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Ziv Raviv explained how he started his business ten years ago with a podcast, which paved the way for him to pursue coaching and online courses. After learning about LifterLMS, he expanded into creating over 300 courses in a variety of micro-niches, such as balloon art, the floral industry, children’s entertainers, relationships (Generous Marriage), and copywriting (Daily Cookie).

Ziv’s first course was just a Google Doc with unlisted YouTube videos. He clarified that by narrowing his focus so much, he was able to establish credibility and trust in close-knit groups, which produced unexpected outcomes, such as generating over $1 million from the balloon art specialty alone, which has just 3,000 members globally.

Additionally, he described how his earnings increased from $20k in his first year to $88k in his second, then to $277k, $377k, $430k (when he plateaued for a few years), $475k, and now to at least $540k in 2025. He eventually came to the realization that, although “niching sideways” into several businesses was effective, his greatest innovations came from discovering his area of expertise, which was instructing others.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a friend and one of my favorite people in the lifter LMS community. His name is Ziv Ravi. You can find [email protected] and also K media.co. And we’re gonna get into some really cool stuff you haven’t heard before today, a concept called Super Coaching.

Ziv and I were just chatting about it and I’m blown away and fascinated. Ziv is also a master of micro nicheing, and good niching is a big challenge with so many education entrepreneurs, or just entrepreneurs in general. And Ziv is a master at it, but we’re gonna get into all that. But first, welcome back on the show, Ziv.

Ziv Raviv: Hello, Chris. It’s such a, an amazing pleasure to connect here and to share this journey of of online business and educational businesses and being a, like an entrepreneur in this space. With you again, like this is the third time I’m here. I’m excited to share some new concept with the listeners.

I hope this will bring a lot of value to everyone. 

Chris Badgett: Before we get going, Ziv also has a podcast called Beyond Six Figures. So check that out. Add that to your next, listen after this one, let’s let’s just start high level Ziv. If somebody doesn’t know you you’ve done a lot of things and you’re, you’ve, you’re really focused on super coaching now and having a unified vision.

But what niches have you been in? What kinds of entrepreneurial activities have you done over, say, the past 10 years? 

Ziv Raviv: It’s actually 10 years since I launched my first podcast, and that podcast turned me into a cost creator and into into a coach. I remember my first course that I launched was actually with a Google Doc and a few unlisted videos on YouTube.

Later on I found Lifter, LMS and started to create multiple online courses. So I, I remember the second year of operation. As a podcaster, we were launching eight different courses in a very small micro niche of balloon art. There’s are people that are serving as balloon artists, as balloon decorators, as balloon entertainers, and they needed some education about the craft and about their business.

And so I launched eight courses on the second year. Since then, we’ve launched through Lyft, LMS. Way over 300 courses in many niches, including in the floral industry, in the kids entertainer industry. We had a bit of work in the relationship niche with a platform called Generous Marriage. We had a round of activities in the niche of copywriting with daily cookie.co.

And all of that, like going each time to a different micro niche and serving clients there, serving the niche with with free online courses and paid online courses and later on with coaching. All of that was something I did year after year to get to a point where I start to realize I need to start focusing, I need to start removing some of the activities and understand what is my system, what is my.

Where is my zone of genius? Where can I actually bring the biggest transformations? And that’s when I realized just a little bit after chat, GPT was starting, like Che GPT-3 0.5 started to be a thing. Copywriting as a service became something that is not as needed as before because it was just too easy.

And I realized in parallel that I wanna focus and that’s where super coaching was born. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s quite the journey. And if you feel like it, maybe just share some revenue numbers of how you’ve grown over the years and also, yeah. Really what people wonder sometimes is, there, especially like if you go back to your early self with the Google Doc and the unlisted videos, you don’t really know you’re gonna make it and you have a lot of self-doubt.

And what happened or why do you think it worked out for you? 

Ziv Raviv: So first of all I wanna say that. I wanna start with the numbers ’cause it’ll put everything in perspective. So the first year online as a content creator, we did 20, we did 20 k, that’s what we did, 20 2K. The second year we did something like 88 k.

Over the years we started to grow dramatically. I was interviewed on your show. The listeners can actually go and listen to it. When I was doing 277 K and then a year later or so, despite the Corona and everything, we were doing 377 K, which was already is a case study where people can listen to the different things we were doing.

We then go to 430 k. We got stuck at that for a couple of years and then we grew to 470 5K and this year we’re targeting and nothing can stop us now. Like we will probably do more than that, but at the very least we’re going to do 540 k. In 2025. So we grew over the years dramatically. We had to grow the team as well.

We had to change the way we do business. We had to let go of certain ideas like certain focus points that no longer served us to grow and to be impactful. So yeah that, that is like the context of the numbers. And, the idea that always led me in doing business, in attracting clients was the idea of microing.

And it’s the idea that people are so busy these days. They see so much content they don’t care about. Other things that are happening. They don’t wanna buy stuff that are not, that are, that is presented by strangers to them and so on and so forth. So it’s almost like the tribes, the different tribes of people are locked inside bubbles.

And the bubble is so thick that in order to pierce through the bubble, you need some, someone from within the bubble to introduce you to the tribe. In order to do that, you need to micro niche so that people will listen to you so that collaborations will make sense and people will agree to collaborate with you so that they will agree to be interviewed by you and so on.

So on our first micro niche, we just recently reached a total income of $1 million. All from people that are making a living, from taking balloons and putting some air into them and tying them and making, events look good. And we’ve managed to, and it’s such a small micro niche. These are like 3000 people throughout the world.

Those 3000 people have like I’m very humbled to say that they have paid us a million dollars, a little bit more than a million dollars over the years. For their education and for their services and for their coaching and so on. And and we are continuing to grow. But in, at the beginning it was micro nicheing sideways, so from one micro niche sideways to another micro niches that is similar.

And these days we’re starting to niche up. 

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And congrats on the success with the balloon artists. And if, correct me if I’m wrong. But it’s, I know you yourself are a balloon artist, and you also have a niche in florist. Do you, have you been a florist? 

Ziv Raviv: Actually I did not I was never a florist.

The first few niches that I chose, micro niches that. I chose to do to produce a podcast. Salon online courses. In that micro niche. Those were things related to my passions. Over the years, I started to do this more professionally. I would choose a micro niche. I did this in nine different micro niches, right?

So I would choose a micro niche that I think I, I could provide some service to that. I think I have some passion in that condition. Sometimes I found out that I don’t, and I failed and I stopped. Like I turned off the shelters some say on that podcast because I just couldn’t really connect with the people in a way that would yield results fast enough.

But on others, I went in professionally, right? So with the floes industry I don’t have any experience with flowers. I actually I don’t know the names of the flowers. It’s really bad. I know marketing and I know business, so I You’re entrepreneurs, 

Chris Badgett: right? 

Ziv Raviv: Yes. 

Chris Badgett: And you’re an entrepreneur and a lot of your current coaching clients are entrepreneurs.

Is that right? 

Ziv Raviv: Yes. And you know what one client led to another client as, as often that happens. And I started to serve florist people. I had clients that were florist. And they were such cool people. They were really good in business. They didn’t need to kind apologize. When people ask a balloon decorate or What do you do?

And they say the in balloons they kind ask you, yeah, but what do you really do? But what? It’s like not a ho it’s a hobby. It’s a hustle. Even though there are people doing a million dollar a year from Baco, but. They always felt like they need to defend themselves.

Florists don’t need to defend themselves. They know what they’re doing. They’re running successful businesses with TE teams and with clients and with locations and multiple locations. And so I decided to go into it professionally. And I partnered with another coach that, that I started to serve his business and his school and I even turned his entire school into a lifter LMS school as a part of our work together.

And so over the years I had. Niches where I went in and I succeeded to bring myself to a point where I have coaching clients in them and on some I stride. I saw that I didn’t like what I’m seeing and I stepped back. 

Chris Badgett: I love seeing your growth and just journey over the years and where you are now, like when somebody kind of compounds and keeps improving and being curious and.

Creating value in the world. That’s awesome to see. And now you’re at super coaching as a concept. Can you explain how you came to that and what it is and how you do it? 

Ziv Raviv: Super coaching is the concept of coaching plus benefits, which means that you add some value to the client in some way, shape or form.

And over the years I have. Added a lot of value to my clients beyond education. I always included a lot of free education for my clients, but I’m talking about something even more than education, which is in the trenches working with the client in order to help them with other problems they have. So one of the first problems I solved for my coaching clients was.

Was through a company called Design Picker. They, or even these days, they offer unlimited designs for a flat feed. They’re amazing. I was coached personally by Rasper for a while, and I adore what they do. I, and I used their service to serve my clients, so my clients would get free designs.

For quite a while over the years, I started to hire my own graphic designers, and then I needed a lot of website fixes. So I would hire a website developer on WordPress to fix a lot of things. And then they started to fix things for my clients. And then they started to build, websites for my clients from scratch.

And then we created a copywriting company and a team. Once I decided I wanna go all in with super coaching the copywriting team became another resource of my coaching clients. So at some point, actually, we actually accidentally turned into a marketing agency where the clients come to me about eight 70% of them, they come to me when they look for a coach and they found out, they find out that they have.

Way more than like that. I give, I, I give them way more than just the coaching. So we do all of their designs. We control the websites, we build them, we create sales campaigns, advertising campaigns, everything. And some of them come to me because they heard about the transformations. They don’t care if I will call myself a coach, or I will call myself A-A-C-M-O-A fractional CMO, or if I, they don’t even care if I have a title.

All they care about. Is they know someone that I helped them grow by 20 to 50% in a year. And for seven figure business, that’s a lot of money to grow by 20 to 50%. So they heard about that, they came to me and then they received like this concept. So super coaching is. It’s a different type of a relationship, and it’s a very deep relationship.

It’s a very close relationship. Some of my clients, I meet them I kid you note, I meet them four to five times a week, so we have a one-on-one session, and then I make myself available for four times a week, sometimes five times a week on a group session level. So pretty much every day almost they have an opportunity to show up and ask a question.

And remind me about something they needed and ask me about some design they were waiting for, or some bug they need fixing or some campaign they need me to look at. And the result of it is that I am a little bit of a business coach and a little bit of an implementation coach, and a little bit of a marketing coach, and a little bit of.

Of of like a relationship coach and the holistic approach, coach, but I will be whatever the client needs in order to get them to where they wanna go. 

Chris Badgett: Wow. That is so cool. What from on the coaching aspect what are some of the common challenges you help people work through to unlock growth?

And I, you mentioned a lot of things. It could be a relationship, it could be a marketing challenge, it could be a technical challenge. Do you see any patterns or themes that are common across your clients? 

Ziv Raviv: We, the more we work with like over time with our clients, the more we see them get to the point where they have new problems to solve.

So I’m actually really interested in this idea where businesses actually have different stages in their in their growth. And a lot of time they struggle with they struggle with identifying what to focus on, right? So they think that they have many problems and many times the first problem that they think they have is we don’t have enough leads, or we don’t have enough sales.

That’s what almost all clients think. That is the main problem, but they actually, that the lead problem is not a problem that you need to solve. Like it’s actually a temporary problem. Believe it or not. Your lead problem is a temporary problem. Your growth as a business, that’s an infinite problem.

You will always want to worry about that. The difference between infinite problems and finite problems, is it infinite problems. You need to think about them. In an annual level, in a quarter level, you level, you need people responsible for that problem, right? And you need to monitor that problem forever.

But if like you have a Jessica and Jessica decided to resign and she’s a part of your team, that’s not an hiring problem. That’s Jessica problem. It’s a very temporary problem that you just need to fix. You just need to replace Jessica. So when you know that the problem is actually temporary, you just need to put in the efforts, you need to trust the process and put in the efforts and fix it.

So a lot of people, they will think they have a lead problem or a sales problem, but actually they just need to understand that it’s a fixable problem. And if they put in the efforts, they will be able to solve that problem. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I wanna ask like, how you developed as with your coaching skills, and part of me knows that you’re just a natural, like you’ve been making people smile, laugh, reading the room, big picture, creative problem solving guy your whole life.

But how do you beco, how does one or anyone become a better coach? 

Ziv Raviv: I think you. You there, there’s a lot of way to improve in coaching and in business and in, and it’s not. First you need to understand that it’s not an easy process. It’s, there’s a lot of skills involved and you need to work on them with the passion.

Of a violinist or pianist that, that really practice for hours. So one of the things that truly makes me better as a coach is just the fact that I work a lot. Yeah. I just, I’m putting in the reps, I’ve been doing I’ve been fully booked for many years. I talk about that in my book.

I, I’ve been doing this week. I’ve been doing 12 meetings with cl coaching clients, 12 meetings a day every day. It’s just something that I put in that’s a lot of hours of work and I didn’t always do that. I took a couple of years where I only worked for three days a week and I walked, I battled through burnout and I.

I’m glad to say I’m now on the other side and I have my energy now back to do like more meetings like that, but but one of the best ways to. Grow as a coach and become better a coach is just to put in the reps. There are many books to list to read about coaching that are amazing. There are many books about business and entrepreneurship that are amazing.

There are many podcasts like lifter LMSs, LMS Cast podcasts which is really a great way to, to be open for ideas that way. And to learn about different educational and entrepreneurs. So I think that I’ve done my share of listening to clients of helping them.

I’ve done my share of being in business myself and building businesses myself and launching things. I’ve done a lot of webinars and a lot of online courses and a lot of group programs. I launched four different mobile apps so when you put in a lot of work in wraps, you can get better quite fast.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned learning from books. You have a book, the Fully Booked Coach. Can you tell us what that’s about and what inspired you? To write it.

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Ziv Raviv: this is a work of love that took a good two years to fully work on and polish and edit and proof and launch. This year we’ve launched the book and it actually, shares my systems completely, openly how I coach, how I, what type of tools I actually use on, on, on a day-to-day basis. And what’s my philosophy in business in getting coaching clients that will stick around. So it’s all about microing, where you actually get people to listen to you, to hear you, to respect you, to trust you, to work with you.

And it’s and in order to do that. You choose a micro niche and you go in and you listen to what they need, and you create some online courses for them for free, and you create some online courses for them for that they can buy. And you do webinars like you do the whole thing and you can do it differently from one micro niche to another.

Based on where they congregate and this whole system is detailed in the book. And after doing that so many times it was, it just was clear to me that this is like a system. At some point I got into a new micro niche and I detailed everything. Like I, I did it with transparency with meetings online and whatnot, and within 90 days.

I was able to secure a coaching client in a totally new micro niche, right? So it’s actually if you know how to micro niche and you put in the work, you can find clients relatively fast as long as you’re bringing value and into that micro niche. The second concept that I talk about in the book is about super coaching, which is how to.

Basically, in order to be fully booked, you just need one thing. You don’t need to be a super coach. You don’t need to provide more than just coaching. They’re purists coaching coaches, and they’re amazing. They’re really good. They provide a lot of value. They solve problems on the call. They listen.

I accountability. It’s great to be a purist coach. I’m more in the trenches. Guy, type of a guy I want to be a more meaningful part of a relationship with my client. And I chose super coaching, but either way, the most important part is that they stay around long enough. Yeah. As soon as people stick around long enough with you, you will become fully booked at some point.

So the concept of how do you provide coaching services that are so fun? And meaningful and so impactful and so transformational. I wanted to document all of the ways to do that in the book based on my experience. And so the book gives you both of these tools, the microing and the super coaching in order to get you to the point where you’re fully booked.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. Go check out the fully Booked Coached book. I’m sure that’s on Amazon. 

Ziv Raviv: It 

Chris Badgett: is, yeah. Let’s double click again on Micro Nicheing. What do you say to somebody, particularly creative entrepreneur people? They tend to have a lot of different interests and maybe what they get paid for in their day job.

There’s some niche they’re in, there’s some hobby niche they love. There’s like maybe a fitness journey they’re on and a certain type of fitness or like they’re into some kind of. Diet nutrition thing or something. How does one choose a micro niche when they’re a polymath or have a lot of different interests and subject matter expertise?

Ziv Raviv: A lot of times saying no to some of those ideas is way more important than than which one you chose because you actually. It’s better for you if you start with one and and put in certain amount of work to assess if this is the right one for you. So I have these three tests that I ask myself in advance before I go into a micro niche.

I ask myself, how easy will it be to find people for for interviews on a podcast or for collaboration on YouTube or for collaboration of, on an ebook or on a blog? So my, so the first question I ask myself is, how easy will it be to find someone the second and get them to collaborate? The second question is, will they brag about it?

So I call this brag ability. And the third question is will they collaborate on helping me sell something? Or will they buy something for me? And they call this the sellability test. So Findability, breakability, and sellability, these three tests initially helped me realize if it’s a good micro niche or not.

I can give you an example of where I failed. So I chose to create a podcast called. Plumbing and money Life. Plumbing and money life, yeah. It’s a show for plumbers to help them with their money. And I did some research about how to help them with their Google ads.

I did some research about how to help them locally with Facebook ads. I was very proficient with both of these tools. I had a copyright opportunity. 

Chris Badgett: I’m getting sold on it right now. There’s plumbers everywhere. They need help. There’s 

Ziv Raviv: what they need help. What, so I went in all, all in, and I checked my numbers.

There were enough. There were enough plumbers to, there were more plumbers in the world than balloon artists. So good for me. I’m getting into bigger niches now, and I contacted 1000 people and one person agreed to be on the show and it was interviewed on the show. I realized that through the responses as they said no to me, many times, many of them just ignored.

But those that said no. Taught me that this is a very shy audience, of course I’m biased. I only talked with a thousand of them. I only was in touch with a thousand of them. I talked with a few of them. Obviously there’s a small number bias, but basically I realized it’s not a good match.

When I was under Facebook groups trying to connect, trying to let to get into the head, trying to meet more people, I could not. Ignore the fact that my nose is imagining the smell of what they’re doing because they were sharing pictures or look it, I fixed this and I fixed that, and they were so happy.

Yeah. And I started to realize I’m not a good fit for them. I’m not feeling comfortable in, in, in the in, in where they congregate, where they show me those pictures of tulips. So I decided to stop on that. I thought it was easy to find them. I realized they do not wanna be on a show and be featured, right?

And I stepped away and on other niches I was able to, get different results and grow. So those three tests are a good starting point. I’ll give you one more. Quick tip for anyone listening, go into sales Navigator on LinkedIn. It’s worth 80 bucks of your money just one month.

Do some research with the proper tool and or use the, other tools for research. It doesn’t matter, HPT, whatever, but find a micro niche where you can actually find people and be able to contact them through email or message. And you want a micro niche that has about three to 20,000 people.

If there’s more than 20,000 people, it’ll be harder to get them to to actually, respond to you because they’re too busy. Potentially, if there are less than 3000 people, it might be too small to actually make you a living and find enough people. But think about this way. You only need 50 of them to agree to collaborate in a year.

50 people. That’s all want that. 50 people are standing. Be that, that you collaborate with, that you wanna help them and provide them value for free with the podcast interview. That’s all that is standing between you and starting a business that is a serious coaching or educational business.

So you want to find a niche that people re, that you will be able to find those 50 people relatively efficiently. 

Chris Badgett: What do you, what’s your perspective on like the education entrepreneur niche? I find it somewhat challenging. This is my niche in the sense that we make software in this niche, but yeah.

There’s a lot of different types of creators out there. There’s a lot of different types of online education. They’re spread out all over the world. They can’t they’re if you go to LinkedIn, there’s no education entrepreneur like group or as like a job byline. So like within the education entrepreneurs, the creators, like what do you see as a really cool micro niche?

Ziv Raviv: That’s a great question. I want, I wanna flip this question just to Yeah. To understand. It’s even better. Would you like to play a game where. We look into lifter LMS as a company that, that micro niches and consider micro niches for you, or would you like me to, would you like to play a game where I, as a coach, I’m thinking about how to find, educational cost creators.

Are specific enough that I can maybe go into a micro, like who do you want?

Chris Badgett: I, I think the first one. So if you look at lifter LMS, like as an example people like, yeah, let’s talk people like you who are subject matter experts, creators, content creators, coaches niche audience, is an awesome group of people.

In many ways, lifter was built like this has always been our core customer, but a lot of other people show up with like different types of e-learning situations and whatnot. And that’s fine. But I’ve always struggled with niching for E-learning or LMS or course creators and coaches and stuff.

’cause I think course creators and coaches is too big. I think I’m outside that 20,000. Guard. 

Ziv Raviv: You are. You are, yeah. A lot of time. It’s okay to micro niche by solving one problem. Yeah. Even on a bigger group, right? So when I say three to 20,000, that’s for someone that. Doesn’t know yet, what are they going to solve necessarily.

They’re willing to listen and adapt and that’s lift LMS has a proven solution and it’s solves one specific problem. Unfortunately there’s also competition, right? And I think that ai, the AI era. Is forcing you to create a new strategy for Lifter lms? That’s what I think.

So it’s almost I don’t remember, was it some Altman said that at some point AI will get to such a level of efficiency of it. It’ll be embedded with so many things in our lives. And that it will be transparent. You will not feel the technology right. You will just experience that everything is easier for you.

And to some degree, I think that’s what Lifter LMS has done for me now in my business. We don’t treat lifter. LMS is something that we need to think about. It’s invisible. It’s a tool that we use when we need to train new people, when we need to train. My, our clients teams, when our clients are in the educational world and they need to sell online courses and to sell memberships, right?

So it’s a tool that we just assume it’s there for us and we go in and we use it. And it’s like driving a car. You don’t think about the engine, you don’t think about the wheels. You just go in and you drive it, right? So I think that, your approach to selling lifter LMS has to change as well to be to help people see that it’s actually getting more and more transparent.

And you see a lot of companies are doing this thing where, for example, Zael you go into Zael, there’s a bot. You tell it what you want to automate, it shows you, oh, so you mean this, and this is the steps of the automation. You go into active campaign. You write an email. You immediately have a chat bot that says, would you like to expand this, like campaign to additional things.

You can chat with it and it’ll literally create. Some follow up based on automation and triggers and tags for you. And there’s other platforms that give you like more and more of these feelings where the technology is managing itself to some degree. So obviously I would love it if lift LMSs wins the race and releases a lot of really cool.

Features like that and I think that’s very important for people. Back to the question about niching. I think I think that there’s a lot of opportunities, a lot of examples I would consider for for you Chris and for Lyft. The first one is actually business coaches. Yeah. So business coaches often.

Need lifting LMS as one of the tools in their tool belt. Some people need a wrench. We need a an LMS. We need it for our clients. We need it for our teams. We need it for our niches, right? For our micro niches. That I’ll give you an example from the Beyond six Figure Podcast.

This podcast. It is a podcast for business coaches, right? We contact business coaches, we contact book authors that write books about business and about coaching. We contact podcasters like Johnny Duma and Jo Jordan Harbinger. Were on the show. We contact Walker, right? Like the people that are in the trenches.

We were able to get. 45 people and by the end of next week it’ll be 52 people. It’s like very fast. 52 interviews all scheduled. For the most part, they’re already recorded in 12 weeks. Wow. So people are saying, yes, I want to be on your show very fast. And so we’re building relationships with new people.

Business coaches, for the most part, they have. Problems that they need to solve. They wanna be featured. And if you look at the numbers, like how many of them say Yes, I wanna be on the show in comparison to those palumbo be before such a completely different experience. Like back then I worked for three months, I got one, an interview, and now with this one in three months, I got a year of content that will be scheduled.

For me, and it’s like in the pipelines, and I don’t have to worry about it. And now I’m starting to think about how to collaborate with these people and how to help them. And help them and and ask for the help as well. So I think that if you with Lyft, MS would do something like a secondary podcast maybe, or just leveraging your existing platforms.

That could be an example where people are responding very fast. I can imagine a situation where at the end of an interview you tell people. Hey, you are qualified for this package. If you ever choose to try us out, or we have a service where we will migrate your course from this platform to this platform.

Some white label thing or whatever. Here’s 90% discount on the white label thing. We’ll move you into Lyft, LMS, literally for free or so on. So that’s just one example of of Microing that will be relatively easy based on my experience. Another way to look at it is to. Go into places where you didn’t go before.

So I think that you do need to be on LinkedIn. You need to be loud on LinkedIn. I think you need to even consider the younger generations gen Zs 20 to 27, a type of entrepreneurs. Educate them when they’re young, on TikTok and on vertical videos. So I would definitely put in some work on that type of a front.

What do you think how much of this is like stuff that you considered or, 

Chris Badgett: I love it. I’ve always loved business coaching. It’s one of the ones that I think resonates the most with me simply because. I’m a business guy, I’m an entrepreneur, so I’m and I’ve been in it a long time and I’ve had business coaches and had amazing experiences and stuff.

When you think about the three mega niches like health, wealth, and relationships, so there’s business coaches, there’s life coaches, there’s health coaches, those are all more micro niche and, yeah you’ve triggered like a pa you’ve reminded me the passion I’ve always had for business coaching and I call it, our market, the education entrepreneurs, but the word entrepreneurs in there, which is like business, and a health coach can be an education entrepreneur of their own, but they’re not necessarily helping other entrepreneurs.

And I have always probably very similar to you, which is why we resonate, is I like hanging out with other entrepreneurs. We think differently. We’re a small percentage of the population, we’re in that we’re in our bubbles, different entrepreneur bubbles and yeah, it’s, yeah. I appreciate what you’re saying and I see how you’re a great coach.

’cause you’re like lasering in and just on a podcast episode, it’s awesome. Part ano, another question I would ask you where I think people get mixed up, and these are just a bunch of business terms, but there’s like niche. There’s your customer avatar, your ideal customer profile, your target market segments and all this stuff.

I think people get a little overwhelmed with all the slicing and dicing. I think you’ve done a good job with saying Hey, just focus on the micro niche, right? And Sure. Within that you probably have the ideal floris shop owner. That’s like a perfect fit. And that’s like your avatar.

And like for a lifter, one of the things that’s always a challenge not with you because you’re both, you’re also, you’re an educator, but you’re also an awesome WordPress website builder. But we have a split audience of agencies, I build sites for clients, or I’m building this site for me and my niche and my passion and stuff like that.

And some people are both like you. But I don’t know if you have any comments on that. Just like the, I see a lot of people get trapped in who is my customer avatar or what’s my niche? Or those just. The, either create a ational person or somebody you’ve actually worked with or earlier version of yourself.

There’s just so much here that I think it gets overwhelming sometimes. 

Ziv Raviv: I think that Microing actually helps you make your avatar a, a group of real people. And I think it’s way more efficient. You’re 

Chris Badgett: guessing, you’re not guessing. It’s like this is, yeah. Yeah. 

Ziv Raviv: It’s a person you met.

It’s a person you talked to. Yeah. So instead of having this really fun and clever exercise where you answer questions based on a fix person. You have that perfect person guide you through every decision you make. That’s something I never really resonated with on a personal level. I wanted real people to talk to me.

And these days with ai, you get AI to answer the questions for you and then you are trying to convince like to you serve a client and your avatar, which is completely fictious. That was designed by a machine for you based on the stuff that it’s read. There’s zero soul in it.

PE people buy things from people. Yeah. From humans. And they buy it based on their own problems, based on things they want. And if you are fixing theoretical problems, you are, it’s going to be very hard to get people to notice you. It’s not going to come up. Authentic. It’s going to be really frustrating.

So I think that, I think it’s really important to, to talk with people. And when you micro niche and you start to collaborate with thought leaders in that micro niche you realize what are the problems. And you have to be curious to ask the questions and to find what they want to you to solve.

And that over time helps you. Realize what they need and if you really want in desire to serve, if you are in servitude of a group of people, of a tribe, of a micro niche, then you would try to solve all of their problems. Really? Yeah. As I’ll tell you what they 

Chris Badgett: are, right? Like you don’t have to guess.

Ziv Raviv: Yeah. And then you will try to solve their small problems and you will try to solve their bigger problems and you’ll try to solve the biggest problems. At some point you’ll notice which of those problems actually. Is the most impactful, transformational problem that you are really good at solving, and that’s what you take into the Google ads or the Facebook ads on or to the scaling, bit of, let’s do this on other micro issues and so on.

I think if you ask yourself I will ask you instead of saying, who do you think is more influential in their ecosystem, the WordPress developer. That if they know lift LMS, so well then they could refer their clients to lift LMS or the business coaches that that guide clients through decisions including potentially the decision to.

Launch online courses or membership sites. So what do you think which one, the developer or the coach, which one do you think is like their world is respected a little bit higher than the other one? 

Chris Badgett: That’s a tough question for me. And the reason why it is because it just happened organically where I was like.

Just another freelancer building websites for clients. But now, like the whole, like WordPress community and a lot of agencies and stuff, I’m like a, I’m known and like wherever I go, like on social media WordPress is with me, and and it’s like effortless. But for business coaches, I also have a lot of VA value to add and.

Just for whatever reason, I would say the website building folks, the technologists, whether they’re a developer or a person like me who just puts plugins and themes together to solve business problems, those type of people have always just resonated easily. But I see the opportunity with, the coaching industry and.

All of that as well. So it’s not the right answer, but I feel like both are good. I’m just saying for whatever reason the website builders, I call them WordPress professionals, that tribe I just naturally fit, or I grew up inside the bubble, so I’m like already there, in the micro niche.

Yeah, because I’ve been doing this since 2008 with WordPress. But I’ve also been an entrepreneur that whole time and interacting with other entrepreneurs and business coaches and getting help and going to masterminds and taking courses and all that stuff too. 

Ziv Raviv: I think in both cases you have a lot of value that you bring to the table.

Like with the WordPress WordPress professionals. You speak the language, obviously you. It’s the easier solution in a way. But the business coaches, which is why it’s 

Chris Badgett: Like you starting with the balloon artist. ’cause you Yeah, you did a lot of that and you were already in the bubble, right?

Yeah. Hey guys. Yeah. 

Ziv Raviv: So that’s like the easy solution the low hanging foot in a way, which I think you already. Maybe even exhausted to some degree. ’cause it’s already there. You actually can manage the maintain your reputation with a couple of events a year with so some not.

It’s not a lot of efforts to just maintain it so your team can actually maintain that for you in a way. I think that business coaches, you have a lot of value to I’ve learned so much from just connecting with you. I did a strategy session with you a while back, and that strategy session made me a better coach.

It just opened me to the way you look at things and it inspired me to dramatically, I actually talk about it in, in the book. Awesome. So it’s really something that you can bring value to other business coaches and I think. I think these days they are, they’re very influential on their clients.

So I think that their ward is considered like they, they take their ward, they take the ward a lot they list. So both of them are mavens, right? Yeah. But I think that it’s time to maybe try a new group of mavens. To 

Chris Badgett: leave the nest. Yeah, that’s yeah. That’s awesome, Ziv. That’s awesome.

I wanted to interview you, but I also got a coaching session. 

Ziv Raviv: This was fun. 

Chris Badgett: That’s Ziv, Ravi. Go get his book the Fully Booked coach. You can find that on Amazon. So check that out beyond Six Figures podcast. About how many episodes are out as of now? 

Ziv Raviv: Right now it is 15. Okay. And they’re going live every week.

And and it’s been a tremendous opportunity to create this resource for the industry because if you are a business coach and you’re listening to this, you get. A lot of ideas about different business coaches in different niches and their different hurdles and their different ideas and modalities and the money that they make, the amount of clients like we’re such a group of privileged people.

We business coaches is such an amazing business model to be a business coach because you only need about 10 people, or 15 people, or 20 clients, that’s it, 20 clients and you are really doing well. In your life in, like in, in creating results for people in reputation and so on. And if you get there to your fully booked and then you only need to replace maybe three clients a year.

As a business owner, how many sales scores and sales you need to bring in every year, every month, every week. A business coach only needs to be active enough to replace three or five clients. If it’s, if they’re good, they’ll need to replace three or five clients a year, and that’s not so hard.

So you can actually get to become fully booked. Relatively fast in a year or in 18 months or so. If you follow the process in the book, and I think if you are listening to this and you are a a business coach or an educational entrepreneur that also want to do business coaching, and reach out to me on zero.com or say hi on beyond six figures and we’ll be happy to to interview you.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s ziv reiv ziv reiv.com. Go get the book. Thanks for coming back on the show, Ziv. We’re gonna have to do this again. Let’s not wait three years. We’re gonna have to increase the cadence maybe once a year. I would love that. 

Ziv Raviv: Would love that. 

Chris Badgett: But thank you for coming. We really appreciate it.

Ziv Raviv: Thank you, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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In his LMScast solo episode, Chris Badgett discusses the new safeguards in LifterLMS 9.0 and delves further into the significance of WordPress LMS website security.

He describes how tools like Akismet spam detection, sophisticated CAPTCHA integrations with Cloudflare Turnstile and Google reCAPTCHA, and IP blocking for repeatedly unsuccessful checkouts help guard against bots and fraudulent activities. By implementing secured media, Chris also resolves a persistent WordPress problem with the Media Library, guaranteeing that only enrolled students can access course materials and downloads.

He highlights effective practices, including employing technologies like Vimeo’s domain limitation for video security, depending on safe hosting with backups, evaluating admin accounts, and enforcing strong passwords.

Chris emphasizes that LifterLMS has always placed a high priority on protecting course developers, their users, and their intellectual property going one step further with version 9.0 while understanding the necessity to strike a balance between security and user experience.

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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.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. Today I’m joined by a special guest and it’s just me. I haven’t done a solo episode in a while. My name’s Chris Badgett. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Lifter LMS and host of the LMS CAST Podcast. Today we’re gonna do an episode about. WordPress websites and security, particularly in the learning management system niche.

So recently Lifter LMS released a new version, a major version, which is called Lifter, LMS 9.0, and it has a lot of new security features in it. And I wanted to discuss security with you because it’s helpful to understand and get into the details. Security, what it is, how it works, what it’s preventing, and so on.

So some of the great things about Lifter LMS 9.0 there’s so many things security related, but just to go through them the first is that we now have a setting you can turn on to block IP addresses that have 10 failed checkouts in 15 minutes. And basically what that does. Is that prevents bots on the internet or scammers from essentially trying to create free accounts or use stolen credit cards or fraudulent credit cards to test them on your website to see if they can find one that works.

So the reality of the internet is there is a lot of. Scammers, bots that are trying to get access to your website. There’s probably actually a lot more of it going on all the time than you realize. But the truth is WordPress is actually a very secure platform. LifterLMS is known as the most secure learning management system because since day one. Which is over 12 years ago, we’ve always been focused on security.

And protecting the users of lifter LMS, but also your users. Users. So we’ve implemented from day one the best security practices and we have continuously improved as time goes on, making things more secure, adapting to new issues of the time. So on. When someone tries to, check out too many times in a row, it’s not a real transaction and lifter LMS will stop that and block their IP address temporarily.

So if somebody made a honest to goodness mistake and, entered 10 different credit cards of their own trying to make it work, they are gonna be able to get back in, but they’re gonna be locked out for a while. And most of the stuff that is gonna block is actual fraudulent activity.

And if you don’t know what a IP address is, it’s just a location on the internet where somebody is trying to access your website from. So your router, your wifi, has a specific IP address or a location that you are connecting from. So if a spammer is at home. Trying to test credit cards on your website, they’re gonna get blocked.

Anybody in that home is not going to be able to keep doing what they’re doing. And the reality is that most of that is actually bots or computer programs that are running and, trying to test hundreds or even thousands or tens of thousands of cards on a schedule. So it will shut those.

Fraudsters, scammers, and scammers down in their tracks. The other thing we implemented in lifter LMS 9.0 is the most advanced capture protection currently available. So there’s two types of the main tools that you can integrate with for free to create a kind of a login or checkout. Or registration blocker if somebody is not a legitimate human or real user of your site.

Those two integrations that we’ve added natively into the free version of LifterLMS one is called Recapture and the other is called Turnstile by CloudFlare. And basically what these technologies do, you basically sign up for free, you get an API key. You put it on your site and through the lifter LMS settings.

And what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna use the advanced capture technology that those companies have to essentially score your user’s behavior on your website. And if anything looks out of line like it’s a bot that’s like clicking on a million things at once. Or, too many like rapid actions all at once.

It’s not really a human activity and there’s a lot more that goes into scoring than just that. But just as an example it will stop those people from being able to register or log in or in some way get into your site when they’re not a legitimate user. And it’s likely, again, not a person, it is likely a computer program.

That a spammer or a scammer is using to try to get into your website. So LifterLMS is implemented the most advanced capture technology currently available for free to Protect You, and we have resources on our website that show you how to set it up. It’s really just a couple things you have to copy and paste and turn on, and you’re good to go and you have dramatically improved the security and protection of your website.

We also did a native deeper integration with Akismet, which is also an anti-spam solution that you can turn on to prevent spammers from registering and commenting and doing things on your website that you don’t want ’em. There to do. So Smit has been around WordPress for a really long time. I highly recommend it.

It’s a great tool. You can get started for free with that as well. Again, the integration of that is built for free into the core free version of Lifter LMS. Now, let’s talk about a different aspect of security. Let’s talk about your intellectual property, your content, your media. So lifter, LMS as if you’ve been using our learning management system, you know you have to enroll in a course or a membership, and maybe you have to pay to enroll or maybe it’s free.

But either way, you have to become a, a user of the site that is allowed or granted access to specific course content or other membership protected content on your website. That whole user system protects your intellectual property from just being public on the internet. And for a lot of people, they’re charging for access to their courses and memberships with Lyft or LMS, and it might not be lifetime access.

Maybe you have to pay a monthly fee or you sign up for an annual membership. There’s a million different pricing models you can implement, but in terms of protecting your intellectual property. WordPress has had a challenge for a long time where the way that it handles media, like in the WordPress Media Library, which you’ve probably heard of those media files are actually public on the internet, and a lot of people don’t realize that.

If you’re in a course, if you’re a course creator. And you’re adding a PDF or a PowerPoint presentation, or an audio file or a download of some kind to a lesson that’s actually publicly available in the media library, which ha, which means the way that it’s publicly available, unless you really get into the guts of WordPress.

You may not have realized that, but the WordPress Media Library, every file in there, every image. Every PDF, everything has a URL associated with it that is public to the whole internet. So LifterLMS has solved this problem so that if you add media inside of a course. Or membership protected areas you can select which course or membership someone needs to be actively enrolled in.

In order for that content to display on the screen. So basically we have solved the issue that WordPress has had for a very long time about the media library being public, and we don’t fault WordPress for that. It started as a blogging platform. So when people would add images to a blog post, there was no reason to protect that image file and it was just publicly available all over the internet.

So if you’ve ever used Google search and done an image search, a lot of times you’re just surfacing media files from the WordPress media Library, which is not protected by default. But Lifter, LMS has solved that with protected media. We have other innovations as well. Where, when you’re creating a course, let’s say you’re creating a quiz and you’re putting images into the quiz questions, all that stuff is automatically protected outside of the WordPress media library.

So the only the enrolled students in that specific course or membership can see that particular media. So we’ve given you both smart media protection that’s happening, where it should be at a global level. Also giving you the ability to restrict content anywhere on your website to specific courses and memberships.

And by content media files. So that’s something you should know about how the WordPress Media Library works, and it’s always been important to us to help course creators, coaches, education entrepreneurs, school administrators. Protect their media assets. So we’ve locked that down to the maximum ability that you can, and there’s a lot more in lifter LMS 9.0, but I just wanted to highlight some of the top security innovations there.

And also just do a solo episode around security. Why it matters, what it is, how it works, why is it important, so for example. Lifter, LMS has a password strength setting that you can choose to make super strong, make it medium strength, or make it weak. Now, the, one of the most important things about website security is having particularly a site that has a lot of users on it, not just you as a WordPress administrator.

Or a couple people that work on the site. But if you have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of users, every user account, ideally in a perfect world, would have a very strong random 16 character password that’s only ever used on that one website. It’s not also that person’s.

Bank account login or email account login or social media account login. Strong passwords are really important, and if you want to enforce that on your site, lifter, LMS, because people are creating accounts as they enroll in courses and memberships. They are, they’re essentially creating a user, a WordPress user on your website with a login.

So you can enforce that, Hey, you really need to have a strong password. Now, keep in mind that there’s also a concept of permissions. So in WordPress there’s a lot of different user roles, like the person who can do everything. The site owner is called the administrator, but there’s actually several other default roles like editors and authors and subscribers and so on.

In default, WordPress Lifter, LMS has roles too, the LMS manager, the student the instructor and these different levels have different per permissions. So all I’m trying to say here is even though your student has the lowest levels of permissions, ’cause they’re just a user that can log in and consume their course or membership content.

That doesn’t mean that if their pass, if their account got compromised, that somebody could come in and, start changing plugins or looking, doing, changing the website and stuff like that. The permissions are already way reduced to the necessary permissions for that user role. But even still a student is entitled to their, privacy and security. So even if you know your community of students or learners or clients are not security experts, you can still enforce a stronger level of security by using strong passwords. Now, if you’ve been on the internet for a while. Like myself, with over 15 years of being a power user, I probably have something like 3000 accounts in different apps and websites and logins and things, stores, whatever, on the internet.

Because of that, I use a password manager. I particularly like one password. And what that allows me to do is I don’t have to remember all my. Super strong, at least 16 character random passwords. My password manager, which has its own levels of security on it allows me to quickly create new logins that are always unique, always strong, and I can always log in from all my devices, from my phone, my laptop, my desktop, and so on.

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Chris Badgett: So if you’re old school, like we all were one day, you might’ve kept us. Spreadsheet, or even before that, you would write ’em down on a piece of paper, right? And then as you start getting more passwords, you start creating a spreadsheet, and then ultimately you graduate to using a password manager. And your whole world just gets so much easier, and you’re being a much more secure citizen of the internet by not reusing passwords, by always using strong passwords.

So I highly recommend that you start using a password manager. Like One Password or LastPass, and there’s some other ones out there. The other thing when it comes to security is you should always look at your users on your website. And particularly there’s a filter for who are all the administrator users on my website.

And when you look at that, you can see. Okay, there’s me, there’s a freelancer I work with, there’s my business partner and so on. But what happens over time with some people is, particularly if you are hiring out a lot of different people to work on your website, is you start handing out administrator passwords and they just exist on your site.

And maybe it wasn’t even. The business owner of who you were working with, it was a team member who worked there, maybe they’re not working there anymore, and so on. So it’s always good to review the administrators on your website. And if there’s anybody on there that you know is probably a great person but doesn’t need to be on there anymore go ahead and delete them, delete that user off the site.

Pro tip, when you delete a user, you can assign all their content to yourself or somebody else. You definitely want to do that. If that person was, creating content on your website and WordPress prompts you with how to do that. Another thing you can do is you can just reduce somebody’s role from being an administrator to being a subscriber.

So if somebody comes back, a freelancer you worked with, and they’re like, Hey. Let’s do another project together, and it’s been a year since we’ve worked together. You still have them as that lowest permission level as a subscriber, and you can just move ’em back up to administrator. Obviously, the most secure thing you could do is just delete that user and when you work with somebody, again, create a new admin user or whatever role user you need for them to work on your website.

Another part of security is having backups. So if something goes wrong, you need to be able to revert your site to basically restore your database and files. Now there are a lot of WordPress plugins that can help with things like backups, but the reality is, particularly in the WordPress learning management system, niches.

This is like table stakes for good hosting. So you should always have a good web host that is doing daily backups, even monitoring your site for anything that looks off or things not loading or the site is down. And you should also always have a web host that if there is an issue, even if you’re not a developer, all you have to do is call or send an email.

They can fix your site or restore it for you. So when you’re selecting web hosting, I highly recommend the middle to upper tier. Which does mean it’s more expensive. It’s gonna come with more of these security features built in. Blocking bad traffic for you so that you don’t have to do it as much on your own website.

And also. They have a quote, disaster recovery plan if something were to go wrong and you needed to restore your site. Another thing that lifter LMS does is it has a setting called copy protection. So if you turn that on, what that does is that allows you to. For your users not to be able to copy and paste stuff off of your website.

So if you have text content inside of a lesson or some members only content, they literally won’t be able to copy and paste. They get a little message if they try to do that. So that’s just another level of security. Now it’s important to note that. There’s only so much you can do. If somebody wants to pull out their phone and take a picture of what they see on your website while they’re a paying customer and logged in, there’s nothing you can do to stop that.

So security is a game of just do as much as you can, but people are people and if you have downloadable PDFs and you’re. Training, somebody may share that with a friend, and there’s only so much you can do about that. And another pro tip for you, a lot of course creators and membership site owners are using a tool called Vimeo for their videos.

I highly recommend Vimeo. It’s very popular among the course creator and membership site community. But there’s a feature that not everybody knows about. Vimeo Pro where you can set a website domain where the video is allowed to be playable. If you have a video, you put it inside your lesson and in Vimeo you say, Hey, this website is only, or this video is only playable on the website, my academy.com.

If somebody were to somehow find the link. To that video, they’re not gonna be able to play it through vimeo’s protection of that intellectual property through the domain level protection. So that’s just another layer of security that you can add to your WordPress LMS website. It’s one of the things that makes Vimeo great, and that’s super easy to set up and even set up as a preset.

So whenever you upload a video. To Vimeo, it will always have that protection on by default. So it can only be playable on your website. And if it’s only playable on your website and the video’s only published inside of an area like a lesson or a membership protected page, you’ll be protected in that way.

So Lifter LMS has long been known as the most secure. Learning management system for WordPress 9.0, which just released, has taken that to a whole new level to protect you, to protect your users, to protect your intellectual property, content, and media. So definitely check out lifter LMS 9.0. If you have any questions about that or about security in general feel free to reach out to the lifter LMS team.

I hope you enjoyed. This solo episode on security, I want to see you keep your WordPress LMS website secure follow best practices. It is okay to be human like. So let me give an example. If you enforce really strong passwords but your audience is particularly let’s say like older generation maybe not as good with passwords and they’re having trouble even just creating a strong password or knowing what that is.

’cause it needs special characters, numbers, capitalization, lowercase, and all this stuff. There are times when it’s okay to reduce your security stands to a medium strength password. Just to make sure your users can actually get into your site. But so it, you do wanna accommodate and not make things too hard.

But I always like to err on the side of being as secure as possible to make sure everyone’s protected, you, your users, your website, your content, and so on. Thank you for checking out this episode of LMS Cast and engaging in this conversation around security. If you have any questions on any of that, just reach out to us and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Victor Julio Coupe reveals in his LMScast interview with Chris Badgett that his strategy for sales, particularly in the SEO space, differs much from the conventional, hard-pitch method.

According to him, the market is already weary of frequent outreach via email, LinkedIn, and other platforms, frequently from independent contractors or even artificial intelligence (AI)-generated profiles. He discovered that, regardless of language or location, cold pitching rarely succeeds as a result of this saturation.

Rather, Victor focused on connection and honesty to build his career. Instead of using forceful sales tactics, he spends time listening, building relationships, and asking prospects straightforward but insightful questions like “How are you doing?” This makes individuals feel at ease enough to talk about the true state of their companies, which inevitably sparks discussions about possibilities and requirements.

Additionally, he highlights that sales isn’t always about making a purchase; sometimes it’s about honoring current relationships, learning from others, and politely moving on when a fit isn’t found. Victor believes that his sincere, people-first approach sets him apart from the competition and fosters enduring trust in the sales process.

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Chris Badgett:  You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Victor Coupe. Victor is an expert in sales. He’s an expert in SEO. We’re gonna dive deep, particularly on sales today, what it is, how to do it, how to do it differently than you think you have to do it. But first, welcome to the show, Victor.

Victor Julio Coupe: Thank you, Chris. 

Chris Badgett: How are you doing, my friend? Really great. I had so much fun with you when I was on an episode with you and I loved your energy and I thank you. I’m a talent scout. It is just something I do and I was like, this guy, is obviously great at sales, but just at a high level, for the agencies out there building LMS sites for clients or the course creators and coaches, they have a product or a service they need to sell.

What is sales like? How do you define it in a way that is probably different than what people are thinking? Perfect. I 

Victor Julio Coupe: think especially in the SEO world sales is a very delicate talk and conversation overall, and I’m gonna give you a very quick rundown as to. Then I can come back to your question.

I decided to join the SEO world last year, so I’m not even a full you even presented me as a, as an expert. Thank you so much. Why? I’m not, I’m just a guy who likes to talk, likes to relate to people, likes to listen, and to really pay attention to what they’re saying. And as a bonus, I sell. That’s how it works for me.

That’s how it’s been working for almost, oh my God, I think seven years that since I started doing this, but. Again, the sales, talking to agencies, talking to people in SEO that might be listening to us right now, sales is very delicate because I don’t know exactly when this started, but when I got into the market it was already a thing.

You have a lot of freelancers, especially over on LinkedIn, connecting daily to a lot of people. And once you click accept, you’re gonna start being slapped all over your face with their pitches. So it’s very aggressive in a way that a lot of the market right now is exhausted. Really. They’re exhausted of going to LinkedIn and seeing those profiles that are, you see they have some common things in between them, usually.

It’s younger people, usually they don’t have a lot of information over on their LinkedIn account. Right now, you are able to find AI generated accounts, so AI faces, there is a human being behind it, but it’s not gonna be like Victor, it’s gonna be somebody else. So the SEO world, especially when we talk about selling SEO services, selling links, which is a huge product inside of the SEO market, is a very, as I said, delicate one, people are exhausted.

People receive emails, dms, even sometimes phone calls in a daily basis. So how I did it to. How can I say, separate myself from most of the noise. It looks counterintuitive, but I just stopped trying to sell. I stopped pitching. Of course, there is always a moment where you can, and you should, the elevator pitch, the thing where it’s okay, give me a 20 seconds pitch.

That’s a good thing for you to practice. And sometimes on elevators, that’s a good moment for you to literally pitch somebody. But I learned from my own use and my own time and efforts, spending hours and days outreaching people both on email and on LinkedIn to try and sell SEO. I noticed that it doesn’t work out.

You’re gonna find people on YouTube, on articles and blog saying that. Of course it doesn’t. Of course it must it must work for somebody out there. Otherwise this wouldn’t be a topic. But when I was trying it. Giving a little bit more, I think, detail so that people can either mimic or not. When I tried to do this, I tried over the uk, I tried in Portugal, I am living in Portugal, so same language I tried in Spanish, I speak the three languages by themselves, so Spanish, Portuguese, and English.

And I was teaching themselves those people with their own primary languages. And even so what I understood was most of them are never gonna reply back, never. They’re never gonna be bothered to reply back. And now with the information that I just shared, I understand why because it’s 10 new messages every day.

But not only that, SEO is has been around for such a long time. It’s not the hottest thing in the market right now. Whenever we think of the hottest thing, we think of AI something. We think of a software with ai. We think of FinTech, crypto. And go back to ai. That’s it. So even ads, I imagine SEO influencer, they have been around for a couple of years, so people know who they wanna work with.

If you wanna do SEO, some people already have in their top of mind, what’s the company that they’re gonna go after? Influencers, same thing. Paid ads, same thing. Of course you have new entries every day. You have new companies. There’s always gonna be somebody breaking from the masses. Still casing that sometimes you may be a different person and this may give you a different result.

But coming back to it, all selling SEO, from what I’ve learned from my time, so only talking about my opinion and my experience. Not saying that this is what everybody should be doing, but in my place it worked by being a nice guy, it worked. By genuinely asking, how are you doing in professional terms?

So let’s pretend I came across a case company in a conference, in an event, in a podcast. I wouldn’t be the one to ask them for their metrics or their priorities. I would just ask them, how are you doing right now? How is it going? Are you happy with who you’re talking to? Yes, Victor. I’m working with these agency.

They are amazing. Awesome. Who are they? Let me see what they’re doing. Not, I’m not gonna try and steal their customers because there’s also a lot of this in the market. No, I just wanna learn, I just wanna learn from who is doing it in a nice way. See if I can learn from their, not mistakes, but from the things that they got.

And apply it the same way. But again, Chris, if I. More than five times, Chris, more than 10 times. I promise you, I promise over camera. I don’t know exactly how to reply back to your question because people just like talking to me and I feel like just again, being there with your mind and your body and literally asking, looking at their eyes, how are you doing?

What’s going on? This makes so much of a difference in regards to sales. Because it makes them comfortable and they start sharing what what I usually said at my meetings was, open your heart. Let’s pretend we are in a cafe, or I’m a Tinder date. I’m a first Tinder date. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your traumas.

Tell me about the things that have happened. In the past, those that worked and those that did not work. And then I’m gonna tell you how I can see myself getting inside. Maybe I don’t. Maybe depending on the conversation, and this is something that a lot of salespeople don’t understand, sometimes the sale is not for you, is you can do whatever you want.

It’s not gonna work out. They already have a good supplier, a good provider, a good app, a good solution in house. That’s fine. Just say thank you. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for letting me know that this is working. Thank you for letting me know that this is how you’re behaving. Now I’m gonna collect myself.

I’m gonna drink a glass of cold water and I’m gonna think maybe I should do that as well. That’s how I feel. The SEO world is nowadays considering sales. 

Chris Badgett: I have a background in anthropology and I love different cultures and cultural differences. Perfect. Tell us about selling in, let’s say, the United States, the uk, Europe, south America, Asia.

Perfect. Perfect. What are some of the differences that people may not think about when it comes to selling cross-culturally? 

Victor Julio Coupe: It’s something that I never figured out that I would do. If I were to travel 10 years in the past and tell younger Victor that he was gonna be literally selling to all regions of the world, but Antarctica, because penguins still do not rank on websites, I would’ve left 10 years ago.

But now I am confident to say that yes, I did it all from all continents and it is different. Let’s talk first about the Americas because I think there is not much of a reason to separate the north from the south. Especially talking about Brazil, we Brazilians grow very much into how can I say this, but North America is like the golden standard for South America.

Brazilians want to be Americans. Brazilians wants to live like Americans. And you can even see this today, literally today in the politics version, you have Trump fighting against Brazilians Brazil’s President Lula. And you are gonna find people from Brazil defending the United States only because we grow by learning to love the United States.

So why am I saying this? Whenever I needed to sell to either Americans or Brazilians, FOMO would work wonderfully. The fear of missing out because it, the capital is mindset is way more stronger over on that region. Chris, why are you not doing SEO? Is it because, I don’t know, you are afraid or something, or you just don’t have the money?

Ah, Victor, I don’t like it. I don’t feel like that’s useful. I just, I’d rather pay ads and work with ads, sir. Nice to know. But do you also know that your main competitor is spending money on SEO? What? What is it that’s gonna change for you? Maybe you see, maybe it’s fomo, maybe you missing out on SEO will make sure that competitor that you hate will have the Porsche nine 11 that you don’t have, but that you don’t wanna have.

Resilience and again, I’m always gonna say this in my opinion, my experience, my time, Brazilians and Americans, they fear missing out very much so in a way where if you come to them. We have a good enough strategy and product and service and you know that the clo, the their closest competitors, sorry, are indeed utilizing the same service and product.

This by itself can turn like a light inside their head and say okay, maybe let’s pay closer attention to this. And then with that said, coming to Europe, whole different beast. As I said, in the Americas, there is more of a sense of urgency, way more of a sense of urgency. In Europe, Uhuh, it’s their timing.

If they want to, they’re gonna pick you up. If they want to, they’re gonna listen to you, but only if they want to, because if they have something else, even if it’s 1% more priority, they are gonna prioritize that other thing. Especially whenever we’re talking about sales. We talk about cold outreach because life would be beautiful. If it, we didn’t need to cold outreach to anybody, but since we do it is a huge part of a sales life.

So doing cold outreach in Europe, again with my experience with the companies that I worked for was also a different beast out together. In the Americas, the content could be more sales. As we say. We have a CTA about booking a demo. We have a CTA about get getting started. We have a CTA that would convert in Europe.

If you don’t give them a cold glass of beer first, you’re gonna have to work yourself very much hard to make sure that they even read you out. So how I did it in a way that it worked for me. To sell to European companies events. And conferences with Europeans, having beers and pizzas with them is a must for anybody who wants to literally grow themselves in the European market, they value the in-person communication way further than the Americans do.

The Americans are super great for cold calling. They are more open to the idea of getting a phone call. They are more open to the idea of talking to somebody unknown. Europeans are not like that. They are more closed. They are more in towards their own groups, so finding them in their natural habitat, just like an animal, usually works best.

Now coming to a close, we have the other side here of the world. We have the Asians and the Australians. Let’s put them together. This by itself, I feel is, I’m not gonna say it’s a mix, but if it’s a Chinese guy, maybe he’s gonna follow the American mindset a little bit closer because he’s more related to Americans.

If it’s somebody from Vietnam, if goes way more around the European side where you need to be nice, you need to. Go to the beach with them, have a dinner, have lunch talk. Just be fun. Be a nice person to be around. This is also what I found. Find the works in Asia, in Australia, since there is a. Sometimes there’s a lack of services in Australia, so they go with what they have.

I don’t think they have too much issues from, besides of huge spiders and kangaroos. So in Australia, if you’re also somebody with a reputation, with a credibility, high effort, and to understand that your good, they will go with it. And in Africa. Lastly, coming to Africa, it’s growing now. Which is great. I love the idea that Africa deserves so much to grow and it’s growing.

Now you have more companies investing money, buying from there, or even approaching Africans, and they are just lovely people. It’s so easy going, talking to any African whatsoever. They are, I think, because they have not been used to the idea of being freed good enough. They are just wonderful people to talk to.

They are way easier to understand what you’re trying to say, and if they don’t understand what you’re trying to say, they will let it go. So of course it always changes and an American can be shy and European can be an extrovert, so it will never be a formula, it will never be something that AI can replicate.

Which is good, but literally selling to these regions will make sure that you, by yourself as a salesperson, will have different personas of yourself depending on who you’re talking to. It is gonna change. It is always gonna change. And you need to understand, even with AI today, Chris if I were starting today and I knew already.

Or I listened to this podcast and I heard this guy named Victor talking to me about how different it is. I would go to JDPT and ask, okay, I’m selling SEO services for Americans and Europeans. What’s the difference? The AI will help for sure, but there is a difference and we must consider that.

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There’s also B2B versus B2C, B2C.

I know you got, I know you got your start in selling iPhones. Yes. Which business to consumer play and a business to business play is a different beast. There’s also like scale of business. There could be an enterprise client, lifter LMS is an example. We have big clients, but we also have.

What’s called A VSB, which is a very small business. It’s like a education entrepreneur, creator type person, but it’s still a business. It’s just a small one, especially in the beginning. How te what did you learn from selling iPhones and how are B2B versus B2C? The same and different? 

Victor Julio Coupe: I think I got it very lucky by starting small.

Because it was yes, selling iPhones to ordinary people, okay? In city centers, in galleries, in small shopping centers. So we’re talking about your mom, we’re talking about your kid, we’re talking about your neighbor. Literally, we’re talking about any kind of people whatsoever. And what I learned, what it taught me can, instead of what I learned, but what it taught me was how to handle different egos.

Because when you’re talking B2C. You can’t, let’s that, let’s only pretend that we’re talking B2C. Even inside B2C, there’s gonna be an SMBA mito and an enterprise, meaning there’s gonna be the director who is wearing a tuxedo who is very successful. There’s gonna be that analyst. Victor here, normal guy, knows how to speak to people, knows how to behave, but doesn’t have infinite money.

And we’re gonna have intern Victor, who was me 15 years ago when I only had a minimum wage and I wanted an iPhone. So it’s always gonna depend what am I’m gonna sell? What are gonna be the benefits? What are gonna be the priorities for such people? So by understanding that a mother of two kids prefers battery over performance, but by also understand that the internal Victor prefers gaming over camera.

You start understanding that even though you’re selling the same product, I’m selling the same set of AirPods for the entire guy who is taking a bus and a train and leaves his home by eight in the morning and coming back at midnight. Battery is imported because he’s not gonna have a charger all the time.

But if I’m talking to Victor nowadays, who is mostly at home working remotely. Sure battery is important, but it’s not the best thing that I want because I have chargers all over my house, so I want quality. Now I’m looking for quality. I’m looking for something different. So why am I giving you all these examples?

When you take into consideration that B2C has different means and you apply to B2B, you’re gonna see that it’s all the same. It’s the same it’s people that you’re talking to. It’s becoming a cliche right now. People buy from people. Yeah, it’s true. But it’s a cliche, but it’s true. So when I was, let me give you a real example.

This I will never forget. Back in Brazil we have this company called XP Investments. One of the, one of the biggest ones, I think it’s the biggest one in regards to trading stocks. All of this FinTech world back in Brazil, and I had to sell to XP investments back in 2020, a little bit before COVID. And I was selling then an influencer platform that I worked at the time called Tagger.

And it, I never talked to XP about the cost of the product. I never talked to XP about onboarding. I never talked to them about, I don’t know, basic. Technology about the product itself? No. They wanted to know the ROI. Everybody wants to know the ROI, but it’s different when you’re talking to an enterprise and an S-M-B-R-O-I is a different thing for both of them.

For the enterprise level, they’re talking about millions and millions in more than a hundred percent in return over investment. That’s what makes them tick. When I’m talking to an SMB, if I give the guy 10% of return over investment, it’s already a good thing. It’s already 10%. So selling iPhones to entry level people and management level people taught me that it’s gonna be the same.

You need to ask the priority, and if you can’t ask the priorities, your job as a salesperson, to set the priority. To understand the priority. Because once you do, once you, you have that information. Doesn’t care. It doesn’t make, like it’s not gonna make a difference whatsoever if that person comes as a B2C or as a B2B lead.

Everybody has their ROIs and you need to understand, okay, how big of an ROI do, you need to talk to that people in relation to that other people. So you see again. And I wish there were formulas. I wish there were magic equations that I could just talk here on camera and say, if you are focusing on S and B, B2B, two B sales, you need to do X and Y and Z and enterprises A, B, and C.

But they’re all gonna be the same. What’s gonna changing between a small brand and a huge one is what they prioritize. Sure. But what you can give them back, if I can only give the enterprise company 10% of return over investment, that’s nothing for them. That’s literally nothing. For a small one, it is a lot of things.

Imagine you taking a huge ROI to a small company. Wow, that’s amazing. That’s even better. Sometimes life isn’t like that. So yeah, it’s. It’s different. Sure it is. You have tons of materials showcasing how different it is. How on B2C, you have to be more human on B2B, you have to be more about numbers. But if I can tell you this, Chris, I noticed, especially after COVID, that the companies that closed the deal with me, they closed the deal with me because of support, because of credibility and authority and because they liked having a good time around with me sometimes because they were friends.

Let’s not pretend that this doesn’t exist. Of course it does. Of course it does. Being well connected, being well networked, pays too much, but it’s always gonna be a case of you understanding first who you’re talking to. Then applying those settings to your mindset and going to market with that mindset filtered for that specific type.

Customer, no matter if B2C or B2B, you need to understand what moves them forward. As I said, is it better for somebody who stays out of home all day long or is it quality for somebody who’s always nearby a charger and wants to extract the maximum out of the investment? There you go. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Victor. I have a challenge I wanted to propose to you.

Oh, nice. It’s commonly known in like B2B software companies. There’s a challenge with moving from founder led sales to a sales team and getting perfect, developing a sales function within a business that isn’t necessarily founder led. It’s also true for an agency. I know a lot of agencies who feel like the agency owner always has to do the sales or do the closing.

For course creators and subject matter experts, they’re like it’s my brand, it’s my authority. I have to do sales. And of course, you have to do that in the beginning when you’re a one person show. And there are great salespeople and not so great salespeople. How do you help people that are stuck in this like founder led sales cage?

Nice. Get out and empower their sales team. Find good salespeople, give them what they need to be successful. Let’s look at this problem of founder led sales. 

Victor Julio Coupe: I think we can even talk about King Show, the company that I’m working for right now. Yeah. S Show Media is a UK agency that has been working since 2008.

The founder has been the sales guy. Yeah. I am the first, I am the first step towards having a sales team. That came show is taking right now. So up until literally now, I’m still not selling. It’s very, it’s a very new venture for me. So I’m still learning. I’m still doing a lot of things behind the scenes, but I’m still not going to market to sell.

And what’s gonna change, because right now the customers that came show has, they were all acquired through the founders. The founders were there. The founders made sure that it worked, and they’re not gonna be there anymore because I was hired. Because the founders don’t wanna be salespeople. They don’t like to talk.

They’re not extroverts. So they are amazing technical guys, but they’re not the social type of people that are always there on stage. On conferences. On podcasts. They don’t like this. When I got into my first day, and I understood that as you said, so yourself, this company was founder led, the sales efforts were founder led.

I immediately asked them what is it that they managed to give in order to sell? Was it their expertise or was it just because they were at the right place at the right time? Was it because something else altogether and then I learned, yes, in their case, this is an SEO agency and an affiliates agency.

Having knowledge of what works and what doesn’t is very important here. It’s most of the services knowing what you’re doing, but I’m not selling my boss’s face or his name. No. What I did, what I am gonna be doing, and this is something that a lot of people can definitely mimic and copy and go and try themselves up, is I shared the knowledge itself without naming the knowledge.

So I shared that we have IGA experience since 2008, but I don’t share that the person that has the knowledge is the founder. At the end of the day, if I’m doing code outreach. The lead that doesn’t know who the founder is, nor who the sales team is, right? He doesn’t know anything at all. So instead of focusing on a person, on a face, on a history and a name, I took that person and I actually spread them to become this whole company, which is came true.

And when somebody asks me, Chris, when you ask me, Victor, what it is that you do? Oh, Chris, we are a company that has been doing SEO and affiliates for iga, casinos, battings, sometimes cryptos and fintechs since 2008. Therefore, we managed to update ourselves. A lot of times we had a lot of mistakes that are now fixed.

So if you’re starting now. You don’t know what’s yet to come. The chances of us already been through that thing are very high, so you’re gonna buy from me the security. The comfort of knowing that Key Show Media has been doing it since 2008. But let me tell you this, Ken Show has not been around since 2008.

The founders have, both of the founders. They have been working with casinos since 2008, and that’s proven. But the company itself has two to three years. So coming to your question and finalizing it. The challenge itself, moving from founder led to team, led to product led to service led, whatever. You don’t need to get a, you don’t need to remove the founder from the equation.

You don’t need to remove the knowledge, the expertise, the authority of the founder from the equation. But you can, and you should stop talking about the founder if you wanna scale, because otherwise we don’t want astronomer CEO type of problems here where, the CEO E is gonna be. Yeah, we don’t want that.

Let’s just take what the CEO has built. Let’s just take what the founder has built. He has built so many things. He was there for so many years. We take the history of the man, but we remove the man. We just talk and by men, human being can be a woman of course. And what I’m saying literally is.

Let’s not disregard the history, but let’s talk it in a different pitch. It’s not about Chris, it’s about Lifter. It’s not about the founders here, Alessandro Art Lummi. It’s about Kahu. So yeah, Kahu is Alessandra and Lummi Lifter is Chris and his team. So Alessandra and Lummi, they’re always gonna be around.

They’re always gonna be a point of the conversation whenever I’m selling, but I’m not gonna be selling their faces. I’m not gonna be selling. Their ideas. I’m selling their breakthroughs, their mistakes, their WANs, and of course, once this all came together, here’s K show media, let’s work together. The story itself is already very nice to be told.

You don’t need to be, you don’t need to be very you don’t need to change your mindset altogether. But, and this Alessandro, I think he, he knows very well. You do need somebody that. Can understand that very easily because one thing that I saw already happening, mostly in Brazil, were salespeople wanting to become bigger than the brand they were selling.

This happens, let’s talk about football again. You have players who sometimes feels like they’re bigger than the club and they start charging things on the club. You have em, mba, G, you have mass at Barcelona, Ronald Mad or Juventus, don’t turn into that guy. You’re not Christian or Ronald.

Another, you’re not El mess. They were enchanting millions of people all over the world. You’re only enchanting your mother, your spouse, and your kid. So what I would say is if you’re a founder, you are looking to scale, but you’re looking to also step away from the sales machine itself. You are gonna have to hire somebody who likes to talk.

Yes. And usually this comes. Easier in some regions. But you are also gonna have to share with that salesperson exactly how you made it happen so that person can take your stories and start sharing that same stories. But instead of, Chris did this, it’s lifter does this. This is a, I think that of course, I’m not giving here a full structure of how they can grow, but I think this by itself can be a good starting point.

Chris Badgett: This is awesome. Victor. As a side note, maybe you should do a course on sales one day just for your personal brand. That would be fun. But 

Victor Julio Coupe: let me actually talk one minute about this, Chris. Yeah. I was this weekend here in the public parking Porto. It was nine. It was on Sunday. It was 9:00 PM The sun was setting, and we were literally about to leave.

Then two guys approached me. It was me, my wife, and my friend, a close friend of mine. The guy approached me and he was like, he was very high, but he was around his 40, 45. So he was like, you look like a very nice guy, and you look like you know about a technical pla, a technical club around your port. I was like, ah, I know.

Good for you. Random dude. I know. But then I just, we were ready to leave and I wanted to leave. Sometimes even though I like to talk too much, sometimes my battery dies very fast. And I, and they didn’t want us to leave. They started talking and they started talking. My wife jokes about this ever since again, it happened two days ago and she was like, honey, what is it that you’re always charming European man?

And they’re always talking how good you sound, how perfect your English is, and how extrovert you are. And that’s the point Chris. If I were to do a sales course or a course, whatever, it would be about teaching people to be Victor, and I don’t want them to, because I don’t know what makes me be me.

I just am. I just. Open my mouth without thinking. I just smile to everybody without considering that I should smile or not. I’ve been assaulted and robbed more than 10 times already in my life because I was too much of a nice guy. But sometimes a Robert came to me, he asked for the hours. I said it was 2:00 PM He was like, nice cell phone.

Give it to me. There is, I don’t know if this is something that I can put in the course, but I appreciate the comment. Of course. It’s nice to know that. People like how I behave, but if I could tell people what they should do, if I were to go back in time, or if I were to talk to somebody who’s young and is starting their own sales life right now, I think if you are gonna be doing sales, unfortunately being introvert might hold you back.

You need to like to talk. You need to like to be the center of attention. You need to like to have all eyes around you. You need to like to be a speaker because this plus a sales role equals success. 

Chris Badgett: That’s it. Just to challenge you and push back that sense in that feeling you have is very similar to the founder led sales dilemma.

Just throwing that out there because a business has a product, but a business also is a product and a function like sales is a product. And so it is that founder led trap. And I, it’s that it’s a hundred percent. It’s Last question for you. Love your feedback on this. There’s common, somewhat common knowledge in the course creation space or really selling anything that there’s, I’m gonna talk in United States dollars.

But basically 500, below 500 or even a thousand dollars. There’s a concept of we can do all the sailing with a sales page. I’m not gonna, I don’t need to talk to somebody to buy a $20 course on Udemy or potentially a thousand dollars course from a influencer that I’ve been following for years.

I trust ’em. It’s fine. Once you get up into the, like the 2000 to 5,000. You could do a webinar and do like group sales so you can bring that sales process. And then above that it’s considered high ticket. There’s definitely needs to be a one-on-one conversation and so on.

Just what advice do you have somebody who’s trying to figure out how to sell at the different levels? IPhone as an example, is a thousand bucks or whatever. It’s it’s on the high side of low ticket, but you still talk to people and Apple has done a lot of marketing and, influencing and branding over the years, but at the different price points, what advice do you have?

Victor Julio Coupe: I, I think I can do a parallel with iPhone selling. Because you have $200 iPhones and you have a thousand dollars iPhones. Of course Apple does all the heavy lifting. You don’t need to explain why one sells over the other. But one thing that I notice in regards to the pricing gap between the 200 and a thousand is if somebody buys a 200 iPhone, which right now would be what?

An iPhone 12, and they don’t like it. Or battery doesn’t last that long, or the camera is not the best, it’s okay to let it go because you only spend $200, right? But if you are buying from the newest iPhone, the 16 chrome max, you want it to do everything. You want it to last longer than a day. You want the pictures to be crystal clear.

So if you were to put that into courses, what I would say is Apple. As we all know, huge company, one of the biggest, if not the biggest. They don’t need to showcase that their iPhone is good enough for people to buy, right? But here they are every single year doing huge multimillionaire events only to talk about the newest, most expensive iPhone.

So even Apple needs to separate months of their schedule to create an event to showcase the newest iPhone. I think you, as a course seller who is charging a thousand dollars for a course, should also take the time to put your face around the camera. Now with ai, we have AI avatars, right? You can.

Talk to the camera for three minutes within this AI avatar software, and then it’s gonna create a video of you talking. But it was never you. Why am I saying this? People are seeing how easy it is to pretend, to care, to pretend, to be around, to pretend, to put your face, to pretend to even go live.

Those that. Don’t follow the AI route and still put their human side content up on the internet. On Instagram, if you’re selling a product on LinkedIn, if you’re selling a service, I think this by itself. Can lead to more sales because you’re gonna be building what authority, and this is what SEO is all about right now.

Google wants all websites and all articles and all blogs to have authority. And what do they say by that? Is that they want Q real humans writing the content. They don’t want ai. There is this SEO expert, her name is Lily, and she taught me something that I will never forget about it. Google doesn’t want people from the Philippines writing about the top 10 best restaurants in New York.

They want New Yorkers who are living in New York for a set amount of dates. And times to talk about their experience, not Trip Advisor rankings. So what I, what if I am. And if I can tell that to anybody who is gonna be selling a thousand dollars course before it’s high ticket one bro. Si, put your face around.

Sew yourself. Create an Instagram. Be there. Go to events, take pictures, go to network round events. Shake hands, just, and the more you can do for yourself in regards to authority and to positioning. Not even talking about your course courses, not even talking about, it’s just showcasing the victory exists.

Because once you exist, you can, what term in English, but people can take you for accountability. Is that how you say? Yeah. We know where Victor is. We know that Victor is always in this white. Okay, I’m gonna buy it. It makes it easier. It makes it easier for people to buy from Victor knowing that he’s always in this living room, that he’s always talking on camera, that he’s, he was online in July of 2024, and he’s still online in July, 2025.

It’s a thing that pizza. Places back in Brazil, you should do a lot. Like since 1998, since 2005, cooking the best pizzas. Yeah. Great. Because this shows me, and it’s fine if it since 2025, but in 2027 it’s gonna be two years. So from day one, put your faces around from day one, start talking to the company.

Not to the company, sorry, to the audience. As both you human being and as the founder of the company, it might not give you quick results. It might not be, instant, but if you keep on doing it, just like SEO, if you keep on doing it, if you keep on placing links and articles and keywords, eventually Google’s gonna.

Showcase you more around the first page and that’s when money will come. I don’t see any reason as to why a course seller shouldn’t do anything, similar to this. So yeah, that’s it. Show your face, be around, go to podcasts, come to Crisis podcast. I think this by itself is a, is what everybody should start and try to do for sure.

Chris Badgett: Victor, this has been awesome. Thank you for dropping so much wisdom and knowledge around sales and. Just where can people find you if they want to connect? Perfect.

Victor Julio Coupe: They can find me on LinkedIn. I love being on LinkedIn, so this name by itself is the, is a unique name. You can find me over at Victor Kopay on LinkedIn.

You’re gonna find [email protected] as well. I’m working over there, as you can see by the subtitle here. But come on, let’s connect on LinkedIn. Send me a message, send me a dm. As long as you are Openheartedly wanting a conversation, I am gonna be there to reply back to it for sure. And of course, I think you can find me at a future episode at Lifters LMS podcast because I am more than open to being around here to talk more about sales.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. We’ll definitely have to do that. There’s so much more we could go into. We will have to do a Joe Rogan episode and go for two and a half hours or something like that. But I, 

Victor Julio Coupe: I, I would be 

Chris Badgett: open, I would be open. Thanks for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. 

Victor Julio Coupe: Thank you, 

Chris Badgett: Chris, 

Victor Julio Coupe: and thank you.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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In this LMScast, Zachary Katz from GravityKit presents Gravity Board, a WordPress add-on for Kanban project management that integrates Trello-like features into your website.

Zachary Katz founded GravityKit, a business that creates robust Gravity Forms add-ons like GravityView, which gives customers extensive options for how to display and manipulate form data on their WordPress websites. Using customisable phases like to-do, in progress, and done, Gravity Board, which is built on top of Gravity Forms and GravityView, lets users graphically organize tasks.

Gravity Board’s primary benefit is that all data is self-hosted. Which is particularly advantageous for institutions who are unable to rely on external SaaS technologies. Such as government agencies or internal business websites. Onboarding, project tracking, and other internal procedures may be easily streamlined using Gravity Board’s capabilities. Which include task assignment, filters, and automation rules that transfer objects across columns depending on form submissions. All of this is possible while maintaining control over your data within WordPress.

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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.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest and friend, he’s back on the show. It’s Zach Katz from Gravity Kit. We’re gonna be diving into Gravity Kit’s newest add-on, which is called Gravity Board. It’s really awesome in terms of project management. Creating a, Kanban, Trello style board in your site.

There’s lots of ways to use that as an agency or as a course creator. But first, welcome back on the show, Zach. 

Zachary Katz: Hi Chris. Thanks for having me. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it was fun to get into this I mentioned this. I think every time we talk on this episode. Somebody once told me that all the internet is and websites are, is a bunch of forms.

And once I like really understood that deeply, I’m like, oh my God, this is wild. Then Gravity Kit has this flagship product, gravity View, which allows you to display form data on your website site in interesting ways. We use it in many ways at Lifter LMS, but let’s drill in on Gravity Board. Why did you, what is it and why did you create it?

Zachary Katz: Yeah, so Gravity Board is a Kanban style board. Plugin that it replaces Trello. Essentially it can replace Trello if people have also used GitHub projects. It’s similar to that, where GitHub Projects has a way of seeing it in in a vertical columns mode where you can assign tasks by dragging them across columns and update the statuses.

By dragging each individual task through a ready for building all the way through completed. And each of the stages of that project are represented by a column on the board. Gravity Board, we built it because people were using Gravity View to do a lot of project management, where every time something needed to happen the form would a, they would submit a form that says, this is another task that needs to be done.

It would be shown in a gravity view table, for example, or it’d be shown in a gravity view custom layout that they built to try to mimic the behavior of Trello or of similar, functionality. And we realized that we could be doing this ourselves in a much better way than Gravity GravityView is able to do by having it be purpose built.

And we purpose built it to be really good at. At project management, but also at being able to visually see quickly all the different stages of your data no matter what kind of projects you’re trying to optimize. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And a Kanban board or is so powerful. I remember discovering this as the agency owner.

I think when you just start out, we all try to manage projects over email and then the complexity gets a little outta hand. 

And then, let’s see. I’ve used Trello. I’ve used Basecamp, Asana GitHub and others. I’m trying to think of that other one. But Monday, yeah, monday, monday.com. But then one of the cool things about WordPress and all the innovation and entrepreneurs here is.

Like fluent CRM okay, we can have a CRM just on the WordPress website instead of this separate SaaS tool. And you were like, Hey, instead of paying for Trello or whatever else. Why not do it on your site? 

Zachary Katz: Yeah. And it’s interesting, one of the most fervent customers of the users of the add-on is a government employee who said that their government contracts prevent them from using external services like Trello to manage their data.

But they can use Gravity board ’cause all of that information is on their own website. It’s not being sent externally. So that was a really good representation of the power of WordPress and the power of owning and hosting your own content. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and we get that a lot in the LMS space as well, particularly with internal company training portals that kind of want to have their own website.

We have add-on called Private Site that locks it down from the public internet. But instead of having to in parallel run some project management tool, like a lot of internal training. LMS sites are for, onboarding new employees, 

Zachary Katz: right? 

Chris Badgett: So part of onboarding new employees is like filling out a form that needs to go to HR or whatever.

And now you can do that. You can get the data through the gravity form, even have it viewable on the site with gravity view, and then also set up the HR team member to do whatever they need to do with that data, right? Manage like a big company. ’cause you can only keep track of so much of that stuff by email, right?

Zachary Katz: That’s true. And intranets are an excellent, and onboarding are excellent use cases where in combination with other add-ons currently. But we’re looking into adding this built into gravity board. You can update values using logical rules that you create so that let’s say you’re onboarding somebody and they submit a form that can automatically move the.

Did they submit this form from no to yes columns, for example or like maybe they completed a bunch of steps and that allows them to step to move into a new a new phase of their onboarding. We’re working on automation integration with automations tools that will allow that type of thing to happen.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And if you’re new to Kanban boards, and we’re gonna do a demo in a little bit just to show how this works. So if you’re listening in your earbuds or listening to the podcast audio only, this is also on the Lifter LMS YouTube channel. Just do a search for Zach Katz or Gravity Board, and you’ll find this episode.

But the way, like when I’m teaching a new team member how to use our tr, our Kanban board. It’s the simplest way to think about it is to do, doing and done, right? These are the, there’s only three columns, right? So that’s the process. There’s a list, there’s a bunch of stuff to do. There’s a bunch of cards for each of those things when you’re working on it, actively move it to the in doing column.

And then when you’re done moving to the done column, but that’s the power of process. That’s a very simple process, like to-do list in progress. Done. But there’s all kinds of more complex processes. Like I know when I’ve used Kanban boards, some of them have 15 columns. And the, and multiple team members working on different columns or collaborating on different cards or whatever.

Zachary Katz: Yeah. They were created, the concept was created, I believe, by Toyota to track the progress of building a car on the factory floor to see. What has been done already and what hasn’t been done. So they had a bunch of different stages of the development process. And I might be wrong about this, but you could look up the history.

But it’s cool that it started in a manufacturing world. And now if you have, if you are a website builder, there are a lot of steps that you need to keep track of when you’re building a website. Okay, do we have the design? Yeah. Has it been coded? Is the code reviewed by, code? People. Has it been accessibility checked?

Has it been staged on the staging site and tested there? It been merged into live and has it been tested again, like all of these, everything that I just said represents a stage that you can move the. Each project through on visually on your ban board and ban Kanban. I never know what to say. Chris and I currently say Apple like banana and banana.

But that’s fine. You could say that however you want. And so what we were doing while building Gravity Board was using Gravity Board. To track the process of building Gravity Board. So we were dogfooding it and saying okay, here are some features that need to be built. And then I moved them into, currently being built.

And one of the cool things about Gravity Board is you can assign these different tasks to different people. So you can filter the tasks that are assigned to you that are due in the next week. You can set up all these filters and see only the most important tasks that are needing to be done right away all visually.

And a really nice user interface. So task management is important, and Gravity Board, I think is a great task manager. 

Chris Badgett: Another thing that’s great for agencies and course creators is the sales process, like the handoff from marketing to sales. And this is why it’s so awesome. It’s integrated with.

Gravity forms. ’cause you can start at like the top of a marketing funnel. Yep. You could have somebody opt in to get a lead magnet and WP Fusion or whatever pipes that data to whatever your CRM is. But it also creates a card perhaps on that opt-in form. You ask for other information like team size or budget or.

Niche or something like that, that you use as a scoring mechanism for who are the best leads, and then that can go into a follow-up process and based on how, what they filled out, certain leads are priority over others. And then maybe there’s like a attempt to schedule a one-on-one sales call, if you’re doing high-end coaching or selling an expensive website.

Where we’re talking thousands of dollars. A lot of those things require a human interaction on a call of some sort. And then you get the call scheduled stage and then you get, then you move into the closing process of like closed and in sales there’s this concept of win loss at the end. But like that would be perfect with Gravity Board to.

To manage lead flow for agencies and course creators and coaches. 

Zachary Katz: Absolutely. And when I got started doing doing web stuff, I would cold call the Yellow pages one person at a time, and I would and I would, check them off if if I had done it. If you have, cold leads, warm leads, hot leads tracking their progress using a K Ben board is perfect.

I don’t like to look at a table all the time, and I don’t like to look at a CSV, like a spreadsheet. That makes me sad. I don’t like spreadsheets. But I like to look at things in a Canada board. It just makes sense to me more so you can re-visualize the same content in different layouts in gravity forms admin on the entries table in a table on Gravity view.

You can see it in a table and, but you can also manage the same content. And when you update it in Gravity board, it also updates in gravity forms and on gravity view. So it’s nicely integrated with the rest of the ecosystem. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I think the other big unlock with a Kanban board is when it’s more than just one person working on a project.

Yeah. You have teams. So if we use our sales thing, you may have somebody that works in marketing, somebody who does the sales calls maybe somebody else who does the closing call, the like final sales call, and then maybe. A customer success manager or something to manage, or a coach to manage the project after it’s sold.

And those are like five different people. And maybe there’s teams of people within each of those divisions. How do you think about like how does Gravity board work with like assignees or teams? 

Zachary Katz: Yeah. So one of the ways that you could do that during, in like this leads example, is that somebody would assign somebody else when a lead comes in that they receive the lead.

Okay, I know this person is the person who should be assigned, so they assign them. That person does the first call and confirms that they’re a viable lead, then they assign to somebody else. And that can happen with inside the card itself. You can choose different assignees at that time. You can also at each stage leave a note.

So let’s say you call somebody and they weren’t there, you add a note to the lead, and you say, I tried contacting them and it didn’t work. I’m gonna call back later. So then you update the due date and it shows up in the Kanban board as due on a certain day. And as it approaches it, it changes color to show you that it’s ready to be, acted upon.

And so let’s say you follow up and you contact them and they’re ready to go. They need to be moved to a different stage with a customer success manager. You update the assignee, you add a note so that everybody’s on the same page regarding the lead and what you talked about. All of this is inside your WordPress website using Gravity Forms on your own, with your own data.

And you can at mention people and they get emails. You can have all sorts of notifications set up so that everybody’s informed all the time with what the project status is. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s amazing with teams like as an entrepreneur, you can come in and look at absolutely everything, but also in, when you’re in execution mode, you can look at which are my cards?

And simplify the right and stuff like that. If you would spin up a demo and if you’re listening just head on over to the lifter LMS YouTube channel and do a search for Gravity board, and you’ll find this. If you wanna see this in action, but we’re gonna take a look at this awesome innovation.

Zachary Katz: Alright by the way, if you want to sign up for your own Gravity Board demo site, you can go to. Site dot try dot gravity kit.com and sign up for a demo there, or go to the Gravity kit website and and go to the Gravity board page and there will be a button that says, try a live demo. And you can get the exact same content that I’m gonna show you on this demonstration.

It, I’m just using a stock demo right here. So what we’re looking at is the gravity kit all board screen where if you’ve created a CanBan board that it shows up there. But let’s take a step back and go start with a gravity forms form. We have a form here called tasks, and the form has the task name a priority, like a medium, low, high, critical, the description of the task due date and the status.

The statuses that we have set up currently are backlog. I don’t know why it’s not showing up, but backlog in progress, et cetera. So we have a bunch of entries that have come in from this form with each task represented as an entry in gravity forms. So a task called update website copy, low priority has a due date assigned to it, status backlog.

Each one of these entries is going to become a card and a Kanban board. And what do I mean by that? I’m gonna click into the existing board that we have where we can configure the gravity Board to be connected to the gravity forms form that we were just looking at. So the lane field and the lane is the column.

I’ll show you this on the front end. So each one of these columns is a lane. So backlog, active, ready for review, complete in future. Each one of those is a lane, and you have the option to choose what field from the form you want to be the columns. So here we’ve chosen status, but you can also choose, okay, let’s say the priority is a lane and you can move between.

When you move a card between lanes, it changes the priority from high to low priority. So you can configure the fields, that you want to be mapped to the cards. The due date is the due date of a form field, for example. You can enable and disable different functionality including entry notes and assignees and really cool stuff.

You can enable card checklists and this is a nice thing where you can have subtasks and I wanna show you this, so I just enabled checklists and I’m gonna refresh the front end here and open up Update website copy. Now this is assigned to a user called John James. If I wanted to assign it to somebody else as well, I could add assignees by clicking their user profile images here and remove them as by clicking them as well.

So this is an example of, okay, I wanna assign this to Matthew Markon, and I wanna set the priority to. High. Okay. High priority. And then describe the the task. So this task is critical to meet our launch goals for updating website copy. But what does update website copy mean? That’s where checklists come in and you can have multiple items that are associated with updating website Copy change the header text to.

Cool. And when you add a checkbox here. You can add multiple items and you can see that the checklist is marked off. It shows zero out of two are completed. And when you check off the checkbox, it updates the progress bar to say one out of three completed. And that is also visible on the front end where you can see one outta three has been completed on the front end of the card.

So you can get a good summary on. From the Kanban board view, or on the entry details modal. And you can filter then by saying, okay, I only wanna see tasks that have incomplete checklists. And that allows you to quickly drill down on these are tasks that still have items that are remaining for me to do.

I also wanna see ones that are overdue or due in the next day. And you can really quickly identify, oh shoot, I need to do. All of this stuff or let’s say you’ve update website copy is no longer backlog, but it’s actively being worked on. You simply drag it from backlog to active, drop it, and then updates the card status in the backend on gravity forms.

So that update website copy now is active in Gravity forms itself. If you look in the backend here, and you can see in the columns of the Gravity Forms entry table. The status has been updated to backlog or to active, and when it’s done, you move it to ready to review. And that’s been updated in gravity forms as well.

So it’s a different way to visualize gravity forms data, but because of the functionality that we’ve added with checklists and things like attachments where the cards can have items attached to ’em.

It makes it okay, so you wanna update website copy. You might need some assets. So let’s add a, let’s add an LMS text file to make sure that’s get us gets updated on your new website. And once you’re done you can say, Hey John James, this has been completed. And when you at somebody using the at mention functionality, they’ll get an email if they for each mention that you give.

So John James, this has been completed. They’ll get an email if you decide you need to change this to have more information ’cause that’s not very helpful. Ready for your review and you can update the note as well. And then John James will be able to see, Hey, it’s assigned to John James as well. Save the card and and that’s all 

Chris Badgett: set.

Wow. That’s awesome. And while Zach was doing that awesome demo, I just looked up and on January 9th in 2017, Atlassian, a tech company acquired Trello for $425 million. And this kind of innovation here, like what I’m seeing is it does what. Trello does, but now you can do it on your website. It’s literally a multi-hundred million dollar of value that’s sitting inside of gravity kit all access pass or in the you can get the individual add-on if you just want Gravity Board.

But this is really cool. And unlike Trello as an example because it’s WordPress base, and correct me if I’m wrong here. You’re not, you don’t get charged more based on the number of users, 

Zachary Katz: right? Number of users, unlimited number of entries, unlimited number of forms, unlimited. And you can have multiple boards that are set up to be filtered for different users.

So you, you might want one board, let’s say a roadmap, a public roadmap, and you have each feature in work in on a roadmap on your website, like planned on doing in progress and done. You could have a public version of that people are not able to update and they’re only able to see and browse, but, and search, but they’re not able to change.

But then you could have the same form that’s powering a different board for internal users where internal users are able to update the statuses and leave notes and actually communicate about the status of things. It’s all, we designed it all to be very secure so that all the data is going through one, one endpoint that is able to be monitored closely in terms of the the data that’s going out.

So we have lots of security guards to make sure that only the people who are supposed to see the data do see the data, and you can manage these missions using, a very in depth board permissions page for who can add checklists, who can view them, who can add attachments, who can view them. Entry notes, assignees lanes.

You can lock it down or open it up as much as you want, including the ability for this to be the source of your feature request form. You can have feature request forms that are completely powered by Gravity Forms and gravity Board where people can add. A new feature to by just clicking add card and they can add a new feature request.

And that’s easy to do. And you can only filter, you can filter to only include the ones that have been reviewed if you want to have a review status so that the administrator could decide whether or not to show it on the public page.

Chris Badgett: Wow, this is this is really cool. I think I’m gonna get off this call and go cancel my Trello subscription because this is this is really awesome.

And just to clarify what you were saying on front end versus back end, 

Zachary Katz: right?

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Like you said, the public, you could have a public board, like a feature roadmap for a software company, say, so that’s like on the front end or, and so where does the, where do these boards live? Are they sure? Is it all front end and it’s based on user permissions?

Who sees it? Or is it backend or both? Or what is it? 

Zachary Katz: So you can have, you can view gravity board boards inside the backend as of the WordPress dashboard. And that’s what I’m doing here. You can see it works just as well in the backend as well as it does on the front end. You don’t need to embed this on the front end of your site at all if you don’t want to.

It can be fully internal, but we do offer blocks. And let’s say you wanted to have a page called, future requests.

You can add a Gutenberg block that says Gravity Board, and then you choose the board you wanna display and you publish. And just like that you have the board embedded in a page. One of the cool things about Gravity Board is we’ve added full keyboard integration. So if you wanted to know what keyboard shortcuts there are, you can press shift question mark and you can browse completely using your keyboard.

So let’s say you wanted to. Navigate around using up and down. You can’t necessarily see what I’m doing, but I’m pressing the side to side keys. It’s selecting the other selecting different cards, and if you hit enter, it opens the card and you can tab through the forms, add items as you want, and then hit escape to close it slash opens the filters, and you can search for something like SEO, for example, to only show cards that are related to SEO.

You can hit escape to close that hit f to go full screen. And full screen mode is the way I like to use it. ’cause I don’t like to have my content be limited by the size of my windows. 

Chris Badgett: I love this. It’s so powerful. You can use a Kanban board as an individual, just like setting your daily goals and stuff.

You can use it, if you’re building a site for a client, maybe the client’s gonna use it to manage a coaching process, onboarding process, learning objective. There’s so many different ways you can use these boards and it make brain not hurt as bad trying to keep track of everything. 

Zachary Katz: That’s true. Apple Notes recently added canman board layout to their actually Apple reminders. That is, you can say okay, I use reminders on my phone, apple reminders for stuff I need to do around the house, refill the bird feeder, take it, take the trash to the transfer station, like all sorts of things I need to do, mow the lawn, et cetera.

And I like to go move the item from, not done to done. And I like to see those visually sometimes in a canman boards layout. I’ve been using Gravity Board for Gravity board development, and we are just getting started. We’re going to be moving from user voice for feature requests. We’re going to be using gravity Board instead.

And the feature request board is not just a hypothetical. We’re gonna be doing this soon ourselves. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And if that’s it for the demo, I might pull this off and 

Zachary Katz: yeah, 

Chris Badgett: We do have a question from a live podcast watcher, so I’ll pull it up on the screen. I’ll I’ll start with it and give you time, Zach, to wrap your head around it.

But Jennifer says that she owns a micro school. Would I be able to utilize this tool to create learning objectives or specific skills by subject? Each student needs to master throughout the year. My first reaction to this is if you particularly have some manual grading and feedback processes in your courses or coaching programs or schooling where you need to keep track of students and they’re submitting some things and you’re grading and making sure they’re getting the concepts and obtaining the learning objectives.

It’s a little chaotic the way you run it. Now, this might be a great way to just transfer your process of how you think about achieving a learning objective to two stages and like how that fits with your course or lesson flow. And you can manage that with gravity board. ’cause there’s, there’s quizzes, assignments, grading, progress tracking.

But when you add something like. Kanban board on top, you’re just making your learning platform and process even more effective, easier to manage. And particularly if there’s a group of people working on it, everybody can collaborate much easier. But I’ll pass it over to you. Zach, what thoughts do you have on this one?

Zachary Katz: Yeah I’m trying to imagine how this would, it would be set up using a gravity board and the lanes might be stages of learning. And so let’s say you visualize the progress of learning arithmetic from. If you learn plus and minus, then you finally get to division and multiplication.

You might wanna drag the user, like the student from plus this person’s mastered subtraction. Let’s let’s move them over to working on division at this point. So maybe that’s that’s a way to see it. It’s helpful to identify. The, Chris was saying, like trying to figure out the stages of the process.

So if I don’t have the stages right that you’re talking about, Jennifer, then please get in touch with me and [email protected], and we’re happy to help you figure out what a good fit would be. But surely with lifter LMS and with Gravity View or Gravity Board, something would be helpful for tracking that type of thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and just as a lifter, LMS feature reminder, if you’re in Jennifer’s case, as an example, if you’re wanting to get input from the student, there’s this, there’s a Gravity Forms integration in lifter LMS that where you can require the student before they can complete the lesson that they have to submit whatever information you want to collect, which can then feed into the gravity board and really use those things seamlessly together.

Make sure your people use them if you want them to be submitting data, or it could just be a back, back office process that you use just to keep track of learners and getting those completion rates and compet competency rates up. 

Zachary Katz: Gravity View integrates with lifter LMS so that each student on their student dashboard can have a tab that shows the forms that they’ve submitted.

Which is really cool. Yeah, it’s a great integration. So that might be another way that you could do that, Jennifer, is to help visualize the courses that they’ve completed on their own dashboard using the form data they submitted, not necessarily the courses that they’ve completed, if that 

Chris Badgett: makes sense.

Since you mentioned that, and we do have past episodes on Gravity View. But could you just give us a quick rundown of like how, what Gravity View is, how it’s different from what we’re talking about here, which is also part of the Gravity Kit suite of [email protected]. 

Zachary Katz: Yeah, so Gravity View is more of an app builder.

Gravity Board is a specific app functionality to display in a CAM member board, and we’re actually going to be doing different layouts as well. But gravity view allows you to do more, creating a custom application for exactly the type of flow that you need using point and click. Let’s say you have more complex needs where each student submits multiple forms and has each student creates multiple entries using a form, like homework assignments.

But then you have multiple teachers maybe grading those assignments and each of those requires a new form submission to say, this assignment’s an A, this assignment’s a b. And then those need to be visualized and exportable and added to a calendar, like all of this stuff that we just talked to somebody who was about to be charged one and a half million dollars a year for this application that they built using gravity views, point and click solutions.

If you’re paying, if your school is paying, if you’re paying for these systems that track performance and fill out forms online, fill out the forms on your own website. Use GravityView to build custom applications to do whatever you wanna do. And we do so many things, it’s really hard to summarize, but like we know that there, you’re being charged too much elsewhere.

We know that it’s pretty easy to set up with Gravity view and that users love using it. And it just integrates with your existing flows. So if you’re running a camp like a an in-person summer camp. We have people that track all the students, all the parents, all the activities, all the extracurriculars. All of that using Forms and Gravity view, and they build a camp dashboard that saves them thousands of dollars a year.

Anytime you, you look at your budget and you say we’re paying a lot for X, there’s a good chance that gravity forms and gravity view can replace that and gravity board now as well. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You’ve made it Zach, to the advanced segment of the interview, so we’re going back to the idea that forms and app building, it’s just mind blowing how, what forms and moving data around and displaying it can do.

If you would just pull up for your own, use Gravity kit.com/products. Okay. And either go through all of ’em or just, give a quick summary of, you mentioned Gravity Calendar in the, in your last answer there. We haven’t mentioned Gravity charts yet, or Gravity Math. What are some of these other things included in the All Access Pass at Gravity Kit?

Zachary Katz: Yeah. Gravity Revisions let’s say you edit these entries using Gravity Board and gravity view, but you want a way to undo entries undo these changes, like track changes. That’s what Gravity revisions does. Gravity export. So many people use. You fill out a form and then. What do you do with that data?

I don’t know. I have my client log into the website and go to the Gravity Forms, export screen, export entries, and then download it. Choose the columns that they want, and then download the CSV and then they have to download the CSV. That’s how they do it. Gravity Export makes that, so it’s a single URL that the same client can access to download a pre-filtered set of entries in different formats, including C-S-V-P-D-F, Excel.

So you don’t have to, if you’re trying to walk your client through using a website and using, accessing their own data on gravity forms gravity Export makes that real easy. Gravity Math, you can say let’s say you have a tasks form that has a custom, that has a field for the number of hours that you estimate a task would take.

And gravity Math can be able to sum each of those entries into, okay, all of our tasks are going to take this number of hours. So it’s the ability to do math with Gravity Forms data. And that same goes with when you sell products using Gravity forms, it can calculate all sorts of good metrics for your product sales.

Gravity charts, you can chart that same data. Gravity forms data. And Gravity Calendar. We use Gravity Calendar as a team vacation calendar on Gravity Kit. So we have a form for vacation requests. They submit a vacation request. When it’s approved, it shows up on the team calendar. Now that team calendar, it’s an ICS feed, which means that you can connect it to your Apple Calendar.

You can view it in Google Calendar. I love being able to see my team availability on a calendar in, on my computer, on my phone, wherever I am. That’s powered by Gravity Calendar. Gravity, import imports, gravity forms, entries, and forms. Gravity gravity migrate is really cool. So let’s say you have this incredible application that you’ve built for your needs and you know that this is going to be helpful for somebody else who has very similar needs.

You don’t wanna have to download and export and reconfigure all this stuff. Well with Gravity Migrate, you export your entire Gravity Forms configuration, and that includes Gravity Kit, that includes third party add-ons, that includes all the stuff you need. So you go to your other website and then you import it into Gravity Migrate as well.

And all of your pages that have forms embedded on them, all of the forms themselves, all the entries, all everything, all the attachments, if you selected, that will be automatically uploaded and migrated from one site to another. That makes migration super easy. Instead of migrating a database, which there are a lot of database migration tools. We wanted to really drill down on the needs of the Gravity Forms community.

So that’s why we created Gravity Migrate. There are other tools out there that we have. But yeah I check out Gravity Kit and if you have any questions about this, if you’re listening I am available for consultation call. I will talk to you about your needs or your, what you want to accomplish.

And if you’re not sure how to do it, I will help you. If it’s not the right fit for Gravity Kit or Gravity Forms. I will tell you, you should probably use something else. I don’t wanna sell you on a software that you don’t need, like any good software entrepreneur, that is our goal is your success.

And I know that’s the same approach that list LMS has. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. Gravity kit is awesome, and once you see the power of forms and doing stuff with data it really blows your mind in terms of building what you want. And the learning management system is a web application. 

Zachary Katz: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And you can customize your.

Learning management system, web application even further with Gravity Forms and Gravity kit. You mentioned demos. The Gravity Board has a demo. Do all of your add-ons have demos or how did the demos? 

Zachary Katz: All of our add-ons have demos? If you go to site dot, try dot gravity kit.com, that’s where our demos live.

The default demos Gravity View. But if you go to the top under More Gravity Kit plugin demos, you can see. Each of them have demonstrations and each of those is live. So you can click a button. Have your own working version of that demo site so you can go in there and see how it’s set up and change it to your needs.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Zach, I was looking forward to this episode ’cause whenever you drop a new add-on, I’m like, this is gonna be really cool. And as a project management guy who’s dealt with Kanban for a long time, it’s really great to see this. Available in WordPress. And so flexible for so many different ways, not to mention all the other great stuff that comes with Gravity Kit.

What’s the best way for. You out there watching or listening to get started? They could take the demo. These add-ons are individually sold or you can get them in bundles. Is that right? 

Zachary Katz: That’s right. Gravity Board is available standalone and all access is actually also includes all of our add-ons, including future add-ons.

Yeah, go to gravity kit.com. We’re actually having a 40% off sale right now for the next three days. We have, we’re celebrating our 11th birthday of Gravity View and Gravity Kit. 40% off ends July 31st. So check out our sale and you can snag a license at a big discount. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Zach, thank you for coming back on the show. Really appreciate it. I can’t recommend Gravity Kit, Zach and his team enough. Go check that out. Any other ways people can connect with you? 

Zachary Katz: I am on Mastodon at Zach Katz and Mastodon Social slash Zach Katz. And I am on LinkedIn add me to your professional network.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for coming on, Zach. We really appreciate it. 

Zachary Katz: Thank you so much, Chris. I really had a good time. Thanks.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen disclosed that John C. is the source of one of his fundamental ideas on leadership. According to Maxwell, “Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.” He thinks that everyone has an innate ability to lead, whether it be in the form of managing a team, a small group, or even just one other individual.

But a lot of people think they are better suited as a “number two” or support person, so they avoid taking on that job. Like in physics, when that occurs, a leadership void is created, and it will always be filled often by the wrong individuals, which will result in bad choices and unfavorable outcomes. Kurt used a tale from his business background to demonstrate this point, in which a sophisticated bonus scheme for merchants was implemented without first determining whether or not they wanted it.

Kurt was the only person in a boardroom full of international executives who had ever worked at the retail level. Based on his personal experience, he cautioned that the program would fail despite making him the “protruding nail” a Japanese term for an individual who deviates from the group.

The scheme ultimately failed as he had feared, but his bravery in speaking up gained him a say in subsequent initiatives. Kurt believes that being a leader frequently entails stating the truth, going into awkward situations, and stepping in before someone less qualified does.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a repeat GA guest. His name is Kurt Van Ahnen. He’s from Manana, NOMAS, and Kurt and I are gonna be talking about leadership today. But first, welcome to the show, Kurt. Hey, man, it’s always good to see you. Yeah. I know you’ve written books on leadership.

What’s the name of your book again? My book is Action Leadership from the Edge. Awesome. Let’s just start super high level. Like when you, somebody asks you like, what is leadership? How would you answer that question? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I actually steal that answer from someone I consider a mentor. That’s John C.

Maxwell. He is if you don’t know, he is like an unbelievably prolific author on leadership, but he is quoted multiple times as saying leadership has influenced nothing more, nothing less, and that’s that alone has helped guide me on my pathway to continuous learning in this space.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s a, it is an interesting question and it’s such a broad topic. I feel like everybody’s a leader in the sense that once you grow up from being a baby. You have to influence yourself and make decisions and move throughout the world. And then you have friend groups and you make decisions and so on, and it just keeps going out.

Not everybody goes all the way to becoming a transformational leader that LE leads a country or a religious movement or something like that, but there’s like leadership potential in everybody. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: You’re touching on. The actual purpose of the book I wrote, and that was for me and I saw this through the pandemic and stuff, so I really got amped up through that space.

But I personally believe everybody, every single human on the planet has some natural calling to some leadership position, whatever that is. You’re called to have influence on somebody or a group of people. And personally, I feel a lot of people bypass or abstain from that calling, right? So a lot of people go, oh, I’m not really a leader.

I’m more of a good number two, I’m a good support person. I’m not, and when you see people pull back or restrict themselves from fulfilling that natural call, I believe it just leaves a gap in leadership. And and I think the universe. All the energies of the universe. I think it hates the idea that there’s a gap in things, and so it allows that gap to be filled, but then it’s filled unnaturally and that’s how we see things where.

Normal people like us can look up, people running things and go, how did that moron get in that position? And you go, oh, that’s how, because the people that were meant to fill that position never stepped up. They never stepped into their natural call of leadership. And it allowed poor fits to fill those gaps.

And then they land and expand and it propagates nonsense instead of what’s meant to be. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s a huge deal. A leadership vacuum, I call it. Yeah. Like it’s missing and like you said, it’s like physics. Something will fill that space. Yeah. And it’s not always the best thing, but it will, that’s, that vacuum will always get filled.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah it’s crazy to watch. I have a ton of corporate experience and I, and so many times the most visually striking one was I wa I was in a boardroom and it was packed. We had to bring in extra chairs, giant table, extra chairs, people from different countries, vice presidents, and there was this giant new initiative, it was a distributorship that was going to.

Implement a new program for all of the retailers. You must do this to earn this bonus. And they were gonna put this giant program out and it was immensely complicated. And and they were acting like it was a bonus for the retailers, and I had worked retail before in that field and I kept thinking, this is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

And I said, Hey I raised my hand and I said, Hey I wanna recognize my position in the room as not the leader, right? Because I’m president and vice president. Everybody’s in this room. I said, but I’m just really curious, who, who has a team or who reached out to the base to find out if this is a program they actually desire?

Who wants to participate in this program? And they were like, oh, Kurt, that’s not a. That wasn’t a consideration. We’re gonna launch this thing. This is what we need to see happen, and this is the bonus structure we put in place and this is the way it’s gonna be. And then I was like buy a show of hands.

How many people in this room have actually worked at that level of retail? So you know how to absorb. The program that’s being promoted. And it was me and one other dude that put up their hand and I was like I can tell you firsthand, this ain’t gonna fly. Yeah. Like the half million dollars you’ve already spent on salaries and all the junket took to, to build this program up.

We’re in this meeting and I’m like, I can tell you right now, this ain’t gonna fly. It doesn’t go over real well. When you’re the contrarian in the room sometimes there’s a saying in Japan the protruding nail always gets hammered, right? And so I was the protruding nail in that situation.

But I’m also a fortune teller. It didn’t go over well, and then that kind of catapults that natural fit for leadership for the next. Project to, to then be considered and consulted and hey, Kurt, what would you do in this situation? But sometimes that step to leadership comes through a contrarian or uncomfortable moment.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And there’s a bunch of words wrapped up in here that overlap with leadership. One of them is power. Another one is politics, which you ran into in the boardroom. And then there’s like leadership and then there’s management and all these things overlap and relate to each other.

I’d like to keep this focused on leadership particularly, but just let’s talk about the difference between leadership and management. So I see leadership as. More of the influence, the vision, the setting, the culture kind of stuff. Management is actually like the mission and getting the work done and having a great experience for employees and customers and all that kind of stuff.

So they’re different. And keeping this this conversation on leadership, but let’s take a sidetrack for a moment. Bring in management. How do you think about the difference between. What a manager does and what a leader does. And it may be the same person or it could be two different roles or whatever.

How do you d differentiate? Because I, I see confusion in the space, like where a manager is not necessarily a great leader or a leader may have really poor management skills. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I don’t know that you and I have ever been this transparent before and I don’t know that you’ve seen my other content, part of my draw to the leadership space.

Was that I was a horrible leader. I was disgustingly bad at it. I was such a driven, a type personality coming, like before high school, like coming outta mid school. I was crazy competitive. Like when I had a paper route in the seventh grade. I didn’t just have a paper route as kids quit their paper routes.

Adopted their paper routes. And next thing I had seven seven paper routes. And the guy that ran, the guy ran a bunch of kids for paper routes, so he obviously he’s not, wasn’t the top of the list. He was totally confused, like, how is Kurt delivering? Hundreds of papers every day on these paper routes.

You didn’t realize I’d subcontracted to younger kids to go deliver the newspapers, and I just went around, knocked on doors, collected money, and went and bought Mountain Dews. And that was kinda like my first but I drove people hard and I did it even then. And so when I got outta school and started picking up these management jobs, like I managed the tuxedo store, I managed a furniture store, I ran a pizza shop.

I did these things before getting outta high school, but I did it like with this iron fist we are gonna produce, we are gonna, we’re gonna be productive, we’re gonna be on time and on budget. I was like, rah. And I was barking at people, push harder, push faster. I was a where it really came to a head.

I was a training supervisor at UPS, at one of the hubs in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. And for a long time I held the load record there. I’m just I was always a really hard worker, even physically, just a really hard worker. And so they said, oh, Kurt, you’re really good at this. We’re gonna put you in charge of a team.

I had this poor kid crying in the truck, like literally sobbing because he couldn’t load the truck fast enough. He is I feel like I’m gonna throw up. And I’m like, suck it up buttercup. Let’s get in there, throw those boxes, and that’s not a leader, right? That’s a manager. The manager is like, what are the spreadsheets?

What are the results? How hard can I push my people? And I was very much like that. Work harder. Work faster. We’ll see the results. And I had to really do a lot of studying and a lot of what would you call it? Self humility or something, right? Like I had to realize I got this wrong. And I gotta figure out what’s right.

And trying to be more empathetic and figure out how do you get performance out of people without making ’em crumble and cry in the back of a truck. Like how do you do that? And it’s a real arc form. So leadership is completely different, but the results can be very similar. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And let’s talk about power and influence.

You mentioned a leader creates influence. Influence can have or, it can also mean like exercising power and making, willing something to happen that can have positive and negative connotations. But what, what, in your view is like a great example of wielding influence in a leadership capacity to get great results in a very win kind of way.

Kurt Von Ahnen: You might be embarrassed, but you’re a really great example of it. You built a plugin by your own admission, you felt like you were late to the party when you launched lifter LMS. You weren’t late to the party. It had space to grow. And then think about it like, you have me on the team, I’ve been with the team.

I think we’re five or six years or something crazy like we’ve been doing stuff together. Emily’s been on the team for a long time. You brought Nadia to the team and she has just really blossomed and she’s knocking like every task outta the park. And the Colemans have joined the team, from an ownership perspective.

So then you have that 360 degree leadership, right? Like where you’re expanding at the peer level too, right? Not just downstream, cross stream. And so when someone takes a look at an overall picture and goes, oh, wait a minute. He’s leading down, he’s leading across, he’s leading up.

And when I say leading up, you have the LMS cast. You have influence at the different, like I’ve seen you at Word Camp, I’ve seen you interact with other people in the space. So that’s leading up, that’s leading across, that’s leading down that is like a full bubble of. Influence. And then it sounds manipulative.

I don’t mean it to sound manipulative, but when you have that full bubble atmosphere of influence, yeah. You get to say, this is the direction I want this to go. Or I’m thinking, Hey, you know what, I’m being led to think this is a good thing. And then people come along with that. And so that’s part of that power, that’s part of that, the influence, the power that the thing that people talk about.

But it’s. If you do it well and you do it with the right heart and the right intention, it’s organic. It’s not pushy, and people want to come along. It’s not like that. You’re pushing them along. And so there’s a big difference in, in how it’s subtle but it’s a huge difference in how it really occurs.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate you saying that. I think one of the, if I’m ever evaluating a company as an example and I’m asking myself the question, how good is the leadership here? One of the things I look for is how long have the team members been there? Because people and sometimes people move on and that’s fine.

But if, particularly when people move on, they were there for a very long time and then they did something different or whatever, that’s a good sign. But if you have all this churn in your organization for employees, to me that’s like a flag that, oh, is there a leadership issue here? And it can be a lot of things.

It’s complicated. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: But you, I gotta jump in. You’re reminding me of a consulting call I did two weeks ago. Yeah. A motorcycle dealership. I do some training in the power sports field for those that are listening and don’t know. I do some training in the power sports field and we had a dealer owner on a call and I said, so tell me about some of the problems of your dealership.

What are you trying to fix with this training? And he goes our technicians are flaky. We got one guy comes in a half hour late, takes two hours for lunch. Half the time you don’t know if he’s gonna show up or not. We’ve had, technicians turn in, turn out like like a bunch of people quit and leave.

‘Cause you can’t trust technicians. And then, our parts guys are, really struggling with back orders from the OEMs and the suppliers and. But for the most part, our sales team is strong, right? And then so he goes to this thing and I said okay. I said, you’ve done a really good job of outlining some symptoms, in this training we really need to talk about root causes.

And he was like, what do you mean root causes? I just told you what the problems were with the dealership. And I said, no, you told me what the symptoms were with the dealership. I said people don’t leave positions. They leave leadership. So if you have a revolving door with technicians leaving your service department, that’s not a sign that technicians in general are flaky and undependable.

That’s a sign that something’s broken. Broken in your leadership, tree, right? You’ve got a broken branch in the leadership tree that’s causing these guys to realize, hey, this place isn’t being run well. I can’t make enough money working under this leadership. I’m gonna have to go find something else.

You can imagine that probably didn’t go over very well, but piece by piece. Every problem he brought up, I was like, that’s another symptom. Let’s talk about how that root cause works. And then we got into process development talks and things like that. But it’s really interesting to see how people.

The perspective what’s the perspective of something that’s not working? And when you talk to somebody, especially if they’re really close to the problem, chances are they miss they start talking in terms of symptoms instead of what’s the root cause, how do you get, how do you establish relationship with people so that they will perform or will come to work on time or will not take a two and a half hour lunch.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s a heavy load to carry. But I think about that a lot. If there’s a problem in a bus in the business, I’m like my first thought is how am I responsible for this? And I think that’s uncommon yeah it’s easier to point the finger and of course multiple parties are participating in whatever the issue is, but ultimately it’s a leadership or management issue.

I’ve watched you take personal leadership and. In short order, move your family from California to Kansas. And like part of what a leader does is they hold space or they provide safety, security through hard things. And so I watch you like, move the family to Kansas and then I’ve watched you lead into developing your network and.

Your influence locally in Kansas and get involved in lots of projects and community and stuff like that. How do you think about that transition just from a leadership, like what kind of wisdom for others? Because one thing a leader will do typically is they will make dramatic change if they need to.

And you did it, you can get stuck and just keep doing what you’ve always done and cross your fingers. But there’s times when you have to burn the boats and try something else. So what tips do you have around that? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: When I talk to people in general about the switch from California to Kansas, the paradigm shift in our quality of life is, it’s darn near immeasurable, Chris.

It really is.

Chris Badgett: That didn’t, it felt risky in a big bet at the time, right? It is lot of 

Kurt Von Ahnen: resistance. It is risky in a big bet, but. Here’s like where I’m going to, I’m just gonna get to brass tacks with it. If you’re a leader, if you’re in charge of stuff and you feel external pressure to say yes to projects that you know you normally wouldn’t want to do, or you think are a bad idea, but you know that you have to say yes because you gotta create the revenue.

That to me is, that’s the sign. Like something. Something’s gotta change. So then you have to start really doing, again, go back to root cause analysis, right? Why am I in this position? Why am I saying yes to projects that my team shouldn’t have to work on? Why am I taking on these liabilities?

And stressing myself out about stuff that I, that normally I wouldn’t say yes to. And any business owner or a project manager is gonna have those moments, but when it becomes a consistent thing, you have to like go, wait a minute, I gotta really take stock of what’s happening here. And when we were in the Southern California economy post pandemic.

I had to say yes to so many projects that I knew I normally wouldn’t do. Either the money wasn’t right or the project was poor or something was, it just wasn’t right. And I was under a lot of stress to do a lot of things that I normally wouldn’t have done. And so I knew we had to change the economic makeup of what we were doing, but I really.

This is gonna sound, weird. I didn’t really fully understand what I was opening up when I moved away from California. So when we got to Kansas, we lowered our overhead by 65%. I’ve always been really on point I don’t need a bunch of car payments. I don’t need so if you think about the basic cost of living.

We lowered our expenses by 65% moving to Kansas. And what that did was it immediately freed me up to not have to say yes to certain projects. So by being able to pass on certain things that were not, high margin items or high, good fit items, I was able to say yes to things that were a good fit or higher margin items.

And that allowed us to grow and scale at a much quicker rate. And then you look at. What’s the population density and the expectations of one region could be anywhere. Right? And then you look at, we live in a fairly small community in Kansas now, and so all of a sudden I’m big fish little pond.

I show up and I’m like, I have all this enterprise web building experience. I’m connected to plugin developers. I’m connected to, different WordPress hosts. And so when I go to local entrepreneur meetups. And have conversations with people. I’m able to communicate in a way to them that lends confidence that I don’t think they’ve really seen before in this space.

And it’s give, and they’ve just adopted us. Everyone’s opened up their arms and let us in. The community college, the high school, the city the entrepreneur development organization in town everybody’s just been super open, super, super friendly, and they want to be, they want. They want to be in our space, but they also are inviting us into their space.

It’s very much a, it’s very much a co-mingling and it’s working out really so far. 

Chris Badgett: One of the things that interests me is the difference between a founder, entrepreneur and a CEO. And from your story you had to. Make a sacrifice, make a move, step into the unknown. And that’s what founder entrepreneurs do. And there’s like a lot of sacrifice. So there’s particularly if you’re bootstrapped, self-funded, just starting from nothing. If later you’re doing well, it looks that you’ve, it’s like unfair maybe, or it happened overnight, but there was actually like this trail of sacrifice and stuff in the past.

And part of what leaders do, it takes courage, right? Because sometimes those sacrifices don’t work out. And it was a test, it was an experiment, but it was a failed experiment. And then the more times you come back, in my experience. The more things you try, eventually it starts looking like luck, but you just, you’re actually really good at failing fast and then trying something else.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I, it’s such a weird thing because I actually used to say, failing forward and then all of a sudden John Maxwell came out with a book called Failing Forward, and I felt cheated. I was like, is he reading my emails? I completely believe in taking a lot of swings. I take a lot of swings and it’s okay if something doesn’t work.

Some things I get emotionally tied to and and I share this all the time, like my Power Sport Academy project. I put that together. I’m super passionate about power sports. I know I’m gonna help hundreds, if not thousands of families find, financial freedom or at least, financial de, consistency.

Through this training. And I’m really proud of it, but it wasn’t selling. It just wasn’t selling and it was years and years. And you even helped me with it. You were like this headline sucks. ’cause you’re really good at that kind of communication, right? So you were like change this headline, change this.

And I kept trying different things to try and promote that product and it wasn’t working. And then to your point. I was gonna turn it off. I was gonna say, you know what, I’m done. It’s too much of a distraction. I’m gonna go in another direction. And, but it was five years, like I’d let the thing sit there for five years trying to promote this thing and then all of a sudden guy calls up, he’s got a hundred dealerships that need trained and that.

Instantly turned that project into, 55, $60,000 a year of revenue. And so then people see that, like last year I went to the AM expo and I was a speaker at the AM Expo, which is a power sports thing. And people are like, Hey, you’re back. ‘Cause I used to work for Ducati and Suzuki and so they’re like, Hey, you’re back.

And they’re like, oh man, it’s so cool. It’s like you’re an overnight success. And it like, they’re acting like, it’s like some immediate. Gift and it’s no, this was five, this is the result of five years of work that I almost gave up on, and now it’s actually starting to come true, which is a cool thing.

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One of my favorite things is to develop other leaders and and the reason why is because when I was younger in my leadership career. I had some people develop me, so at the place I worked in Alaska, there was an opening for a manager and I felt like I, I was probably less Type A than you. Like I was a all star employee.

Worked really hard, pulled more than my load was always helpful. It was, I’m a good employee and then. One of the other managers at the time brought me aside. He is you really should apply for that manager position. And then I got a lot of mentor from my boss and other managers and stuff like that, and really developed and also just naturally found that I liked also to develop other leaders and stuff like that.

But what advice would you have for somebody and let me just say, I see this at lifter, LMS, like the entrepreneurs that use our tools are some of them, if I’m looking for case studies, some of the best ones are like super humble and they’re like, oh, I’m not ready yet. And they’re like, but they’re actually like doing great and making great progress.

But they’re underselling themselves on their. What they’ve accomplished and the influence and power that they have, and there’s different leadership styles. But for someone who’s maybe not realizing how much of a leader they already are, what advice would you have to like, discover that or encourage that, that, that 

Kurt Von Ahnen: seed to grow?

I almost don’t wanna encourage it and spoil it to be honest with you. True leadership to me, like people that are organically great leaders. One of the, one of the things, one of the traits of that is a sense of humility, right? Is like they’re still approachable. They’re still normal people.

They’re, I can go and I don’t really like, like domestic beer but I can still go to the neighborhood pub, grab something that tastes decent and and get along with everybody in the room, and there’s just a certain. That’s a certain sense of humility, right?

I’m not above any of these people. Farmers, tow truck drivers, whatever. It doesn’t matter. You’re in, you work hard, let’s crack a cold one and have a good time. There’s a certain like that trait, that humility is so attractive to people that you don’t wanna spoil that.

You don’t wanna put people on a pedestal and be like, man, you’re slaying it. You’re awesome. You are kicking butt. Because then you run the risk of leveling down the humility, which is the attractive part of leadership. And then they start to get, inflated. There’s gotta be a certain balance to things.

So for me it’s like I really like to focus on accomplishment or direction or, apparent potential of somebody, but not so much you’re slaying it, you’re the bomb, you’re the this. It’s more I wanna say, Hey, you’re in a really good space. You’re in a really good, this is a really good moment.

Momentum. Momentum moment, can’t speak. This is a really good momentum moment. We want to capitalize on the momentum, right? But I want to use that kind of talk instead of break them out of their shell, because that shell is part of the attractiveness that’s making them successful.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And one of the, my favorite quotes from the DA by Lao Sue is he says, the people will say, we did it ourselves. So great leaders, in my opinion, are almost invisible, and they’re empowering others and they send out, influence and positive change through others and don’t even necessarily care or need to take the credit for it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: When I tell people, like when I first started coming outta my shell as I’m gonna be purposeful about this leadership thing, I took over as a service manager of a Pep Boy store. And this place was, I’m not gonna say it was in the ghetto, but it wasn’t in the best of neighborhoods. It was a little bit rundown.

The shop was filthy. The cars were junk in the lot, it was a pep boys service center. And I walked in there. In regular clothes. I didn’t have a uniform yet. I walked in and it was like a day or two before I was actually supposed to start the job, and nobody stopped me. Like it was one of those stores, like no security.

Nobody gave a credit about nothing, right? So I walked through the shop, nobody said anything. So I picked up a broom and I started sweeping. And then I, so I cleaned the back room where the oil disposal place was, and then I started cleaning the shop and I literally started pushing like toolboxes around and scrubbing the floor and.

Usually if you touch a technician’s toolbox, you’re fixing to get, some hands, right? Nobody said a word. They all treated me like I was some kind of paid labor to come in and clean the shop, which to me was fine. I went into the restroom and it was just coated and grease and hand prints.

So I basically pressure washed the bathroom, slapped on some gloves, cleaned the bathroom. It took me two days to clean this shop, clean the whole shop. On the third day, I walked in with my service manager uniform shirt on, and I said, Hey, gather everybody up. We’re gonna have a quick meeting, and they were like.

Oh no. And I just said, Hey, does the shop look good? Oh yeah, the shop looks great. I said, great. Now you guys already know I’ll never ask you to do something I wouldn’t do myself first. Now we just need to maintain it, and they were like, oh. But it was like instant buy-in that way.

There wasn’t any there wasn’t any question about whether Kurt was gonna come in and work hard at this job, and then. I gotta admit, I’m pretty good at running a service department. So everyone started to make more money as soon as the sh like the shop was already clean. But once they started to make more money, these technicians were like, what can we do next?

Like that influence starts to take over. And then we ended up having one of the number one stores in the district for profit. But it’s, to me it is the way that you come into leadership. When I started at Suzuki, it was the opposite. They had, Suzuki had promised my job to people that were on staff, and then they hired me from the outside, right?

And then I show up and it’s this is Kurt. He’s the new manager of publications and training. Everyone that was promised that job instantly hated me. And then I had to overcome all this negativity that I didn’t create. I had to overcome all, it took two months to get people to have any buy-in with anything I wanted to do.

Because that’s the difference of how you enter the space, right? And the difference is like 15 years between Pep Boys and Suzuki. So at the beginning of my leadership journey, I had this great success. And then near the end, recently in my employment career, I have this giant failure I gotta overcome.

But I guess that overcoming is part of the success. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Leading by example I find is really powerful. And I see some entrepreneurs not do it in the sense that like for me it wasn’t a surprise when you were two minutes early to this meeting. I’m timely to my meetings, right?

And if I’m late, something crazy happened or if I like, it rarely happens. But if I completely missed something, something came up that was outside of my control. So I demonstrate the behavior that I like to see, which is respecting each other’s time. Being ready and prepared. A funny story from Alaska is we would have our team meeting in a tent in the morning with about 20 people, right?

And outside of the tent, it’s about a 50 yard walk to a dog yard that has a couple hundred sled dogs in it. On the corner of the dog yard is a porta-potty, right? And it was interesting like how. 25% of people would use the porta-potty before the meeting and 25% or and, or 75% before the meeting, 25% on the clock out to start their shift.

And I just, it’s, part of leadership is to pick and choose your battles. Is that really a battle I want to have or do I care more about this other thing over here? Yeah. But. Leading by example. Like being prepared to work and ready for go time is a very important signal. And if a manager or a boss or a leader doesn’t do that themselves, they’re literally setting the bar like really low and then they act surprised when performances, basically similar to what they’re doing.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, that do as I do not as I say, or do as I say, not as I do nonsense. That’s there’s a couple of different ways to look at that. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a, it’s an interesting one. Let’s talk about leadership styles, because there’s not just one leadership template, there’s like the humble leader, there’s like the command and control leader, and a lot of it depends on context.

Are we going to war? Are we doing life coaching? Are we doing like fam, like some kind of major decision as a family? There’s all kinds of context, but there’s so many different leadership styles, yeah, the, the humble one, the command and control one. Another one is I position myself probably more as like a servant leader.

I’m the opposite of command and control, but I’m still effective and I’m, I care more about unblocking my team, making sure their goals fit inside the goals of the business, adapting and, lifting people up. I’m not trying to push ’em down and push ’em out and deploy. That happens like through the work and stuff, but it’s just, I have my own style.

It’s soft. It’s not hard, but you can also be a hard leader too, and be effective and respected and respectful. So tell us some thoughts on style and finding your own style. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I, if anyone is like thinking, let’s say that someone listens to this and they go this is a different message today. This is cool.

I’m inspired. Maybe I should do something. One of the first steps is to figure out how are you internally wired? Yeah. So take an assessment and there’s. Half a dozen right off the top of our heads that we could go through, right? Whe whether it’s A-A-A-A-A-C-V-I or a Briggs and whatever, and or a disc or, but find out like how are you internally wired and then how do you actually naturally communicate or naturally work within systems.

And then Chris mentioned a couple of things. Is this a process driven leadership example, right? Is this something that is really dependent upon process, organization, and conformance? Like you have to conform to a certain process to find success as a team? In this arena, whatever that is. Could be war, could be making cars on an assembly line, could be like all kinds of things.

Certain things are very process driven, whereas if you get into like the coaching space, you are more like, like a really great coach never teaches the subject anything. A really great coach asks phenomenal questions that allows the subject to teach themselves. And so that’s like a form of leadership where you’re extracting it out of somebody else, but you’re leading and you’re having influence because of your method of extraction.

But the success is really coming from the person. So it’s completely different. And some people are wired for different ways. For instance, sometimes I’m really good at asking these questions and being this coach kind of person. But if I’m honest with myself and how I’m really wired. Sometimes I just don’t have the patience internally.

I just don’t have, ’cause it, it could be like a tattoo on somebody’s forehead. Like you’ve got this issue and you are skirting around it. Someone needs to bring it to your attention. And so I’m the kind of person that’s a little more direct and I’ll bring something to someone’s attention and then I’ll say, now let’s do some root cause analysis and figure out how to erase this tattoo issue.

So that’s not really great coaching. That’s more like. Great consulting and that’s like a different thing. So I really thrive in the consultant space. I thrive really good on seeing things that most people don’t see from their own environment. Maybe they’re in too deep to really see the details.

And so I’m really good at saying here’s our existing structure, here’s our existing process. Here’s our existing, results. Data set that we’re looking at. Where is this coming from? If we take a snapshot of this right now, what’s actually causing this snapshot to be reality? And then where do we want it to be?

And then I’m really good at so what would be the next steps to get to where we want to be? So that’s more of a consulting leadership mindset. And that seems to be like where my real strengths are. The coaching side, like I said, I don’t know that I have enough patience for it. And when it comes time to crack the whip and really get something moving like a soccer team that needs to win the big game. That’s one of those that’s process driven, right? Defense is defense. Offense is offense, the triangulated play, and the art of the sport, like all of that. So when you’re yelling from the sidelines, yeah, it’s maybe, it seems like you’re being really hard in the moment.

To me, successful leaders that are in those environments, they are hard in the moment and the team looks for them to be hard in the moment. They’re looking for that discipline in the moment, but you have to have the cognizance the self-awareness to realize that when the moment’s over you, you can gear back and be more relational.

Then it’s that relationship that allows you to gear up in the moment. It’s that emotional bank account. If you make enough positive deposits in the emotional bank account, when you’re not in those moments, then in those moments you are fully qualified and fully deposited so that you can make that emotional withdrawal, and be demanding in the moment.

Chris Badgett: Let’s leave people with an actionable leadership superpower or something to work on. It can be anything. I’ll do mine first, which is realizing that people are not robots and realizing that we, there’s something called the superior worth hypothesis, which means this is from my anthropology background that, you perceive a culture, another culture through the context of your own. And I think it was Margaret Mead that said we see the world as we are, not as it is. And so once you realize that not everybody else is neither a robot, nor are they wired, just like UNC, have the same mindsets and viewpoints and everything, you start realizing how different people are.

If you can empathize with people and really take their perspective, you can be a much more effective leader. And the human brain likes to take shortcuts like you may see yourself like, oh, I’m a b plus leader. I’m pretty good at what I do. But the reality is, if you have followers this person over here sees you as an a plus.

This person over here sees you as an F. This person sees you as a c. Like, and you can’t control that, like respect is earned and stuff like that. And maybe your style doesn’t match their style. So what I learned is if you can really take the perspective of the other person and adapt, particularly in a one-on-one situ situation, like if you have a global challenge at your work and the te the whole team is involved and you go to people, maybe you have a team meeting about the challenge.

But then you go to people one-on-one. I might approach this person who, and you can use things like personality type assessments and things to figure out how people are different, but I’m like, this person over here needs a lot of autonomy in the work they do. And what they need from me is to just clearly paint a picture of where we need to go and then give them a hundred percent freedom on how to get there.

This other person over here is more of a process person. And they’re gonna, if I give them like, here’s what I would do, and maybe structure like a flow chart of changes and activities and time boxing and calendaring and chart the path they’re set up for success. But those are two completely different approaches that achieve the same outcome.

When you’re leading first be okay with lots of people having different perceptions of you within and with and outside of your organization. Also treat your team, your customers, your industry partners, your colleagues. Everybody’s different. And if you can meet them where more, where they are, it, you become a lot more influential as a leader.

Yeah. That’s good stuff. What about you? What’s a superpower or insight you had that you would hope other leaders could unlock or explore further?

Kurt Von Ahnen: One of the things I think really needs explored by most leaders is a lot of leaders don’t give themselves the space to be able to find success. They allow themselves to get into too many obligations or putting out too many fires or, not having that clarity of thought in the moment where they really would perform well.

They didn’t set themselves up for success in advance, so they don’t perform as well as they could. So one of the things I recommend to people is, and you’ll hear this with a lot of people, right? But it, but I’ll say, Hey, just get up a little bit earlier, right? Have some quiet time. Do some kind of inspirational reading, whatever that is, a chapter of the Bible some book that you like, whatever.

And then for me, I use a digital planner and I actually write down my schedule every day. Even though I have a digital schedule, I have, nine calendars for all these different projects I do, and everybody’s trying to book time on that calendar. And but I have everything set up so that they can only book an appointment.

24 hours away, right? So when I get up in the morning, there’s not gonna be any more appointments booked on my day when I get up. So I get up and I physically write down my calendar every day. And what that does, Chris, it sounds stupid, but it like. Plugs me into the day, it aligns me with what are my requirements for the day, and then what am I able to fit into the other spaces of the day?

And then that’s my time blocking, like when you say time block, right? And if a customer needs to meet with me, they’re gonna if it’s today’s Thursday and they need to meet with me, they’re gonna go to my link and they’re gonna pick an appointment. The next available one’s Friday. Not a problem.

So when I get up tomorrow, I’ll see that appointment. I’ll put that, I’ll write that into my schedule. So if that appointment’s at 11, I know that I’ve got from nine to 11 to knock something out of the park, and I’ve got from 12 to five to knock other things out of the park. And I think that a lot of leaders don’t have the clarity of their day, so they’re constantly jumping from one.

Distraction to the other, and they never really get the time to succeed at any one element. And I think if you build that as a habit, you’re able to have influence on others to build similar habits. And then if you have a team of people seem to be more organized, more, more together in their space, more clarity of thought.

And I think you start to see a lot of great things happen. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just in closing, leadership is it’s a whole other job and you have to make time for it. Like I have a, yeah. I have a block in my calendar and I learned this trick from somebody else. So leaders are supposed to be visionaries, right?

And a lot of leaders and entrepreneurs are, they have a vision for the future. But I have a block of time on Fridays where for 30 minutes I have everything off, every device off. And I just sit with one question, which is, how can I create more value for. My, my users, my customers, the person I’m serving than anybody else in the world.

And that’s a, that’s like literally an exercise or a workout around vision. But if I don’t make the space for that and I’m just in reaction mode like you’re saying and oh, that time block just went away, but make time, like you said, get up early, read a book on leadership, pick one area of leadership and try to just work on that over a month.

And if you do that for 12 months, you’re gonna be a much better leader at the end. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, the time blocking thing is huge. Personal development is huge. Part of that personal development, and I know that you’re strong on this one, Chris, some kind of physical activity. Oh yeah. Our talk today has been mostly about, mental stuff, mental gymnastics and relationships and emotions and all that.

But I think there’s a lot more clarity in that space when you’re physically fit or when you. Exert energy. When I’m working on the computer and I feel like nothing’s happening. Like I get that, just that weird I’m not being very productive right now. I don’t force myself to work through it.

That’s, to me, I’ve learned over the years, that’s not gonna work for me. I’m just gonna get more and more frustrated and work slower and slower. What I do is I go jump on a bicycle, knock out 10 or 20 miles, come back, take a shower, sit down on the computer and knock out three days worth of work in an evening.

Like it, it’s so if you’re a physical person. Don’t let this other, don’t let the stuff that Chris and I are talking about distract you from that physicality. Make sure you still center yourself with, the exertion that you need. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Burnout is real for everybody, but particularly leaders. You have to have, it is a balancing act and you have to unplug and do other things and just be a human and just like you getting outside, exercising is a definitely a superpower that.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Is, I really opened the door for you to say you bike 15 to 20 miles. Heck, I run that far almost every day. Hey, I’m a humble leader, Kurt. I’m a humble leader. They say that they say that bicycling they, how is it? It’s four times the distance for running, isn’t it? That what it is.

I don’t know. So so a marathon is like 23 miles? Yeah. But a century ride on a bicycle of course is a hundred miles. Yeah. So running is four times harder than bicycling. I just wanna be super clear on this show running is four times harder than bicycling. So if I’m biking 10 miles and you’re running three or four a day you’re slaying me.

You’re absolutely slaying me. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s it for this episode on leadership. Hope you enjoyed it and continue to develop as a leader. It’s a lifelong thing that never ends, but it’s one of the most rewarding things in life, both in business or work, but also in your personal life, like personal development is personal leadership.

Thank you Kurt, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, and we will do another episode down the road. Take care. Nice.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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He describes how course developers may utilize automation to offer timely, pertinent information at every stage of the learner experience by segmenting their audiences based on behavior, such as engaged prospects, new leads, or inactive users. Greg outlines important lifecycle automation processes that are intended to increase conversion rates and student retention, such as welcome sequences, abandoned cart messages, onboarding emails, and post-purchase interaction. Additionally, he emphasizes how crucial it is to keep email lists healthy and optimize message timing to match client intent.

Creators may oversee all communications from a single location by utilizing a unified platform such as Omnisend, guaranteeing consistent message at every touchpoint.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS Casts. We’re joined by a special guest. His name is Greg Zow. He’s from Omnis Send. You can find Omnis [email protected]. Greg is an e-commerce and retail advisor at Omnis Send. We’re gonna go deep on marketing for LMS websites and the creators of those websites.

We’re gonna talk about marketing automation, multi-channel marketing. Changes in buying behavior and what’s going on at the macro level. But first, welcome to the show, Greg. Thanks, Chris. Super excited to be here and looking forward to a good conversation. Yeah, I’m really loving Omnis. Send Omnis send has done a lot of great things in the WordPress space, both with WooCommerce, LMS plugins, membership plugins, and the digital commerce side of things.

Let’s start at the macro. What are you seeing in terms of how spending behavior or cons, consumer behavior is changing in ways that might be relevant to course creators and coaches out there? 

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, it’s a good question ’cause we’ve been seeing it for the past 18 months and it’s finally coming to a head now.

So I’ll start from the product level and we’ll back over. Because that’s where a lot of that consumer behavior changes data comes from. We all know we live in a relatively uncertain economic time right now. Every day seems to ebb and flow a little bit here and there. But the changes have been coming, like inflation’s been around for years, so we’ve been dealing with it ever since the pandemic.

And really it’s, while they say it’s come down, it’s come down over the previous level, which was high, right? So I feel at the grocery store when I go. Buying product. So about 18 plus months ago, we started to see a shift to value focus. Private labels, right? Customer or consumers, would trade down when the value of the private labels matched, product quality or whatever it is, stores now.

Costco, target, Walmart, they’ve all expanded their private label offerings. And that’s just an example. So we were starting to see like this value focused mindset, which was groceries, it was products, it was sneakers, it was clothing, whatever. And then you had stores like Teo and stuff like that and Shane, which are facing their own problems now, at least for the US audience.

But they were contributing to that. So yeah, I can get a. Desk clamp for four bucks, why not? If it breaks in 12 months, I’m out four bucks and I’ll just buy another one. So that was the shift, and over the last probably six months, we started to see that accelerate a little bit more. So spending was still up, but what we were starting to see was the number of orders were down.

So what you would have is consumers focusing on value. So Walmart’s a good example here. If I. Start to buy a couple things at Walmart and my dollar, I need to stretch further and I get the value here. Now what I do is I start to consolidate my purchases. So spending was up, but the number of orders across the board were down.

So what we were doing is consolidating purchases. But what that tells me as. A brand as a course creator, as an agency, every sale really matters at that point because there are fewer sales to go around. You wanna capture those dollars. So average order value would go up. And then last month the report came out, came out last week, but last month we started to see consumer spending slow for the first time in almost 10 years.

So those tariffs and stuff and kind of that hesitation and concern is caught up with us. So ffr. If you’re a course creator, you’re not selling, widgets per se, where you need to worry about consolidating value, but the shopping behaviors have changed. Consumers are in this value focused mindset that’s gonna translate to everything.

Whether you’re buying a car, you’re buying gas, you’re buying a service, you’re buying you. HVAC services, right? You start to evaluate those purchases a little bit differently. And if you’re a course grader, you now need to look at, okay, this is a lens which consumers and my customers are going to order through.

Do my offerings, do my value props. All these things match that lens and can I filter that a little bit more? And that’s I know we’ll talk about this a little bit more, but that’s really what course creators and agencies should be looking at. It might not. Directly apply to them from a product standpoint.

But that lens at which those same consumers that are buying those things and have shifted their mindset, that’s the lens they’re looking through and that’s what we need to talk about and flesh out a little bit more. 

Chris Badgett: Does that make sense? It does. And and I guess it’s somewhat of a controversial issue, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the cost of higher education.

I’m a fan of university and liberal arts education as an example. I’m an anthropologist, but I’m a business guy now. And I got a lot of value in university. But when you think about that value lens and the uncertainty of the world I just have this sense that course creator, subject matter experts.

Can put together offers that kind of help fulfill the promise of the quote, American dream of get good education and get a good job, or chart your course in life. It seems like there’s a lot of opportunity for course creators and as an example this was several years ago I think in 2 20 19, I was like thinking I could spend two years and get a MBA.

Or I could, work with a business coach that really understands software entrepreneurship for a quarter of the cost and it’s more focused and targeted on my domain. And I did that and it was an amazing two years. But what are some thoughts about that in terms of. Creators who want to help people get jobs or grow skills, like in a more decentralized, non-traditional higher ed fashion.

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, it’s a real we could probably spend two hours talking about this, over a cup of coffee or something, but I’m like you, I went to college, loved my experience. Learned a lot, right? There’s a lot of growth that goes in there, especially at those ages. I’m also saving for my kids’ college now, which you talk about the cost increasing.

Holy cow. But I work in marketing, like you talk to a marketer, did you go to school for marketing? And it’s 95% of ’em did not. And I did marketing was my minor communications guy. I went to radio broadcasting, right? That was my focus. And I transitioned to marketing. I look at this and go, okay, do you need a marketing degree to work in marketing?

Absolutely not. Do you need a X, Y, Z degree to work in a different field? Some cases, yes, doctors, stuff like that. In some cases, a lot of cases, no, you don’t. Now we live in an era where YouTube is probably the best educational platform. Think about it out there, right? I replaced a fuse in the back of my dryer a couple weeks ago, which normally would have to pay a guy to come out.

And I just looked at a two minute video and bought a three minute $3 part on Amazon. I’m like, boom. Done. So we talk about courses and stuff like this and upleveling and learning new skills, and I think the, for me, we live in a, that age where, yeah, these things make sense. The more you can, the more you can learn about a specific topic industry.

Having a mentor. And then sometimes these things are important for just connecting who’s the instructor on this thing? Can I connect with them on LinkedIn and learn more and ask them questions and things like that without having to pay $20,000 a year or $40,000 a year? Do. So I think it’s great.

I think what we talk about courses. We should be like, this is a value add to me. We talked offline about this before about promoting value add, and I think this is one of those value adds. Yeah. Cost of education’s increasing, cost of everything’s increasing, and we have these less costly courses that you can still learn the same skills that will get you ahead and whether you’re full-time in your career.

Omni Send, we still do training courses and we take classes and we do stuff like that. You never stop learning. And that’s the thing. And I think that’s the one thing where people, I say this probably more so young people, and I was definitely one of these, one of those where, you get outta college and you’re like, all right.

I’ve done it, and now I just need to learn that specific role of my next job. And once I do that, and really the learning never ends. And I think that’s where chorus creators are looking at this going, okay, we have a value here that fits with what people need in a very competitive but really expensive world, and we don’t, we’re not that expensive and we still get you the same value.

It’s the one thing people never look at is, okay, I’ve got an instructor here in college that is charging me 45 grand a year to go to, and I’ve got an instructor here that maybe has the same qualifications, has charging me 400 bucks or 300 bucks or 200 bucks to do, right? I might have a little more interaction here maybe not, right?

I might have more direct access here, but. Does this person over here have so much more knowledge in this person? A lot of times, no. There’s a lot of people out there that have more knowledge than me on certain topics, and that’s fine. And it doesn’t mean that I’m not valuable. It doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.

So I think this is the one benefit that course creators have now is that. People are seeking upleveling, they’re seeking cheaper ways to do things. And it doesn’t mean those cheaper ways are any less effective or any less better. So I don’t know if that answers the initial question, Chris. I might have just skipped over the whole thing, but I went on this diatribe about education, but I think course creators sit in a really unique position now where maybe they did in 20 years ago because it was harder and even 10 years ago.

It is, you get these online universities that. You get the bad terminology when the student loan thing was happening a few years ago about these, the fake colleges and stuff like that. But I think people are smart enough to realize, hey, there’s a skill, there’s a class there.

That skill will help me. That class is good. It’s got good reviews, let me do it right. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. You nailed it. Let’s talk about email marketing or email automation through the lens. I think Omnis send one of the things that makes Omnis send great. Is, it was born out of the Shopify retail space.

And what can course creators and coaches learn from more of the traditional online retail email marketing and automation space. Like what tips and tricks, what transfers over quite well that course creators may not be thinking about? Yeah. This is, so this is 

Greg Zakowicz: fun because 20 years ago, your B2B.

Marketing approaches and D two C were fairly different, right? You had different mediums and stuff like that, and strategies were different. And really those things are like this now, right? You might have a fringe here and there, but for the most part, those strategies are the same. You have the same consumers buying products, running organizations, making organizational decisions that are also buying a pair of shoes on the weekends.

What we’ve seen over, I would say the last 10 years, but notably in the last five years specifically was just the convergence of these. So whether I’m looking at a B2B company, their email program, or a D two C company, I’m still seeing the same things. Be more effective than others. Value of email is a first party channel, right?

And I don’t discount paid ads on paid social or paid search. I think they’re all part and necessary parts of the journey. But email is a first party channel, so you can. We get this later, but there’s ways to reduce retargeting costs using email and cutting your costs on social platforms and stuff like that.

But email is a first part. Channel SMS is the same thing. Someone willingly gives you a piece of information saying, yeah, I want to hear from you. That is gold in itself, whether it be two B or D two C, it’s perfect. The things within that we’re seeing to be most effective, we’ve been saying it for years.

I’ve been saying it, everyone’s probably sick of hearing it, but it’s still true. It doesn’t make it less true. It’s automations and. We put out these stats reported on me. Send, we have, excuse me last year, 26, almost 26 billion emails going around for a variety of customers. So we’re looking at the data.

It holds true every year. Automated messages are driving 37% of all email orders. They’re accounting for 2% of sends. Reason is they’re timely and they’re relevant, they’re naturally then sending individually. So I take an action, I get an email based on an action. That email is customized and it sends automatically, you don’t have to be awake, you don’t have to schedule it, you just need to set it up one time.

So those things are disproportionate from a revenue and it’s a send standpoint, but it doesn’t mean all automations are created equal. So this is like you’ll hear oh, send the birthday message or do this write in engages, and those. Sure they’ll engage. You’ll get high opens, but they don’t necessarily drive conversion.

So yeah, you could have, you could create a course, you can try to retarget a customer, maybe you asked their birthday ’cause you’re trying to create a connection. You send ’em and they’re like, okay, great. I got a birthday message. So what three messages that drive more than anything. And this is related to products, it related to course creators, it related, it relates to agencies selling services, welcome messages.

Browse abandonment or product abandonment, however you wanna do it, and card abandonment. So check out abandonment. Those three, whether you’re selling something, a service, those things, three things apply to you. Those will make up more than they’re roughly around 87% of all automated orders come from those three messages.

So you talk about out weight performance here. Those are the things. So if I’m a course creator I’m gonna have a popup on my website that I probably got you to my website through a paid social ad or a paid search ad. Something. So I’ve already invested money in that. So I get you to my website.

I’ve got a popup. I wanna capture that email address. ’cause now I can retarget you, right? I don’t have to spend tons. My email costs what? An email costs which is not much. So I captured that information. Now I can send you that welcome message. That’s one of ’em. That welcome message I can introduce, right?

The offerings, the value add, really promote that value on there. If I don’t get you to buy. To put something in your cart, go to the checkout page. I know at that point what you’re viewing. I know what products you’re, your pages you’re going to, so I know a level of interest there. I also have an email that welcome email where I might have links in there where I can look at and say, okay, I clicked on upleveling on marketing.

The marketing cores versus the admin course, or HR course, or whatever it is. So I can now do any sort of automation retargeting based on what you clicked or based on the pages you viewed, which is your browser abandonment, right? Viewed. So now we’re sending these things off and we can do email or SMS or both at those things.

And if I can get you to a checkout page, conference con conferences, were doing this 15 years ago. I get to the checkout page, I don’t register for the conference. I get the abandoned cart one. It’s really just a checkout abandonment one. And that’s still, that applies to, it could be agencies and it could be course graders.

So you’ve got these things that are transferrable over. But a lot of times what I find is either B2B companies, course graders, agencies, they neglect them ’cause they automatically think, ’cause they go through ’em on their personal lives, they think. Oh, this is for products. This isn’t for me. A service or I’m an offering or I’m an online product.

So it doesn’t matter. The fact is, it does, and they still work. They’re timely, relevant, and they’re based on intent. I’m on your website ’cause there’s some sort of intent there. I might not be ready to buy today, but I’m interested and that is the intent you need to follow with that stuff. It’s a long answer for you Chris, but we can dig into any one of those strategies you want.

We can dig into. Whatever you want but those are the three I hit. Welcome messages. Browse abandonment. Checkout abandonment.

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Wow, I think you nailed that. 87% of automation orders coming through those three and. Just to put it out there, if you’re watching or listening this, you can do this easily with Lifter LMS or WooCommerce, or paid memberships Pro with Omnis Send, which integrates directly.

And you guys have like templates and all kinds of stuff to make setting this up easy. 

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, everything’s pre-built. You can customize anything you want, but we pre-built segments. We pre-built workflows based on what you want. You select it and you can. Even though it’s templatized, you can then customize the template if you want.

But the whole thing is designed to get you to build it in literally a matter of seconds to maybe a minute a couple minutes to create a message, but we even templatize the message for you so you can just customize a couple things and super easy to do. And then you can get more advanced and sophisticated as you want and slowly add and optimize it.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s riff on Black Friday, cyber Monday a little bit. I noticed, the software industry was looking at the retail industry and like what happened at malls and shopping centers and stuff with this craze to buy on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and all these things. And the software industry got on this bus, and particularly in WordPress, where with a very value focused buyer, black Friday typically has substantial discounts.

Lifter. LMS is an example. We make five to 10 times a normal month’s revenue during this kind of November, end of November period. And I see a lot of course creators and coaches not leveraging Black Friday or at least trying. Another thing I see, which is interesting is some people do a Black Friday campaign once and then they stop because they’re like.

They get bored of it, but I heard this quote that you’re, you may be tired of your marketing, but your market never is. Black Friday will come around like clockwork every year. But stepping back, what could course creators and coaches do, or, and even agency professionals around Black Friday to, get those massive increases in sales or perhaps tie into another event that has.

Shopping behavior kind of baked into the psyche and the cultural landscape? 

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, it’s a good question. So I love the analogy kind of you gave there, there was an old saying in radio boss told me it was like, play what you want at home. Play what they want at work. So it’s the same, like your marketing thing was always spot on with it.

It’s the exact same thing. Here’s the thing about Black Friday, cyber Monday or whatever. Keep your right if you’re back to school season, which we’re currently in right now, right? Whatever your big sales period is. We talked earlier about the lens of value focused shopping.

Nothing screams value focused shopping more than Black Friday, cyber Monday. Those, that, how those holiday deals. So whether you like offering ’em or not is one thing. You can offer ’em. People are expecting it, right? It doesn’t have to be the biggest thing in the world. And I’ll give you an example. I have a couple pieces of exercise equipment at home.

I have an iFit membership to check my workouts on and they run Black Friday deals and yearly memberships are not inexpensive. I’m a value focused shopper and they run ’em and. Every Black Friday, I go look to see what the discounts are, look at the previous year, and I will renew my membership at that point.

But it’s the subscription, but I’m looking for value on it. I don’t need to do it in June when it expires in December, and I just start stacking ’em. So the one thing I will look at is one, people are expecting some sort of value. So be in the conversation, right? It doesn’t have to be the biggest discount, but be in the conversation.

Reinforce to your audience, yes, I’m in the trend. I see you. I can offer this to you. And if you can’t offer, if everyone else is doing 40% and you’re like, you know what? I could do 10% off. That’s what we do here, right? Add onto it with focusing on value. What makes your course different and really promote 10% off for Black Friday.

So let ’em know it’s a deal. Let ’em know 10% off. Let a limited time window on there. For four days, only, five days only, whatever it might be. You can use SMS as a flash sale, two hours, maybe get 15% off, but then focus on the other values, direct access to course or have your questions answered by course creators or whatever your value props are.

And that’s how you wanna build that whole thing together. So don’t have to give away the farm. You don’t have to do 70% off. Again, you don’t have to, but you need to be in the conversation. If I’m looking at this is just consumer mentality here and the marketing psychology, but I’m looking at two courses.

One is, 50 bucks more, but they were giving me 10% off and this one is flat fee. And at the end of the day, they’re at the same price. I’m gonna look at this and go, okay, I’m gonna take the 10% off ’cause it’s priced more here and I’m getting a better deal. So inherently I think we have better value over here.

Might not be true, but if they’re not, they’re just promoting 10% off this course and I’ve got. Hey, flat fee, but we get this, and this. Now I’m looking, okay, where is that value? I’m looking through that lens. Where am I getting the best bang for the buck? And it might be on these value props here, so we need to be in the conversation with it, if nothing else.

And I think that’s the one thing to look at is, look at margins. Obviously you should have fairly decent margins, I would think if you’re a course greater because you’re not manufacturing products per se. But you need to be in the conversation. But I would promote it. I would try to do, find ways that work with your brand, work with your product, your discounting philosophy as a organization and kind of move from there for it.

But I gotta be in the conversation for it, in my opinion. 

Chris Badgett: Let’s learn from retail again, and I’m hoping you can do the same thing for SMS that you did with. Email automation. Three emails welcome, email browse abandonment and card abandonment. SMS is underutilized by course creators and coaches.

Omnis send makes it easy, but at a international level ’cause a lot of course creators have people all over the world. I think a lot, there’s a misconception that. Email’s easy ’cause everybody has an email. But how do I do all this international text messaging? Omnis Send actually does, it makes it easy to the tech part and the infrastructure part of that.

But what kinds of SMS campaigns could course creators do?

Greg Zakowicz: I think give you the same answer. It’s gonna be the same messages. So what we see from SMS, just put it in perspective conversion rates, click rates on automated SMS more than double. Just scheduled messages so effective there it’s not 37 to 2%, but it’s, I think the number was 18% of all or SMS orders came from automated SMS 9% of sent, so still two to one ratio.

Again, the reason is simple. It’s relevant, it’s timely, and it’s personal to ’em. So what I would do from an SMS standpoint is look at the same ones, right? I talk, I talked a little bit about focusing on high intent messages, birthday messages, great. They can engage, but they’re not high intent. I’m not opening the email because planning on shopping, maybe I am, but.

I’m opening ’cause you’re wishing a birthday. And people like their birthdays generally, and they wanna feel good. It’s the intent, the welcome message has an intent. So send an automated SMS message. Just get in their inbox, get in their messages, slide in their dms browse abandonment.

Again, there’s a high intent there. What am I checking out? So that’s an easy place where you can just slide an SMS in there and be like, Hey, we noticed you checking out X, Y, Z. Or don’t forget, all. All new subscribers get X, Y, Z, and just have a link there, getting it back. So if they decide, 12 hours from now, they’ve got an easy place to link.

And then again, abandonment, check out abandonment. You’re so close, don’t you know? And you just promote Hey, get ahead, get that promotion, whatever that value add for taking that course is right. It’s the same three messages that I would start with, and then you can expand from there. But I don’t think you need to expand a whole lot.

Maybe. A re-engagement message if they stop logging into the course or whatever lapse purchase, stuff like that. But I don’t think you need birthday messages on SMS for a course creator. I don’t think you need, back in stock messages. You don’t only have back in stock. So really what I tell people is look at the intent of a, the customer, consumer, whoever it is, what’s their intent, and that’s where you wanna follow your messages.

So that’s the second lens that put it through. I’m sure you’ll probably ask me about it. Like we were chatting offline about this is like people are scared to jump in S mess. They either don’t know how to do it, they don’t think, for course creators, it makes sense, or agencies it makes sense. They think, oh, it’s too intimate, it’s too personal, and I’m not a fun brand, right?

I’m trying to, I’m trying to educate someone. I would say it, it’s hogwash. So the best thing to do. Is test it and how do you test it? You put ask for mobile. Ask for mobile numbers at signup. On the popup. Leave it an optional field. Do not make it required. Do not make it seem like if they get an incentive, whether it’s an ebook or a discount on the first course or whatever it is for setting up for an email address, you then go to a second step that makes it sound like they need to sign up for mobile to get that.

A lot of times they’ll say it, but they still do it. Sometimes they require it. It’s okay to have two steps. Just make that second step optional. If people sign up for your SMS, it’s an indication that yeah, they’re okay getting an SMS from you. If they don’t sign up, it’s your indication that, yeah, maybe my audience for this particular product or course it’s not their jam and that’s okay.

But that’s a simple way to figure it out. And then if you need to start, if you start to see those, estimate, those mobile numbers come in, the simple way to start is just put an SMS message in those automations we talked about. Let the automated SMS do the work, and you don’t have to schedule messages every week or every two weeks to those people until you’re ready.

Let ’em see if it works. Like my kids say, let it cook, right? That’s the simple way to start. You let the automation do it, you let it test out. If it’s not gonna work on a really high intent, ones that are proven to convert, maybe it’s your indication that yeah, they want SMS, but we don’t really have the formula for what they want from that SMS.

And you could slowly refine your automated ones until they start working, and then that gives you an indication of how to build your scheduled messages out. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. You mentioned fund brand and maybe we could use potentially the university professor versus an independent subject matter expert as an example.

This is so from like a marketing angle. How do we build, a fun brand office, authenticity, trust, and authority? Because I see a lot of people get hung up in this imposter syndrome stuff. Yeah. And in our marketing, just how can we be more authentic and authoritative and really at the end of the day, build that trust.

Greg Zakowicz: I, I think you, the word you used is authentic, right? Like I look at it from a couple, couple different ways. I’ve been in this, I’ve been in email for almost 20 years now, I think 19 plus years. I’ve been doing it for a long time. I’ve been in SMS for over a decade. I’ve been through B2B, I’ve done D two C.

I’ve done kind of all roles in it. I still suffer from imposter syndrome. I’m like, I know my stuff, but I still suffer from it, right? I think it’s natural for people. We also live in an era where the industry changes a lot, right? You think about e-commerce five years ago, it was pretty well fleshed out, but it’s so different now.

Right now we got a agent tech AI for shopping and browsing and doing all these things and it’s continually changing, and I think that’s where kind of imposter syndrome comes in. But then I look at, okay, if I’m a professor and not knocking professors here at universities, but if I’m a professor and I’m not in the actual field, I’m.

Doing coursebook and studying, lecturing off that versus here’s Greg over here who’s living in this day by day and looking at numbers and, talking to brands. Which one might be better for me, from a practical skill standpoint. And it’s probably gonna be the subject matter expert.

So it’s not really answering your question yet, Chris, but I think there’s a lot of value to being in the field day to day and figuring out, hey, this is working, this isn’t working. But it used to. And it’s less theory, it’s more practical. And I think the practical skills sell how to build it. I’m really bad at building things like this.

Just personally it takes a lot of time and I’m not a course creator, but YouTube, we talked about being I mentioned as the greatest educational tool out there. Right now. You got other ones like Khan Academy and other courses. But collectively, YouTube is awesome. So you have the ability to build.

Short videos and things that kind of reinforce it there. You can be more fun on YouTube. You don’t have to be stuffy. TikTok, Instagram, whatever social channels you wanna use, you can be a lot more fun and build the authenticity there. You can write bylines for, industry articles, whatever you want.

So I think it’s just a collective effort. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of, it’s a collective effort there to, but you have the ability where. People don’t care if you’re, suit and tie professional anymore. For the most part. They care that whether you know your stuff and you can relate that content transferable and they trust you.

And I think that’s the biggest thing. And you build trust by, say say what you’re gonna do and then do what you say it’s the same thing, right? If I’m telling you that automation is awesome and everyone’s automation stinks, they’re gonna be like, this guy doesn’t know what he is talk about, but we see the automation work and now.

We can see which ones work or whatever. So it’s all about just building trust and having fun and smiling and, self-deprecating when it matters. You know your audience best and what type of course you’re building, but be relatable. And that’s really the biggest thing. 

Chris Badgett: Question about Omnis.

Send email marketing platforms and multichannel marketing platforms. They’re a little sticky. But I’ve noticed every two to three years people start, getting frustrated with their current setup. And maybe they’re starting to shop around and looking to switch.

If somebody’s looking to start or switch with, switch to Omnis, send particularly around this idea of, welcome automation, browse, abandonment, automation, card abandonment automation. What’s the best way to get started and why should they take a hard look at Omnis Send. 

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah. Best way to get started, I think for anyone, regardless of the type of platform, is to understand what else is out there.

So you look at your own capabilities okay, what are we lacking that we need? Why do we think we need that? So you gotta figure out what you’re missing, right? And it could be the platform is not advancing. We got ai, but the platform doesn’t have any AI in it. And now I’m using three tools to get one thing done.

So you gotta figure out what you’re lacking, why you’re lacking, and then. What you want on the next platform. That’s the easiest thing to do. It’s not always easy, but that’s the simplest place to get started. And then when you start looking at what else is out there, you have to look at the platforms.

Do they have these things? And what else did the platform offer beyond these core things? So I think every platform in the world has features that most people aren’t going to use. You get the 80 20 rule, or, 90 10, whatever they want, where, 20% of the features used by 80% of the people.

But do they have the ability to have the features? Should you grow into ’em as you scale? Can they meet your scaling needs? And when you look at that, I point you back to Omnis sound, but the platform is just good. I’ve been in, in the email email marketing and SMS platform space for 13, 14 years now.

The platform’s good. We have AI built into things you can. Generally talk about segments you wanna build and they’ll build a segment for you, right? So it’s small things like that. We talked about automation. Do they have automation? Is it customizable and is it gated? Now, that’s an important thing too, because you’ll have email providers that say, Hey, we have all these things.

You go on there and you get this cheap plan. It’s oh, you gotta get the enterprise plan to get these things. So look to see what’s gated and what’s not. And that’s gonna be an important thing. Our automations, you could be at our free plan, you can use the automations. You gotta figure out that stuff out.

Does it integrate with your platform? So WooCommerce WordPress, do you have an integration that syncs the data? ’cause that’s gonna be important then what other tools? Right? Popups. Okay. Popups built in. I can use ’em, I can choose not to use ’em, but it’s there for me if I want to. Do they have testing with the popups?

Do they have segment builders? Do they have, like what’s the email builder like what I, when we talk about like why should you use Omnis send, we just check the boxes, we follow the industry trends, we build it into the platform. We integrate very quickly on these things. We take customer feedback and that’s the one thing I will say about Omnis Send versus others.

We’re organically funded, so if we don’t have investors to report to, we have our customers to report to. And if we’re not providing a value to our customers, they’re not gonna choose us. They choose us, get 125,000 happy customers. It’s just a really solid platform. When you’re looking, go talk to someone there.

You can sign up for Omnis, send for free. You don’t have to put a credit card down. So if you wanna just play around with it, go sign up, play around with it, integrate it, do what you wanna do and see if it works for you and see if those customizations. Reaching out to the company a lot of times will give you a sense of.

Are they business oriented? Are they customer oriented? Are they fun to talk to? Are they very stuffy? A lot of times just having a conversation with someone’s easiest way word, approachable team over here. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Greg Zow, e-commerce and retail advisor at Omnis Send. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you online?

Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, usual places. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m on Blue Sky more than Twitter now. Not many people are on Blue Sky, but I’m over there. If you go to my Twitter, you can link over, but LinkedIn’s probably the best place you can find me. Anyone else on Omnis Sun there? Omnis Sun as well. They’re pretty active on social too, so just feel free to pop over.

We’re friendly. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome Greg. Thanks for coming on the show. I could have talked for hours with you on marketing, but it’s been a great conversation. Really appreciate it. 

Greg Zakowicz: I appreciate the invite and thanks for having me Chris. I enjoyed as well. 

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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In the episode, Lindsay Halsey from Pathfinder SEO delves at the ways artificial intelligence is changing search behavior and the implications for website owners, particularly those creating online training programs or e-learning platforms.

She explains that with the rise of AI-generated search results such as Google’s AI Overviews and conversational modes users often get direct answers without clicking through to a website. Because of this change, websites find it more difficult to become visible using traditional SEO alone. However, Lindsay emphasizes that this is merely a new challenge and not the end for content providers.

She highlights the ongoing importance of human connection, pointing out that when people wish to learn a lot or make an investment in something worthwhile, they still look for reliable professionals. Lindsay suggests producing very specialized, long-tail content that is suited to certain audiences and situations in order to remain competitive. She advises going narrow and answering specific search inquiries that represent issues and objectives in the actual world rather than focusing on broad, fiercely competitive keywords.

Lindsay suggests producing very specialized, long-tail content that is suited to certain audiences and situations in order to remain competitive. She advises going narrow and answering specific search inquiries that represent issues and objectives in the actual world rather than focusing on broad, fiercely competitive keywords.

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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.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest, she’s back on the show. It’s Lindsay Halsey from Pathfinder, SEO. You can find her and [email protected]. We’re gonna get into all topics, SEO, and AI, and getting found on the internet. But first, welcome to the show, Lindsay.

Lindsay Halsey: Thanks so much, Chris. I’m excited to be here. 

Chris Badgett: Let’s just jump right in and the big question I know a lot of people have, if you’re building a website or an e-learning website is how is [00:01:00] AI changing the behavior of people that are, going to their laptop or their phone or their computer to search for stuff Like what’s happened in the past four years?

Lindsay Halsey: A lot’s happening and things are evolving reasonably quickly. And really AI is starting to reshape the way we think about search and search engine optimization and and some of the kind of behavior changes. And we can dig into a few of these in more detail. The first is that there is the opportunity for essentially like generative responses directly on, on Google, Yahoo, Bing, right?

So when you go on Google and you type in your search query, you get a new row called AI overviews, and in there you get a generated response that has sites or citations and some links to the websites that sort of trained up the ai. But that you may, in this case, one of the things changing is you may decide as a, as the end user not to click through to a website for information, but rather to just receive the response directly from Google.

And [00:02:00] then as Google often sees do another Google search and and you can have that more conversational nature. If you’re in the US right now there’s AI mode which allows you to take that that conversation further and have and continue on almost like you would with chat GPT.

So that’s just one of the things that we’re seeing happen right now is in some ways people feel like the search engines continue to make it harder to get traffic to your website. Because Google is answering things directly in the search results. So it’s the people also ask boxes that used to pop up where you could just see the results or you put in something like movie Showtimes near me and it just tells you the showtimes.

You never go to a website. You can think of AI overviews and AI mode as being in that similar vein of changing user behavior. But on the flip side, the more optimistic piece of this all is that it really is an opportunity for your brand, for your business, for your training, for your expertise to get [00:03:00] shown directly on Google to build brand awareness and to educate, which I know a lot of your audience is all about education and training and, and so I, I see the positive side of these changes. But in the short run, one of the things a lot of businesses are experiencing is a decrease in sessions or traffic from organic search 

Chris Badgett: before we zoom in, like on a macro level. At what point, like we often still want to get the visitor to our website to buy the movie tickets or take our paid course or read our, the full article.

For the content creator, how do we, where does the wall stop where AI isn’t enough? Even if you think about teaching a course online, there’s pressure from people just learning a skill or knowledge directly from AI without needing a course. Do you have any thoughts on like, where does the creator still hold territory in terms of, getting that traffic all the way over and out of the chat [00:04:00] interface?

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, definitely. So like the biggest thing I think about, because we’re in the same situation as we’re, in the field of SEO education and and so when somebody searches for something like how to learn SEO they’re unlikely to click through to our course about intro to SEO, right?

That would’ve been the old user experience. Somebody would’ve made. But now you’re more likely to either put that query into chat, GPT, Gemini Perplexity or Claude, something like that, and get some structured response on how to actually learn this tool or this, the skillset. Or you might put it in a Google and see the AI mode or the AI overview and not click through to a website.

I still see the role of the human expert is essentially that we are still human and so we wanna connect with other humans. And so we only go so deep with where the AI response will take us. And the way you can create value in this space is to have contrast. So have an [00:05:00] opinion, take a corner, have an opinion about, what’s happening in your space, share something unique.

Tell stories that are like basically founded in real world experience so that your content on your website is different from all of the AI generated response that’s just average out there. And that you, as an expert really shines through because at the end of the day. There is a trust issue with ai and when you’re gonna invest time in learning, you wanna know who you’re learning from and that they’re a genuine expert.

And I personally think a lot of user behavior will basically touch on the high level of Hey, it’s nice to get a structured response about how to learn SEO but at the end of the day, if you’re really gonna dig in and get hands on you’re likely gonna benefit from learning from a human and not from the ai.

Chris Badgett: Question. And first I just wanna say I got a ton of value out of working with you and your team at Pathfinder. On leveling up our SEO game, even though we’d been at it for a long time. But just to give a real specific example we wanna rank at lifter LMS for the best WordPress LMS plugins and.

We had an article on that, it was like rank 23. Now we’re regularly at one or two. Awesome. I give Pathfinder a lot of credit from working with you guys on like really going deep on SEO and throwing every tactic in the book at that. And it worked and it sticks. It’s not like it’s moving. It stays there and we are constantly refreshing it.

Awesome. But to get to my beginner question, I think it sometimes when I saw AI come on. I’m like, wow, that’s great. We’ve been in the space for over a decade. So the AI and the language model already knows a lot about us and I’m really glad we’re not new is the thought I have. So what would you say to somebody who’s new in a competitive space to get.

At least into that AI [00:07:00] conversation as a source or a personality or whatever, because if you’re not established, that seems even harder than it’s ever been. 

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, definitely. So a couple of tips there. The first one is go very specific. It’s really hard to rank for something general, right?

Take your expertise and create a piece of content and rank for the big keywords. But one of the things that’s shifting here is people are putting a lot of information in their queries in more detail. They’re putting like the who, how they’re trying to get from point A to point B, what those points might be.

All sorts of different scenarios are shifting in how we search online. And so when you start to think about the kind of content you create, instead of playing in the like general competitive keyword space. If you go hyper-specific, you’re gonna find the right audience and likely get more visibility more quickly.

And so this is that concept that’s been around in SEO forever, which is that concept of the long tail of SEO, that you don’t just go for like the mothership. Two word, [00:08:00] keyword phrase that everybody else is optimizing towards and has thousands or millions of searches a month. But rather you create more specifically shaped pieces of content and that goes further faster.

And so you see a shift in people’s content marketing, for example, away from the definitive guide to whatever the subject is into really specific pieces. And so that’d be my biggest tip is invest in content marketing that really showcases a specific topic. Then layers in who it’s for because that’s what Google is getting better and the rest of the search engines.

And really AI is getting better at connecting those dots between the individual behind the search. So that’s the first piece of the puzzle. The other piece of the puzzle is when you’re new you also need to go out and think about how do I build a little like authority and trust out there in this space?

And that’s one of the things that established brands get to rely and relax a little bit on is having a domain. And a brand that has a lot of [00:09:00] mentions and backlinks and things like that to it. When you’re just getting started, you don’t have those things. But you can go out and find the low hanging fruit.

And so what I mean by that is if you’re just getting started, consider creating a Google Maps listing, even if you don’t consider yourself a local business. And the reason is because it’s a place where you can get some reviews online and it really is training up the AI quite a bit. Reviews on anything go a long ways.

So showcasing reviews on your own website, getting them on Google Maps anywhere you can get a review is helpful. One of the things you’ll notice in a lot of the AI generated responses is things when they start to actually talk about businesses in a space is that there’s, they put in like reviewers or people often say things like that, so they are able to very quickly process all of the reviews out there about, say, lifter, LMS.

And smush them into a, one to two sentence phrase. That’s a synopsis. And then if there’s a list of like best, whatever [00:10:00] plugins in this space, et cetera, then they’re gonna be able to do the same for your competitors. So just starting out right out of the gate and going and trying to pick up a couple of reviews, whether it’s Google Maps, Facebook reviews, directly reviews you put on your own website that’ll build a little credibility.

Then trying to get those back links which is one of the ways you can do it, is just sharing your expertise. So if you invest in writing a blog post on a topic, try to get out there and be a guest on somebody else’s podcast, for instance. Try to get out there and share your knowledge and your experience and do that on as a webinar guest, a podcast guest.

All of the, those things go a long ways in building a little bit of brand recognition and authority.

Chris Badgett: It seems like for both AI and SEO or just the search engine results pages, there’s a lot more emphasis on things like Reddit conversations. Yeah. Why is that? It’s Google’s [00:11:00] prioritizing, like real people having a discussion, not some listicle about the best, whatever. 

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, the Reddit thing has been surprising to me as somebody that like doesn’t tend to go to a lot of forums for answers and things like that, and I thought it was a fad and that Google would play around with it and then back off.

And we’ve seen that before, but it does not appear to be a fad. Reddit really does appear to be, it gets strong placement and visibility on Google in and of itself. So being there and it’s training up the AI and and it’s seemingly not going anywhere. Yeah, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s because like you said, it’s real people and and now it can really take all of the information about a topic or a brand or whatever, all of the conversation on Reddit and create a structured sort of understanding of that.

And yeah, Reddit’s kind of crushing it right now in the SEO world, and it’s in a lot of those kind of best of queries, et cetera. 

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about AI for content creation. For SEO as, [00:12:00]yeah when I’ve tried, I’ve. I tried to write a whole article with AI and I’m like, it’s just not there.

But for research or like building on what I already have, it’s great. Yeah. But and also related to this, do you get penalized if you just publish some AI generated content that’s totally AI generated? 

Lindsay Halsey: Good question. So the first you do not get penalized by publishing AI generated content. There’s not like a flag that says, created by ai, don’t show in the search results.

Or even worse penalize the brand for it. Instead it’s just that AI generated content doesn’t really add new value. It doesn’t have contrast, doesn’t feel as powered by genuine experience and authority, so it’s unlikely to perform well. So I really think about basically this human centered approach to content ma marketing that’s AI supported.

Yes, I think AI tools are amazing. I haven’t published a blog post in the last year without relying on some component of ai. To help me create the content, refine the content, et cetera. That being said there’s always a human involved and so I find that sometimes it creates a better final product.

In the ai it takes our weaknesses and can fill in some gaps depending on how you’re using it. It also speeds the process up, but and that content is doing, we’ve done some experiments, like fully human powered content, didn’t touch ai, fully AI powered content in that sort of middle ground that human centered AI supported and we’re not finding that the totally AI created content doesn’t do anything.

We’re doing just as well in our performance, in our rankings and making it quicker when we go with that kind of combo approach versus when we just go a hundred percent human powered with no ai, if that makes sense. So you gotta figure out kind of the workflow that works well for you. I think the research piece or just creating structure and a frame can be really helpful sometimes.

We are so close to our love our area of expertise. One of the [00:14:00] things we struggle with is seeing the big picture and teaching it, whether it’s in a blog post, a YouTube video, or behind a course paywall or wherever the teaching is. Sometimes, like we’re so zoomed in and narrowed in, we skip the beginning or we miss a step or something like that.

And I personally find AI to be really helpful for, Hey, here’s this topic I’m thinking about writing about. Here’s who I’m trying to reach with it. Help me create an outline, et cetera. And then I’ll do some writing, and then I’ll have it reshape it. I’ve used it in so many different ways to help support support our content marketing.

Chris Badgett: One of the challenges of LMS websites is there’s a lot of content that’s not visible to the search engine, 

Lindsay Halsey: right? 

Chris Badgett: So what, because it’s behind the login and that kind of thing. What? Should a, how should a course creator structure their website today to, with SEO and AI discoverability in mind?

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, that’s a tricky one. And that is to say you need to give away some of that expertise and content [00:15:00] for free not being behind a paywall so that you are part of the conversation, whether it is the conversation on Google or chat, GPT, et cetera. You wanna contribute to training the AI in your subject matter, and you wanna get known as an authority in that space.

And and so to do that, you have to strategically decide what content, is free and on the blog, and what content is paid and behind a paywall. And there’s no one solution to that in my mind’s eye. But one of the biggest things I like to do is think about if I do give this content away for free, right?

Like it’s on a blog post and it starts to get traction. What’s the bridge between getting them, if you’re selling a course or a membership or whatever the purchase now is, what’s the little intermediate step? That’s more of a call to action in the middle, where I’m gonna also get a little something in return.

So a lot of times if I publish a blog post that’s educational, et cetera, I’ll embed a YouTube video in it. Like I’ll really try to make it great, right? Add value, share, teach, et [00:16:00] cetera. But then the in content CTA won’t just be the buy the thing, buy the course, or buy the membership. It’ll be the next step in something for free where it can still trade that email address and trade for a download or an email series or whatever it is tied to the topic at hand.

So if I’m gonna give something away in the blog post, I wanna make sure that my conversion rate on that blog post to picking up an email address is somewhere in the 5% range. I find if I tie the call to action directly to the topic at hand, so it’s like the next thing you would want on this, and I’m willing to give away just like one ounce more for free then I get a lot of value out of that.

And if I just stick a call to action on their sign up for a newsletter, it gets less than a 1% conversion rate. And then you start to say was creating that traffic and giving it away that content away for free worthwhile. It’s harder to measure. 

Chris Badgett: I learned this from you all that like original research [00:17:00]is really valuable.

Lindsay Halsey: Really valuable. 

Chris Badgett: What are, expand on that, let’s say we’re we have a subject matter expertise in X, Y, z. How do we do that original research or publish it in a way that it’s beneficial to AI and SEO? 

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah. So that’s always been something that’s been beneficial to SEO. ’cause one it shows your expertise, right?

You did original research and you’re publishing it, in a scientific type format, in a blog post, sharing that research it gets quoted, it gets linked to more often. Other people might come back and look at that original research and then wanna link to it. So it does a lot of high value work.

In this era, it’s even more valuable because it is that original type research that the AI would like to be trained on and then is more likely to cite you, et cetera. And to showcase your expertise. Anywhere where you can publish that original research it’s tricky. Like in the field of SEO it’s really hard.

Most of the kind of big original research is [00:18:00] coming out of big SEO software companies that have access to massive amounts of data, et cetera. So you have to think about like where is your place? But that being said, even if you can’t get like original research in your space, one of the things you may be able to do is genuine storytelling, et cetera.

And so weaving that in is something that I know we did in our, some of our blog posts last year, and it really made a big difference. Basically taking the whole intro and starting with a story in the first person and making it relatable and talking about something that happened. And so it’s not research like a comp, compilation of lots of data, but it’s this like singular point in time.

And that’s helped our content resonate more with sort of Google’s helpful content algorithms that are really looking at that sort of expertise, authority, and trust behind a post.

Chris Badgett: Related to research is doing like charts and graphs and tables and gifs and all that stuff like, [00:19:00] like visualizing data. And that’s so easy to do now and even in Canva you can, it’s give it some numbers and it gives you a nice looking. Chart branded to your brand. 

Lindsay Halsey: Exactly. And so you can put that together with so much more ease now.

And that also makes it easier to create downloads and things like that where somebody might be willing to like, Hey, I read through it, but download the. The paper version or the PDF version and you’re going to email it to a colleague or something like that. So it is a lot easier to create that high value and to just push yourself to take your content a little further.

And so one thing I. Often think about that I think really applies to the folks listening to this podcast is that a lot of times we take our expertise, right? And you go and you create something with it, like a course or training module or whatever it might be, but you have an area of expertise and you create this thing and then you’re like, okay, the next thing I’m gonna do is a blog post.

And then what we tend to do if you’re anything like me, is like move to the next topic, right? You’re like, I did the [00:20:00] blog posts, I did the thing, right? That was the marketing piece and the creation of whatever, the training material that was like the sales piece or the product piece. But really I try to make myself.

Fit in that space for a lot longer than I ever wanted to. So a while back, Google Analytics launched GA four, right? And it was a topic I really didn’t wanna be an expert in, but became one. And I just decided to sit in that space for three months. And that meant I wrote a blog post. I created a YouTube video.

I created social posts. We added paid social behind the paid social posts. I reached out to six. Podcast, webinars, things beyond like our brand. And I was a guest on them talking about GA four, what’s changing, how to handle it. Then I self-hosted a couple of webinars. By the time those three months were over, I was totally exhausted.

But the value is that I built up a cloud of expertise and authority in that space that Google could pick up on it. So all the content I created and that’s. Space was performing really [00:21:00] well at the time because I was doing all these other things. And so that’s one area that I think once you decide, hey, this is something I’m gonna, be an expert, this is like a little facet of my expertise that I’m gonna go down a rabbit hole in, make yourself stay in that for a little bit longer so that you really exhaust like all avenues.

And to me, that’s. It’s not just SEO, but it is all of those actions were things that helped us build domain authority, trust all these other signals that then help our other content, and it’s the snowball effect, if that makes sense.

Chris Badgett: I didn’t entirely get off the content treadmill, but I started going back and instead of doing a new post, make an old one better. 

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Like the really important pillar posts like. Coming back to him week after week, and that’s how. Really able to move up to top ranking. It wasn’t about like continually pumping out new content.

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, exactly. So a content revision with something new, like an infographic or [00:22:00] some kind of new visual. And one of the, other areas of SEO that we know that Google’s looking at is when you do win the click and traffic comes to your website from Google, Google is looking to signals around things like engagement.

Rate engagement time. If people are like hitting the buy now button, going to other web pages, etc. They’re looking at that user experience because what Google wants to see is oh, this is, this query led to this click, and then they had a really great experience over here that has a positive reflection on Google.

So that those are dwell signals in like SEO terms. And so when you take an existing blog post and you add a YouTube and embed video in it, or you add a cool image or you update the intro so it’s a little catchier, or you add some kind of a call to action that maps to the topic, any of those things is gonna be a rising tide because it’s gonna lead to a little bit better.

Like incrementally better user experience, which then trains up Google’s algorithms and its machine learning to send more [00:23:00] traffic your way. And that was one of the things that we’ve really seen over the last year or two is like a certain number of posts are just taking off because they get that self-fulfilling prophecy.

Whereas other posts that we think are really great, totally fall flat. And I look at it a little bit like baseball, even the best hitters train a ton and they think they are gonna get to the plate and they’re gonna be able to hit a home run. When it comes to content marketing, you just have to keep your at bats going and know that you’re gonna hit a couple of singles and a couple of doubles, and then a home run from time to time.

And it’s even for experts, it can be a little hard to predict which ones are really gonna go the farthest, but it’s all about getting back up to the plate and getting a new piece of content or trying again, revising something, et cetera. 

Chris Badgett: Question if you do a major rewrite or revision first, is it okay to change the publish date to today. Or should you not do that or does that even matter?

Lindsay Halsey: I do change it, [00:24:00] and recency really does matter in SEO and all of the AI getting found in ai. So yeah, recency matters. I do change the published state as long as I actually add new value to the post. If I fix a typo, that doesn’t count.

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Related to that, like it I see a lot of people, and I’m guilting myself of doing this, if you have a best of X, Y, Z in 2023, but it’s [00:26:00] 2025 now if all you’re gonna do is just change the date, it’s, that, does that help or not really?

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, so those posts can be really at least they were really hard to write. Like I remember years ago writing best SEO plugins for WordPress and like how much time and resource our team put into we already used all the plugins, but figuring out who had what feature, what price point, all this stuff, like creating charts and diagrams, it was a massive amount of work.

To create a post like that. And so then, yeah, before you know it, 2023 becomes 2025 in this case, and it is okay to put the new publish date. I think as a end user, I wouldn’t respond very well to the best whatever of 2025 and then see a 2023 publish date. I’d probably hit the back button and be like, that doesn’t align.

There’s just a quick like cork in the system. But in terms of refining that content, it’d be a great thing to be able to just drop in the chat GPT and say, here’s this post I wrote, like on the best of what should I consider updating what’s out [00:27:00] of date, et cetera. And and go through some prompts to try to help you modernize the content enough so that you feel good about putting the new date stamp on.

Chris Badgett: Same question I get. And I’m sure a lot of people get like all these emails requesting back links that aren’t very good besides creating great content and being a guest on somebody else’s platforms. Is there any other way to think about getting back links that if you want to put some effort into it and just come off well in your efforts?

Lindsay Halsey: Good question. So yeah, you still like SEO in some ways has evolved a lot and hasn’t evolved at all in other ways, right? So there’s still people sending you these random emails. Will you link to me da, hit delete on all of those. There’s still people trying to sell you link building at scale, et cetera.

Or even link building, not at scale, right? So paid link placement. You can go and buy a backlink in like blogger outreach [00:28:00] and things like that. But at the end of the day, what I always like to do back is take a step back from my overall like online presence and think about my real world.

Like how your business does business, right? Who do you do business with? Not necessarily who are your customers? ’cause it’s pretty unusual for customers to link back to your website. But more like who are your partners in an ecosystem, et cetera. So as an example, if you were an interior designer, you would probably get referrals from other architects, general contractors, et cetera, and you would probably also refer business to them, right?

You work in an ecosystem and there’s all these adjacent people that anyone who’s building a house needs more than just an interior designer. They probably have five to 10 other professionals like working in their ecosystem space. So most interior designers have all these relationships in the real world, but almost none of them are actually modeling that for Google, right?

So if I were to chat with you over coffee, you could tell me about all [00:29:00]these pals and people that you do business with and refer. But if I looked on your website and if I looked on their websites, I’d never know that there was any kind of real world integration. And so in the spaces that we’re all in, we can think of those types of counterparts, like who’s in your ecosystem.

And you don’t always have to do a webinar or a podcast, which takes a lot of time and effort to be able to leverage those relationships in a positive way. So it still works to have get links from people in more static ways. If you have a, our partners page and they have an our partners page, you might link to those types of things.

You can also give a testimonial away, right? So we have a web, like an agency that helps us with our marketing and our web design. We could give that agency a testimonial of what it’s been like to be a client of theirs and they could put that on their website and then link back from where it says my name to my website, right?

So I can do smaller ways of showing like the ways that we do business. You could do something like that for your accountant or a tax advisor like [00:30:00]anybody where you have like real world professional relationship. You can go out and come up with creative ways to show Google and model for Google what’s going on there.

Other businesses, like a really generous, or maybe you’re on a board of director you could be generous in your community by supporting nonprofits. You could be a board on a member of a board of directors, et cetera, like related or not related to your business, but part of you who you are, right?

So things that we do beyond it. I know my business partner, she’s on the board of the skating club for her daughter. So she has a little bio on the Skating Club website and somewhere in the bio it mentions our businesses and it links to them, right? That’s pretty low hanging fruit. You’re just already doing those things.

But sometimes you just need a little bit of follow up to go pick up those links. So there’s not one way to build a backlink network. And I think the biggest way to be successful is to weave it into your real world marketing. So it’s not something you do because I’m sitting down to do link building.

It’s something I do. Cause I’m thinking about marketing and partnerships. And trying to add value on the internet and and all of these ways and showcase partners, et cetera, 

Chris Badgett: related to authority. I feel like the author page, like on a WordPress site. Or a social media bio or the about page on a business website.

Like what can we do just to best practice, explain who we are, what we do, what our expertise is, because that stuff really matters. I think 

Lindsay Halsey: it matters a ton. It’s actually one of the things I’m working on our own website right now is like making sure the who shines through behind your content.

I think a lot of times as marketers, our initial inclination is I’m building a business website, so I need to look like a business, right? And so you almost take the human out of it. Now you wanna be putting the human back into everything, right? So if you have a blog post, under the blog post, it should have the publish date.

Who the author was. And then that little like part where it says your name, it should link to your authorship page. And ideally you have a great authorship page. That could be you talking in the first person, hi, I am so and and then there could be a section there like also seen as, or here’s some blog posts I’ve written.

So we invest a lot of time into creating both the individuals. Then also the about page could be depending on how your team is structured.

Could be more about the business, but it could also just be about you. If you are a one person business then you need one killer page all about you, which always feels a little uncomfortable, but once you start putting it together, it’s not so bad.

And if you have a team, then you wanna try to create something similar for each team member and really make sure you’re connecting the dots and showcasing the humans behind the business. 

Chris Badgett: How does social media impact SEO and ai discoverability? 

Lindsay Halsey: Good question. In general, I’ve always said social media has overlap. But not nearly as powerful as like backlinks or Google Maps, reviews, etc. Because a lot of that is behind a paywall and Google struggles to get trained up on all of those social conversations. Social has so much paid space right now too it’s just, it’s very complicated.

The search engines never really wove social very well into its algorithm directly. So that’s still the case. Like social still only plays some overlap, but I think now we’re in this like massive period of change in evolution and technology has gotten obviously so much smarter and so I think we’re gonna see a little bit more change there.

I think of social as standing on its own two legs. It’s its own marketing channel, but it helps me with SEO. Because if you put, say a social post out about a blog post you wrote and then it gets picked up and seen by your colleagues, your friends, the people that follow your business.

It gets more likely to then pick up a back link because someone’s oh, you remember I saw like Chris wrote this cool thing on this topic, and then I remember it and I drop it in a blog post, or I drop it in an email. I send like news from the web and things like that. So yeah, social is weaving in more and more.

I haven’t spent a lot of time studying how well AI like chat, GPT itself is able to like pull from the social sphere. But right now there’s a big push for making sure your website content is training up the AI as effectively as possible. And that rests a little more on things like technical SEO.

And there’s a new-ish file called an L-L-M-S-T-X-T, which is a file that gives directions on how to crawl the website and index it for a learning language models. So there are so many parallels right now between getting found and included in conversations on Google and then chat GPT Gemini Perplexity.

It’s not really like a comparison of are you gonna invest in SEO or invest in some of these emerging marketing? Areas, but more of a convergence that the fundamentals work across the board [00:35:00]

Chris Badgett: related to the lls dot txt file. Yeah. Some of the SEO plugins now just create this for you. I’ve I’ve looked at it and what I realize is it’s pretty good and it’s probably my own fault for having an old site and what it’s pulling from.

It’s, I, it’s not the best. So I realize I need to create my own LLMs txt file, but use that structure. 

Lindsay Halsey: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: But related to that you’ve got that TXT file let’s say at the end of a blog post, you put FAQ questions that either Google instant answers or AI mode. I forget what overview mode or whatever.

Like how’s it, how. How exact does it, does the keyword phrase have to match? And is the AI just gonna spit out exactly what you said or is it gonna modify it or quote it? Or how do we think about that? Because it, you can get lost in the details of the wording and. 

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, you really can.

You can go. So at the end of the day, I [00:36:00] think whether you’re thinking about the AI or thinking about Google, you really should be thinking about the end user, right? So if you add an FAQ, you should be thinking about like, how do I resonate with the actual human audience that is reading this content? And then when you do that, you will.

As a default, be playing well into these like marketing channels you’re caring about and getting found in those places. And so that being said, sometimes we get too comfortable and we don’t say who the audience is or put the keyword in, et cetera. So I do sometimes like just look at my content through both lenses.

Like on the one hand I can overdo it and shove keywords everywhere, and then it doesn’t read well, it screams SEO, or and answer engine optimization now and things like that. And on the other side of it, I can give like no context, right? So you can’t even tell like a business I am.

And so that also doesn’t work. So you wanna make sure, if you add an F, A Q, you don’t have to overdo the questions like crazy, who do you think the best, WordPress, like plug, you don’t have to go crazy, but [00:37:00] you do wanna make sure there’s context behind, your FAQ questions, your headers and things like that.

So that if you were to take I like a tool called Detailed. It’s like a Chrome extension and you can play around with it where you can just look at like the headers on your page and you don’t see the content behind it. So you see the outline, and I should be able to get like the concept of your entire webpage from that outline.

Meaning I should know who you are, what you do. Like I, I should get the meet, whether it’s a blog post or whatever the topic is of the page. That’s for me, a gut check of if I can’t get the meat of the topic, I probably didn’t use those keywords enough in those pertinent places. And if I just see the keyword weaving down the whole list of all the headers, then I probably overdid it.

Right. 

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Speaking of headers, I feel like this is something that writers for SEO learn gradually in terms of heading structure. So yeah. What’s, this also gets [00:38:00] into the word count question. If, how long does a post need to be, but also like H twos and h threes and all this stuff, like what’s a good average if we’re gonna do an authoritative piece about something what would an example post look like?

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah. So even though it’s a little bit like still old school SEO to think in terms of word count, I still do when I create content on my site, on client sites, et cetera, and I typically in this kind of era, am aiming around a thousand words. And I know that I’ve picked a topic that is specific enough when I can cover it in a thousand words.

So if I need way more words to cover the topic than a thousand, then I probably pick something too much like a definitive guide. And it’s gonna come out being too generic, right? And not go deep enough into that subject matter expertise. And if I can’t write about a thousand words about it, I probably went too specific or I glossed over something, et cetera.

So that somewhere 800 to 1200 words thousand-ish words [00:39:00] tends to, in my minds, I be like a good amount of content. Then within that you’ve gotta break it up. ’cause a thousand words is still a lot for people to read. And so you wanna break it up into sections with headers. And it depends on what the format of the post is.

If it’s five best whatever you’ll probably have a header above, the list. And then each item in the list will be like an H three. So the title of your post is the H one, some title or header above the list. And then you’re gonna hit on h threes down below it. But again, you see all sorts of exceptions.

You wanna keep the structure, but if you decide to use h fours instead of h threes, ’cause it looks a little bit better on the, in the blog post formatting, it’s probably not gonna be a, the deal breaker. Like it’ll still have its form. It’ll just violate some smaller SEO principles. 

Chris Badgett: Our SEO checklist is probably about 50 items long.

Is there anything we can stop doing in SEO or, oh, 

Lindsay Halsey: good [00:40:00] question. 

Chris Badgett: Or long, it’s not as relevant as it used to be thing. 

Lindsay Halsey: Good question. Without looking at the checklist it’s hard for me to like necessarily answer what’s less relevant? I’d say one area people debate about how important it is customizing the page title and meta description.

Because Google so often creates its own text there, I’m still like a big fan of customizing it. ’cause it’s just to put your best foot forward and market the page how you would wanna market it by customizing those fields knowing that Google may choose to do its own thing. So that’s one area where some people I think are putting less emphasis.

But I still I still like to have that sort of. Control knowing I have no control with what they do. I’m trying to think of some other ones. Alt text I would say is more important. Web accessibility and good image naming, et cetera. I would add like extra time and attention to, I still see a lot of people just skip over things related to images, whether it’s file name, the alternative [00:41:00] text, the file size, et cetera.

Yeah, those are the big ones that people tend to either skip or kind of debate. Its fa their value. 

Chris Badgett: Is there any SEO AI tools that you recommend? For example, sometimes I get frustrated with chat GBT when I’m like, Hey, here’s the whole article. I need a meta description. This is the phrase I’m targeting.

These are, this is the content brief, this is everything, and it still gives me something that’s way too long and generic and doesn’t fit in the box. 

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or or if there’s other tools that are just more A or SEO friendly for it for. 

Lindsay Halsey: So I think there, there are so many tools out there right now.

You could just do nothing but play with these ai, SEO overlapping tools, et cetera. And so I like to keep things pretty simple. So I find myself using chat g PT the most, but then relying on the built-in AI functionality of things I already use [00:42:00] in a WordPress site for an example. So Yost with the premium version, you get some AI based.

Tooling right directly in there. And so I, I personally am a fan of if you’re writing a page title in meta description and you’re like copying and pasting and then not really liking the output from the ai, you can turn to you can turn to the AI built into WordPress in that plugin. And rely on it.

And it is accelerating things like, there are plugins that can help you generate that alternative text on images and help you keep that up to date, et cetera. So there are a lot of tools, I think in the words press space that have been really helpful in terms of, and then you don’t have to go and pay for some other third party SEO, powered or AI powered SEO tool.

Yeah that’s what’s been working best for me.

Chris Badgett: Niche, SEO question. I see some people and myself included sometimes struggle with keyword research in the sense of okay, now we have all these [00:43:00] keywords and we have these clusters of keywords around this keyword and all this stuff. What’s, how do you think about keywords these days? 

Lindsay Halsey: So I think about keywords every time in the same way and use the same framework when I’m getting started.

And it’s the customer acquisition funnel. So I think about basically this funnel where at the bottom I have the conversion, right? So it’s people generally speaking for like searching for keywords that are your brand name, your name, et cetera. So that’s at the bottom of the funnel. And then in the middle of the funnel, you’re talking about the consideration phase.

Those are like those best of right, or just they’re looking for your product. They’re looking for your offering. They’re looking for course, could be in their keyword search or something like that, right? So they’re in like a, in a shopping state of mind, but they’re looking for the thing that you sell.

That’s the middle of the funnel that usually maps on a website to pages or collection pages, [00:44:00] taxonomy pages, things that are like at, in your main navigation. And then at the top of your funnel you have the awareness building and that’s where you’re like thinking about how do I get out there and share that expertise?

Or how do I get out there and get in front of somebody? One or two steps before they’re ready for the thing I do. So if you were that interior designer and you wrote a blog post of like best architects in your city, that would be an example of reaching that upper funnel because you’re getting in front of the right audience.

Just like they’re not quite ready for what you do, but they will be in a little bit. So you’re building brand awareness. So whenever I do keyword research, I think in this like real world model. And then I think about where am I today and what’s realistic? So I don’t have to go and do a ton of research for my upper funnel, like audience building campaign.

If I’m just building my first website and getting started, I should just start with the bottom of the funnel and showing up for my own name, my brand, et cetera. And then start to build from there. On the other hand. If you play in a really [00:45:00] competitive space, you might just put your best foot forward in that middle section of the funnel.

But realistically, it might be like, lifter does well in the best queries and has a lot of trust and authority and reviews and has put a lot of effort in if you were just entering that space. There’s not reason really to play very aggressively there. You should probably just skip to the upper funnel.

So when it comes to keyword research, I instantly start to think about like how my keywords map into these different parts of the funnel, and then just instantly start thinking along the lines of what’s realistic? And if I were to spend one hour doing something, in which section of the funnel would I have the most impact right now?

And that helps me from. Getting overly exhausted with an endless amount of keyword research. The other thing is that you can turn to tools like chat GPT to help you with your keyword research and like export data from the Google search console and help it organize the keywords into a funnel.

Pull data from multiple data sources like search console. And if you have like rank tracking software, we use win for example. You can like. Have it do some of this organization and thought process for you which has been a nice accelerator too. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Lindsay, this is like a masterclass in SEO and ai.

One quick question, is there the, what is the proper. SEO for ai. Does that have an acronym yet? 

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah we just actually published a blog post. ’cause people are starting to do search queries, like SEO versus yeah, we think it’s like SEO and ’cause it’s like all getting pushed under one umbrella.

But you’re gonna, you’re gonna see the phrase generative engine optimization, so GEO and then you also see answer engine optimization. It starts to get a lot of acronyms. Like most of the people I talk to, like just keeping PPC from SEO separate. And so the good news is though, again, there’s this convergence, the fundamentals of what you work on in like a holistic SEO.

Project are the same things as investing in those other in those other kind of initiatives. There’s just like little extras like the L-L-M-S-T-X-T, et cetera. Yeah. But some of those things don’t really matter till you’re a little bit further down the line anyways. Like lifter is where you have a lot of content, you have a lot of training material out there.

And so yeah, just starting with the fundamentals and making sure you have a solid base is really the name of the game. Whether it’s S-E-O-G-E-O or a EO yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna be getting it mixed up myself. And so I try not to use any of those, like when I’m in kind of agency mode talking to clients.

We talk about getting found on Google, getting found on chat, GPT, things that we can all relate to. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us about Pathfinder. If someone wants to go deeper with SEO what do you offer at Pathfinder? 

Lindsay Halsey: We call it a guided approach to SEO. And within our guided approach, we have community coaching and [00:48:00] courses all designed to help you take a step-by-step approach that’s backed with with coaching and accountability.

So you can come to group office hours as one of our members get your questions answered, get feedback on your work. You can go through our checklists and in our courses to take a step by step approach that’ll help you get from point A to point B. There are discussion threads in there and and a whole lot more.

We have a 14 day free trial if you wanna check it out with kind of no risk. And and learn a little bit more about SEO, but more importantly, learn while doing. And that’s a lot of what we try to help people do is. A lot of people will go invest like 10 hours trying to learn SEO, but not do anything that moves the needle forward.

We wanna change that around where if you do invest 10 hours in SEO, like an hour is the learning and nine hours is the doing so that you actually see a result.

Chris Badgett: Results working with Pathfinder is we had actual hosts we were working on and [00:49:00] getting, feedback and doing training, like looking at a specific project is, it’s a, it’s applied, it’s project-based learning that makes a lot of sense. 

Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, it’s a lot more fun. And then there’s a community and and so that’s always just nice to be around others, trying to do the same thing you are and realize it doesn’t have to be confusing, overwhelming, time consuming, expensive that SEO really is real world marketing and and there’s a lot of value in the short and long run when you get going with it.

Chris Badgett: This has been great Lindsay. Thank you so much. Go check out pathfinder seo.com. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you or find out more? 

Lindsay Halsey: I’m also on some social channels like Facebook and Instagram but yes, our website is the best place and you can always shoot me an email if you have any questions, Lindsay, at Pathfinder seo and and that’s my quickest response.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you Lindsay. We really appreciate it. 

Lindsay Halsey: Thanks so much, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that [00:50:00] episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Andy Jack from Candle Digital explores the revolutionary potential of artificial intelligence in e-learning in the LMSCast episode.

He specializes in assisting subject matter experts in transforming their expertise into effective virtual learning environments. He highlights that we are in a new era with opportunities for personalization, virtual tutors, and reflection-driven learning by drawing a connection between the early internet and the current generative AI explosion.

AI-driven interview simulations that prepare users for real-life situations and scaffolded reflections that assist learners in articulating complicated ideas are just two examples of the useful use cases that Andy mentions that are now in place. For course developers, he presents the idea of creating a “Second Brain” a personalized AI driven by the voice and resources of an instructor.

He urges creators to use AI as a tool to expand their knowledge rather than as a replacement for it, emphasizing the value of concentrating on learner transformation rather than merely content delivery. Non-technical instructors may effectively incorporate AI with the use of tools like Google’s NotebookLM, custom GPTs, and the AI e-Learning Power Pack for WordPress. In the end, Andy promotes beginning small, getting to know your audience well, and utilizing AI to enhance high-impact, human-centered learning opportunities.

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

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.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. We’re joined by a special guest. His name is Andy Jack. He’s from Candle Digital and Training Spark. We’re gonna be talking about artificial intelligence and E-Learning Candle. Digital is an agency, but they also have. Some WordPress tools over at training Spark, and one of the ones that really caught my eye was the AI e-Learning Power Pack.

We’ll get into all that, but first, welcome to the show, Andy. Thanks. Really 

Andy Jack: excited to talk through the conversation, you know, see what we’ve got to talk about. I think, um, just some really good topics to dig into today. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s a deep one. Tell us about the opportunity with artificial intelligence.

E-learning at a high level, like what’s going on? What’s the state of play and where are we going with all this? 

Andy Jack: Yeah. Well, I think back to when I started in All Things Web, so this was the late nineties and I dunno if it was the same in, uh, in the States as it was in the uk, but used to get these magazines.

They used to have the CDs, the CD ROMs on the front with like comper or a OL. I remember that first time when we got the, I think it was a 14 4K mode and plugged it into my 4 86 pc. And, and I got this, got this um, CD rom I installed, I think it was the CompuServe, um, browser system. I remember logging on for the first time, heard the, heard the mode were in a away, you know, that sound that, younger generations might not have a clue what is, and I just remember.

Being presented with the World Wide Web for the first time. It felt messy, but it felt new and it felt full of potential. I am, I think of where we are now in terms of the internet and, and AI and Gen AI specifically. And I feel like it’s, it’s a very similar vibe to me. It feels like there is a huge amount of opportunity to.

Learning terms to, to craft some of the opportunities that we’ve always wanted to, but never really had the chance to, or never had the tools to. So I’m really excited about things like personalization and for, um, scaffolded conversations and virtual tutors.

I just think we’ve finally been presented with a tool now, which we can do some really exciting stuff and actually create very high impactful experience led, master classes and courses and educational experiences. So I’m really excited by it. I think, I, I dunno if sometimes I’m in a bit of a bubble, so I’m a bit of a LinkedIn feed and if you, you look at my feed these days, it’s nothing but ai. So I wonder if I’m in a little bit of a bubble. Although the, the way I’m getting it at the moment is you could think about the, the, the Gartner height cycle.

I think over the last six months we’ve had this wow, this excitement. This is a really exciting place. I am starting to feel that. We’re starting to hit that, what was it called? The Tropper disillusionment, I think it’s called. We’re starting to hit that as some of the novelties wor off, some of the excitement’s wor off.

It’s actually, Hey, how can we, what are the actual use cases we need to drive out of this now to actually make this thing useful and work for us rather than it work for AI itself. So, yeah, I think really exciting times, but I think now it’s starting to really. Tease out where it actually adds value in educational experiences.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. It does feel like we’re kind of exiting the toddler years and we’re starting to grow up a little bit and, uh, well, which, which use case are you most excited about when it comes to e-learning and ai? 

Andy Jack: Yeah, there’s some really practical ones now that I, I’d say, I say in production and we can use straight away.

So I really like what we call scaffolded reflections. So some of the things that we believe are really important to an educational experience are practice feedback and reflection. Those are really important and we try and get away from knowledge acquisition. It’s all about transformation and practice.

Feedback and reflections are really, really important of that. I think the challenge with reflections is if you’re not from, if you’re not particularly academic or maybe education wasn’t your thing or maybe it’s just a new skill you’re trying to learn. So reflect on something can actually be quite hard, so if I know one of our clients is a, um, personal brand expert and she really wants her customers to really dig into their value set. Because that underpins what the, the personal brand that they’re gonna display. And if you ask people what their values are, you know, and you present them with a, with a, a blank screen, you know, it’s, it’s really hard to dig into that.

I really like the way that AI can prompt and cajole and provide a draft that can then be shaped. So it’s almost like, at the potter, at his wheel, it’s throwing the clay on the table. AI can throw that clay on the table and you can shape and mold it. For example, with the personal, the personal brand expert that we work with, Deborah Ogden, she asks several questions.

The way we’ve worked with her masterclass is it gets to understand that person and you know, their background, what their story is and it starts to squeeze out, well, given what you’ve already told us, here’s what we think your values may be. And then what they do is they take that, say, well, I don’t agree with this one.

I don’t agree with that one. Well actually this one’s really on point, and they can start to refine it. So that’s a very immediate, practical use of AI that we’re. We are baking with our client projects straight away and we’re just finding that it’s having a great impact. The other one as well for me that works very well is simulations of kind of virtual conversations.

So we work with a client who does a lot around, career development, and particularly around getting the job that you want. And a scary part of getting a job is the interview process. So we’ve created a tool that sits within her course that allows someone to knock the edges of that interview experience.

For example, we’re using chat GPT and well open AI specifically as a way of creating personas. The personas are almost sitting in and it’s just a chat interface at this stage. It’s not that it’s not using voice or anything like that, but each persona plays a different role in that interview context.

So one might be the interviewer, one might be the, you know, the head of hr. One of them might be the MD or the fd, something like that. And what it starts to do is it starts to pose questions and start to react based on what they’re. The user fires back now, it’s not perfect, it’s a little clunky, but it gets them to the goal a little bit.

It gets a little bit closer. It knocks off some of those edges. So I already think we’re starting to see some practical use cases that we can bake into our programs. 

Chris Badgett: I think that’s wonderful. I. Like, uh, the AI space, I feel like the course creator space is also growing up a little bit because you have these subject matter experts who have a lot of knowledge, but they’re not trained as teachers or instructional designers.

So like even something like the Socratic method in a, you know, asking questions and not just delivering videos or PDFs or slideshows, but getting people thinking and taking action is just as much a part of learning as the content, 

Andy Jack: right? Absolutely. It is something we fair, we rail against quite a bit, I think.

I think unfortunately you know, I’m a huge fan, you know, given what we do about online courses. But I think a lot of people and course creators fall into the trap of thinking an online course is just gated content.

And actually it’s not really, you know, a user wants to take. A person wants to take that online course because they’re looking for a shortcut to an outcome.

They’re in place, A, they want to be in place B and there’s something stopping them getting to place B and your online course should help them with that. And that’s often not just a case of firing content at people. It’s about. Taking ’em on the journey. Journey, you know, giving them opportunities to practice, reflect, and, and get feedback.

And I think that’s a, those are almost the, that’s the essence, that’s the experience that make, creates transformation. Not the content. The content is a key part of that, but it’s not at the center of it. It’s the experience that’s at the center of it. 

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah. I, I love, uh, explaining to people that, you know, there’s that website masterclass.

And it’s like $20 a month or something, and you have these, the best experts in the world. And if somebody asks like, well, why is that only $20? It’s like, well, if you learn how to become a comedian from Steve Martin, he’s not gonna help you tell your jokes. It’s just, yeah, that’s not like a $2,000 coaching program or something else.

Right? 

Andy Jack: Yeah. Yeah. I mean the, the only cost. Place is interesting as well. ’cause we found that we’ve moved as a digital studio to, to developing more cohort based courses, which has been a really interesting move. And I think it’s because it brings certain characteristics to a learning experience that perhaps on demand, struggles with, but I think, you know, on demand still has its place, you know, and I think for those that want to get somewhere fast and perhaps don’t need a community experience, it’s great. But we’re finding that cohort-based courses bring aspects such as accountability, you know, particularly where you’ve got, you’re part of a group or perhaps you have live workshops as well.

It brings that community aspect as well. So it’s, yeah, it’s, I think the online world, the online course world or online education world is, is ever changing. It’s a really kind of fluid dynamic and AI is a. Can I say a new grenade that’s been thrown into the mix? Yeah. And it’s, it’s shaking things up and I, I love that because I think there’s so much potential in online learning to transform people’s lives and to transform communities in the world.

But it’s not about gated content, it’s about transformative experiences and those need Designing well and delivering well. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Well, what are, what are some of the benefits of AI or the opportunity with. You know, a course creator that wants to design a more robust learning experience in addition to content.

Obviously we have scale, like it’s gonna automate and scale, but what else, what’s the other benefits of using AI for reflections and tutoring and things like that? 

Andy Jack: Yeah, I think a lot of experts get into the online course game because they wanna scale themselves up. That’s, you know, so a lot of our clients are typically delivering their experiences, their, their training in person on virtual, and they, they hit a ceiling, you know, there’s only so much of them they can give.

And I think what online learning allows them to, sorry. What AI allows them to do is there’s new opportunities now to scale that up and bring the essence of them into it. So, we love the idea of, I dunno if you’ve read, um, Tia Forty’s Second Brain. It’s a, it’s a wonderful concept. It’s about.

Taking everything that’s in the brain and basically put it into notion. But I like the idea of that from an online learning perspective. And the challenge I always think about, can we do that from an online learning perspective? Can we ca, can we take this expert? Can we take their insights their knowledge, their stories, their scars and their spiky points of view?

And try and capture this into one brain, you know, a virtual brain that perhaps AI could power. This is something we’re trying to play around with and tease out with the work that we do at Campbell Digital. Um, I don’t think we’re there yet with it, but I, I love that as a concept of, so, um, almost bring, turn that and bring that into different forms.

So it could be a virtual tutor, so someone that accompanies or guides a person through the course without actually having to be there. Now I think there’s always the, there’s always. Importance of having some kind of human connection, whether with that, with peers or with the, the tutor or the course leader themselves.

But I love the idea of being able to use AI to distill the essence of that person and all their insights and use that in an online learning environment to, to scale it up. So I don’t think we’re there yet. We’re playing with a lot of tools. I dunno if you’ve come across the model context protocol, that’s a.

It’s a really interesting concept around, um, I think someone to told said it was the USBC of ai. So it, it sits in the middle, it allows it to interface with different things and I can just see that being part of this, this amazing second brain that allows it to, um, to scale someone up. So yeah, I think that’s the opportunity we’re looking at.

Again, I don’t think we’re there yet, but it’s exciting times for that. 

Chris Badgett: Help us understand, just like technically I think, um. Some people have this idea that, you know, maybe you’re gonna use chat GPT, but you can also train, you can put your own source material into that second brain. Tell us about that.

Like, ’cause maybe the, uh, you know, the branding expert might want both, some general branding help from the large language model of chat, GBT or open ai, but they also wanna load in like their unique secret sauce and take. So how do we. Should we do both? Should we really just focus on our unique Second Brain or like, how do we think about that?

Andy Jack: Yeah, I think what I would say at the moment is there isn’t really a playbook for AI for course creators yet. Yeah, I think, I think we’re still writing it as we go. You know, it’s almost like we’re, you know, the trains on the tracks and we’re putting the tracks on as actually, as the train is speed in the head.

So we’re still trying to figure it out. So I don’t think there’s any kind of reset path yet for this. But yeah, I’ve heard it called a rag corpus. So is it retrieval? Augmented generation. So it’s not just where it’s pulling from the LLM itself, it’s actually using source material to, to pull that in.

And we use that a lot within our own internal workflow at Candle Digital. So we have a, a custom GPT and that, that’s always something I would recommend any course creator to create, in tax three PT as an example, as a way of. We’ve got one at Came Digital called the Strategic Brand Partner.

And in that we’ve got, it’s pulling from the, um, the large corpus of chat gpt, but in there it’s got our mission and purpose and values. It’s got our tone of voice, it’s got our branding documents, and I, I live in this custom GPT, so I’m using it every day to test new business ideas, to help me write blog posts, all this kind of stuff.

And I think. Once we have this model context protocol in place, which, which can be done to a NA 10 and there are a few other things I think make.com as well has a a model context, protocol tool in it. You can start to pull in all these resources, whether that be sat within the tool itself or whether it’s pulling from Google and start to start to use this to overlay.

But I don’t think yet, I could be wrong that there’s actually a way to use that and present that back to an audience just yet, but I don’t think we’re far off at all. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I think subject matter experts, I mean, a lot of ’em have like books slide presentations, maybe a history of podcasting, a YouTube channel, a blog like creators are being set up to win super big here, I think.

Absolutely. 

Andy Jack: Absolutely. I mean, if you take yourself as an example, Chris, and your plethora of videos on Lifter LMS, I’m sure if I could turn, you know, use a transcription tool. Take all of those. I could probably create, quite a good version of Chris and, it, it’s, I’m sure it wouldn’t, you know, it might be 90% there.

You might have some of your quirks and some of your spiky points of view, but I’m sure it’d be a, a pretty good representation of what you’re all about. And I think that’s, you know, we talk about our subject experts are often sat on a mountain of value that they’re not making the most out of. So there’ll be so much of there.

Expertise setting. You know, as you said, PowerPoints, workbooks toolkits, books, they’ve written slides, they’ve designed all this kind of stuff, and they’ve got all this. And actually they’re not making the most out it. And that’s, those are often the clients that come to  us if they say, I want to have more impact.

I wanna leave a legacy. And I want to reach more people. I know there’s a huge amount of potential in what I have. How do I scale this up? And I think online learning so far has helped us do that. But I think AI is, fuel on the fire too. To make that go in further. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I just wanna throw out another tool recommendation.

You mentioned building a custom GPT. Everybody should try that. But what’s also cool is Google’s notebook, lm. Oh yeah. Which allows you to add like multiple sources, videos, documents, all kinds of stuff. So if you’re working on a, the problem with Chad GBT in my experience is like if you’re working on a big project.

You kind of get lost in the threads and you know, it just gets a little crazy. But you can also like create that corpus inside of a Google LM and stuff, which is, or notebook lm, which is super cool. 

Andy Jack: Absolutely. And you get the novelty of the podcast feature as well, which, you know, when everyone talks about, notebook, LLM, it’s, uh, it’s always the, the, the podcast feature agent.

And I’ve used that quite a lot. I remember taking, um, I think you can come across Mr. Beasts. Oh yeah. How we does production. I just looked at it and thought that’s quite a lot to consume. So what I’ll do is I’ll stick it through, you know, a notebook. I’ll take that podcast and when I’m out for a walk in the park, I’ll digest it that way.

So I love that It gives us lots of tools like that to, to see things in different ways. 

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about, um, course creation like may maybe more on the content side. Like I see some people trying to take a shortcut and have like, chat, ask chat GBT to make me an outline and then make me the content for this.

And they’re not really adding any of their own stuff to it. And you can create some good stuff that way. But there’s also. I, I find it much easier. I just did a course on that, how to use chat GPT to create an online course. And I know that the, um, I have a section in there where you have to dump in your own human knowledge dump, I call it, to add your unique takes, sources, ideas.

But what, what’s your advice to creators like when they’re trying to flush out a like sort of an outline and an approach on a topic? How to leverage AI without just being like, here, chat, GBT, do it all for me. 

Andy Jack: Yeah. I, I think that’s coming at it from the wrong angle, isn’t it? It’s about what could you teach rather than what, who is your audience and what is the transformation they’re looking to achieve?

So, um. Yeah, lots. Un pick there. So we, we use a technique called, um, action mapping quite heavily by Kathy Moore. It’s a brilliant, it’s a brilliant book and it, but the, the, the key part of it is it focuses on the audience. You know, it’s, it’s all about who are you trying to serve, what are, what’s their desired outcome?

What are the challenges that getting away from achieving it themselves? So always starting with that point, because I think that’s the key. And it’s all about having a real understanding of your audience, but not only from a content or from a course creation perspective, but also from a marketing perspective.

You know, you need to be, you need to be, create experiences that resonate, that connect. That only not only needs to be reflected in the actual products, but in your positioning and in your marketing as well. And I think that’s, so I, I’d always start with that. So the way I would be using AI in that perspective is actually helping me to, before I even think about course structures and course over using course format is helping me get under the skin of my audience.

I’d actually be using it to scaffold that. Use it as your sparring partner to help you suss out the best approach to tackle that problem of understanding your users. So, which I do all the time. You know, ask, ask, ask it. You know, what’s the best way to do this if you’re unsure and it, you know, or come back with, the perfect places with interviews.

So get hold of you, you know, interview, like we’re having a chat now, transcribe it, get AI to distill it. What are the key themes through all of that and through, and, and get chat to. Provide a series of questions to scaffold those conversations as well. It can be our, it can be our partner throughout this whole this whole piece.

But only when you’ve got a strong understanding of the audience, that’s when you use it to dig into structures and overviews and outcomes. Because ultimately otherwise, it’s just gonna be based on what the rest of the world already has. You know, vanilla content, which isn’t gonna land from a product perspective.

It isn’t gonna have the transformative aspects you have you, or for transformative outcome you’re looking for. And it’s not gonna have any kind of marketing nuance or resonance that’s gonna capture anyone to actually purchase or enroll in it. So I think that’s the, that’s the key of it. I always think about it’s, I think subject experts are really in a really interesting place at the moment.

And depending on what day you wear up, it’s either AI is the, the greatest opportunity we’ve ever had. The dystopian, it’s gonna, you know, wipe my business out overnight. And it sometimes for me, when I wake up in the morning, it depends how I’ve got out of bed on which side I sit. But I think there’s a real opportunity for subject experts to stand out from that.

And that comes down to making sure that whatever you produce has the essence of you in it. It has your spiky points of view, it has your. And It has your context so you know how to marry the theory with the context of the audience. It has all lots of different aspects around tone of voice, how you deliver something.

It has all those kind of personality traits that AI being. The vanilla homogenous blurb of content, it just can’t provide. So I think that’s the place. I think that’s the a way to go. The only thing I would also add. To answer this and what you’ve been a prime example of Chris, is you’ve been prolific in your asset creation over the last, five to 10 years.

And you can tell by the YouTube and. All the blogs and all the interviews that you have, that corpus and material as a subject expert is absolutely invi and valuable because it takes forever to create. So if you’re not already doing that, start it today. ’cause that’s gonna form the foundation of whatever you want to create in 3, 6, 12 months time.

Just make that sure, that stuff cap. You know, as, much as possible captures the essence of you. ’cause that’s gonna be invaluable to that content creation process when you’re feeding it through ai. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m working on, uh, a framework right now. I call it well, the, the three, the Venn diagram is who?

You and then how, okay. So like how is like. The content and the, whatever the, the content of the course is. But the you is like, who is this? Or, sorry, the who is this for? And I think this question gets skipped all the time by subject matter experts. And then like you said, you what, what are your values?

Like, why are you doing this? What’s your unique point of views and stuff like, that’s where great courses come from. And uh, and if you make yourself available. I call it a, a support mechanism. So like group coaching calls, email support, one-on-one coaching online community that you participate in. That’s where the value comes from and the conversations, you know?

Andy Jack: Absolutely. I say I think, I mean there’s a couple of things there. I think subjects experts forward this rapid. They want to almost download their brain and Yeah, feed it to their eyes. It’s actually, they only need a fifth of that and they only need it in a certain context. And so that’s often that’s the education trap.

But I think there’s something around. What you said around designing that in a certain, certain way and delivering it. It makes sure it has the essence of you throughout it as well. Um, and again, I think all the AI can only support that process. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And like you, I, you said, um. We’re not sure where we’re at on the timeline, but just start doing it.

Like, when I created my course on how to create an online course with chat, GBTI, I just went full in, used the tools as best I can. It has like tons of prompts, but I also built like a digital version of myself on Hey Jam. Okay. And I was 90% happy with it. And, uh. So like in my course, I actually created a real course that we give away for free just to show people what’s possible, but it’s not perfect like AI just get moving.

You know? Like don’t, don’t wait. Right. Just like you said, don’t wait to start creating public free content and sharpen your thoughts and build a audience and SEO and all that stuff.

Andy Jack: Just create motion. I think just take one step forward. And I think I, you know, I don’t think anyone has the, as I said, no one has the path yet, but there’s, we’d like to think we’re two steps in front and at the moment that’s okay.

You know, as long as we’re two steps in front, we can lead people that want to follow us. I think there’s an interesting thing about, there’s a lot of procrastination and perhaps a lot of head in the sand about, I don’t really wanna get involved this AI thing. I’m scared of it, or I just, I’m just nervous about it.

I do believe that you’re either gonna be, well, there’s a, there’s a chap in the UK called Daniel Priestland. He talks about you’re either gonna be, as with ai, you’re either gonna be a super consumer or you’re gonna be a super creator. Ah, I like, and that’s, that’s a chasm. That’s a chasm. So, and the longer it goes, the wider that chasm is getting.

So if you’re not, we, I mean, you know, in terms of our business, when ai, when Gen AI came along, it’s very much. Where do we fit in with this? This is quite interesting and, and, you know, in a good way. And we’re, we’re open to the challenge. We’re quite excited by that. But we are, we, let’s think about, we’re surfing in the shallows at the moment.

That’s the place to be because we know this big wave is coming. And again, ’cause we’re in this bubble, I suspect it might be a bit later than we think. But if we need to make sure that as a business we’re surfing in the shallows and playing with this stuff, because when that wave comes, we need to be able to ride it rather than get drowned by it.

So is there, you know, I think making sure that you are committing some time every week to have. Practical use, you know, just have a practical play with this stuff. And I always recommend to the people that aren’t really, perhaps just have to play around with chat GPT and you know that that’s the extent to many people’s experiences, or they’ve created a video avatar or done some stuff in free Pick, create that custom GPT as a starting point.

Just ’cause it get, it’s that I, I’ve just seen so many people do that and the light bulbs go, you go, oh, okay, this changes things. And I think once you’ve had that, then it’s like you can’t help but playing it. 

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Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think the human brain has a really hard time. Like we know this from, uh, like investing as an example of understanding exponential curves.

’cause we live in our brain is kind of linear. But I love that concept you said about the widening gap between the super consumers and super producers. Like our brain can’t even comprehend. Like I don’t even, I’ve done 500 podcast episodes.

I’ve been doing it for over 10 years and. I don’t remember every single episode, every word, but chatGPT can. Yeah, so you can like, get somebody’s 10 years worth of work.

And ask it a specific question based on all these experts and everything.

Then you can even go exponential off that. You’re like, well. I wanna ask Chris. GPT, Andy, GPT somebody else. Somebody else. And you can build like a tribe of mentors. I mean, that’s just like an exponential thing based on like hundreds of years of content that’s like, we can’t even fathom that. 

Andy Jack: And I think the key to that is to be, is to be prolific in your output.

You know, be, I dunno if it’s Gary, but be prolific not perfect. 

Chris Badgett: I think that’s 

Andy Jack: what he says. And I like that ’cause it’s. I think so many people have looked into ship, whether it be content or courses or, you know, different products. But I think now the half life of content, particularly social content, is so short.

You’ve just gotta get it out there because the more you know, we’re having this conversation now that can be used and recycled and repurposed and used to form these tone and essence of me that I can then use in loads of different products as that process to. Almost the world, you know, the creating digital products now is becoming almost permissionless.

There’s very little we can do, but we need to have that corpus and that understanding of ourselves and that, and to be fair, personal brand as well to be able to build from. 

Chris Badgett: I have a, a question for you that I see hangs up a lot, of course creators, educators, which is sometimes. And I would put myself in this category.

Like I have some expertise, but I am, have a skill in curating. I’m a voracious, lifelong learner, right? And I consume a lot of content. But I see some course creators perhaps like they’re really good at curating. They have all a lot of knowledge, but maybe they’re newer on their own personal expert journey, and they get into this trap of feeling like.

Well, it’s not my original content. Like the problem with AI and all this is like you can source all these awesome material. But then I see people get hung up and thinking about like plagiarism.

Or it’s not my original idea. But I mean, if you look at a book. It has an index full of sources and you can always give credit where credit is due.

But any thoughts there? And for as an instructional design perspective on how to get past like. The value of being a curator, it’s not like you’re stealing, you’re just good at learning yourself and you have a lot of sources. 

Andy Jack: So I 

Chris Badgett: see that a lot. 

Andy Jack: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lots, a lots there. I mean, the first one is, is there anything, any, is there anything original anymore with my, and the world has, you could almost argue there’s enough content in the world, do we need anymore?

But I think it’s, it’s, there’s that one, there’s also the fact that there’s that. You don’t have to be the expert, you just have to be two steps in front. Yeah. Because there’s people following in your footstep. They want to be where you are now that are just, two steps, six months, two years.

However, when you frame it just behind you, so provide them with the footsteps to get to where you are. And that’s not about in the sage or this, you know, the, the big thinker on this thing is actually just being, and actually that can be a benefit sometimes if it’s really big thoughts. It can be quite, it can feel quite inaccessible.

Remember, it’s all about transformation. People are looking for a roadmap to get to somewhere new, whether that be a new career or a change in themselves or and so you can provide those dots. I just think, I dunno, I think you know what they say, ideas are, ideas are worthless, execution is everything.

And I think that’s so important. Just, just get on with it and just shape. And I think we advocate curation. But I think to under, to do curation really well. And it comes back to one of the furthest. Earliest points is you have to understand the audience.

So if you can take all this stuff, this corpus and material and repurpose it to a, a niche that is perhaps underserved, isn’t having their problem, isn’t having their problem solved, then that’s the way to organize it.

So I, I believe there’s, I believe, with ai. Coming in and, uh, providing so much information and, making access to information. So, democratized is that I can see course creators going a lot more micro niche, almost drilling down. I just think it’s gonna be hard to market itself as the best in a certain field, but it’s a lot easier to market itself as the only.

So much. If you can define yourself as the only person in your go-to field, whatever that might be, and it can be so micro niche, that’s the way to start to build it. ’cause you know, it’s about, you know, it’s the power law or the explanation. It’s all about being number one now, I think, and being the only, so I think it’s, if you are going down the curation route again, just lasering on your audience and test it and speak to them and have conversations.

It’s amazing how much, how much can, how much value can just come from. Conversations with the target audience, and so many people want to skip that because it feels uncomfortable. And it might, it might list the lid on this thing, oh, that’s not what I was expecting. I didn’t wanna teach that, or I didn’t want to provide content on that.

So it’s having really good, solid conversations that are either going to reaffirm the path you’re on or they’re gonna change the path that you’re on. But the best about having conversations with that audience is you’re priming an audience to buy your product later on. So it’s, it’s, it’s just a no brainer.

So I always say to our, the people that come into us. Say, I’ve got this idea for X. Have you spoken to potential clients about this? And what have they said? And you go, oh, I don’t want to, I don’t want anyone stealing my ideas. It’s not about the ideas, it’s about execution. And you are in a prime position to deliver on that.

So go and speak to your audience and start to build demand for what you do and interest in what you’re doing, and frame it so that when you create the product, you’ve got an audience there ready and waiting. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I love that. And also, I just want to add another tip is like, and if you’re out there listening or watching and you’re worried about you know, what makes you unique, draw a Venn diagram, three circles and just combine three things.

And so like for example, if I was teaching some kind of entrepreneurship, I, okay, I’m not gonna make a general course about entrepreneurship. What if I’m gonna also talk about like personal development and how that fits into entrepreneurship and then what if I’m gonna talk about being a one person company Now that’s, that creates a unique kind of thing.

And when you do that, you don’t necessarily have to be the best at all three of those, but you may very well be the best at combining all three of those. 

Andy Jack: Absolutely. And that message will land and doesn’t it, if you can get that out there. People you, we always think with learning experiences, one of our kind of key things that, or one of our metrics is that someone does it and says, this feels like it was designed for me.

If you can get that at the essence of your course or your masterclass, then that’s the gold dust. ’cause then you can, you can market it on that and you know that the impact it’s gonna have, it’s just gonna have a, such a big ripple effect on them and their audience and their clients. And it’s all gonna feed upwards if they’re in an organization.

So that’s the, you know, design it as if it was built so they feel as if it was built for them. 

Chris Badgett: I had, I’ve experienced that personally. I was in a, um, software entrepreneur coaching program with Dan Martel, who’s kind of famous on YouTube now. He was, uh, it was called SAS Academy, and I got inside there and there were a bunch of weirdos just like me in this giant community.

Actually, it wasn’t that giant. I mean, it was, it was big, but it wasn’t like tons and tons of people, and it was almost like the content and Dan’s coaching and everything. It was like psychic, like, oh my God, I didn’t even know how to vocalize that problem I had. He just did and he gave me a solution. It was like I couldn’t get enough of it.

It was, uh, I was in there for two years just getting into all that. But it was definitely, that I know what that feels like on the other side and that’s what you want to create. Yeah, 

Andy Jack: absolutely. 

Chris Badgett: And you mentioned, I forget what aspect you were talking about, but, I like to think of writing as three things.

It’s research, writing and editing. And we’re not even talking about marketing and promotion or course creation or anything, but don’t skip the research and then don’t skip the editing. So like, creating a course isn’t just like course creation. There’s, I would spend equal time in all of that. Let’s say I spent two months on research, two months on building the program.

Two months on editing it. Ideally after I’ve gone through it over it with like a pilot group or something like that. Yeah. I feel like people get that wrong in social media too. It’s social media. It’s not just content. IE media. You gotta talk to people, get in the comments, be social. 

Andy Jack: Yeah. Research out loud.

Yeah, because if you’re research, you know, there’ll be other people that have perhaps researching similar things or are looking for the answers to similar things. And if you can provide them. If you can do your research and create your product, then you, you know, you served an audience there. I think, yeah, I think social media’s become, LinkedIn has changed quite dramatically for me in the last, well, ever since. Twitter became X there was a big exodus, people moved onto LinkedIn and it’s all, seems much more of a broadcast medium than it ever did, rather than networking medium.

But there’s still ripe opportunities there for it. But I think, yeah, to go back to your thing, I, the one thing that makes me nervous about AI is. Sometimes it takes out some of the writing process as well. Yeah. The writing process is so critical in terms of shaping your ideas and getting things wrong and framing it in different ways.

I guess my advice would be you could use the AI on all three of those research, writing and editing, but don’t let it do too much of it because I think it’s as much about that critical thinking and honing your craft and shaping it in the right way. And I think that’s the key part of it too.

Chris Badgett: I’ve trained myself, I, I can feel the pull to just be lazy and just, Hey, write this thing for me. Like yesterday I was doing some copywriting in an email. I was like, I’m just gonna ask ChatGPT to, to write this thing. And I’m like, no, do the first draft and then get it to look at it. So I’ve trained myself to always like, input first.

Like it’s, don’t be lazy with a prompt. 

Andy Jack: But you can see, you can see it as well. You can see the output. I mean, I, you know. I’ve not really published anything on that front. But when you do create it, you can just tell, you know.

You can see below it that it’s, you know, it’s, it’s vanilla homogenous kind of LLM slop, I think they call it, don’t they?

Slop. And I think that’s, uh, something that’s really important to push against. 

Chris Badgett: I wanna get your take on another issue that course creators face which is, especially in the AI world, where you can kind of create big content. There’s sort of two paths that course creators could take and maybe your branding expert might be a good example, but I could create like a signature course, a big course on like a, some kind of branding system.

Or I could create like mini courses and kind of have a membership of like logo design, values, definition, color schemes, whatever. And. kind of have like these little more bite-sized pieces. I know, uh, at least there’s a lot of claim that attention span is shrinking. So maybe the shorter ones make more sense, but at the same time, I will listen to a three hour podcast if I’m really into topic.

So what do you advise from an instructional design perspective? Like when to do like the mega course versus a membership side of like. Many problems and solutions. 

Andy Jack: Yeah, I mean, I mean it’s kind of, it’s kind of a boring answer, but it’s to go back to the user, and I know I keep on, I keep on hammering the same point, but just it’s all about creating products that resonate for the users that help ’em with their outcomes.

And it’s, I appreciate it’s a well trotted kind of answer, but that’s the place to start. ’cause ultimately, you know, there are so many courses out there in the world that are collecting digital dust. And that’s not because they’re terrible courses. They’re probably really fantastic. But they just don’t land.

Some reason, and it might not, it might be the product itself, it might be the marketing it might be the, um, productization of, you know, the container, how it’s wrapped up. So it kind of, I, it always starts with the user and it, and, but I think to add to that, um, we talk about something called a value ladder.

Start small. Like, like this is the lifter ML LMS experience or product. But it’s given away for free. So you’ve got something where people can allow you to, uh, engage with you in a very, um, passive distance led way. Um, understand what you are all about, Chris, what I’m about at Campbell Digital and work their way up the ladder.

So I almost think of it as that. To be fair. So think about the value that you can add any increments rather than don’t get hung up on the labels. So we find that sometimes. Clients come to us and say, but I really want a program. But the problem with I nailing it at that early stage is that becomes with assumptions about what a program is.

It comes with labels and checklists that you have to achieve to make it a program is actually, well, is actually that what people want. So I’d always find a way to. Try new stuff around. Designing out loud, I would create wait lists for stuff. I would just, again, have conversations with potential users and see what the challenges are and figure out what kind of products our experience is gonna help ’em overcome that challenge.

And it might be completely different to what you think, so I guess it’s kind of a boring answer, but it’s, talk to your audience and start with them and start with them and work backwards. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, at Candle Digital, you guys also have training Spark. Tell us about the AI e-Learning Power Pack.

Why’d you create it? What is it and how do people get it? Yeah, 

Andy Jack: absolutely. So,training Spark is a spinoff of Candle Digital. What we found is that we were creating, plugins for WordPress that fill some of the gaps that, um, weren’t being fulfilled elsewhere. So we, have this mantra internally within, uh, candle Digital to sell you sawdust.

And that’s, uh, you know, anything that we create, can we kind of commercialize and productize it in other ways? So with training Spark what we did is we started experimenting with AI very early on. It was about maybe about 18 months. 18 months ago. You know, being candid, when we launched it, it was right to crickets.

And I think that was because we were just so early with it that people couldn’t grasp their head. I think to be fair, a lot of people in the WordPress space, there may be cost creators, but they’re also agencies. The demand to, to involve AI in their projects you know, needs to come from the client rather than the agency.

So there’s something we learned a lot there. But what a, what the Ai e-Learning Power Pack, it works with any WordPress based. LMS like lifter, but it allows you to create AI based experiences and new shortcuts to insert them into, into pages or in various parts of your, um, your learning platform. So there are three things that it has.

The first one is conversations. So I mentioned this earlier. This was a way of creating almost like simulations. So if you want to create a persona, you can do that within this one interface, uh, within one screen. You can get that persona to play a different role. And what you can do is you can bring it in so that the user can, uh, interact with it in different ways.

So, um, it’s primarily a chat-based interface right now, we’re looking to voice quite soon. But it’s, it’s in essence what the AI Power Pack does is it breaches the gap for technical, for non-technical. WordPress people. So it allows them to bring AI using open ai, but without having to do all the, the APIs and all the recordings.

So the first one is, uh, conversations. The second one is the scaffold of reflections, which I, you know, referenced the example in the personal brand. So it’s where you basically, in essence, you click create generate suggestion, and based on the prompts in the background, it will create a response which they can then shape and mold and use in different ways.

And the final one is also virtual tutors. So virtual tutors, you can choose where it appears on the learning platform. But it’s based on large language model, but it also uses this from rag corpus, so your own materials, so to tailor it in a certain way. So it’s just in essence, the AI learning Power Pack is that bridge between bringing AI into your learning platform without having to go through all the complexities of manually, you know, getting knee deep in the code with, uh, open ai.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I’ve played around with AI Power Pack, ai, e Learning Power Pack, and it is awesome. I’m super excited about it. When I saw that and started playing with it, I’m like, oh, wow, this is, this is really good. Tell us more about Candle Digital. Who’s your ideal client if somebody’s watching this or listening?

Who’s the best fit for Kendall Digital? 

Andy Jack: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, we work with subject experts and expert businesses. So they are subject experts are usually authors, consultants, trainers, uh, speakers. We also work with training providers and we also work with some quite large organizations, which basically those that have really valuable knowledge and skills that they think they aren’t getting the most from.

Typically they will be delivering in person or on virtual, but they just know they’ve hit a ceiling. They know that if they create some fantastic high impact digital products, then they’ll be able to scale what they do. And so we take them through that whole process of helping them identify, tease out their ideas, keep the tires on that and make sure that what they’re creating is strategically sound.

Then we help them design, build, launch, and scale it all that way through. So we’re the, we’re the thread. So we want to work with people that are. Ambitious. They know their craft. And they have all the stories and stuff that they go with it. They have a, an audience already and what, but what they’ve done is they’ve hit a ceiling and they want to level up their game.

And we can help ’em through that whole process. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. We’re gonna have to do this a year from now. Andy, when and ’cause I know a lot’s gonna talk about the exponential curve. We’re gonna be in a different place, but also the same place, like some of the stuff we’re talking about here. It is just even easier to do.

People understand better. It’s gonna be interesting times you out there watching and listening. I would encourage you to go get the AI e-learning power pack and also check out Candle Digital. That’s candle Do Digital. You said you’re big on LinkedIn. Where else can people connect with you or is, is there anything else you want people to check out?

Andy Jack: LinkedIn is the best way to find me. Andy, Jack, Kendall Digital LinkedIn. I have a very, a fledgling YouTube channel, but I’m following in your footsteps, Chris. I need to be more prolific and less worried about being perfect, but that’s a, that’s a journey I’m going on myself, Chris. Awesome, 

Chris Badgett: Andy. Well, thank you cope for coming on the show.

Really appreciate it. That was a fun conversation and uh, man, it’s, it’s just an interesting world and uh, just get out there and take action and start playing with the tools and put your customer at the C center of your business, not your product and the world changes. But thank you for coming, Andy.

I really appreciate it. 

Andy Jack: Thanks, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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The post Create an AI Tutor For Your WordPress LMS Website With Andy Jack From Training Spark appeared first on LMScast.

In this LMScast, Founder Karen Wisch of Graphics by Design talks about how she transitioned from traditional graphic design to web development. She began her profession in design when computers were widely used, and once a customer requested a website, she progressively moved into web programming.

Karen finally started using WordPress after learning it on her own. She talks about an exceptional effort with the Missouri Credentialing Board, which certifies practitioners in Missouri who treat drug use disorders. About seven years ago, the Board was managing license renewals and continuing education (like the MARS course) entirely on paper.

The Board was handling continuing education (such as the MARS course) and license renewals all on paper around seven years ago. The Board selected Karen over larger organizations that wanted a share of their revenue because she suggested digitizing these processes. Karen replaced their traditional, mail-based continuing education and grading method with an online system using LifterLMS.

This change made it possible for classes like the MARS course to be fully automated and offered on-demand, transforming a time-consuming, biennial program into a scalable, effective, and adaptable educational experience. She stresses that the Board is quite pleased with the project’s success and that LifterLMS played a key role in it.

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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.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Karen Wish. She’s at karen wish.com. That’s W-I-S-C-H, and her agency is called Graphics by Design. Karen caught my eye. She built a really cool continuing education project. Called the Missouri Credentialing Board.

We’re gonna talk about that. But first, welcome to the show, Karen. 

Karen Wisch: Hi. Thanks Chris. 

Chris Badgett: It’s awesome to have you here. And we were catching up before the, we went live here and you’ve been around for a while. You got the lifter LMS shirt in the background. Awesome.

Karen Wisch: Swag from you guys, right? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we do a lot of strategic swag, it’s not, there’s no merch store. If you have an item you’re on the good list and doing awesome stuff. But tell us a little bit about you, graphics by design. How did you get into this space of helping businesses with technology and marketing and sales and modernizing their tech?

Karen Wisch: Yeah. I’ve been around forever, so I graduated with a degree in graphic design before there were computers. Seriously I took a. Basic coding class while I was in college, but there was nothing in my field as far as computers. We went through a lab one time and the professor goes, these are computers.

We think they’re a fad. He walked on through he was wrong. Over time, I did a lot of graphics for people, a lot of publications and stuff. And then one of the people I did. Graphic design for, they needed a website. And so I started with, oh gosh. What did Word have that they used? Microsoft had publisher what?

Not publisher. That was, they had something for websites. And I did that and then I did some HCML forum. And then eventually somebody contacted me through a referral and they said, our site’s been hacked. Can you fix it? I said I don’t know, but I’ll see if I can. And I was able to, and it was a WordPress site.

So I got intrigued by that and pretty soon they were coming to me for all of their website needs. It escalated from that is how I got into designing WordPress website. So it was basically there was a need and so I filled it. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the Missouri credentialing board that’s at Missouri cb.com.

Yeah. What [00:03:00] what do they do and how’d they find you and what’d you build? 

Karen Wisch: They do credentialing for the state of Missouri for people who are substance use disorder professionals. So people in that sector need counselors and people to help with recovery. And I was asked to come and make a bid.

They were looking for someone to help them with their renewals. They, their licenses for their counselors for the state of the Missouri need to be renewed and they wanted to put that online ’cause it was a paper document at the time. And this was probably seven years ago. And so I went to a meeting with a couple other people and the other companies were larger.

But they wanted a percentage of each of the renewals. The credentialing board wasn’t super happy about that. And I said I think I can do it. Let me see what I can figure out. And I gave them a bid. At the time they also were doing a lot of continuing ed, and one of the things they did was a course that was called the Mars course.

And the assistant director was in charge of grading all that. So everything was done by mail. Again, this was seven years ago. So they would send out a program, like a document and a quiz, and then the people would mail that back in. He would grade it manually and then he would mail back the results in the next course.

There’s probably 11 different sections to the Mars course and I. He had to manually grade all 40 or 50 of them each time. So while I was there I said I think that we can set this up so this is all automated. That really sealed the deal for them because this was a lot of time for him.

And obviously using Lifter, it’s, once it’s automated, it’s all set up. It worked great. It [00:05:00] was a huge success for them. And. As I was telling you beforehand, that’s now, it used to be a class offered twice a year. Now anyone can go on at any time and start the course because it’s self-paced and they can finish it when they want.

And it’s all, because it’s all set up with Lifter. It’s a great solution for them. They’re really happy with it. 

Chris Badgett: So what were the what are the key parts of Lifter? I noticed they’re selling these continuing education units. And there’s continuing a continuing education credits.

Are you, did you set up certificates or how 

Karen Wisch: Oh yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So what are all the nuts and bolts of it? 

Karen Wisch: Okay I’ve got the Infinity bundle and I bought the lifetime access to it, which has been awesome, but then I can use the advanced videos we have videos for a lot of our courses where.

So we have it set up, so they have to watch the entire video. They can’t turn it, they can’t speed through it. They have to watch the video. And [00:06:00] I kind of love if you open a different window, you can’t still listen to the video. It’s it’s really cruel. You’re like, oh rats, this isn’t gonna work.

But I love it for our people because it’s so easy to get distracted. So they. They watch the video and then they have the, they can then take the quiz, it grades itself, and if they pass it, they’re, they automatically are sent a certificate that I’ve set up. I use something that’s very personal to the credentialing board and looks very official because it is, and it has their director’s signature and everything on it.

But that’s all set up ahead of time. Super easy to do and then. They, if they pass they get their certificate automatically. If they don’t pass our, the office gets a notification that they didn’t pass. Their supervisor has to contact and get a voucher for the [00:07:00] second exam because we don’t do the same exam for each effort.

So if you. Fail the first effort, you get a second chance, but your supervisor has to get the voucher code for that because we set ’em up so that they have voucher codes, which I am, I’m probably going ahead of where we are, so we have voucher codes. I use Lifter and Gravity Farms forms, together a lot.

And they work, they play nicely together. So that works out really well for our people. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I, when I checked, I looked at their site and I think I counted 59 courses. How much?

Karen Wisch: There’s 64. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. You go? 

Karen Wisch: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Did you set all those up or show them how to do it, or it’s Oh, no, I do 

Karen Wisch: all of them.

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Karen Wisch: They go ahead and they schedule. They set up the videos themselves and they give me the quizzes that they want and then I set everything up for them. They’re very busy doing the other half of the stuff. They don’t wanna mess with this. And I think I could show them how fairly easily, it’s not a hard process, but there’s some, there’s little caveats that we use that maybe not everybody does.

It’s a win-win. I take care of it. They don’t worry about it and it works for them 

Chris Badgett: yeah. That’s awesome. And it sounds like a great, relationship. Like they’re busy, they just want somebody to handle the website and make sure everything’s good and that’s a great long-term client for you.

Karen Wisch: It is it’s a really good situation for me and I have a couple other. Agencies. ’cause I am in the middle of the state. I’m, our city is the capital of Missouri and there are a lot of state associations and a lot of them need CU set up. So I do a couple of different ones beside that. Prior to this, they had used services that cost several hundred thousand dollars to, do you know what I mean?

And it’s. We’re not talking tens of thousands even here, we’re, it’s way more reasonable, and again, if I could get the hundreds of thousands, I’d probably do it but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. So

Chris Badgett: you can do a lot for what people used to pay 10 times that amount for and stuff like that, without limits, either, like without. Caps on number of students or courses, right? Or teachers or whatever. 

Karen Wisch: Yeah. And again, for them, I, before they were having to do the same process every time, and now it I think COVID has streamlined a lot of stuff for people.

Like I know we talked before, before COVID, they did a lot of trainings in different areas of the state, and now most of those are done. [00:10:00] On Zoom or whatever, just because it’s easier, it’s less expensive for an employer to give somebody eight hours off during the day and not pay for their travel, and things like that.

And we see huge success with that as far as having the Zoom calls with the education, and then following up with the training afterwards or with the. And information afterwards 

Chris Badgett: forms you use. I noticed on the Missouri credentialing board, there was like a order form for something that had some e-commerce in it.

How do you use Gravity and alongside the LMS and then what other plugins and things do you find super useful when you’re building this type of site? 

Karen Wisch: I, my, theme I use is generate press. And then I started with them. I, we talked a little offline and I would say WP Crafter with Adam Preser when I first started learning about what lifter, which LMSS.

Software I wanted to use, he recommended you guys and he had some valid reasons at the time. Again, that was seven years ago and I hopped in. I was like, this is a way to go for us. But I use gravity forms occasionally. They’re so blended for me that like sometimes there’ll be something in the course that I use a gravity form for instead, and.

Occasionally, I’m trying to, I’m stumped right now as to what, because they’re merged together. But we’re going to have a peer conference in October, and so there’s a registration out there right now that we’re using Gravity forms for, that people just sign up and tell you, give their information.

And that doesn’t require a learning management system. But all of our trainings. Do you know, they all end with a quiz to make sure that they’re proficient in the information, if not several quizzes with a series of different trainings within it. I don’t know if that answers your question. 

Chris Badgett: People are always using forms in interesting ways alongside lifter LMS, and it’s cool to see what folks are doing.

I have to ask you, because you have an agency, the number one question we get for agent from agency folks is how to get clients. It sounds like you have a lot in the Missouri area, like you, there’s a lot of local word of mouth perhaps, but what would your advice be on getting and retaining clients for the long term?

Karen Wisch: I would say retention just means you’ve gotta pay attention to your clients. I’m a one person agency, if they call, they’re getting me. I think it, that’s part of why they have me, right. I, it is I tend to respond quickly, which sometimes is like probably the bane of my existence. But I’ve had a lot of referrals.

I, I seem to be in the education and prevention and recovery area. Is because that’s where I started. And so by word of mouth, that’s what I’ve gotten. I have some other outta state things, but they were all at one point there was a, an association, a national association, and they I found out.

Through the Missouri one that they were no longer going to host everybody’s website, that they all were going to have their own website. So I contacted the head of the National Association and said, I do websites for people and I’m going to contact everybody. If someone contacts you and you need someone to refer them to here’s my information.

Here’s some samples of my work. And I ended up with six different websites that way, which was nice. It because they all wanted to be very similar to each other, so they were easy to make. Does that make sense? So I would say I have been lucky with getting information and then. Going after it after that.

But most of it, I would say, is referrals from other people. 

Chris Badgett: And clients like it when you’re easy to reach and return calls quickly and prove your just your reliability and track record and it’s, you’re always there for them. It’s not that complicated, right? 

Karen Wisch: It isn’t. I, one of my clients said before they ought to submit a requisition order and then.

In five to seven days, they would get a response and then they, the change would be made. [00:15:00] But, part of it’s price. I’m not charging $200 for 10 minutes of, for a change. Maybe I should, but that’s with a bigger agency you have a lot more overhead too. So I’m sure prices is part of it.

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For the Missouri Cred Credentialing board is there anything you can [00:17:00]say as to the impact that platform is having on the world or people like, do you know anything? Even just roughly, like in terms of, we mentioned I think you said 64 courses. That means that a lot of people are flowing through this thing.

What impact is that organization having with these online learning programs? 

Karen Wisch: One of their programs, which is the, they have a crisis peer, and these are people who are, you have to be in recovery to actually get that certification and. These are peers, mentoring peers, right? So it, it’s awesome.

These are people who maybe if they didn’t have someone else to help, they’d still need recovery, but they’re able to go back after they’ve gone through the process and they can help other people who. Are in the middle of a drug crisis. And I don’t know how much you know about the opioid crisis in the United States right now, but it’s, more people die of overdoses than right in 1 7 47 a day.

But nobody says anything about it. And I, if a 7 47 crashed every day, there’d be people paying attention. I, that’s part of why I love what they do. They’re saving lives. 

Chris Badgett: It’s a great impact. Tell us more about your learning curve with, learning how to use all this stuff and WordPress.

You mentioned following WP Craft or videos and you’re you’re self-taught, it sounds like 

Karen Wisch: I am.

Chris Badgett: Besides the graphic design, which you went to school for, which is awesome. But but, 

Yeah. 

Karen Wisch: Yeah. I I would say you guys, your help is awesome. I, when I first started, I needed a lot of handholding and you guys were great.

It, I would send you something and it’s like you would, sometimes it was a very obvious thing, sometimes it wasn’t. But between watching the videos and doing that. And now I, now that I have the Infinity bundle, I go to office hours every Thursday with Emily and Kurt, and that’s been very helpful and it’s great to have other people there with problems because sometimes I don’t know I have a problem until somebody else’s problem gets fixed right there.

There’s extra information that I’m getting that I wouldn’t get if I wasn’t part of that group. I really appreciate that you guys are very good at documenting things and explaining it, and I would say ease of use is part of why I am still with you guys and why I bought the Infinity Bundle. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. We always feel like support is like a feature of the product. It’s not like a cost that we have to minimize something we invest in and, like you said, your clients like the fact that they can talk to you and call you like, we wanted to make ourselves as available as much as we can and be real humans and help people.

Karen Wisch: I don’t know. Yeah, I would say you guys are, 

Chris Badgett: I don’t know where I heard it on a podcast like this is 10 years ago. Somebody dropped an idea in my head that. Caused what you’re talking about, which is that the support documentation, it’s part of your marketing content. You should invest just as much time in supporting your customers with content as you do trying to, do sales pages and marketing stuff.

And that really clicked for me, and we even for a while. We would have a, everybody came to a Zoom call and would write documentation together for an hour on Thursdays or something. And a learning management system is not an easy marketing website with a homepage and about page and a contact page.

It’s got a lot going on. So there’s a lot 

Karen Wisch: of bells and whistles, right? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Karen Wisch: Yeah I would say that most of the time, whatever my problem was. There was a way to resolve it very easily, and if there wasn’t, you guys are like, okay, if I can have access to your site so I can see what’s going on.

Because sometimes, the websites act a little swirly. But I would say in general, you are able to fix it or give me a suggestion of something else I. When I first started, I did not have a good host. I didn’t realize that was gonna be an issue, but I didn’t realize how many people were going to be coming to the website, and I think that’s increased in I use Cloud ways now and I’m very happy with it.

And that was one of your all’s suggestions at the time. I don’t know if that’s still one of your go-tos, but, yeah. They, because I’m able to scale with them, which is very helpful. As the site’s grown in popularity, we’ve been able to scale the size and manage the workload that we’ve got.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Yeah. Sometimes, you can start on like a cheap shared hosting account, but if something like Missouri credentialing board starts getting a ton of traffic and a ton of users, you gotta get on something a little. A little goofy.

Karen Wisch: And it is if people are required to have a certain amount of continuing education hours, and we’re one of the places that can provide them for them and we do it very reasonably, most of the courses are five or $10 it draws more people to them.

But it’s also a nice. Side source of revenue for them. It’s stuff they don’t do anything about. And it continues, they don’t, the selling point for LMS, I think is the fact that once it’s in place, people pay their money. They review the materials, they take the quiz, they receive their certification, and no one in the office has to deal with any of it.

They get an email that says, John Smith. Passed his Mars course and gets three units of continuing ed, and a lot has gone on in the background, but they’ve, they don’t have to mess with it. It’s a hands-free thing for them, and yet people are getting what they need and they’re getting. They’re getting all their, the bells and whistles that you guys implement.

So you pass quiz one, the, it lights up and it goes, congratulations. You’re through with quiz one. You did it. And you go on to the next place. All that stuff is wonderful and it’s not stuff I even have to think about. It’s stuff you guys thought about you. It’s great. I’m sorry, my desk is wiggling.

Chris Badgett: Hearing from this story with this client, I. Is the time saving, like you came in and you were able to automate and time save, like to a level that is exponential in terms to what they were doing before.

Karen Wisch: I would say they have grown exponentially, partially because of that. Their staff is much larger.

They’re doing a lot more than what they were before. They have several programs that they do now for the state of Missouri and before they couldn’t do it because they’re. It was so much, I wouldn’t say not important stuff, but it was stuff that they had to do, but they couldn’t get it done.

Because, they’re grading quizzes instead of working on helping people save people, and now that’s all taken care of for them. They don’t have to worry about it. They can deal with the peers and with the crisis that’s going on. Rather than going, yes, they, they passed this test or not.

It’s it’s crazy how automating just this one part has allowed them to grow in other ways. Be, ’cause they have the time to think about it, okay. 

Chris Badgett: Buying back your time with automation. It’s what you can do with that time. Once you have it back, you can make more programs, you can help more people, you can scale in other ways.

That’s a really beautiful project there. 

Karen Wisch: And that’s exactly what they’ve done. They’ve taken that time and they’ve moved on with it, which is awesome. It’s, just having time that they’ve never had before. ’cause they could never get ahead of these quizzes and stuff, which sounds silly, but again, we’re seven years later.

The world has changed a lot in the last seven years and I’m sure it’ll change another a ton in the next seven. You just, I, and back to the original reason they wanted me to, they hired me, was so that they could get their renewals done. The people were not ready for online renewals at the time.

It just was a epic fail. It just couldn’t do it. And now, seven years later they’re doing it, no problem. It’s just the change in comfortable being comfortable with being online, that pe And again, I hate to give COVID any credit for anything good, but I would say that people had to learn how to do things online in that time period,

Chris Badgett: like you said Hey, maybe we should do this by Zoom instead of airplane tickets in multiple days.

Karen Wisch: And I, it’s like I have a physician friend and she was like, oh yeah, we used to go to Orlando and sit in a very cold hotel. I never got out of the hotel. I’d much rather sit on my couch and watch the Zoom meeting there and be in the comfort of my own home.

It’s a lot easier when I’m not freezing, and have spent the money and shows. It’s not like I ever saw anything in Orlando, but the inside of the hotel.

Chris Badgett: Karen Wish. That’s karen wish.com. KAER or sorry, K-A-R-E-N-W-I-S-C h.com. We were talking about the Missouri credentialing board. Thank you Karen, for coming on the show. Thank you for being a shining example of an education entrepreneur, somebody who empowers others to lift up others through education.

It sends out a ripple of positive impact in the world. And thank you for sharing your story with us today. Is there anywhere people can go to connect with you besides your website or just karen wish.com? 

Karen Wisch: Just my website. That’s all I. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you Karen for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Karen Wisch: Oh, thank you Chris. And thank you so much for getting Lifter LMS together ’cause it’s awesome. 

Chris Badgett: You bet.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Chris Lassiter of LearnAINow joins Chris Badgett in this episode of LMSCast to demonstrate how AI is revolutionizing web development.

Chris is now developing online courses that show individuals how to create websites completely with AI without using conventional coding. One of his initial classes covers making a website with a new tool called Bolt.new, buying a domain through Route 53, and utilizing AWS to host a website. Chris provides a live demonstration of Bolt.new during the show, which creates full-stack websites using React and JavaScript utilizing AI agents that are probably driven by Anthropic’s models.

The front-end and back-end are automatically built and deployed by the platform, which also has component-based design, light/dark settings, and seamless navigation. In addition to supporting database and payment connections like Supabase and Stripe, it even interacts with GitHub for version control.

Chris demonstrates how to instruct the AI to build all the required code and add features like an admin panel or payment site. Additionally, he draws attention to Bolt.new’s next hackathon, which offers a $100,000 grand prize and $1 million in prizes. He encourages developers of all skill levels to take part, including “vibe coders” like himself who use AI rather than conventional coding.

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

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.

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Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Chris Lasseter. You can find [email protected]. Chris does a lot with artificial intelligence. It’s always fun to see what he is been up to. He’s working with agents. He is building entire courses with ai.

We’re gonna do some screen sharing in this episode. So if you’re listening on the podcast and you wanna see what Chris is demoing and talking about, go to the lifter LMS YouTube channel [00:01:00] and do a search for Chris Lasseter, and you’ll find it. Make sure you get the most recent episode or the most recent video so that you can see those screen shares, or you can go to the LMSCast website.

Which has the podcast on it, that’s lms cast.com. It has both the audio and the video version of the podcast. But first, welcome back to the show, Chris. Yeah, thanks Chris. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. Well, you’ve been busy. You’re, uh, going deep in the AI tools and, uh, you’ve been doing a lot of development.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to at Learn AI now. Yeah, so basically we have, uh, been working on courses on the site to teach others on how to use ai. One of our first courses that we’re about to release here in the next week or two is on how to build a website by using just ai. I know you and I, we mainly use WordPress to build our websites.

Chris Lassiter: But the way that I’m doing it for this course is I. To show people on how to use AWS to host your website, how to buy a domain through Route 53. And then we use, uh, a new program called, bolt new to uh, build the website. And that’s what we’ll be showing you today. Awesome. Well, what is Bolt new?

Chris Badgett: What does it do? 

Chris Lassiter: Yeah, so, uh, bolt on new. Basically, uh, allows you to use AI to, to build, uh, a full stack front end, back end of a website, uh, using mainly React and JavaScript. And then you can take, build that project up, and then put it on, uh, like an S3 server for AWS and then bam, you have a front end and a back end of a website.

It does it all for you. Wow. That’s awesome. 

Chris Badgett: Well, I’m excited to jump into the demo if you wanna show us. And again, if you’re listening, come on over to the video version of the podcast on the YouTube channel or lmscast.com. 

Chris Lassiter: Yeah, absolutely. So let me go ahead and click on share screen here.

All right, so you should be seeing my screen here in a second, and it should be the bolt new website. Yep. That’s up. All right. Perfect. So right here, it’s really simple. So let’s say we want to build me a portfolio.

I am a let’s say full stack developer with a w. Certifications.

We’ll just keep it as simple as that. And what we’ll do is we’ll hit go. And so what it’s gonna start doing is it’s gonna start designing you know, the front end and building all the code. And it’s really fantastic. And, you know, something that I’d also, uh, like to point out also if Bolt new right now, they.

Here on May 30th, uh, they’re actually gonna be launching a hackathon with prizes up to, uh, a million dollars worth of prizes, and the main prize is a hundred thousand dollars. And I’ve actually signed up for it. So, you know, if they go to hackathon.dev. They’ll be able to register and it’s gonna be amazing.

I mean, a million dollars in prizes with a hundred thousand dollars as the main prize you know, they’re not sponsoring me, uh, to say that in this video. I just think it’s something that’s just fantastic and people can really, uh, to do it. And it’s for anybody vi a vibe coder like me. ’cause I, I’m not a coder, I’m a vibe coder, you know, I use AI and, you know, I try to understand what’s going on and, you know, I learn as I go.

But this event is for anyone from a beginner to advance. That’s awesome. And as that’s building AI I find a little overwhelming ’cause there’s all these new tools and stuff’s happening really fast. How, how do you 

keep up with it all? So actually I have a routine, uh, throughout my day. So I try to stay focused on my projects during the day.

And then in the evenings you know, while I’m sitting in bed, that’s when I’m actually going through, uh, YouTube and notifications, uh, you know, from, you know, lifter LMSs notifications on Facebook, you know, or, there’s some people I follow on YouTube and I just start going through, you know, all the new ai, uh, that’s being released.

And I just try to, to try to stay ahead of everyone and, and try to remember what’s going on. ’cause you know, if you, if you don’t, if you don’t. Stay ahead. You know, you’re gonna fall behind. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great point. And it’s amazing watching what Bull New is doing here. This would take a developer, weeks, months to do what you’re doing and like a podcast episode, and then not even the whole episode.

It’s awesome. 

Chris Lassiter: Yeah, so right here, what you see right now, um, is it’s installing all the dependencies on the server. After it, it kind of broke down on what it’s doing. Uh, it kind of tells you how, you know, for the navigation it’s gonna be smooth scrolling badges for AWS uh, it’s talking about the design elements.

And then what it’s doing is it’s creating every single component that it needs for this React website. And then once it’s done, it’s gonna show you a preview of it. And that’s where you can actually start, uh, modifying anything that you want changed. And what’s really cool is recently they actually just added a selection, a selector on here.

So you can actually select components or elements on the site and actually say specifically, Hey, change this. So that’s really cool. And another thing that they just added is GitHub connection. So once you have this saved, you can actually save it to your GitHub, and then you can take it to another IDE like, uh, you know, cursor and, you know, make changes to it.

And then. Push it back to your GitHub and then you could come back to Bolt and then pull it back from GitHub and then continue working on it for the design aspect, if you want. Um, it’s, it’s really powerful. It’s a really, it’s really amazing. I’m excited to, to show you what this is gonna look like here in a few minutes.

Chris Badgett: So after the initial build, like if somebody just wants to update some text on the about page, how would they, what would the simplest way to do that be? 

Chris Lassiter: No. Yeah, absolutely. So, one of the simplest thing is, is connecting it, uh, to A-C-I-D-I, uh, pipeline. So, for example connecting it to your GitHub, and then when you’re over here, you could say, Hey, make this change to this, push it, and then it’ll push it to your GitHub.

And then once you accept that, then in your GitHub. When you have the, deployment, uh, YML that sends it to AWS, um, once, once you accept it into GitHub, it’ll push only those changes to your S3, if that’s how you’re doing it. Oh, I got people coming the house and and it’ll make those changes. So, yeah, great question.

Um, you know, we can use, uh, GitHub to control that. So if you see right here, I’m gonna go full screen on this. This is. All built by ai. And so, you know, you got your call to actions right here where it says Get in touch and it works perfectly fine. Um, you know, you got view projects, takes you down here, and it kind of just puts in pretend, uh, view projects here.

The live demo, of course, is, is not gonna work right there. But you can, uh, fill that in with your information. But what I wanna do is kind of just scroll down. So if you see here it says, like about me, it talks about, you know, what a, a full stack developer does, and then, you know, you have a call to action here for download resume.

But I personally don’t like having those on my website.”

So I would actually change those. I, you know, I, I think that’s just, um, you know, whatever someone says, I really don’t like those. Right here, uh, kind of talks about the technologies that, that a, you know, a full stack developer, you know, what would be able to build with and, and what they know about.

Of course we talked about the projects here. Then right here we got the AWS certifications. What’s really cool here is you could actually click on this and say, you know, use this badge and, you know, give it a link and it’ll put that picture in there. But right here it’s talking about, you know, the certifications that are available.

And then you got your get in touch right here and then, send message. So what’s really cool about this, now that we’re at the bottom. Is, let’s say we wanted this to actually, uh, work, be a hundred percent functional. All we would have to do is, is go back to it. It’s also got dark mode and light mode.

See how it already built that in? Nice. Nice. And that’s one of the hardest things too, especially with like, if you’re building on a WordPress, uh, trying to get that to do it without installing like a hundred plugins. Um, you know, it did, it did all of this, uh, instantly for me. But what I wanna show you is take this outta full screen is for example, let’s say we, you know, we wanted to actually send an email.

So what we could do is you see the integrations, uh, it can integrate to Stripe, superb base, and GitHub right now. We could say, Hey, uh, we want to connect to super base and be able to, you know, send emails. Um, and it will connect that to the super base, which is, which will hold your database. You can also connect it to, uh, to Google and use their fire base, which I’ve done a lot, especially for the email services.

So that’s really cool. But the stripe, uh, this one’s fun. Watch this. So let’s say we want a payment. Portal on here. Okay. So I want people to be able to purchase my resume for $5. Please add Stripe to my website. Make me a backend for admin. And so what it’s gonna do here is it’s gonna go ahead and start integrating the stripe CLI into it.

We don’t need to add the stripe key right now, so we’ll go ahead and, and, uh, not do that real quick. Hold up before we, oh yeah, it does need to add a stripe key to it. Actually I wanna show this to you. So let me, let me get a strike key real quick. It’ll be a test one so we don’t have to worry about anyone, you know, using it.

So what questions do you have about this so far? 

Chris Badgett: I’m impressed at how fast that comes together. So for people watching, this is an AI agent, right? Putting it together or, I mean, it’s a chat interface like chat GPT, but it’s doing multiple things. So does that make this an AI agent? 

Chris Lassiter: Yeah, so it is an agent and I believe they have it connected to Anthropic for their ai.

I’m not a hundred percent sure on that, so don’t quote me on that. But it is an AI agent, uh, that it’s connected to a Pacific model and, and it’s, and it’s doing all this for you. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s that’s amazing. What, um. What, uh, explain how the stripe works. ’cause normally you, like you, you have your own Stripe account, right?

And you’re getting a test API key, so you can show it working. But I mean, like at lifter LMS as an example, we have a Stripe plugin that allows people to be able to connect Stripe. But this is just doing all that is basically writing the code for the Stripe connection and putting it in your website, which is pretty cool.

Chris Lassiter: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I’ve looked in the backend, I’ve looked at your guys’, uh, Stripe code and saw all the hard work that, uh, your developers have done on it. And it, it does all that. It automatically just integrates it, uh, into it. It makes you kinda like a little e-commerce. That’s really, really cool.

Okay, here you go. I got a strike key. Let’s see here. We’re gonna 

Chris Badgett: create one. When you said create me an admin, a backend for admin, explain what that means. 

Chris Lassiter: Uh, so basically, um, I can have like a backend to, to be able to see like, you know, who ordered history, uh, things like that. All right, so we’re gonna add the stripe key.

That’s fine. Oh, I forgot to add the product. Of course I did. Oh, one second. Let me cancel that real quick. You know what? I actually forgot to put it onto staging mode. So that’s one important, uh, to remember. For those who, uh, are doing this, you always wanna make sure that you are in test mode before you add the strike key because or you’ll have to use a real credit card.

So we’re just gonna call this a, I know you guys can’t see it right now but basically I’m just building a product real fast on, on here. So let me bring this over so you can see it. So I’m gonna say a resume, and we’re gonna call this, we’re gonna say it’s $5, it’s a one-off, and we’re just gonna add this product real quick.

All right? And then, so now what we need to do is we need to be able to get an API key. And so we will go ahead and grab this. I think it’s gonna want, huh? And this will all change. I’ll, I’ll delete all this afterwards.

Okay.

Integration for people to buy my resume and that’s wonderful. Spell check.

Chris Badgett: How do you do with bolt new, like domain mapping? 

Chris Lassiter: Yeah. So, right now, uh, when you’re ready to deploy this, it actually deploys it to a temporary site. So you can view it and then you can domain map from that temporary site by using their service. Or you can actually, uh, you know, download it to, uh, a server already that already has a domain, uh, map to that server.

So if you look right here, it’ll say, it’ll say that, Hey, we need to be able to save all this information, uh, into a database. So we need to connect to superb base database. Uh, so what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go ahead and, uh, connect. And so we’re gonna create a new project. We’re just gonna call it a resume, and then we’ll just have it, choose its own password.

And then of course, we’ll, you know, change all this at the end and delete this. And so what’s really cool about this is you don’t, you don’t necessarily have to use this database. You can actually use any database that you want to use, you know, you can use, um, you know, AWS, Mongo, you know, what have you.

Cause it’s a lot easier ’cause it automatically already fully integrates.

All right, so now what we wanna do is.

See, I want to change my strike key as I was using a live ’cause. We don’t want to do that. ’cause right now it’s connected to the live side of the strike configuration. So let’s go here. We’ll get a copy of that.

All right. Uh, we’ll go to code here and let’s see here. Go to ENV. There’s the super base. Where is the stripe A go.

All right. Come on. Should have done that in the beginning. I think I, uh. I think I made it mad.

All right, so this is what we’re gonna do then. We’re just going to, since I messed that up, we’re just gonna send it back. So I, I should have given it the right key, uh, in the beginning. So what we’re gonna do is we’re just going to, uh, switch it back, uh, outta the test mode and then a product catalog.

Then I’ll create a product real quick. We’ll call it a resume, uh, one off $5, add the product,

and then let’s see here. There we go. All right. All right. So right now it’s gonna go ahead and it’s going to, uh, be able to create that, uh, stripe checkout session. Uh, so people can securely purchase it. And then it’s building, those functions within the database. And of course, it’s gonna create those components.

Now I’m really happy that this happened. Uh, this will happen a lot when you’re vibe coding. Vibe coding is basically, uh, you know, people who don’t know how to code and they’re just using ai, uh, to create and you’re just vibing along trying to figure it out. And so what I’m gonna do is I’ll apply this, uh, super base migration and then I’m gonna say right here, I need you to go ahead and fix this component.

Like I said, happens a lot when you’re, uh, building because sometimes it may add like component that’s not connected to another component. And so you’ll just have to click on it to fix it. So not a big deal. And then normally what I’ll do is I’ll click it like twice. Uh, and if it doesn’t change, uh, what the issue is, I’ll say, discuss problem.

And it’ll kind of talk it out. And then you can say, fix the error and it should fix this problem. So, let’s see here. It’s talking about the, about component.

There you go. Perfect. All. So we got out of that. So right now we’re in a different one. Discuss problem. So have you used any, uh, you know, vibe, coding tools, Chris? Not yet, but I’m close. You’re getting me pumped 

Chris Badgett: to try it.

I was talking to my friend Matt Madero, and he was doing a bunch of custom podcasting apps and stuff. Getting me excited about it.

Chris Lassiter: Yeah, I have a friend, uh, right now he does a podcast and is 100% all ai. He types it all out and he used his voice and it does it all for him. And I think, you know, it’s fantastic.

Uh, it saves him a lot of time.

All right, it should have it on there. So now, um, I don’t see the links or anything like that, so let me see on here. I saw it. Download 

Chris Badgett: resume. It’s just lower on the page. 

Chris Lassiter: Yeah, it said download resume. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna say okay. Create me a, uh, stripe portal to purchase the resume.

Uh, give me a backend to see histories and also a customer portal.

All right, so it’s gonna go ahead and update the package, uh, Jason o to add any, uh, necessary dependencies. And now it’s gonna start updating, uh, the React app to, to add, uh, you know, those components that we need, those pages that we need for React. So I’m actually learning a lot about React right now.

You know, I’ve been using WordPress for 15 years and there’s so much to learn when it comes to coding. The coding is the part that I, uh, don’t understand at all. ’cause I’m a vibe coder, but I’m just really trying to understand, you know, the difference between pages and components and, you know, JS or TX files and just, all the different types of you know, the different types of coding that you can do with React.

Uh, but I think that’s what’s, that’s what’s nice about being a vibe coder, you know, even though AI is doing it all for you. I’m learning all of it, you know, while I was doing it, I’m asking the questions. 

Chris Badgett: It sounds like, uh, WordPress in a way, like I’m not a developer myself, but WordPress allowed me to like basically vibe code websites like the tools, I’ve heard it called the layers of abstraction.

Like we don’t necessarily know. How the machine works at like a mechanical level at the server, but we, we use it to create websites and that’s okay.

Chris Lassiter: All right. Let’s see here. Did it add it?

Okay, so I don’t see it on there yet, so, uh, I don’t see a way for me to purchase the resume on the landing page. Please update.

So it’s taking me, uh, a little bit longer to get through this process because I didn’t, I didn’t actually tell it from the beginning that, you know, we were going to integrate Stripe and super base into it. So I. Normally, uh, last time I built an example it took me like five minutes and I had everything there.

So let’s see if it works now. All right, so the purchase resume is there, there’s, there’s some kind of issue. So let’s, let’s see what the issue is.

So for your, for yourself, uh, what are you exploring for ai to help you, to assist you with like the podcast? 

Chris Badgett: I. As an avid podcast listener, my friend Matt, had built something that helps you like kind of gather podcasts. Like podcast Discovery is actually a big problem, like podcast search, like finding, you know, how like Amazon suggests movies you would like once they really, or, uh, Netflix gets to know you and, and it like shows you, hey, you might also like this other dystopian future movie.

Like finding good podcasts and not just like the six that, um, Spotify recommends based on your, what you follow and all that stuff. That’s an area. Um, I like, as a podcaster, I like using AI to do research on guests, and that’s just, chat GPT land. And, coming up with good questions and stuff like that.

One thing I’ve been interested in that I haven’t done is sometimes I like to be a guest. I wanna be a guest on my own podcast. I. But I don’t necessarily like to just sit there and talk for an hour, but if I could create some kind of AI interviewer, uh, I think that would be really cool to prepare a show, like a vision for a show.

And even if like, not all the questions were, you know, just say exactly this, but if you could have some kind of podcast interviewer that could interview yourself or even other people, I think that’s really interesting. And ideally that would, it would be able to also be a video version and stuff like that.

Chris Lassiter: I think we’re close. Yeah, I think we are so close to being, uh, there like that. 

Chris Badgett: I mean, you could probably do it now just with chat GPT and the voice mode and, you know, just say, Hey, I wanna record a 45 minute podcast of myself. I’d like to touch on these topics. Interview me and, and then just record that.

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I like Google LM too. Have you played around with that or, uh, notebook, lm 

Chris Lassiter: I actually, I have not. It’s on my list. I have a little, uh, green book here that I keep on my desk of all the AI stuff that I’m working on or doing, and it’s actually, uh, in there to, to go take a look at it. 

Chris Badgett: What I love about Notebook LM is.

You know, you can get lost in chat threads and stuff, but, uh, with Notebook, lm I think you can upload up to 50 or a hundred different sources. That could be videos, it could be like a PDF of a book. It could be a URL and all kinds of stuff. And so it’s like you’re consolidating your research and then, um, you can tell it when you prompt it to look at all of it or just these three things and so on, to guide the output.

Then it also has a feature where once you’re done with the output, it will, you can ask it to create a 20 minute podcast where two people, two fake AI people talk about whatever the thing is. And it’s actually a really cool way to learn. So I, I, I just find it fascinating.

Chris Lassiter: Oh, that’s really cool. Yeah. I’ve actually, I actually, uh, saw something like that the other day on a, on a YouTube channel.

I thought it was pretty funny. How, how people are doing that. So while we were talking, um, like I was saying in the beginning, it’s kind of nice to go ahead and give that prompt in the beginning on what you wanna do with connecting to like, a database and using Stripe integration. Uh, so I went ahead and restarted the project and you know, that’s the fun part about it being a vibe code or sometimes you just gotta stop what you’re doing and start over again.

Um. Could I have gotten it to work through the other, uh, way I could have. Um, but we just don’t have time in this, uh, podcast to do that today. So we’re gonna try to do it, uh, here in, in like under 10 minutes, try to get this connected to Stripe in a database, which, any, if we were doing this back in the day, I mean, it would’ve taken probably a week to do this.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Easily. Easily. I think that’s a good point. Too about not getting frustrated, like that’s part of vibe coding. You gotta just reset. And just go with the flow. And sometimes you gotta burn your ships and start over because when you have this kind of speed, it doesn’t matter if you, okay, well, I, I took, it took me 10 minutes to learn a mistake, so now I’m just gonna start over and not make that mistake.

And you’re literally doing like weeks or months of work and 10 minutes. So it gives you a lot of time.

Chris Lassiter: So what I’m doing, uh, right now is I just reset all my keys on Stripe since they were publicly, uh, on the video. So that’s, they’re all replaced now. So it’s very important, uh, that when you are filming with other people, if, if you accidentally show your Dov file or your, or your secret keys or tokens, make sure you always change ’em right away

or logins. Yeah, that too. Have you done that before, uh, on a podcast? Have you accidentally like, uh, accidentally showed, uh, like a login or a password or anything like that? 

Chris Badgett: I mean, the password managers make it, they kind of know, expect that, so they hide it when you do it. So I haven’t had that problem in a long time.

But yeah, there’s plenty of times where I’ve had to edit a video and, blur out a license key or something like that.

Chris Lassiter: So as you see here, um, it’s actually doing a really good job. It, it’s showing the, the super base, the stripe integrations. It’s showing the login page, the, the checkin, the checkout. So, um, I think we may get this on the first try, uh, when it’s done here in a few minutes. But, uh, while we’re waiting, I would like to show you, uh, that project I was talking to you earlier about before the podcast, uh, about how I’m using, uh, AI agents to actually build a course for you. Yeah. Uh, inside of WordPress. Uh, can we switch to that real quick? Yeah, let’s, let’s switch over. The agent’s busy. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So we’re gonna go do something else.

This is another cool thing about pipe coding. 

Chris Lassiter: Yeah. So, this right here. NAN and what’s really cool, uh, about it is it’s basically just a complete workflow, uh, automation system to connect to like so many different APIs And what I’ve been working on, I’ll zoom in on this so you can kind of see it is.

You receive a chat message from someone to say, Hey, build me a course on how to be a lifeguard. What it’ll do is, is it’ll store that into a memory right here, and then it’ll go up to another, uh, agent to understand exactly the course details and what’s going on. And then it’ll have like an if and factor.

So like, Hey, did they answer it correctly? Did they not answer it correctly? And then if not, uh, then you know what they’ll do is it’ll go back to the user and say, Hey, I need more answers on this. And then once the chat has everything it needs, what it’ll do is it will it will post it to your site, uh, create the course, create the lessons.

Then send a chat back, uh, to the user saying that it’s created. And I actually got it to work yesterday on simple mode. It created, uh, a course on how to be a lifeguard. It created the four lessons that I asked them to create. The only problem was, is I didn’t connect the lessons to the course. Uh, that was my fault on the coding side.

Uh, so this morning I fixed that and everything worked out great. But what I’m trying to do right now is, uh, an advanced version of this. And so I added some storage memory for ai. Uh, so it can like, remember. What the AI and what the conversation between the user and AI is, and I changed, uh, a bunch of code responses in here.

And so basically at the end, what I wanted to do is to be able to build a web app that users can come in and, they already have their WordPress site up. They have their lifter LMS installed, and they want to be like, okay, hey, I wanna build a course on how to build an airplane. And they can go into my web app online and go to, okay, hey, build me electro MS course on how to build an airplane.

I want, 10 lessons within this course. And then just hit send. I. Then, it’ll do all of that. And then it’ll, of course, you’ll have to put in your log informations to your WordPress, you know, like maybe a custom user. And it will connect to securely to your site, and it’ll use this automation and it will build everything out for you.

So all you have to do is then go into lifter LMS and go into the course builder. And see that these courses and lessons have all been built and then just start modifying it. Uh, so instead of going one by one and adding everything in there. It’s already there for you. Of course, you’ll have to modify it, add the pictures, videos, or what have you.

Uh, but eventually once I get my vibe coding done, ideally it would be great. Uh, for it to say, okay, hey, you know, what quizzes do you want? What assignments do you want are, do you want a video? Okay, what’s the link to the video? And then you put all that in there and it’s done. And then now you’re, now you have a less, a course with a bunch of lessons and everything’s there for you.

Chris Badgett: That is super cool. That is super cool. Tell us more about what N eight N is like, what it does. 

Chris Lassiter: So it’s an open source workflow which you can, uh, use NAN uh, dot io or you can actually download it onto your computer. And it basically lets you like, build automated processes without writing, uh, a ton of code.

It’s just click and go. Uh, it’s really freaking fascinating. It’s kind of like, um, like Zapier but. For me, it’s got like a lot more, uh, connections, and I. I really love it a lot and there’s really a ton of videos out there on how to use it. But what I’ve been doing is I’ve been using chat, CPT and anthropic, and I’ve been going back and forth between the two.

Uh, like if I’m working on like, hey, I kind of need step by steps, I’ll use chat, CPT ’cause chat, CCP t is really good at walking you through stuff. But then if you go to Andro, Andro is really good at coding, so I’m working on, for example. Let’s see here. If I go to, was it prepare section data? So right, right here, if you look at this, this is the code saying once it’s created the course, it needs to make sure that the, that the courses, uh, and the lessons, um, are mapped together.

I use philanthropic to do that. Um, and that was the problem before. I didn’t have that code in there and so I didn’t connect the lessons to the course id, but now it does. Um, nice. And so and so that’s what 

Chris Badgett: I’m using. It’s really cool. This looks like, um, you know, like if you’re building marketing automation and active campaign or something, you can build these workflows and automations that happen through time.

So the, the interface looks familiar in that way, and I personally like the visual style so that I can see how it all fits together and not try to hold that in my head. 

Chris Lassiter: Yeah. And I’m telling you, if you go online and look at NAN workflows, I mean there are just some crazy workflows. Uh, I could build right now.

It would probably take me maybe about an hour. I could build a workflow that connects to my chat TPT account, and when I’m on my phone, I can go, Hey, read me all my emails that I received today, and in the workflow it connects to my, uh, my Gmail account, and then it’ll send it back to chat GPT and then it’ll read me all my emails or I can say, Hey, send an email to, to Chris.

Hey, I’d like to be booked onto your podcast today, and it will send you an email on my behalf. It’s fantastic. That’s cool. All right, I think any other questions about this? If not, we’re gonna go back over to the bolt and see the next steps. Let’s switch back to Bolt. All right. All right. It says, uh, we need a new super base connection, which makes sense, uh, because we started a new project.

So we’re gonna click on superb base. Uh, we’re gonna call this, uh, resume two, create new project, sorry, resume two. Let it fill its own. Some password in create new project.

All right, we’re gonna go apply those changes to the database schema.

Okay. And now we need to, uh, be able to. Add the stripe payments into it.

While it’s doing that, look, see how it, like, how I like that little animation. 

Chris Badgett: That’s cute. Yeah. I like subtle animation like that. It’s good. 

Chris Lassiter: Last time I built this, it did like the glass animation where like it lit up in glass mode. It was kind of cool. I could actually add that on there pretty quick. And then there’s your resume right here.

There it is. There’s the resume purchase, secure payment stripe processing. So I asked it here to, to add the stripe integration. So I’m going to hit apply.

Was it not done yet at there? Let’s try that fix real quick.

Chris Badgett: So what is, um, when you’re looking with, working with [00:41:00] tools like NAN eight N and, um, bold new, like how should people think about cost in terms of, uh, you know, AI has a cost, but these absolutely. So how you know, but it is probably not as much as you think, right? But somebody has to pay for the agents and this, the energy required to run all this.

Right. 

Chris Lassiter: You know, I’m glad you asked that. Let me give you an example. If you take the entire Harry Potter’s series of books, all those words, and you throw ’em in a chat, GPT. It’s about a million tokens. Well, right now for chat, GPT, depending on what model you use, it could be anywhere between, you know, a couple of pennies to 25 cents per million tokens.

That’s a whole novel. That’s so much so many characters that you can use. And so yeah, it costs money. I would say I probably spend. I like to pay annually because you save more when you do it that way. But if, if I had to say monthly costs, I pay $20 a month for the chat CPT Pro. Um, and then for Bolt, I paid their, for their annual.

So I would say, let’s say annually. So I probably pay about 200, maybe two 50 a year to use all these tools. Which is not 

Chris Badgett: much for writing code. That would take no, you know, a month to do, like manually so 

Chris Lassiter: I once paid a coder to build something for me. It took him two weeks and it almost cost me a thousand dollars.

And that was years, years ago. And now I can do pretty much all of that and it cost me a few cents. Yeah, if you think about it, so right here I clicked on the button to, to purchase the, uh, the email, or I’m sorry, to purchase the, the resume. And so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go ahead and fill this out real quick, uh, on a different screen.

So none of my stuff pops up.

Oops, let’s bring this back over here.

All right, let’s apply the changes. So sometimes when you are trying to register on a site, uh, with the database, uh, there are, uh, security policies, uh, that are in effect. Um, and so I had to update that. So what I did was, is I registered and let’s see if I click on dashboard, uh, here’s like the purchase history.

There’s nothing that’s been purchased yet. Now it hasn’t a asked me yet to connect, to drive. Let’s see what happens when I click on this purchase resume. $5. You know, obviously we’d have to, you know, fix all of, you know, the text, make it a little darker or what have you.

Okay. Yeah. So as I thought it, it aired out right there because it hasn’t even asked me for my secret key. Uh, so let me, let me do that.

So it’s gonna, first, it’s gonna take care of this issue. Let’s see what it was, uh, JSON issue, uh, with credentials.

So while it’s doing that, let’s take a look at, see how we’re in the backend, how it’s making all those changes. Pretty cool.

Go to the ENV.

And then we’re gonna click purchase, resume, proceed to payment. Why do we keep on doing this? All right. We need to connect the stripe.

To 

Chris Badgett: my Stripe 

Chris Lassiter: account.

You gotta love that word integration, right? Always spell it wrong. So, yeah, so basically here, uh, it, it’s having a path issue with a superb based database, but I don’t, it didn’t ask me for my secret key. Normally it’s gonna ask right here to integrate with Stripe. I think I might have missed a step there.

So, let’s see here. Let’s see what it says.

Oh, okay. So it wants me to go to the super based dashboard and then add that under there. Okay. All right. Not a problem.

So I’m just gonna bring it over here real quick in a different window. ’cause I don’t know. What it’s gonna wanna show. All right, so let’s see here. So navigate to settings API. Yep.

All right. And then click on.

Click on environment variables.

You know, it’s funny when you go, uh, to a different, uh, website. Here I’ll show, let’s see here. You know, it’s like, oh, you’re following the steps, but it’s like, where’s that at? So project settings and then. Variables. I don’t see it. I’ve been, I, you know, I’ve been in here a a a few times but sometimes I just get lost.

Bring this over here. So, let’s see here. So I went to project settings, and then it says, I wanted me to go to variables, but I don’t see where the variables would be.

This is making me nuts.

So what are your thoughts so far? 

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool, man. Like it’s amazing. It makes me wanna roll up my sleeves and commit some time to vibe coding and learning the tech, like you said. If you don’t learn this stuff, it’s changing the world. So like it’s good to do it. What advice would you have for somebody who wants to try their first vibe coding project?

I know like, it’s really common for people to do, like a to-do list app is like their first project. So like, go try to build a to-do list app without being a developer and see how far you can get. So what. Would you recommend Bolt New for that? 

Chris Lassiter: Oh, absolutely. I think, uh, bolt New would be, uh, one of the first things to start with, especially when you are creating you know, your first website.

Yeah, I really do that that, that was a great question. I,

okay, so it, we, it should just be in here. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna say. Add the following into my env,

and then what I’m gonna do is give my developer information to that. So it should update you see right here. It should update my ENV with all that information. There we go. I saw it happening. Okay, cool. All right, so we’re gonna go ahead and give this information to it. Like I said, these will be reset afterwards.

Oh,

is it done now? Can I go back in there? Let’s get out of it. Go back in there. All, there you go. I was trying to make changes before, uh, before it was done, and then we’ll take a copy of the secret key.

And then we’ll take a copy of this.

We should, technically we can get away without wet, get away without doing that. So let’s just save real quick.

All right. So let’s go down here and try this.

Yeah. ’cause I think it’s storing it in my, my super base. I think it’s actually storing the information there, but it shouldn’t be. It should be storing it, uh, here in my B. So let’s see what it says right here for the checkout page.

But, uh, but normally, uh, when you’re using it in the beginning, it’ll ask you just to, uh, connect to your stripe and then you give your secret key. I don’t wanna keep on boring you guys with this, but I did wanna show you something like really cool. So, for example, you see how this like animates right here?

Yeah. Let’s say, you know, you want these panels right here to like, to glow. You know what I can do is I can click on this inspector. And then click right here. And I can say, make these panels animate and glow with a glassy effect when you know the mouse goes over it

All right. So right here, it’s gonna make a beautiful, glossy, uh, hover effect. So it’s updating, uh, those components.

All right, so now it’s done it. So we’ll scroll down and see. Look at that. Yeah. That’s cool. Very cool. That’s cool. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so it’s really cool. So Bold News, it’s one of my, uh, favorite websites, especially when I’m vibe coding. Uh, I really like using them to start an idea. I. And then, take it outside of it and go to, you know, like an IDE like cursor and, you know, just do more, uh, advanced stuff on it.

But I have built websites for customers who didn’t want to use WordPress. And we specifically, you know, just I built it here and, sent it to ’em and they were so happy about it. And it was a static, so they didn’t need any changes. And yeah, it does a lot, you know, people are worried about, oh, is AI gonna replace, coders, um, or designers?

And, and I’ll go, no, I, I think it, I don’t think it will. I, I think what it’ll it do is it’ll just be able to allow them to work faster, make, you know, make smoother projects and, you know, make futuristic projects 

Chris Badgett: and get more people just who aren’t developers getting involved in the space, which is a good thing.

Exactly. Chris, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for taking us to school on Vibe coding. I love your style too about like, Hey, it’s, we’re vibe coding, we gotta roll with it. We gotta learn. Let’s fix these errors, let’s reset. It’s something that just like we all started playing around with chat GPT two years ago or whenever it was like, this is the next evolution of that.

Start playing around with. Vibe coding and this, these Ag agentic workflows, which is really cool. ’cause automate, it’s all about saving time and extending your capabilities, which is the whole purpose of technology. 

Chris Lassiter: Yeah. And you know what I wanna say is, um, you know, if you come to learn AI now.ai and sign up for our first course, we partnered up with Bolt New and you know, they’re giving our customers three months free of their pro account, which is $20 a month. So you get three months free of using Bolt Bolt new by just signing up for our first course, uh, when it’s available here soon. So we’re, we’re excited to do that.

That’s 

Chris Badgett: awesome. That’s Learn AI now.ai. Chris, thank you for coming back on the show. Keep up the good work. You’re gonna have to come back on again. And we’re gonna see the, um, you know, the, the lifter course builder workflow and how that evolves. That’s gonna be fun. But, uh, keep up the amazing work.

Keep innovating and thanks for coming on the show.

Chris Lassiter: Thank you for having me. And you know, I’ll be using, uh, bold new to create the front end of that, so I’m excited to show it to you and, um, I’ll see you next time on the podcast.

Sounds great.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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