In Episode 72, we continue our series,  Starting and Growing Your Online Course. In today’s show we are looking at the benefits of adding courses to your online store with Chris Badgett, instructor and creator of LifterLMS plugin for WordPress.

Online course are a perfect opportunity for online sellers not only to educate their customers, but to grow better relationships. And depending on what you sell, whether it’s a physical or virtual product, there are solid strategies to increase your sales and customer base through education and online courses.

We chatted about:

* How shop owners can make sure they have the resources to start their online courses

* If you should put your courses in your online store or on a separate site

* The challenges store owners face when starting online courses and how to overcome them

* An example of an existing site that has been incredibly successful with online courses

* How a store owner my be surprised that there is an audience for their online course,  no matter the product or service

The other shows in this series:

Online Courses: The Past, the Present and the Future with Brian Clark

Tips for Starting Your First Online Course with Carrie Dils

How To Successfully Market Your Online Course with Troy Dean

Thanks to Our Podcast Sponsor: Bluehost

Transcript

You can also download a pdf of the full transcript here: WordPress eCommerce Show Episode 72 May 1 2017

Hey, everyone, Bob Dunn here, known as BobWP on the web. Thanks for tuning in to the third show of our series, “What You Need to Know About Starting and Growing Your Online Course”.

In the past two shows, we’ve talked about the space of online courses, we’ve talked about how to start your online course, and today we venture into how to bring your course into your online store, which is another whole way of using online courses, and who better than somebody that has actually done this, experienced it, and worked with online stores: Chris Badgett creator of the WordPress plugin LifterLMS. Welcome to the show, Chris.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for having me, Bob. It’s great to be here.

Meet Chris Badgett, instructor, creator of the LifterLMS plugin

Bob: So, Chris, before we get into the nitty gritty here, tell us a little bit about yourself and your plugin, and maybe just a short story of why you actually created that plugin.

Chris: Awesome. Well, I’m an online course creator myself. I started in the organic gardening niche, in the permaculture niche within organic gardening. I started creating courses and traveling around the world with my wife. It was a project where we would film these permaculture workshops, even in remote places like in the jungles of Costa Rica, and then I would bring these courses online for these very low-tech niches, and it was a win-win for everybody.

That’s how I got started with it. On the side I was running a WordPress agency and building sites, so it was only natural for me to explore WordPress LMS online course and membership site solutions. Over time, I merged my agency with another company. We were deciding what type of product we wanted to roll out and focus the next decade of our lives on,