know, for anyone listening that has the funds to. Hire an attorney and have them monitor privacy laws on your behalf and provide you with legal advice. Nothing beats that. Like of course, if that’s in your budget and, and you can afford that with your business, go that route. Nothing beats having that. But, but I would like to think of term again as an excellent cost effective alternative if that’s not. Possible. Because, you know, that’s our job. Monitor privacy laws, notify customers of changes and keep policies up to date over time. And, you know, we started the business seven years ago, but fast forward to today, I still remember the very first time an attorney was interested in using our service and I was so scared. I’m like, oh my gosh. I felt like term attorneys were gonna hate us. Turns out the vast, vast majority of attorneys also don’t like creating privacy policies because of how complicated it is. We’ve had people come to us that were quoted $60,000 to comply with 12 international privacy laws, something that they can do in term again in 45 minutes. And and the attorney set a six month turnaround. So they went with term McDon, they got their policies drafted, and they even shared access. With their attorney who reviewed it and had zero edits. I think like one thing that we’ve really appreciate I’ve, I’ve enjoyed is that we are attorney friendly. To be honest, I thought people were gonna, I thought attorneys were gonna hate us, but yeah, they, they like us too. So that, that’s been nice. Donata Skillrud: Yeah, we have a lot of law firms using our service, which has been great. And you know, if you still wanna use term andin and a lawyer, you can do that. You can create your policies with term andin, share the license with your lawyer, have them review it. Which is significantly cheaper than drafting something from scratch, too. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s, let’s assume somebody’s watching or listening to this that is newer to online business WordPress. Maybe they missed the big G D P R wave that came maybe four years ago or so. Can you kind of set the stage of what that was, why it’s still important? And I just wanna note like with a learning management system, You’re definitely collecting user information. There’s all kinds of their data on your website, and I just want to state that WordPress and LifterLMS is G D P R compliant. People can disappear in the correct ways if they want to. Request to be removed from your platform, which is a really cool innovation. And I actually really value the the intent behind privacy laws, even though they can be a pain to deal with. But what was the whole G D P R thing and how is it still relevant today for those that have. Never heard of it or kind of forgot about it. Hans Skillrud: Yeah. And, and Chris, you shared a whole bunch there that I couldn’t agree more with you on and, and for anyone listening that’s concerned, oh, LifterLMS collects data or, or my system, my LifterLMS system collects data. Collecting data is a totally normal thing that. Any business, I, I can’t think of an example where a business can run a business without collecting people’s data. Like you gotta get paid somehow. You know? So there’s nothing wrong with collecting data. What’s happening is people are getting privacy rights, where we as business owners have a responsibility, a legal obligation to make specific disclosures within our policies to respect their privacy. Comply with applicable laws and although there’s been privacy laws for decades now what really got people kind of turned up a little bit was G D P R, the General Data Protection Regulation, which protects the personal information of residents of the European Union or European economic area. And I think the reason why this caught people’s attention was for number one, they enforce it quite regularly. A lot of people think it’s just Facebook getting fined. One, what was it last week? 1.3. 1.3 billion. Yeah, 1.3 billion last week. But actually there’s one person companies being fined, five figures, six figures for, for non-compliance too. So I think the fact that they are enforcing it at an increasing rate caught people’s attention, but also the broad reaching nature of, of Europe’s privacy law. That privacy law, if you’re, I mean, obviously if you’re located in Europe and offering goods and services to people in Europe, you obviously have to comply with the law. But for people outside of that country, Or outside of that continent. They need to, that law can apply to you the moment you start tracking or monitoring the behavior of a resident of the EU or Donata Skillrud: offering goods or of services Hans Skillrud: in the eu. Yeah, that’s true. But the monitoring or tracking in particular, I think has really caught people’s attention. ’cause everyone’s all of a sudden I have a website, like in theory someone from Europe could come there. Do I have to comply with the law? It’s if you’re tracking them. Yeah. And that broad reaching nature is really what I think caught people’s attention. And the fact that people are getting privacy rights and. Now we as website owners have to deal with it. And you know, I personally think regulations, I, I don’t, I’m not a huge fan of regulations, but privacy rights are something I’m a big fan of. I do believe people deserve privacy rights. I certainly wish it was being done differently, but the reality is we as business owners just have a responsibility to respecting our website visitors’ privacy rights. Donata Skillrud: Yeah, and I think, if I can clarify one thing about G D P R, just because your website could accidentally, you know, through no fault of your own be accessed by someone in Europe, that doesn’t mean that G D P R applies to you. So it’s only if you offer goods or services there. So let’s say you offered lead website in French or. France is one of the dropdowns on your address menu when people are entering payments or, you know, you offer a tourism service in the eu or you have a special phone number that people from the EU could call or if you’re tracking the behavior residents of the eu. And that applies with services like Google Analytics services like heat map tracking things like that. So if you are using those services, G D P R can apply to you as well. Chris Badgett: What’s a simple explanation of the difference between what a privacy policy is? We’ve been talking about that a lot, but we haven’t talked as much about terms and conditions. What are, how are, what are these two, what are the two jobs to be done here? Hans Skillrud: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Good one. A privacy policy explains to your website visitors what personal information you collect, who you share that data with, if you sell that data and of various other Details regarding your privacy practices of your business. So in other words, a privacy policy helps you comply with privacy laws, a terms of service, otherwise known as terms and conditions terms. I know there’s another one in there. T N C. Yeah. T o Ss. Yeah. But terms in general, explain to users the rules of using the website. So unlike privacy laws that have you disclose exactly what they tell you to disclose, a terms is more so a means to limit your liability as a website owner. So terms I like for virtually any website because you can have little statements in there Hey, we offer links to third party sites. We’re not responsible when you click on one of those links. So if you click on that link and that site gets hacked and you get hacked, You can’t come back and sue us. That one little statement is a good example of the countless statements you can add into a terms. But the reason why it’s extra important for l m s systems is because terms can also explain your refund policy, your cancellation policy, if you do happen to ship anything, your shipping policy. It explains the e-commerce relationship you have with the buyers and explain and explains to them. How you run your business and what to expect if you are happy with the service or if you’re not happy with the service. Donata Skillrud: It also explains subscriptions. Yes, so there’s some laws out there like California’s Automatic Renewal Law. The Federal Trade Commission’s negative options offers guidance, which basically say that unless you provide certain information to a user before they sign off for a subscription, That subscription will actually be considered a gift to the user, and you’ll have to refund them whatever they paid you. So if your course is something where somebody pays you once a week to get the course, or once a month or whatever to get the course, you wanna make sure that you have those disclosures within your terms of service regarding subscriptions. Or it could be considered a, a violation of those particular laws and then could be considered a gift to the consumer. So you’d have to refund them and they still get the course. Hans Skillrud: So just to summarize that as simply as I can, privacy policies are to comply with privacy laws, terms of service are to comply with consumer protection laws and to help avoid you from getting sued from your website. Chris Badgett: In terms of, that’s a really good explanation in terms of pricing. I see people get hung up on that a little bit. Oh, what if I’m offering a subscription, I wanna reserve the right to change my prices even on existing customers. What, what can, how do we think about pricing in terms of terms and conditions? ’cause most. People change their prices over time and they, they’re allowed to do that. But, but yeah. What, what, what would you say to that? Donata Skillrud: Terms of service can say that you reserved the ability to change your prices or to correct incorrect prices. So let’s say you were putting a price on a course and you forgot to add a zero. You know, you have the right to correct that price to the right price if you make a mistake or to change your prices over time. That’s not something that’s unnatural or not normal. In a course of business businesses always change their pricing or change their pricing models or different packages that they offer. That’s totally normal, you know, just make sure to notify people before you do it. Chris Badgett: Can you speak to, I see you have automatic updates and email notifications. As a as a, as a type of document. But I think people get hung up a little bit around email itself you know, the unsubscribe laws, but what about transactional email, like a receipt email, and when do I have the right to email somebody or put them on an email list and all this kind of stuff? How does it, how does email fit into all this? Donata Skillrud: So it really depends on the privacy laws that apply to you. So each law has different criteria for what you can email and what you can’t, but generally speaking, so you have two types of emails. The first type of email is the transactional email, right? So if I. Create an account with someone and I want to reset my password. They have to send me an email to reset that password, or I have a payment that’s coming up, you know, they have to be able to send me my invoice, right? Those types of emails are, should be separated from all other kinds of emails. And the other kinds of emails, what we would consider marketing emails, right? So those are the ones where usually you would have to get consent. So under most privacy laws, you have to get consent to send email marketing to people. And what that means is, You know, having people agree to your privacy policy or having people and or having people select and agree to receive promotional emails, right? And those two choices are usually separated and the user can click to agree. Don’t do opt out. So if the box is pre-checked, that’s a problem because the user never actually consented. You just precheck the box for them. So make sure that the boxes are unchecked by default. And make sure that you are actually respecting their choice. So if they didn’t opt into receiving emails, Don’t send them the emails if they opted out or unsubscribed, you know, don’t send them emails. And all emails at the bottom should have an unsubscribe button. And that button should not be hidden, so don’t hide it behind a background that looks the same as the font for the unsubscribe. A lot of companies do that. Please don’t do that. You know, and then when somebody clicks, unsubscribe. They need to be actually unsubscribed or taken to a page that allows ’em to unsubscribe. Describe and make sure that those options are very clear and easy to understand. Hans Skillrud: We were we were at Disney World because we, we went down there for an event and it included tickets to Disney World. So we went there. First off, they, they take your fingerprint id, which I, I find very concerning to enter a theme park. I don’t feel like I need to provide my fingerprint identification. But aside from that fact, once we got done, I started receiving emails from Disney World. And I unsubscribed, and then I unsubscribed again and again and again. And eventually I filed a complaint with them. I was like, look like please stop. I, I don’t, I’m, I’m not, I’m not your demographic. Like I, I, I just happened to go there ’cause of an event. And they, and I think it was like seven days after I submitted that request, I stopped receiving the emails. But that’s the type of annoyances. That we’re talking about here. You know, that’s the type of stuff that no one likes. I don’t think anyone loves spam emails. I, have yet to meet anyone except those YouTubers who like stalk spam. And I don’t know if you’ve ever, those are, can I Donata Skillrud: go on a tangent real quick? Sorry. So this makes me think of something. Google was recently fined they settled a case for $39.9 million with the state of Washington. And this wasn’t under any privacy law. This was under Washington’s Consumer Protection Act, which is a consumer protection statute. And what happened was that Google. Continue to track people’s location even after people said no. So I guess in Google accounts, and I recently read this lawsuit, which was just fascinating in Google accounts, if you wanna opt out of location tracking, there’s three different places to do it. And if you turn off location history in one place. You’re still being tracked on your device. Even though you’re not tracked on your account, which consumers did not understand. So basically they got fined for violating the consumer protection statute for continuing to track people even after they said they don’t wanna be tracked. And I think the same thing can be applied to email marketing. You know, if people want to unsubscribe, they shouldn’t have to go to three different places to unsubscribe. It should just be one place. And then once you unsubscribe, you don’t get the emails Hans Skillrud: anymore. Yeah. And there’s nothing wrong. For the record, everyone, there’s nothing wrong with sending emails, sending relevant emails are great and valuable. You know what we’re talking about here is just making sure you send emails to people who’ve opted in and asked to receive emails. I mean, not to mention, those are probably your higher caliber customers or leads in the first place. Yeah, so some to take into consideration. Chris Badgett: There’s a funny thing that I see happen in the, the subject matter expert industry, particularly in certain niches like finance, health and fitness type stuff. Where like at the beginning of this show we gave a legal disclaimer none of this is legal advice. There’s a lot of like health coaching on the internet now, but a health coach, my understanding of it is, They can offer advice and experience, but they can’t prescribe anything. There’s like certain nuances to like what constitutes you know. What’s governed by the medical laws or whatever. And the same like in finance, like if you wanna learn about investing, you watch investing YouTube channels, they’re constantly saying, this is not financial advice. Consult your financial advisor. The funny thing about it is some of the best people. Are the most concerned with that stuff. The people that are the really good, you know, finance wizards or health advocates that just don’t want to end up in a illegal mess or whatever. Yeah. Do you have any general advice here? Yeah. Donata Skillrud: Yeah. The, the Federal Trade Commission is increasingly cracking down on this type of stuff. Because there’s been a lot of consumers that have been harmed by. Wrong or, or incorrect advice or you know, things that people told them to do that didn’t work for their situation. So I think they’re trying to avoid that Federal trade commission enforcement, but I think they’re also trying to avoid, I. Being mistrusted by their audience because when they provide that disclaimer to me that says. Hey, this is a person that has thought about this. Yep. This is a person that knows that not all advice is applicable to all people. Yep, exactly. And this is a person that that takes this seriously. And I think that helps establish trust with their audience as well. At least for me, maybe I’m different ’cause I’m a lawyer and Hans, you have a different opinion on this. No, Hans Skillrud: I. I completely agree. When I see someone give a disclaimer, I actually am already off to okay, I, this person’s. At some level of professionalism already. And then, you know, I, I hear them out. But the reality is we, you know, things it, especially with like live. Live podcasts, something could be shared that was not a hundred percent like the most accurate statement and people could misinterpret it. Then go do something that harms themselves or their business and, and that’s the type of stuff I think experts try to avoid. From misconstruing, like having people think, oh, I now understand everything about every privacy law under the sun, for example. That’s impossible to do in one hour. Donata Skillrud: Yeah, because every single piece of advice doesn’t work for every single person. If we say, Hey, you need to be compliant with G D P R. Yeah. That applies to mostly everyone. But what if you don’t need to comply with gdp d r, like the law doesn’t apply to you. Then that doesn’t apply to you. So I think the fact that Hans Skillrud: C P R A under certain circumstances require you to have a toll free telephone number to opt out of the sale of information like that one little detail. It’s super required for the people who are required to disclose it. But if it doesn’t apply to you, why stress the person out and having to go get a retail phone number? Yeah, exactly. Chris Badgett: For somebody who’s just starting out, let’s say the financial resources are tight or we’re just. They’re trying to side hustle an online course or coaching program. It’s not really proven yet. So they don’t wanna hire a big lawyer or anything. But they do want to be compliant from day one. So they give, go to term mcg, giddon, they get their privacy policy and their terms and conditions up. Where, where else can they go to to get just a general. To level up their understanding of the legal stuff. ’cause it feels like it’s all over the place. Like the FTCs over here, the state laws are over here. I just see it a lot where let’s say I’m a yoga expert or I’m a math teacher and I have no background in business or law or whatever. But I, but I’m concerned. Yeah. So not like where, where do I start? Just to make sure I can launch and not be worried like I’m making some huge legal problem. Hans Skillrud: Yeah. So if you’ve decided that, look, I can’t, I, I want an attorney, but I can’t afford ’em right now. I’m just too early. And you’ve decided, okay, I’m gonna sacrifice legal advice and use a tool like term again. I would make sure you’re selecting a privacy policy generator that’s Very focused. I guess, on, on providing comprehensive policies you know, look up the background, who’s behind the company. Do they often talk about what’s happening in changes in privacy law? Are they active on social? Are they providing free assets and free material to, to review? So our blog, for example, is a great resource. I think I mentioned it earlier in this call, but Montana passed their privacy law three days ago. We had the compliance guide up. That day because we’ve been monitoring it since its beginnings. Donata Skillrud: Yeah, we have a lot of compliance guides that kind of break down the basics of each law, which can be very helpful. And then we also dive deeper into some other kind of more nuanced topics within the blog as well. Yeah. I think if you’re you know, that’d be a great place to start term getin.com on our blog. Another great resource is the International Association of Privacy Professionals ipp.org. So they have a lot of white papers trackers, as well as a news source. So they collate all of the privacy news and there’s a lot of them, which can be pretty overwhelming. Yeah, it’s, but I would recommend heading to their resources tab where they have a lot of these types of resources, which can be very helpful as well. That’s a good one. Hans Skillrud: Yeah. Good recommendation. Chris Badgett: How do you guys at term McGinn stay up to date? Because it seems like it’s hard to have 50 states and other countries, all this stuff. Like how do you do it? Hans Skillrud: It’s me the whole time. It’s just me doing it. Donata Skillrud: You do Literally none of it. So a couple different places. So we use a service called LexiNexis Statement. Which is kind of like Google alerts for bills. So we can set our topics. Like for example, one of ’em is privacy policy. So whenever a bill is proposed that has that text it sends me alert. Then I can track it throughout the legislative cycle. That’s a really great resource. I also use the I P P as well as legis scan, which is another bill tracker. And then also I keep track of bills through help with my colleagues at the American Bar Association and the Chicago Bar Association as well, where you frequently talk about privacy laws. So it comes from a lot of different sources, but the main source of alerts is LexisNexis statement. Yep. Hans Skillrud: And Donato will never share it, but she’s the chair of the American Bar Association’s EPR committee, so 500 privacy attorneys report to her. Donata Skillrud: So it’s a, a great time. So we try to work together to stay up to date with all of this stuff because it is a lot to stay up to date with. Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s wild. Could you touch on that 0.1 more time that you made earlier about how to think about location or Nexus? If you know we live here, but our customers here, how do we know, like they can view our, if they’re viewing our website, we don’t necessarily need to comply, but if we’re actively doing business, what’s, can you just explain that? Donata Skillrud: Yeah, so it’s called availing yourself of the privilege of doing of doing business or having a connection with a particular state. So if you have a connection to a state, so let’s say you have customers that are located there. Or people from there have submitted their personal information to you. So let’s say they submitted their email to an email marketing list and you’re actively trying to sell things to them, or you’re tracking them on your website, so you’re collecting their data to track them. That would be sufficient. Usually would be considered sufficient connection to a particular state. So most privacy laws will apply when you do business in a particular state. That means you’re taking advantage of their infrastructure, their customers, their residents, to make money from that, right? So that’s usually a sufficient connection to established jurisdiction, which means that you could get fined for those particular laws. Hans Skillrud: I think a lot of people are like, I’m, you know, I don’t care if Europe tries to find me to find me or something like that. And I’m like, why do you wanna live your life where, you know, you can’t travel to a certain part of this world because there’s a fine out for your business. Like why? Like I think a lot of people try to avoid privacy rights ’cause it’s stressful and I get that. But I think there has to be some kind of acceptance eventually. Where people understand that like these regulations are here, if anything, there is a lot more coming. And it’s like for those who embrace it, like what you’re gonna be doing as a result is respecting your website visitors’ privacy rights, demonstrating professionalism. Continuing to offer the same type of marketing and lead generation that you currently have in place. You’re just doing it with best practices in mind. Donata Skillrud: Actually if I can add a couple things there. So fines are not the only tool that regulators have at their disposal. They can also make you delete the data and anything that you’ve derived from that data. So let’s say I have an email marketing list of a hundred thousand people and 90,000 of those were obtained. In violation of certain privacy laws they can ask me to delete that 90,000 and I would have to delete it. And then two as well. I think it goes into the idea that If you were to sell your business, right? So a lot of people start a business with the idea that eventually they would sell it and not, you know, work there till their dying day. I know there’s some of us that are like that, but others aren’t. But you know, one of the things that the company buying you will do. As part of their due diligence is say, Hey, were these emails, were these customers obtained legitimately? And if you can’t prove that they consented to that, then the value of your business goes down as well. Because if they’re buying a list of 10,000 customers, but they can’t email any of them, you know that value goes down. There are no customers. So that’s something to think about as Hans Skillrud: well. That’s a good call. Chris Badgett: This is great for those out there listening, if you’re thinking, I want to protect my business from fines and lawsuits in 30 minutes with mcg. What should they do next? Hans Skillrud: Yes, I guess as a salesperson, I’d love to put in a delicious plug to the business. But yeah, so term again is $99 a year and includes a full set of policies, a cookie policy too, a cookie consent solution, and an end user license agreement. But that tends to not be needed for the typical l m s user $99 a year. I do want to note we exercised our own terms. Rights and our our pricing is changing to $119 a year starting July 1st. Look if you’re meaning to get around policies and you are wanting to get set up with term, again. I then I would recommend checking us out before July 1st before our price goes up 20 bucks a year. At least your first year will be discounted. Yeah, that’s how it works. Chris Badgett: Thank you so much. I just wanna say thank you, this is so needed. You know, any serious lms site needs to have a privacy policy in terms and conditions. It’s not really negotiable. I, the worst thing that I see sometimes I go to what somebody’s website and those pages have Lauren Ipsum text on there. Oh boy. Yeah. And that, and that might be a business that’s been going for a while. So this is something to not ignore. Go to term mcginn.com. Check it out. Hans and Don, thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate what you’ve built here. This adds a great service and a great value to the experts and WordPress professionals out there. We’ll have to do this again sometime and keep doing what you do and helping us all stay safe from fines and lawsuits. We really appreciate it. Hans Skillrud: Absolutely, Chris. Yeah, thank you for having us. Thanks so much and thanks for the boat of confidence. Yeah. There’s many o other solutions out there, but yes, we’d love for you to consider Turin. Thank you. Chris Badgett: That’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@LifterLMS.com slash gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Protect Your eLearning Business from Fines and Lawsuits appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Malorie Nicole shares her experience and expertise as a coach. Malorie Nicole is the host of the “Abundantly Clear Podcast” show. She is a coach and a mindset expert, dedicated to assisting people in their business and personal growth journeys through her insightful guidance and advice She talks about how her path into coaching began with her personal health issues and her choice to enroll in a health coaching program for her own wellbeing. Her first encounter with coaching inspired her to research other coaching certifications and mentorship partnerships. Malorie Nicole adds that she works with a variety of customers in her coaching business, each of whom has unique needs and objectives. Her coaching technique assists clients in navigating these patterns. She stresses the importance of dealing with identity-related issues and exhorts CEOs to continue working on their personal and professional growth in order to overcome obstacles and succeed. 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 LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Malorie Nicole. You can find her on the abundantly clear podcast.com. Welcome to the show, Malorie. Malorie Nicole: Chris, thanks for having me. I’m so excited to start the morning with you. Chris Badgett: We’re gonna take a couple tracks with this interview. I’m excited to talk with you. You kind of have two journeys here. One is a, coach of CEOs and somebody who helps create transformation in the lives of others. So there’s like your subject matter expertise and there’s also your journey as a coach. Where did the coach calling come from to help serve other people. You know, kind of focus in on this particular niche. Malorie Nicole: Great question. I developed some food intolerances years ago before health and wellness became kind of what it is today with all of the course creators. And the world that you and I kind of live in. People talk about health and wellness a whole lot differently than they did 10 years ago, and. We have a lot more knowledge around how to. Sustained wellness for the body. And about a decade ago I went through some really, really challenging, health issues that I wasn’t getting clarity on with conventional medicine practice. And in that time I found a health coaching program. Honestly, I invested in it just for me, for my own health and wellness at the time. Although it was a certification program. I was trying to figure out like what was going on with me and how to get healthy and what I can do to fix the problems that I was experiencing. And to be honest with you, I didn’t even know what a coach was at that point, like other than, you know, a football coach or a basketball coach or an Olympic coach. I had never heard of coaching before, and the entrance into health coaching really expanded my mind into. All of this other stuff in the world of coaching and that led me down a path to continue getting certifications and working with mentors. And I actually started a health coaching practice and it, it morphed into what I do now over time. Chris Badgett: And what do you do now, like in terms of your current coaching practice? Malorie Nicole: Yeah, it’s a couple different things and I’ve gotten more comfortable over the years with just saying that like it’s a couple different things. I don’t have like the perfect elevator pitch. I don’t have like the one line sentence. This is what I do for everyone. Because I do a handful of things for different types of people. To some people I am strictly like their executive coach. I work with them and other, um, people on their leadership team and we’re doing executive coaching work. I. With other clients, I’m more of a transformational executive coach. So you know, maybe their company is going from 3 million and they wanna do 8 million and they’re gonna have to grow their team. And they know that the growth of the company, a lot of their own personal growth is going to need to happen in order for the company to expand. So I do something with them. It’s more of a process called internal upgrades, and it really is the mindset and performance and staying dialed in on their own belief systems, making sure there’s no sneaky limiting beliefs in the way of the growth that they’re going after. So there’s a few different varieties of people that come to me. You know, sometimes people come to me when they’re like, I am creatively burned out. I feel like I hate my business, Idon’t know what’s going on. I built this wonderful thing and now I’m just, I’m burned out. Don’t have any time. I have money, but I don’t have time, don’t know what’s going on. But then there’s also some people that are like, I just need to grow my support team. I need to have an executive coach in my corner. I know that we’re, you know, we’ve got big goals and I wanna continue to have people on my team supporting me in the direction of the goals that I’m after. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. How did you develop like a system or like a framework or your methodology as a coach? Malorie Nicole: That is a good question and something that personally is challenging me this year. So I’m in the process of writing a book and it is, Requiring me to look at, okay, I’ve got six years of calls with people that’s like literally tens of thousands of hours of coaching calls. What is the actual process that I go through to to take people through a transformation when I’ve got different types of people at different stages coming to me? What does it actually look like? And what I’ve found in working with a really phenomenal book coach and working with some other people that have. Gone through my process with me to help reflect it back, which has been amazing, is that the process isn’t necessarily a linear thing, which I know for like selling a course and in the course creator world, that’s really not the best, the the best marketing thing in the world, but it does come down to five principles. So every time I work with someone, there are five principles that we end up covering. Now, whether that happens in a linear fashion, one through five, or we kind of cycle back, that’s to be de to be determined depending on the person and the season of entrepreneurship that they’re in. Those five principles are identity work. It always starts with identity work. Who we are being, what creates our habits and behaviors the way that it does. What are the stories that we’re telling ourself about success and about the life that we wanna live, vision, work? What are the goals that we’re going after? Where do we actually wanna take the business? You know, there’s a lot of entrepreneurial pressure that people find themselves in. Uh, scale, scale, scale, scale, scale. And sometimes that’s not what people actually want. Sometimes they wanna spend more time for their kids or hiking in the mountains, but because they’ve gotten in such a hustle and grind mentality in the entrepreneurship space, it can be a little hard. To really pull back some of those layers and find alignment in their business. So vision is really, really important to me on getting clear of, you know, not necessarily what you can achieve because we all have limitless potential. But what do you wanna achieve? What does success actually look like for you and your business and where you wanna take your company? After vision, we look at structure. That is like the, the systems and the behaviors and the habits per both personally and in the business that set you up for success. Boundaries is a big one. I don’t necessarily think that burnout is the problem. I think that it starts with a boundaries issue that actually creates a lot of entrepreneurial burnout. And then the last one is communication. None of these things work unless we work on our own expression of self and communication. And that is a lot of team, a lot of team dynamic. Are you actually communicating to your team what you want to achieve? Are you just. Becoming a manager of people. A lot of the clients that I work with come to me and they’re like, I just feel like I’m managing everything in my life. And that’s not really what I thought life was going to be. And as, as a person in the c e O seat running a company and they just need some help with a new energy addressing things differently, working on different communication styles so they can build leaders within the company to give them more space to let go. Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s solid. Let’s, uh, let’s dig in on the identity stuff a little bit. What? Mm-hmm. Tell us more about that. Like, if you’re leading a company or you’re an entrepreneur, like what, how is identity getting in our way? Or, or what are we, where, where do we have room to grow from in there? Malorie Nicole: Yeah. There’s usually two types of people that I see. There’s two patterns that happen, there’s the person that leans in. And the person that leans out. And what I mean by this is ’cause this is actually what I see happen is when problems start to arise, the control sets in. So this is the C E O, and this is totally a hypothetical. We’re not saying that all CEOs find themselves in in bucket A or bucket B, but this is a C E O pattern that. When when things get stressful, they become the decision maker. So versus building people in the teams become their own leaders. What they do is they become the solution for every question that needs to be asked, and that really creates a bottleneck in the company. They have to work on a little bit of identity work of letting go and trusting and communication of developing the team members to really be able to. To take hold on their own. And sometimes that kind of stuff actually has a little bit more to do with childhood stories that we may be carrying into our business or other business relationships that we’ve had before we’ve started. You know, the company that they may be in now, you know, that happens a lot where. Let’s say A C E O, for example, had another business relationship in the past and it didn’t go that well. And so there’s a fear of really trusting people on the team to take initiative and take hold. So that’s the lean in pattern. It’s more of like an anxious pattern. When things get stressful, it enhances their stress, and then you have some decision fatigue that happens and a lack of clarity. That happens with the day-to-day and you just create kind of an anxious energy within the company. And then there’s the avoidant pattern, which is a lean out pattern when things start to get really stressful. This, this particular c e o pattern looks like. A fear response, they shut down a little bit. They, they get paralyzed a little bit. They don’t even know what to do. And this can happen when a company is going through big growth spurts. Sometimes you can’t always predict when a growth spurt is gonna happen within a company, but when it comes. If you haven’t necessarily done the identity work of what does it look like when I’m leading a team that’s doing double the revenue that we’re doing right now in some of the more deeper personal stories that are there? Sometimes it can lead into more of an avoidance pattern. I. That can then create a bottleneck in the company because things get overlooked. The biggest one that happens with avoidance, because I like to give people like tactical things of where to look at the, the two biggest things that people avoid are financials and letting people go. I’ve never had a client that said, I wish that I would have. Fired that person six months later that I chose to. It’s always, I wish I would’ve done it sooner. And I know that’s a hard topic to talk about because everybody wants to dream that all of the people on their team are just gonna be amazing all of the time. But it’s not the reality of a C E O and a business owner. And sometimes you do have to let people go and. It’s a challenging thing for people to do is to really have those conversations and address them with ease and with grace, but also hold the standard for the company of what somebody might wanna build. So those are the two biggest things that people start to avoid is looking at financials and looking at team and making sure that they’re, you know, holding up to the standards of the company that they want them to, to be at. Chris Badgett: Wow.In your view, what makes a good coach? Let’s say, you know, there’s a course creator watching this who wants to kind of add on a coaching program around their subject matter expertise. Mm-hmm. What does good coaching look like and what does, you know, quote, bad coaching look like? Malorie Nicole: That is a great question. Oh my goodness. I love that question. I don’t know that. I’ve done so many podcast interviews and I don’t know that anybody’s ever asked me that question, so thank you for asking it. I think one of the biggest things that create creates a great coach is active listening, so really understanding, okay, I hear what my client is saying right now, but what are the, what is the message that they’re saying underneath What’s coming out of their mouth? What else might be here? So sometimes you have to ask a question three or four different times to get to the root of something. And it doesn’t always, it’s not because your client doesn’t wanna tell you. It’s not like they’re trying to withhold information from you. It’s just that that’s how we process information. Sometimes we need to go to three or four different layers to really hear the truth of what might need to be said. So one of my favorite questions to ask my clients is, if we’re really ripping the bandaid off here, what would you say to me about this? And they go, oh man, that’s a great question. And it’s like, well, it’s the same question that I just asked you, but we’re just going one layer deeper to have that transparency and honesty with yourself and developing that skill because that is really a skill of. Being able to be present with your clients and just really listen to them and not feeling like you need to always provide the solution. One of the things that really helped me become a good coach is doing my own work on not attaching myself to my client’s success. And I know that might seem a little weird because you want your clients to be successful, but when your own personal worthiness stories are caught up in the success of your clients. You, you almost create a codependent relationship with your clients and that is something that happens a lot in this industry is that the client’s results are, are more because you need to be validated than they are of creating a healthy coaching relationship. So the more you actually lean out and don’t just jump in and provide solutions and, and project what you think might be the best answer there. Help your clients come to their own determination and really hold that space. And even if you think you know what the answer is, ask a couple more questions and help them get there. You’re gonna offer more transformation for your clients. You’re gonna have more trust with your clients and they’re gonna stay with you longer if they’re building companies that you know are gonna continue to go through seasons of different iterations that need support. Chris Badgett: Awesome. How do you help, uh, clients with strategy? Malorie Nicole: Good question. It’s all dependent on what someone wants. So that is the, the vision pillar in the, the book that I’m writing. Is really important because I have some clients that they wanna have a team of 50 people and they wanna continue to get to 20 million. And then I have some clients that are like, no, we just wanna do like 3 million a year in revenue and have three to five employees and work 20 hours a week. So it really depends on. What is it that we’re actually after? And I think that’s something that people miss in strategy a lot and why burnout happens so often in entrepreneurship because we go to step 2, 3, 4 without looking at step five. So, Really we need to work backwards. What is it that we’re actually working towards so that we can get you there if we don’t know what we’re working towards? Chances are you’re running a race. Somebody else is telling you that you should run. You know, there’s so many different ways that you can have an online business. There’s so many ways that you can be successful these days. The opportunities that we have at this day and age are. It, it tenfold compared to what you could do 15 years ago and being really clear about what you wanna achieve is what I think is the first step to strategy and then working backwards from there. Chris Badgett: You’ve kind of talked about it, but I just want to clarify it. Mm-hmm. For you out there listening, what’s the difference between executive coaching and transformational coaching? Malorie Nicole: Yeah, that’s a great question. Transformational coaching has a little bit more, well, I shouldn’t say a little bit. Transformational coaching has a lot more to do with the deep interpersonal relationship of self. So you are looking at things like, Why might I be avoiding conflict? You know, I have a lot of people that come to me that are like, I avoid tough conversations on my business and I don’t know where that comes from. And it’s something that I need to clean up because it’s gonna help me be a, a better leader. Or an example of transformational coaching, a transformational coaching need that someone might come to me with is, It doesn’t matter what I do. I seem to keep dragging myself back into the business. Even after I hire a team and I hire support, I’m still working 50 hours a week. What is going on there? That’s actually not a strategy thing. That is a, a little bit of a, a, a possible. Addiction to chaos or a need to be needed, like there might be something deeper going on there that needs to be cleaned up as to why you would create the systems and the structure and you’ve got the success, but you still find yourself continuously caught up in the momentum. There’s something more personal going on there. Another thing that people come to me with that requires more transformational work is, I’m not as creatively energized in my business as I once was, and I’m not sure what’s going on there either. You know, it’s something we don’t talk a whole lot about in entrepreneurship because it’s way more fun to talk about the fun things, right? Everybody’s happy all the time, but we all know that in entrepreneurship you go through different seasons of it. Especially those of you that are listening to this that are like going on eight in 10 years that you’ve been doing this. Maybe you’re getting a little bored and that’s okay. And how often do you hear people talk about, yeah, it’s okay that you built success and you’re getting bored and what’s next for you? There’s transformation that might help you figure out what that next season looks like. And you know, it’s, it’s not always just about strategy. A lot of times people that come to me, They already have a lot of clarity on strategy and what creates successful business. They, they help other people create successful businesses, but they need some more clarity in, in themselves and the stories that are running their show and their life to figure out what is the next chapter, what, what does the evolution look like? Executive coaching, It is more about focus, it’s more about what are you working towards? More strategy, more, um, team and leadership, tactical stuff, how to. How to stop managing people, how to really build leaders within the company. Um, communication tools, so it’s less deeper work. I think one of the problems with the personal growth industry and the business industry is people get caught up. And that you need to go do this personal growth stuff and that’s, that’s gonna like fix your business or you need to go do the strategy stuff and that’s gonna fix your business when a lot of times it’s both. It’s, we continue to grow and evolve as people. And we also need to look at the tactical strategy pieces of our business too, and have both of those worlds work together. And I think that’s something, you know, more in the female industry of entrepreneurship, but it’s either one or the other. We’ve gotta work on both. Chris Badgett: How did you develop as a coach with the, uh, inner game, outer game kind of balance, where those two worlds do work together and you help people do that? Like, how did you, like some, some people I see as like really good strategists, but not so much transformational type people, and then mm-hmm. Other people like really extreme personal development stuff, but how did you. Become strong with the blend of both yourself. Malorie Nicole: So my background before this was in engineering and I’ve always had a way of seeing things in pieces, systems and how things, yeah, and how things connect. But the mentorship that I did when I started getting into transformational coaching was really about childhood programming and limiting beliefs and the stories that are running our life. And that was really useful and I use it all the time. But I couldn’t unsee the other things that I already knew. So in that training, it was very intensive. It was like a two year training and I worked underneath someone and she really helped me. Like working with her was the most transformational thing I’d I had done in my business to this date. But in working with her, I also was very clear that there’s all these other things that I’m seeing in people’s businesses and I’m not going to, to not vocalize that too. I’m not gonna just have this pigeonhole, I. Of, okay, I’m, I’m learning this stuff with this mentor. This is the only thing I can focus on, because there’s this whole other part of my brain that was like, yeah, but what about this and this and this and this and this? And so naturally I just kind of let it, let those blend. And I even, I say that on my website. I say it to people on calls, and I think people, you know, it’s not for everybody, but the people that it is for, they love the transparency, they love the honesty. They get it, and it’s a really good fit. The people that I work with are not afraid to do the deep work, but they also understand that that’s not where we’re gonna live. We’re not only going to just do deep work for the next three months or six months or whatever. We’re gonna focus on the business and the tactical pieces too, because it all works together. Chris Badgett: If you look at c e o entrepreneur types, I, I know that everybody’s different and there’s nuances, but are there any particular stories that you see the c e o founder entrepreneur types get stuck inside of that is holding them back, like that’s pretty common across all your clients or tho those types of people? Malorie Nicole: Totally, totally. And. This took me a little while to figure out, because this question comes up a lot, but the book coach that I’m working with, it’s been really I, I know I’m alluded to this earlier, but it’s been really transformational for me just to rehash a lot of the conversations that I’ve had, a lot of the processes because it’s not something I’ve ever done with someone to sit down and really look at like, what is it that you’re actually doing when you’re doing the transformational work and the story that it keeps coming back to. And something she said to me a few months ago was, You’re teaching people how to receive, because what happens when A C E O goes from, you know, making $30,000 a month to building a really large company, you have to learn how to receive support. You have to learn how to receive feedback without it totally shutting you down. Received objective feedback from your team and not take it personally. You have to learn how to receive more money. Without it making you feel uncomfortable. You know, we all have weird money stories sometimes that we have to address and clean up and go through. Um, most entrepreneurs anyways, I shouldn’t say all, but a lot of entrepreneurs do have some money stories that when they’re cleaned up, it enhances their business. You have to learn how to see, receive, um, receive ease. You know, if you think about it, not all of us were programmed in both at home in our childhood and in society. Pressure. To receive a life that’s not full of chaos and stress, and that can feel very unnormal to some, you know, if you or somebody, especially if you’re listening to this and you grew up in a house that had a lot of chaos and maybe there was a little bit of trauma, you might notice that your business relationship is mirroring that. Learning to receive that ease is something that will help clean up the energy that you bring to your business. So really a lot of it goes back to. Is it okay? The stories that we’re telling ourself in our mind, is it okay that I’m receiving all of this money and that I have 30 or four 40 employees relying on me and that I’m growing into this person that, you know is, is doing big great things? There’s a lot of times that I’ve seen clients create more stress. Because they have team relying on them, and the story becomes, all of these people are relying on me, right? There’s a deeper story there that creates more enhancement of the pressure they put on themselves, and then the amount of stress they carry around on the, when we start to untangle that a little bit and just go. Yeah, so what? You’re really smart and you’re brilliant, and you built a great company and you’ve got a bunch of employees. Why is this such a big deal? The energy starts to shift and they go, oh, I didn’t even realize the amount of emotional pressure that I was putting on myself to carry the weight of these 30 employees. Right? Some of it is really just the intention that we’re putting that creates how we experience it. Chris Badgett: What’s a example money story that where it’s counterintuitive, like people don’t realize that they have this money story, story that’s keeping them from growing. Malorie Nicole: A lot of that has to do with deservability about money. And my, my thoughts on money have even changed over the years of my own growth. You know, some people. Some people work really hard to make a lot of money and some people don’t. You know, all of us know people in this world that have a lot of money and they didn’t work really hard to make it. They just happened to have it. Maybe their parents had a trust or something, or maybe they stumbled upon a really brilliant idea and got into the market at the perfect time, and their success took off really, really quickly. Now, in the personal development space, a lot of what they preach is. Your worthiness equates to how much money you’ll allow yourself to receive. I don’t really think any of that’s true. I think some people make a lot of money and some people don’t. And there are a lot of people that work. Really, really, teachers work really hard, right? They don’t make a lot of money that doesn’t really have anything to do with their worthiness. But when we bring our worthiness and observability into the money stories that we create, then it gets a whole lot more complex. None of us really deserve the money or don’t deserve the money. If we’re looking at more of like a, a, a, if we zoom out a little bit and look at more of a spiritual level, if we don’t make money about deservability and we just make it about objective business stuff, are you doing the right things to get more customers? Yes or no. Okay, great. Then it doesn’t become such a personal emotional money journey that we ourselves get tied up in. So part of the process in in what I do with people is interesting, Chris, because it’s actually removing the emotion that people don’t realize they’re carrying and being more objective about it, which makes things easier on the mind and on the body and on the spirit as they’re moving through their business growth. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Where are, what are some example traumas or situations that cause a need to be needed story to embed in a person? Malorie Nicole: Yeah, that is a great question. And it comes from all over the place. So sometimes it’s, sometimes it is like there was a lot of chaos in the house and maybe mom was an alcoholic, or dad was an alcoholic, and you know, stuff that you wouldn’t wish upon anyone. Then sometimes you also wouldn’t wish this upon anyone either. But sometimes it’s more like rejection. Sometimes it’s, dad wasn’t around very much because he was working all of the time ’cause he was trying to provide for the family. And because of that, this child might have developed, uh, a pattern because they had younger siblings. I see this one a lot. They had a bunch of young, younger siblings and they were the oldest son and they were always taking care of everybody. And then that translated into how they. M maneuver themselves in the business. And those patterns, once they realize it, they can start to un, un pattern it and dissolve it and remove it. And the big thing that I want people to know too is that. You don’t have to stay doing this deep work for years and years and years. A lot of times just the observation of it and the understanding of the patterns and saying, oh, I see, I see where these things are showing up can help you transition. A new story and develop a new story and pattern and behavior and belief that will shift. People are not their patterns. We all have patterns, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t be changed or dissolved or created anew. Chris Badgett: I saw on your website, which is it mallory nicole.com, uh, you mentioned you made a statement that like you’re rare, like, uh, this founder entrepreneur type. Mm-hmm. C e o type, what makes them rare, special, unique in the world, in general? Malorie Nicole: Oh, like my client is rare. I was like, really? Did I put that on my website? That’s interesting. Chris Badgett: I think it’s on, uh, your Malorie Nicole: high level leader space, not high level leaders. Yeah. Yeah. So what makes those people rare? And I do believe they’re rare because they, they are willing to take a step that the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily wake up in the morning and jump into. The clients that I work with are typically running companies doing three to 22 mil, and their responsibility is a lot more than most people’s responsibility, and their risk tolerance is a lot higher than most people’s risk tolerance. Their innovative thinking is a lot higher than most people’s innovative thinking, and because of that, the problems that they deal with are often more complex than problems that you know. A lot of other people deal with, you know, that I, I don’t wanna get into this hierarchy thing. But people that solve problems at that level, it’s really important that they have support for them, that they have people that they can go turn to not, you know. I’ve found that just going to a therapist, a lot of the clients that I’ve worked with, just going to a therapist doesn’t really give them the clarity that they need for certain things that they struggle with. So if you’re listening to this, This isn’t just about me, this is anybody. Find an executive coach, find a c e O coach. Find somebody that can challenge you, that can help you decipher what’s the best next step for you because, The other rare thing about these people is that they often don’t have people on their teams that challenge them. They often don’t have people in their circles that challenge them. They’re often the ones challenging everybody else on the way that they’re thinking. They’re challenging their team on what their team is bringing to them, but who are the people in their corner that are also challenging them and helping them stretch their balance and thinking and, and making sure they’re staying dialed in. So, I mean the, it is a little bit of a rare breed of people. It’s, it’s people that, like, they have a hunger that is never gonna go away. It’s what they want. And I love supporting people like that. Chris Badgett: As a podcaster, Malorie, I normally don’t ask people two questions at once, but I’m gonna do it this time because it, I think it provides some healthy contrast. What’s, if you’re coaching somebody and you’re trying to help them, what would you say in terms of partnerships? What’s, what are keys to a great partnership at work? Let’s say, you know, two entrepreneurs leading a business, two or three leading a business together, and then contrast that with leading a partnership at home, or not necessarily leading it, but just having a successful partnership at home. With a spouse who is not of a similar personality or entrepreneurial type. Mm-hmm. Like how do we have really healthy partnerships at all levels? Malorie Nicole: Yep. And I love that you asked those at the same time, because they really are the same. Okay. They’re very similar. Um, you know, we could, we could talk about each separately and create our own conversations, but what it really comes down to is expectations, vulnerability, and communications. Did I say communications is plural? I said it plural. Communications, because there’s so much communications, right? There’s body language, there’s verbal, there’s communication. Is isn’t all of it. Business partnerships. One of the things that happens most often as to why business partnerships don’t work out is the expectations aren’t right from the beginning. You jump into it based totally off emotion, and you’re not talking about objectives that both of you want to achieve. And when you get into a business partnership in a business relationship and you haven’t had some of those further conversations about what do we both want this to look like? Then it can get kind of sticky. The same thing happens in a marriage when you get into a marriage and you don’t have conversations. Which requires vulnerability, about what does success look like in this marriage? You know, I think it’s really healthy to approach a marriage with a similar frame of mind that you would approach a business of, kind of like a business relationship. And that doesn’t mean that your marriage is going to be business oriented or there’s not going to be intimacy. Or connection or anything like that. But setting sa, setting aside those times for saying, okay, you know, who’s gonna be responsible for this and who’s gonna be responsible for this? And are we on the same page? So there’s not patterns where you think you’re doing the right thing and your spouse thinks they’re doing the right thing. Or same in the business partnership. You think you’re doing enough and the other person thinks they’re doing enough. But one or both of you are left unhappy because that lack of vulnerability and communication doesn’t happen. Vulnerability is something that. Everybody needs. Everybody needs to have vulnerability in their relationships and just that willingness to have the deeper conversation. Than maybe you think you need to have, go a step deeper. Share what is it, you know, what’s really underneath this that we can get to that can create more of a transformation or better enhancement for our relationship, whether it’s business or marriage. Don’t be afraid to have those conversations. Because those are really what changed the trajectory of where the relationship is headed. And it all comes back to, again, expectation and communication. Chris Badgett: You mentioned earlier like a eight to 10 year, uh, itch or maybe the passion mm-hmm. Changes or, um, maybe burnout that is really settling in or something. What, what’s under all that? I know that’s a big generalization, but Yeah. Like, Describe what you, how you would help someone who’s feeling a little burnout and they’re. They’re trying to rediscover their passion for their business. Malorie Nicole: I think a lot of it comes back to what we were talking about in the identity piece. Sometimes people start building something that’s really exciting for a little while. But they stop doing their own alignment work. And they just get into the what needs to happen today to take care of the business and what needs to happen to run the ship. They’re no longer asking the deeper personal questions of, am I enjoying this? And when you look at your calendar and you can say that 15% of the work on your calendar is stuff you actually enjoy. You have to be honest with yourself and say, is this still working? And that can be really scary for people. To build something that is working right on paper or moneywise financially. But their spirit or their soul is going, this isn’t working anymore. That’s a really challenging thing for people to admit to themselves. And sometimes it’s not actually that they need to shut the business down and start over or start anew. It’s that something in the business needs to change the dynamic in the work that they’re actually contributing to the business. Maybe they haven’t built the team that they really wanna build. So there’s a variety of ways that can go. It. It isn’t a one path thing for everybody, but the first step that I would ask anyone to look at is to look at your calendar and do an energy audit and go hour by hour. How excited am I about this work that I’m doing? And rate it. And if you get to the end of the week and more than 50% of it is stuff that you just like can’t stand doing, something needs to change Chris Badgett: any other energy management. Ideas. I’m sure you have them, but like what, uh, if we want to, uh, increase our energy, ’cause we, you know, founders, entrepreneurs typically love their work. Mm-hmm. Earn out gets in the way, uh, workaholism and not sleeping gets in the way. Mm-hmm. There’s all kinds of bad habits that get in the way, but how do we. Better manage our energy, which is one of our most vital resources. Malorie Nicole: Mm-hmm. This is where we get more into like the holistic side of it. Macros, count your macros, eat the appropriate nutrition. And I love walks. I know that sounds like, you know, we we’re looking for the hack, but I actually am a big believer in let’s get rid of the hacks and go back to like, Primally what our bodies need. Walks are a saving grace for me. I walk in the morning, I walk at the end of the day. My husband and I both do. We both work from home. We both work in the entrepreneurial space. It can be really easy for both of us to sit down at the table and just continue talking about work into dinner without that transition period. So I call them buffers. We need buffers in our day of where we transition out of work. And into family, especially those of you that are listening that have children. I know this is a big issue with moms and dads that work in an office at home and then shift straight into like going and eating a meal with their three kids and their spouse. It can be really hard to say. To your brain, okay, stop thinking about all the things that you were just thinking about and be present with your family. We need buffers in between, even if it’s 15 minutes, even if it’s 10 minutes, go outside for a few minutes, walk around in your lawn before you go to the next thing. Have buffers this. That’s the the granular. And then also for CEOs, I highly suggest quarterly solo retreats. All the CEOs that I work with. I recommend to them go on a solo quarterly retreat with yourself to give yourself some space away from your computer. Because most of the clients that I work with don’t come to me and say. I was, I was sitting in front of my computer today and I had the best idea ever, and just this amazing idea came across my mind. It’s almost always. I was out of the office down by the river, or I was at this mastermind event with, you know, other people doing great work like. I’m doing, or I was on my solo retreat away from the office and I found clarity on this thing that I’ve been working on. So I’m a big believer in buffers. Get yourself away from your computer. Your mind is still gonna think about your business. It’s what we do. We love it. Our passion is in it, but we need the buffers in between. Chris Badgett: What would you prescribe on a solo retreat like format, if you could like kind of organize the the activities? Malorie Nicole: Yeah, that’s a great question because one of my, one of my clients recently, I was talking to him about it and he is like, I don’t wanna just go journal for the whole weekend. And I’m like, then don’t, first of all don’t do things you hate. Right? Which, Is a whole nother topic in and of itself. But I don’t think that any of us need to do something just because somebody said that we should, and our entire body’s resisting it. And we’re like, oh no, but I need to do this. In order to be successful, we need to learn to follow the flow, follow the things that align with us, follow the things that that inspire us. That’s where we’re gonna find our clarity. So something with him that I suggested is. Well, instead of just going and writing for 48 hours or for two days, what if you write down like a mind map all of the things that you’re working on in your business and the names of all of your employees, and then just create a mind map from it and see what you can come up with. Let’s say you’re thinking about maybe someone in a client success role. Her name is Rachel, and you write Rachel’s name down and then you’re just thinking about Rachel. What does Rachel need in order to be successful this quarter? Is Rachel really being challenged in the role that she’s in? Does she have the adequate like developmental stuff that she needs to get to where she could go next? Is there anything that I can think about her that I’m not seeing? When I’m going through my to-do list and trying to get through the Monday through Friday work. So just looking at the big picture. But then also getting really specific in the granular mind mapping is something that I’ve suggested to people before. Um, really the big thing for me is don’t take your computer with you. We think differently when we write and we do when we type. Or when we’re checking emails. So even if it’s a one day retreat that you’re getting away, whatever it needs to be, I suggest that people don’t necessarily go to try and solve specific problems because then you’re going with an intention that you’re gonna have like a great big outcome. And maybe that’s not gonna happen. It’s more to give yourself space to think, space to think away from what’s on your day to day. Chris Badgett: Um, Jessica, who’s watching this live says, who is this amazing human speaking to my soul? Can you, can you, Mallory, tell us about your podcast? I have some more questions for you, but I just wanted to make sure Jessica was able to find you. What’s your podcast? Yeah, Malorie Nicole: of course. It’s abundantly clear podcast.com and it’s all, it’s on all of the platforms. And, uh, just a, a quick tip, if you’re. If you want to listen to my podcast, what you’re gonna find are solo episodes. They’re less than 10 minutes every single week, but if you go back into a couple years ago episodes, you’ll find interview episodes. But the podcast is, um, really just like a lot of the topics that we’re talking about, the, the emotional piece of it, but also the practical piece of it and how they blend together so that business owners can be successful. And it’s short and sweet because. I know my clients, they’re busy. I try and make it custom to the people that I work with. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Going back to the solo retreat idea, I actually have a sabbatical coming up, which I’ve never done before. Oh, nice. And, uh, I’m actually gonna take two weeks completely off. I’m gonna be in the French Alps with my family. But then the, the last four weeks I’ve had some time set aside for deep work on a book that I’m, I’ve, uh, got been in my head for a decade. Um, oh my gosh, Malorie Nicole: I’m so excited for you. Chris Badgett: Just, uh, kind of building on what you’ve talked about with the. Solo retreat, which I, I do those as well, and they mm-hmm. They’ve added a ton of value, um, over the years, once I learned a, a process around all that. But what would you advise on somebody who is trying to focus on a sabbatical who’s been, you know, Busting their, their tail for a decade in the industry without really resting enough and, and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. Malorie Nicole: Focus on one question because it sounds like you’re, you’re also curious on what’s next in your next season. What lights you up? What lights you up right now? I think the biggest thing with sabbaticals and retreats that people. Where we do it wrong or where we could improve it is we go into it with our problem solving brain. And as entrepreneurs, we’re all really good at solving problems, right? It’s literally what we do. We help people solve problems. We go into different markets to solve problems, but sometimes we can be so good at solving problems that we create problems for ourselves. And when we do that, we stop hearing ourselves. So it’s almost like, how can you go into this without having an objective? Then see what you find and then see what comes up. If you go into it with no plan at all, what would be created from that space? Chris Badgett: I think that goes back to what you were talking about with like letting go and releasing and stuff. Mm-hmm. That’s part of it, Malorie Nicole: right? Yeah. Surrendering to, I’m not gonna go on this two week sabbatical trying to solve anything or come up with a new course, or come up with a new business plan. I’m just gonna go hear myself. Maybe I’m not gonna hear myself like maybe I’m going to go fishing or go hiking or, or I don’t know if you have kids that hang out with my kids and just like be present for a little while and then see what comes up from there. It’s moments like those where we undermine how often we find our answers when we are not looking for our answers. And it can be so hard for us as human beings who want safety and want control and. You know, we’re all embedded to want those things for security purposes to turn that off. But so often when we have the space, we come up with ideas that we didn’t even know were in there. Chris Badgett: I wanna just touch on one of your five principles, which is communication. As a, if somebody’s a course creator or coach, or an entrepreneur or agency, communication is essential to get better at. It’s one of our company values at LifterLMS. Clear communication. How do we get better at communication? Malorie Nicole: I think the first part is to, how many employees do you have? Chris Badgett: It’s about eight. Okay, Cool. Malorie Nicole: So the first part is really looking what I help people. Start with is really looking at what is our process for communication? Because a lot of people don’t even know what the company process is for communication. They just know it’s something they do Well, we talk about these things. This is something that, you know, we have to talk about. It’s part of the business. But what I like to do is get granular on it and say, okay, so this problem that you keep having, let’s say for example, um, let’s talk about client success because everybody kind of deals with that in the entrepreneurship space. What do you as a business business owner expect to happen if a client is unhappy or if a client is coming to you with, um, you know, complaints or something like that. I would wanna know really process oriented. What is the system that you’ve set up for success? So this is where we we’re actually getting out of the transformational, and we’re getting into the practical and we go, does your team actually know what you expect? Because most often the gap is, I know what I would do. But I haven’t relayed to my team what I’d want them to do. And so I’m constantly feeling disappointed because I want my team to be stepping up. And doing something that I haven’t told them that I want them to be doing, or I haven’t relayed the process to them. I, I’m gonna say this and I know it’s gonna ruffle some feathers, but a lot of times CEOs think that everybody else is just going to think like them. One of the biggest gifts they can give to themselves is understanding that your employees don’t think like you. If they did, they would all also have a business with eight to 50 employees. Right? And when you allow that awareness to go, oh shit, yeah, my employees aren’t gonna think this way. I’m going to be really specific about this process, and I’m not gonna talk about it in quarterly meetings or annual meetings. I’m gonna talk about it over and over and over again in a weekly leadership meeting. Until it’s completely ingrained into the business to where it handles itself and it never gets missed. That’s like key number one right there. Looking at every single area of, okay, when this happens, what does it look like now? When this happens, what does it look like? And getting really, really specific on communication. Another thing is language versus saying, Hey team, I want you to get this done. Changing your sentence to my intention is to get this done by next Friday. What needs to happen in order for you guys to be successful? That is so different as the receiver from hearing. My boss just told me I need to get this done by next Friday to, oh, my boss is asking me what I need to do in order to be successful to get this done by next Friday. Let me sit back and think about that for a second and come up with the answer and give it to him. It puts your team members in a power position to where they can take ownership of their responsibility. And that is really how you develop leaders. You start coaching them and you stop telling them that’s what’s gonna create the company culture shift into getting you out of manager mode and getting your team into an a more inspired opportunity mode. Where you’ve got people coming to you saying, Hey, I had this great idea. It’s a, it’s a, an unlearning process, but it can be really impactful for the business. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And you’ve got some people watching this live, tagging their friends, so they’re, you’re definitely hitting, uh, hitting some nerves here. Last question, as we get ready to land the plane here, uh, you mentioned like not taking things as personally or zooming out more into the executive coaching style mm-hmm. Of, um, but I, I know a lot of founders. Get really, they’re very emotional or they’re very attached, um, to their business. I know there’s scientific studies where seeing the, their logo gives them the same brain response as looking at their, at a child, their baby, their child. Mm-hmm. So how do you, how does one detach and be a little bit more objective and, and, and develop that, that skillset? Malorie Nicole: Yeah, I think the first, the first thing that I would wanna say to that is that we’re not detaching your inspiration. We’re not separating your inspiration from it. That’s not what we wanna do. But the more you become less reactive, The bigger your inspiration can get, because then you have room for creative energy. If you’re in reactive mode all the time, you’re actually not working the part of your brain that’s in innovation, that’s coming up with new ideas because you’re constantly trying to fix the problem. Right. And it’s a skill. The other thing that I wanna say to people too, going back to that, you know, a lot of people either do the, the, the interpersonal growth or they do the strategy piece. Emotional resilience is a skill that is built. It is not. I did four sessions with a coach on inner child work, and I am now emotionally resilient and I, I never react or respond negatively to anything. It is all of these things that I talk about. I believe they’re skills that we built. It’s not, I went to the retreat in Bali and I fixed, I fixed myself, and I never do that again. We are constantly evolving in entrepreneurship, in marriage, in our relationships, in every part of our life. And continuing to look at, I don’t wanna say from the deficit of how can I always improve. Because that can have a negative connotation to feeling like you’re starting each day from the negative of how can I always improve? But being willing to be honest with ourselves about what are the areas of growth that are available to me right now that would better my life if I focused on them. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Malorie, could you describe, you know, a perfect fit client for you and how they, if they, if somebody’s interested in working with you, what they would need to do? Malorie Nicole: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the places that I tell people to start is to go to my website and to take a 10 question quiz. It’s called Do I need an Internal Upgrade? And. That tells you if you need a little bit of transformation. Transformational work or, uh, I will remove the word need that tells you if some transformational work is available to you in your business growth, and if it could be something that could enhance where you’re going next. That’s the biggest thing that I think helps people go, oh, maybe some transformational work is actually helpful for the next stage of where I’m going. It’s really easy. It’s 10 questions and I promise there’s it all. Answers do not lead to. Yes, you need an upgrade. There is actually a solution on there too. A quiz result on there that’s like, no, you’re doing great. Keep going. Because one thing for me that. I’m super big about in my work is it’s really boring to work with someone that doesn’t need my help. What are we gonna do? Sit on the phone every other week or every week and just. Make up problems, like I’m a big believer in not creating problems where problems don’t exist. So really understanding and for anybody look, listening to this. Looking for a coach, really understanding, again, expectations wise, what are we actually gonna be working on together? What does this look like? What are we going after that’s gonna give you the best success that you can with the coaches that you work with? One of the reasons I think we hear in the coaching industry of like. Oh yeah, I worked with this person. It wasn’t that great, blah, blah, blah. Disappointment is because that first conversation, the expectations aren’t actually clear of what. You’re going out to achieve. So the, to answer your other question that I haven’t answered yet. The perfect fit client for me is somebody that listens to a piece of content and goes, oh my gosh, I need some deeper work. And this is resonating. Like it’s someone that’s not just looking for a business strategy plan that I hand them. That’s not to say that those aren’t really useful. I’m just not the person that does that. It’s not my zone of genius. It’s not my thing. So if you’re looking just for strategy, probably not the best person. Most of the people I work with again, are founders or owners doing one to three to 20 million. They have teams of five to 50 people they usually fall into to that category. So, It’s more of a feeling thing than anything. It’s less about numbers and more about feelings. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Malorie Nicole: And, uh, it’s like an intuitive Yes. Chris Badgett: And tell us about your podcast one more time. Malorie Nicole: Oh yeah. The podcast is abundantly clear podcast.com. It’s less than 10 minute solo episodes. Episodes, excuse me, once a week on all of the principles that are going to be in the book. The book will be out in, um, a couple months. And it’s just the best way that I can help people coach themselves. Without actually doing coaching work with me. Chris Badgett: Do we have a title for the book yet? Malorie Nicole: Yeah. It’s called the Abundance Decision. Because I do believe it is a decision that we make. And not something that just lives in, in our minds. It is a decision that we make every single day to step into abundance and to build an abundant life. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, thank you Malorie for coming on the show. Yeah, appreciate you shining your light and in many ways coaching me and all the listeners on, on this call. This has been a really informative, um, interview, so thanks so much for coming on. We really appreciate it. Go check out Mallorie’s podcast. Check out the book, and we’ll have links to all that stuff below the show notes and. I hope you have a great rest of your day. Take care. And that’s a wrap for this episode of L M S Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@LifterLMS.com slash gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Create Transformation as a Coach appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, EZ Smith shares his WordPress and web design journey and about his popularity on Twitter. EZ Smith is a WordPress Expert, WP Developer, and Entrepreneur. Smith provides WordPress technical consultancy, offering solutions to small agency or B2B marketing teams to improve their business. EZ Smith discussed, he was first hesitant to sign up for Twitter and offer his knowledge because he didn’t feel prepared and thought that others in the community were more skilled. But around six months prior to the talk, he made the decision to start speaking about his expertise and experiences. He says, he’s been interested about creating websites for a long time and wants to join the active WordPress and tech Twitter communities. He likes talking with others who share his interests and lending his knowledge to the society. 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, Smith, he’s the WordPress rockstar. The best place to find him, which is where I found him, is on Twitter and that’s at the WP Rockstar. Welcome to the show, ZY. EZ Smith: Thanks Chris, man, glad to be here. Excited to to jump in today and chat it up with you, man. Chris Badgett: I’m sure we’re gonna have a great conversation. I’m really into a couple things. Caught my radar with you. I’m really into marketing. I’m really into social media, like the real kind, where you’re like engaging with people and creating quality content and stuff. And you just exploded on what I would call WordPress Twitter or agency Twitter. And I’m like, what’s this guy doing? Like his stuff’s getting so much engagement and the analytics and everything. I’m like, wow, this is awesome. So I saw that. And then I also noticed, I saw your style and it’s very, Chill real world. You remain po. You’re a very positive person, which I really appreciate on social media. Yeah. But yeah, let’s rewind the clock. Where did, to me You exploded on Twitter. How did that happen, man? Okay. EZ Smith: So an analogy I use for it is like I had a powder keg built up, so if you could run it back, I’ve been building websites for 15, almost 16 years now, professionally. Wow. And I’ve studied personal branding. I’ve studied brand building marketing. I. I got a stack of books back here that you can’t see, but I got all the Seth Godin’s books back here and this past year I finally decided that I really to build a personal brand and actually get out there and speak. ’cause the ironic thing about it, man, is after studying marketing and branding and audience building for so many years, I never actually felt good enough or worthy enough or like it was the right time. I always felt like I would kind of be a fly on the wall here and there. I guess probably a year before I started blowing up on Twitter, I had created an account and was just watching and I was like, oh man, I’m nervous to jump in here. I’m seeing people that I know that own some of the big agencies or some of the big product companies or founders and entrepreneurs who have done like things that I thought were far outside of my reach, and I just never quite felt ready. And about six months ago I was finally just like, all right, screw this. I’ve gotta get going. I literally helped. I. Friends, family, some clients like coach them, push them in the direction of what to do with social media, their marketing, their branding. And I was finally just, you know what? I gotta take my own medicine. I gotta get out here, I gotta put myself out here. otta start talking about what I know, what I’m doing, and just sharing like the honest journey of where I’m at. And that was the biggest thing, was realizing like, okay, some, somebody has got to be able to find some value and it somebody has got to be able to be. Inspired or motivated by it in some way. And I just started talking and sharing and that’s when you started seeing it. Really. There was no massive strategy. It was really just, Hey, get on there, get active and share the story. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Your stuff has a very much like a build in public vibe, which is cool. That’s like a, that’s a thing these days. Yep. I really resonate with what you’re saying ’cause I’ve read all the Seth Godin books and I, I started with an agency and I built a lot of other people’s brands. Yeah. When I got into Lifter, I was like, okay, I know personal brand is a really important thing for marketing. I feel like it’s a, it’s like a, something I contribute to the business. Like we do marketing and we create content stuff, but I also donate or give my personal brand to the business and just try to be helpful to people. Yeah. And I’m curious how you found your niche, and what I mean by that is you’re obviously a website builder and a marketing person. But sometimes like social media, like you end up figuring out your sweet spot and maybe you’re doing it just ’cause you, you just have something to say and it’s just what you wanna say and you don’t even think about that stuff. But if you think about like your niche in Twitter as an example, what is it? Is it who’s following you? Other WordPress builders out there? Is that pretty much it? EZ Smith: Yeah. You know what’s funny, man? That’s one of the things that held me back for the longest time, right? So I guess prob, okay, so we were talking about 75 hard before we actually started, but the stream here, About four or five years ago, I was doing more video content and just like life entrepreneurial type content on my Instagram, and it wasn’t really catching on, but I was enjoying it. I was just documenting more of my mindset of what I was doing with my business. At the time I was running an agency, I was documenting, sharing like my health and fitness journey and just kinda like life advice as I was going through and learning and figuring things out on my own. Just sharing like some of those hard one lessons. So when I started, when I really committed to Twitter, which was like really fall of last year in 2022, I sat down man, and I have notebooks and notepads stacked up out of frame here on this other desk. I sat down and was just writing out different stuff, like different names, different audiences. Because truthfully, 10 years from now, I don’t want to just be known for WordPress 10 years from now. I would like to grow and be a larger, more impactful entrepreneur in different ways. But I sat down and started just like writing and running through ideas and running through strategies, and everything I kept coming back to was like, I think part of what was driving my imposter syndrome before, like we were talking about, was I didn’t feel like I knew enough about just entrepreneurship as a whole. I didn’t feel like I knew enough about personal growth or motivation, health, weight loss, all that stuff. Like i’d, I’d had my runs with that stuff, but I didn’t feel like I was enough of an expert at it. And I just went back to what I’ve always known and done, which was designing and building websites and specifically WordPress. I focused a hundred percent on WordPress back in 2015, which was already like halfway through my career as a web designer and web developer. And like I said, I was a fly on the wall. In the Twitter, space Tech, Twitter, WordPress, Twitter, all the different little niches on there. And I just saw that it was a really vibrant community and I wanted to be part of it. Man, I spend so much time working at home by myself. I was like, this looks like a good place to be, and it’s what I do all day every day. So why am I not part of it? So that was really the strategy was just coming to honesty with myself about what I was doing and who I was and just diving in. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I. I found that I have a lot of like thoughts on entrepreneur’s journey and marketing and info products, courses, coaching and all that stuff. But what I found with me when I went out on social media is, man, the people that follow me are WordPress people. And when I go to a WordPress conference, a lot of people know of me or have heard of a product, my product or whatever, and I’m like, it just like there it is, just, it’s just where I fit. Yeah. And it’s just interesting, like sometimes it’s like a, like a dog, like you, you said you’re from Georgia. I took a semester off college to hike the Appalachian Trail, and I got a stray dog that started following me in the beginning in Georgia. And sometimes your dog chooses you, and I think sometimes your niche Yeah. Chooses you. And like you’re, like you said, I’ve just been building websites for 15 years. That’s what I know. And, and there’s like infinite content there, right? Yeah. EZ Smith: That was the biggest thing, man. Was that. Reading all these books, doing all this marketing and branding, studying it was really easy. I could sit here and whiteboard out a business or a brand that I would want to build, but it’s like it, it wasn’t me. It might be something that I might be, like I said, aspire five. Yeah. Five or 10 years from now. Maybe I can be that guy, but it’s like right now, this is what we do. This is what I do all day, every day. So talk about it. ’cause it’s easy to talk about. Chris Badgett: Tell, let’s look behind the scenes a little bit. Like what? How do you have a rule of thumb for, oh, I create this many tweets a day, or not at all? No, you do seem consistent, right? I see you on the regular. EZ Smith: I don’t know if it was just timing of algorithm changes following a couple of key people getting involved in some conversations. I would say, and I think you can probably relate to this, when you’ve been around internet entrepreneurship, marketing for a long time, you’ll learn a lot of stuff, even if you don’t sit down and officially study it. Like in a course format, you just like osmosis, absorb this stuff. So I think I organically over the years, probably picked up on a lot of writing styles, engagement styles, strategies that are just subconscious. Subc maker. Yeah. They’re just kinda subconsciously there and they bubble up. I know I had a couple of really viral tweets that I literally sat down and just wrote off the cuff in 30 seconds. You know, some of those gaming five or 600 followers a piece. Chris Badgett: Let’s slow down a second. What, to me, what’s a viral tweet? What were you writing about that went viral? EZ Smith: For me, and this would be a good example of this wasn’t a specific strategy, just to back up, like I don’t have a content calendar. I don’t have a list of topics. I open Twitter, I engage in some conversations, and if I think of something that I wanna share, I just, I write it. I’ve scheduled maybe 10 small tweets. Obviously you can’t schedule long stuff for threads. I’ve scheduled like a couple of small things when I knew I was gonna be like crazy busy or out of town for a half day or something. But to answer your question, vi viral for me, I don’t know, man. I probably consider it like 80 tweet over a 10 or 15,000 views, which is a lot. Which, yeah, and like I have a small account, so if you follow some of the big people that have. 50, a hundred thousand, 300,000 follow their views or their impressions on a tweet is always, they post anything, it’s gonna have 50,000 impressions. But for me, I started getting 10, 15, 20,000 impressions when I had 300 followers. So for me, I was like, oh, that’s pretty cool. I must be hitting on something and getting some sort of reward with it, with the audience and the algorithm and the platform. So it just did more of it. But like I said, organically it wasn’t, I’m not a data analytical guy, so I’m not sitting here Dissecting the analytics and picking things apart. I just write stuff off the cuff based on my experience, based on maybe something I see going on in the community and if it takes off, and I’ve had a couple of things, you know, by my definition, take off pretty much each month for the past probably four or five months. Chris Badgett: Maybe a second nature to you, and you don’t even try, but you just seem like a positive guy, which I appreciate, especially in social media. There can be a lot of negativity or complaining or finger pointing or whatever, but you just seem pretty positive. Is that, is that just who you are or like To me, I like that kind of content. Like I’m not, I like positive energy in my life in including from social media. But how do you think about that? EZ Smith: Me too. Definitely. A lot of my mindset, I, I have my down days, man. I. I struggle with some depression and some anxiety here and there, but like in general, yeah, definitely try to be positive. Try to look on the upside of things and try to look at what’s possible. That’s been a big thing for me. I’m, I’m in my thirties now, family and kids, but I’ve always had big vision. And big belief in that vision, even if I didn’t have any reason to believe in it at the time. So sometimes, what do you call that? It’s like a delusional optimist. So that, that, that’s been just a driving force of who I am. I think I got that predominantly from my dad growing up, just the way he raised me. The mindset was to believe in yourself and see yourself accomplishing things that maybe other people could ever see you doing. And that, that’s been a tough thing for me is that I’ve coached friends, I’ve coached employees, people I’ve worked with, not in official capacity, but sometimes just in having conversations with people, realizing that they don’t believe in themselves. And one of the things I think you, you’ve probably seen as well, when you’re in the entrepreneur space, when you’re building businesses and stuff, one of the, one of the key things is. You have to have some self-belief to be able to get through the hard times and there absolutely will be hard times. There always are in life, so being able to not always be overly optimistic, but have some sort of positive vision light to hold onto to, to get you through it. Chris Badgett: I love that. Another mindset thing, question for you, A lot of what holds people back is fear, myself included. We all have our issues with fear. Part of building in public, like when you’re talking about what’s going on in your agency or financial numbers or clients or whatever, how did you overcome that fear of building in public and like maybe it was, it’s all kinds of things like, oh, I don’t want my client to see me talking about this, or maybe I shouldn’t talk about money publicly, or I don’t know, like, how did you get over all that? EZ Smith: I’m still getting over it. That’s one of those weird things, right? So I grew up, Not poor, but pretty close to it. Like pretty, pretty low income family with a single father raising us. I wasn’t around like people who were, would be financially successful in like a business owner sense or professional careers, that kind of stuff. So like I, my first taste of getting okay with the idea of making money really happened because of web design and online entrepreneurship and stuff like that. Because I started freelancing like as soon as I graduated high school and. I thought I was doing something, making 30 bucks an hour at 18 on a small little project for 10 hours. I was like, oh my gosh, like minimum wage was like 7 25 at the time. So getting to submit an invoice for $30 an hour, I was on top of the world. And of course, it’s like the feast or famine’s, like I made $300 and I don’t think I made any money again for a couple of months, like trying to chase clients and get stuff off the Craigslist. But so I didn’t, I was never comfortable talking about what I would consider like big money or business earnings. For the longest time, I had to wade through those waters myself and get from familiar and comfortable with it. I will say it’s a lot scarier sharing it on Twitter versus sitting down and talking to another business owner. Mm-hmm. Or somebody who’s maybe giving you some mentorship or some guidance, getting over the fear to share it publicly on the internet. Honestly, probably. It’s something I’m still working on. You might’ve seen it. I just started sharing more like financials, revenue and revenue goals. Like more, more consistently last month about my path to 25 K a month that I’m on right now. It’s scary as hell, man, because I didn’t want to be like the kitschy guy whose entire following is built off of piping up and selling some money dream and not actually sharing like valuable content. Because if you talk about money on Twitter, it will get views and shares and. Retweets and stuff, but I wanted there to be more substance behind it. So as far as how you get over the fear, I’ll let you know next year, man. I’m still working on it. Okay. Chris Badgett: Now let’s talk about the agency a little bit. I think there’s two styles. One style is to build a team and another is to be as solopreneur and stay small as possible or whatever. Which, where do you land on that spectrum? EZ Smith: Man, I’ve been going through that a lot more here recently. I would say I’m solo, honestly not by choice right now. It is more what makes sense for this phase of the business, but it’s quickly starting to not make sense. So backstory, I had an agency with an office in 2015 and 2016 and I did a terrible job of setting like the company culture, the vision for it. I was scared and I, and honestly just Ill experience to, to do what I was trying to do at the time and. I burned myself by making the wrong hires. The two guys I hired were fine. They just weren’t the right people to hire for my business at that time. And honestly, I wasted so much money during that period and got turned off from it that I’ve been scared to grow into a full agency since then, especially I have a good thing going as a solo guy right now. So it’s been one of those things, like I’ve looked at it, I’ve toyed with the idea, I’ve tiptoed around it, but I haven’t. Been able to commit because I don’t want to give up what I have now to potentially chase something that might turn out the way it turned out last time. So it, it’s solo forever is not the plan. It’s solo for now. And figuring out some way to refine it and grow in a more natural, organic way without just burning money, which is what I did in the past. Chris Badgett: You mentioned earlier that you’ve gotten clients from Twitter. It’s one thing to go to Twitter and there’s a water cooler and hang out with your industry peers, but especially for an account like yours where you’re talking about insider agency stuff and your personal goals, how do you actually get a web design client from Twitter? EZ Smith: So a lot of the work I do right now there, there’s two sides of the business. The side that I share the most about is like the development partnerships with other agencies. Okay. I have a small handful of other small agencies that I do white label development for, so I think they, because I’m talking so much and it is like a water of our peers, because I’m talking in there, they’re naturally in there. So I’m, I’m doing a project right now that’s white label under N D a, but it’s for an agency that found me and reached out off of my Twitter two weeks ago. He, the guy who owns it had just been seeing my content and reached out and said, Hey, we got a project and we need help on, would you build this custom theme force? And so we’re doing that now. Another small thing was somebody who has a couple of productized services had just posted up. They needed some help doing some through one redirects, and I just was the first person to comment on it ’cause it happened to hit my feed. So I messaged ’em. I was like, Hey man, I can knock this out for you. And then another one was a guy who, I’m a little bit in the niche site community as well of just like content sites, bloggers, people who have monetized sites like niche affiliate sites. Yeah. Like content and ad based sites. Yeah. So a guy reached out who just bought a new content site a few weeks ago for a redesign just ’cause he had been following me. And the best thing I think I can say for that is once again, there was no strategy. Like I’m not, ’cause I’m not putting out salesy content, there’s no strong c t A in my content. My feed is not about hiring me to build websites for you. It’s just, I think it comes back to the thing, you know, if people do business with people they know and trust and when you’re. Showing up consistently, engaging in conversation, sharing your expertise freely. I think it over time, people come to know and trust you and that’s like the key for the business relationships in my experience. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. The, that makes sense ’cause that you’re getting other entrepreneurs, so it’s a little more water cooly. Yeah. Core style. Can you explain, I think some people out there don’t even know about white label. Yeah. Website building. Like how does that work? For sure. And what’s the setup like? EZ Smith: Yeah. To be honest, I didn’t realize people didn’t know what that was until recently. Okay. As I’ve talked about it, I’ve had a lot of people like, what is white label? What does this mean effectively? It’s when you do work for somebody else, you can do it as a freelancer. You could do it as a small agency, as a consultant, where you work on behalf of their end client or their project for no credit. The same way you would if you were an employee at an agency or a business like you’re doing this stuff behind the scenes. But you’re not claiming that work. You’re not promoting it in your portfolios. And that’s a a, the bulk of my work right now is I have one corporate marketing retainer, a small enterprise marketing retainer for a team where I’m their webmaster, and then I do a bunch of white label work for agencies. So pretty much the bulk of what I do day to day right now can’t be shared with the world. So I have to just talk about it and try to extract the lessons and little nuggets from it. But I can’t post screenshots and URLs. I can’t share Google Analytics traffic for these sites. ’cause they’re not mine. They’re not mine to claim. So it’s a little bit of a catch 22. It’s good for business, at least up until a certain point because in my experience there’s a lot of agencies and a lot of companies that need help in this sort of capacity. But the flip side is that if you’re trying to build a traditional agency, it doesn’t help you. ’cause you don’t get case studies, you don’t get portfolio pieces out of it. But I’ve said it before in my content, I’m in the business of building websites. I’m not trying to be a famous web designer. I’ve shifted my mindset so much over the years that I love building websites, but it is a business. It’s a business and part of my overall lifelong journey to be an entrepreneur. So for me, it, I don’t really care if I don’t have the last 15 sites. Can’t go in a portfolio. It’s no big deal to me. Yeah. Chris Badgett: That’s cool. I think, I think more. Agencies out there are like marketing agencies. Mm-hmm. But if you’re like really in the WordPress world, you think, oh, everybody’s got WordPress development and all these skills. But a lot of agencies, I think there’s just such a huge opportunity that a lot of people who love building websites Yeah. Don’t even realize they can tap into, EZ Smith: Dude, I ideally, I can’t take all the credit for this, but there’s a guy who reached out to me who’s a new front end developer. He did a little bit of WordPress stuff, but also just front end in general. He reached out to me on Twitter dms and I’ve had a lot of people ask for help and I usually can’t help ’em just ’cause they don’t even, they don’t come correct enough to even take the information. I can tell they’re not ready for it and it’s just, Hey, how do you make money? And that’s too broad of a question. But this guy came and asked a more specific, clearly thoughtful question and for some reason I was like it the right time and I had some time. So we went through some stuff, we scheduled a call and I coached him on just my approach for how I’ve built. The relationships I have with these other agencies and he went back and sent out 12 cold emails that were thoughtful and targeted and got a job right away off of those 12 emails, which is what I’ve done in the past. It’s how I’ve built some of my long standing relationships. ’cause like you said, yes, agencies, whether they’re doing marketing, branding, creative, or even if they’re doing WordPress development, I think a pretty big opportunity to help them if you just actually show up as a person. And don’t just spam the hell out of them. Cold email has a very bad rap around the parts of Twitter that I’m on. People hate it so bad and it’s, I get it. Not if it’s relevant. Right? Yeah. That’s the thing. I think if you show up and show people, Hey, I’m a person, not a script, not a bot, I’m a person. This is what I do. I, if you, if you need help with this, I would love to help you and opportunities come up that way. Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think there’s also. When I did a lot of agency stuff, so many clients have such a bad experience. You’re under the shadow of every previous agency or web person that they’ve worked with before. Yeah. That just by showing up, being positive, having good communication. Adding value, being caring about their business, like it’s such, you like way up there. EZ Smith: That’s the thing, man. If you have studied business, entrepreneurship, any of this stuff for any amount of time, you’ll hear all of that stuff you just said, and it seems so, so easy and so surface level, oh, communicate well, add value, be present, be personable. It’s hard as hell to actually do that stuff consistently, and I think a lot of people don’t. I’ve definitely had little issues here and there that I’m not proud of over the years, but I think if you can do that stuff 85, 90% of the time, it really does set you ahead of the pack and that’s, I’ve started sharing a little more content about that on my Twitter recently of if you’re, whether you’re freelancing, building like a micro agency or like a full on agency like. From my perspective, one of the biggest things is just being personable, being approachable, and building those actual relationships. ’cause it’s cliche, but like for real, people do business with people. So whether you’re a freelancer, a consultant, a contractor, like people are gonna have to know and trust you to do work with you or do work with your business or your agency or your brand, or whatever it may be. Chris Badgett: Love that. I think you have a course in you. It’s already validated with that person, but it’s, I’m thinking like the white label agency system or something like that. I think there’s a tendency with, ’cause you’ve been in it 15 years, oh my gosh. WordPress Agency success, like, how do I teach that? But like that specific problem. Oh, how to do, how to go from zero to three agency, white label agency clients is like a really compelling, focused offer. EZ Smith: It’s funny, man, I had a, a very famous Twitter influencer hit my DMS last week. Good to get me in his program to do just that. Okay. Apparently you’re not the only one who thinks that. I’m still wrapping my head around the idea of being a course creator and coach. I know we spoke briefly before the stream started, like it’s something I’m very interested in, but that’s another layer. So I told you earlier on that I felt like for the longest time I had like the imposter syndrome or like I wasn’t good enough to. To build a personal brand. That’s one of the next layers I’m working through is yes, people are finding value and even winning projects based on the information I’m able to give them. But have I done it enough? Have I made enough money? Like I don’t even this, these are arbitrary things, but in my head it’s maybe I need to make another a hundred thousand per year by myself and then I’m good enough to start down the teaching model. Or may maybe I need to have. 15 active white label agency partners at a time instead of just five like I have now. And it’s obviously that that’s a slippery slope of, oh, you’ll never be good enough. But that’s the next thing I’m working through. And hopefully I’ll work through it as this year goes on. ’cause I, I’d like to move into that space, but I don’t feel like I’m quite there yet. I feel like I’m close, but I need to do a little bit more. I need to refine my processes a little bit more and then I can start down that path. Chris Badgett:I’ve been in this info product space for about 14 years and the best experts, subject matter experts, all have imposter syndrome, all are very slow to roll out. And then when they finally do, they’re like, why didn’t I do that five years ago? Yeah. But I, yeah, I think it is just common. Just that whole thing of am I ready and you can don’t discount 15 years of experience and then also, The highest odds of success from what I’ve seen is when you help a previous version of yourself. So what I’ve heard that a lot. Yeah. Which is where you’re at. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s just all, everything’s in alignment. Like what you do, what you talk about on social media, what products you make. You’re not just spotting a business opportunity like and chasing it. EZ Smith: I think that’s incredibly impactful and powerful to hear. I think one of the things from my mindset that’s weird, I’m earning a high living right now. I’m doing okay for myself money-wise with the solo thing, the way it’s set up. But right now I get paid for doing right, like pe people might come to know and trust me for my knowledge, but at the end of the day, all of the revenue and all of the income is based on fulfilling services. So I know it’s a mindset unlock piece for me to feel worthy or good enough to get paid for my knowledge and not just for executing on services. So that’s like a shift. And maybe you’ve seen people yourself go through that or people that you work with, but it’s like that’s one of those next steps or next hurdles to get over is okay, yeah, I know people are resonating with my content or my experience or the thing, the insights and lessons I share, but it’s, am I ready to get paid for that? Or is that just like the free stuff I’ll put out there in the ether and then I get paid at the end of the day for grinding it out? ’cause I’m having some long days right now to fulfill on this work. So it’s, can I get paid or am I good enough to get paid for what’s in here? Or just from being behind the computer building the websites. Chris Badgett: I’ve definitely experienced that also as just a manager, as a leader sometimes. As I started managing people and stuff like that, sometimes you feel like, oh, I’m not doing enough ’cause I’m not doing as much. Yeah. But I’m spending this time thinking about like employee challenges, business structure, all this stuff. So what I was doing is I was discounting. I felt less productive even though I was doing all this head work. Yeah. So it’s like you just not equally valuing. The doing, the management, the, the instructional design, product creator part of it. EZ Smith: I’ll tell you why I think that is too. So I come from a very blue collar background of people who do like physical labor, like paint houses, do body work, cars. So it’s for me, like I’ve seen some people do okay in those spaces, but it’s always been based on grinding it out more. It’s like you want to earn more overtime a fabricator, you work more hours. And so it’s hardwired and my brain and my d n a and my subconscious of, okay, if I wanna grow my business right now, I sell more web development projects and then I grind it out and more harder and just do more hours to earn more income, which is obviously a terrible long-term business model. Like it’s not a sustainable business model. You have a ceiling on what you can possibly physically fulfill yourself. And I know that. But it’s hard to work. It’s hard to unlock and shift past that ’cause it’s just like in there subconsciously. So I’m working on it. I’m working on it. Chris Badgett: There’s a funny inverse to that, like my first year working for myself, I think I made around $5,000 and I had a young family and it was really tough. And like you’re saying, you made the $30 an hour, $300, then two months of famine. You weren’t. Yeah. Back then you weren’t, EZ Smith: I was living at home, man. Yeah. I was living with my mom in Atlanta, had moved up to where she was. Yeah. So 300 bucks then and I was walking around tall and proud, but okay. 300 bucks in my pocket and a paid off car and cheap insurance. Chris Badgett: One of, one of the frameworks I use like to do the course C stuff is, like I say, you gotta wear a five hats, which is you have to be a subject matter expert. You clearly are, you have to be a teacher, like an instructional designer. You have the ability to chunk that knowledge into usable pieces and create content and stuff. And then you have to be a community builder, which you’ve already built a huge community on Twitter that’s in your niche. You have to be an entrepreneur, which you’re obviously good at as well. And you have to be a technologist, which you already are. So you pretty much got like everything. EZ Smith: So you tell to get over myself and answer. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. I think the, I think the biggest thing that I’ve also heard helps people is to make it about service and focusing outward and like just get outta your own way of like how much money you wanna make or your imposter syndrome. And be like, I see these WordPress builders struggling to get clients and have a nice lifestyle and I can really help just make it about them. And then all, sometimes that gets all the other stuff out of the way. EZ Smith: See that? That’s actually a big motivator for me. So one of the reasons I’ve talked about this a little bit. One of the reasons I don’t like the, like solopreneur path is ’cause I feel like it is too, honestly. Sometimes I feel like it’s too selfish as far as being able to impact and build up other people. That’s probably why I lost so much money in the past with some of the businesses I ran because I tried to pour in and nurture and develop people. ’cause I’ve always felt called to build others up. I think early in my career I’ve just. I didn’t have a lot of people that, that poured into me, and I always did desire that I had to just figure it out over some very lumpy, hard won lessons and failures. So I’ve always wanted to be able to do that within my business or within my community. I think that’s probably why I enjoy sharing stuff is just hoping that five people read it and they’re like, holy crap, I needed that. So that, that, that’s impactful for you to hear me tell that back to me because I know that about myself and it’s a nice reminder too. Lean back into that calling and that purpose part of it. Chris Badgett: Again, another thing you can do is actually launch a mini course for free. That’s just an idea. Yeah. Like one time I launched, a long time ago, I started making WordPress videos, tutorials, and then I put a course on Udemy about how to build a WordPress website in a weekend. And then fast forward four years later in my agency, there’s this guy applying to work with me. As a developer and he had said he had taken that course on Udemy and that’s what got him into WordPress. I’m like, oh, wow. I had an impact on this guy’s life. And then he was able to go to a different country to go to university and stuff, and it was just like, whoa, this. That’s pretty cool that you can affect people in that way. Yeah. EZ Smith: There’s not much better, man. Like I told you that I, I did that coaching call with that person to send out those 12 emails. It wasn’t an ego thing for me, but it literally made my heart feel good. I was telling my wife about it, just beaming with happiness for the dude. I was like, I know how scary and how anxiety ridden that is to go put yourself out there and ask for work and try to build those relationships, and it’s like knowing that just a little bit of help, a little bit of guidance from what I know might’ve helped push over the hump that he was going through. To get that first gig by doing that. Like it, that, that shit, that stuff feels amazing to, to be able to help people like that and give back. Chris Badgett: And when you help entrepreneurs, I. They send out like a ripple of that goes of value that goes out into the world. So not only are you helping them, you’re helping their clients be more successful and who have customers. It’s, it’s a huge impact when you serve entrepreneurs. What lemme just say another way to get unstuck with a thing is the Skittle method. Have you heard of this? Which just stands for Screw it, do it Live. So if you find yourself in like instructional design quicksand, and you’re like, oh, perfectionism and everything like that. By running. You can call it whatever you want. You can call it like a workshop or a challenge or a course, a live course or a class or whatever. And let’s say it, it meets once a week for six weeks, and you deliver a training, you give ’em some stuff to do in between. And then you record it and that becomes the first version of your course. That live method is helps some people get going. And it’s also really cool ’cause it has the feedback loop of real human beings on the call. Yeah. So it challenges all your assumptions of, oh, I wasn’t completely clear about this, or they have this other question. So that’s another powerful way to do it. EZ Smith: Heck yeah, I like that man. That’s one of my favorite things. I love interacting with people. I’ve always been a people person. I don’t know if I’m technically introverted or extroverted. I know that I love talking to people and when I don’t, don’t feel good. So I guess that’s probably classical extroversion. But doing live stuff and actually interacting with people definitely would make sense to, to work through it. So you’re talking about getting stuck in the creator quicksand. Like I said, I have stacks of notebooks here on this desk beside me and paper. So I definitely tend to do that of if I sit down to have a strategy, the strategy will be too complex. So it’s either overthought or F it, just do it. Maybe that is more my style to just do the Skittle method than I’ll keep that in mind. Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I’ve heard the time box helps too in just making you accountable. And I learned a method once from somebody who. He forces himself to make courses on an airplane where he has some index cards. Yeah. And before the plane lands, so he is got four hours or three hours or whatever it is. He is gotta figure out, okay, what’s the problem? State, what’s the solution state, what are the steps? And by the end he is got like a stack of cards for the curriculum basically. Nice. And it’s also a, because the index card is small, it forces you to not expand infinitely into the quicksand. EZ Smith: That’s genius. ’cause I usually own like full eight and a half by 11 papers or big sketchbooks and 150 pages and it just goes and goes, and goes. Do you have, let me ask you this, man, you’ve been in the info space long. I. What do you think? Like how do you determine what’s the, we use the M V P, the minimal viable product thing a lot in software websites or whatever, but like how do you apply that same sort of idea to a course regardless of the format, how you decide this is enough of a problem and I have enough of a solution to do it, that it’s actually valuable. Chris Badgett: I think there’s two questions in there. One is like focusing the topic and like the selection, and the other is like creating the M V P version of the course. Like the Skittle method is basically an M V P. Yeah. In the sense that it’s raw. Most course creators will then take that and redo it. They’ll either run it live again with another cohort or do a more polished version without a live audience or whatever. Yeah. And there’s also, I should say there’s two types of course creators. That you need to figure out what you want to do, which is some people make like their signature system and then they just keep making it better and better. And there’s this other type that like is more of a serial entrepreneur and they’re like, okay, I’m gonna make a course about this. I’m gonna do a white label agency, then I’m gonna do this other problem that WordPress designers have. And they start building like a membership kind of catalog of many courses. So I would think, which way you want to go? There’s not a right or wrong answer, but going back. All of those things have either mini courses or like a signature program all have a problem at the center of ’em. So if you put the WordPress professional are you a mind mapper? You know what it is? EZ Smith: I know the term. I’m not sure what it is exactly. Chris Badgett: No, it’s like you draw bubbles and lines and connections on paper to connect thoughts. Like I’m doing a mind map with you right now as I come up with what I’m gonna, what I’m gonna interview you about, like what connects to what Nice. But basically the way I learned this is you put your target, your ideal customer profile at the center, and then not even thinking about what course does easy wanna make. What are the five top problems that my avatar has for you getting CL or for a WordPress professional getting clients Big problem. Yeah. Yeah. Managing people. Big problem. Yeah. What’s another one? Help me out here. Like contracts, EZ Smith: terms, payments, payment processing. Yeah, so communication project management where you keep your, so business systems. Chris Badgett: Business systems, there’s another one closing the sale. There’s another one. I’m sure there’s more. But find the five like main problems and then you figure out like what’s the most red hot? If there’s one, what is it? And it’s probably getting clients. Clients. Always sales. EZ Smith: Always. Yeah. Yeah. So if you don’t have any money, you can’t figure out the other stuff. Chris Badgett: And that’s why I latched onto what you were saying earlier about, oh, this white label niche, that’s a total niche. So it’s not just like how to get clients as an agency. It’s, there’s a unique mechanism here. Oh yeah. So there’s a guy, I don’t have his book right in front of me. His name’s Dane Maxwell. I interviewed him on the podcast. I highly recommend you check out that episode. Yeah. On l m s cast. But Dan. Kind of wild. He has this thing called idea extraction and all this stuff. He does, he even played a song on the podcast. But anyways, one of his songs. Yeah, he’s, he took a break from helping entrepreneurs and became a musician for a while. EZ Smith: But anyways, oh man, I’d love to see that. I have a music background, so I’d love to get checked that out. Chris Badgett: Yeah, he’s cool. But his whole thing is like customer result mechanism is the Holy Grail business. So result, get clients, customer WordPress. A freelancer, whoever, however you want to niche that down. And then the unique mechanism is, is there. And what a lot of course creators do is they overfocus on the mechanism. Like they don’t choose a customer avatar. You’re already focused. A lot of people are like unfocused and then they don’t pick a clear result. They’re like, oh, agency success. What does that mean? It’s too vague, too broad. So that’s, and then it’s. Chunking it down. So in order to go from zero to hero, what are the milestones we need to cross? And then you can use something like the rule of thirds to be like, okay, if there were three sections in this course, then there were three action items in each section that needs to happen to fulfill the milestone. What would those be? And that you can, that’s like a general framework for a course template, EZ Smith: but to go through a course on creating courses. Chris Badgett: Yeah, you should check out our, we have a course plan challenge. It’s like a five day thing that’s, I was gonna, I was EZ Smith: gonna go look and see what content you had about creating, we got off this call. Chris Badgett: Yeah. But yeah, the, so yeah. Clear problem. Clear result. A unique mechanism. The unique mechanism is important. If it’s just everything rehash, it’s there. The other thing I’ll add that’s not obvious is the support mechanism which you’d be into ’cause you like people. Yeah. There’s like synchronous asynchronous group and one-on-one. So like an example of asynchronous one-on-one is like email support. Okay. Asynchronous group is like social media, Facebook group, private Facebook group or discord server, slack community, whatever. Synchronous would be like weekly office hours, mastermind, live group coaching call, and then private coaching call or whatever. And that’s how you’re able to charge more. It’s really about the support. Your content and your mechanism matters. But the reason Masterclass is only $15 a month is like Steve Martin’s not gonna help you with your jokes. Yeah. But he’s got some great content. But this, there’s no support. So that’s don’t undervalue. Imagine that person you helped on Twitter. If you had like a Zoom call and there were 10 people on there, you would have a huge impact on those people. Yeah. And they would really value it. So just brainstorm with you and the M V P thing like, There’s people who create courses that are nothing that you’ve heard of. Gumroad, I imagine. Oh yeah. So like the product is literally like A P D F and it’s a course and there’s people that have really successful stuff ’cause they have a really cool mechanism and process that works for a certain type of person. So you can get as fancy or is not perfectionist as you want, but ideally not perfectionist. Otherwise it’ll never launch. EZ Smith: Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Man, it took so long my, my first few. Websites were terrible. Mm-hmm. 10 or 15 websites I built were probably terrible. It took a while to, to build up the skills and the momentum and the expertise. So I guess this is no different of just diving in and getting started without overthinking it. I like that Skittle method a lot. I’ve never heard that acronym, but yeah, the, the Twitter personality who reached out to me the other week, hi. His guy who was doing the sales call suggested a very similar thing to me, was like, just do it if, if you’re getting stuck trying to create. The content, do it live and record it, and then that’s your first version. And I’ve never thought of that. And you just said the same thing, so maybe that’s a sign of something I should really check out. Chris Badgett: Yeah, and like the whole signature program thing is a trap sometimes where, oh, I’m creating the ultimate system. It’s gotta be perfect. But. If you do a mini course first, take the pressure off. Maybe even, don’t even choose what you’re saving for, like your magnum opus work and do something around another problem that isn’t the number one, but just to give yourself permission to like just get some reps in. EZ Smith: That’s another way to think about that. That makes sense. ’cause that’s been like the core of my advice that I’ve given family, friends, people who are trying to get going into career is to literally get the reps in that. That was one of the things I noticed a couple of people I helped over dms. Was, oh, what’s the secret to getting clients? I was like, there’s, there’s not a secret. The secret is to start trying to get clients and to try to get clients consistently for five years, and in five years you’ll be really damn good at it. Like you have to get, the secret is to get started. That’s another example though of what I was saying at the very beginning of our talk of I know this and could easily tell somebody else exactly what to do. But it’s hard to hold up a mirror to yourself and let that same advice come back to you. It’s easier to give it out ’cause you really do know it, but it’s like it’s harder to take your own medicine. Chris Badgett: A hundred percent. A hundred percent easy. I, I just checked the time. I’m like, holy cow. Where about last 30 minutes go, but we’re getting near the end. What? Tell us about your world and what your plans are. You’ve got a great Twitter account. I see you have a newsletter. Yeah. What, where, what’s your vision for what you wanna do? Even if it’s not entirely done yet, or, yeah. EZ Smith: In process, like I said, man, I’m definitely still working through it. I know I cannot work solo by myself on the fulfillment side forever. So one of the big things I’m trying to go through now is literally figuring out the economics of my business model. ’cause right now the economics of my business model, when you do white label work for other agencies, you have to be priced pretty competitively because they’re not. The bulk of the budget is going to them as the agency. So you’re doing just a small piece of the work. So your pricing model is more in line with a really good freelancer or contractor. It’s not, you don’t have as high of margins as operating a traditional agency yourself. So I’m trying to figure out the economics, how it’s scalable. If I need to pivot a little bit, if I need to. I refine it somehow because I do want to build a team, a small team. I do want to build a business that has value outside of me. I’ve, I feel like I’ve proven many times over my career now, the value of myself as an individual, but the entrepreneur drive in me is to build a business that has value apart from me. Like I’m, I wanna take everything I know and pour it into the business, but at some point in time, I want to be able to be. Away from it and the business to still be valuable to our customers, our clients, our members. You know how, however, the model is, I want the business to be able to deliver value and to be worth something aside from me, because right now, obviously in the solo kind of setup, as I just do more and more fulfillment, I’m spending a lot of time trying to build my personal brand up this year. And then I’m spending a lot of time just doing what I’ve always been doing, which is building the websites, be behind closed doors. So like I want to build something that has value apart from me and be able to pour into and invest and mentor people to help them as well, which I feel like being an entrepreneur is one of the best ways to do that. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I had a business coach, his name was Dan Martel, and he said, build the machine that builds the machine. Yeah. EZ Smith: Is is because I’ve read E-Myth Built to Sell all over. Like I said, I’ve been studying this stuff forever, man. You’re talking about. Signature Systems. I’ve gone through some productized service. I’ve worked with Sam Sheer from Testimonial Hero, so like I’ve got all of this stuff bouncing around in here. Chris Badgett: It’s just, it’s called The Experts Curse. You have it. It’s, oh, man. Yeah, and you’ve probably heard that term before as well. EZ Smith: It like, I’m at the point where I don’t want any more information. I need to just shut everything off and go to work. But yeah. That’s awesome. That’s legitimate. Potentially one day sellable business. And then on the personal side, man, I’ve got a bunch of projects that I’d like to build. My schedule keeps getting away from it, but I’ve got a lot of personal projects I’d like to build that are for our community of WordPress and web professionals, some different communities and sites and platforms that I think would really be helpful for the community and fun for me to do something that’s not for clients, but for the community. So hopefully I’ll be able to carve out some time to get started on those this year. Chris Badgett: Do you do any annual planning? EZ Smith: Yes, and yes and no. I did some annual planning at the beginning of this year. The end of last year. Yeah. It didn’t really stick. Chris Badgett: Yeah. There’s another course on the LifterLMS Academy site that it’s free. That is, it’s an annual planning system that I, I learned the technique, most of that technique, and it, it goes further out. It’s like a, what’s your 10 year vision, your three year mission? And it all rolls down, but into a document template. And I found when I implemented that, it’s, I just started getting, of course things change and come up and everything, but it really helped me like, Get more on track or whatever. So maybe check that out. EZ Smith: I’d like to, man. Yeah, de definitely send me that link or I’ll go looking for it, but I’m trying to, I’m a creative person by nature, like you can’t see it. I’ve got guitar in the background here and do a lot of songwriting, so it’s easy for me to get excited about all these different ideas and tangents. So being able to pull it back down and focus on one for a long period of time is, is what I’m working on this year. Chris Badgett: If you haven’t heard it already. Another thing just to put a feather in your hat is that your vibe attracts your tribe. Yeah. I’ve read a lot of the same books as you, and so that’s why we’re resonating on it. Oh, I like this guy on Twitter. Here we are in a conversation. There’s a guy, John Tendo, who’s watching the live stream who wants to connect with you, it’s yeah, like just being you. Yeah. Is all is you’re there. So that, and that can, if you want to do courses and other stuff, like you already have, your vibe is already attracting these people. Appreciate that man. You’re already further down the road than you think is what say. Yeah. Appreciate that a lot Chris. Easy. Thanks for coming on. Absolutely, man. Thanks for having me. For those of you watching or listening, go follow Easy on Twitter at the WP Rockstar. Any final words for the people? EZ Smith: Yeah, man. Just to put in the reps, have some vision and some belief, and don’t quit. That’s the biggest thing, man. I’ve been at it for a long time, so the biggest secret is to stay in the game and you’ll eventually have some wins. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for coming on the show. Easy. We’ll have to check in maybe a couple of years down the road. Do another episode. Thanks for coming. EZ Smith: Thanks Chris. Appreciate you, man Chris Badgett: Have a great day. And that’s a wrap for this episode of L M S 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 slash gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post The Journey of WordPress Rockstar EZ Smith appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Shannon Mattern discusses Web Designer Academy and shares techniques to grow a web design business. Shannon Mattern is a business coach and educator in the web design industry. She is the owner of Web Designer Academy, a platform that provides business coaching and training for web designers. According to Shannon, many web designers possess the technical know-how necessary to create excellent websites. But struggle with aspects of their jobs that are more related to business, such as customer relations, pricing, and marketing. These designers may increase their income and increase the effectiveness of their job with the aid of Web Designer Academy. Shannon also draws attention to the distinctive feature of the program, which provides participants with individualized coaching and feedback on their work. They send in their homework via a form, and the coaching staff gives them feedback via Loom videos. Participants can get instruction via this asynchronous method without the necessity for in-person contacts. 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 LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Shannon Mattern. She’s from web designer academy.com. Welcome to the show, Shannon. Shannon Mattern: Hey Chris. Thanks so much for having me.  Chris Badgett: We’re really gonna geek out today because we’re gonna go over our very overlapping worlds of building websites for clients. The business of that, and being a coach and trainer yourself. Tell us at a high level what is Web Designer Academy?  Shannon Mattern: Yeah, so at a very high level, we are business coaching for web designers. So what we find is that. A lot of times people have all the skills that they need to build awesome websites for clients, and they spend a lot of time working on those skills and developing those skills. But when it comes to running the business side of their business, charging sustainably, marketing. Dealing with clients, boundaries, all of those things. They have a more challenging time with that, and that’s where we come in to really help them like leverage the skills that they’ve already developed and make more money and work less. Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s what we do as a course creator, coach, trainer, academy builder. What’s inside the box? Like what, what do they get inside the program?  Shannon Mattern: Yeah, so our program is multifaceted, so we have like our core curriculum. That we walk people through. And so they’re learning things like how to really like. Understand the value of a website and untie that from their time and the complexity, all of that stuff, and really internalize it. They’re learning how to package, price, position, what they do and the value of it, how to do consultations. How to make offers, how to follow up, how to get the clients, how to run the projects. So that’s our like curriculum. They go through that, and then as they’re going through that. And they have the ability to get coached by us because stuff comes up, right? They have like questions or need to tweak a strategy to themselves, or they have some mindset stuff come up where they’re like. There’s no way I could possibly ever charge that much for a website or whatever. And then we also what makes us different. I think, than a lot of other programs is that we actually look at what they’re creating. Like when they create their packages, we review it, we give them feedback, we look for where they might be. Let’s say, holding themselves back a little bit or having some. Just underselling themselves. And so we give them feedback so that they can go out there and then help them with like when clients act weird. Stop cooperating and go crazy and like it all looks great and suddenly the client’s ghosting them and not paying them. And we help them navigate that stuff too. So that’s like what’s inside the box. So it’s really fun cause like the way we have it structured is. There is no. It’s not like a cohort where you go through and you have to be a certain time at a certain place. Like it’s completely asynchronous. You do this at your own pace and we are just there for you every step of the way. So yeah, that’s inside the academy.  Chris Badgett: Sounds awesome. Tell us more about coaching, the feedback piece. I’m particularly interested there cause it’s one thing to make a course like on masterclass. It’s $15 a month, learn comedy from Steve Martin, but Steve’s not gonna review your jokes or watch you do that. So like how do you deliver the feedback slash coaching element of,  Shannon Mattern: that’s such a good question because like before we added this element back in 2020, it was just a course and we’d be like, here’s our strategy for presenting your offers and here’s all the nuance of that. And then people will go and do it and they’d be like. This is, I don’t understand why this isn’t working. We realized that everybody learns differently and everybody hears something differently based on like their, what they’re coming in with. The way we do it is we have a form, it’s so simple. We have a form that they, they have a workbook or whatever. And they just submit a link to that workbook and our team every single week we have like our schedule, right? We’re like, if you submit by Monday at midnight, by Thursday at 5:00 PM you will have your feedback. And we use Loom and we make Loom videos for them. we just, we have our criteria of what we’re looking for in this, in your offer, in your outreach or whatever. And we give you feedback. If we think that there’s something. More that we need to discuss. We’ll be like, Hey, why don’t you bring that to a coaching call? But otherwise, here’s what you did really well. Here are some opportunities we see for you. And then those videos go into our, like our course dashboard. And each student has their own like portal. This is the fun part for me as like a techie person is we have Airtable talking to Zair, talking to whatever. And so like our coach just pushes the button and they get an email notification that their review’s ready and then they can go in. And the thing I love about Loom is that then we can comment back and forth on the video, right? So if they have a question about some feedback that we gave. They can just leave a comment on the video and we don’t have to get on the phone together at a certain time to collaborate. And we’re able to serve so many more people that way. Because it’s so asynchronous.  Chris Badgett: Wow. Sounds cool. So is the coaching fully asynchronous? Shannon Mattern: No. Live calls. We have one live call week. Oh, awesome. And people like pre-submit their questions and they come and get coaching, but everything else is like asynchronous. And then our Facebook community through the work reviews.  Chris Badgett: How do you do the live call? Is it, you said questions in advance, do you, is it like a Zoom or what is it? Shannon Mattern: It’s a Zoom call, so it happens at the same time every week, Tuesday at three. Every Monday we send out an email saying, Hey, click this link to submit your questions. And we go through all the pre-submitted questions first in order. And then if there’s time left, the people who are there. They have something, they can just put something in the chat or whatever and get those questions answered. But we like to. I like to see how much time I have for each question. If I get four questions, I know. I can spend more time if we have 10, and it also helps me plan, do I need to add more time to this call this week or whatever. So that’s how we do that. Very cool.  Chris Badgett: If you had to pick like one to three primary reasons that somebody’s excited, they start a web design. Freelancer agency business and then it fails after trying for six months or a year. What’s, what are some of the one to three top reasons that people get stuck and it doesn’t work out that they could have potentially avoided, but Yeah. What are the main causes of those businesses failing? Shannon Mattern: Yeah, that’s such a good question. I think there’s, there’s two sides of this. There’s like the client acquisition side and then getting clients. There’s the sustainability side, right? Yeah. I think, I think a lot of times we start out, especially for me. When I was a freelancer, it was not hard to get clients, right? You just tell someone you’re a web designer and they’re like, oh my gosh. I know someone who needs to talk to you or they need to talk to you. That was my experience. I didn’t know how to charge or anything back then, and so getting clients was easy. But my business wasn’t sustainable. And then when I decided to raise my prices and put systems and processes in place to. Make my business sustainable. I actually had to work a little bit harder to go get the right clients for the type of business that I wanted to run. And so I’ve had to be proactive and put myself out there. And I think that’s one of the places where. Where businesses fail is like the initial going and meeting people and telling them your web designer. Telling them how you can help them, talking about what you can do for them. And just putting yourself out there in those situations to to get clients. And being patient for those relationships to come to fruition. Then on the flip side, it’s truly like you are undercharging and overdelivering and maybe you’re trying to outsource to take some stuff off your plate. But you’re not making enough money because you’re not charging enough. So all everything you’re making is going right out the door to your subcontractors and you’re just like, Oh wait. This is not the freedom that I thought it was going to be. I don’t wanna do this anymore. I’m out. So I don’t know that that’s my experience with just my own business. And then most of the people that come to work with us, they have opportunities on either of those sides.  Chris Badgett: What’s the first hire that you think somebody who’s starting a web design business. And they’ve decided they want to be more than a company of one, who would you recommend as the first hire? I know it depends on the person, but in general, is it a project manager, is it a developer? Is it designer?  Shannon Mattern: Honestly, I think it does depend on the person. Because some people could really benefit from a project manager, right? Like they could so benefit from someone who’s, hey. I want you to interface with the client. I want you to be the one responsible for getting all of their project ready to hand over to me and I will just knock it out. And I think that could really help some people. Some people love the project management side and wanna be the visionary and the solution architect and want someone else to build it for them. And I think in either case, I think it’s just know who you are and what you love to do. And what you don’t love to do and where you would feel like excited to wake up and run your business every day. Like you take on that role and then hire the right person to do the other thing. And even if you’re a developer and you’re not a designer and you hate the design part, like having just a partner, that you can work on that. So I really do think it just depends on. What you love to do as far as the first, first hire that you make.  Chris Badgett: This is a big question, but let’s pretend, or let’s say we’re focused on a niche, like a lot of the agencies and freelancers that watch this are focused in the online learning niche. Yeah. So they’re building sites for coaches or course creators or internal training sites for clients, but they’re, they have a niche focus. How does somebody with that niche focus get clients?  Shannon Mattern: They, I think that they speak to the solutions and the opportunities that can happen when the person in that niche comes to work with them. So it’s not just, oh, I’m selling the service of building you an on online course platform. It’s, we are going to work together to come up with the best strategy for you and your clients. And create an outcome that’s going to support your business, make it easier for you to run your business. Make it like we’re gonna take your clients and they’re this client journey and the results into consideration. I think you have to go outside of the out the deliverable and into the results that the deliverable creates for your client and really speak to that stuff, not only in like how you’ll work together during the project, but then what’s possible for them afterwards. And when you can do that. You can have so many people in the same niche and never run out of clients. Because you’re calling in the people that want that thing. Not just, oh, I need an online course. There are a bajillion choices out there. I don’t know what to pick. Oh, I wanna work with the person who’s gonna really guide me through this process. And look at my business as a unique business, even though the buttons that you push to create. The thing are the same regardless of the client. Tell us about  Chris Badgett: recurring revenue. Let’s say if we’re a learning in the learning niche and there’s like maintenance plans and care plans. But how do we get, have a less of a feas or famine cycle and our agency grows spherically. Because we have a good recurring revenue model. Shannon Mattern: Yeah, I think retainer packages, maintenance plans, all of that. Why not have those? I think they’re important for your clients, but like, How can you be a consultant? A lot of things about the industry that you work in, even if you are not a course creator yourself, right? So if you’re implementing these things for your clients, like you understand best practices. You understand certain things, like why couldn’t you create some sort of recurring revenue model around just your smart brain and your ideas like your con, your consulting coaching. All of those things. So I think that there are so many opportunities for us beyond providing the service to sell our ideas and package those up in whatever way feels good to you. And share those with our client base or share those with people who maybe aren’t ready to work with you one-on-one, but who want to have the outcome of what you do. So before I started, Our web designer academy and while I was freelancing I was like, man, these clients are a pain. Like I don’t wanna work with them. But this was because I didn’t have like processes in the country and like the confidence to say that’s gonna cost more. But what came out of that was I decided to create a training, teaching people how to do it themselves, and it’s very niche specific. And I built that and I personally gave that away for free. And I had affiliate like stuff baked into the training. So affiliate links and I made $5,000 a month lap of affiliate commit from that training in recurring revenue. But why can’t you teach what you know, the people who. Don’t wanna do it themselves, don’t wanna do it themselves. And no amount of you showing them how to do it is going to change that. So you can share your process, your strategies, your how you do things, and teach people and sell that too. So it’s just, there’s so many different ways to monetize your smart brain.  Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about relationships. There’s often a conflict between web designers and the clients. And on one hand, like there’s some Web DI designers are just not proactive. And I do whatever the client says, even if they in their mind think it’s the wrong business or design decision or whatever. On the other side, the client really wants to feel like a collaborator. They have the most at stake in a way, and they do have some uniqueness to them. Not everything is cookie cutter. So how do we ha, how do we, you mentioned. I think your words were confidence and some other words in there, respect or something, but. How do we build a strong partner relationship with our clients where everybody wins healthy boundaries and all that stuff. Shannon Mattern: I think it’s so important to establish, establish the relationship or the relationship dynamics from the moment that they interact with you. And it can be as simple as they, you’re not just going to be available to them whenever they want you to be available to get a consultation. They’re picking a time on your calendar like. Things like that where you’re establishing like, Hey, here’s how this relationship is going to go. And I think it’s important. One of the concepts that we teach in our program is like when there is a situation where you’re like. Hey, I don’t agree with this design decision that you’re making. Or whatever the case may be, how can you come? How can you, a, just give them some education and then give them some options? And let them choose. Cuz ultimately it ends their site like it is their business. They get to make the decisions that they wanna make for their business. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t just say, Hey, I understand that you want to do X, Y, and Z. Here’s some potential issues that I see for that. Here’s an alternative. If you really want to move forward with this, I can absolutely do that. But here are some of the challenges that you might run into later. Here’s a, here’s what I’m thinking. How would you like to move forward? And I think that in that way, you get to really, you get to show that, show your expertise and. But ultimately let them make their own decision. And then you can’t, if you’re letting them know, here are some potential consequences. Then you get to almost release yourself from the burden of the thing. Like even when. At the end of a project, you offer someone a maintenance plan and they say no, and then one month later they’re like, help, I need this. And you’re like, I’d love to help you with that. Here’s a link to get on my calendar and here’s how much it costs to book my time to do that. It’s I gave you the choice. You made your choice. You’re an adult. I’m an adult. We get to move forward how this is gonna go.  Chris Badgett: Good stuff. You mentioned maintenance plan. Again, what’s in the perfect maintenance plan?  Shannon Mattern: Boundaries. Okay. The more you pay me, the more responsive I’ll be. The less you pay me, the less responsive I’ll be. I think that’s truly establishing the expectations for response times and turnaround times and what’s included. And more importantly, what’s not included is the way that you’re not gonna dread opening up your inbox and being like, everything’s on fire. I’m out like, It’s really gonna be. I’m giving you an empowered choice to choose at what level of service you want from me. If you don’t choose this level of service, then when you email me that something’s on fire. I’m not going to provide you that level of service. I think that’s so important for us to be able to like have that sustainability side of our business. Chris Badgett: Well, let’s tell us some pricing Wi wisdom. And I know it, there’s a lot of, it depends in here. But how much is a website worth for the main street business? Like a restaurant or, I know that’s a, it depe it dramatically Depends question. But yeah, how, what are some ways to think about pricing that people may not have thought of or hurting themselves? And just to add, myself included. Almost every web designer I know undercharge, undercharge, especially in the beginning. And then there’s confidence issues and all this stuff, but how do we do pricing better? Shannon Mattern: Yeah. One of my favorite concepts is the rule of 10, and I did not make this up. I heard this from a colleague, her name’s Aisha Crumbine, and she runs a completely different business. But she was sharing this rule of 10 about how to make. Like decisions to invest in a invest in training or mentorship or something. And when she was talking about like making the decision and she was talking about, okay, what this. If I paid X number of dollars, would I be able to make 10 times more than this over the lifetime of the investment? And by paying a thousand dollars for your website, which I’m just doing easy math, let’s say say 10,000, if I paid 10,000 for the website. Over the lifetime of this website, would I be able to create a hundred thousand as a result of using this tool that was built for me? I have to do my part as the business owner. I can’t just buy it and expect it to magically make money, but if I have this tool, would I be able to make 10 times more? If the answer is yes, then. Think, okay, would I be able to recoup my investment in three to six months, right? So if I pay $10,000 for this website and I do my part and three to six months after like really launching this thing, will I recoup my initial investment? So when you think about that as a web designer and you’re thinking about like how much you’re charging your clients and how much they’re charging and how much more time, money, capacity. They might be able to have as a result of having this $10,000 doesn’t seem like it’s a drop in the bucket. And it’s just, it’s so important to think of, like it’s not necessarily about like I could spend that $10,000 website up in a day if I had all of the information from the client and everything that I needed. It’s not about how much time it takes you. It’s not about how easy it is for you, It’s about what the client’s able to go on and create. As a result of having it that they weren’t able to create when they didn’t have it. And if you can make that shift in your mind and think about the rule of 10 when you’re, when you’re thinking about pricing things, then you want, you’ll just be like, it’s a steal. They’re gonna go on to make 10, 20, 30 times more than they ever paid me throughout the lifetime of this.  Chris Badgett: I love that. So for a learning side or a coach, It’s also about what project, what are we building here? How do we make something so this coach or expert can put $10,000 in and have a $30,000 of income and have three months after launch or whatever. Shannon Mattern: Yeah. And are you saving me having to hire an employee to do the things that this site is going to do for me? I think we also discount like the efficiency that a well-designed website that fits into all of your business systems can create. Oh no. I don’t have to hire a VA to do all of these things that we were doing manually because I hired the right person to automate this stuff for me and to think about the full picture of my business. So it’s not just about what more is made, it’s about how much it’s saved, it’s about the opportunity, cost of all of it, factor, all of those things in when you’re thinking about pricing and when you can just make that internal shift that like, oh my gosh, this is worth so much more than I’m charging, even though this number might feel.  Who would pay that much? That’s why you have to talk about it in terms of all of those other things instead of, oh, it’s a website and it’s 10, $20,000.  Chris Badgett: Let’s drilling into like pricing and time and scoping as price points go up. Usually in my experience, the client doesn’t pay all at once. Like how, what if you could wave a magic wand, let’s say for a $30,000 website build. How would you structure the payments or the milestones or whatever? How would you advise?  Shannon Mattern: Yeah, let’s say it takes three months to do this project. Maybe, I don’t know. I’m just like making easy math. Like you definitely need to pay a certain percentage for me to even get you on my schedule down payment. And honestly, I divided into thirds. I would, I divided into thirds. And I’d say one third to lock this in on my calendar and like for me to start the process of working with you and doing the strategy and all of those things. The other 10 when I start the project, and then the other 10, like when we go live and, but also I would have provisions in the contract that if the client’s delaying, they’re still pay. If I’m delaying, which I won’t because I’ve got my, I’ve got it together. The only delay on my side will be if you delay me and clients. And so it just keeps everybody like motivated and moving forward with the project. But, and I also think that there’s room for you to have creative arrangements with clients that you trust. You could absolutely do a longer payment plan for them if that’s something that is sustainable for you to offer. Right? So you could say, $30,000 website and this project’s gonna be done in X number of months, but we’ll break your payments across this amount of amount of time. And that’s up to you as a business owner. But I definitely think there needs to be, like, there needs to be commitment on the client’s part to keep the project moving, which I think at $30,000 there probably would be, but you never know. It just, it all depends on the client.  Chris Badgett: I’ve seen surprisingly, a lot myself and other people where the client in a price pricing conversation will say something like, can we get the price down? But you can have a piece of the upside of the business. What do you, what would you advise a web designer who’s getting those kind, who’s not really excited about that prospect to, to negotiate back to the client or whatever?  Shannon Mattern: Yeah. If you are like, oh, I wanna become a web designer so I can get a piece in part in all these different small business, that’s fine. Cool. But most people I know just don’t, aren’t setting out to be a small business and investor and return for their design skills. When a client wants to negotiate the price down, then I’m willing to take services away to get them where they wanna be. That’s my response to that. Okay. Here’s the full scope. And it’s out of your budget. What is that? Here’s what we can do. We can remove this bell and whistle and we can take this part out. We can, we can put you responsible for writing the content, and I can put placeholder content in there for you. So there’s lots of different ways that you can get the price where the client wants it, but I’m always gonna take, take away either deliverables or my level of effort and shift that over to the client. Or whatever to, to make sure that the job is still sustainable For me, I’m not gonna ever be like tying my revenue to the future profits of a company that I don’t even know if it’s going to make the money that they say that they’re gonna make.  Chris Badgett: How do, how does a web designer avoid scope creep in some ways. Clients have a right to want to change things and we can adapt. But like sometimes you end up in infinite scope creep where a client is asking for more and more new things as the project evolves and it looks like, oh my gosh, this is never gonna launch. What do you advise in that whole scenario?  Shannon Mattern: I always like to be very upfront about how this request is gonna impact the timeline and the budget. And I’m also very clear that the timeline’s not. Start the project. We have a clear start date and end date. And then when you ask for things that are going to, that are not gonna fit into my development schedule, like I’m not gonna not go on that vacation to get this done for you in the timeline and also might push it beyond. It’s always, yeah, I’d love to do that for you. Here’s how much that’s gonna cost. And here’s when that can be done in terms of the scope of the project. Would you like me to move forward with it? And it’s just a very like straightforward matter-of-fact statement instead of just assume that they know it and tell them that, and then let them decide instead of being like, oh, they asked for it. I have to do it like within this whole project. And it helps when you do that, like it helps them be like, Oh, okay. Maybe I just got excited about that, but we, it, I really don’t need to do that right now. That’s not necessary. And then you can, you can really, it’s in their best interest to not try to add all those bells and whistles on before they rolled that out, used it, tested it, see if they really need that thing a lot of the time. Chris Badgett: I’m trying to get as much value out of you as possible, possible. Ask all the questions. Another big challenge is gathering content from the client. I’ve seen people build software to try to solve this problem. I’ve seen people try all kinds of different things, myself included What? Me too. What’s the key to getting the content from a client? Or you mentioned maybe part of the scope is the agency writing the client themselves or the content themselves, but what are, and images and all that stuff. How do you get the text and images and possibly video  Shannon Mattern: from a client? I think there are so many different ways to go about it, but I think the first most important thing is to establish like what you need from them and buy when. Get the get go and then get their agreement to that and then follow up with them leading up to it to make sure that they’re, they don’t have any questions and to get them to recommit to that date. And I know if it sounds a lot like babysitting, like I’d rather babysit on the front end than have these projects go on forever on the back end. And, In terms of like softwares and all of those things. I’ve tried all of those things, but it’s not gonna, I personally have not found that a software solution compels a client to get stuff to you faster. But that, that’s just my experience. But then there has to be some, and I don’t like to use the word consequences, but choices, right? So if. Do not get me this content by X date. You’re gonna move to the next spot on my development calendar and your payment is still due and whatever. So there, so we have to like, we have to know what in our business, what the process is for. Inevitably when a client’s not going to cooperate for whatever reason, it could not be, it could just be that they had something happen and they can’t move forward. And we need to let them know all of that up front. Let them make informed decisions. Do I wanna hustle all weekend long to get this together to start on time, or do I wanna move the project? Another option is to say, Hey, we would be happy to take this on for you and it’s going to cost this much for us to do it. Would you like to move forward with that? So I always like to give clients empowered choices, and when we do that, like they are making the decision all along the way. They fail empowered. You’re making, you’re offering them choices that, that are within the scope of like your boundaries and work for your business. And ultimately, if it’s not gonna work out, like it’s cool to let a client go and just be like, I guess this wasn’t the right time and your contract should have language in that for what, what happens? But it all, sometimes we’re like, We don’t wanna do that cuz we don’t wanna let the money go. But you are making so much less money by trying to keep working with this client who’s not moving forward and paying you than you could just by letting them go and getting another client. Chris Badgett: Just a quick tactical question. How do web designers get these great contracts? What do you advise to for, so they have really strong scope of work or relationship terms laid out. Yeah.  Shannon Mattern: There are so many contract templates out there that you can buy from, like law firm, like on, like law firms that serve online business owners. I think that’s one option. We have sample contracts in our program because our process that we teach for running a project is tied to that sample contract. So all of the. Boundaries and all of those things are in there, but you ca I would invite anybody to be like, okay, how do I want this to go? And almost, it’s like writing and choose your own adventure book, right? If this, then that, if this, then that. And then you like outline all of that stuff in your contract. And then it’s a, it’s a really easy way to say, Hey, awesome. You ready to move forward? We’re gonna kick off. Let’s go over the contract together so that you know how this project’s gonna go. And if you choose A, this is what happened, and B, and this is what happens, and then it’s just so much clearer. So you get to decide that. You don’t have to like subscribe to any one person’s like way of doing it, but I would, the more work you do up front, the less work you’ll have to do on the backend. And once you. Do it a couple times upfront. It’ll just become part of your process and it’ll just be so much easier. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What would you say about the personality, like some patterns, themes you’ve seen with being a web designer yourself and and serving so many web designers? What’s kind of part of the D N A D N A of a great web designer from a personality perspective? What patterns do you see?  Shannon Mattern: I think one of the things is that they. Get real excited about opportunities that they see for their clients that maybe their clients don’t see. So they’re like visionary in a way. And that might come out in lots of different ways if they’re more a more skilled developer than a designer. But I think that they’re always like looking for ways to maybe things that the client didn’t see, or opportunities for the client or really translating down like. The big vision of the client into something practical. I think that’s, I don’t know, that’s the opposite of a visionary, but someone who’s able to like, take a vision and turn it into something tangible and whatever medium you, you do that in. I think that’s another thing, I think patience and persistence and communication also like great trait of of successful web designers. Patience in terms of Relationship building, like going through the steps of a process, things like that, and persistence and all of those things too. But just being really like confident and I know that I can figure out how to help this client. I can figure I can solve any problem that comes my way. I don’t already have to know how to solve it, I just need to know that I can solve it. And, and that ultimately I’m here to create something that is gonna help my client get what they want. And when you have all of those things, it just makes doing the thing that you love to do so much more fun.  Chris Badgett: You just made me realize that quality of being a visionary, but also being able to bring the vision to life is the magic trick or what makes great web designers or. Building a team that can handle all those aspects really special, cuz those are, yeah, it’s almost like they’re opposite yet you’re tasked with doing both of those. Yeah. Yeah. That’s super cool. Tell us the story of you transitioning from web designer to teaching and coaching the web designer industry and the great people out there that do that work. How did that happen?  Shannon Mattern: Yeah. So it goes back to when I decided clients were too hard and I didn’t want that many bosses telling me what to do. So I made my own training, d I y training course, and then I had people sign up for that course who would reach out to me and be like, it’s really cool that you’re showing me how to do this all myself. I don’t really wanna do it. Will you do it for me? And I’m like, absolutely not. Like I can’t deal with clients. I saw a day job at that time, and then I found a business coach. I didn’t know business coaching was a thing, but one of the people who asked me that was a business coach. And she’s, you’re leaving so much money on the table by saying, no, you have this like great marketing vehicle for getting your ideal clients. And I’m like. I still couldn’t figure out why they would hire me if I was teaching them how to do it for free. I’m like, now you’re great fee. So she helped me get some of the things that we’re talking about today, like really established in my business. And then I went on to start like booking clients and, and like running the d i Y side and the client side. And I was like getting ready, like getting close to replacing my day job income, which at the time was like six figures. So I, through relationships I met, I met someone. I met the owners of Skillcrush. They are, I don’t know if you’ve heard of them, but they teach, I’ve heard of that. Yeah. WordPress to women like Coding and Skills to Women. And back in 2016 they were doing this webinar about like how to monetize your design skills. And so someone connected me with them and said. This girl like figured out a way to monetize her design skills through teaching and doing freelance work. So they invited me to do this training and my business coach at the time was like. I know you don’t see this, but I think that you should make an offer to the people on the webinar to coach other web designers to do what you do, what you just figured out how to do. And I was like, I’m not qualified to do no, but I’ve said, fine, I’ll do what you tell me because I, so far it’s worked. So I trusted her and I made an offer on that to, I called it the group coaching programs that that was like for $600. Which I felt like I was ripping people off. You can come work with me for six months and I’ll teach you all of the things that we talked. It’s definitely evolved since 2016 and I have 10 people take me up on it and I’m like, what? And it was such a blast. We met once a week. I taught them everything I knew. I helped them like work through all of the stuff. And then at the end of the six months I was like, okay, I have a course now I’m gonna do it again and I’m gonna call it something. And I think we came up with the web designer academy, just with that group and we launched it as a course and we launched it again and, and meanwhile it’s so fun and easy and it’s like just happening and it’s making money and. I’m still over here trying to grow a massive audience for the DIY side of my business, teach people how to build online courses and market their businesses and all this stuff. And it’s like hard and it’s a slog and I’m still working with one-on-one clients and it took me a couple years to have the realization that like this thing that’s fun and easy and then I barely have to market is like the thing I should be doing. That’s when I decided to start sunset setting some of those other things and really go all in on helping web designers. And I started speaking at like other conferences for web designers and all of that. And here we are in 2023. Yeah, I was able to quit my day job in 2018 doing all of that. And now we’ve helped hundreds of women, if not thousands, who haven’t joined our programs, but listen to our podcasts and all that, built their businesses and not hate their lives. What’s the name of your podcast? The Profitable Web Designer.  Chris Badgett: The Profitable Web Designer. So go check that out. And last question for you, brushed over it real quick. But you said that you had a day job, I think it was six figure range, and then you got there on your, on the web design and the stuff you, you’re doing on your side. I see in the market sometimes or just in in the world with people that some many think that’s not possible to. Do a side hustle or they can’t make the time, they can’t make the space, let alone get it enough love for it to replace their day job. Another magic trick. So how did you do that? Or what mindset shift, or what is it if someone’s like struggling with that idea, how would you unlock them? Shannon Mattern: That’s such a good question. So it took me three years to do that. From the time I start my business, started my business till the time I was able to quit. One of the things that I had to do, and I know this sounds crazy, but I started my side hustle cuz I hated my day job. I was like, I don’t wanna do this anymore. I, I cannot sit another day in this beige, windowless office and do this t p s report for the hundredth time. And I feel like I’m wasting my life. So I, I wanted to grow, I wanted to be my own boss and I wanted that freedom and flexibility. And I’m, and one of the things that I had to actually do to have the energy and the drive to grow the side hustle was to like fall back in love With my day job. I really had to change my attitude about the office politics and all of the stuff and, and go in with a better attitude because I needed that energy to put into my side hustle. I could not leave that job stressed and drained. And then go build websites in the evening. And so when I had that realization I know I wanna leave. But I’m going to take the time that I have here, make the most of it. I’m gonna be patient. I’m gonna give myself the time to grow this business while I still have a paycheck coming in. And I’m gonna show up for my job in the best way possible. By the end, honestly, I could’ve staged because like my fit was like. It was so good and it was like bittersweet to leave. But it gave me the time and the space and the energy that I needed to really grow my bigger vision and. I, and then it became leaving to grow the bigger vision, not to escape something that I hated.  Chris Badgett: That’s Shannon. She’s from web designer academy.com. There is a time in my journey as a web designer where I got coaching and training and leveled up. I did it again with Academy for a software space. I ended up tripling my business. So invest in your own education. Go to web designer academy.com if you’re looking to grow and scale. Discover systems and save yourself a bunch of time and headache. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you, Shannon, and also mention your podcast again.  Shannon Mattern: Yeah, the Pro Profitable Web Designer podcast. You can get that at Web Designer Academy. You can also find me on Instagram at Shannon lma or at Profitable Web Designer.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Shannon, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing so much valuable wisdom with us today. We really appreciate it.   Shannon Mattern: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.  Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com slash gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Grow a Web Design Business with Shannon Mattern appeared first on LMScast.

In this episode of LMScast, Melissa Love shares her experience with her new WordPress project and discusses how to deliver online learning to thousands of students using WordPress. Melissa Love, the founder of The Design Space Co, is a course creator and expert coach. She is also a theme builder and designer. Recently, she helped her friend migrate a photography education site to a new platform and implemented LifterLMS. Melissa shares that Cole is a friend of hers and an accomplished marketer who gave her helpful advice on how to start online courses. Due to a missed opportunity to mentor photographers, Cole had previously sold his company but then acquired it back. To help with the site makeover and migration, Melissa’s agency was engaged. Untangling and cleaning up the current site, stripping it down to remove pointless plugins and code, and protecting any custom coding that had already been done were issues they faced throughout the conversion. They choose the Kadence theme in order to guarantee a quick and efficient website and they use LifterLMS. 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 return guest, one of my favorite LifterLMS users. Her name is Melissa Love. She’s been around LifterLMS since almost the beginning, if not the beginning. She was. I think she created the very first child theme for Divi. She’s a course creator. She is a coach. She’s an expert in membership, she’s a designer. She’s a theme builder. She does it all. Welcome back on the show, Melissa.  Melissa Love: Oh, thank you. I feel tired just listening to that a lot. Chris Badgett: You have a lot. You have a very special set of skills. You do a lot of things around WordPress and design and online business. I wanted to bring you on to talk about one of your recent projects, Cole’s classroom. Yeah. It caught my attention when you said there was 500,000 plus users on here you also, you came from the photography niche, so this is a photography education site. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about the story of that website and what you did for the client? Melissa Love: Yeah, so Cole is a friend of mine going way back, we probably met eight or nine years ago. And he was one of the first people who taught me something about marketing. I was just about to launch my first course, I didn’t know what I was gonna build it with. I had like two people on my mailing list, one of. Was one of those was me with a test dress. The other one was my mom. Like, it was terrible. And I went to this marketing conference and I felt, you know, you know how they say you should never be the smartest person in the room. I literally couldn’t understand what anyone was talking about. They’re talking about lead magnets and funnels. I was like, oh. What am I gonna do? And all, and everyone was mentioning all this different stuff for, I use this for my courses and I use that and I use this for my funnels. I was just like, this is just impossible. And he gave me, he was well into his membership journey and he already owned Cole’s classroom. It was really successful and I was pretty intimidated at the time. And he said, look, you can, you’ve got this, you can do this. Just, you know, firstly, don’t go away and build this massive course without testing the minimum viable product. In fact, you should start selling it before you build it. At the time I was like, Oh, I’ve already built and designed this massive course in my head, but yet I haven’t done any research. So he was the one who said to you must go and survey your audience and see if. They want this thing, you can’t just don’t build a massive course without checking if people actually are gonna buy it. So I remember getting some really good advice and I thought one day maybe I will be able to have my own course like Kohl does.  So he has been on a journey with that. He sold his business to. Somebody, another company in the photography industry, and recently he had the option to buy it back. And he just found he’d really missed coaching all those photographers. So yeah, so we kind of hooked up and I agreed to, you know, we love building membership sites. It’s one of our, one of our strong points as an agency. So yeah, and we’d never worked together in that capacity with me as the designer and him as the client. So we had, you know, he’s been a dream to work with. We had a great. We had a great time together and he was really open to us kind of introducing features that we know worked really well within the course experience. And we used a few nifty little things as well for conditional content depending on what kind of journey people are taking through the site. So, you know, it is great working with someone cause I’m a marketer too, is. He approached the whole project with his marketing head on. So he wanted to know if he could split test pages, you know, how we can manage upsells and downsells and trials, and how could we show conditional content depending on what what part of the blog they were in. Like, you know, that they should get a different offer if they’re reading this article versus that article. So it was, it had lots and lots of challenging things, which I really enjoyed. But also we just knew he would like the tools we were using. We knew he’d, like, he was, he already had. Part of the tech stack in place. He was using Active Campaign. He’d heard of WP Fusion. He was open to moving away from a competitor to LifterLMS. So once we’d agreed that he was open to using the tech stack that we loved to work with, it was great.  Chris Badgett: What was what’s some of the challenges of a migration like that and how’d you deal with them if they’re, you know, you’re upgrading the site? Yeah. What challenges did you face?  Melissa Love: Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I was so lucky that actually all of their transactions take place in Stripe and then they are passed due to active campaign via Zaia and given, and the access is given via tags. And in this by WP Fusion. So for us, actually, it was not as complex as it could have been. It meant we could duplicate the site to staging. I was terrified of affecting the SEO in any way whatsoever. Cause they get huge traffic from their blog. So that was good. We could just, we then just stripped it out. I mean, he hadn’t meant, he hadn’t had control of that site for several years, so there was like a gazillion plugins that weren’t being used and lots of old code lying around in various different kind of, Child theme. So it was a real case of stripping it back to lean and kind of lean and means. So we knew it was gonna be fast and you know, we chose cadence accordingly. We wanted, he wanted a really fast sight. And so yeah, so it was a kind of one of those things like a do no harm type situation. Let’s. Be super careful, but also let’s get rid of, you know, cut this back to the bone and make sure everything that’s in there should be there and deserves a place there. So we, and we also had the added challenge of probably. Just when he first came back a year ago, he’d had some custom coding done that we needed to preserve. So yeah, it was, so the first issue of the day was a massive untangling and cleanup operation before we then brought in what we wanted to bring in, like the lifter and all that kind of stuff. Chris Badgett: Any other advice for somebody doing a migration like that, like lessons learned or things to think about or ways to make the actual go live day easier?  Melissa Love: Yes. I think what we didn’t do was he won’t mind me telling you this. When we went live, I decided to rely on syncing all the user roles and all the tags back it from Active Campaign into the WordPress installation via WP Fusion.  And what that did was make the site over. So my big takeaway from this would be sync everything to the. Development site, then strip out what you don’t want, then just push it to live. So we, yeah, and we, even if, even as we ran that synchronization, we ran it asynchronously, we ran the web hook asynchronously. I’m sorry if that’s a bit technical. If you listen this thinking what the hell’s, that basically means it doesn’t overload your system, it just keeps running the script and it pushes us through at a time. So in theory, Site’s not meant to fall over and, but with half a million people it, yes, it did. Even running it through the async. So and then it took several, it, I could tell, I could see how slowly they were ticking in. I thought, that’s gonna take the, like it going down. I thought that’s gonna take like a week to sync up. So we just had to scrap it, put the old site, live back, live again, take it back into staging, do the sync and start again. So, you know, you live and you learn with something like that. I just didn’t foresee how. How memory heavy, how much memory that would use. So it kept kind of maxing out their server. Even though I’d double check the capacity. And you know, it’s one of those things, you know, it’s one of those situations where everyone’s going, it’s not us posting company. It’s not us. There’s loads of memory. I’m like, well, it’s not us. There’s only this many co active contacts and. We got there in the end. But, you know I think it’s a real, I mean, I’ve built hundreds, maybe a thousand websites and I’m always nervous about a migration and literally nothing ever goes wrong. And I’m like, God, why did you worry about it until it’s for this reason? For one day you’ll get the site, which, you know, isn’t where it’s not as smooth going live. But you know, of course no one would’ve known that from what they saw on the front end. Only we know the stresses of that kind of size of project going live. Chris Badgett: Why did you choose to switch it over to LifterLMS?  Melissa Love: I, well he, it was more of the client really wanted to get away from their previous plugin and he just said, I hate it and I want it gone. So I didn’t really dive into the Wise and where Force, and he’s well, what should we use? And I’m like, well, he’s, he had, he didn’t know about the, he was kind of, Mentioning the name of a competitor and I just said, no, actually this is what I know really well if you want. And I did. I said as well it’s light. It’s easy to customize the way we want to with css. I know how to make it, do what I want it to do. And I showed him my site, the backend of our membership and he was like, I want that. And I was like, well, if you want that, I can do that. That’s, we can use lift. So.  Chris Badgett: Nice. Can you tell us a little bit about the business model of a site like this? You said they got have a lot of seo. It’s Kohl’s classroom.com. They have a lot of SEO from just organic blog content. But like what kind of platform is it? Is it multi instructor? What’s the offer? What are people buying?  Melissa Love: It’s actually quite simple that although if you go to Kohl’s classroom.com and you click on under photo training and free tutorials, that’s effectively. Their blog, so it needed to be really easily searchable. And they drive, you know there’s hundreds and hundreds of articles on there which pull in the traffic. So in terms of inbound marketing, their blog is really important. They have, and if you go to that site as well, you’ll see there at the top menu, there’s something that says free resources. And if you look at that, it brings up a huge grid of all their different freebies. And they run, I believe they run them through ClickFunnels, actually. I think they, those go out to ClickFunnel signups.  Chris Badgett: So there’s like a page of a bunch of resources, but essentially it’s like there’s like nine lead magnets here or something. There’s a lot.  Melissa Love: Yeah, and I think they just build up over time. And, you know, the other fun thing is if you were to go into that blog, that photo training free tutorials area, and you click on a you click on a blog post, you’ll see in the left hand side recommended for you. And depending on which category you’re in you’ll be given a different recommendation. So if you’re in lighting, you’ll be given something relevant. If you’re in photo editing, you’ll be given a different free off from the left hand side or an office to start free trial. So we used a plug for that called, if so,  Chris Badgett: I haven’t heard of that one. Melissa Love: If so, yeah, it’s like a conditional content you, so you can say if they visited X, Y, and Z pages in the last kind of cookie session, show sh. Take them to this page or show them this section or show them this offer. And if you work with any kind of, so it works on a kind of page level scale. It does work with Gutenberg, it works for the block builder, and it does work with all the major page builders. You can have this. Show them this section. If they’ve done behave like this, show them this section, if they’ve behaved like that, or if they’re in this category of the blog, bring up this sidebar with these offers. So yeah, and you can do that right on a really granular level. So those offers in the sidebar, they’re actually just widgets in the customizer area and each widget has got a different, if so, condition. Chris Badgett: That’s very cool. And tell us about the the member courses. Is it like one membership and you get all the courses or is it a la carte or both or what?  Melissa Love: It’s one membership, but I do believe he does sell some of them individually. But yeah, I did set it, we set it up as one membership and there’s lots of different instructors in there, but they’re not set up as instructors. It’s just got their name on their content. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. What are the courses like? Are they like 20 lessons or more like long webinar presentations or what? Or a mix?  Melissa Love: They’re a real mix actually. There’s some which are, have just got one video and then others, which are quite long, like the 80 set of wedding photography is a quite a big chunky course within it. But then there’s a single course on, you know, a certain type of photo editing. I saw all different kinds of ones.  Chris Badgett: A question for you about the photography niche. The photography niche is so massive and you know, sometimes when you get into tech or marketing or courses and stuff like that, the, or the world gets kind of small, but there’s like these mega niches out there. I mean, I did like some affiliate marketing stuff for a photography education site a long time ago. And I went to New York to visit them and I was like, oh my God this is huge, like this photography niche. And you’ve been in it for a while. This is Cole’s classroom. Has you know, been around for a while in the niche. Tell us, like for the course creator or the web designers looking to niche or whatever, like, tell us about this niche and working with a big niche like photography. Like how do you stand out? How do you focus and make an impact in a niche like this?  Melissa Love: Well, do you know what Even though some niches seem quite big like photography, it’s a pretty small world. Okay. So I can tell, you know, when I was really hard niched down in that I was going to all the same, all the conferences couple of times to the states every year. And there were, there’s two or three in the uk, which I still speak at today and go there as a speaker. So it’s a bit like the world, WordPress world. You just keep. Bumping into the same people and everybody reads the same magazines and reads the same blogs and belongs to the same groups. So that’s the beauty of niching down. Like people are easy to find cause they stick together, they congregate, you know? And so as long as you are, you know, happy to network and leverage. That the places where, you know, you can find people, it’s, you know it’s relatively straightforward to start to get traction in a niche. And I think I was delivering some training essay on this very subject actually. And I think what people, when they first try niche, you have to have a lot of personalized things for that meeting ready to go. So you need to make sure that you have an offer that, you know, even just if you’re sharing links, if you are a. Web designer and you are trying to land photographers, which is what, you know, I technically am. If I just go around saying, here’s a general article on this. It doesn’t have the same powers. Like, here’s an article I wrote for photographers about how to do X, Y, and Z with their website. People are, oh, that’s just what I need, so, Sometimes when you’re trying to get into a niche, I think people don’t go deep enough and get specific enough. So you need those extra landing pages, those case studies, those tutorials, those tools, those kind of content upgrades, which solve a specific problem for that specific person. So I think if you try and bring your generic lead magnets and your generic ideas into a niche, it’s never enough. You have to go much deeper, put the work in, and make sure you’ve got the resources in a much more. Curated way so that people think that’s exactly what I need. Not like not, oh, I can adapt what she’s saying to my, to me as a photographer, you have to kind of go that extra mile when you’re first trying a niche to stand out and be noticed. Chris Badgett: I was, I know you’ve known Cole for a while from Cole’s classroom.com and his. I was looking at the mission page and it’s helping photography enthusiasts and to prof become professional photographers earning a minimum of a thousand dollars a month. So basically to help people kind of start businesses, whether it’s wedding or bourgeois photography or whatever.  Is there anything with the way you built the site or designed the site to like, Help a learner who’s trying, who has these goals and aspirations to become this type of entrepreneur, a photography entrepreneur is there any way, how does that feed into the design of the site? Or, you know, if a client has a mission to get their learners this result, is there anything you way you approach the website to help with that? Melissa Love: Well, it’s not just specific to this site, but it’s something that we do with all of our. Membership site builds is we really big on creating an amazing custom dashboard experience. So when we talk about lift lms, we think of the dashboard that it, that is kind of set up as a short code inside a page, which kind of gives you a nice little dashboard. We take it and elevate it a step more than that. We don’t want, we want it to feel like an experience they’re familiar with. So most people have, at standpoint, taken a course on Udemy or, and one of those big, so we go out of our way to make sure that the member navigation is really slick. So it’s got little rows of icons so they can easily flip between, say the library and the course area and the. Member calendar or whatever other features you wanna share. We also personalize experience. We use WP Fusion and we use a short code to pull in their first name. So it’ll say, Hey, you’re smashing it today, Chris. So they’re greeted with a different message and you can also rotate those messages. You can kind of do a kind of, depending on what day it is or what page they’re on, we changed the message, but we always have their name. And we’ve done this nifty thing now where it displays their goals. In the dashboard where they can’t really avoid them. So they can update their goals for the form at any point. And the form is mapped through into active campaign. The goals that they’ve submitted then appear on their dashboard by using the short code, by pulling in that data back into the site so they can keep on top of their goals. And we also set up the and automations for the client, which. Reminds them of their goals every month and offers them a chance to opt out of being notified about their goals. We embedded the widgets so they can see what they last watched. I know in Kohl’s custom dashboard, he’s also got a member of the month, which is, and I think there’s a prize associated with that. So that’s very That’s motivating. But most importantly, all those tools he regularly talks about in the private Facebook group, like they, I don’t mind. We have member of the month. We announce it every month. So we talk about goals. We ask people to drop their goals in the threat. Same thread in the private Facebook group, that we invite them to fill out the form, which then magically appears on their dashboard. So it’s about creating an experience that feels really kind of gently surrounding them and supporting them and not just relying on. Them remembering to log in and look at their courses. So we try and create an experience and not just, you know, a site, it should feel interactive and it should make them feel that there is something bigger going on than just the nuts and bolts of being inside the back end of a WordPress site. Chris Badgett: Pure gold right there. Could you walk me through the technology of that, the form and the goals? Was that an active campaign form or gravity form? What was that? And then how did you get the data back on the site?  Melissa Love: Okay, so. So our stack that we preferred stack that we use when we build these sites is we love active campaign. Other CRMs are available of course but that for us, a tag We love active campaign cause it’s tag based and when you have tags. And we, and the other kind of partner tool is WP Fusion, which is an awesome plugin with run by an incredible team. And it gives such a deep data integration. I’ll just give you a couple of examples of what it can do. Any custom field or any user field from your crm, from Active Campaign, you can then pull through and display with a short code anywhere in WordPress using WP Fusion so we can pull through the goals that they’ve submitted by with an active campaign form or gravity form or fluent form. It doesn’t really matter as long as your form can. Be mapped through interactive campaign, you’re golden and you can pull all that data through. You can set up things like if somebody completes a certain lesson, you can, that can trigger an automation, which sends them an offer. If you’ve got something to sell, which specific relates to the part of a course or lesson they’ve just completed. So you know that. And I can also see what pages they’ve been visiting in mine in my active campaign. It tracks what’s the last thing they watched? You can also gamify with it. So we have used I’m gonna forget the name now, gamer Press to to create these lovely badges and these levels that they can work through. And that’s all sitting there in active campaign, which is anything that’s sitting in your crm. If you have that deep data integration with something like WP Fusion, you can display it on the front end of their dashboard. And that’s why it’s really fun so they can really visually see their progress.  And so, so as long as you can get an interactive campaign, you can get it back out again and display it on the front end just using a short code, and that’s really cool. Then you get to make these really immersive, fun experiences for learners.  Chris Badgett: How do you, as a designer design that experience? Is this start, is this like a piece of paper or is like a, or you just kind of have a vision in your mind? I mean, I know it’s a lot of art, it’s a lot of science. Like how does that. How does one craft a compelling learning experience?  Melissa Love: Well, I’ve gotta give a shout out actually to Kelly and Mike from the membership guys, who I’m sure you know if you’re thinking of starting a membership, you should join their membership.  They’re the membership that teach you how to run a membership, and I first met them at their retain conference probably a few months before I started my own membership and. It was being inside their dashboard where I thought, this is good. You know, they, I, they had the icons across the top and you, it felt like you were flipping between tabs. And I really liked that and I thought, how can I replicate that myself? But I also had some things which I wish I’d had to hand. Like I really wanted the member calendar. I really wanted the thing that I’d last watched so you could just easily pick up where you last moved. And then it evolved. We didn’t have the goals thing to start with. But once I worked out how to do it we now have, we also have their badges that they’ve earned now on the dashboard so they can see how far they’ve got through the roadmap. So I think it was just things that I’ve appreciated as I’ve. Taken and bought an enormous number of courses, which I may or may not have finished or bought and never opened. But we’re all guilty of that. I think they’re just things over time where I thought that’s cool. That’d be really useful. I wish I had this.  Chris Badgett: We get a lot of questions actually about the, that roadmap concept. Can you explain that and explain how you built it? The version that you  Melissa Love: use. I’ve gotta be honest, mine isn’t a true roadmap where things move along it. I built a I built just a structure in terms of graphic design with couple of borders that kind of look. It looks like a nice snaking roadmap. Effectively. I used I used the timeline. It’s, I think it, there’s an extension for Game Repress, which generates a timeline based on the tracks of LifterLMS. It’s something like that. And I divided my roadmap into four tracks. Then I made them look like they were connected just using Borders and Red Border radiuses to make it look like a nice winding track and the bad the game repress badges are displayed. And then the. Mini courses are listed below. It’s just imagine it as a winding roadmap, but it’s a kind of a little bit of a fake one. Like there is someone who teaches how to build proper roadmaps with like, animated little boats or cars or something. That’s what I really want. So I’ve kind of got like a fakey faked up version of it and everyone loves it. They can see how to, they can even click through to the courses that are on the roadmap. But I’ve got to admit I’m when I’ve got time to do this, I’m gonna go and hire those guys and get them to build me a proper  Chris Badgett: one. That’s one of those things, it sounds like simple, but it’s not like to make it really good. It’s, and even what you have, I’m sure is really good. It’s a lot of work. What keeps you going, Melissa? Like you’ve been in WordPress and learning membership sites, online business for a long time. You’ve worked with a lot of clients. Continue to improve in your own education? Yeah. What a, as a seasoned WordPress professional and education entrepreneur, like, what, where does all, where does that spark come from? Melissa Love: Gosh, that’s a good I think we’ve talked about this before on a previous episode. I think my spark comes from the people I’m. What the audience I’m trying to serve. So my, in my kind of 32nd version of my journey is that I was building websites just for clients and I kind of got into the photography niche and, you know, I got busy and I, I had a very, I was very lucky. I got very lucky. I had a couple of. Connections with people who really recommended me. And so I’d al always had a waiting list. And I’d put my prices up and still there were people on my waiting list. I realized that actually it got to a point where kind of people who were just starting their journey were saying, yeah, I’ll pay you 5,000 pounds to build my site. I was like, you know, you’re just starting. You should, shouldn’t not, no, I can’t take your money. This isn’t right. Nobody should just spend five grand on the first website they ever have. So I decided to make themes and you know, then people said the themes are lovely, but I wish I knew how to use WordPress. I was like, oh, I need to do a course. And then, you know, people were like, Hey, I’ve built my amazing site with your course and your themes, but I don’t know how to do marketing. I was like, go, I need to start a membership. So I think, you know, just listening to what people are asking for, really listening to what their pain points are. Just always points me in the next direction, really. So that’s the next step. And you know, so I’m always thinking I know what people are asking for. So I’ve normally got some little idea ticking away based on what’s the next iteration of things that are gonna help people.  Chris Badgett: I was interviewing a woman named Pua a couple days ago, and she was saying that she started out doing some training inside corporations. Yeah, and the people didn’t want to, they didn’t really want to be there. It was like training they had to do. And then when she started working with other entrepreneurs who wanted to be there, like it’s a totally different experience. It, so I kind of picking a similar thread there, like when you’re helping and hanging out with other entrepreneurs, there’s a lot of energy and buzz and goals and dreams happening. It’s a fun place to be.  Melissa Love: Well, you know you know, it is, and I’ve often picked your brains about things and asked you how you know, people who you’ve, who you are hanging out with and you’ve interviewed friends of mine. And, you know, it becomes, you know I find marketing endlessly fascinating, you know, so, and I think it’s that blend of doing something practical. I’m also a bit of a nerd, like, I like the techie side of WordPress. I’m not a developer in the sense that I can create plugins or, you know, write a ton of. PHP or JavaScript from scratch. But I’m a pretty good code editor. I’m like a self-taught, you know, I can turn my hand to all of things, but I do like that kind of seeing how far I can push something. For me, it’s like a really satisfying puzzle to. Work out how to do something. So I think being in the WordPress world and training people in that and the coaching world, it kind of straddles the two and lets you help people in lots of different ways. And I find that really motivating. And I get to hang out with my marketing friends and we get my digital marketing friends and kind of nerd out about that stuff too. Go to conferences together and. I love all that  Chris Badgett: Marketing. I’m a nerd like you. So, so much of it is timeless, but it does change and evolve over time. What, is there any kind of new trends or I. Things that you’re seeing espe particularly relevant to somebody running an agency who’s trying to get clients or a course creator trying to get students. Is there a new trend or anything that’s maybe not working as well? Or what do you see out in the space?  Melissa Love: Do you know what, I see a lot of people trying to skip the basics. And for me that is, that sometimes. But I was saying to, to some, to a group yesterday when we were on a kind of conference call in my membership when we were doing a coaching session and I said, imagine there was no internet. How would you go and find your next five clients? And everyone said, well, I’d. Probably go down into town and I’d go and knock on some doors and take a brochure. I said, I, what do you think would happen if you did that tomorrow? And they said, I think I’d get some new clients genuinely, you know, that kind of old school shoe leather marketing approach works on so many levels. And I think sometimes I do think the Internet’s, you know, not a great thing. Cause it makes us lazy. We like, oh, I’ll just pop up a website, do some seo. Yeah, pay for some ads. It’s gonna be easy. But actually the old ways. And I know this cause I talk to lots of other marketers who are, who run similar businesses and I dunno about you, but I spend at least a day and a half, two days a week reaching out to people, being on podcasts, pitching things, looking for connections, asking for introductions, getting in front of other people’s audiences. Those are just the new ways of doing the old fashion stuff, which is boring other people’s audiences. Trying to leverage the connections you have. And I, so if anything, I think it’s worth just checking that you haven’t missed some kind of old school tricks. And then that, and also that you, if you are doing things like you’ve got a lead magnet, you’re growing your list, just, you know, really auditing that and making sure it’s sharp, that it’s to the point that it’s, you know, just the basics, I guess is what, it’s very easy to get your head turned with the la like the latest shiny new app or this clever trick or, you know, obsess over split testing your email. Headlines when actually the difference is very normally very marginal. And meanwhile you could have been, yeah, and also it’s a numbers game, so I think people get very discouraged. They’ll send out five emails and I’m like, guys, listen, I send 5,000 a year to people. I don’t know who looking for, you know, that connection or asking people to introduce me to X, y, and Z person, or, you know, going to online summits or going to inline, you know, speaking at conferences. It’s hard work, so I, and I think you sometimes see gurus popping up and it seems like they’ve achieved this overnight and it’s never the case. They’ve always done their time on the various circuits speaking and promoting and becoming more and more visible.  Chris Badgett: That’s Melissa Love. We were talking about one of her projects called Kohls classroom.com. You can go check that out. Melissa’s at the design space.co. Tell us what’s there and what you’re up to and how people can connect with you. Yeah. So, and get into your world,  Melissa Love: of course. So if you if you head over to our site, you’ll see we primarily sell WordPress themes for all the major page builders. And specifically we do have three themes just for Lyft or lms. Cause we love it so much. So if you are struggling with your building the membership site, you can install ours with one click and you’ll have a working membership site. Straight outta the box. And they’re pretty as well. We like to think they’re well designed. And then once you’ve built your site, you can join our membership, which is a marketing membership called The Marketing Fix, where we can show you how to use it once you’ve built it and you can nerd out with us. And all the other members about all things marketing. We have a lot of people who are, we have a lot of web designers who have a lot of photographers. We have an opera singer, we have an accountant we have somebody who dies. Makes hand natural dyed ribbons. We’ve got, it’s a very interesting membership. There’s all sorts of fun, creative people there. Yes. So that’s what we do. We help people build their own site and then we help them learn to mar market using the site. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well thanks for coming back on the show, Melissa, and thanks for doing all you do and it’s great to be with you on the journey. Always a pleasure. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Deliver Online Learning to Over 500,000 Students with WordPress appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Ken Theriot, shares his journey into audio and how he became a course creator and how to produce professional audio for courses. Ken Theriot is an audio professional and course creator. He is the owner of Home Brew Audio, a platform aimed at teaching people how to do audio recording at home. Ken initially started recording music as a teenager and sought to improve the quality of his recordings. Ken offers guidance for both beginner and more experienced course authors on audio setup. For beginners he advises to start with live instruction utilizing programs like Zoom. He highlights the need of having decent audio quality for filmed videos nevertheless. He advises utilizing a microphone that is placed near to the face. This might be either a USB microphone that is directly linked to a phone or computer or a separate microphone that is attached to the device. For advanced course creators, Ken suggests purchasing a nice large-diaphragm condenser microphone and connecting it to an audio interface box, which is connected to a computer, for more experienced course developers. For an affordable alternative for the audio system,  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 Ken Theriot. He’s from home brew audio.com. He’s a course creator, he’s a audio professional. And we’re gonna get into his story, his journey as a course crater. And also I’m gonna try to extract and mine as much audio wisdom as I can out of Ken’s experience on the podcast. But welcome to the show, Ken. Tell us a little bit about the journey into audio. Where did that story begin for you? Ken Theriot: A 17 year old kid with lots of hormones. I think that it was really as simple and as primal as trying to impress girls. When I was a teenager, I was a musician, so that was the thing that I could do well. Play guitar and stuff, but I was poor like most teenagers. And so I couldn’t afford to make recordings of myself that weren’t really crappy recordings made on the little boombox, those little tiny round microphones that were built in to those things. But that’s how I started. And I wanted to sing harmony too. I wanted to do all the parts and one of the songs that I recorded, Back when I was that age was a Beatles song called This Boy, which if you’re familiar with it, it has three-part harmony. All the way through the song. So I wondered how I could do that. And so I, I sang the, I played the guitar and sang onto one of the tapes, the cassette tape recorder, and then I borrowed my brother’s boombox and I played that cassette recorder back while I sang the second harmony. So all of that was going into the other cassette recorder with this awful. Hiss that was multiplied by going by, bouncing it down to that. And then I had to do the third harmony. So I took that recording and played it back while I sang the third one. And yeah, it was god awful hiss in the background, but I had three-part harmony in a song by God. That was a an interesting kind of foray into it. And that’s how it started. And I just wanted to get better and I continued to not be able to afford professional recording studio, so had to figure out how to do it on my own. Chris Badgett: Let’s just fast forward in the story to the part where you decided to create courses. How did that happen? Like you’re a guy that loves music and audio. What was the spark for the course creator journey? Ken Theriot: Wow. Okay, so the first one was was a primal motivation called I don’t know trying to impress girls. Then the second one to answer your question was another sort of primal motivation, which is laziness. So I retired from the Air Force. I was an Air Force officer, and I served 20 years and I retired from that in 2007. And of course the natural thing is while I’m still young enough to get a job, and my wife is expecting me to. I did, I put out all the the resumes and I did the interviews. And meanwhile while that process was working itself out, I I saw something online that that talked about. Doing voiceovers and and I yelled it down and my, Hey, why can’t we read audio books? We listened to them. Why can’t we read ’em? We have all this recording equipment cuz I had recorded several albums by then. So we had a pretty good setup. And she said, huh, no. Keep on dreaming.  But we actually landed a job doing some voiceover work and then we continued to do that. And through that was voices.com. So it’s called a pay to play way to do voiceovers. Instead of starting your own business, you just sign up and then you answer auditions and somebody put a a job out for doing an impression of.  Caricatures like some Bronx guy doing, because he wanted to put third party voices onto GPSs. Back before that was really popular on phones. These things these little GPS units that you used to carry around in your car before everyone had an iPhone and what have you. And you could choose voices on there and change accents and change gender, but they wanted to make these things funny. And put characters that said stuff like, what the hell are you doing? You’re off track. That kind of thing. And I answered the ad and I got hired to do the job and I. I did another job at another job for him and he said yours you get back with me quicker than anybody else that does this for me. And your audio sounds better and what are what are you doing? And I mentioned it to him and he said, can I hire you to produce the audio for all these other guys? So it basically started that way of me. Getting in with this guy and then I learned that he started this. This is a long, rambling story, but it is interesting. He started this company called Pig Tones to do these third party GPS voices, a as an internet. Marketing online business. And that was his jam. He was an online marketing guru basically. And so he said, Hey how would you like to learn to make a living online doing on doing an online business? We could do one together. And so I thought that, yeah, that’s cool. I wouldn’t have to work I wouldn’t have to go to a job. What they don’t tell you is when you work for yourself, you are working all the time. But anyway, I went and he, we talked it out and he said, how about you teach people how to do audio recording at home cuz you do that so you know how to do it. And I thought, yeah, let’s do that. So we brainstormed it and came up with a business and. Long story short, he dropped out. He didn’t, he wasn’t really interested in doing it. And so I just took it all over and Home Brew audio. The idea was to teach people how to do it. And two ways to do that is to do online courses and the other way is to do one-on-one coaching with folks. And so that’s how it started. Chris Badgett: Nice. What help the people with audio? I feel like it’s a rabbit hole and there’s the beginner setup for a course creator. I’d love to hear your list. And then for somebody that’s maybe they’ve been in business for a while, their courses are doing well, they wanna upgrade the home studio. What does that setup look like from a software and hardware perspective? And just draw some wisdom on the people. Ken Theriot: So drop some knowledge, some, So this is for course creators? Chris Badgett: Yeah, the beginners and then the more advanced, like down the road. Ken Theriot: Okay. The the beginning course creator is probably gonna start with a pilot course in which I learned through Miy and Danny, and that is going to be a lot of live, live teaching to start. And the idea is just to see if you’ve got an audience and if your course idea is viable, so you don’t have to really worry about it too much at that point. Because you’re probably gonna be on Zoom or some other online conferencing tool in order to teach. But when you move into doing recorded a scalable version of your course, you’re probably gonna want recorded videos. And this is where so many people get it wrong. And it’s not that, it’s not that hard. Like you said, it can be a rabbit hole and a lot of people think it is. But the the videos that I do for my courses are I have a good camera right now. I’m just using a webcam for this, but I have a good camera that’s back there with some lights that will be right here. And this is pretty much what the video looks like. It’s very high quality, better lighting. I start this way and I talk and I say, alright, we’re gonna talk in this lesson we’re gonna talk about X, Y, and Z. And I have this microphone right in front of my face when I make these videos. And. Then and, okay, so before I go off down any rabbit holes, this doesn’t have to be, this happens to be a, a good mic. A pretty good mic cuz I use pretty high quality stuff when I’m recording music and and voiceovers. But it doesn’t have to be, it just has to be close to your mic. Anything, even if you’re using, if you’re shooting your videos on an iPhone and it’s three feet away from you. You can get another iPhone, borrow your spouses or your roommates or whatever, iPhone, and put that on a a little, what do you call ’em?  Tripod. You can put it on something like this, but where is it? And just put a little iPhone holder and, or you can just put it on a mic stand. That’ll actually be better cuz then you can tilt it up and have, and just have the, that iPhone there and use the notes recorder. You don’t have to spend any money assuming you have another phone in the house. The, I the key thing is no matter what mic you’re using, you gotta get your mouth close to that mic. And the thing is, when you’re doing video It seems how in the world am I gonna get my mouth close to the camera, which is four feet away? I can’t just walk up to it and put my face in the camera so the idea there is you have to use a separate mic one Like I’m doing, this isn’t connected to or when I’m doing my course videos, this isn’t connected to the camera. I do that separately. Or you can get a good mic that actually connects to the camera. So these days, most U S B microphones can connect directly to your phone. So in that instance, I could get a microphone. Let me see where is it? Oh, thought I had a handy. Things like a Blue Yeti, that’s probably one of the most popular large USB microphones. And and you can plug that into your device. Just record the audio along while you’re recording the video. That can be your microphone instead of the phone. So the idea is that no matter what mic you’re using, even if you’re just not even using a mic, if you’re using another phone, or you could get a lapel mic, but you gotta get a mic close to your mouth. And if I had one piece of advice to give to to a beginner, to a starting course creator for making their videos for the scalable version of their course. It is whatever device you’re using, get a mic close to your face. And when I say close, I’m talking it depends on how you’re doing it, but it shouldn’t be more than 18 inches max. That’s, if you’ve got a microphone just out of frame right there or another phone. That’s maybe 18 inches, 12 to 18 inches from your face just pointing in. And That’s how they do it in the movies actually. Or if you don’t care about having a mic in the frame, you don’t when you’re obviously and I don’t here it is. So what all they need to see is a person who is engaging with them, they don’t care. There’s a microphone here. And they just want the information. So if you can get a good mic like this, you can record the audio separately and then join it up with the video after. But that’s a long answer a long way to say, get a mic very close to your face. And the second part was you said, for more advanced people. So for more advanced people, I would say. Do it this way. A lot of people don’t like to have a mic in their frame, and I don’t know why that’s such an issue. There’s a lot of people that want to stand up and they want to have a green screen background or something, and they wanna be standing up and they want to show at least like the upper half of their body from the waist up or something. Yeah, if you do that, then it’s gonna be hard to have a mic. Like this. I get you could stand in front of a mic stand, but then it starts to look a little unusual at that point. Most people use lavalier lapel mics. That’s probably the best way to go at that point. If you wanna stand up and you want to be show most of yourself, then then you should get a wireless. Lapel mic system. And I say wireless because the wired ones are very difficult to work with or can be, and you can’t get as far from your camera. So just spring for a wireless one. There’s a, the one I use, I don’t have it with me right now, but it’s a system from road. Same company that makes this mic called the Road Wireless go to. They’ve actually now got three versions or four of that system. But in the past, in order to buy a wireless system like that, you’re talking four or $500 or more. Nowadays it’s closer to 2, 2 50, somewhere in there. And and that gives you the ability to just clip this little thing on. It’s not even a mic, it’s not even a the little lapel mic, the little tiny microphone that sits right here? It’s not even that, it’s just a all right, hold on. This is what it’s, and it this isn’t a I’m not necessarily a shill for road. They’re not paying me or anything. But this is just a really good, convenient thing. And and it clips, it’s got a little clip in the back. Like this, and you literally, there’s the mic and you just clip it onto your, I don’t really have a you’d want a button down shirt for you. It would work perfect. You could just plug it right in, right there. I’d have to like, pinch my shirt or something and stick it on like that. But this is all you do. And the other piece of it is a receiver, and that goes on your camera, but it also, this also goes straight into a computer. So it doesn’t have to go into a camera, and that gives you flexibility. These things also record onto themselves. These are little mobile recorders, so it can act as a safety backup in case you did in case you We’re too loud in it, distorted or something. So it’s all kinds of flexible and easy to use. So if you have to stand up and be far from your camera and you don’t want a microphone in there a wireless lapel system, lapel mic system of some kind is my recommendation for people who wanna do what you and I are doing. I recommend not using a USB mic. We’re ta you, you said people who are more advanced course builders and yeah. I’m about to actually test a new a new u SB mic that I might be changing my tune after this week on this advice. But for right now I say get yourself a good large diaphragm condenser microphone that goes into. I got a spare one into an interface box. Ugh. See how dusty that is? But it’s cuz I’m not actually using it at the moment. So the microphone get, gets plugged into here, and then by u sb this just goes out and plugs into your computer and this gives you high quality. Audio, very high quality, like professional quality audio coming from a professional quality mic. And that’s the way that I recommend for more advanced creators that. Cost is going to be the mic that I usually recommend. It’s one of the more affordable ones, but it’s still very good, is about $150 an audio technical one. And in one of these you can get for about a hundred dollars, 110 maybe depends on which one you get.  I usually use a focus, right? Scarlet? The focus, right? Scarlet Solo, I think is like $110, something like that. So you’re talking. $280 or so. So my advice to advance course creators is to make the investment of about $300 for good audio for your videos. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s talk about editing a little bit if we’re coming out with our audio, but we’re likely also shooting video. There are some course creators that are audio only. But what are the small handful of softwares you recommend for editing course? Video and audio together, or audio by itself? Ken Theriot: Audio by itself. I like Reaper for that. And two reasons. One is it’s just about as good as pro tools. In my opinion, I can’t think of anything that I can’t do with it that Pro Tools can do, but it’s also super inexpensive. It’s $60 if you wanna use the Personal use license. And what they say is that if you start to make money with it, then it’s it’s, they recommend that you go up to the professional commercial license, which is $220. But that’s all on the honor system. The licenses are all the same. There’s no crippled functionality. There’s no you can use it for 60 days. There is a trial and you can use it for 60 days. But they’ll. They won’t stop after 60 days. So that’s what, they’re an awesome company and they’re really good with that kind of thing. But anyway, Reaper is the software that I recommend using for most of the editing of the audio. And for the video, I I recommend if you’re doing video I, I use Camtasia because I’m on a PC system. You can use Camtasia on a Mac or a pc. And that lets you do, oh my God, that is so amazing for creating courses. It’s I do you I don’t know what you use for it, it’s great for screen capture stuff, so I should it’s great for everything You can do any kind of video, it doesn’t have to be screen capture, but that’s what it was originally designed to do. And then you can take outside audio and sync it up. Nothing flat. I’m doing that. And those are the two biggies. I also recommend one plugin. There, there’s, we can again get into a long list of things that, that I could recommend, but if you’re just gonna get one plugin for Reaper, it has a lot of its own built in stuff you don’t need to buy. Third party plugins for it necessarily, but get yourself a reverb removal plugin. Be I used to say like in this room I’ve got these acoustic absorbing foam panels, and that helps cut down on that room echo. That is so common for audio that’s recorded at home, but. Nowadays the reverb removal edit is so amazingly good that really you can wait on getting, or you might never even need to get the acoustic foam in your room.  Because this stuff is so good. There is one, again, no affiliation at all, but it’s called DeVerberate three by a company called acon. And the, there’s another suite of editing tools and they have a D reverb tool in it. And that one is called isotope Rx. For audio editing. It cleans up audio.  You can remove pee pops and and mouth clicks and noise. And it’s pretty cool, but it has a d reverb in it. That’s the key thing I’m getting at is without talking about doing any more editing that I think is those three things have either for video, Camtasia or ScreenFlow if you’re on a Mac, and then Reaper for the audio.  And and a plugin, a d reverb plugin. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Thank you for that. What about just actually creating the courses and figuring out what to make? You’ve done on your website, home brew audio.com, you have several courses on there. What advice do you have for people. To actually get the courses done. Cuz you have, for a lot of people, there’s tech challenges and you’re obviously really good with audio, video stuff, but how were you able to like, successfully make so many courses? If the technology wasn’t a challenge, how did you get through the instructional design challenge? Ken Theriot: Yeah. I used something, especially on this last course, it was. Amazingly helpful was a mind map. A lot of people tell you to outline your course and you can use any number of tools for that, but I found that to not be very helpful for p different people process information differently. And so for me, looking at something like a mind map or I could add anything and stick it in anywhere I wanted as far as sequence was concerned. That, that was super helpful. So I went in and I just started putting bubbles in for everything that I wanted to teach every topic. And then if that seemed to be part of a bigger topic I could always move things around and have that bigger topic be the main module, how it ended up being. But I couldn’t have done that with a standard outline. So that was the first thing. Once I got all that set up, I did it to where you go down one side, I know if you’re familiar with mind maps, but you go down one side. I went down one side and then I went down the other side for my sequence and whenever I finished a video, I would color that bubble red and put a big green, no, actually, lemme back up. I, whenever I finished a video, I would put a big green check mark on that bubble. And because there were, Main modules, and then there were topics and then there were subtopics and everything that branched out. I decided that not, you can’t make every one its own video, so I tried to pack everything in that logically made sense into one video, not letting any video be more than 10 minutes if possible, and anything that needed to be a video was read. So I could look at my mind map and go, okay, boom. There’s all the red bubbles. Boom boom. I have to do 32 red bubbles. So I’m gonna start at the top and I’m just going to mark these bubbles off as I finish them. And and that really for me was amazingly helpful. I could look at it and go, all right, green dots or green check marks. Done. How many do I have left? I would make a separate bubble that said, you have 13 more videos to do. And that, that is how I went through and finished my courses. And then once they were done, I just put them in sequence in my L m s. Chris Badgett: I’m a big fan of mind mapping. I feel like it changed my life when I learned how to use it cuz it’s, I think it’s closer to how the brain works and especially when you’re starting with a blank canvas, you can bring it like an outline is a very structured thing. Yes. But you can get. Anything I do new, it always starts with a mind map, and if I need to get it to conform to a structure, like a course outline or a spreadsheet, I’ll get there. But at first I don’t want to constrain the brain and see what’s related to what. What are the big ideas or the small ideas? It’s a really powerful way of I say it’s like an alternative way to then making a list. Like even when I do a shopping list, it’s a mind map. I don’t even make regular lists anymore.  Going back to the technology a little bit if we’re doing like a screen share content, like I do a lot of that cause I’m teaching people how to build websites and use software. I’m a screen flow guy. I’ve been using it for a decade. But most of what I do is I’m just trying to get it done.  I’m just talking over the video. I’m moving around. But then sometimes you can if you actually do the audio first, like you have a more polished message you want to do and then you wanna. Put visuals behind that later. And then there’s like the voiceover where let’s say, oh, I want to demo this product and then I’m gonna edit it and make it perfect. The timing perfect. And then I want to do voiceover. How, I guess what I’m trying to understand from you is how can we better do. Video and audio separately so that whether we’re doing the video first or the audio first but we want something that looks more like a polished commercial than oh, this is just somebody just talking and over their computer screen. How can we do that better? Ken Theriot: Yeah. Teleprompter. Okay. Is my, when I’m on screen like this, I tend to, and you’ve probably noticed in this interview, I tend to go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, and another thing, blah, blah, blah. And and it’s you don’t wanna wa, first of all, it’s a waste of people’s time. If they paid for a course to watch me. Stumble over my words and oh yeah. Obviously not be prepared. It won’t look professional like you’re talking about. So I use on my camera a that might be part of the list of tech that you want to have me recommend, but it is a, this is it right here. And that just, I have a it’s like a D S L R camera.  Lumix G seven. It’s technically mirrorless. But anyway this slides over the whatchamacallit lens, little round thing. And then I have an app on here that does the teleprompting, and I just stick this inside of the teleprompter. And and then that scrolls while I’m doing the actual video and then there’s a remote that comes with it that you can stop and start it. I don’t like, I don’t like it going because I might need to, I don’t like it going automatically cuz it might get too far ahead or too fast or too slow or whatever. And I’ve tried that’s a huge pain in the butt to try to set it automatically and then have it go and you’re like wait. It’s going too fast. And then it’s going too slow. I use this and I just zip and stop. And then zip and stop and zip and stop. So manual control over where that text is. But anyway, I write that stuff in Evernote on my computer, which is a cloud-based note app. And that’s on my phone too. So once I write it on the computer, I got the script done and now it’s on my phone. I copy and paste it into, this is called the Parrot podcaster, by the way. I noticed I’m doing a lot of Pee Pops. Parrot podcaster. And there’s other versions of these, but that has an app that lives on your phone, and then you can drop the script in there and then it will reverse it backwards so that you can slip it underneath. Then I’m just looking right at my screen and I’m reading off of reading the teleprompter, reading my script. And that is a talent in and of itself that I, it took me years literally to wonder why I was looking at the camera going, yeah, well done. It was very good. And the thing was, and I was like, oh my God, that’s horrible. I’m, I I look like I’m a deer in the headlights. And it’s just not animated and I’m not, Engaging at all. I wouldn’t watch me. So it takes a lot of practice to, to look at a teleprompter to get the text right, so that you make a nice, snappy, quick, tight video that doesn’t have a lot of ums and ahs in it. It gets a point across very quickly, but that you do it in an engaging way. So I practice the script and then I look at it. And I pretend that it’s not even there as much as I can. So you’re looking at text, but you also have to remember that there’s a camera lens behind it and that you’re actually talking to people, it took me a while to learn. I had to almost force myself. In fact, I do. Before I hit record on my camera, I go because otherwise I’ll be like this. Hey today we’re gonna talk about compression, which really is not as hard a thing as it seems. I literally had videos that looked like that and I was like, ah, I gotta redo it.  Teleprompter, but make sure that you’re engaging with it. That helps it to be professional and tight. And then you rec I record the audio separately into Reaper while I’m doing that, so the camera’s recording the audio, and then I’m recording into Reaper just like this onto my computer. And then after I join them up in Cantasia, which you could do in ScreenFlow the same way as far as the screen capture part where I’m actually not on camera.  I just let that go. I’ll be explaining something and I’ll go, Ugh that was terrible. I went ah what’s the word? And so I will snap my fingers and start that thought over again and demonstrate the thing until I get it to where. It, it didn’t have a lot of idiocy and re and repetition behind it.  And I cut all that stuff out in the editing process But I add the audio in before I do any cutting. That’s pretty important piece there. So warts and all. Before I make any improvements to the audio, I will sync that audio. So you’ve got your Camtasia or ScreenFlow or whatever it is, whatever video program you’re using, and you’ve got all of your audio that the camera recorded on one track. Then I bring in the audio that I saved, that I recorded in Reaper. It’s the same it’s the same words and everything cuz it recorded the exact same thing. So I will stick that underneath and it’s very easy just to cite it just zoom in and go and sync it up. Visually you can tell once that is synced up, I delete the old audio. Then I cut out I go in and do all the slicing and dicing. I cut out the bad takes, I cut out the hesitations, I cut out the extra time and all of that, and then I export that audio out. I go into, I could do it in Reper, but personally I use Adobe Audition for this. And that’s just a personal preference.  You could use Audacity, you could use Reper, whatever you want. Then I go in and I improve the audio I take out, when you do a lot of cutting and video, you end up with with breaths that get cut off or they just sound weird. So I’ll go in and edit those out and I will You have to be careful not to shrink up the audio while you’re doing this. You don’t want to delete anything because if you do then the audio will be outta sync when you open Camtasia again. But then I go in, I take out the noise, I take out the pee pops, I take out the mouth clicks I will optimize the volume and then I bring that back in to the finished video and export the whole thing out together. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Another use case we see come up a lot that I’ve seen some questions around that. I’m sure you can. Answer and you already ha have a little bit is what about in a lesson controlled environment? Like an action environment like a yoga instructor or a somebody who’s teaching dance and moving around, not just screen sharing at a laptop.  How do we get that person to make good audio but also still be able to move around pretty well? Is it the, it’s the lapel mic situation. Ken Theriot: Yes, I was just looking at a review. I did a review of it, but I was just looking at a YouTube review of this system yesterday. And one of the things they did was they had a guy on a motorcycle with a I don’t know how he mounted, I guess he had a GoPro or something, and he was using this to record the audio. He was talking in as he was going 70 miles an hour down a highway going, Hey, see, and I’m, this is me talking while I’m riding a fricking motorcycle. You don’t get much more where you can’t pay attention to the tech than this, and and basically you could. Either I don’t use GoPro, so I don’t know if you can connect an external mic directly to it, but it doesn’t matter because these things record audio right on them. So you can record audio onto this clipped right here while you’re riding a motorcycle teaching yoga dancing. I plan to do a dance demo actually at my wife and I did swing dancing for many years, but I want to show people how to do audio on video. In several different situations and how to get the mic close to your body and in order to demonstrate an action video like that. It could be outside, it could be in a yoga studio, like you say, that’s very echoey and what have you. There might be traffic, there might be other people around. Getting a mic close to your mouth helps with all of that. And this is a great way to do it if you’re wearing a t-shirt or something.  You? I see, I can still do it. I can clip it to my shirt by folding it over, but it it’s, it kinda wobbles it’s heavy and unwieldy. Some people actually clip it. Inside, so it’s against their body and and that way it’s a little more stable. But yeah I could definitely, Lindy hop with this thing on. Nope, no problem. If you have partner dancing, that might it might like ruffle and bump and whatever get in the way. So you might want to keep that in mind. When you’re When you’re demonstrating that kind of stuff. But yeah, that’s really the answer. And when you have to move around a lot and you’re doing some action, you need a wireless definitely has to be wireless in that situation.  Either lapel situation, it either looks like this or the traditional little Thought I had one up here. Little everyone knows what they look like. Little lapel mics that just they’re little black things with little little foam hats on that, that sit right here. They’re much lighter weight. And you can plug those right into here. So if you want, if you wanted, if this thing is a little two one wieldy, you can get yourself a road, makes a a lab, a lavalier mic that you can clip here. That’s much lighter weight. And and then just clip this to your waistband or stick it in your pocket or whatever and plug it into there. So those are, that would be my advice for that situation. Chris Badgett: Can you just educate us on how to prevent background noise, whether it’s family, animals, urban noise and maybe let’s just say our or home or whatever, we just can’t quite keep it quiet. So what can we do to help with the background noise and manage it? Besides obviously solving the source of the noise. Ken Theriot: Besides yeah, that’s obviously the first step. It depends on where you are because if you’re in a gym if you’re teaching people how to do fitness stuff in a gym that’s being used by other people, there’s obviously not a lot you can do if you’re at home. And and it’s the, it’s leaf blower time, which drives me crazy. Or there’s construction going on, or a motorcycle driving by or whatever, or there’s stuff the family’s doing and you really need to get the video done now, but you really don’t want to tell them to stop doing what they’re doing. The best advice to prevent getting that recorded in the first place is just to try to close the door, close their door, and then close your door.  These, that’s obvious. But. If it, if you can wait until the noise isn’t there. And, but if you can’t like I said, getting your mouth close to the microphone is gonna be your first line of defense for all of this stuff, for any kind of noise actually. And then the when you have pauses in between your phrases, you’ll hear that. Whatever it is going on the TV or the music my wife’s listening to, or if she’s singing along or doing whatever downstairs, that sometimes gets recorded and it usually, you can’t really hear it very much when I’m talking, but in the breaks in between, you can, and so that’s a matter of editing it out after the fact.  If you get your mouth close to the mic, you probably won’t have to worry about the noise while you’re talking. And in the spaces where you’re not talking, you can edit it out just by silencing the stuff in between. Now. There’s one other situation, and that is, or one other thing you can do. I have a post on this with a morning dove. There was a morning dove right outside my window with that. Ooh. And I was like, oh my God, I don’t wanna kill the bird. But what I was able to do was sample that. So I recorded the morning dove all by itself. So I had its voice on my on my recording software. And then I fed that with all noise reduction software. You have to feed it, you have to train it. What noise is so it, no, it knows what to know, what to remove. I was able to train. It was an Adobe audition. I told it All right, this is what noise sounds like. This is the sample of noise. Now remove this from my entire file, and it did, it removed only that. Now, that works really well. If the frequencies is different, because I have a men’s voice, actually, my voice is, people say, ma’am, when I talk on the phone, more often than I’d than I’d. Would’ve thought, but anyway there’s a big difference between the frequency of my voice and the, so it’s easier to remove that without affecting my voice. So the more difference a sound is from your voice, the easier it is to remove by, by using noise reduction software. And if it’s something that’s in the same register as your voice. Yeah. In my case, I have to sometimes do multiple takes to try to find a time when there isn’t that noise. And yeah that’s a tough nut. That’s a really hard thing. If, especially if you’re making videos, but if if I really, a, had to get the video done now and b could not prevent the noise from happening in the house for whatever reason, I would go into my closet with my laptop. I could bring my camera too. I have a pretty big walk-in closet downstairs and that has a lot of clothing hanging up. So that helps to to block out a lot of noise that’s coming from inside the house. And that’s a last resort, but it is something I could do and it’s something anyone could do. I don’t recommend recording in a closet normally, but but if you have a walk-in closet or closet that’s big enough to get in there with a laptop and a camera That’d be my last resort. I think I covered everything that I can think of. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Ken Rio from Home Brew Audio. Thank you for dropping so many knowledge bombs with us here today. And also for those of you listening on the podcast Ken was referencing some things and holding some things up. Go search for Ken. Home Brew audio on the LifterLMS YouTube channel. So you can find that video if you wanna see the lavalier microphone and some of the audio interface and things he was holding up.  Can any final words for the people tell us about any course you think you have that might be a good fit for the course builders out there and any other ways to connect with you. Ken Theriot: I’m actually putting together a course right now just starting on how to sound good on video. So I think that’s the thing that would be the most relevant to course creators. But I also have one that’s out there right now. That is that let me just I always forget the name of it, which means I have to change the title. It’s too long, but it is called Professional Talkers, how to Record High Quality Audio for Podcast Voiceovers and More. And that teaches you how to just, it doesn’t talk about course creation per se, but it talks about recording the audio and then how to edit the audio to make it sound pristine and professional.  So those would be the two most most. Relevant to course creators as far as the courses that I’m doing. And you had something else in the, in, in their question that I just, that I, any other, Chris Badgett: what else did you ask me? Something about people to connect with you? Any other way for the people to connect with you? Ken Theriot: Oh yeah there’s the Home Brew Audio YouTube channel. I have a lot of videos on there. Talking about specific things of all audio recording topics and the, there’s also a Facebook page for Home Brew audio and ken@homebrewaudio.com is my email if you wanted to get in touch with me. Chris Badgett: Awesome Ken. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Ken Theriot: Thanks for having me, Chris. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Produce Professional Audio For Your Courses appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast episode, Arnas Donauskas discuss and shares about WordPress Hosting. Arnas Donauskas is the product owner of Hostinger, a web hosting company. Hostinger offers the most affordable WordPress web hosting services. They provide hosting packages specifically designed for WordPress websites, offering better performance, enhanced security, and improved compatibility for WordPress sites. Continuous improvement is highly valued by Hostinger. They offer a variety of plans, allowing people to choose according to their specific requirements. Arnas advises considering the budget and opting for a shared hosting package for course creators embarking on their first project. To create online courses, users can install WordPress and useful plugins like LifterLMS. It is essential to ensure that the website has enough space, so being aware of any restrictions in the hosting package is crucial. 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 Arnas. He’s from Hostinger, which is a web hosting company that’s been around since 2004. They’ve got some rock solid WordPress hosting. We’ve just tested it with LifterLMS. It performed very well. It’s a very affordable, approachable option. And we’re gonna get into the What Hostinger is what it’s all about today. Welcome to the show. Arnas Donauskas: Hi, Chris. Happy to be here and thanks for reminding me today. Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Tell us a little bit about hosting or like the, the origin story. Where did, where did hosting or come from? And, and I know now it’s like big, you guys have data centers all over the place and you know, you have customers coming in from all over the world. I know you’re, you’re, you have, you’re big in places like Brazil and I’m watching on YouTube, all these multi-language videos, people talking about hosting her. Where did all this, where did this story begin?  Arnas Donauskas: Yeah, I would be happy to share that. So, as you mentioned in your intro everything started at 2004 at November as a, in the same city I’m living at right now. It’s in Konas, Lithuania, and group of tech, tech people. Basically Ki kickstarted this personal company and named it hosting Media. Then after the years after innovations and the new things, everything kickstarted, when we started creating our own panel this was like a new thing when we, you know, We are not offering like cPanel, but it was our in-home custom functionality and so on. And throughout the years of, you know, the innovations, new, new stuff built in, new features that were made by us. Yeah, hosting your brand came in and yeah, really happy about the, the naming of it, the branding of it, the, the coloring and yeah all of the team’s hard work really paid off and. It’s, it’s really amazing to see the company growing every, every year and getting public explo exposure to communities like WordPress and other, other smaller ces. Chris Badgett: What do you see like what do you see about the WordPress community? I mean, you guys created WordPress specific hosting. Mm-hmm. Tell, tell us more about that offer and where it came from and how it’s going. Arnas Donauskas: Yeah, so, It’s quite let’s say, straightforward. It’s not a secret that WordPress is you know, the most popular content management system there is with the volume of the webspace there is. And we wanted to, you know, to offer a hosting plan that is directly dedicated for it that it would benefit the user itself. How is the setup procedures going off the plan and what they were able to, you know, To experience it because the, once you get the WordPress hosting plan, you straight up get the WordPress and you just jump on the onboarding and fill out the details, you know, on selecting the preferences, theme plugins, and you’re ready to roll on making your website to, with your unique content. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And, and when somebody asks you, how do you answer the question? What makes hosting or different? Or special what?  Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. Yeah. So there, the, there are times when this question is asked quite often, and especially, I like that question in the World Camps what I really like is that we have our own servers.  This is one of the reasons why we were able to provide these prices to the customers because our infrastructure is our own. So we ordered the pri, the, you know, the service specification details, all of the, you know bare metal things. We send that to the de designated location and our team assembles everything and perhaps it to get it going. So we have, you know, that control. Of our own infrastructure and you know, maintenance of it and so on. This is one of the things. Then of course the custom panel. Why I like this because it’s the thing where you can keep on growing and it at quite good pace. Let’s say we see a demand in some specific feature that clients may like and the. There’s nothing stopping, there’s no no stopping us. That why we shouldn’t create it for and deliver it to the clients if we see, you know, a need for it. And yeah, these are the things like that, come straight directly to my mind.  Chris Badgett: That’s, that’s awesome. And you’re, you do a, you’re the product owner of hosting. Arnas Donauskas: Yeah, I’m currently a product owner of the web hosting product.  Chris Badgett: Tell us how, tell us about that role. I’m, I’m a product owner of LifterLMS, so, but what is it like at a hosting company? What kind of things are you looking at and how does what kind of things are you working on to, you know, continuously improve hosting? Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. So as a product owner at the hosting product, what I do is Work on the new upcoming initiatives that we will be delivering to the clients. I work closely with the developers, with the designers, how this feature should function, how it’ll look like, and then we’ll be altogether, make that happen on hosting it itself.  So if like we have, you know, the like upcoming No, have our own public roadmap with the released features. In the upcoming features. So let’s say one of the initiatives I, as an example I worked on is the, it was released quite some time ago, but it just directly came to my mind, is providing WordPress vulnerabilities on the plugins, on the themes and the core versions. And it’s one of the initiatives they work on with the developers and how we can represent it better for our clients. So they would get, you know Benefit from it and were able to keep their site secured.  Chris Badgett: Very cool. Hosting her appears like super international. Mm-hmm. In, its, in its reach and its kind of, its culture. Tell us about that, like just the international nature of hosting her.  Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. So we have A lot of colleagues working all around the world. We do have an office in Brazil like a physical office and the, yeah, we really have a great marketing team on spreading the word globally about hosting here.  But we not only limit ourselves here marketing, but we have people all around. We also hire people from all around, all around the world. So over the time, the word of that you know, Just grew on, and I believe it’ll keep on growing And yeah, more worldwide the news will come from hosting yourself. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And you mentioned Word camps hosting or started doing more with Word camps. I’m looking forward to connecting with you at Word Camp Europe that coming up this year in Greece. Yeah, like how does, how do, how do you guys think about Word camps? What do you guys do there? And how has it affected the hosting company? Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. So I’ve personally been, right now, I believe the three of them And yeah, it’s been, what I really like about Orcas from my personal view is that I’m able to talk with the ver people directly and ask what they expect out of the hosting provider. What are their struggles that they would expect from the hosting provider, you know, to sold out or, or even in some of the cases, like I believe it was in the. The us world camp us, where I’ve met a few people that are already our clients and they just came in with the feedback and that was really amazing to hear directly feedback from them. So for me as a product owner world Camp’s really is a great place to gather feedback, to know the community, what are their expectations and yeah. Chris Badgett: And that’s, that’s awesome. So. What, what would you say to like a, a course creator, like somebody, let’s say it’s their first website, they’re coming to hosting, or they’ve got big hopes and dreams. They’re, they’re kind of new to the this is like their first website project. How should they think about getting started on your platform to, to build their online business, their online education company? Arnas Donauskas: It’s pretty simple, to be honest. Of course when you’re creating not only a course product, but any, any like website, you need to think of the budget, your, of yourself. But for the course, program program, I know we have clients that do that and keep going on doing that, and the base of them do increase.  I would pick our shared hosting plans. Out of the of the pricing and like directly installed the WordPress and the one of the plugins that could be installed is like LifterLMS since it’s and as direct assistance and like in terms of limitations, I do know that websites that provides using, you know, tutorials on certain things could take up more spaces. So I would also di directly check on the limitations of the hosting plans since, you know, since you’ll be paying money. You don’t want to like, run out of short of the space anytime soon And, yeah. We handle all of the installation of the WordPress. You just click to install it, select your theme, and create your first tutorial, how to solve a certain task. Chris Badgett: Awesome. And, and how should somebody think about scaling? Let’s say, you know, first they’re just building in private. Nobody’s really coming to the website. Then maybe they get. You know, a hundred users and then things start to take off and maybe we get up to a thousand, 10,000 or more. How sh how do they think about scaling mm-hmm. And being supported, or traffic spikes and that kind of thing.  Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. So I’m gonna go like directly, is it all cool if I go with the plant names? Sure. Go for it. Yeah. Yeah. So let’s say from my personal recommendations for Clients who would create websites where they make tutorials and so on. I would recommend like the business hosting plan out of the shared scope. And we actually assist in this place for our clients. We show what’s their usage, what’s their traffic from coming from different countries, and we inform clients, let’s say, One day you start to reach like 80 or 90% of the resources that are being currently used.  We first suggest them to go over. Perhaps there’s something happened with the website that is only like a one-time thing. We do have a A feature called Boost Plan, which what it does for you, it increases your limits free of charge, and you can just try out a higher tier plan without actually committing to it.  So you would see oh yeah, it was a one time spike. It can happen, it everything would go back to normal. And your website would be like up and running without issues. But if it’s more of a constant thing, then you would get like a, a recommendation to step it up and, you know, go with a higher tier hosting plan. But as I mentioned, the boost feature will give you like a free tryout of that higher tier plan.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. And I just wanna mention, I usually don’t like doing, saying prices on, on content because they change and whatnot. But that’s, we tested at LifterLMS, the business WordPress plan. It was awesome. Everything worked great. The site was fast. And as of today, as of this recording, the price on there is $3 and 99 cents a month. Plus three months free, which is an incredible value cuz the the, especially a startup like a course creator, just new entrepreneur, they’re often doing it as a side hustle. Mm-hmm. Or they don’t wanna invest too much money in the beginning. And this is a great entry point for people to be able to get in and not have the hosting get out at. Get outta hand to, you know, or on day one or whatever. So that’s that’s really incredible. Can you elaborate a little more? You, you, you, you mentioned it, but you know, some of the people watching this are, you know, aren’t super technical and know about you know, hosting infrastructure, whatever. And I remember in my WordPress journey when I kind of realized more about how hosting works. It’s just interesting. And can you explain that part about how you have your own servers and therefore you’re able to control the prices better? And how some companies, hosting companies, it’s not actually their servers, they’re, they’re subcontracting somewhere else. Can you explain how all that works and how hosting or does it  Arnas Donauskas: Yeah, of course. So renting servers can get expensive. Pretty fast because when you need to scale things up as a hosting provider and then your renting servers, prices add up. And where based on our current infrastructure we are able, you know, to keep the prices low because when we need to extend, all we need to do is get some more additional. Server space and delivered. And that’s all. Like there are some, you know, electricity and so on and so on. But it’s still more beneficial for us to have our own infrastructure. And when it comes to the technical details we have really, really nice Lightspeed servers where we have the light speed caching plugin, which additionally provides speed for the website of, of the WordPress.  So, yeah I’m thinking what of like in. When it comes to infrastructure, what the additional details I could provide, but when it co in comparison with the rented servers, but basically because we make everything our own. It not, not in, not in terms of infrastructure. But like features that panel all of that, all of those controls around. Inhouse made, we are able to, you know, to provide these prices for our customers.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And, and it’s, and that’s just cool that you pass a lot of that savings on to the customer so that they can you know, get started at an affordable price. Can you take us on a tour of some of the other things that hosting or offers? There’s email and some other things, like what else? Is the company making an offering that digital creators might be interested in?  Arnas Donauskas: Yeah. Yeah. Would be happy to. So. Apart from the different web hosting plans that we have, like Shared Cloud WordPress, we do have like other products as well. So we have our, our own VPs hosting plans. Those are, you know more dedicated servers and we also do provide them with the prepared C panel. VPSs is like a really comfortable panel. I did try that myself. We did not found any like issues and it’s really like a quite nice design I can say as well. And also we have a V ps hosting plan.  Servers data is. Ready for a Minecraft server. So if anyone want to host up with your buddy’s Minecraft server to play on. We all already have them prepped up. Also we provide our own email services. We have a dedicated team for that with the developers. And yeah, same with that comes with the hosting features. We are able to do them on our email services as well. And also on hosting, you’re free to register domains with quite a lot of variety of TLDs. And if you like, come up with a hosting plan with us as well. Like a free domain will be given to you, like I believe that you have to choose like a higher period of time. The free domain will be added to your hosting plan, so that’s a win-win also. Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. In our testing, we got the free domain as well. I’m like, that’s it just makes it, you’ve done a lot of work removing the friction on the initial setup, which is really cool. So keep up the good work here. Well, that’s, that’s awesome. This is ais, he’s from hoster. It’s at hoster.com. Any final words for the people you know, advice on getting started with a hosting or plan or, or other ways to connect with the company or ask questions, get support, that kind of thing?  Arnas Donauskas: Yeah, so. Like a final remarks and this would be guys, don’t be afraid to try out.  There’s always a 30 days money bag guarantee. And we do have 24 7 support in like different languages and you can ask any questions you may have on the site’s development, on the issues that have occurred. We will help out with any questions and yeah, straight from the registration, registration part, we having access to the support. And you can write us the contact@thehostingor.com and yeah, we’ll be happy to help you out.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, Arna, thank you for coming on the show. I’d encourage everybody to go check out hosting or check it out for hosting, check out their WordPress hosting plans, and I look forward to seeing you at WordCamp Europe in Greece. Arnas Donauskas: Likewise, Chris. Thanks for reminding me. Thanks for inviting me today. It was a pleasure. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Discover the Affordable Full Stack WordPress Web Hosting Company Hostinger appeared first on LMScast.