LMScast

In this LMScast, Taco Verdonschot presents Progress Planner, a proactive solution for website optimization and maintenance made just for WordPress users, including developers, agencies, and site owners.

Taco makes a compelling analogy when he says that creating a beautiful website is only the first step, much like growing a garden. To remain healthy and functional over time, both require frequent care updates, cleanups, and continuous enhancements. This is the role of Progress Planner, which functions as an omnipresent and persistent setup wizard that keeps helping users even after the initial site creation is finished.

Progress Planner helps users properly optimize their tools by integrating with plugins like Yoast SEO to reveal hidden or overlooked options. Through the use of badges and points, Progress Planner gamifies the experience, motivating users to do activities they may otherwise put off. Progress Planner guarantees that websites continue to expand and function smoothly long after launch, whether it is by resolving minor SEO problems or finishing onboarding chores that developers overlooked during initial setup.

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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 Taco Vendor Shot. That’s the best I can do with a Dutch last name. We’re gonna get into how to make your website progress better, get the tasks you need to get done to, to help builders also set their clients up for success.

It’s a really cool project. You can check that [email protected]. But first. Welcome to Show Taco. 

Taco Verdonschot: Thank you so much. I’m really happy to be here. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. We were chatting at a WordPress event and you were telling me about Progress Planner. I’m like, oh, this is cool. I build complex sites. Our users build complex sites, and there’s a lot of things that need to happen, even with just regular playing WordPress to get going.

But tell us in a nutshell, what is Progress Planner? 

Taco Verdonschot: I. So I like to use an analogy and that is where I compare your website to a garden. If you have a new plot of land and you want to build a beautiful garden out of it, you need to spend a lot of time and energy getting it ready, putting in the plans, designing everything.

It’s very similar with your website. You need to spend a lot of time and energy to get it up and running. But just like a garden, you can only sit back and relax and enjoy it for so long before little wheat start popping up. And you need to mow the lawn at some point. And with your websites, it’s the same.

You can only leave it alone for so long until you need to start doing little maintenance tasks. Maybe update the plugin, revise some content write a new piece of content. It’s those tasks that people oftentimes forget or really don’t like doing. It’s pretty much like me and gardening. I like having a nice garden.

I swear I hate gardening, so I need some extra motivation to do those tasks. And that’s where we build Progress Planner to be your little motivator to help you do those little maintenance tasks that weeding on your website. 

Chris Badgett: I think it’s really cool. I was thinking about it in terms of the user journey.

I. There’s a lot of stuff around like getting people to your site, getting traffic or getting a sale, a conversion. And then but the other half of the funnel is what happens after that. It’s about onboarding, activation. I. Retention, giving them coming back, staying around, telling their friends.

There’s like this whole other journey after the beginning of getting the traffic, which you know a lot about from Yost, SEO. Yeah, for sure. And we have these setup wizards as an example, like some WordPress plugins. All right, you got one shot to proactively give somebody some advice. And a lot of times if you’re in a hurry or you’ve been building sites for a while or something, you just close that thing.

Yeah, 

Taco Verdonschot: whatever. Yeah, exactly. And then later you’re 

Chris Badgett: like, wait, what was that thing I had to set up for this thing to work? And you, and then this is like a, it is like a setup wizard that never stops being proactive and working for your best interests. And I find that really cool. 

Taco Verdonschot: That’s yeah, exactly that.

And so right now we started fairly recently August last year, and we’re still billing new things and new checks and new tools and new tasks for you to do. But one of the cool things that we recently introduced is an integration with another plugin. And you. Probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that Yost as yo it’s a plugin that we know quite well since the majority of our team used to work at Yost.

So what we now do is we look at those settings in Yost as yo that were really hard to surface from within the plugin, and we help Yost users to make the most out of their SEO plugin. And that’s definitely something that we want to expand to other plugins as well. We’re looking for next integrations to see which plugins have a need to nudge their users into some of the settings, into workflows that they have in the plugin that their users tend to skip and will happily help them get their users activated to do all of those.

That’s awesome. 

Chris Badgett: I know as a guy who’s been trying to figure out SEO for a long time, I think I’m pretty decent at it. But it, it took me a while and I remember getting into the Yost tool and you had the workouts and there was some progress bars of Hey, don’t forget about this thing over here.

I just found it super helpful. Like you said, there’s buried. Components and pieces that if you miss it, you may be really hurting the success of your project. 

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And those exist in plugins, but also in WordPress core. Yeah. One of the things that we see a lot with sites that have been around for years, that they still have the tagline, just another WordPress site.

Yeah. And if your theme doesn’t expose it on the front end. There’s no way you’re gonna see that unless you either dive into that menu and then it doesn’t stand out as being a problem. Or if you look at the source code, because WordPress does output your tagline on every single page, and it’s quite annoying if.

You are just one of those, just another web workforce website websites according to search engines, because they do see that output. So that’s one of the checks that we have in Progress Planner where we really find problems that oftentimes have existed on sites for years. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it makes total sense.

I think I just got it naturally ’cause I’m in the LMS space and progress tracking is a big part of what our software does. Yeah. And for most courses you can, you don’t complete it in one sitting, so you need to come back, figure out where you left off. Some people may jump around to different lessons out of order.

And need to know what’s done, what’s not done. And if that didn’t, that’s literally the whole point of the LMS and a lot of building a website is just like that. 

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Absolutely. And so the interesting thing is you just talked about onboarding experience in your plugins, what we, and that works perfectly if the person setting up the website has all the information about the end result.

But especially if your website’s built by an agency, we oftentimes see that a more technical person is doing the initial setup and installing a set of plugins and all of that, and then later on a content team is filling the website. But if your plugin has shown its onboarding wizards to this developer who has no clue about the.

Eventual name of the site about social images, about users, what have you. They’re going to close all of those onboarding wizards. And then typically they don’t pop any pop up anymore because they’ve already been closed. And so you completely missed the opportunity to bring your onboarding wizard to the user who actually should be going through that onboarding wizard, but as a plugin, I think it’s an urban legend that everyone is tired of notifications. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Taco Verdonschot: Probably beyond an urban legend because it’s true. It’s highly annoying if every plugin’s throwing constant stream of notifications at you. So there’s only so much you can do as a plugin to nut your users into the wanted behavior.

Now, if you gamify that. And you make people get points when they resolve notifications, all of a sudden they start asking for more notifications. I. And that’s exactly what our users are doing. They’re emailing us saying, Hey, I’ve completed all my tasks. What am I going to do next? I want to get my batch for this month and I need another three or four points.

Give me more things to do so we can send unlimited notifications because people are rewarded and are actually asking for them. And that’s also where we can. Be a nice partner for plugins to help get users. Yeah. Reminded about some of the tasks. 

Chris Badgett: I love that. And also in the LMS space, like we have gamification and notification, so I get it.

Like it, it works. It definitely gamifies, you know what needs to be done and you get the little dopamine hit. And another example I wanted to point out to what you said earlier to. The site builder closing all the setup wizards and then handing it off to the content team. Another one I’ve seen more and more over time is people are building these websites as a service where it is like it’s bundling all these different plugins and themes and stuff together, and the user just gets a site.

And what those folks do when they build those setups. Is they often like skip the notification ’cause the notification or the the setup wizard. The setup wizard is waiting for you to activate a plugin one at a time. But in these cases where a website activates all these plugins at once, you can’t run.

10 setup wizards at the same time. Oh, yeah. So I could see progress planner really coming in handy for those kind of setups as well.

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And it’s not just agencies doing this because for example, if you look at what hosting companies are offering nowadays, so even at the lower end of the market where people built their own websites, back in the day, you would get a hosting package.

Download WordPress. Install WordPress. You had to manually create a database, enter details. That doesn’t happen a whole lot anymore. A lot of people are using prebuilt packages. For example, blue Host as a whole AI onboarding wizard. WordPress.com has their new AI onboarding wizard. So you don’t touch those first steps anymore, but you start with.

Sort of a prebuilt site where you only have to change some content on the site. So more and more people never even touch plugins and don’t know how to install them because they’ve never done it. So that’s definitely a change compared to when I first started in, in WordPress, 

Chris Badgett: beyond the the setup in the early month or two of a website.

Tell us about like the ongoing challenges, like for copywriting challenge or broken links challenge. How does this stuff work? Yeah, 

Taco Verdonschot: In the plugin there’s a lot of recommendations and there are on a more technical level, which is the ones that we talked about before, and there’s a set of content recommendations.

One of my. Pet peeves is when I go to someone’s website because I’m interested in their business or buying a product off of them, and I go to the about page and it lists one or two people, even though I know that it’s a bigger company. By now and they’ve never updated it. It’s been sitting there for six years and no one cared to tell, Hey, we’re now a 40 people team instead of just the two of us.

So little checks like that when if you last updated the page, is it time to do something new? That’s what we also have in the plugin. But some of the things that you need to do on your website, things that you need to improve are bigger than a five minute task. And that’s where we currently have the challenges.

Right now we’re in a side speed challenge. So we had a webinar last week to tell people about, Hey, this is what site speed means. This is what it does for your site, why it’s important and now they have some time to work on it themselves. And we give some extra reading material, extra handholding to help them take on a larger task.

Then just the five minute checks that you find in the plugin. And we’ve done the same for broken links a couple months ago. We’ve done the same for copywriting, so how do I write a decent page? How do I write a blog post? How do I write in about page? So that’s what we do about six times a year at the moment as well.

Is those sort of focused topics that take a little bit longer than just a few minutes to to do. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m gonna get this thing on my main lifter LMS website. ’cause for example just recently we did, I did a broken links scan. I just, it popped in my head like, oh man, I should really do that.

It’s been a couple years. And oh my gosh, were there a lot of broken links and we should have been doing that all along. And yeah, like you, you can’t hold it all in your head, even if you’ve been doing it for a while. 

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. And I would say, especially if you’ve been doing it for a while, because then your side grows, you have a lot of content, a lot of posts, and it becomes really hard to.

Continue to realize, oh wait, maybe I should go through this and click all the links that I have in my posts and my pages and everything. So yeah, I think everyone. Who looks at their site and throws a broken link scanner at it will come to the same realization. Oops, there’s a couple hundred links that I need to fix.

It was more than that. What, 

Chris Badgett: You’ve been around for a while, so I have been around for a while and I’m not the only one making content on the site, so there’s a lot of content. What about, in terms of the, you have a free version and a paid version. How should people think about that?

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, so right now we’re heavily focusing on the free version. And to the point where in a couple weeks we’re going to work in Europe and we’re going to not even mention the pro version. So it’s all about, hey. Use this tool, make your site better experience that it works. And from there we’ll see.

But for now, full focus on the free version.

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That’s awesome. And you said you’re going to Word Camp Europe. Tell us about first of all, you’ve been around WordPress for a long time, and I wonder this question sometimes, like I didn’t. I just fell in love with the open web and being able to build a website and, display a message that anybody anywhere in the world could see and just magically, I just woke up inside the WordPress world and I felt wow, this software is built for people like me.

And I joined the community and did a bunch of stuff and but what was your doorway into WordPress and falling in love with this ecosystem? 

Taco Verdonschot: So it’s quite an interesting story. Back in the day and we’re talking early 2013 I was studying computer science as a part-time studies next to a job.

I. And one of my classmates for a project that we had to do suggested using WordPress. And I had heard of WordPress before as a blogging tool, but he said no, we can really do this project. It can serve it can, we can create an API with in a and we can do all cool stuff. We started using WordPress, he was quite convincing.

Worked on that project for about three months. Got a decent grade and that was was the end of it. Then something changed at the job where I was at the time and. On a morning while commuting to that job, I saw a retweet by the classmate. He retweeted a guy named Joe DeVol who was looking for a developer and said we’re looking for someone to, to train junior developer.

They said, hire for talent and attitude, train for skill. I was pretty sure that I did not have any skill. So that was a match attitude I know was fine. That’s not gonna be a problem. And talent. God, if I know. I decided to apply on this train at six 30 in the morning, and to my own surprise, I got a phone call a day or two later inviting me to an interview.

And I joined Yosef Falk at his company called Yost owner of Yost as yo, this is also why you should never name your company after yourself. By the way. It’s highly confusing. But I joined the company at first as a developer. Then very quickly we learned about the talents, or lack thereof in my case for being a developer.

And I switched roles within the company to to customer support. But in the meantime, there was this event organized in Leiden, in the Netherlands. And it was called WordCamp Europe. It was the first time someone ever organized something like it apparently. And yos yos. Devo was like, okay, you know what?

You go and go have fun, go learn things. There’s interesting speakers. You’ll make, you’ll probably meet some people. It’s a nice community. I did meet a lot of people and some of them I still con consider friends today. One of them you had on the show a couple weeks back, Brad Williams had the most amazing event.

Ended up with people that I had never heard of, but apparently were known names in the community. Mark Jaqui NAS, I had no idea who these people were but everyone welcomed me and it was one friendly bunch and I decided to stick around and. Here we are 12 years later still in WordPress and still love to travel to conferences and yeah, meet my people around the world.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. What’s the future vision for progress Planner? Like where are you guys going with it? Because it’s newer. I know it has a vision behind it. So what’s big vision? 

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Our ultimate goal is to make the web better. There, the web is an ever expanding collection of information and it should be useful and it should be usable.

And having old still websites. Doesn’t help anyone. It uses unnecessary power. It doesn’t add value for anyone. It doesn’t add value for SEO for search. It doesn’t it’s just, it’s bad. So if we can help keep the web better up to date through Pro Progress Planner, through helping people be more active on their website, then that’s what we’re aiming for.

And I am convinced that we can do it, that we can integrate with more plugins, that we can have more checks in WordPress, that we can be even more engaging to help people come back to their site, write more content, keep the site online, and then when they decide it’s tight time to retire the website that they.

Do so because they are making a decision and not because it’s just lingering somewhere on the web polluting it. 

Chris Badgett: I 

Taco Verdonschot: love that. 

Chris Badgett: I think this idea is as big as the idea of documentation where documentation. Is a reactive, oh, I have a problem. Let me search the knowledge base, see what I can find.

And this is like the proactive, it’s like proactive documentation and that’s  anticipating what the user needs next is like really cool. That’s how products should be. 

Taco Verdonschot: It’s also challenging because for people 

Chris Badgett: to you to be a psychic, you have to be a mind reader. 

Taco Verdonschot: Absolutely. And there’s another component to it.

We’re super upfront. We help you do those tedious tasks that you’re forgetting about, but that means that people first have to admit that they might not be as on top of their website as they. Want to think they are. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Taco Verdonschot: So in order to get those installs for progress planner, we have to convince people, look, there, there really is a need on your website to install this so we can help you.

And that is an interesting challenge that we’re currently facing. And yeah. I hope that all of your listeners now go, oh, wait a second. Maybe there’s some things that I. Haven’t done in the last six months. Let me check. Let me see what progress planner comes up with. And I’m pretty sure when they do, they’ll fall in love.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. It almost seems like the kind of idea that like this is a good thing that web hosting companies should install by default on all WordPress sites, just to, 

Taco Verdonschot: yeah, 

Chris Badgett: just to be of help. 

Taco Verdonschot: If there’s a host that wants to talk about that [email protected], send me an email.

Happy to, 

Chris Badgett: let’s go back into Yos history a little bit with what you were saying about what people may have missed. What are some common things when it comes to SEO for a site that, that things progress Planner as an example, would pick up and be like, Hey, be sure you do X. What’s x?

Taco Verdonschot: Oh. One of the worst problems that we have in WordPress is a feature called tags, because that sounds like the hashtags that we use on social media. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Taco Verdonschot: And people use them in WordPress as if they are hashtags in social media. Now, the problem with that is that for every tag you create, WordPress creates a page.

And actually a couple of versions of that page. So for every tag, there’s several URLs that are created on your site, but if you create a tag for a single post, then that tag page does not have any value for your website. Now, if you add eight different tags to every post. You get a mass inflation of URLs on your domain, that which adds absolutely nothing to your site.

They’re all thin content pages. There’s, they’re absolutely useless. But they exist. And so the perceived quality of your website is much lower because a search engine is going to see that only one in every eight URLs has any meaningful content. That’s not a sign of a quality website. So one of the things that Progress Planner does is compare the number of tags that you have to the number of posts.

To see if that is a healthy balance. And if not, it will recommend you what to do or even to install one of our plugins called Fewer tags which was built by Yos a while back. And that will help you slim down on those those useless tags. But. In the long run obviously what we hope to achieve is that people understand that the tags in WordPress are not the same as hashtags on Twitter or Instagram or what have you.

And that they start using them responsibly so we don’t have to solve the problem afterwards. 

Chris Badgett: Just for general education, for blog posts, what’s the difference between a category and a tag? Like how should tags actually be used? If at all. 

Taco Verdonschot: If at all is the first one for most sites, you don’t need them.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Categories can organize 

Taco Verdonschot: your stuff. If you want to organize stuff, usually categories which are, and this is a word I hate in English. Hierarchical. Hierarchical. That’s pretty good though. Yeah, I just so that’s the main difference between categories and tax categories have that hierarchy and they you can structure them a little bit.

Deeper. Tags are just a, hey, this is related to this, and that could be across categories could even be across custom post types in some cases. And so I. For example, if you have a recipe website and you have them categorized in this is Italian recipes, this is Mexican dishes. I like that example.

And this is Polish dishes across those categories, there might be recipes that take 15 minutes. That’s where you could use a tag that says, this is ready in 15 minutes. Now if you then go to that tag page, you will get recipes across categories that are done in 15 minutes. So that could be a valuable use of tags in WordPress.

Chris Badgett: Another thing I thought of is that, we all know if we’ve been in WordPress for a while to check, but the disabled, there’s one checkbox that says disable indexing from search engines. Yes. And so a lot of times when people are building sites, they have that checked so they can build in private and then they forget or they hand it off to the client and forget to turn it off. That’s a bad one. 

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. I think that if you have any SEO plugin installed, it should already scream in your face like, Hey, you forgot something. But just to be sure, we’ve also added that to progress bladder. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. What’s another SEO? Area that progress planner would pick up on.

Taco Verdonschot: So an another interesting one is the tagline that you have in WordPress. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Taco Verdonschot: It, by default it says just another WordPress site, and if you don’t have a theme that outputs the tagline in the front end, it’s hard to spot. You’ll actually have to go into the admin to see that this tagline is set.

But it is outputted on every single page in the source code. So a search engine will see that description of your website on every single page. If you search Google for just another WordPress site, you’ll be amazed how many sites show up because they still have that set on their site. So that’s one of the things where progress planner also helps you.

Hey, don’t forget about this little thing. And the surprising thing is we saw it a lot on sites that have been a lot online for a long time. So it’s not just post-launch. But years and years in. 

Chris Badgett: Since you’re a SEO expert, I have to ask what are your thoughts on AI’s influence on SEO or an emerging new field of artificial intelligence optimization or whatever?

Like what? What’s happening right now? What should we be worried about? Not worried about? What are some things we can do as we enter the intelligence age?

Taco Verdonschot: I feel that you are asking the Wright brothers just after they had their first successful flights. How big is a jumbo jets going to be in 80 years?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Taco Verdonschot: I have no clue where it’s going. And that is despite me studying artificial intelligence for a couple of years at university. I don’t know where this is going. What I do know is that for SEO what we’ve always been trying to solve is a user’s problem. Someone has a problem and needs a solution to their problem.

And in order to show up. You need to have that information in a clearly written accessible way available for them. And that doesn’t change. LLMs consume your website as well. From what I’ve seen so far, they are. A lot worse at processing JavaScript and stuff like that. So all the complex sites make it harder for LMS to understand your site and its content.

So basically we’re back to the early days of 10 blue links in Google where you need to be specific, you need to build an authority in order to show up. In search results and whether that’s an LLM or a search engine doesn’t really matter. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. The human and the LLM and the search engine, they still need high quality content that you made from your original website.

Taco Verdonschot: Yes. Anyone can generate anything using ai but the original idea to create something valuable. For now at least needs to come from human input. There’s no LLM that’s going. Haha. I have the next fantastic idea that no one’s ever thought of before. Because the whole way the model works is it just it’s a chance calculation on what is probably going to be the next word after the one I just printed.

That’s not generating new ideas yet. 

Chris Badgett: I’m curious, and at Yost, how many sites did you say are approximately 

Taco Verdonschot: using it? So right now there’s about 13 million websites running Yost as yo. So how do you do 

Chris Badgett: support for that many websites? 

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, so me, not anymore. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Taco Verdonschot: But the interesting thing is that the support team at Jost at the time I left last year was about 40 people.

So how do you do support? You build a product that’s good enough that most of your users run without needing support. There’s no way to, to answer 13 million questions with whatever size team you can imagine. 

Chris Badgett: I’ve been using Yost for, I don’t know, over a decade probably, and. I don’t think I’ve ever submitted a support ticket, 

Taco Verdonschot: but, and yeah, that’s as it should be.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And that’s that’s where a progress planner comes in too, is that’s only gonna help too with just helping people figure out how to use the tools they just read about in an article, got excited about and put on their website. Yep. Be proactive. It’ll actually reduce support for plugin companies, theme companies, WordPress core, all of it.

Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re aiming for. It should be beneficial for any plugin that we’ve integrated with to say to the users, Hey, install progress planner. It will help you get to that next level using our product. There’s a lot of complicated plugins out there. Setting up an LMS is something it’s not rocket science.

It will require some time and there’s some finesses that we probably can help you with by giving the right nudges at the right time. So that’s one of the things that we can do with with progress Planner is help you get those nudges. So maybe we should do integration. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that sounds 

Taco Verdonschot: like a plan.

Chris Badgett: It sounds like a plan. And my last question for you, Tako, is. Like who, and there’s a couple characters here. We’ve got the do it yourself website builder, business owner, passion project person. We’ve got the freelancers and agencies. We’ve got we talked about how hosting companies could benefit from this, but who is this for and how and tell how can they get the most value out of it?

Depending upon which type of character they are. 

Taco Verdonschot: I. Yeah. So I think for the end user, it’s the feedback that no one’s giving them. So the things, Hey, have you thought about updating this content? Have you updated plugins? Now, if someone’s working with an agency, I. That agency might want to receive those notifications and be proactive towards their customer and go, Hey did you know that it’s been six months since you last updated this page?

Has anything changed? I. You could package it as an agency. Talking about that, about page again, for example Hey we’ve been working together for a year. Have there been any changes in your team? Is there something that we can update for you? So it helps you ask the right questions to your to your client.

And it will make you look good because you’re so on top of what they’re doing on their website. It will also give you some of the nudges on the more technical level. That’s how an agency could benefit from installing the plugin on their client’s websites. Or if an agency goes, what, if I can offload updating some of the content.

To the end user and have them do that reminder, then I can use some of the budget that’s remaining to want to work on the fun tasks, because typically updating content is not the most fun to work on. So that’s an agency play. And then as you said, for hosting companies if they install it for all of their clients and this helps their client keep their website more active it means you’re extending your customer lifetime with.

I don’t know how much yet, but I’m hoping that will be significant. And knowing the hosting industry, even a couple of months is significant at the scale that they’re at. So that’s definitely the hosting play right there. Awesome. So a lot of things, and there’s something for everyone.

Chris Badgett: Awesome Taco. Amazing work. I’m excited to see Progress Planner and where it goes. What’s the best way for those out there watching and listening to get started with it? 

Taco Verdonschot: Go to your WordPress website, add a plugin, search for progress planner, and if you see a happy rooster. That’s our friend Ravi, right here.

That’s the plugin you’re looking for. That’s where you get started. Install it. It will already run a lot of checks on your site. So probably you get your first badge. Almost immediately. And then there will be a lot of useful checks that you can do so you can keep busy for the next couple of months.

And for those who are listening and coming to work in Europe, make sure you have progress planner installed on your site. Come show it to us and there will be a nice raffle just for progress planner users. Nice. Nice.

Chris Badgett: That’s Paco. Vander shot, I got you on hierarchical. You got me on your last name, but that’s Taco from WordPress.

Thanks for coming on the show, really appreciate it. Go check out progress planner.com and look for Taco at WordCamp and around the internet. But thanks for coming on Taco. We really appreciate it. 

Taco Verdonschot: Thank you so much for having me. A lot of fun here.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [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 Powering Your Website Progress For Maximum Results With Taco Verdonschot appeared first on LMScast.

If you spend any time in WordPress circles you’ve probably noticed Kinsta’s name surfacing whenever developers talk about stress‑free performance, stellar support, and content that actually solves problems.

In this week’s LMS Cast episode, host and LifterLMS CEO Chris Badgett sits down with Roger Williams.

Roger Williams is the Community & Partner Manager at Kinsta. He’s been in the WordPress community for many years. He unpacks the culture, tech stack, and relationship‑first mindset that make Kinsta stand out. Roger is an expert community builder and loves sharing his best tips with the opensource community.

Here are the biggest takeaways from their conversation.

Roger’s Kinsta journey started long before he joined the team. While troubleshooting database errors at a previous job, he kept landing on Kinsta tutorials that explained why an issue happened and exactly how to fix it. That “give‑it‑all‑away” approach to knowledge still drives their marketing strategy, turning blog readers into brand advocates before they ever become customers. Ask yourself: Does our content raise the bar for the whole community, or just chase keywords?

Kinsta deploys WordPress sites in isolated Linux containers, which lets them move workloads or spin up dedicated machines in minutes. That early bet on containerization—not retrofitted later—means they can iterate fast, roll out new features safely, and protect every customer’s resources. Course creators can apply the same principle: choose infrastructure that won’t box you in when enrollment surges.

Inside Kinsta, team members at every level are encouraged to suggest improvements. Roger recalls submitting migration‑workflow tweaks and seeing them live in production weeks later. When your engineering, support, and community teams share a single backlog, customers notice. Consider building a lightweight process (a public roadmap, a Discord channel, a monthly call) that turns learner frustration into feature ideas.

Roger is an unabashed open‑source evangelist. Closed SaaS course platforms may feel frictionless now, but they can lock you out of raw data exports and custom functionality later. With WordPress + LifterLMS you control both the code and the learner records, making it easier to train private AI models or migrate hosts without losing course history. Total cost of ownership beats lowest sticker price every time.

Kinsta’s support engineers aren’t measured on ticket speed alone; they’re empowered to dig into “out‑of‑scope” plugin conflicts so customers leave each chat with a clear next step. Roger applies the same philosophy to outreach. On LinkedIn he spends more time leaving thoughtful comments than publishing viral posts, because comments spark real conversation and social proof. For in‑person relationship building, start small: attend niche meetups before springing for the 20‑foot expo booth.

Roger repackages his Kinsta Talks interviews as short vertical clips on LinkedIn and full‑length episodes on YouTube. The platform‑native format keeps algorithms happy while driving cross‑traffic via links in the comments (LinkedIn penalizes external URLs in the post body). If video feels daunting, begin with 60‑second insights recorded on your phone; consistency matters more than studio lighting.

Whether you’re shipping your first online course or running a mature membership site, Kinsta’s story is a blueprint for blending technical excellence with genuine human connection. Listen to the full episode to hear Roger’s unfiltered thoughts on AI, the hidden costs of closed systems, and why handing out value for free is the surest way to earn lifelong customers.

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

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 we have Roger Williams, who I just met at a conference in Arizona. Roger is the community manager and partner manager at Kenta hosting one of the top hosts we recommend at Lifter LMS. He also has done a lot of things in the tech space. Uh, he’s got a fun, interesting lifestyle.

We’re gonna get into that. But first, welcome to the show, Roger. 

Roger Williams: Hey Chris. Thanks for having me on the show. I’m excited to be here. 

Chris Badgett: Well, tell us about Kinta. I can. The, one of the things I love about Kinta is I see people use it, and I never see anybody complain about it. So something is going on there. You guys are doing something right, people are happy.

But what is the kinta difference? What do you love about it? What, uh, you know, what makes it different in the space? 

Roger Williams: Yeah, man. Thanks for the great question and, and teeing me up here. But, uh, yeah, so Kinta, you know, I, I’ve gotta say it’s one of the most unique working experiences, uh, I’ve ever had. Um, I found a company when I was working at another hosting company in tech support, and the, what happened was, is that every time I would Google, like, you know, some sort of database issue, right?

Would be the most common problem. I’m, I’m trying to help a customer. They got this weird error. So I go to Google it. And time and time again, this blog kept coming up with the perfect answer, right? It wasn’t just like, oh yeah, here’s the problem. It was like, here’s the problem, here’s why it’s happening, here’s the steps to resolve it.

And that blog was considered.com. Um, and, and it just, it was again, and, and again and again for all these different problems. And so. I was like, man, this is a really interesting company, right? They’re, they’re willing to put all of this knowledge out into the universe for anybody to use it. They don’t have to be against a customer.

And it was just really helpful stuff. And so I, I applied to go work there. And they actually didn’t hire me, uh, for tech support. I wasn’t, I wasn’t good enough. I, there was a specific question about file permissions that I just totally messed up. And so, uh, but they were looking for migrations engineers and so I, I got hired doing migrations.

And, you know, I quickly like realized this is a very different company for a few reasons. Um, the, the big one for me was feedback. I, I’ve worked at a lot of companies and I’ve had ideas for like small improvements and some bigger improvements, but definitely like smaller ones that specific to like the task that I’m doing.

And in migrations, right, you’re. You’re interfacing with different hosts and all these, you know, there’s just a lot of stuff that changes all the time and I was able to like, give feedback to my manager and the stuff got implemented. That just maybe I haven’t worked at really good companies, uh, that much.

But, um, that was really unique, uh, for me to experience where I could give feedback, whether it was to my boss or straight to the engineering team, right. About the product, about the dashboard and, and stuff. And they would actually, you know, if it was a good idea, they would actually implement it. And so, you know, just all these things kept happening like that, that just made me really realize like.

We really talk, we’re walking the talk, right? A lot of companies say that they’re really interested in taking care of their customers and their employees. Um, but at, at Kinta, like I really do see that difference. And, and you know, you pointed out, you said some nice things there about you’ve never heard anybody I.

Complaining about Kinta, and I think that there’s a few reasons for that. Um, the first one is we’ve built our dashboard from the ground up, um, around people managing WordPress websites. And so, you know, we’ve taken, our engineers have taken from their own experience of doing this and then also feedback from different developers and, and people that are using the service and they’ve built this dashboard that we’re able to iterate on.

And so since we’re not using somebody else’s dashboard, if there’s a change that needs to be made, we can just make that change. And I see this happen again and again. I mean, since I’ve been here for just over five years, I. We’ve done a complete revamp of the dashboard in that time, not only from a look and feel, but also from the code base behind running it.

And, and they did that to help anticipate the things that we would be doing in the future. And so they’re able to iterate really quickly on things. So, so there’s, the service is really good. Um, but then on top of that. The support is really amazing. Um, we have a really good team of leaders that understand how support works.

Like they’ve been in the trenches, they’ve been on the chats and, and dealing with customers so they know what a support engineer goes through. And they’ve created a really good system where, you know, the engineers get amazing training and then they’re really encouraged to. Work with the customer and get to know the customer and help them and understand their problems and realize that even, even if it’s an outta scope support issue, right?

Like for instance, like code, like we’re not developers, we’re not gonna go in and touch your code. We want to get as close as possible to some sort of resolution for you so that when you get off the chat, you’re able to go, okay, hey. You know, either this plugin or this specific line of code is causing some sort of an issue.

And I can either as a developer, work on it or I can get a developer to work on that. And I think, I think that is a really big difference from how a lot of other companies run support, where you know, hey, it’s not our problem. Uh, you know, go figure it out. We really don’t want to say it’s not our problem, even when it isn’t our problem.

And I, I think that that makes a really big difference for customers. So, uh, long-winded answer there. Um, but, and I can keep going on for days, but, um, yeah, it, it really is definitely a unique place. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. But I mean, you can just tell the brand the feel like in the market it’s, and that comes from somewhere.

Roger Williams: Yeah. And, 

Chris Badgett: uh. I often hear also a lot about kin’s content, like you’re saying, lots of helpful content. It’s what you found. And, um, I know, uh, I remember listening to an interview, I think with Brian Jackson a long time ago, who did a lot of great content work there and, you know, and he’s a big leader in good content and SEO and all of that.

It’s, um, 

Roger Williams: yeah, 

Chris Badgett: yeah, it’s off. 

Roger Williams: Brian. Brian, Brian was with us for a long time. You know, he’s still a big supporter with us. Um, he needed to step back from the marketing role, but, um, yeah, he really pioneered, uh, for our teams, you know, this approach of creating really useful content that, that the marketplace is looking for.

And so really trying to solve a need there. Um, but you know, it goes all the way back to the founders when they were in their apartment getting it started. Um. Just, you know, realizing like, Hey, we’re going to build a really amazing product. And part of that was, you know, starting to use Linux containers for every site to really help make ’em more bombproof, um, and scalable as well.

Right? We, we can easily move those containers around if we need to, if you need to go to a dedicated machine. It takes very little time for us to provision and get you moved around. And so I think there’s some of these fundamental aspects of our technology and the decisions made early on that have really paved the way for the, the, you know, the great product and service that we’re offering today.

Chris Badgett: I know you’re a big open source fan, so somebody out there is watching or listening and you know, they, they wanna make a course, they haven’t really decided where they’re gonna put it. Yeah. Um, you know, there’s hosted solutions like Kajabi or Teachable or Thinkific. But then there’s options to have the website yourself and use WordPress and tools like Lifter, LMS and the other ones.

Roger Williams: Hmm. 

Chris Badgett: What? Why are you such a big open source advocate, and how do you feel about it? 

Roger Williams: Yeah, man. Great question again, and, and a big question. Uh, I think that open source software is one of these, uh, inventions, revolutions, what have you, that not enough of society really understands how fundamentally different and important this is.

Um, you know, with open source software, you, you can see all of it and everybody can see all of it. And so. If there’s a huge network effect, um, with that, it, you know, with, when you have closed source software such as like Microsoft or Apple, nobody can see that code and so they can’t see when there’s a problem in the code and point that out.

To Microsoft or Apple of, Hey, you know, here’s the, here’s a problem I found and here’s a solution. And with open source, anybody can come along and do that. And you know, for a lot of people, the quick reaction’s gonna be, well, if the code’s exposed, then all these bad actors are gonna be able to identify that and take advantage of it.

And, you know, that’s not an incorrect statement that that is accurate. But the, you know, my, my belief is that humans are at. Full nature or regular nature, just good people. And so the majority of people are gonna point out, Hey, there’s an issue here. You should fix it. Um, and if you flip that on its head and you say, Hey, with Microsoft product, if there’s a security exploit and somebody discovers that.

There’s no place really. It’s not an easy way for them to disclose that to Microsoft. And so you’ll have just as many bad actors taking advantage of things, uh, in that case as well. And I think the open nature to it, uh, you know, trying to get back on track here, the open nature to it tends itself towards people being able to help.

I think that’s, that’s the exciting part about open source software is the community part. Um, you know, there’s, there’s a whole group of people coming together to, you know, there’s a smaller group that actually works on the software. Usually. Sometimes it’s just one person, but then you have a community of users around it and they’re giving feedback and they’re testing and, you know, all of, all of this stuff that helps the developers.

Continue to work on the project. So kind of, you know, short cutting a little bit here and talking about, you know, when you’re going to go and build a learning management program. Um, why open source is a, is a, a better way to go. I. You know, there, there might be more cost on the front end, um, either in terms of time of setting it up or you need to hire a developer to help set things up.

Um, you know, with open source software, that is a reality. And, and you know, it’s good that we don’t hide from that, but you fully own the solution. You have, you have complete access to that code. So if you’re a developer, you can get in there and mess with it. You can hire developers. To do anything you want to it.

Um, and so you own the code, but you also own all the data and, you know, there’s, it’s all about the data anymore, you know, in terms of your customer’s information, the actual, uh, course that you’re building and sharing, and. When you’re using a closed solution, you don’t have access to hardly any of that. Um, you know, there’s a lot of times I’ve seen with these closed source solutions, you can’t even really export the data out at all.

So if you wanted to at least get something out of it and move somewhere else. You’re gonna have to build everything again from scratch. Um, and so that little bit of savings you had up front for the convenience of just clicking a button and getting started, you know, down the road when you’re five, 10 years down the road and you’re making serious money because you’ve made a really great course, you’re very successful.

Um, now you’re, you’re hitting the, you know, the, the restrictions of whatever that. Software is that you were using or worse yet, the business that was building that software was mismanaged or they get sold to Adobe for, you know, worst case scenario is that when Adobe buys your software, ’cause it’s probably gonna go away and you have no control, you have no recourse over any of that.

And with open source software, something like WordPress using L Lifter, LMS. You have full control because it’s your code and you know, if you’re not happy with the host that you’re at, you can move on over to Kinta and, you know, have all those options to find better service. So, you know, I can keep going for days about, um, you know, the philosophy behind why open source software is better than closed source.

Um, but I think, you know, really thinking in terms of ownership and total cost of ownership is a great place for people to start. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And one of the things that gets me excited is, and I don’t know exactly where we’re going with open source and artificial intelligence, but like you mentioned, because it’s open, um, anybody could leverage AI tools and create all kinds of innovations, modify the code with ai, even if you’re not a developer.

Like this is the world we’re coming to, you know, web hosts as an example. I could, like, I, I’m also, I like free open source as well, and we have free and premium Sure add-ons. But the, if something’s open source and it’s free and it’s just sitting up here on the entire internet for AI to take a look at and do whatever they want to do with it, it’s really powerful concept.

Whereas like closed source software. People who work in that company are probably using AI tools to help write code and stuff, but it’s not open to the world. Mm-hmm. And that’s such a, a big idea. Any, any artificial intelligence thoughts in open source overlap for you? 

Roger Williams: Yeah, no. 100%. Uh, big shout out to Victor Ramirez.

Uh, he’s a really awesome, uh, developer. Does a lot of work with WordPress and stuff, and I saw him at Word Camp Phoenix, uh, 2024, and he had a really great talk about. Why WordPress is perfectly positioned for large language models and these AI tools because again, you have total ownership of the data. So if you want to give this data to a large language model or you want to grab something like llama, right, the, the open source, um, LLM from um, uh, Facebook, you know, you can now create your own private LLM.

With your data in it, and you have full control over what it says and what it shares and what it doesn’t share, whereas, you know, if you’re going out to use open AI or, or you know, some of these different, uh, closed source LLMs, you don’t have as much say in terms of what data they’re collecting. And as we evolve into using these tools more and more and as companies realize the benefits of bringing these tools in, I think there’s going to be a big wake up call, um, where people realize if they don’t own their data, I.

They’re, again, they just don’t have the control over what’s being shared into these systems, how it’s being used in these systems. And, you know, with a, with an open source tool like WordPress, you do have all of that control. And so I think, I don’t have a great exact answer for all this stuff yet. I would definitely follow Victor.

Um, he, he’s putting out really great content. There’s a lot of people talking about this stuff that are a lot smarter than me. Um, but we’re seeing it happen and it’s, it’s very exciting. Rich Tabor had a really great presentation at Press Comp. Talking about how he’s using AI and how he’s using it in WordPress.

And again, because you have the ability to go in and and work with the code within WordPress and adapt it to what you want to use these tools for, you just have so much more freedom. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Exciting times. And it’ll be an interesting by or decade from here. 

Roger Williams: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Um, one of the things we talk about on this podcast a lot for course creators and education entrepreneurs is build the power of building community.

You’re a community guy in your job title at Kinta is community manager. Yeah. What’s some advice you have for people who are trying to get out from behind the computer in their niche and participate, but also maybe intentionally build community like. How do we do that? 

Roger Williams: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a great question.

I, I wish I had, uh, all of the answers for you. Um, you know, it’s in my title, so obviously I must be an expert, uh, is not accurate. Um, I, I think having a beginner’s mind and realizing, uh, community is, it can be challenging, but, you know, take small bites. So for example, I think getting onto social media. Is, is a great first step for building community.

Um, there’s already people out there talking about, maybe not your exact course, but they’re talking about something related to your course and you can start interacting with them. Um, I think, you know, tools like Reddit. Are pretty amazing also because of how much they’re getting pulled into Google search results and also these LLM tools.

So you can kind of get some little double dipping there where you’re getting community plus some SEO um, you know, if you’re doing a a B2B course, you know LinkedIn, um, there’s, there’s all these different social media platforms out there you should be using and, and you can get the two-way feedback going.

And so I think that that’s really great. I think interviewing people that have re something related to what you’re trying to teach, uh, is a great way to get started with that because now you’re bouncing off of somebody else’s ideas. You’re, you’re gaining from their experience and you’re sharing that with your community, and I think there’s a huge benefit to that.

I get approached all the time on the interviews that I’m doing. Uh, with people, uh, when I go to events and, and people are like, Hey, I, I’ve been watching your podcast. It’s really great and, you know, thank you for, you know, the, the great interviews and. And so that, you know, that always catches me off guard just a little bit.

But it is really powerful and, and, and interesting. So then the second stage is talking about like going to actual in-person events and interacting with people. And I think starting small again is really important here. Don’t think that you need to go and buy the biggest booth or even a booth at all.

Like just start going to the events that have. Some sort of relation to the course that you’re doing, uh, whether it’s an industry event or just a, a general get together of, of people around that topic and start interacting with people and, and connecting with them and connecting with them on social media and taking those relationships and, and extending them beyond.

Just meeting in person, but it, it’s, you know, getting that salesman, it’s a sales mentality too, as well. Right. Or even a marketing mentality in that you really need to be putting yourself out there. You need to be not afraid to make a mistake and sound stupid. Um, because first of all. Most people aren’t paying attention that close.

Um, and, and like people are focused on themselves. Uh, so, so don’t, don’t get too hung up on making a mistake and, and sounding or looking stupid. Uh, it might, it, it’ll happen. I mean, it’s inevitable. It’s gonna happen. We don’t. We don’t all know, uh, everything that we’re talking about, especially when we’re first starting.

Um, and also that’s gonna be a great way for you to learn is when somebody corrects you and, and now you’ve, you’ve learned something new and maybe you won’t do that mistake again. Um, you know, just. Really enjoying it and then learning really to enjoy talking to people and listening to people. So I think, you know, the sales and marketing, we’ve, we’ve talked about this in, in other conversations, uh, I think sales and marketing is, is really integral, uh, especially for a business.

Um, obviously you need to sell your product, but really, you know, going beyond just the. You know, I need to close this deal right now and realizing you’re building relationships. Uh, and not everybody’s gonna be a customer right now, but they might be in six months, they might be in a year. And just seeing every opportunity, every relationship as an opportunity to just connect with somebody.

And maybe down the road something will come of it, but at least in the meantime, you’ve made a new connection with someone, uh, learned their perspective on the world. And maybe you can take that, uh, into your business. 

Chris Badgett: I love that. That was, that was a masterclass and it’s, I love what you said about just get out there, start with social media.

We can all do that. We’re probably already doing that, but do it with maybe a little more focus. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah. You know, your net worth is your network kind of thing. Like you can’t always measure everything. Yeah. Like it’s almost a meme in our space, as with like WordPress companies, product companies, hosting companies.

If you get asked a question, what’s the ROI of sponsoring or attending a Word camp or conference? Like, I don’t know man, but I’ve, I’ve met some great people and you know, things evolve and we’ll see. Uh, 

Roger Williams: yeah, no, it’s a really great point. You know, and, and, and it’s something I need to get better at is the whole measurement.

I need to get better at making sure I’m putting my UTMs into my links and I, I know I need to work on that. But my, my suggestion in going with what you’re kind of talking about here is be careful with how much you’re focused on ROI in relationships and with community because, uh, it, it’s very, it’s much more organic.

It’s very transparent, right? Like, people will know when you’re trying to sell them. And, and so you need to, you need to take like a slower approach with that. Um. And, but you know, you can still use those sales tools in the back of your mind, like, you know, try and leading conversations in different directions and whatnot.

But you know, for the most part, you’re really just trying to connect with people and I. You know, learn more about what their challenges are, you know, and, and you know, and you might not be able to actually help them with that, but you might know somebody else who can. And so making sure that you’re building referrals up and just showing people that you’re there to actually try and help them and not just make a, a buck off of ’em, that goes a long way as well.

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Yeah, that’s awesome. You mentioned getting on social media and um. You’re active on LinkedIn and other places. I feel like many of us, sometimes we have our primary, like I’m a primarily a Twitter person and my company’s more primarily YouTube when it comes to, which is kind of like social media with the comments.

But uh, and we have like a big Facebook group or whatever. But the funny thing about social media is. People often say, oh, like Facebook’s dead, or LinkedIn, there’s too much DM, spam, or whatever. Like, Twitter’s dead, but they’re not. You just gotta learn how to drive it. So what? Take us to school on LinkedIn, how you use it, what you like about it, and just advice for people looking to grow, influence, and just participate in a social network like LinkedIn.

Roger Williams: No, absolutely. Uh, you know, I’ve been on social media off and on for a long time. I think I signed up for my Twitter account in like 2007 or something silly, and I used to really be big on Twitter and then I got burned outta that. I was big on Facebook and I got burned outta that. And I think one of the big reasons that I like LinkedIn is it’s about business.

And so. There’s a lot of times on like Twitter and Facebook, these other social media networks where you’ll start wanting to do a business type of thing and people will get really upset and, and you’re like, okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t, I didn’t know. Whereas on, on LinkedIn, it’s like everybody is there for the purpose of doing business and so like, you know.

It’s just expected that you’re going to be talking about your product and you’re going to be talking about, you know, maybe a business idea or a methodology or sales technique and things like that. And so I really like that because I’m at the point now in my life where I don’t really need social media to like fulfill.

Personal things. Um, you know, I’ve got, I’ve got my wife, I’ve got, you know, friends and all family and all that type of stuff, and, and I really try and disconnect as much as I can. But when I’m working, LinkedIn is where I’m at because I can connect with all the people that I, either I’m doing business with or I’m partnered with or I’m in a community with.

Um, and so it, I think it helps from that standpoint. Um, you know, if you’re, if you’re looking to do B B2B stuff, especially LinkedIn’s huge as far as actually using LinkedIn, there’s a few different things that I would highly recommend. So the first one is understanding the power of comments. On LinkedIn comments are possibly more powerful than actually posting.

Chris Badgett: It’s funny, as you say that, I’m looking at one of your LinkedIn posts that has 27 comments, which is a lot. And, uh, and, and you were doing a community thing. I think it was around. So something you did with Nat, Nat, ick. Yeah. Um, and, uh, and like. For example, if I do a LinkedIn post, I don’t often get as many comments, but I’m also not participating that much in comments everywhere.

So tell us more about why the comment is, could be superior to the post. 

Roger Williams: Yeah. So you know, it’s, it’s on any social media when you get a comment, right? Like you get really excited, you get this feel good. Oh, somebody left a comment. You know, I remember on Twitter back in the day, it was all about the star.

If somebody starred your. Tweet like you, you’re, oh, this is amazing. So on LinkedIn you get that same feeling right? Every time somebody leaves a comment on a post for me, I am like over the moon, so excited. Um, but one thing to keep in mind is when you leave a comment on somebody’s post, LinkedIn now shows that post in your follower’s feed.

Highlighting your comment, but it also highlights the post. And so every time you’re commenting, you’re creating more network effect inside of LinkedIn. And so you’re helping to spread other people’s posts. Um, so there’s the first reason. The second reason, and from a, this is from a sales perspective, right?

If I’ve got somebody who I’m trying to sell to, right? I want to, I want to talk to them. There’s a lot of ways to do that, right? You can cold call, you can email, you can send them flowers or whatever. If they’re active on LinkedIn, you can comment on their posts. And I can tell you that when somebody leaves a comment on my post, and I don’t normally get 20 seven’s, a lot of comments.

Um, so it’s not normally that much, but every time somebody leaves a comment on my post, I, I see who they are and I’m immediately like, okay, you know, this person, especially if they leave a good comment and it’s like. You know, they’ve obviously read the post and they’re, they’re trying to build a conversation with it.

I’ll remember who you are. And so then if that person sends me a dm, it’s not a cold, it’s not a cold DM anymore. Right? Or if they cold call me or they email me, I’m, I know who that is already a little bit. And there’s also this verification because on LinkedIn you can verify your company email. Show, Hey, I actually do work at Kinta, right?

Um, I’m not, I’m not just, you know, some random scammer who’s reaching out to you, and so you get this social verification. Also, if I’m connected to people in their network, LinkedIn immediately shows that. And so there’s all of this social contract stuff that you know immediately is coming through your mind.

But all you did was leave a comment on somebody’s post. Um, and so, so commenting is really big, and it’s also a great way for people to start looking at you and your profile and what you’re posting and getting more interested in that. So start with commenting. Um, and then after that, after you’re doing that and you’re starting to get a feel for.

You know who, who’s on LinkedIn that you’re interested in following. You know, not, not just because it’s fun, like they post like, oh, these cool cat memes, or, you know, they post a big takedown on ai. No, they’re actually talking about your industry. They’re talking about a topic that you are interested in, either because it’s directly tied to your business, or maybe that’s a course you want to work on.

Um, and so you start building out this network. Then you start looking at posting. And so posting, there’s a lot of, uh, strategies to take with this. Um, I personally like posting videos. Uh, LinkedIn has been making a big push to get more video onto their platform, and so just by posting videos on there, you’re immediately going to be shown in their algorithm.

Poten, you know, more often than not, um, especially more often than just a text post. Um, but also adding images can help Carousels is another thing that they were trying to push. I don’t keep up with these things as well. Here’s what I know though, Chris. Video is what it’s all about. You know this, I mean, here we are right now, right?

We’re on video talking. TikTok is the biggest social media platform in the world right now. Facebook has changed everything over to reels. YouTube has shorts. Um, and so LinkedIn has their videos and they’re pushing that really hard. And so at first I was doing videos where it was just a selfie type of thing.

Hey, look at me, I’m talking, I’m, you know, doing something. And I quickly realized, or my boss actually quickly realized that. You know, I’m, I’m pretty okay at talking to people. And, and so she was like, you should start interviewing people and putting that onto LinkedIn. And so that’s where I got started.

And um, and that’s something that, you know, I, I think Matt Madero calls me the king of vertical video or something like that. Okay. It’s not my intent, right. It’s just, it’s just when I post stuff onto LinkedIn, LinkedIn wants to show those video posts, and then I’ve. I’ve done a good job, I think, of having great guests on.

Like, it’s always good to have somebody who’s very interesting on and people want to hear from and, and things like that. Um, and then, you know, and then also just like posting pretty regularly a couple of times a week is a, is a pretty good cadence. Um, and then finally, uh, you know, I can talk about LinkedIn a lot, but there is a tool that I do recommend people if they’re really serious about LinkedIn.

It’s called Aware. The domain is use aware.co. And this is a really great tool for working on LinkedIn. It’s kind of like a Hootsuite, but it’s only for LinkedIn. And I think the reason that it’s really important to have this tool as opposed to like a Hootsuite, is that with Hootsuite, your scheduling posts, right, like that’s the primary purpose of that.

And you have that in Aware, like it has the ability to send a post in there. It creates a nice little preview, so you see like where the See more button’s gonna be and you know how it’s gonna show up, but that’s like 10% of what Aware does for you. The bigger part of it is the commenting, and so it helps.

It helps you find your replies. It organizes those into a reply. It has a community tab, so people who are in your network as they’re posting. It makes it really easy to find their posts and leave comments or reshare. And then it also creates, um, you can create custom lists. So if you’ve got like 30 or a hundred people that you’re trying to prospect, you can throw them into aware, and then now you’ll see all of their posts and you can leave comments there.

Um, so it’s a really neat tool. Um, if you’re, if you’re at all serious about using LinkedIn for business, especially for social selling. Aware is a indispensable tool to, to have. 

Chris Badgett: Wow. That was a masterclass on LinkedIn. It’s, that’s awesome. I’m checking out use aware.co right now. It’s really cool. We’re coming up on the hour.

Roger, um, tell us about the podcast. It’s, is it Kinta Talks? Is that what it’s called? 

Roger Williams: Yeah, no. Great. Great question here as always. Uh, so Kinta Talks is the name of the show. We don’t actually, it’s not actually a podcast at this point. I need to take that extra step and start posting. I need to get a podcast set up and, and send it there.

Chris Badgett: So LinkedIn is where people should check it out, the Kinta talks or, 

Roger Williams: so even that’s evolving. So YouTube is really the main place. So on the Kinta YouTube channel, there’s a playlist called Kinta Talks. And I’ve, I’ve been posting there, I’m now it’s like, okay, the full length episodes go onto YouTube. ’cause that’s where people wanna watch anything that’s more than five minutes long.

And then usually I’ll put like a 30 to 32nd to three minute clip on LinkedIn. And so like a teaser a little bit. Then people can click and, and go on over to YouTube. Uh, quick caveat, with LinkedIn, they do not like external links in the posts. Uh, you, you will not show up as well in the feed. So what you want to do is put the links into the comments.

So, you know, it’s a little, little bit of a, a hack around there. But, uh, yeah, be careful with the external links on LinkedIn. But yeah, so the show’s on YouTube and then hopefully I’ll get my act together and actually have a podcast so people can just get it in their, their feed and have coffee and listen to me talk.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, Roger. I, I appreciate the conversation. Keep up the amazing work at Kins. Um, go check out kinsa.com. Go find Roger on LinkedIn. It is Roger Williams. I feel like you look, um, your profile and you, you always like look the same. So like, I find you easy to find on social media or even at a conference.

I’m like, there’s Roger. He he is, he is. Uh, you’re consistent man. And you got the orange kenta shirt on. That’s awesome. A, b, 

Roger Williams: b always be branding. 

Chris Badgett: There you go. Uh, any other final words for the people or any other, uh, place you’d like people to connect with you? 

Roger Williams: Yeah, absolutely. Just to clarify on LinkedIn, my, the URL slug is Roger Williams Media.

There’s a lot of Roger Williams is out there. Uh, one guy even decided to found a state. Crazy. Um, but, uh, I’m also, I’ve got a personal blog, Roger Williams media.com. Uh, I’ve just kind of kicked that off again, so come and check it out. I have different musings. I talk about some of my interviews. Um, have, have a look, gimme some feedback.

Let me know what I’m doing well, what I’m not doing so well. And, and, uh, and yeah, if please connect with me. Uh, if you see me in an event, come and say hi. I, I love talking to everybody. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show, Roger, really appreciate it. 

Roger Williams: You’re welcome, Chris. 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 episode of LMSCast, David Risley from Blog Marketing Academy talks about how his online business has changed over time.

In 1998, he started a tech blog called PCMech, which eventually attracted over 100,000 readers. He switched to internet marketing in 2008 and used his blogging background to instruct people on how to launch and expand online enterprises. He first concentrated on marketing training courses and programs for bloggers, but as the industry grew crowded and saturated, he progressively shifted away from that strategy.

David switched to a service-based business after realizing the difficulties of growing his company only via content and courses. Through the recurring subscription service Concierge, which he founded, his team offers WordPress site owners continuous technical and webmaster help, addressing difficulties with plugins, performance optimization, and upgrades. He was able to create more steady, predictable monthly earnings instead of pursuing particular jobs thanks to this technique.

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, David Risley. He’s from Blog Marketing Academy. Blog marketing academy.com. I’ve seen David on the internet for probably over a decade, and I finally gotta meet him in person at a conference. We’re gonna get into internet marketing, David’s journey, what he does now.

But first, welcome to the show. 

David Risley: Thanks for having me. Good to talk to you again. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the birth of Blog Marketing Academy. What year was it and what drove you to do this thing? I. 

David Risley: It’s been a while, so it, it starts even before that. I, before Blog Marketing Academy, I had a technology blog talking about computers and like building computers, PCs, back when people still built them.

And, that space changed a lot. It was becoming something where I was getting tired of it. That started by the way, in around 98, I think it was like way the heck back there before WordPress, all that. And so by the time 2008 came around, 10 years later, I was like, I wanna do something else. I was starting to, research the internet marketing space and all that.

And so I started what. It was not Blog Marking Academy then, but it became that started in 2008 and I ran both for a little bit of time. Eventually sold off that tech site. And and then Blog Marking Academy is pretty much what I do now. And what was that? So it’s, I guess it’s been 17 years.

Wow. Time flies. 

Chris Badgett: That was a fun, that’s when I got into the whole internet thing too, around 2007, 2008. Yeah. I feel like internet marketing kind of had a golden age of around that 2008 to 12. Yeah, it was like early days and there wasn’t that many influencers and people, you could get into the space and get big pretty quick.

It seemed but what was your experience? 

David Risley: It was, I never was one of the big guys, but it’s funny, the, at that time in the heyday of it, you had the celebrities of that space. Frank Kern, Jeff Walker you mentioned Evan Pegan earlier. Those guys, they were like, they became like.

The guy, and those spaces. And I don’t know if that happened so much anymore, just because the space is so much noisier and things have matured quite a bit. But yeah, and I know I went to some other conferences and all that and bought the courses and the whole thing.

Nice back when you could still sell a course. I don’t know how well it is now. I’m a little outside the space now, but I remember the what, 1997. That was like the, I always sold the courses. I always ended with a seven, which I thought was funny. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s really fun looking back at that time period.

And people still do sell courses for that amount, but it’s gotta come, I’m sure they do coaching and a lot more support. It’s not just the videos. That’s the 

David Risley: thing. Back then, you could primarily rely on content, not so much. Now, 

Chris Badgett: what does Blog Marketing Academy do today? What do you guys offer? 

David Risley: The reason it’s called Blog Marketing Academy is because it started off doing online courses and and some of which are not even there anymore.

But I, it was, but it was more toward the new media, like the blogger type, traditional blogger type, but trying to teach them some online marketing skills and it was trying to bridge that gap a little bit. So that’s how black marketing got start. Black Marketing Academy got started.

I’ve never changed the name of it. I still have those courses. It’s just that they’re under a membership now that is really super cheap because that’s not really the how I make money now. Now even though I have a service aspect to the business, which is the majority of it, I just haven’t changed the name just ’cause I didn’t want to go through all the work to do it.

And it’s got some traction obviously. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the transition from content and courses to services. It seems like some people are trying to go the other way. Yeah. And you’re going this way. So what, how does, how’d that play out and what, tell us the story. 

David Risley: Yeah. Some people do go the other way, but it’s, it’s one of those things to where there’s always been this thing about the time for money idea, and people will try to avoid it, and and but so they try to avoid service work. They don’t wanna work with clients. And then there’s this almost attitude out there with some of the grooves and ah, you don’t want to get into that kind of stuff.

And so for a long time, that was the mindset that I have. I didn’t want to get into that kind of stuff. I didn’t wanna work with clients as the online course space, especially in my niche specifically, was just getting more and more noisy. I was like the friction is there. I could either sit there and fight it.

Or I could listen to what my students were telling me for years, and I was avoiding because they would go through some videos that I did and go that’s really cool. Now how do I execute? How do I build it? I didn’t really get into the techie part of it so much at the time. But eventually I just started listening to them.

I’m good at, I come from a background where I know how to do that stuff really good. And they, and then even just looking internally with me, I realized I really liked working on my own website. I enjoy getting in there and working on it. I’m like, I need to listen to this. And so it’s, it turned into a pivot.

It was. Maybe four years ago, and it was much more official about three years ago where I was like, I’m just, I’m going into client services and downplayed the courses and haven’t looked back and I leaned into recurring revenue really early on. And so it’s been a good thing.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the recurring revenue aspect. ’cause a lot of service work, you think of one-off projects and things like that. 

David Risley: Yeah. So I didn’t first for one, I didn’t want to get into the whole, Hey, contact me for an estimate. And it, I, it’s just a pain in the butt. Most people end up really overestimating how long things are gonna take.

So what I did, I, and I also didn’t want to always be project chasing. It’s just why would I leave what I was doing in order to get into chasing project work? And I had a recurring membership program before, but it was just more content driven. So obviously I knew the beauties of recurring revenue, I knew how it re removes a lot of the stress out of things.

And so with the service work, I opened up what I call concierge now, which is basically, you could call it a maintenance thing, but it’s actually a lot more than that. It’s basically. I’m gonna hand, I’ll be the, their webmaster for all things that come up. And it starts off with a recurring program right off the bat.

And and then just over time, that grows to the point where, yeah, I’m ba at a point where I don’t worry about where the money’s gonna come from every month and the project works still happens. It’s just instead of doing the estimate type stuff, I have a credit system on the side. It’s a unique way of doing it.

And but almost everybody who’s doing that. Is also on retainer through the concierge. So it works out pretty well. 

Chris Badgett: Think back to the internet marketing. I can tell you are a good copywriter. Like the headline on your homepage is be on a first name basis with your web guy, which is like a really good headline that speaks to what people want.

They want, like somebody who has their back, who ha has a face and a name that they can talk to and stuff like that. Tell. Tell us how your experience with copywriting and maybe some pro tips, and I think a lot of good internet marketers, like it just becomes second nature and you forget about it and you just do it well.

But what’s been your journey with 

David Risley: copywriting? To be clear, other than some of those online marketing courses I went through in the past, it isn’t as if I’ve done professional copy. I would not consider myself a copywriter. I will say that I do have a lot of experience in writing, ’cause I’ve been doing it for so long.

And so with time and practice you get decent at it. But the other thing too is. N knowing, developing a skill of being able to get inside their head of the, of your target market and knowing what they really want. And one of the things I’ve always found important in any business is the importance of survey now but not survey, which is I’ll fill out this form is really impersonal.

’cause the survey can come in a lot of different forms. And that includes talking to people in person, which is one of the things that so many people try to avoid is they’re like, eh, it’s awkward to talk to somebody. But I, even now, I do what’s called roadmap calls where people can book a short call with me and they don’t pay anything, and I.

A lot of it’s, a lot of it is to look, see if we’re a fit and see if they wanna work with me. But sometimes I’ll do those calls and they don’t convert and I don’t view that as a waste of time because I’m still learning what they’re looking for. And so the more you do that, the more writing you do in general, you get to where you can write and you’re envisioning that person you’re talking to as you’re doing it and you’re just trying to, to.

Know, make your message meet where they’re thinking already. That’s that’s the 1 0 1 level thing with copy. I don’t have any, courses on that topic or anything. 

Chris Badgett: Some markets like it becomes an echo chamber so internet marketing with internet marketers or tech with tech people.

But some of the most successful agencies, their target audience is very different from them. Who’s. Yeah. If you were to like, tell us about the avatar or the type of people that are a perfect fit for Blog Marketing Academy Services, who’s, who is this client? ’cause you obviously have a feel for what this person is.

I. 

David Risley: Yeah, my clients come from all kinds of different niches, but the base, but at the core, they are solopreneurs. And some of ’em are in the very early stages, so I don’t even know if they would call themselves a solopreneur yet. They’re trying to become one, and so I’ve got that too. But most of ’em are, they’re working for themselves.

They might have one or two other people working for them. They’re basically in that idea. They’re using WordPress to run the business. And so that’s mainly who I’m speaking to. And I also know that a lot of them are, they’re tackling WordPress and they deal with the frustrations we all deal with.

They’re not they have some light level tech skill, but enough to get themselves in trouble, and I also know with me, because of the content with YouTube and all that and the content that I’ve been putting out there a long time I have built up a level of trust. With a lot of these people.

So that was part of the genesis for that headline to be on a first name basis with your web guy. And but yeah, that’s who they are mainly. They’re small time solopreneurs businesses of different scales, but they don’t have large teams, frankly. You have to know who you work with the best.

And if some big company was coming at me, I probably would straight tell ’em, I don’t think I’m the right fit. I don’t think I would want to do it. So how do you get these clients? Most of them are coming to me. I really don’t do any overt promotion outside of content. It’s the site. I would say in terms of lead sources right now, YouTube is probably the top one of people finding me on YouTube, but a lot of people were on my list.

For quite some time to begin with. I do have a weekly newsletter that I send out, so even people who are not doing business with me now I’m I stay top of mind and when they’re ready, they sign up or they book a call. 

Chris Badgett: I’m a big fan of YouTube for content marketing. What’s your approach to making videos or deciding what kind of content to make?

On YouTube specifically, 

David Risley: some of it’s just gut feeling. Some of it’s frankly, what I’m in the mood to make. If anything, I need to become more regular about it. Ideally I’d be putting out something every week but sometimes that’s the balance. When you’re doing client work, sometimes you get so busy with stuff you forget to do it.

But it it’s really. I guess it’s the same mentality that would come up when I’m writing my copy. I think about my target market and what they’re looking for. I know people on YouTube are looking for how to do stuff, how to fix problems. They the typical listicle style stuff does work on YouTube.

You also look for reviews. I’ve talked, I’ve had a video about. Buddy boss hosting, how what’s, because that can be a little bit of a demanding platform, and so I get people on that or talking about Buddy Boss talking about the fluent line of products. People are looking for that stuff.

So I just go and I make it. And I and also my videos are pretty informal. How I’m talking to you right now is how I record a YouTube video. I don’t script them out. I don’t do double takes on anything. I just let it rip. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And going back to your services. Sometimes it’s, when you’re helping a solopreneur, like you have to set up a scope of work, like there’s the website, but then maybe there’s an email list tool and hosting and other things.

Like what’s in your scope of service that you do for these business owners?

David Risley: For the most part, I will go where they need to go. That being said, I do have my limits for one thing. With my service work, I tend to stick with the same tools. Most of the time. I can work with other ones, but if I have any say in the matter, I’ll try to get them into the same ones because I’m so quick with them.

When it comes to email, I’m a big proponent of fluent CRM myself. I love using that product, and I, on my site, some people they know me because I talk about what I call digital sovereignty. I like the idea of having things in house and not relying on an army of third party services all over the place.

And so a lot of, some people, they do join with me because. That’s my philosophy and I’ll work, I’ve got some clients using Active Campaign and stuff like that, but most of my clients are using fluent CRM and we put it all inhouse and I just provide, I, my idea with concierge is to provide the platform so they don’t have to worry about all that stuff.

For example, fluent crm. But you need to tap into a, an email service for that.

I have one. It’s that type of thing. And then they don’t have to think about it. That’s how I’m approaching it. If they get too far out of my wheelhouse or if they’re, they want something completely and totally custom coded, I’ll probably be like, yeah, that’s not me.

Chris Badgett: Your let’s talk first is like a primary call to action on your homepage. Some people, a lot, some agencies like it’s gotta go through a contact form and there’s all this stuff. You go straight to book a 30 minute call. What’s your structure for those calls for talking to clients and figuring out if it’s a fit?

And what do you guys talk about on a 30 minute call? 

David Risley: So there, so there’s not a lot of stress. It’s not like I go in there with a, an outline or anything. It’s definitely not. A salesy thing at all. It’s really we’re just having a conversation. I, when they go, excuse me, when they book, I do have some questions on the form that makes it clear that it is a thing where we’re exploring working together.

So there is that intention when they book, I forgot the questions that I have there, but it’s, these are not people, they’re just gonna come ask me random questions to get a free consultation. They know why they’re there. Once they’re there we’re just having a free flowing conversation. I, it’s not like I’m running the show.

I, I, they we both know why they’re there to begin with. I have the summary of what they’ve typed and then we just go to it. Sometimes they don’t even take 30 minutes. Sometimes they go a little longer than that. I don’t worry about it that much. 

Chris Badgett: Is, are a lot of people starting with an existing site or they’re starting fresh, or what do you prefer?

David Risley: Most are have an existing one and when when they’re talking to me about concierge, most of them have an existing one and they’re probably just tired of dealing with it with. With it. That’s pretty much what it comes down to. But I do have some who come in and they’re, they have a new concept and we’re starting from scratch.

And usually with concierge, I’ll make it clear to them right off the bat, Hey, look, you’re getting into concierge, but it’s early and there’s no traffic. So there’s a little overkill there at the beginning, but they think it’s going to. Put light of fire under their butt, so to speak. I was like, I’m, paying every month.

I really want to utilize it. And so we go at it. Plus they get a discount on the credits with me if they’re in concierge. So some people do it for that. But most of them, they came in with an existing site like buddy boss element, mentor setups, things that have a little bit more complexity and they’re just tired of squashing little tech gremlins and that type of thing.

Chris Badgett: How do you manage the relationship? Like particularly with a recurring plan? Are they, like you said, they wanna get the most out of it. Are you also following up with clients every month or making suggestions or how do you get, how do you keep the recurring situation healthy?

David Risley: It really hasn’t been any issue at all. I, we have a communication area in Basecamp. We use Basecamp for project management super user friendly. And it, and then of course there’s the core services that they’re getting, whether they’re. I have a lot of requests or not. There’s the hosting, I use postmark for email delivery.

There’s, the malware stuff, all the standard stuff. And then there’s all the plugins. I have agency licensing to the plugins that I put on their site. So there, that is one of the things too, is that they don’t have to go and buy all those things. I’ve already done it. And so all those things are part of the core services.

I have a few clients that don’t contact me that much, honestly. Others are more active, and that’s fine. You just balance it out over time.

Chris Badgett: And the ones that are more active, they’re also in addition to the monthly, they’re buying credits. Is that right?

For actual project work on top of the monthly? 

David Risley: They 

Chris Badgett: are, 

David Risley: yeah. If for, if I’m just answering messages for them I don’t bill for that. It’s part of concierge, but if we’re getting there and we’re, getting more. If I’m having to go on there and do something on their site more regularly, that’s where we do use the credits.

The concierge, I have a higher level of concierge called platinum, which does include time. And then we don’t have to use the credits unless we really start using a lot of time. But for the core people, we’re using credits a lot more frequently. 

Chris Badgett: How do you stay organized with all this? It’s been a growth 

David Risley: curve 

Chris Badgett: for 

David Risley: sure.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned Basecamp for getting the projects in Basecamp, which helps. 

David Risley: That helps a lot. It keeps it out of my email. I. Which is important. When I first started, everybody was emailing me and it I dealt with it for a while. I thought about having a traditional support desk on my thing, but it felt a little impersonal.

And so I didn’t go that route. And so Basecamp, for me has worked really well. I used it a long time ago, and then I, so I came back and revisited it. It’s just super user friendly. It doesn’t have a really overwhelming interface. They if they don’t want to go into base that often and they just reply to an email, they can still do it.

It’ll still show up base. So it’s just really easy to use. As far as managing clients, I’ve done a lot of stuff inside of WordPress admin to be able to manage them from in there. I’ve customized my dashboard quite a bit so I can see my client list and pop into different parts of their profile really quick.

So there’s a lot of time saving. And I have for passwords and all that, I don’t keep that in WordPress. That wouldn’t be a good idea. I’ve got a one password for all that type of stuff, but, over. I don’t know, I guess I’ve adapted to that system and when I find that there’s little hitches and I’m wasting time on, on stupid little things, I’ll try to think up some solution to iron out the constraint.

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What about work-life balance? What’s your approach there? ’cause we all struggle with it, when you’ve been in the industry for a long time, you figure something out that works for you. What works for you? 

David Risley: So far it hasn’t been a problem. Mean, so for one, I like what I do, so it’s not like I’m feeling like I have to escape from it.

But but people know I, I go out and in an RV sometimes I’ve got a family, I work through stuff on the house, so I. A, a lot of it comes down to setting proper expectations when people come in. I I think because a lot of people who work with me have been on my list for a while or what have you they already know little things because I’ll mention at the top of my newsletter, I always mention just little things that are not related to business, so people know about the RV and all those types of things.

I have never had anybody, if I go on a little trip, I’ve never had anybody. Freak out about it, and they’re like, have fun. They, they literally try not to be as needy while I’m gone, which is really cool. And and if something happens I’m still monitoring things. It’s just that it’s more if a site goes down, I, no matter where I am, I will try to get it fixed.

It’s just. I work with rocket hosting sites, just don’t go down. I, and so it’s it, you’re paying for security with those types of things. But so far I just enforce the balance that I want. And clients don’t raise a ruckus about it. And frankly, if they did, if I had somebody who was getting, who, weird about it, I would look at that as we weren’t the right fit anymore.

I’d probably cut them loose. Do you run all this solo right now? I do. I I had I had a developer it was through an agency, so it wasn’t like he was working for me. It was like a separate thing, but it was interesting. I found that I. Wasn’t using him as much as I thought I would. And so that’s probably my fault, honestly.

Outsourcing has always been a thing that I can’t say that I’m great at it. It’s I don’t, it’s probably something I need to get better at. I do realize that with the level of what the work that I have, it’s coming whether I like it or not. There are things that. I have a lot of systems in place that allow me to get a lot done, but if I have so many ongoing projects at the same time, people end up waiting.

And I’m aware of that, so I’ll have to deal with it. But so far it’s just me. 

Chris Badgett: Let’s imagine you got a client who doesn’t have a website yet, and I know this changes with time and there’s multiple options, but what are some of your favorite tools that you like to work with? You mentioned fluent CRM.

What else is like a go-to for you? 

David Risley: I use fluent most of the, I don’t use all their tools, but fluent CRMs. My favorite fluent forms is where I go to for forms for community stuff. I’ve been definitely looking into fluent community. I it’s true they’re developing that one’s fast. So it’s doing pretty well and I’m.

Even though I know Buddy Boss is such a powerful platform, it just comes with so much overhead. I don’t like working with Buddy Boss that much anymore. Yeah, as far as building it out I’m a big fan of the Cadence theme and cadence blocks myself. So that tends to be my go-to. I do have some people who are using Elementor and those types of things, and or Astra and Spectra.

If they really like their platform, I’m not gonna try to drag ’em over. But if I’m involved, I’ll usually go with Cadence. What are, I don’t know. I’ve got a bunch of, different ones that I use. I’m looking at my own list here, but those are probably the ones I use most often. Press player for videos, I got some performance stuff. I use WooCommerce, WP Fusion, Jax plugin. Use that one quite a bit. 

Chris Badgett: You mentioned what was it? It’ll come back to me, but what was it?

You, you said rocket, you meant rocket.net, is that right? rocket.net. Yeah. And I remember what I was gonna ask. You mentioned you, you like to get lifetime licenses, I think, or unlimited, so there’s always this question with the agent when they’re available. When they’re available, yeah. There’s always this question with the agency of do I get the license or does my client get it, or whatever. What’s, it seems like you’ve figured it out. Like how do you think about that? 

David Risley: So I think about it in terms for one, it’s one of the value adds of concierge is that they don’t have to go and buy all these plug Yeah. They don’t have to go shopping.

And the shopping is not just a matter of expense, it’s also all the time of evaluating, trying to figure out which ones worked, so I’m trying to save them all that hassle. So I acquired the support licenses. If an unlimited is available, that’s usually a good idea. There’s a few that I’ve got on Lifetime that’s even great, but but some of ’em are not, and I just pay for them and, my thinking too is that if I’m gonna call myself concierge, it’s one of those things to where sometimes I have to contact the support people. Like I’ve done it with cart flow several times. I’ve had to do it with Presto. Sometimes I can’t figure something out. I’ll just go to the support people.

That’s what I’m paying for, worth the license. And so it’s really, I, the way I look at it, I wouldn’t really be able to provide the. Full level of service needed for concierge. If I couldn’t deal with the support people, if I I was hanging out with Jack at the conference, but for WP Fusion, but if I didn’t have those relationships with these people, I how I’m a little bit stuck on how far I can go with the support.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And that’s a huge value add to just to have all those relationships and be able to, basically get the best support on behalf of the client. That’s awesome. Yeah. You mentioned you worked with a lot of different clients but is there like a main kind, are they kind of content people or are they main street businesses or like what’s the.

80 20 of who is the majority of the clients? Are they doing digital, most digital 

David Risley: products, retail? What? What is it? Mostly digital, mostly in the content business. Most of them have membership sites. That’s probably majority of my clients are running a membership site and, if it was just a standard blog, they probably wouldn’t even need concierge.

But, mo, most of what I do with concierge is for WordPress sites that actually do work. They’re selling things, they’re, they got plumbing involved and so that’s the average. I do have a few that sell physical product. And let’s see, I’m trying, do I have any, I. Yeah, actually I do have a few locals I’ve got a chiropractor over in the uk.

I’m managing three sites for him, and so his sites are actually pretty, no, he is got one that actually is a content driven membership site. Then he is got two first his practices, so there’s all over the board, but definitely the large majority of them are selling like membership content. 

Chris Badgett: What’s the.

I’ve been obsessed with membership sites. As long as you have yeah, whatever, 17 years or whatever, and it’s changed. It’s evolved. There’s never been more options like now, and like you mentioned, it’s also much more crowded than it used to be. But. What’s working in membership sites with your clients now?

There’s courses, there’s community, there’s premium content or digital files, like what is, what does SU successful membership sites have going on these days? 

David Risley: Most of mine are selling courses. I do have a few that have communities. Buddy Boss, I think there’s one. She’s launch getting ready to launch up on fluent community.

But most are selling courses. But the interesting thing is they’re not in the most crowded niches in the world. Most of ’em. I’ve got one who she literally does handcrafted toys and the membership site is about how to. Craft these toys. I, it’s not something I would know anything about, but that’s there I got somebody who’s selling training on how to play the saxophone, I guess so it’s markets where there might be noise.

Honestly, I don’t know that much about the markets, but it’s probably nothing like internet marketing or anything like that either. These are niches where. They tend to be pretty niche, actually. I’ve got one who’s in the doula space, working with family members who are, or somebody’s, on their deathbed.

I have those types of people who are running membership sites. I don’t think I’ve got anybody trying to think off the top of my, I don’t think I’ve got anybody in the really big niches. Weight loss or internet marketing, they tend to be in these smaller ones and they’re still doing pretty well, actually.

They are definitely making money. When I log into the site, I can see their income figures and it’s working. So 

Chris Badgett: yeah. That’s awesome and inspiring and honestly, that’s what excites me. Like I love finding these niches and I see a lifter lms, just like you mentioned, arts and crafts.

I can think of 20 different like art and craft things that I never even knew about. That there’s whole, this person has a whole following on. Yeah. Ear. Earlier you mentioned like the. 200 or 100 9990 $7 course or whatever. Sorry. A membership site. You said courses like the the art and craft hobby toys or whatever.

Are these membership sites doing like mini courses, like lots of little courses or what?

David Risley: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: How do they get, how do they get the recurring revenue to keep happening in the membership? Or is it not always recurring revenue? 

David Risley: Most of ’em have recurring or if, or they were. Or they’re gearing up to do recurring.

There are some who were selling things one by one, but they’re like I want to have a cash all membership for recurring, which is a pretty common model. You can get a, it’s like the Netflix model, recurring or you could buy the one on one and it just costs more. So a lot of them do that type of a thing.

Most of them have several smaller courses, not so much one, massive one. And, personally I think that model works better mainly because of the amount of noise we’re all dealing with online. I don’t know if people have the attention span to go through some big multi-module washing hours of video anymore.

The people want the TLDR all the time and so I think shorter actually is a superpower these days. If you can get them from point A to point B and do it in the least amount of time, that’s ultimately what people want. Of the.

They’re just one pagers. It’s just, it’s literally we just set up a custom post type. It’s just, we just set up a one pager because they don’t even need all the structure. And and that was actually something with my site that I started doing a few years back, was getting rid of some, or restructuring them so that I could go more towards short form stuff just because.

People, even in the past people would buy these big courses and the rate of completion was pathetic. ’cause it’s like people just, they buy the promise and then they’re like, I’m tired of this. It’s too much work. You, so you try as a creator to create stuff that’s A, it’s easier for you to make, but B, it’s easier for them to consume.

And that’s the point. 

Chris Badgett: As a web guy on a first name basis, and if, first somebody who’s been in the industry for a long time, I imagine you don’t just get tech questions. People will ask you for business advice around, yeah. Things like pricing or marketing strategies and tactics and things.

What are you seeing with your folks? What are they coming to you for business advice? 

David Risley: Sometimes it’s just for a, somebody to bounce ideas off of. But yeah, sometimes we do talk about pricing. That, that type of one is always interesting to discuss. ’cause every, as I just was going over, I got people in so many different markets and I don’t know anything about those markets.

So how am I supposed to tell them pricing information? But we just we talk it out. And what I find for a lot of people is just talking with somebody else. Helps. It’s not oh, it’s like going to the, it’s definitely not that. It’s just more because I have been in the in business for a long time.

I’ve seen so many other types of businesses that I’ve had my hands on them. When people talk to me, I don’t think they’re looking for me to talk top down and give them the answers. I think they realize it’s a two-way conversation and things can come out of that. And I will give them my experience on certain things if I have any.

If I don’t, I’ll tell them that too. Like these people who are running, my clients who are running physical products, where they’re shipping things, frankly, I’ve never done that. I sold a few physical products back in my tech days, but I used an outsourcer thing and it just wasn’t the majority of what I did.

And I could give you what makes sense, but that’s all it would be. And I’m always p upfront with people about what my experience would be if I don’t have it. 

Chris Badgett: If your client asks you to help them get more clients, what do you tell ’em? 

David Risley: That type of thing. I don’t get into, I’m very, I know where my superpower is and that is the working I say working with the tech stuff, but working with the tech stuff, with a business background.

I’m the, I’m one of those kind of guys who can marry the two things together and create a site that’s actually gonna serve your purposes. But that’s where, what I like to do. I don’t wanna do people’s marketing. I don’t wanna run their social media. I don’t want to do SEO. I know enough where I probably could help them with that stuff.

I just don’t want to do it. And I, so when people ask, I’ll just tell them I, I don’t do that. I probably need to come up with a list of people that I can refer them to. I haven’t done that yet, but yeah. I just don’t wanna do it. 

Chris Badgett: What are you seeing with the membership sites in terms of. Outside of content supporting their members, like with coaching or group coaching calls or email support or community, like what are people doing from the support side for a membership site to support their members in addition to content these days?

David Risley: Yeah, community is definitely one. But. I’m also a fan. As you can see, I basically 100% pivoted into it, but I am a fan of the idea of offering services on top of a membership anyway, because, if you’re looking at it at terms of a funnel, you want to have some higher ticket stuff. And I, selling, from what I’m seeing I’m sure that there’s definitely niches where you could sell high ticket content, but for the majority of my clients.

It’s not high ticket, the content part of it. And so to, to develop the funnel out, you need higher ticket stuff. That’s where the services, the done for you, those types of things. And you can build them into your membership to where they, maybe some things are included, but then there’s upsells and and I think that.

Will increase revenue quite a bit for a majority of memberships because most, even the client in the toy making space, I don’t know off the top of my head if she’s offering a service, but she could almost anything. There’s room for that type of stuff. You just gotta get creative with it, even if it’s just a simple phone call.

Chris Badgett: Do you see like any common pricing, and I know it’s a range and it depends, but $30 a month, a hundred dollars a month, $500 a month, what range are people doing these recurring membership sites? What are they charging their clients? 

David Risley: I’m trying to remember, I’m looking at my list of client sites right now, trying to remember what they charge.

I, but it’s all over the board. I will say it. Overall I’m thinking that recurring prices tend to be lower now than they were a few years back, but that’s just a broad level overview. I don’t have any numbers to back it up. And It’s just what I seem to be seeing. We’re not talking like. Single digit numbers.

We’re talking about, still respectable numbers, but the idea of charging several hundred dollars a month, you gotta be in the right business for that type of thing. It’s almost always under a hundred, usually, down to, 10, 20, 30 range. But again, it just, it depends so much on market.

Yeah. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for nerding out with me, David, on membership sites. It’s it’s always fun to run into somebody who’s been into membership sites, into marketing, into WordPress and serving clients and helping. 

David Risley: I love membership sites. I’ve been a fan of it for even back in my tech niche days.

I was, I probably had one of the first membership sites in that space. It was a little harder space to do because it was so focused on reviews and all that kind of stuff, but. I went for it and I just, I’m a fan of the model. I’m a fan of recurring. It makes for a much more predictable business, 

Makes 

Chris Badgett: life easier.

And there’s so many great tools out there now to, oh, it’s so easy. That I get what you mean by I have fun building sites. Like it is fun. Yeah. And the tools just get better and better. It’s pretty cool. 

David Risley: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, David. Blog marketing academy.com. What’s the best way for people to get into your world?

Your YouTube channel book a call. What, where would you highlight people to go 

David Risley: check you out more? My home base is blog market academy.com. You could book a call if you’d like. That’s more if you want to possibly engage me for I. Some work on the site or look at concierge services.

The best way to, if you wanna just keep in touch, is to get onto my newsletter which is the WP Edge it sends out every Monday, and it’s basically the type of stuff we were just talking about. That’s the kind of stuff that’s in my newsletter. It is a, it’s, it is discussing WordPress of course, but with a business slant to it.

It’s not, we’re not talking about blogging with pet pictures. These are sites that do things and and that’s what I talk about. That’s probably your best bet. And then if the time is right for somebody, they wanted to come in on the other stuff, they always know where to find me.

Chris Badgett: Awesome David, thank you for coming on the show. Really appreciate it and keep up the great work. Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [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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Remkus de Vries, a WordPress performance specialist and strongman athlete, combines technical know-how with a holistic outlook on life and health in this episode of LMScast.

He talks about his curatorial WordPress weekly, Within WP, and his work on performance tools like as Scanfully. Remkus highlights the need to be genuine online in order to encourage feedback and personal development, in addition to fostering connection in a remote work environment that is frequently isolated.

He emphasizes the psychological and physical advantages of strength training and points out that long-lasting habits are formed by constant discipline rather than incentive. He suggests that those who are new to fitness endure whatever discomfort they may experience at first and concentrate on long-term outcomes rather than immediate gratification.

At almost 52, he is still dedicated to strength and health as a means of securing longevity and quality of life, serving as a potent reminder that making an investment in one’s own well-being also entails making an investment in the well-being of people we care about.

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 LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest and friend I’ve known around the internet for a long time. I don’t know how long, maybe eight years, something like that. I remember I first shook Rimkus Dev RISE’s hand in, st. Louis, that’s when I first met you in person, I think.

Remkus Devries: Yeah. I could be wrong, 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. But Rimkus is a WordPress performance expert. He is working on some training, a course about that. He also has a tool to help with that called Scan Fully. So go check out scan fully.com. Also, MKU has one of the few news letters that I moved to my primary inbox.

It’s called Within WordPress within wp.com. If you want to keep tabs on what’s going on in WordPress, it’s a great newsletter. We’re gonna get into all that. But first, welcome to show mku. And I pronounce it wrong, it’s D freeze, so it’s you could feel free to correct me if I mess up again, but welcome to the show.

Remkus Devries: Thank you, man. Happy to be here. Yeah. I think the first time is probably more than a decade ago. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Remkus Devries: For 2025. And in 2015 I was aware of you already. I know that for a fact. 

Chris Badgett: One of the things about that I remember at that word camp, I took my brother with me and it was the first time that I noticed, like when I first started going to some events.

I didn’t really know a lot of people, and then all of a sudden I started realizing that creating content, social media, getting out there there’s people watching and listening, and you it’s just a pro tip to get out from behind the computer, get out in the world, share yourself publicly.

But maybe let’s start there. You share your personal life. For example, rems, and correct me if I’m using the wrong term here. I know it’s not bodybuilding. He’s a strong man. Yep. So one of the things I like about REMS is, you can check out social media, you’ll find stuff about performance and WordPress, but you’ll also see him lifting and throwing and carrying heavy things.

So you put your whole self out there. Tell us about your approach to like just being you on the internet. 

Remkus Devries: So I try not to overshare. Let’s start there. But I don’t know, it’s I think there’s I think there’s value for me as well as for whoever tunes, tunes into me. Understanding what the sort of mindset is behind a few of my choices, the things that I do.

Strongman lifting is one of them. But also performance, right? So there’s, for me, it’s not necessarily that I am like thinking about what am I going to share and what’s my story going to be and how am my angles and all that sort of stuff. But I also have realized that if you share, people will listen and people will re will respond and.

Since we are sitting in our offices online Sure. But, very isolated. It’s just my home office now again, my, my, my wife is sitting in front of me for most of the time. Not that alone, but you don’t have any colleagues around you, right? If you want to have some sort of connection and.

I appreciate connections. Then you have to show that you are there, that you’re available, that you have ideas and thoughts, and the more you share, the more feedback you get. And ultimately that leads to growth. And I like growth. I think I. Personal growth, whether that’s done on the professional side of things or the strength side of things, or the mental side of things, all of these things.

I put an effort in. I think they’re important and thus being online for me is a, is essentially a method, a way to do that. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. And since we’re talking about the strength stuff I’m similar in a way that, I do a lot of hiking and running and getting out in nature and it keeps me sane.

And when I see somebody else like you who’s like outside throwing really heavy things over these high bars, I know it helps keep you sane. But tell us about mental health and just the value of exercise and getting outdoors and how you balance life. 

Remkus Devries: The, there, there’s a saying where where the outcome is the more healthy you are in your body, the more healthy you are in your mind.

I think it’s, I think in Latin we say men in corporate Asana, something like that. But the, it’s a symbiotic thing. So the more you are in fact living in your body, less in your mind, the more benefit you’ll see in your mind and vice versa. So it doesn’t matter where you start really. ’cause if you start educating yourself on exercise, you’ll realize that is the one thing to do for longevity, for a better life, for quality, for better sleep, for all of these things.

I discovered this decades ago ’cause I can say that I’m past 50. One of the things I realized that I like going beyond limits that I see or feel and lifting heavy weights. Or carrying heavy weights or doing anything heavy for me is one of those things that absolutely forces me out of my mind.

’cause I can’t be thinking about how many plate. If you want me to see me at my dumbest, like my absolute dumbest, come join me in my strongman gym. I can’t even count what plates I should put on. That’s. It’s just too heavy. So I’ll be slow in 1, 2, 3, 4 times 25 kilos is what now? That’s 200. The bar is 200, so that’s two 20.

Okay, so then I need two more. Like I can’t do that fast. Like I need to do one or the other. The more I started doing that, the better I started feeling. So I was like, this is pretty straightforward, so why don’t I invest in this? And as it so happens, I am genetically predisposed to be stupid strong.

They turned out to be very heavy at the, in the end. 

Chris Badgett: What how many days do you. Workout or get exercise. For me, it’s every day. I’m, it’s all varied. Some days of strength running fast, slow hills flat, but for me, I to do it every 

Remkus Devries: day, yeah, I’ll walk every day. But working out, I have a minimum of three days a week.

But ideally I’m four, maybe five if it depends on the whole bunch of things. I have a home gym, so I have always room to do something. There’s a gym at two kilometers, which is what, a mile and a half away. So I also, I always have a way to do something and I’m of the opinion that even if I am cramped for time 20 minutes spent is 20 minutes well spent.

So I’ll prioritize that. I’ll focus on that. And, the. The easy part that comes with it is the more you keep doing it, the less it’s about discipline. It’s just habit. ‘Cause for, let me be very forward and straight on with this. It’s not about motivation, it is about discipline.

But if you do discipline often enough, it becomes just a habit. And I think that’s the power of, forcing yourself in your body, finding boundaries and going beyond them. Finding ways, and obviously I’m, I’m also hitting limits. There are certain things I can’t weigh.

I can’t lift heavier than what I currently can, and I probably never will. That’s also fine. I chose not to use any form of enhancements. So I am at my natural limits for some of the stuff that I do, but that’s fine. I can play around with the thing, how I do it or how often I do it, but doing it means I feel better.

Period. 

Chris Badgett: I know for while we’re on this topic, for some people maybe they’ve just haven’t moved in a long time. They’re pretty sedentary and they get the bug, and I know once you get into it, it becomes part of your life. That’s the way I feel about it. But that period between making a change and installing that discipline and habit, what advice do you have to help people get over the initial resistance?

Remkus Devries: So accept that you’re going to be in discomfort for about three to four months. That’s a given. That’s a fact. So your body just needs to understand pain, understands recovery, all of those things. And that’s annoying, but it’s how it works. So if you can mentally on motivation or just sheer will power yourself through the first four months, let’s call it that then the benefits start becoming quite real.

And the rest is making sure you form a habit. Logging, getting a buddy there’s different ways of using something that helps you keep momentum. So I would primarily focus on finding that thing, that will motivate you. Some people will say, lifting weights or fitness or whatever version you pick it’s boring.

It’s just doing the same thing over and over again. What I don’t enjoy that. I don’t think it’s about the enjoyment of the exercise. I don’t think it’s about the reps. You do, I don’t think it’s about any of this stuff. What it, for me, what it’s about is the result. So what does it give me? I’m close to 52 and I can sprint and run and do all the things of guys half my age.

Now that’s worth something to me. I saw a very interesting I don’t know if it was an ad or just a, an interesting TikTok, but the gist of it was you say you die for your family, you do anything for your family, right? And then it showed some some family picks and then it said, but would you actually start investing time in feeling healthy and better because that is helping your family?

Would you put in, put the time in for that? And I was like, that. That’s pretty much that sums it up. I’d like to have the highest quality of life, not just now, but for the next 50 years. So what’s the best way to do that? And what modern science tells us what the data sells. That tells us.

That essentially means you need to be the strongest version you can be. And running is great, walking is great, but strength is where longevity lives. So I focus on strength. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Speaking of consistency and discipline what got you obsessed with WordPress and specifically performance and speeding up sites?

Remkus Devries: So the, what got me into WordPress is basically I wanted to share some stuff that I was learning at the time and I needed a platform and I rolled into it quickly, was asked for friends and family. Can you build that for me? And that turned into a career. But the thing that pulled me into performance I think the, I come from an enterprise background.

Like I, I used to work at a large insurance company here in the Netherlands. And that gives you a different mindset. And with that mindset, I looked at WebPress and as well as the projects that I was doing, and I quickly, I. Rolled into sort of the more complicated types of sites. So when custom post types and custom taxonomies came around, that was heaven for me.

’cause now I can build anything on WordPress. And the first couple of sites that I’ve built had, some of them had 12, 13 custom post types and about double of that in custom taxonomies and everything needed to work together. And I quickly learned that a lot of optimizations we’ve seen in the last two, three years were not available then.

So you needed to work in an optimized version. So the more data, the more complexity, the more. Limits your hitting. So I was forced into looking what are ways that I can do this smarter, faster from the ground up and not after the fact, because building something and having it work great, but as soon as five, six people are on the site and it crashes, you go that’s not really motivating.

So I started Interesting. The, if. Being interested in the concept of if you wanna solve a problem, you need to start at the root. And that brings you to interesting discoveries, not just in WordPress or performance, but in life, I’d say. But for WordPress, that meant I needed to figure out how to build smarter.

And yeah, once you jump in that road, there’s no way out of it anymore. There’s just a smarter way to build. 

Chris Badgett: So what does Scan fully and where did that come from and what does it do? 

Remkus Devries: So Scan Fully is a WordPress site, health monitoring and performance monitoring tool. So our goal, and I’m doing this together with Barry Coy, who’s also from the Netherlands.

And the problem we want solve is. We want to be the tool that essentially monitors anything and everything that has to do with the performance and the health of your site. And so that’s things like op time and certificate monitors. Sure. There’s we pull in site health, that is present in your WebPress site.

We pull that into our dashboard so it’s easier to access, certainly if you have a bunch of sites in there. It’s just easier to navigate in our dashboard than it is to hop from, 30 different WebPress sites let alone hundreds. And, the thing we’ll be adding this year that’s going to make the biggest impact is we’re going to be monitoring for content health as well.

And that’s a very wide concept. So that basically means your broken links, your broken embeds images CSS files, JavaScripts, all the logical stuff. But we also include form validation e-commerce optimization and checking. Can somebody add to cart? Can they check out? And does everything work after an update?

All of these things we’re going to scan for quite regularly and fully. 

Chris Badgett: Nice. You have a course coming too about performance and I know you mentioned getting into the foundations and helping people understand it and all the layers. What are some of the. The first three things people should look at with performance if they want, I want my fa my site to be faster.

I know that’s a hard question for an expert ’cause you’re like, it’s a lot of things and it depends, right? Yeah. But I’m going to cheat a little ’cause I’m gonna add step zero. 

Okay? 

Remkus Devries: So it’s gonna be four things. Step zero is building for performance. Meaning you don’t fix it at the end. ’cause caching is what most people think is the thing that solves performance or produces performance.

But caching doesn’t solve your performance. Caching makes an optimized version of your site. And the optimization can be that it’s a static version of the site, meaning full ht ML caching. You can move that to the edge CloudFlare or many of the other solutions, but you still haven’t solved performance.

’cause what does solving performance mean? That means there’s a cash hit ratio of a hundred percent. That’s never gonna happen and in some cases you may be lucky to get 50%. So depending on your type of sites, especially when you are logged in, for instance, with an LMS. Or e-commerce. You are by definition never looking at cache.

You may have elements that are cached. For instance, your menu, but your site is onc because you, if you are caching your site for a course, then whatever you just did, Chris will be seen by the next person trying to log in and they’ll see your version of the course, which is obviously a no-no. Step zero means you, you starting building for performance now.

I think the key there is, depending on the type of site, you need to be on the right hosting and there’s there’s. There’s a wide range of hosting plans out there for, at different hosting companies. I’m not gonna give you my my preference here, but I am going to say there’s ways of figuring out what per, what hosting company has good and great performance.

And spoiler alert, performance has nothing to do with support. You can have wonderful support, but a mediocre product, which is then looks like it’s fantastic. Not in the edge cases, not in really busy sites which I’m sure you’ve seen happen with your your product in many different ways. So that’s step one.

Your hosting needs to be perfect. Then step two means you need a theme that is a singular purposed theme. Meaning a theme needs to, he needs to have the base principle of wanting to do only one thing and do it well. That automatically means I don’t like themes that wanna be everything. A lot of the themes, for instance, on theme forest, that’s never gonna scale because there’s no optimization happening in the entire code of that theme anywhere, and they just wanna fix the output and cache, which again, back to step zero, that doesn’t solve performance.

And the third would be you have to have the desire to run and lean and mean sight. You have to force yourself to be. Wary of everything you introduce to your site that potentially may slow it down. That doesn’t mean you can’t have 70 plugins. And this may sound weird, but it’s not about the plugin amount, it’s about what they do.

I have clients running sites in less than 500 milliseconds, cached and uncashed that are running more than a hundred plugins. So the size, the number of the plugins isn’t the problem, what they do. Is the problem. So a plugin needs to be built in a fashion where it understands that if it’s not supposed to do anything, certainly not on every page load, it’s not doing anything so lean and mean.

And how can you stay lean and mean? Make sure you use a scanning tool that does it fully 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us like who’s the perfect fit for Scan Fully, which [email protected], and who is a perfect fit for your upcoming course and where can they find that or get on the email list to know what.

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Chris Badgett: When it comes out, if you go to mku d.com/courses, you can sign up for, I have a few courses listed, but my site’s currently in the, in, in rebuild, so I’ll have a better landing page there. But there’s a form there where you can sign up to be notified when the courses go live. But the, the ideal customer is essentially boils down to one or two words.

Remkus Devries: That’s a WordPress professional, and I know that’s a vague word, but it essentially means anyone that wants to treat WordPress professional. So that’s agencies that, site owners that have sites that make money where you rely on it. Working perfectly or understanding the principle. And the performance course probably is focused a little less on the beginner, but I am covering every single layer.

And I’ll explain to you what that layer is. So you have an understanding of what that layer actually in, in, in in its full intent does. So that means. I’ll be throwing things at you like this is your DNS layer, and this is what happens on the DNS layer. This is what your certificate does.

And yes, there are a few cases where you get a wrong version of a certificate, your site will become slower and this is why. So you be are better equipped with the knowledge of, making the right decisions essentially. So I probably less about less super beginner. Anyone who regularly builds web sites or works with them, they’ll have a good understanding from both the course as well as using scan fully.

And then, and I should mention, the best features of Scan fully are up and coming for this year. But I urge you to get in now ’cause the price is as low as it ever it’s ever going to be. 

Yeah, I was looking at that and it’s very reasonable. Speaking of WordPress professionals, one of the things creators.

My opinion really need to do is build their audience ideally in advance as soon as possible. The best day is 10 years ago. The next best is today. Yep. You started a newsletter and like I mentioned, it’s one of the few I follow. I just find it really value packed to the point and writing a newsletter. It really, you’re serving your community.

You’re also building an email list. I know you have. Pretty high open rates on your newsletter, but what’s the story of that? Why did you start it and what would you advise somebody who hasn’t built a newsletter for their community yet? 

The answer to the second question, just start. I. Yeah, don’t wait it out.

Don’t think there will be a better time or I’m better well prepared. It’s the same with kids. There is never going to be a perfect time to have kids. Just have kids. If that’s what you want, ultimately go for it. Same for the newsletter. Just make that choice of where to host it. And you can go fancy and go straight to kit, but you can go, you can do beehive, you can do substack.

It really doesn’t matter. Just start. And in terms of the first answer. It’s, so I have the natural ability to process a lot of information and deduce from that what the thing is to remember here. Whether that’s a multitude of separate items or bringing back something complex to this is what it is about.

And I started sharing this on and off over the last, almost four years ago, five years ago now. And I enjoyed it, but I didn’t have a routine in it. Mostly because it was published on a site and I got less feedback. And at a certain point I realized, oh, people actually like what I digest ’cause it’s essentially my digest of the week.

With the focus of performance, security, and just fun tools, like stuff that you can build. Even cooler stuff on top of what Chris with. And I realized I should bring this to a newsletter I did and, what I essentially do is share stuff I think is interesting or has an a, a different angle from all the other newsletters you see out there.

So I want to have a particular voice and I work at having that voice. Sometimes a newsletter has a few commentaries on my end, and sometimes I basically have something to say about every single item I add. I’ll tell you why I am adding it or if I think it’s a really good one, then I will say that it’s less of a.

There’s a few more newsletters out there that just share. They just post the links and send it out. And I’m less about that. I’m more about quality. And I made a decision to not share specific stuff related to community stuff or drama or any of that sort of stuff.

There’s others that do that wonderfully. I don’t need to have that particular type of audience. I’d like to stay positive. I’d like to build. Stuff I’d like to help people understand what they can do with the platform that drives me, that motivates me, and I try to make that quite visible in my in my newsletter.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned you process a lot of information. I relate to that. I do that as well. I know there’s like a strength and personality type tool. I can’t remember which one called Input. And you can take a lot of input. Yeah. Of information, 

Remkus Devries: I’m an info. Shorter is the best description I’ve had thrown at me at one point.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I think a lot of course creators and kind of content people, but also a lot of people in the WordPress professionals, they take a lot of input. They’re researching technology, they’re talking to clients, they’re just input people. Given all that input. What’s your process from going, from your research of listening to podcasts or RSS feeds or the newsletters you’re subscribed to and blogs and stuff?

How do you translate that volume of input into a newsletter format? 

Remkus Devries: Diligently. ’cause I have a few systems in place, so it depends on where I see the thing that I find interesting. Yeah. If it’s shared on X or blue sky, I turn it into a bookmark. If it’s A-U-R-L-I see somewhere I have.

I prepare all my newsletters in obsidian. So I have a template that is my newsletter, and I essentially copy and paste all the things that I see as I see them. And I, and on Friday I sit down and I take a, an, it’s about an hour, and I process all the bookmarks, all the links that I had in a fashion that it is digestible for someone else as well.

Oh and obviously the I’m subscribed to probably 50 plus newsletters, about 150 sites on RSS. And I’ve always done this, I’ve done this since 2007, so I, for me, it’s just normal to check my systems for information and translate that. What I find interesting into obsidian. So I can then copy and paste it from obsidian into kit and it’s marked down in obsidian and Kit when I paste it just accepts that.

So it’s very little work. It’s basically just me processing the things that I’ve seen. And sometimes I add something during the week that I, on Friday, go yeah, nevermind. And sometimes even on the Friday, I see stuff being talked about left and right and go oh, interesting. I should add that quick.

So it’s yeah it’s a continuous process, 

Chris Badgett: so it’s really just you living your life, getting the information you want. And then about an hour on Friday and you have a newsletter. 

Remkus Devries: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: What about consistency? Do you ever feel like, oh gosh, I have to write the newsletter today, or it’s become a labor of love, or you just enjoy it?

Remkus Devries: I enjoy it, but there’s Fridays where it just doesn’t work because so last Friday I was in in Munich and I was busy all day. So that means no time for this, and I don’t prepare them on, like during the week. I don’t prepare, write them. I process it on Friday. So I have my links, I have my bookmarks, but I’m not complete.

The next morning, on the Saturday morning, I sent out the newsletter. So I’m okay with being flexible like that. And I’m also okay with skipping a week if it just doesn’t work for whatever reason. And I’ve, I have done that in the last couple of months twice I think. And it’s just what it is.

I’m human. I have things popping up on my priority list and there is, there’s companies sponsoring me and I let them know this is the schedule and unless it’s like super important, it goes absolutely out on this day because the campaign is related to it. I’m general as flexible as I can be.

That said, for. I don’t know the per year. I missed maybe three, maybe four top. So it’s it yeah it’s more about I don’t want it to be that I feel that I’m forced to do it, so that means I need to have that flexibility to let one go if if need be. 

Chris Badgett: So that’s it within wp.com, I highly recommend it.

It’s an awesome newsletter. Thank you. And you mentioned sponsorship. I think that’s really cool for a course creator as an example. Sometimes it takes time, as to build a course. Yep. And so if you’re building your email list and maybe generating a little revenue through newsletter sponsorship, how do you get sponsors and what’s your approach to that?

Remkus Devries: I don’t approach it. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Remkus Devries: It just happens. They approach you. They approach me. At a certain point people started asking me can you share some promotional stuff in your newsletter? Yeah, sure. So I sat down and wrote out what I think I’m worth. That’s not right.

And I think I’m worth more, but what the newsletter’s worth. Wrote out a sponsor within WordPress page.

It interesting to share with my public, then I’ll add you to it. And If you ask me to share something, I will point you to the.

Sponsor list. So that means sometimes something commercial is being shared and it’s not sponsored, but it could, that’s my choice. If you ask me, then I choose to ask a compensation for it. Maybe a weird model, but that works in my head. That means I stay true to my integrity and, don’t muddy the water with half type of messages in here.

You’ll see me, mentioned plenty of commercial solutions and I’m okay with that. It’s it’s a little bit it makes sense, right? So there’s there’s, there is advertisers or sponsorships where I say no. This is no match for me. Yeah. But we really want to get in front.

Yeah I get it. But for me, no, it doesn’t work. So I’m selective. I need to like the product I. I need to like the people even. It’s, yeah. I’m weird like that. 

Chris Badgett: I don’t think that’s weird. That sounds awesome. Going back to the personal side i’ve noticed on social media that you like to drive.

So when you go to conferences, as an example, I will watch you fly into a town and then drive across the country. I see you driving around Europe and going through, border crossings. I see you, I think you did one with your son. Yep. And you guys had an adventure. What’s the pull of driving? And I just, I relate to it because I always say if I wasn’t in tech, I’d probably be a long distance truck driver and just listen to podcasts all day.

Oh yeah. Why do you like it? 

Remkus Devries: I’m born and raised inside a family business that had, anything from a gas station to a garage, to a body shop taxi company, car rentals. We did the whole thing. So from the age of three, I know cars and I enjoy a car for what it is. Sure. Transporting from A to B, but I also enjoy the beauty of the car and the, I don’t know the freedom that comes with it.

When it comes to road tripping.

So I like the idea of, so for instance, last, what was October, November I drove to the Black Sea, and if you look up the Netherlands the north of the Netherlands, and you look then at the Black Sea go, that’s a ridiculous distance. Who does that? But I looked at it and went that’s a stupid thing to do.

I should do that. And I enjoyed it. So driving all the way through Bulgaria, ending up at the Black Sea, that’s the largest body of water that I’ve seen. I think. No. May, no. I, no, possibly. Anyway it’s a stupid distance. I was like, that’s cool. Let’s do that. And we, camp Sophia was an option and I was in I applied to speak and I, and they said yes. Good match for Workcamp Europe. The last three editions I drove with my son, so he’s he’s on the photography team. So I drove to Porto with him. I drove to Athens, which also a three day drive and I drove to Torino and we’ll be driving to basel in Switzerland in about yeah. About two weeks. And for me, you can fly. Sure. But I enjoy seeing the roads, the countryside process, the travel and having the freedom to stop wherever I want. So especially in in Switzerland, there’s mountain passes, which I thoroughly enjoy. I’ll drive around.

It’s not that I hate flying, but I just like driving more. When we met last at Press Con, I flew to Miami. Got in the car in Miami, went to Key West first, and then back up all the way through New Orleans. Up to Graceland, went down to Texas, saw Dallas Deley Plaza drove down through New Mexico.

I. Saw the largest pistachio in the world. Super weird but fun. Ended in tombstone for a night and then drove up to Tempe, Arizona. And that was like five days. So it’s long, but I also enjoy it and I enjoy the alone time as much as I enjoy the the, driving with my son. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome.

That makes sense. Being a strong man, working out and also just getting out in the world driving, going to conferences, and what keeps, I think this is, these are all important parts of mental health, so 

Remkus Devries: Totally get it the alone time forces you to. So I just I just got back this weekend from Minchin Munich. It’s a good day to drive. I can do those long hours driving. And I think I’m used to it. That’s one. But it’s also fine if I drive for blocks of three, four hours. That works for me, but I enjoy the alone time. That’s a dedicated time to think about things. I don’t have to force myself to think about it. But I know it’s gonna happen anyway.

You can turn the music on, sure. That’s gonna make it even more pleasurable, but at some point you start thinking about things and that it’s a good way to process thoughts. I do that less in an airplane, for instance. That doesn’t, I’m more like, that’s a lot of noise around me. It’s people way too close.

If I can have the comforts of my own car, yes, please. That’s awesome. If I could drive to the United States, I would. 

Chris Badgett: You might be able to if you go through bearing Strand. 

Remkus Devries: Yeah. I don’t think that is there a bridge or have they talked about a bridge? I think they’ve only talked about it.

Chris Badgett: As far as I know, there’s just like a certain part of the winter, there’s a ice road. Yeah, 

Remkus Devries: we’re not doing that. There is limits. 

Chris Badgett: That’s Rimkus DeVries. You can find [email protected]. Go check that out to speed up your website. Monitor it improve your performance. Also the within wp.com, the newsletter.

Thanks for co coming on the showroom. ’cause any final words for the WordPress professionals out there? 

Remkus Devries: Final words, I don’t know. Stay fresh. Stay fresh. Start thinking about what your foundation of a fast and perform at WordPress site should look like before you need to build it. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for coming on the showroom kiss.

Remkus Devries: Happy to. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [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 Future of Online Education in an Artificial Intelligence World,” Bud Kraus examines how the field of digital learning is changing as a result of artificial intelligence. Bud Kraus, who has worked as a WordPress specialist and educator for decades, emphasizes AI as a potent tool that may improve student engagement, automate repetitive activities, and customize instruction rather than as a substitute for instructors.

Bud Kraus is a seasoned instructor and content developer in the WordPress community, having taught WordPress and web design in person and virtually for more than 14 years. In this LMScast episode, he highlights how AI may be used to develop learning environments that are tailored to the requirements of each individual student while simultaneously posing significant ethical, data privacy, and digital equity concerns. He also has a podcast channel.

Kraus emphasizes the necessity for educators to embrace lifelong learning and responsibly incorporate AI as educational institutions come under increasing demand to modernize in order to maintain online education’s effectiveness, accessibility, and human-centeredness.

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. His name is Bud Kraus. He has a podcast [email protected]. You can also find him [email protected]. I met Bud recently at a conference. He’s a course creator. He’s a WordPress professional, he’s a teacher. We’re gonna mine as many tips, tricks, and strategies as we can out of bud.

First bud, welcome to the show. Hey, Chris, what a pleasure to be here. Now I have a question for you, which I should have asked before. [00:01:00] Yeah. I know you’re recording this, but video two. Video two and we’re live streaming right now While we’re recording. Oh no. All right. Turn this off. No. Just kidding. All right.

Bud Kraus: And I should have asked before, but what the heck now I know. Alright so thank you for having me on too. This is really nice. 

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Absolutely. Take us into your past like you were a teacher and I think one of the things, particularly in the LMS space, sometimes entrepreneurs get excited about information products, building courses, selling courses, and a lot of people pull it off with no teaching background.

But teaching and instructional design is like a fundamental skill. Tell us your history as a teacher, some pro teaching tips, and then how you’ve used that when you’ve created courses in your life. 

Bud Kraus: Boy, that’s such a great question, and I think that’s one of the fundamental things about before you ever start doing a course, if you can get some [00:02:00] real live in class, that’s a rare thing these days.

I know in class teaching experience, I think you’re gonna be. Better off in the sense that when you teach a course, at least my experiences, it’s so important to be prepared that you have a beginning and a middle and an end for the entire course and for each lesson. And that you do this a number of times, meaning semesters or years teaching the same material, tweaking it as you go forward.

So that. There is a method to your, the way you do things and that you understand it and that you’ve tried it out on people and you’ve gauged a reaction as to whether or not they’re learning. And once you have all that kind of experience, then I think it’s a good time to do an online course. Now that’s.

That’s not how the real world works. I understand that. But that’s how my journey went with online teaching, which is I did things live in class first, and [00:03:00] by doing it, then you really become an expert and authority on the subject. It makes it so much easier to create the content for the course.

It really is because basically you already have it and then it’s just a matter of putting it together in however you do this, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. But so I was, I felt very fortunate that I went that way. It wasn’t planned, but lucky that it did. 

Chris Badgett: We call that the experts curse, where you got this knowledge, but you need to figure out how to teach it or coach a student and get feedback and improve stuff over time.

What was the subject matter you would teach on? 

Bud Kraus: The only things I really ever taught was H-T-M-L-C-S-S and WordPress. I never, I taught a little bit of Dreamweaver, but if you can remember what that is, I’m sure you might, but I, I taught a little bit of that, but for the most part it was just good old fashioned coding back in the 2000 OTTs, because that’s really the way people made websites.

[00:04:00] And most of my, I was teaching in New York City, most of the students were coming from graphic arts background, so I had to deal with. A group of people who were not believing what the web, what the nature of the medium was, which is not, it’s a text-based medium and it’s really not a graphic medium.

I know there’s pictures and I get it, all that stuff, but at the end of the day, when you’re looking at the source code, you’re not looking at pictures, you’re looking at text. So I had to convince a lot of people, Hey, this is really the way to do it. Don’t just insert a flash video here. Let’s do it. Let’s play to the strengths of the medium.

I know that, people don’t always, at least in those days, they didn’t really like that. But, I had to convince them. A lot of ’em really were not believers. I was talking about resizing and this and that and, and not pixel. I, not setting things by pixels. And it took a little bit of doing to tell people, no, this is the way to do it.

And it, ’cause they just weren’t believers. They didn’t [00:05:00] see, they didn’t understand the medium. And it took a long time for people to. Understand the nature of responsive design is really what I’m getting at. But anyway, that’s neither here nor there. I guess 

Chris Badgett: on the other side of teaching is learning and I’ve been around WordPress, I think about 17 years.

It’s been a long time and the, it’s changed a lot. And I’m not a developer. I can’t write ht ML and CSS like you can. 

Bud Kraus: I felt 

Chris Badgett: like when I found WordPress, I was like, oh, this is something for me. I know you can customize it with code, but 

Bud Kraus: Right. 

Chris Badgett: I could build websites without knowing a line of code and I just fell in love with it.

How do you think WordPress is different now in terms of if you’re, if you were teaching somebody how to use it, what would your approach be? 

Bud Kraus: That’s a great question. I certainly could go on for a long time, so I’ll try to truncate my my answer here. I think overall, since I’ve been teaching WordPress since let’s say 2012, [00:06:00] 13, I think it was easier to learn then than it is now.

Yeah. It’s just become more complex. I know it’s not supposed to be, the idea was make. Complex things simple, and I think they made complex things complex. It just seemed a lot easier to stick a word processor into a CMS, which is what WordPress was in those days. And. Let the user, the creators, decide how to extend and modify their experience.

Now it’s, no, we’ll basically give you the experience and you’ll just have to adjust. And that with the block editor, and I understand the philosophy behind all the stuff. So like I said, I can go on for hours talking about this, but as a practical matter, as somebody who’s taught all this through the years, it’s harder for people to learn WordPress today in general than it is.

10 years ago. It just is. And I regret saying that because I don’t think that was the intent, [00:07:00] but as somebody who has seen in the field how this works I think it’s just true. It’s actually harder for me sometimes to work with word WordPress and I forget how things are supposed to work or how they work or they don’t work or, yeah.

There, I know this is the year of. Taking thing, no more major releases. And I’m hoping that there’ll be a lot of that polishing, they keep talking about fixing things that need to be fixed before moving on. So hopefully, this will be the pause that refreshes kind of year.

’cause we need it. 

Chris Badgett: You’re also a writer. I think writing is a super skill like. It. Communication and writing is everywhere. It’s not just writing books or blogs. Everything’s writing from emails to figuring out a plan, to making a video, it’s all writing. Tell us about your, write your journey as a writer.

Bud Kraus: As you say that, I’m thinking like, yeah, but, and here’s the, what the Yeah. But’s gonna [00:08:00] be. I think, up until recently, I would say writing is the number one skill of today in this era of in the age, in the digital age. But now I’m not so sure anymore because of ai and it’s still important.

But boy, I use AI all the time for different things, and I’m starting to wonder, where is my future now? I’m not 25 years old, so I don’t have to think about it. A long runway here, but I do write, I write for web hosts like Kinta and hosting, and I’ve written for GoDaddy and others, and we’ll continue to write until they say, we don’t need you anymore.

However, I learned recently, they still seem to think they need me, which is really nice. Which, because right now I still think the human touch of writing, you can still read the difference. Okay. I can pretty much tell AI from human and I love it as an assistant. I think as an assistant [00:09:00] it’s tremendous giving me ideas, fixing this better that answering questions, but I can’t.

YI, I just don’t want, we’re gonna come to a day where, you’re just gonna you gonna write a blog post. I guess we’re already there. You write a blog post, write a blog post about Bud Kraus and done, I, I don’t know what’s what is the value of that?

We, are we gonna lose that too, on the other hand? Who, where is all this ai? Where are they learning all this stuff from people who re, who write. So it’s a, I teach chat, GPT it teaches me. It’s like that we’re in that phase right now. And I am discovering all kinds of different ais, not just chat GPT, I’ve used cursor ai.

I am using this video animation AI now. These tools are great, but I fear that they are going to replace us. I’m sorry, I just do [00:10:00] you know, what do you think? Can I ask questions on the show? Is that okay? Yes, 

Chris Badgett: you can. This is what happens when you interview another podcaster. They come back around, which is great.

Great. Yeah, I’m definitely with you on where’s the source material, as a person who’s been podcasting for a long time, I. There’s 500 hours of transcripts of this podcast alone that wow. An AI could just Sure. Probably already has scanned and put into the language model.

I think at least for the medium term writing is still important for communicating to the ai. And I think about the difference between writing a. Prompt that says something like, Hey, make me an online course about x versus going into detail like, Hey, this is my avatar.

This is what I already know already want to teach. What are the gaps? And then having an iterative back and forth. You still need to be able to communicate, but I [00:11:00] think it, it does create it does give me concern, but it also, I find myself as a writer. Not being lazy, but there’s like a pool of laziness in the sense of even when prompting, like not correcting spelling errors and just 

Bud Kraus: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: The desire or the tendency or the inclination for shortcuts is there. Yes. And I think that’s dangerous territory. And like you said, polish, even if AI is helping, like the human polish on top really makes it awesome. But where we’re gonna be in six years? I don’t know. No, I that I’m not even so sure.

Bud Kraus: I really can’t tell you in in two years. It’s just I, it’s such a it is, I think to me, and, it is the biggest shift, change, whatever, however you wanna describe it important. Revolution. I don’t know. In my life. And the funny thing is I’ve lived long enough. You could have said television, radio, [00:12:00] no cell telephones.

No. I’m not that old. But all these technologies which come faster and faster, and they’re more and more important. We felt like the web was like, oh my God. What could ever be more important than this? Wrong. What’s gonna be more important than a, I don’t know.

This sort of seems like the end of the road here, but No, I don’t know. I think, there’ll be human teleportation one day. Okay. That’s big, if that’s possible. Everybody’s, so I’ve heard it’s impossible possible. I think it’s possible, but we don’t know how to do it now, obviously, but, so wouldn’t that be a groundbreaking thing?

Yeah, I think so. So you don’t, techno, we don’t reach the end with technology. We’re just, there is no end, but this certainly is like any, and the stakes here get bigger and bigger. Like the web that’s really good. It, but it also could be dangerous.

Look at AI really good, but boy, could this thing be dangerous? It seems yeah. You, as these technologies get more pervasive, important, predominant in our lives. [00:13:00] You can easily see that we the good is really good and the bad is God only knows, I mean with ai, cancer, this, that, and then who knows with the bad.

So I don’t even wanna think about it. Anyway, where were we? So can we, let’s talk about creating courses. That’s, ’cause we were talking a little bit before and I wanna talk about that. 

Chris Badgett: Is that okay? And just dovetailing into ai. Yeah. One of our company values at Lifter LMS is learner results first.

So like we build software for people, building sites and stuff, but we always think about the student and their experience. It’s like our primary concern and related to ai yeah. How do people learn? Like I myself find myself using Google less and going to AI to learn something. Particularly if it’s something custom.

I think a great example is instead of going to a recipe blog like, Hey, I [00:14:00] wanna make cur curry chicken tonight. And I can go to the AI and be like. I have this much chicken, these are the vegetables I have, make me an awesome recipe. And it’s so custom and customized. I think that the AI tutor is gonna be helpful, but I have hope that the human in the loop will always add value.

But our job description might change as course creators or becoming more like coaches, but what are your thoughts? 

Bud Kraus: Here’s the 

Chris Badgett: thing, 

Bud Kraus: and I’m thinking as you’re bringing this up, which is. I like to learn new stuff too. Would I take an online course to learn JavaScript or would I just have, she GBT, teach me whatever I wanna know about JavaScript?

The answer is probably the latter. Now, do I need to know JavaScript like a programmer? No. But can I like, just like parachute into part of JavaScript, learn that and pull it out and use it? Yes. So I think that course creation and the kind of things that you do, [00:15:00] that’s. I could see that’s a real problem.

If I was creating a course today, you know what the answer is, I wouldn’t probably be creating a course today. Now that’s pr. Now I say this because number one. Everything I could create has been done 10,000 times already. So why do I need to make something that’s been done? The last course I made was on using the Gutenberg block editor.

This was about 20, 21 or so, maybe 2020, I don’t know. And I went around to everybody in WordPress. What do you think of this idea? I went around to course creator. Oh, that’s a great idea. We need it. Blah, blah, blah. Nobody needed it. Nobody needed it. It wasn’t, yeah, I didn’t market it very well, but nobody really needed it because they could already Google stuff and they already, before ai, and it was just, and there was, there were also fundamental flaws to what I was doing that really doomed this thing.

But as far as creating a course today. I think when I write an article on, let’s say an in-depth look at theme JSO, I think that’s a way, [00:16:00] that’s a form of teaching. So that’s the way I teach today, is I write like a long article for let’s say Kinta, and you’re reaching God knows how many people and hopefully they, they think it’s valuable to their customers.

And that’s teaching. It’s different. And you’re probably teaching and you’re definitely teaching. The ais, that’s a really good point you brought up. Made me think are we writing for humans or are we writing to teach or enter, the LMS, the LM ls, right?

Learning, is it large? What is it? LLMs large language models. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah are we teaching that or are we teaching humans or we’re doing both, or what? So it’s really a time of such change in the world of education, which is, the broader sense of what we’re talking about. And I just don’t know, i, I, there’s, like I said, for the example I gave is perfect for just a little piece of something, but how about becoming an expert in [00:17:00] something? Would that work? When you have a course, you have guidance, you have somebody who’s thought through the beginning, the middle, and an end. If you’re just using chat GPT. It’s a hit and miss.

If you’re trying to learn something big for. I’ll give you a, for example. If you were learning CSS, where would you start? I don’t know. And I give that as an example ’cause in 1998 or nine when I was just first learning it, I dive, I didn’t know where to start, and I dived into the deep end of the pool and I got confused.

I got turned off. Of course, the browsers weren’t supporting CSS very well, and I just didn’t look at CSS for another two or three years because. It because I started out at the wrong place. A course online that’s well thought out will guide a user in a way that, a student, in a way that I don’t think AI can do it now and give you the whole picture of what it is that you need to know.

So there’s still value, yes, in courses [00:18:00] when I, just thinking out loud here, but as time goes on, I think it’s gonna be tougher and tougher for course creators. It just is. I’ve said to my wife, I don’t even know if I need to have a tea. What’s gonna happen to education? Are we gonna need teachers anymore?

When you can just learn a lot of stuff by just learning how to use the learning, how to work with prompts. That’s like ridiculous, again, good and bad. 

Chris Badgett: I’m 

Bud Kraus: optimistic. It’s extreme. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: I’m optimistic. Because at least in the past, disruptive technology usually opens up new opportunity, but an evolution is required, and this is a very confusing one.

I remember when I fell in love with WordPress, just this idea that I could build a website. I’m not a developer, and I could anybody anywhere in the world with the internet connection could see it. 

Bud Kraus: Yeah. I fell in 

Chris Badgett: love with that idea, but I didn’t at the time know. Oh you can extend this platform and turn it into web applications and all the stuff that happened after that.

We can’t always see where we’re going, [00:19:00] but I’m optimistic that new opportunities will be there, but we have to evolve. And the other thing you mentioned, you talked about parachuting in to JavaScript or whatever, right? There’s a framework I, a friend of mine said there’s just in case education and then just in time and.

Sort of, there’s an argument. The traditional education is a lot of just in case here’s the library of stuff for you to put in your head. And then there’s just in time, which AI is really good at is Hey, I need to know how to fix this plumbing problem right now. Or it’s like right now, right in the moment.

Bud Kraus: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But also believe there is a benefit to. What some would call liberal arts education with, where you’re like studying broad topics that like, don’t, they might not help you get a job per se, but they’re helping shape your mind. And this goes back to the laziness thing I was talking about.

If we, if everything just becomes just in time [00:20:00] prompts stuff and ai, like what does that do to brain for brain development? I. Yeah, if the AI is smarter than us and we get super general, super intelligence and all that stuff, how are we humans gonna feel? And we should still probably develop our minds, 

Bud Kraus: that’s the scary part of the, of our, it’s one of the scary parts of the future of this is that we just don’t know. Nobody knows. I don’t care who you talk to. They don’t know nobody. How could you know? Some people seem to know, I. Probably have a better insight than I do, that’s for sure.

But with certainty, I know it’s very hard to rethink in a profound, fundamental, complete way. I. The nature of, let’s say, learning and education going forward? It’s, we have, what’s really cool to me is that, your brain can only hold so much data, right? So most of the data we now use and hold is external.

It’s outside of us. [00:21:00] It’s like the thin client concept, right? It really is. Do you remember that term thin client where you know you didn’t need a hard drive basically? I don’t hard drive in there. Can you explain thin client? Thin client. Really. I think the first time I heard of the term was I, micro Sun Microsystems was using it in like the 1990s.

Okay. And I couldn’t quite figure out what, maybe that was a skinny person or something, but thin client, it refers to the fact that this was really early thinking is that all the data would be online or in the cloud, or however you wanna put it. And not stored in your local computer. Okay. And your local computer is, thin would be just a very small, hard drive.

And essentially that’s what we have today. So your brain is like the thin client because you can’t store that much in there relative to what is out there. And knowing that means. I’m conscious of that, so why do I have to learn this stuff? Why do I have [00:22:00] to learn like almost anything now?

I could write what’s really cool or maybe not, is that I can get an assignment and I do. I take on writing assignments and I look at this and go, I don’t know how to do, I don’t know how to use multi, I don’t know how to use W-P-C-L-I for multi-site. And then I start getting into it and I say, oh yeah, you do here.

Ask check GPT how this works. So I have enough of a foundation, a vocabulary to build to the next step. But what happens if I don’t have any foundation? I don’t know the answers to those questions. If somebody just threw me in and said I don’t know, react, okay, here, do something with react.

I don’t know if I could navigate my way through that with ai. I should try that to see I. Can you, can I come up with something useful in a, with a, some kind of programming language that I do not know anything about? I. Huh, I probably could, which is like, why do we need developers?

And developers aren’t losing, he, Hey, a really smart guy. Now I give this credit to Marcus [00:23:00] Burnett, but he’s not a really smart guy. So then Marcus and I are very good friends. But said to me, Marcus said quite a while ago, he said, it’s. It’s not, it’s like you’re not gonna lose your job to ai, but you are gonna lose your job to the person who knows how to use ai.

Yeah. And then, and Marcus didn’t say that. He said a smart person. I always, and that’s true. I find that right now, if you’re a dev develop, if you’re almost anything in some kind of information world like we are, if you know how to use ai, you’re about to become obsolete right now. If you’re not already.

Me going into AI is just a natural evolution, and it’s funny, people my age, they come up to me and they say, Hey bud, you know anything about this AI stuff? What do you think it’s gonna last? Or what? So I just roll my eyes and go, huh, okay. But that’s, I know, but retired people and stuff like that, they don’t need to know.

They don’t want to know any of this stuff. I’m just the opposite. I just wanna know [00:24:00] all can me. ’cause I’ve always been into science fiction and technology and I’m not going anywhere anyway. Oh, can I get back to something I was thinking of about, yeah. When we started in the beginning about creating courses and stuff, at least having the experience of teaching and writing, because the first courses I ever created were.

There were no videos. Okay. It was all text and you had to write out everything. So it was like making a simple website, and I had to create the entire. Every chapter built on the next chapter and got harder and heard all that kind of stuff. Then there was a project and, but you weren’t there to explain it, so you had to write everything out, which was really an interesting experience and very time consuming.

My first course that I taught online was called, I believe it was called Intro to HTML. It was, there was no CMS, it was all whatever I could make by hand. And students would upload their files. They would upload their files in a system that I reviewed the files manually. I would look at the code and say it’s good or not good or whatever, and I got paid.

Now that was a tho that course was marketed through adult education systems around mostly New Jersey, New York, Connecticut. ’cause they didn’t have anything else and they wanted to offer this stuff. To their, adult education program. So that was, that lasted a little while. It wasn’t gonna last forever, but the time it took to create that, today it’s just a lot faster to create stuff because we have lifter LMS and stuff like that.

So we have a lot of choices now, but before, I’m just, my word of advice to anybody who’s thinking of it. Creating a course is to plan all this stuff out in advance. Don’t start the course first. Come up with your title. Come up with your chapter heading, subheads everything. Just do a huge outline [00:26:00]and then start filling in and know we’re gonna start here and end up over here.

What is the goal? What do you want people to be doing during the course? After the course? What’s the takeaway? What are your expectations of a teacher? For what the students should know, not just what their expectations are, what do you expect them to know? And then you can build a course around that.

So 

Chris Badgett: whatever I think about writing, let’s say writing a book or a blog post or something, right? Yeah. I like to use the framework writing is three parts and ideally equal parts of research, writing and editing. So course creation is the same, slow down, don’t just tell the AI to make me a course about x.

Bud Kraus: Right. 

Chris Badgett: Do a ton of research. You’ve been doing it your life, if it’s your subject matter expertise, but Right. Dig a deep, see what else is out there. And then creating it, polishing it. And then editing is also, I. Come back and improve it. I’m sure you improved your HT ML course over time, right?

Yes and no. 

Bud Kraus: And the reason why I say yes [00:27:00] and no is because it didn’t change all that much. Like a tag is a tag and attributes and values, they’re pretty much, after a while, they got pretty well settled out. With this HTML, then we had X-H-T-M-L, back, H TM L. It wasn’t terribly changing. But here’s what’s different now than back in the day, is that we have different ways now to communicate that we really didn’t have.

In 2001, 2, 3, 5, 10, whatever. You’ve got video. You’ve got better ways to do screenshots and animation and AI animation. And God, you could do avatars, you could do all kinds of engaging things. Now that I just, I couldn’t do, I would’ve thought about it, but, I didn’t know Camtasia then.

I didn’t know. So there’s so many different tools that we have to communicate. To make and I, and it’s it’s now here, here’s the other thing too. If you’re creating a course, you know what I just said might be just totally bewildering, right? What? I have to learn all this stuff. Number one, no, you [00:28:00] don’t learn only what you need to know, but trying to learn something that’s gonna have broad application.

So you don’t wanna spend a lot of time learning something that you’re just gonna use a small bit of time that will only do a very small little thing for you. Okay, that doesn’t make any sense. So I always look at something like, Hey, once I master this thing, like I know Camtasia pretty well. What else can I use it for?

If I need to do blah, blah, blah, whatever. It’s, oh, I could use Camtasia for that. So you’re building, so don’t try to think of I need to learn everything ’cause you don’t, but choose wisely and stick with industry tools like Camtasia, snag it, stuff that people are using.

Don’t try to do like one of these little knockoff things that aren’t really as popular. They’re popular for a reason ’cause they’re really good. Yeah, you don’t, like you don’t have to learn Final Cut Pro and Premier and Camtasia just Camtasia really is as far as screen capture video goes, it’s probably, what do you think?

The gold [00:29:00] standard here? 

Chris Badgett: Probably. Yeah. Camtasia, the script is coming up with its AI tools. Yeah. I’m a screen flow guy with a Mac oh, yeah. 

Bud Kraus: There you go. Screen flow. Yeah. I don’t know it, but it’s certainly well known. Yeah, but the thing is like if you are new, you want to, explore these tools and then settle on one and get a license or whatever. I’m doing that right now with this animated AI stuff, which is I look at a whole bunch and I go, that’s the one I wanna use. And it’s not is it, are other people using it? But it doesn’t, I don’t know.

It’s just that you don’t have, don’t worry. You don’t have to master everything. It’s just not, it’s not important. What you do have to master is a really good outline of your course. I think that is so important, and that either you. Here’s another thing, and Chris how many, how does your system work?

Do you have anything built in for feedback? That is, is it easy for students to [00:30:00] tell the course creator, Hey, this was good, or I didn’t understand this, or like a whole feedback loop. Is that built in by any chance? 

Chris Badgett: We do. We have a lot of ways We do that with like a. Like a private coaching thing where there can be a private conversation we have.

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Okay. Comments and forums and, okay. We also do a lot of education showing people how to [00:32:00] use form plugins and things to create feedback loops. We have assignments and quizzes that have remarks and things like that. But yeah, feedback is, I think, such an important part of learning and that’s something that humans.

Can do, AI can give feedback, you can have an AI tutor or whatever. But that real, I think that’s the sign of a true master teacher is like realizing that not all students are exactly the same. They have challenges. You gotta adapt.

Bud Kraus: Yeah. And the other thing is it’s great to get feedback that says, Hey bud, this course is really great.

All right. Everybody loved everybody. Testimonial. That’s a testimony. That’s right. But it’s the ones that dropped out after the first lesson or second lesson. What happened? Maybe it may it may have nothing to do with you. I, my father died. This, that, whatever. But if it is something that, Hey, I got stuck, I didn’t understand.

Okay. Was it just, did we market it incorrectly? A lot of times, people say, oh, [00:33:00] I didn’t know you were gonna do the, that’s very important in the marketing is that it’s clear what it is that the person is going to learn. Because I’ve seen where either I took a course or somebody took a course from me and said this is not what I was expecting.

Yeah, the marketing is really not just imp not just in terms of getting the information out, but in being very accurate as to what it is, that you’re selling and you are selling, so how do you think I could ask you a million questions? How, if I’m a course creator, I was a course creator, what is the, what’s a good way, do you do anything, does your system have anything built into concerns like social media and marketing, or is that just something that’s totally outside out of the bounds of what you’re, what you offer? 

Chris Badgett: We have like viral loops built in where somebody could share like a certificate to social media.

Okay. We do a lot of [00:34:00] education around marketing. So like in, in my view one of the best content marketing things you can do as a course creator is help people for free with a free mini course around some topic that really sets ’em up to be a perfect fit for your paid program or whatever.

Yeah. And 

Bud Kraus: can you do like a, can a course creator do a try before you buy kind of thing? Or not. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we have a integrated e-commerce system. We also integrate with Woo, but we have our own Stripe and PayPal, but you can do like free trials and set up all kinds of access rules for how long and when and what the payment’s gonna be and stuff like that.

And do you, 

Bud Kraus: Now I wasn’t expecting, I don’t care. This is the way it goes with me. But do you is this available in the WordPress repository and obviously there’s a pro version or it’s just, pay version? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we’ve always been big fan. Our company mission is to lift up others through education and to democratize learning in the digital classroom.

[00:35:00] So our 

Bud Kraus: That’s good for you. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Our free core plugin is extremely powerful and 80% of our people are just using the free LMS which helps people get started and get moving and Sure. And it’s very powerful. Every time we do a release of updates, we’re always adding stuff to the core and then focusing on some of our paid add-ons and things.

Now 

Bud Kraus: is there, do you guys have a course. I think you do. Maybe I misunderstood about how to market your course. 

Chris Badgett: Yes. We have lots of courses. So we have we have a quick start course, which is how to like it covers like what you’re saying. Don’t teach ’em everything. Like we show the 5% of okay, this is how you set up the site, this is how the system works and all that.

We did a web, like a, we brought in some guest experts and did a. And did some content ourselves to help people, [00:36:00] show people how to go from zero to 10 enrollments, because when we looked at the data, we realized that if people had at least 10 enrollments, their platform was gonna stick and they were gonna stay around.

So that includes a lot of like marketing help and showing people like what works to get students and stuff like that. Yeah. 

Bud Kraus: Because your success is based on their success in the sense that you want them to renew their licenses. Exactly. So obviously and that’s like the way that this works.

So you want them to be successful. 

Chris Badgett: The, yeah. I think one of the most important questions a course creator can ask is who? Who is this for? ‘Cause we have our subject matter expertise, right? And this goes by many names, like the ideal learner, customer avatar, things like that. 

But that who question if anybody is either struggling or has a modest win or a runaway success, I think that who [00:37:00] question is fundamental.

Absolutely. So learning about that. I wanted to tie that who question into something you said earlier. 

Bud Kraus: Before you do it, let me just stick something 

Chris Badgett: in 

Bud Kraus: and hold on to that for one second. Okay. That is the who question is the fundamental question, and if you teach it in class, you’ll find out who the who is because you’re, you’ll be talking.

Yeah. Like 

Chris Badgett: when you were telling me, my course creator, brain’s going okay, he got graphic designers in, they didn’t understand the web. They’re inserting the flash videos like. I just naturally do it. I like form the avatar that Bo was dealing with, but that’s easy to do in a classroom. 

Bud Kraus: It’s 

Chris Badgett: much harder on the worldwide web.

Bud Kraus: Absolutely. And because, I knew it was graphic artist and then eventually it turned into some more writers and then it turned into people who were working in offices. They needed to manage their websites for their boss. And after a while I knew exactly who the, who was that I was creating.

Of course. And when you’re sitting writing it, you’ll say does Susie so and so under, she can understand what [00:38:00] you’re talking about here. So you know your audience. Yeah. Okay. What were, what I sidetracked you so I’m sorry. 

Chris Badgett: No, you’re good. This is the magic of two podcasters talking to each other.

We the danger you mentioned, I think there’s some hope here in terms of what’s AI gonna do, and what I mean is we’ve been through technological revolutions before and history doesn’t always repeat, but it rhymes. And if you think about the industrial revolution, right? A lot of people left the farm and went to big cities with the emerging, industrial jobs and also the beginning of the white collar kind of knowledge economy worker.

And when somebody comes off the farm and they show up by you over in New York City, what do they say? They say, oh wow, the world’s moving really fast. It’s really busy. I don’t know how these subways and all this public transport.

Yeah. [00:39:00] And it’s like overwhelming. I think that’s where we are with ai. And it’s, it is really busy. Things are changing really fast. But a new economy emerged through industrialization and the rising middle class and the white collar and all that. But here’s the scary part, but also the opportunity, which is junior level job positions are the first things replaced by ai.

So we would often use, let’s say a junior web developer at a software company to get on board, learn the ropes and stuff. But a lot of that stuff’s going to ai. 

Bud Kraus: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So what has to happen, if we go back to the who question, like what’s a high school graduate to do these days? They needed a way to figure out how to leapfrog and like.

You mentioned you like science fiction when Neo plugs into the matrix and gets the download [00:40:00] about combat. Like you, and also what you said earlier, I’m just tying this all together about, oh, I can, I actually do know how to do multi-site from the command line. I just had to get in here and tinker.

And this is a particular learning style. Called kinesthetic where we right now with ai, the people that have a kinesthetic learning style and just kinda learn by doing, they have an unfair advantage to like that. 

Bud Kraus: Good to hear. 

Chris Badgett: It’s just an observation because that’s what people are doing.

They’re just figuring it out. But the point being and this is the challenge. There’s a giant class of education like. Young adults and whatnot that are scared the entry level jobs are being automated. But then I tie it back to history and look at what did the young people do when they came off the farm?

In many ways, they adapted a little, maybe easier and quicker to the city than the [00:41:00] older person who lost the job and then had to go figure out how to hang in the big time. But there’s gotta be something with. In education by helping kids just adapt to the new world and and because there can also be, just like with industrial machines, there can be much greater output, but that’s scary and you gotta learn how to.

Leverage all these machines and technologies and stuff like that. But you 

Bud Kraus: know, as you’re talking, I’m thinking, all of these changes that came about from farm industrial, from agriculture to industrial to information, the pace just gets fast as we know. And these disruptive events, technologies.

Whatever be become faster, closer, and closer together, more disruptive. I thought we just disrupted everything with e-commerce. Now what? I’m shaking my head. I can’t, I, and now I have kids that [00:42:00] are, they should, they, it’s no wonder we are.

As a society, as a world where we are today with a lot of confusion. Yeah. Because it’s just, this is, a long time ago and there was a book called The Third Wave written by a guy named Alvin Toffler. This is 50 years ago or so, and it’s really funny. My wife isn’t really into this kind of stuff, but when I met her, we were both reading that book and that’s not the kind of book she reads.

It’s the kind of book I read and. It was all about where we are today, the inability of human beings to process and understand rapid change. This is what he was talking about 50 years ago. Wow. And 50 years ago or 40 years ago, we didn’t even have fax machines. These things come and go in the blink of an eye.

When fax machines came in, oh, this is great. You know this is, could be here forever. It was here for 10 minutes. When you live as long as I have, things come and go [00:43:00] so fast. Now that, you think okay, digital has to be the end here, right? Yes, but I don’t know.

When I used to have records and albums and CDs and tapes and all that kind of stuff, I don’t have, and I’m moving, I don’t need any of that stuff anymore. Who I used to collect and who. Who knew we were gonna have digital, you don’t need it. You don’t need any of this junk anymore.

So whatever. I think that’s the fundamental. What I’m saying is it’s very hard for people in general and including me, to a adapt to such rapid change and understand your place in the world and how you can be effective. It’s very hard. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I heard something funny on a podcast the other day.

You don’t know much of my background stuff, but I used to run sled dogs in Alaska and I managed a tour business that you could only get to by helicopter on a glacier. Yeah. I was listening to a podcast where somebody was having a [00:44:00] discussion similar to what we’re having about ai and they were talking about what’s the future opportunity.

And they’re basically saying human experiences where people go outdoors and, be in nature and remember what it’s like to be human. I’m like, I just, that’s where I came from. We’re going back there and it’s it’s just interesting though. So but there’s gotta be, the human will still need things, but the needs are gonna change.

We just gotta figure out what that is. And sometimes it’s analog, like getting back to the great outdoors. Other things might be like psychologists to help people deal with, exponential technology and overwhelm and stuff like that. Yeah, but you’re right. It’s interesting because it think you’re correct.

The crux of the issue is the rate of change, not just the change. 

Bud Kraus: Right. 

Chris Badgett: And what is 

Bud Kraus: things is the rate of change, right? 

Chris Badgett: And the human processor up here, you can’t upgrade it. Like [00:45:00] it only, it hasn’t, it doesn’t change like technology changes. So let’s just say it this 

Bud Kraus: way. The shit stays in the queue, 

Chris Badgett: okay?

Yeah. 

Bud Kraus: Can you swear on the show? I just did. Okay. But yeah, but that’s it. It’s just it’s like a, it’s like a printer, it’s just in the queue and it gets backed up and stuff. Just, you just go on overload and that’s where things are. And it’s, I don’t think we as species can.

Comprehend any of this stuff right now. Really. I think we’re all, I’m having trouble just thinking about it maybe it’s just me, but I think we all have, we’re all struggling with this, not just, I know, because I talk to a lot of people and I see that everybody struggling with this Hey, can we talk about my podcast?

Is that okay? Yeah, 

Chris Badgett: let’s 

Bud Kraus: do it. 

Chris Badgett: Talks about Seriously, bud. Oh, okay. 

Bud Kraus: All right. And you’re gonna be on it. ‘Cause you got some good stuff already with the dogs in Alaska and all that. So seriously, bud is a podcast I’ve launched February 29th, 2000 and [00:46:00] I. 1424, I’m sorry, 2024. And every Friday I drop an episode featuring an unexpected conversation with somebody in the WordPress community.

So we don’t talk shop, we don’t talk WordPress, we don’t generally talk about any, it’s really a show about nothing. So we just talk about the guest life, their story, where were they born, what did they d where did they live? What was it like to do so and whatever. And it’s just. It came from when I left Word Camp US 2023.

Were you there? You were probably there, right? 

Chris Badgett: Which one was that? Where were you? Yeah, I was there. I was there. 

Bud Kraus: The freezer bowl. It was really freezing in there. Yeah. Yeah. And the vendors were like, 30, miles away from the Yeah, we know. Anyway when I left that I was thinking, I was in an Uber and I was thinking like, boy, wouldn’t it be great if I could just speak with.

Chris badge it a little longer, ’cause I just waved to him and I just saw for a second I thought, that guy’s kind of [00:47:00] interesting, and, but there’s just no time because you’re like in a, you’re like a pinball. You’re just like bouncing from one person to the next, and you’re having a great time.

But it’s just like I, and so I thought yeah, why don’t you do a podcast and just talk to them about their life story and not like. Something that they’re marketing and developing. Now that stuff gets in there a little bit, but I just try to keep it out because I, because there’s lots of podcasts that talk about product and marketing and community and stuff.

I just wanted to focus on the person that I was talking to, like a real conversation about their life really. That’s what I was looking for. So turns out, I was thinking about it and I said, oh, I don’t think there’s anybody that’s doing anything like this, and turned out there wasn’t anybody that doing exactly this.

Maybe something similar, but not exactly. And I never, I, let’s just say this, I never thought I would be a podcaster. The podcast came looking for me, so it [00:48:00] wasn’t like I was sitting around gee. I should have a podcast. No, it didn’t go that way. And I’m sitting in the car thinking like, I don’t even care if I ever get any sponsors.

I don’t care if anybody listens to it. I just wanna do this. And then after a while I said, yes, I do care if people listen. Yes, I do care if I get sponsors ’cause it takes a lot of time to do this. And even though I love doing it. I wanna get paid to do it too. And and so there I am. So I’ve to, tomorrow will be episode 58 and I use the script, which is something I had to learn.

I didn’t know the script, but a lot of other things I basically already knew because I’d been on podcast before. And the fact though, that I am doing a podcast, go ask Bob WP. Bob Dunn. ’cause for years I would say to him, why would you do a this? I would go up to him all the time and go, pop, why are you doing a podcast?

This is crazy. This is I don’t understand why you, why people do this. And then you know, [00:49:00] now you know, I understand why. And once you start doing it, and if you love doing it, it’s just really hard. It becomes your life, and look at how many show, how many shows have you done? Just crossed 500.

And Rob Karens, I did his 400th show. And, but it turns out there’s a lot of podcasters in the WordPress base. I’m not. Do you have any idea why? 

Chris Badgett: My theory is that WordPress people are above average in terms of creativity content creation. We also work remotely, so like we get a lot out of online media, but also just connecting with humans and we also look beyond.

A company, which is what I love about the angle of your podcast. Who are the humans here? What’s the backstory here? I think that’s a wonderful angle. 

Bud Kraus: Yeah. That’s what I like. I’m addicted to stories, yeah, we 

Chris Badgett: all are. That’s how it makes us human. I have a background in anthropology and storytelling.

Is as human as it gets, right? [00:50:00] Yeah. 

Bud Kraus: And I had no idea about this stuff. If you told me like what happened in 2018, I’ll tell you a real quick story. I took a trip, a train trip on Amtrak around the United States. I circumnavigated the United States on Amtrak, and I stopped a different cities and. And I was never, I never fell alone because I was constantly interviewing people wherever I went.

Now, I didn’t, it was, they were conversations, but I would sit with somebody on a train all night long and talk about their childhood. I. And the stories I heard were on one person to the next were just mindboggling. And I started realizing like, oh my God, these are just regular people. This is nothing like, and they all have these incredible stories.

So I didn’t leave the, that experience thing like, okay, I’ll do a podcast. No, it just stayed in my head. And then eventually it met up with this. 2023 thing and I said, oh, do a podcast. You’re ready to do this. So you’re like [00:51:00] made to do this. And it turned out I, yeah, I was made to do this.

It’s really funny that at a later stage in life you can find something that is your calling, that you just did not know. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, sometimes it finds you right. 

Bud Kraus: Yeah, it, this absolutely found me. ’cause I, like I said, I wasn’t exactly sitting around wondering should I do a podcast? Because if I had done that, I said, no way.

So it’s a big surprise, you know that it is. And you’ll be on the show for sure. I can’t tell you what year, but you’ll be on the show. 

Chris Badgett: Alright. That’s seriously bud. You can find [email protected]. It’s Bud Kraus and also Joy of wp. Any final words? Yeah, any final words for the folks or any other way to connect?

Bud Kraus: Joy WP is the business side of me, although the podcast is it’s business too. Yeah. But Joy WP is the easiest way to [00:52:00] reach me, and I hope you will because always like really cool to, meet people this way. And, the really cool thing about what we do is we actually do meet people online.

We’re all experts at, I can name tons of people that are friends of mine today that I met online first before I ever saw them in, in person. Which is really extraordinary when you think about it. I think it is, 

Chris Badgett: whatever, and that’s just to close it out. And that’s one of those unforeseen things where this disruptive technology actually increased human connectivity in a way, which is 

Bud Kraus: amazing.

Good point, because I tend to think of social media as not social media. It’s not really social, but when you use it to make strong connections and friendships and business connections and whatever, and then you meet them and stuff, that is that’s the ultimate, or reconnecting with people, that’s the, like all this stuff has such big trade offs, good and bad.

So that’s it. 

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, bud. We really appreciate it.

Bud Kraus: Chris, thank you so much for even asking me. It was a real, it was a real pleasure.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [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 latest LMSCast episode, Chris Badgett reintroduces Mark Westguard, the creator of WS Form a robust and adaptable form-building WordPress plugin.

Mark Westguard, the creator and principal developer of WS Form, a robust and developer-friendly form-building plugin for WordPress, founded it. Mark and Chris explore advanced applications of forms beyond the typical contact form, emphasizing their potential to improve learning websites and streamline intricate workflows. With over 150 customizable templates and more than 90 integrations, WS Form allows users to connect with platforms such as Mailchimp, CRMs, Make, Zapier, and others.

No matter if you’re gathering leads, organizing quizzes, carrying out surveys, developing calculators, or generating WordPress posts from form entries, WS Form offers dynamic features that streamline configuration and enhance flexibility. No matter if you’re gathering leads, organizing quizzes, carrying out surveys, developing calculators, or generating WordPress posts from form entries, WS Form offers dynamic features that streamline configuration and enhance flexibility.

Additionally, Mark describes how WS Form can create forms dynamically depending on third-party connections, such as importing Mailchimp lists and automatically creating mapped fields, making the process very user-friendly. This episode is jam-packed with tips for WordPress experts, site builders, and course developers who want to improve the way they utilize forms to engage people and optimize workflows.

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 return guest. His name is Mark West Guard. He’s from WS Form. You can find [email protected]. It’s an incredible form building system for WordPress. It has a free version, which is awesome, and we’re gonna dive deep into forms and blow your mind about all the things you can do.

But first, welcome to the show, mark. Hey Chris. 

Mark Westguard: Thank you for having me again. Good to be back. It’s been a while. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it has been a while. I see. I saw you in person recently, but it’s been a while since you’ve been on the show. That’s 

Mark Westguard: right. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Mark Westguard: We usually 

Chris Badgett: see each other at a work camp. Yeah. Seems like a once a year or twice a year.

That’s right. Let’s expand the minds of what’s possible with forms. People know there’s contact forms, there’s a email newsletter or lead magnet sign up form, but what are some other, just at a high level, like what, just rattle off some other ways people can use forms on their website, particularly for.

Learning sites, but really any site. 

Mark Westguard: Yeah. You’ve got your user contact us form, like we just discussed, which is super easy to set up. We’ve got templates for that. But other things like newsletter sign up and what’s quite important is obviously getting that data stored somewhere so you can use it.

So if you’ve got an email marketing platform that you’re using or a CRM platform. That’s certainly something that we can cater to. We have 90 plus integrations now. And a few of those integrations are things like Make or Zapier where you can actually connect to hundreds of other different platforms.

So we’re integrated in with those as well. And then you’ve got things like. Creating custom posts in WordPress is possible. Calculators, quizzes, all kinds of stuff. So the list is pretty much endless. I think we now, we’ve got a hundred, 150 plus templates. Some of those are static, so those would be like, it’ll just create like a qui, a quiz for you or a survey.

But some of them are dynamic. So some of our templates are dynamic and such that you would, to give you an example, like if you were connected to MailChimp, for example it’ll show you your MailChimp lists in the templates. And then you can choose one of those lists. Click on one of those and it’ll actually build the form for you.

So you’d. Really don’t have to do a huge amount of work. It’ll just put all the fields in, map those to MailChimp, and then you just have to add that to a page on your on  your site. So yeah lots of different use cases. 

Chris Badgett: I think one of the biggest questions that we try to answer on this podcast for course graders and also the web professionals that build sites for the e-learning industry 

Is how do I get clients. One of the ways you get clients is by having lead magnets. So something that somebody opts into. Yep. But there’s, you can get creative with it. Like in the early days it was, it’s like an ebook or sign up for a newsletter.

Some digital thing. But I think the calculators are really interesting. I’ve seen people do things, particularly if they’re teaching business 

Where they have some kind of business niche and they have people like type in some variables. Hey, if you go through my program.

And how much do you think your thing would sell for? And yeah. How many people on your email list right now and I’m like a business coach. 

Mark Westguard: It 

Chris Badgett: can calculate like your potential ROI from joining the program or something like that. Tell us a little, and you have AI to help non-professional form builders like. Get a start on building the form. So tell us more about calculators. 

Mark Westguard: Yeah. We have what are called calculated fields. So you can basically add any number of inputs to the form. So this could be number inputs, they could be maybe a range slider. If you wanna make it like a nice user interface for it you can put prices in there and then use the calculated fields to combine those different values and come out with an output.

And that output could be. As simple as a number form, or it could be even just some nice HTML. So if you want to use your skills and design skills to make something look really pretty, we can actually inject the output into HTML. And then you can make it a really nice looking calculator. Like you said, you could have a, maybe someone that’s got a course that will save somebody, X amount of dollars per unit you could be able to calculate it around that.

And then just on the point on the ai. We have AI built into WS form where you can actually type the type of form that you want, so you can literally talk to it as a human. Almost a five-year-old child tends to work better. But just type in what you want, so you type in the type of calculator that you want, and it will then build that form for you with the calculations ready, and then you can use that as a basis for your form and edit it and make it responsive and make it look any way that you want.

So yeah the calculator thing can be a really good way to entice people into purchasing your product. ’cause they can see instantly the kind of savings or how much money they’re gonna make as a result of using that course. We have a lot of people doing that actually. 

Chris Badgett: Can you do it in a way where they have to submit their email address before the calculation reveals?

Mark Westguard: Yeah, you can do that. So we have. A thing called email validation in WS form. So they can type their email address in. That could be step one. You can then send them an email and say, click here to, check out the calculator or download the free guide, or whatever you’re offering as part of step two.

We’ve also got tabs as well, so if you wanna do a tabulated. Experience for the user. You could have step one, be the email. Step two could be the actual calculator itself. You can even hide those tabs. So it’s, they’re not expecting that. Step two one of the things that we try to educate people on is.

Try not to make the form too long or appear too long, right? So by breaking that up into steps that can really improve conversion rates on the forms and on those forms as well. We have a lot of tracking features as well, so if you wanna know where people are coming from, you can do UTM tracking.

You can even do iP geo lookup on stuff so you can see what country they’re coming from, al almost down to, the town of where they are. And all that data can be stored alongside the email address that you’ve captured. You can even push that data through to what, whatever, CRM or whatever email system you are using.

So obviously you’ve gotta put that in your privacy policy if you’re capturing that type of data. But that’s all possible too. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and just a super advanced pro tip out there, lifter, LMS, as an example, has geotargeting coupons. Oh, cool. So that, yeah. If you’re doing a price localization strategy where, in certain parts of the world where their purchasing power is. Much lower than where you are. You can figure out where they are in the world, just with the form and then later give ’em a special offer. Yeah. Geography. Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great idea. Tell us about quizzes and stuff. ’cause one of the ways quizzes can be in courses and things, but they can also be lead magnets, like 

What’s an example of quiz that you could do where you could capture an email? As well and provide some kind of value through the quiz. 

Mark Westguard: Yeah, quit is come in so many different flavors. Some can be just, ask, asking questions and seeing whether they get the questions right is a challenge.

Others can be recommending some kind of output based upon parameters that you’ve put in. So you could ask a series of 10 questions and then work out which of those has the majority. And then almost like a knowledge based system where, you’re asking questions and it’s giving back a recommended answer based upon what you’ve put in.

And a lot of that in WS form is done with our conditional logic. Also calculated fields, but we have conditional logic in there. So you can say, if this, and this has been answered, then show this message or show this HTML block that has some information on it. Our conditional logic is.

Incredibly powerful. A lot of form plugins will have, if this value equals this, then show this field. And that’s pretty much as far as it goes. But with ours you can do, calculations, you can work on ranges, you can check multiple, like radio buttons or check boxes to show certain things.

Really the sky’s the limit with it in terms of what you can do with it. But we have some example quizzes in our templates, but I’ve seen some really cool stuff done. Like Kyle from the admin bar if people are familiar with him he’s done. All the quizzes and stuff that he does now with Ws form.

So he does things like like the survey that he gives out to web developers, and then he then publishes the results from that elsewhere. I’m trying to think of some of the other stuff that he’s done. He’s done so many and I usually end up helping him with them. ‘Cause I’m the nerd that knows all the buttons to press yeah.

But that’s, it’s a great way of enticing people to your product or whatever you’re selling by having some kind of. It could be a fun quiz or it could be something that gives value add. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you could even do lead scoring,

I know as a copywriter the number one question a website should answer is, will it work for me?

The prospect is wondering, will it work for me? So if you had a form that was like a quiz to help see if you’re a good fit for what’s on offer here. You could have the conditional logic and potentially scoring and stuff, and based on their inputs it could recommend and also notify you like, Hey dude, you have a really hot lead right here.

This person’s a perfect fit. 

Mark Westguard: Yeah. And that score, again, can be pushed through to your email marketing or CRM, so you can score them and use that to determine who you’re gonna target first.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. How does surveys work? I’m asking because. There’s a little bit of not confusion, but it really takes your a while to wrap your head around the differences between things like a review, a testimonial, a survey.

Like how do you think about surveys of WS form? What do they do?

Mark Westguard: Usually you’re just gonna have a series of questions that will be presented either with like radio buttons or check boxes. It’s important for people to realize the difference between check boxes and radios as well. Yeah, we often get people using ’em in the wrong place.

But checkbox, essentially you can choose more than one. Radio, you’re gonna choose one option. And a survey you would probably use, gonna use a series of radio buttons on there with different questions and answers. And then behind the scenes you could. Score those give them different scales and you could even add those values together.

So maybe you’ve got a question with three answers and you know that this answer is gonna be. The best weight, you might give that a score of three, and then the least one will be one. And then you can just add up all those values and then using our calculator fields. And then you can then use that as a indicator for that lead in whatever platform you’re using for, for who to target.

Again, it’s entirely up to you how you wanna lay that survey out. You can use things like the radio buttons. You can even use images. So if you wanna have images that people click on, that’s possible. You could have a rain slider. All kinds of different user interfaces that you can use to survey people.

And if you want to get just general feedback as well on that survey, maybe just wanna ask a general question at the bottom. You can put just a text area filled so you can capture some content from that user as well. So you can use a combination, any combination of fields that you want. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And all those field types and everything.

It starts opening the mind of how powerful WS forum can be for just data. That’s what I realized The power forms is it’s an opportunity to collect data and there’s all kinds of data and what you do with it. Tell us about, 

Chris Badgett: Go ahead. 

Mark Westguard: No, sorry. It’s interesting how sometimes forms get forgotten about on a website and how important they are, because really they’re.

Your main channel for capturing data about a user. Whether it’s a potential user or someone asking a question on your site it’s important to get those forms right. They’re often overlooked.

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Yeah. And you can use ’em for almost anything like 

An example I’ve seen a lot in the e-learning community.

Lifter, as an example, has its own e-commerce system. But we also integrate with WooCommerce and one of the reasons we recommend WooCommerce. Is when somebody is selling other products besides courses and memberships. 

But a lot of times people will say, oh, I’ve used WooCommerce. It’s complicated.

I don’t want all that. I just need a way to sell my t-shirt. 

My swag store for my brand or whatever. Yeah. That goes along with my courses. You can use a form for that. Can you walk us through how to set up like a simple payment form? 

Mark Westguard: Super easy. So obviously decide what you wanna sell. Maybe it’s a, let’s say a t-shirt.

You can add options on there for choosing a t-shirt size. You maybe you’ve got different prices based upon a particular attribute on a product. So you can actually use what’s called, we have a price check checkbox. We have a price radio, we even have a price rain slider. So you can adjust the price of the product.

Yeah. You can adjust the price of the product with user interface elements like that, that ultimately is gonna give you a price, right? It’s really as simple as dragging a stripe field onto the form wherever you want. And that’s gonna be where they enter their credit card details. And then you put a stripe checkout button on there where again, wherever you want on the form.

So you can drag and drop these components where you want them. Put your. Stripe key in you’ll have two keys. There’s a test key and a production key, or a live key. So when you’re testing, you use the the test key and you can use test credit cards to, to make sure everything’s working okay.

And that stripe. Field basically becomes a gateway for that form. So nothing’s gonna run on that form unless the payment goes through. And as long as the form is validated, IE, they put their email address incorrectly, they filled out their name and all the other required information that you need.

So it’s really a case that’s building a form. Add the strike button and then just set up whatever actions you want to occur when the payment goes through. So that would be things like showing a message to the users to say thank you for the order. Sending them an email as a confirmation, sending you an email confirmation so you know the orders come through and saving that submission as well.

And it’s important to know that if you use our payment methods, we don’t store any credit card information at all. That’s all handled by a third party for security. So yeah, it’s quite straightforward. It saves you having to, install WooCommerce for such a simple sale. But if you’re looking at things like, product variations and order tracking and all that kind of stuff, then you’d probably want to look at WooCommerce.

But for a simple sale online maybe given a donation or buying an event ticket or where, whatever it may be, then you can certainly do that with WS form. 

Chris Badgett: I’ve seen it too in the LMS space for people want to put an application in front of the course. And application form is something that. A lot of us are familiar with in the offline world.

And sometimes there’s an application fee, like 30 bucks or 50, a hundred, whatever it is. 

So you can do that too. You can put a wall up. So not just anybody can apply. Apply. You wanna make sure they’re a good fit. 

Mark Westguard: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: Yep. 

Mark Westguard: And you can also tie in a user registration with that as well. So once they’ve, if you had maybe a payment gateway, you could say, if the payment goes through, then register the user. Make sure we’ve captured their name maybe any other fields that lifter LMS requires as part of that information. And then you’ve got the user registered and then you can redirect them to lifter LMS to carry on the process. Yeah, you could use that as a gateway if you need a larger application form.

Chris Badgett: And sometimes those forms. There are some privacy issues or terms in the agreement. I remember my mind first being blown with the whole like, oh my gosh, I can sign a signature on a website. 

But tell us about the signature and then, privacy confirmation, agree to terms yeah. Stuff. What’s possible? 

Mark Westguard: Yeah. So you can add a signature, fill to a form. That signature fill can actually be any size that you want on the page. So obviously you wanna make it big enough they can put their signature in there. And that’s actually touch compatible as well. So if you’re using a mobile device, they can, I feel like that’s easier to use your finger than using a mouse.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Mark Westguard: And you obviously for accessibility, that can be a problem. So you usually wanna offer a text field input as well, where people can just type in their name. So you can offer that as an alternative. And the next level with that is there are now services which do consent certificates. And what that does is as somebody is filling the form out.

It’s actually recording what’s going on that screen. It’s big daddy, right? But yeah. As you are filling the form out and you do the signature, it’s recording the cursor position, it’s recording what they’re typing in, and when they hit submit, you’ve then got actually a visual recording.

Of that consent that they’ve given. And in some cases, certain laws require that type of consent now so we’ve integrated in with a company called Trusted Form that does that, and that’s built into Ws form now. So there’s no add-on or anything that you need for it. So if you are a trusted form customer, you can just drag the trusted form element onto the form.

That’s pretty much it. I think as long as you’ve got trusted form installed on your site, we’ve actually made it fully automated. It’ll even work with multiple forms on the same page as well, which a lot of them don’t. So that’s, it’s it’s quite a cool new feature. We’re trying to keep up with all the regulations.

That are going on behind all this stuff and all the laws that are involved. And as these new products come out, we try to integrate with ’em and make them available. And we try to make it available as part of the core product. So the signature field is included. You don’t have to purchase an additional add-on for that.

That’s actually WordPress core sorry, WS form core. And so is the trusted form functionality as well. So that’s all included in the product. 

Chris Badgett: Nice. Open our mind to post management and how forms and posts can interact. That’s 

Mark Westguard: a big part of what we do. So you’ll be familiar or maybe not familiar with.

Custom field plugins in WordPress. So those basically enable you to add custom fields to a post in WordPress. So you might want to build a post and let’s just, I’m trying to think what it might be. Maybe a recipe and you want to add some fields to that recipe post, such as, here are my ingredients. Here’s the methods, and maybe here’s a picture of what it looks like in the end.

So with Ws form, what you can do is once you’ve got those custom fields created, and you might want to use something like a CF, it’s a CPT, there’s pods, there’s the there’s jet engine, the six that we support. So what happens is if you go into our template library and you click add, you go to post management, and then you choose your custom post type, we’ll actually automatically detect that you have custom fills installed.

When you hit that form template, it’s gonna build the whole form for you. So it’s actually gonna add an ingredient field, it’s gonna add a method field. And it’s gonna add a file upload field for the recipe image. And when you preview that form, you can fill the data out. On the form, hit submit and it will then automatically create that recipe post in WordPress for you.

You can even make an edit form as well. So if you want to give people the ability to edit that recipe, they can click, edit, go to the form change anything they want, and then Ws form will update that post for you. So we have one of the things that we’ve really focused on is we’re focused on kind of the developer community quite a bit in terms of.

Reducing the time that it takes to build forms. Traditionally that whole process would’ve been fairly cumbersome. ’cause you would have to create all the fields for the custom fields you’ve created. You’d have to do the mapping manually. And then we also have, and I think you may remember this, Chris, we have that populate feature in our debug console where you can, if you’ve got a field with, sorry, a form with say, 20 fields on it, having to fill that out every time.

So then submit. Yeah, when you’re testing it’s cumbersome. So that was one of the first things we ever developed for WS form was the populate feature. You hit populate, it fills out all the fields for you, even signature fields, and it’s one click to test the form. So that makes things a lot quicker. So yeah, we’ve done a lot to cut down that development time for sure.

Chris Badgett: I see you have a PDFs ad on PDFs are popular in LMS sites for all kinds of reasons. But how do you see people, how does that work and what’s an example of how people use that? 

Mark Westguard: Yeah, some people want to send maybe a PDF receipt with a submission, or they just wanna create a PDF document where you inserting different fields within that PDF document.

So [00:23:00] by default. You can attach a PDF to a form submission, and we just have a, like a basic template for that, which is like filled value, field value. But you can fully customize that PDF if you want to. So you can use an HTML template. You can add images to it, logos, lay it out however you want, and then use our, so we have a.

Hundreds of variables that you can use in WS form to insert fill content or your blog name or date and time and things like that. So you can make that PDF template dynamic. That’s awesome. 

Chris Badgett: And just from an example we used earlier, so you could do like a PDF receipt for the t-shirt and the Exactly.

And and just to put you on the spot, ’cause I’ve had this support request many times a lot of courses. Help people come up with a plan of some sort. Okay. It could be like a business plan. 

It could be a like a customized fitness plan or something like that. Is it possible with WS form to.

Kind of work on a form, but not complete it all at once and then at the end create a PDF of the finished product. 

Mark Westguard: Yeah, so there’s two parts to that. You could create a form that they can save and continue and come back to. So yeah, that’s. So we have two ways of doing that. You can either do it cookie based, so if they’re sitting at home on their computer, they can hit save and then go away and then come back and continue.

And we also have an email method as well, so you can send ’em an email with a link and they can come back to their form any time. And then at the end of it, when they’re ready to submit, so we, I’ll save and submit are two separate actions, so you can do whatever you want when they hit save. You could even send ’em a PDF when they save.

But then usually you probably send a PDF on submit when they’ve actually completed the whole process. You can even add a progress. Field to your form that shows how far they’ve got. That’s calculated in several different ways, but the most popular is how many required fields they’ve completed.

But you can also do it based upon how many tabs they’ve got through. So they’ve got  an idea of, how much further they’ve got to go with that form. So yeah, you could do, say we continue, even in the PDF itself, you can actually put we have, if. End if variables in there. So you can actually switch parts of that PDF on and off based upon what they’ve answered in that form too.

So you can make that fully dynamic. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Right after we get off this call, I’m gonna email the guy who’s been hitting me up about this for a long time, because I’ve found it. We’ve, you found the man. I have in my notes, but I don’t remember what it was in reference to. I wrote down Google, dude does that.

Oh yeah, 

Mark Westguard: yeah. So we have, we’ve got integrations with a lot of different Google APIs, so for example, Google mapping. So if you wanted to show a map on a form, you can do that. That map can also be made interactive so people could click on it to show maybe where they live or where they want something delivered.

So that’s possible. And then we also have a Google address field, which enables that. The Google address field’s actually really useful if you’ve got an address field. On your form so people can start to type their address out and then choose their address from a dropdown. You’ve probably seen that on forms before, and then you just click your address and that will then fill out the relevant fields on the form.

Ours is quite cool because you can map any of those address elements to any number of fields on the form. So if you have maybe a billing address and a shipping address, you could have it fill out both at the same time. So you don’t have to fill things out twice. And then we have Google routing as well, which is our newer one.

That’s pretty cool. You can put a start address and an end address in there. The end address could be your business and it could be hidden. So they just type in where they live. And what they can do is use that routing to calculate the distance between those two addresses, and then that can be tied in with e-commerce fields to then work out a cost for that distance.

And that can then be tied in with the stripes. You see how you see where we’re going with this? You can tie all these fields together to do cool stuff, and then you can charge people for. Whatever you wanna do with that. So the route, it basically gives you distance time. It even plots it on a map if you want to show you the actual route that will be taken between those two, two locations.

So we actually have some, like delivery firms that, that use that type of stuff. But yeah. And then what else have we got on Google? There’s the Google map. Feel. We’ve discovered that. Yeah, I think that’s pretty much everything. Obviously we have Google recapture and stuff for spam. And that’s a whole another part to this.

Making sure that your form doesn’t get, spammed too much by the unreasonable is out there. So 

Chris Badgett: I see you have fresh desk. I think like with coaches and course creators, if they’re providing support you can have a contact form, but you can get a little fancier. What’s, 

Mark Westguard: yeah.

Chris Badgett: What can somebody do to create a sort of a support area on their website that’s a little more than passing to email handoff? 

Mark Westguard: Yeah. So if you’re using a support system such as like Zendesk or Freshdesk. You can use our integration with those platforms to actually get the ticket put directly into that system so you’re not having to take the email copy and paste it and put it in as a ticket.

The other nice thing with that is you can also tie in with fields such as the priority. You can also do file uploads too, so you can attach file attachments to the ticket. So if somebody wants to send you a screenshot or an export of some kind, they can attach that to the. Ticket itself, and it’s all done in one click when they hit submit on that form.

So that’s, I think any way you can cut down steps, any way you can make support easier and making that form easy. The other nice thing you can do is once they’re logged in, say they’re logged into lifter LMS. You’ve already got their username, you’ve got their email address, you’ve got their first name, their last name.

You can inject that into the form so that they don’t have to fill the information out. They can change it if they want to, but most of that support ticket can be completed for them. All they’ve gotta do is type in what they need, hit submit, and off it goes. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. This is super cool. I think we’ve done our job of getting people excited about forms.

I find it, whenever I talk to someone like Mark and I get deep into forms, I’m like, oh my God, there’s so much you can do. And like it’s the, you can just be as creative as you want to be. It’s really amazing. 

Mark Westguard: Yeah, and it’s the challenge with the product is to make it. Broad enough that it can handle a lot of different use cases, and that’s basically what our job is as a form developer, is to make sure that functionality is there for you.

And then we also have, WordPress hooks, filter hooks, actions. The ability to run WordPress hooks when the form is saved or submitted, or even, we actually have the ability, like you could have a button on the form that when you click it, it goes off and does. An action via PHP if you want. So it is, there’s a lot of, more complicated methods that you can use behind the scenes to make the form, do whatever you want.

But we’ve tried to make the vast majority of the functionality that you need. Super simple. So it’s, a few clicks to, to make it do what you need to do. And we’ve got a lot of functionality built in, such as select two on a select field, which enables you to like partially type in what you want from a long list, and then it’ll give you suggestions that traditionally would require some custom Java script which a lot of people can’t do.

It’s it takes a bit of research to do that. So in Ws form it’s a checkbox and you just check it and it does the work for you. 

Chris Badgett: Nice. And if you wanna play around with this, ws form.com has a demo. So tell us what they experience in the demo. 

Mark Westguard: So it’s it’s actually run using Insta wp, which is a really cool service.

That spin basically spins up an entire server for you virtual server, which has WS form pre-installed on it. And you’ve got like the post management add-on that we spoke about. There’s a few other add-ons in there that you can play around with. WooCommerce is actually installed on there as well.

’cause we have the ability to put our forms on products so you can customize products. So yeah, there’s a lot of functionality built into there. I think it’s a 14 day  trial so you can play around with it. Any forms that you build, you can export and then put into your own server when you’re ready. So anything that you play around with, you can actually migrate that across very easily.

Yeah, give it a go. 

Chris Badgett: And you’ve got the the pricing on your site. So there’s different options to choose from. Where do you recommend people to get started 

Mark Westguard: if they, so there’s three different levels. There’s a personal one, which is a single site license, and with that one you can buy the add-ons all cart.

So whatever you need. You’d have to buy them all at once. Then we have a freelance license, which is a fire site license, and that includes some of the most common add-ons that people use. And then we have the agency. So if you’re an agency user and you have a lot of sites, you can use our agency edition on unlimited sites, and that includes all of our add-ons as well.

So that one’s the real value add package. But if you just start it out, we actually have a light edition as well, so if you just wanna try it for a contact us form or building. Like a basic questionnaire and things like that. The light edition is pretty cool. We’re one of the few freeform plugins as well that actually stores all the submissions and enables you to export them.

Yeah, some of the freeform plugins don’t actually enable, you have to pay to, to get that feature unlocked, which is crazy. And all of our. Anti-spam measures like the recapture, the H capture, the CloudFare turnstile, the honey pot, all the usual stuff you expect to see. That’s all included in the light edition as well.

But if you want the more powerful features like the conditional logic, the signature fields, the, all the other fun fields that we have, the e-commerce the ability to create posts and integrating with third parties, that’s in the pro edition. So that’s where you wanna look. 

Chris Badgett: Every website needs a form solution.

WS form is awesome. Check it out. Mark, thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. And now my mind’s spinning about, oh my God, I want to go build something in WS form and I’m thinking of my afternoon projects. But thank you for coming back on and appreciate all you do at WS form. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you besides ws form.com?

Mark Westguard: Yeah, so there’s contact form on there, but if you can check me out on Twitter, I’m on there at West Guard, W-E-S-T-G-U-A-R-D. Ws form is at WS form. And then we’ve also got a Facebook group as well. So if you wanna join in the conversation there, we’re on Facebook too. Awesome. Thanks for coming on, mark.

Yeah, thanks for having me, 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 Beyond Basic Forms – Advanced WS Form Techniques for Your LMS with Mark Westguard appeared first on LMScast.

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In this LMScast episode, Matt Medeiros shares all the tips about podcasting WordPress. Matt Medeiros highlights that the success and longevity of a podcast come from genuine interest and care, not just from treating it as a marketing tactic.

With a history of involvement in the tech and open-source communities, Matt Medeiros is a veteran podcaster, WordPress expert, and digital media strategist. Matt highlights the difference between this and hosts such as Chris Badgett, who truly appreciate human connection and see each episode as a chance to learn, develop, and interact in a significant way with others in the WordPress, online learning, and entrepreneurial communities.

Matt additionally notes that this authentic approach causes the work to seem less like work and more like a creative endeavor. When podcasters focus on their curiosity and the desire to serve their audience instead of solely measuring downloads or ROI, they naturally expand their “luck surface area”—the potential for unexpected opportunities such as partnerships, new ideas, and customer connections.

Podcasting then becomes more than just content; it becomes a platform for personal branding, business development, and long-term impact. According to Matt, those who focus on the art of conversation and consistency, rather than just results, are the ones who truly succeed in the podcasting space.

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’ve got Matt Medeiros, he’s back on the show. I think this is number three. This is a special episode. This is episode number 500 LMS cast, started in 2013. Here we are 16, or what? I’m doing the math wrong. I can’t do math either. What’s that? 13 years later, which is amazing.

Matt’s been podcasting longer than that. We’re gonna talk about the power of podcasting, celebrate this milestone, talk about personal branding benefits of [00:01:00] podcast. But first, Matt, welcome back on the show. 

Matt Medeiros: Chris. I’m glad you haven’t got sick of me yet. I’m happy to be here on this milestone episode of yours.

Big round of applause. Is folks like you that. I actually really look up to for that dedication and also for numbering your episodes. Oh, because that’s something that I’ve just never done. But we can talk about the why in, in a little while. 

Chris Badgett: Let’s start there with dedication.

To me, I feel like podcasting is quote, easy. I tend to do commitment well, like I do things over a long time. But when I discovered the medium, it just works. And I get a lot of value out of talking to people. I become a better communicator. I’m doing marketing, I’m creating content, building my network.

But mostly it’s the personal connection and being able to connect with people all over the world who have similar interests. And we’re trying to serve, course creators, WordPress professionals, coaches, and these folks. And to me, it’s just fun. I don’t wanna say it’s. Quote, easy, but it just, it’s not that hard.

And just to get one done a week it’s not that bad. But What are your thoughts on commitment and consistency and just the podcaster DNA? Because I almost feel like I discovered oh, this is, for me, I actually, it’s easier for me to podcast than it is to write and make YouTube videos, even though I’ve done bo a lot of both.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. So I think. That’s the secret sauce right there is that you care about like the human connections that you’re making, you care about, like this conversation that we’re having right now. You care about meeting new people, you care about hearing new ideas and how people are tackling things in their business or their course creation.

And that’s something that for a lot of podcasts and now I, a few years ago, so I work at full-time at Gravity Forms now. A few years ago I worked in the audio space proper. [00:03:00] Where I consulted a lot of folks to start their podcasts, and there’s nothing wrong with it. A lot of people start their podcasts because they go, oh, that’s a thing to do.

A podcast is a thing to do in this marketing content marketing wheel that I’m told I should be rolling down the hill. And oftentimes people will say Podcasting is a lot of hard work because it is. But the 50% of the hard work is. If you don’t enjoy it if you don’t enjoy meeting people and having those conversations and being curious about like different aspects, and you simply look at it as a task and you’re like, how do I measure the ROI on this podcast thing?

How am I getting customers? Why am I downloads only a hundred downloads per episode? I’m looking at YouTube and I’m seeing tens of thousands on these celebrity podcasts. What, why, what’s, what am I missing? And I think that. When you care about these conversations and you’re looking at it as a learning experience, it’s enjoyable.

Number one, you, number two, you increase that surface luck area of things that can happen because of it, you have another creative idea. You meet somebody else that could be a business partner, you create a friendship, whatever it is or somebody listens to you and they buy your product.

Like you’re increasing all of this luck surface area when you’re doing this work. And then you think of that like business side afterwards, okay, I’m gonna brand the show differently. I’m gonna have different segments. And you kinda work on it and it becomes like this art as I like to refer to it as, so when you actually care about this stuff, it is easy. And I think the particular challenge is when people just look at it as, I gotta fill in the dots of this thing and ship it to my newsletter, or just post it on social media and God, I gotta get to the next one. That’s when it becomes, the particular challenge for somebody who says ah, I burned out from this podcast thing.

So you’re in a good spot by like actually caring number first and foremost. 

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk a little deeper about ROI. In marketing there’s always this goal to like, what’s the return on investment of time and capital? I feel like podcasting is literally the hardest thing to track ROI on.

A lot of people listen, they’re not on the show notes. They hear about a brand or a person. They Google it. You have no idea how this person actually, or the ROI you got from that. There’s all kinds of intangibles from the network to becoming a better communicator. We all say it like, I can’t go back and listen to my early episodes ’cause I’ll just be like, man, I was, I’ve become a better public speaker.

There’s the personal brand thing. You’re, I know when you went to Gravity Forms and you were looking for new opportunities, I saw a tweet, but like everybody in the WordPress community. Knows who Matt Maderis is, but that’s because you’ve put yourself out there, you’ve added tons of value for people.

I remember when I was new to WordPress, riding around Montana, listening to the Matt Report and just like falling in [00:06:00] love with this industry. But you were the guide. You were like, let me introduce you to some interesting people. And there’s all kinds of ROI that comes from that, but 

Matt Medeiros: yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Riff on ROIA little more.

Yeah. 

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Particularly in, in particularly in this space. In the WordPress space, and I would probably say like in different silos of the tech web development, and probably from your listeners here who are doing courses and in industries I have no idea about. It’s like finding those pockets of community that you can, associate yourself within.

And podcasting is fantastic for that, right? Whatever that little silo of the community is. And I would say in the greater community of WordPress, the silo that we are in is. We’re bus, we’re building businesses, right? We’re building brands or, working for brands. Like we care about the economy of WordPress, and that’s our, our thing.

I would also say that there’s a hidden gem in podcasting for the business side of it. Is local podcasts still a very untapped. Market. But I [00:07:00] will tell you now as of, early May, 2025, that’s gonna change because at the top things are so saturated with celebrity podcasts and all this other stuff, I.

That the industry is going to buckle to that pressure a little bit, and people are gonna be so sick of the next celebrity podcast or the next news anchor who starts his or her own YouTube show, where they’re like, but now this is all the same. It’s like when everyone said cut the chord for cable and here we are, 15 years later.

We’re all paying micro fees to all these streaming services to, to go like 50% more than what we were spending on cable, 10, 15 years ago. And it’s this same like flip o of this of the industry. And I think local is gonna be a big thing, which could, for those who are listening, maybe your courses and courseware are in could affect a local market.

So that could be a benefit, but. Measuring that ROI is super difficult. So you’re either doing this thing to build your brand sentiment, takes time, build [00:08:00] that resume, get your name out there. That’s all cool. And if that’s what you’re in for, which I’m largely in it for that, then continue with what you’re doing.

There’s no need to try to pixel your podcast and try to convert at the end of the day. It’s gonna be very difficult to measure that in the audio space. But what it also does, connections, networking, we already mentioned that. The sort of the third thing is I look at this as.

Speaking of like comedians, comedians have a podcast and like I, I listen to Bill Burr very often, his podcast. Hilarious. But what he’s doing in that podcast is he’s practicing his standup. He’s using that as his stage. So if you study comedians and it’s just like you gotta do a hundred shows to get 15 minutes of content, right?

And do that four more times, 400 shows to build your hour special, right? These are like, the comedian in my opinion is like the true, oh, this is a broad term, but the true [00:09:00] essence of an entrepreneur, you go up on stage, you fail countless times year after year, and then suddenly you figured it out.

You figured out your process, you figured out who you should be speaking to. You start figuring out what your craft and your angle is in your content, and at, if you’re podcasting and you’re, having these meetings, think of it as that. Maybe brainstorm session for your business, work out different topics and ideas.

That’s what I did when I started the MAT report. I didn’t know how the WordPress community worked. I didn’t know how to run an agency. You and I were both at Press Conf and I just interviewed Jake Goldman at Press Conf on, on stage, and he was a huge part of me like figuring things out. Getting my business down.

I was like, okay, now how can I like 10 x this experience with Jake and asking him questions on how to run an agency, how can I 10 x this? It was, at first it was gonna be start a blog, but then I was like, I’ll start a podcast and see where it lands. And it was a massive education process, so don’t undervalue that.

Oftentimes people can just throw that away. But in your early days, like really use that as. As you are expensive as you’re learning, try not to look for did I get a customer outta this? But look at it as like your investment in, understanding how to run your business, if that makes sense.

Chris Badgett: That does. And let’s, you mentioned pockets of community. What advice would you have for somebody who’s getting trapped in the compare game? So LMS cast as an example. Doesn’t get big numbers on the downloads, but the people that do is a pocket of community that care about things like WordPress, entrepreneurship online education.

It’s very tight focus. But if I look at something like the All In Podcast or My First Million, or Joe Rogan or whoever. I’m like, am I failing? I don’t really feel that way ’cause I’ve already figured it out that yeah, hey, small is good. And like you said, there’s a million streaming services.

Pick the ones that work for you. Pick the podcasts that work for [00:11:00] you. There’s like like mainstream podcasts, but there’s also these tight niche podcasts. How do you, what advice do you have about not getting wrapped up in the download counts or having a small, a quote, small audience compared to the mainstream ones?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, I think especially. It is hard for me to answer this because I analyze the podcast industry as much as I analyze the WordPress space. And COVID was, I know I hate bringing up Covid ’cause it’s man, this is like five, six years ago. Like how long are we gonna talk about that?

But what Covid did, I guess also maybe for your audience too, is it accelerated the adoption of podcasts. People were listening more and people wanted to start more podcasts. So we. We got this insane boom. This is probably, this is why I joined that CAOs because there’s an insane boom, a lot of money into it.

And it was just like, oh man, audio’s here to stay. Like this is the thing. And people got conditioned to inflated numbers on the audio side. And we felt shouldn’t we all have like big numbers? ’cause everyone’s doesn’t everyone [00:12:00] listen to this? And what we’re getting, just like maybe your Google search traffic, it starts now.

It’s worth coming back down. It’s starting to plateau like AI’s com combating against your organic search. Now video’s competing with audio. So it’s plateauing. I don’t look at that as a negative. I look at that as I’m correcting the amount the size of my audience, right? When I, look at.

Whatever, the 2000 subscribers on my email list for the WP Minute, back when I was doing the MAT report, it was like almost 10,000 back then. But hey it’s been corrected. Now. There’s a lot of people who have just simply left WordPress. I don’t, I realize that. I understand it. And I course correct for that.

And it’s a more intimate audience, right? People are engaged more. And you can craft content that’s gonna be more compelling for that audience. This is something that I was actually thinking I was telling you before we hit record. I was out on a walk. ’cause that’s what I do now instead of running.

And I was thinking about this, is if you do feel [00:13:00] like you’re on that hamster wheel of, okay, I’m doing an episode every single week. And this is getting to be a little bit of a slog. I am feeling a little drained from not feeling like the numbers are oh so big. This is a perfect time to have a little bit of reflection point and make sure that you understand who your audience is by literally polling them, telling them to take a quick little survey.

Tweeting this stuff out, do a single podcast episode that begs, literally begs for people to tell me what you do so I can make sure I am making the content for you. And have a little strategy to, to reinvest in understanding who that audience is. If you’re feeling burned out, cut the content in half your production in half and take the information that you just learned from your audience.

Double down on super valuable content for that audience [00:14:00] and make sure that content is going to be a must listen, right? Like it’s a must listen. Like Chris, I want to go back and start creating content that you wanna listen to again, just like you did, 10 years ago. And that’s what I’m doing.

In these coming months and then cut it in half and spend more time promoting it and breaking it down. And making sure that you can bring that wisdom in chunks on social media or short clips on YouTube and making sure that you are giving yourself a fair shot at promoting, because half the battle is making the content.

The other battle is making sure people tune in and see it ’cause everyone’s busy. And there is so much competition. So cut it in half if you have to, which is what I’ve done, and spend more time breaking it down and making sure people are seeing the big takeaways through social platforms and things like YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and all this other stuff.

That was a long answer. I apologize. [00:15:00]

Chris Badgett: And a pro tip, I used a script for editing and they have AI confined viral clips and all this stuff. It’s never been easier. It’s still a lot of work, but Sure. Yeah, it’s 

Matt Medeiros: a lot of work. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Let’s address stage fright. We’re so far from it that we we’ve dealt with that issue.

But I think you just gotta do it and then over time you get, you just get used to. Just having a conversation. And I really love, I heard Lex Friedman once say when he does a podcast, it’s like the whole world exploded and it’s just him and the guest and that’s it. And it’s just a deep conversation and that’s how I feel.

I do always in the back of my mind have the audience in mind like, let’s create value. What can we talk about that’s not just makes a great conversation but like really helps people and a lot of people ideally, but for me, it’s like I just get absorbed in this one-on-one conversation and the stage fright that just doesn’t exist because of that.

How about you? Yeah. 

Matt Medeiros: Yes. This is something [00:16:00] that it you work through it. It’s like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the more you strengthen it, et cetera, et cetera. I would say though that the, the only strategic piece of advice that I have for that is to. This sounds super cliche, but it’s just be your authentic self.

It’s just don’t talk about shit you don’t know. Yeah. And that is the biggest, that is the biggest advantage. Early on in, when I was in like high school I forget what the name of the program was, but it was, something career, I forget what it was, but it was like kids that had particular skills, there was a program that you could join and like you could teach other people, like how you do these skills and ob obviously mine was like computers back then. And I remember the teacher was fantastic because she was making me break down. The most simplistic things that I just took for advantage.

Took advantage of. Now you gotta remember, this is this is late nineties, right? So computers, people still struggle with [00:17:00] computers today, nevermind, like back in the nineties. And I remember her telling me to like. Set this computer up. ‘Cause this is when they were just like getting computers in the office for like, all these teachers.

And she was like, can you set my computer up for me? I was like, yeah. So I, I started doing it and then I just put the whole thing together in five minutes, monitor, desktop, keyboard, mouse, printer, all this stuff. And she’s whoa. So what did you do? Oh, I just plugged in the stuff.

I don’t know what’s a, like I just, how’d you get the printer to work? I just plugged in the printer cable. What’s a printer? Cable. And she made me break down the most basic fundamental steps that I was just taking advantage of. You don’t know what a printer cable is? And she’s no, I’ve never seen a printer cable in my life.

People listening to this today might be like, printer, what the hell’s a printer? But she made me like really break down those like real basics. And I’m sure you teach us in like courses. Don’t take. It, don’t forget like the most basic fundamental things people don’t know, and this is a perfect learning [00:18:00]moment.

So I use that to my advantage, like growing up, like understanding, like I have something to offer as basic as it might be. I just have to find the people who need this information, right? I’m not talking like this is something that’s infamous in the WordPress space. A lot of like course creators and stuff like that or content creators.

We all want to like create courses and things like that, but we’re talking to other WordPress people who are doing the same thing. It’s this is not your audience. These people know how to do this stuff. They tune in and they like you and they engage with you on social because they’re, you’re friends with them, but you’ll never sell them how to make a website with Elementor because they already know how to do that.

They’re already doing it. You have to go find the people who are not here on Twitter and sell that course to them and get them engaged in it. So finding the audience and never taking the most simplistic things that, you know for advantage. And it’s another lesson that Gary Vaynerchuk, whom I haven’t followed in quite some time, but that was the thing he always [00:19:00] said.

He is I would just never, I just never talk about anything. I don’t know, like. When I know something, you’re gonna hear everything and every opinion that I have on that topic. But if you started talking to me about like financial tech industry, I’m not touching it with a 10 foot pole ’cause I don’t know anything about it.

Pass I got, I’ve got no opinion. And that’s, I also grew up in car sales, so that was a getting rejected in a cold November afternoon on a dreary car lot in New England. I. We’ll teach you a lot on confidence and being able to talk to folks. 

Chris Badgett: I think one of the things that really stands out in the AI world and where podcasts can help is having a personal human brand.

And I want to get your thoughts on branding. In my opinion, branding is easy when you just be yourself and stay in your lane like you’re saying. If you meet me at a conference, same hat, same shirt, talking about the same stuff, I’m [00:20:00] probably a little shyer than you think because you’ve seen me on the internet, but I’m actually a reserved guy.

But other than that, what is what you get. How do you think about brand and why it’s important and the way podcasting fits into that? 

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, so for years I always thought that the output of my work. Was defining my brand right? Was like, oh, if I do this podcast episode and I put out this conductor plugin or something like that.

That was the brand, right? And I’ve slowly over time started to realize that I. I’m trying to detach myself from the work and bring people on more of I hate the word journey, but this is the experience that I’m going down and here’s, here are all the things I’m learning while I’m doing this stuff.

See the stuff I’m doing over here? It’s the MAT report. And it’s the WP Minute. It’s South coast fm. And it’s breaking content. It’s, we are Here podcast. It is our Beloved Medium podcast. It’s the Breakdown podcast. It’s the Crew Collective podcast. Coming soon, like there’s all these things that I do, but I want people to understand, like for me.

My brand is that you, you trust and trust me, right? The typ, the typical like marketing sales kind of thing. And trust me, this is all the stuff that I do over here and I will be as transparent as possible. Along the way, you know that the content that I’m creating or the product that I’m recommending is.

Tested by me, Matt approved to a degree, but I don’t want that to define me. I want you to understand that the way that I morally evaluate this stuff and like how I find it valuable and share that with you, like bringing people on that ride is I hope what the.

What the brand for me is, not saying that’s for everybody, but that is for me because I feel [00:22:00] like I do a lot of things and experiment with a lot of things. And maybe that’s another part of it that shines through. So I try to look at that personal brand. Yes, super important. You’re without a doubt, especially in the face of ai, the digital handshake, is this what we’re doing right now?

It’s these conversations, it’s this human interaction. But I try to look at it as the output of my work is not my brand, it’s about me and how hopefully I build that relationship with the viewer, listener, or reader. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, great points. I think there’s two brands. There’s like the personal brand and then the corporate brand.

So like for example, gravity Forms brought you in to help with the brand in a way, and, yeah, and by the way, I just wanna mention, you should go check out crafted by matt.com and you’ll see all of Matt’s projects and brands and so on. But yeah, you’re almost all of them. At least the ones he has the Yeah, 

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: He remembered to put on there. 

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But if you just focus on the corporate brand, without the [00:23:00] human element, it’s like it’s, everything’s a sales pitch. There’s always a human in the machine, so you’re, yeah. Whether consciously or unconsciously, I. Brand is everywhere, and it’s not just the founder and CEO or whoever works at the company is part of the brand.

The community has a brand to it, and the I think of it as the way people feel after, in hearing from you, engaging with you, consuming your content or interacting with company X, Y, Z. It’s like the brand.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah.

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Brand feeling and it’s gonna happen no matter what. 

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. And listen I’m also, like I said earlier I’m trying to take a step back.

This is brand adjacent here, but I have, I still have imposter syndrome, like we just talked about stage fright. I’m not afraid to talk, but I also have a lot of imposter syndrome and. There’s also like this like level of nothing I do is perfect. Like we’re recording right now. I’m in my basement.

I’m not happy about this. In the back of my head this whole time as we’re recording this, I’m like, I can’t believe I’m doing this in my basement. Even when I’m in my studio. I’m never happy about things in the studio that happen. Sounds reverb, people next door. Things drive me nuts. Studio’s not in my house.

It’s in a coworking space. And part of the. Of like [00:26:00] this evolution of the WP Minute is promoting the content more and trying to be more engaging on social media, whatever that means. I’m still trying to figure that out. But then also yes, I’m about to literally install Lifter LMS on WP Minute so that I can use it and create courses for my audience.

And by the way, I’ve used Lifter LMS countless times at. Gravity forms for learn.gravity.com is powered by lifter LMS and and my old job at CAOs, but I’m back to like building courses and I’m like, ugh. Like I, I feel like I’m jumping into a pool that I don’t want to go into where it’s just I’m, right now I’m making a podcasting.

It’s not even like a full course. It’s just here’s a quick little guide. ’cause so many people ask me about podcasting and I have this imposter syndrome like. Are people just gonna look at this and be like, oh God, you’re a course guy now. Yeah, and I’m having these issues like with that [00:27:00] mentally, and then I talk to all these other people no, we want that.

I wanna take it so I know how to like, do this thing. So it’s always a challenge, the whole brand thing, both from competing with, your competition and then as a solo person, you’re just always just like in your own head and that’s, that is a particular challenge. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think imposter syndrome, I have it too.

I think the only people that honestly do not have it are psychopaths. So just get used to it. It’s just part of the journey. You just get better at managing it. Yes. Yes. Let’s talk about podcasts. I’m gonna use 

Matt Medeiros: that on a t-shirt only psychopaths don’t have. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah it’s always with you. One of the things I’ve, that I’ve admired about you is, and I’m similar in the sense I consume a lot of podcasts, but you have a very like you keep tabs on an industry via podcasts.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So what’s some advice there? ’cause not only is making a podcast great to do, but you can [00:28:00] also leverage ’em to just master your craft, find possible guests get niche news. Like how do you, what’s your method to your podcasting consumption? 

Matt Medeiros: Oh, this is where AI comes in, Chris. There’s always two x, right?

So speaking of psychopaths, I do listen to a lot of podcasts on two x because it’s part of my, what I call part of my job, right? I need to be informed with what’s happening in WordPress because that’s largely how I. Evaluate things at the WP Minute, and it’s largely part of my job at Gravity Forms.

Like to know things that are happening, to take that information and do something with it. Either here’s a feature I see a lot of people asking about, or here’s where the WordPress market is going. We should be aware of that. So there’s a lot of podcast consumption. There’s a lot of two x there’s a lot of podcasts listening around the house sometimes when the family’s home.

And my wife is are you listening to another podcast on speaker phone? We’re all sick of [00:29:00] it. So there’s a lot of that jamming a lot of content in, but recently even before like consumer AI software building with bolt and rep lit I was downloading a lot of podcasts just individually the MP threes and then running them through D script and like taking that.

Find the hot clips or whatever they call it, the clips, AI clips. And I was just doing that on podcasts that I needed to listen to and long form podcasts that I’m not gonna listen to the whole thing. I was getting the text and finding those moments and like leveraging that as like a reverse engineer.

But now with ai, I’ve built my own tooling. I built this one site called Pulse, wp.cc. Anyone can look at it. And basically it’s a over, it’s just a RSS aggregator of all these top WordPress sites that I listen to or that I read. On the back end of it, I have it. You can click through and see all the articles.

AI summarizes it. You can go [00:30:00] through it right now and see a summary of all those articles. And I have it shooting me messages in my Slack that. Give me that information so I don’t even have to view the site. So I am constantly like building that infrastructure out including podcasts. So either transcribing podcasts that don’t have transcripts or podcasts that do have transcripts.

Thanks to the podcasting 2.0 transcript tag. Downloading those podcast transcripts and summarizing those for me. So I’m starting to use AI a little bit more to help feed me that information on a swath of shows that I need to be informed on. And I do that in the WordPress space and in the podcasting space.

’cause I also follow that space quite closely. It’s not a very sexy answer, but that’s how I do it. 

Chris Badgett: Pro tips in there. I love that idea of letting AI find the viral moments in long form content. 

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. DS script. I’ve always used Ds script for that and as a content creator, especially when I [00:31:00] was like doing a lot of WordPress news summary and writing out more of like my thoughts around the new stuff That was that was key DSCR for that stuff.

Chris Badgett: I’m gonna flip the script on you and, going back to your printer example of chunking it down and somebody learning, I’m so close to podcasting and been doing it for a long time, as are you, but what are some questions you might have for me about 500 episode milestone and just where we’re at.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I, so in my world or my world, but in my podcasting journey, I want things to end. Yeah. I save nothing. Like I don’t, YouTube videos gone. And I save zero which is actually yeah, gravity Forms says we wanted to like, revisit another video and I was like, I deleted that thing. I don’t have it on my hard drive anymore.

I save nothing, I want things to end. I’ve never numbered my podcasts [00:32:00] because I feel like I’m on like this artistic journey and I just want it to stop. And start a new album, and I never wanna look at that album again. I’m curious, 500 episodes in, do you get that itch to be like, you know what, gonna chop the show down to 15 minutes, I’m gonna reorganize the sentiment or the premise of the show.

Do you have that sort of desire to just throw the whole thing away and start fresh or are you happy with I’m 500 episodes in. And this is still the same like format and process. I like. 

Chris Badgett: Oh, that’s a great question. I have two answers for that. One is a personality type thing. Having been around entrepreneurship for a while, I’ve identified two characters that show up to this party.

One of ’em is the serial entrepreneur that does like a lot of things, right? And then there’s this person who’s just obsessed and. Is does the one thing and neither is better or worse. And I actually think [00:33:00] it’s amazing when those kinds of people can work together. But I’m definitely in the obsessive camp and just like tunnel vision guy.

The deeper answer to that question, which I lucked into, but also, made a lot of decisions. I feel lucky that my life, mission, and company mission are aligned. Lifting up others through education is something I care deeply about as a father, as an individual in society, but that’s what the company does it.

It helps democratize education, empower education entrepreneurs, and send out a ripple of, positivity and improvement in the world through people’s courses that end students do and then move on. So it creates like this exponential value. The, I just feel like there’s no end and it doesn’t feel like a treadmill to me, and it’s an ever renewing market.

There’s always, people are getting older, new people, younger people are getting older and start getting into [00:34:00] this education thing. So it’s like never ending opportunity. Technology keeps changing, WordPress is changing. Video cameras and tech and all the rest keep changing.

There’s just like infinite. It is just, it feels infinite to me. So yeah, I don’t think I’ll ever stop, but maybe one day there will be a reason to do it and change. And also by doing an interview show I’m on the train, I don’t have to carry the luggage in the sense that I get smart people like yourself who bring insight and so it’s, and I just get so much value out of it personally and professionally.

Like, why stop? So that’s, yeah. That’s not where I ended up. 

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Have you started to you do this, I think maybe with like your live streams but have you thought about replacing yourself as the face of the podcast and or starting a podcast or a media channel that is for lifter for the company, [00:35:00] but just not hosted by you, like getting another talent personality in there?

Chris Badgett: I have done that to a degree with, like Kurt and Emily do a lot of our live calls, right? And I used to do all those solo, then they came on and now they do almost entirely them themselves. So I’m a big fan when you build a business and we’re talking about like a business brand, if you can, and if you have the right amount of scale to give multiple faces out there.

For the podcast, I’ve thought about it, but I need to meet somebody who has the same. Obsession. 

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, that’s the tough one. 

Chris Badgett: And like that same focus. So that’s I know there’s people out there and there’s a lot of great people out there, but I’d want to be really certain that they could share that.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And I also want to add I do get the itch because I have other interests also outside of online education and all kinds of topics. So I do get the itch to start another show about something like. [00:36:00] Ultra endurance stuff or some other kind of more general entrepreneurship stuff.

But I just can’t this always pulls me back to the focus. 

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. One of the folks that I think you align pretty closely with in terms of whatever, like your. Your, the way you operate the business similar markets is Nathan Barry, right from Kit. Yeah. They just convert from Convert Kit to kit.com.

Great show. By 

Chris Badgett: the way, I love the Nathan Barry show when he interviews his customer, like it’s really good. 

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. So that’s where I was going with that. He’s heavily invested, like you, you both probably have very similar on the Venn diagram of customers. Pretty similar. Yeah. I’d imagine. Yeah, not directly competing with each other, but similar. I’m curious if those, if that thought process of a higher production has entered your mind? I can definitely see, like you and I both live in New England and there’s a lot of [00:37:00] like mill space that can be converted fairly cheap. He just opened up Kit Studios, I think, which is in Ohio or something like that.

Don’t quote me on it. Probably fairly affordable versus if he did it in New York or Boston directly or la big hubs of content creators, but probably very expensive. So I’m curious has it ever come across your mind to maybe invest in something really unique for the brand where course creators can go and create their own courses in a higher production studio, just like he has kit creators, doing it in his own production shops.

Has that crossed your mind? 

Chris Badgett: You actually are getting me really excited about that. I’ve thought about it. I’ve always been challenged because I’m a, I live in a rural area of Maine, right? 

Matt Medeiros: Sure. 

Chris Badgett: I believe Nathan Barry’s in Boise, Idaho, which is not Idaho, which is a it’s a big city in Idaho.

It’s not in California. It’s not New York, but and he’s done a lot with like in person stuff, has the conference that kit puts on and stuff like that. [00:38:00]But yeah, I do get jealous. Like I. I’m sure you’ve listened to the diary of a CEO podcast. 

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Yep. 

Chris Badgett: Great interview show, always in person. Same with Lex Friedman and Joe Rogan and many others.

They’re in person and you can’t beat that kind of fidelity and it takes both production value, but also I think the. Interaction and the content is just even better. So it is a goal out there. I just figure need to figure out how to make that happen, where to make that happen, how to do it.

And definitely the idea of creating hubs for course creators to just remove friction. That’s what I do as a software entrepreneur. It’s all about friction removal. So if I can make it easier to create courses and create high production value content. I’d love to do it. The challenge is lifter, LMS has customers in 180 countries, so where do I put it?

You know what I mean? 

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And this ski, [00:39:00] there’s certain parts of the world that have more than others, but even like in the United States, they’re all over the place. Yeah. But I love the idea and I do get quote, jealous of the Lex Freeman and the diary of a CEO and that like just awesome setup.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, it could be something. This is so totally brainstorming, slightly off topic, but you could travel down to Portland, right? Yeah. And do like a weekend or a week session, maybe rent out a coworking space, bring lifter, LMS creators in do in-person workshop, that kind of thing where it’s like, Hey, I’ve got the studio set up.

Hire a videographer, probably fairly affordable these days to set up a space, and maybe try to pre-sell something like that where people come in and, you do the whole half a day of recording with their mini session or whatever, and then you can scale it out from there.

But I can definitely see you doing stuff like that because I think the brand, I think your brand is already like at that level, right? [00:40:00] Where it’s trusted. It’s a higher pedigree. It’s not just something that you stumble upon in wordpress.org anymore as oh yeah your free plugin is fantastic.

I’m gonna turn this into a commercial for you. The free plugin is great because I leverage it just for that. Like I, I leverage it for that course creation, for brand awareness and everything is. Very well done and well thought out. So I think that’s, when I look at you and I look at Lifter, I’m like, oh, that’s the natural, like next step for like brand sentiment, just like what Nathan has done.

I love that. And I just checked it’s kit.com/studios and he has Boise, Idaho, not Ohio Chicago, Illinois, and New York coming soon. Both coming soon. So pretty cool. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Building community. It’s another thing in the AI world, like creating those kind of workshop pop-up events and things is, has a lot of opportunity for the future.

I. 

Matt Medeiros: [00:41:00] He’s thinking, ladies and gentlemen, if you’re listening to the audio, I can see the wheels turning. You got it on Chris badge. 

Chris Badgett: Hey, this is why I’m talking about why serial entrepreneur type entrepreneurs and like tunnel vision entrepreneurs should get together. ’cause then the magic happens and that’s yeah.

Yeah. 

Matt Medeiros: And you look at what’s the place that Chris Lema really likes? It’s not Airbnb Cross. 

Chris Badgett: You mean the no. So he has Oh wander. Yeah. You 

Matt Medeiros: know, so why not? You could always centralize around something like that. It’s rent a nice, great place. Wandered, bring the studio there.

People come, they stay, whatever. I think there’s many ways to do that, but I, but that’s where I see Lifter as the next, again, I think that’s like the next, for your brand, for increasing brand sentiment and stuff like that. That’s where it goes for you, in my opinion. 

Chris Badgett: Like you, I come from a marketing and sales bent angle.

So if you’re listening to this and you are interested in this kind of event, workshop on location deal send me an [00:42:00] email [email protected] and let us know what you’re excited about, where you want it to be, what you would want included in the format. Love to hear about that ’cause it’s great to get people together and.

Conferences are great, content is great, but I think there’s a lack of workshops, like hands-on. Yes. Outcome driven, project driven. There’s a lot of that in the world, but I think in this space we could have a lot more of that. Nathan Barry’s doing a great job leading the way with that kind of stuff.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, and if you do one in Maine, I will come up for it. All right. And I will attend the workshop and meet the fe. The folks listening to this now meet and greet and I’ll hold the workshop on podcasting or whatever you want me to, 

Chris Badgett: dang, Matt, you’ve ruined my afternoon. Now my, my brain is gonna be like, okay.

Awesome. Matt, I want to thank you for coming on the show and celebrating 500 episodes together. It’s quite the milestone and I. You [00:43:00] out there listening or watching? I’d encourage you to do what we’re talking about here. Get into podcasting, try it out. You don’t have to do a solo show. You can talk to people interview style like we’re doing right here.

And you can see like the chemistry and the we’re creating value and bouncing off each other and it’s, you just get a ton out of it. So I’d encourage you to do that. He’s at Crafted by matt.com. Go check out gravity forms. We use gravity forms at lifter LMS. I’m actually right now building something with gravity forms to help people figure out which lifter LMS plan they need.

Like conditional logic help me pick my plan thing. I’ve been using gravity for I don’t know, 10 plus years. It’s been a long time. It’s awesome. The WP Minute. Check it out. Anywhere else people can connect with you, Matt? And any final words for the people? 

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Again, super excited for you to hit 500.

It’s an honor to be celebrating this with you. I look up [00:44:00] to a lot of the work in critical thinking that you do in the space, and I really appreciate it. So congrats on 500 the WP Minute. Dot com. That’s where you can find me in my WordPress stuff. And two podcasts. The WP Minute and the WP Minute Plus, you can search for them in your favorite podcast app and or YouTube if that’s where you prefer to listen and watch things.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for coming on, Matt.

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 [00:45:00] episode.

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In this LMSCast episode, Brad Williams from ThemeSwitcher Pro talks about the motivation for and workings of ThemeSwitcher Pro, a WordPress plugin created by his agency WebDevStudios.

Brad Williams is a seasoned WordPress expert and the co-founder of WebDevStudios, a leading WordPress development agency that has been building high-quality websites for over 17 years. The plugin tackles a frequent difficulty encountered by numerous website proprietors: the shift from traditional, classic WordPress themes to contemporary, block-based themes utilizing the Gutenberg editor.

This sort of upgrade usually meant that the whole site had to be redesigned, which is a lengthy process and incurs considerable expense. Theme Switcher Pro removes that obstacle by enabling the operation of several themes on one WordPress installation.

This allows certain pages or sections of a website to adopt a new block-based theme, while the remainder of the site continues to operate with the existing legacy theme. With this incremental approach, it becomes simpler for teams to adopt new technology, uphold visual consistency through shared headers and footers, and manage budgets with greater flexibility.

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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.This allows certain pages or sections of a website to adopt a new block-based theme, while the remainder of the site continues to operate with the existing legacy theme.

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. He’s back on the show he was on maybe five years ago or something like that. We’ve got Brad Williams. He’s from Theme Switcher Pro, which you can find on theme switcher.com. He’s also a founder of Web Dev Studios, which is an awesome agency.

The Lifter LMS website was actually designed by web dev studios. They’re an awesome company, but first, welcome to show Brad. Yeah, thanks for having me Chris. It’s funny, I forgot I was on this show. I guess that means it has been a while, so you and Lisa were on. I wonder what number that was.

Brad Williams: You and Lisa were on together. It was a tag team show five years ago. Yeah, that was, it was like the before times, so I don’t, it’s a little fuzzy back then. 

Chris Badgett: It was a while ago. I’m back. You’re back and you’ve got a new project theme switcher, which once you told me about that at a conference.

I was like, oh, that’s cool and let me do my high level of why I got excited about it. Yeah. So what theme Switcher Pro does is it allows you to use different WordPress themes on different parts of your website. And in the learning management system space one of the early questions we get from people is should I do a subdomain or not?

And one of the main reasons we advise people to do a subdomain for the LMS is because they already have this massive website. But they really want to use all our tech, including our full site editing theme, sky Pilot, but they can’t get their head around switching, redoing the whole site. So we’re just like, put it on a subdomain.

And there’s other reasons to put it on a subdomain, but this idea that you can, do web design more one piece at a time, in the live environment and maybe you want elementary and Astra over here and you want something else over here. It’s awesome. But tell us the genesis of Yeah.

Theme Switcher Pro and why you guys decided to build it over at web dev studios. 

Brad Williams: Yeah. Thanks Chris. So theme Switcher Pro. So at Web Dev Studios, we’re an agency that’s been working with WordPress for, we’re in our 17th year, so we’ve been doing this for a long time focused on the WordPress platform, building WordPress for kind of mid-tier to enterprise level organizations, larger companies, more complex challenges, more content, bigger traffic.

So very experienced in the WordPress face, and we’ve had a number of products over the years, and we still do that really we built some, we just built for fun. Some we felt like were, really important utilities for cu for a WordPress like custom post type UI is our most popular one, which allows anyone to register custom post types through the dashboard, through the ui, WordPress.

Very much a utility. It’s a free plugin that we found out there for a long time. But the genesis of Theme Switcher Pro really came from our clients, right? So we have a lot of clients that are on the, a classic legacy WordPress setup, right? They have a theme that was built a number of years ago, before Gutenberg, before the block editor, or when the block editor was early and new, and, they weren’t comfortable going down that road.

But now the block editor is very refined. It’s a very powerful tool. It’s a great tool. And companies wanna leverage the block editor. The challenge is how do they get from classic legacy WordPress to the block editor? Traditionally it is rebuild the whole website, right? Redesign, rebuild the whole website launch.

What we’ve seen in the past few years is it’s harder to get, budgets approved at a higher, a larger amount. So it’s, so the idea of let’s rebuild our whole website so we can use this new block editor is a very tough sell to executives, up the chain of command. ‘Cause they don’t care, right?

The website looks fine; I don’t care how the content is made.

Content creators. And website admins who truly understand the block editor know the power it offers.

It enables them to efficiently create new pages, landing pages, and other content in a really beautiful way

We started thinking about that. If we can’t get. I Larger budgets approved. Is there some way we can chip away at a transition some way we can iteratively, as you said, replace sections of the website with a new block-based theme while other sections continue to do what they’re doing?

Using the classic setup and that’s where Theme Switcher Pro was born, we started building out this technology for some clients. Started integrating it and using it with some clients and had a lot of success and they were really enjoying how quickly we were able to get them to the point where they could produce block content.

On their production website, which is generally within a month, maybe two months max, they’re already producing content versus a full blown redesign that might take six months, eight months, 12 months before they can start creating block content. So we knew we had something, right? And then we started showing off to some friends in the industry, some hosting company partners, and they said, look, you gotta productize this.

This is a, there’s a need for this. There are so many sites out there stuck on classic, they don’t know how to get to the block editor. And a rebuild is not an option. So theme Switcher Pro we built it into a plugin, and now very easily you can run, multiple themes across a single WordPress install.

So what we’re doing with a lot of our clients is we’re building them a block-based theme. We’re mimicking their header and footer from their classic site, so it looks exactly the same. And then that is, and then we’re styling up all the blocks through theme json and other methods. So that. It all fits their branding it all as part of their website.

And then at that point they can deploy that theme and start using that theme for new content. So if they create a new page, a new post, a new feature section, whatever they use, the new theme, the header footer looks the same, but all the content in between is all block based. So it allows ’em to start really rapidly using patterns, blocks, and all the power of Gutenberg and the block editor.

Again, the rest of their website is locked into that classic state. It’s not gonna touch that. It’s only touching where you tell it’s a switch. So really opens up some, a lot of options, a lot of use case scenarios. We can talk about a lot of different ideas and how we’re seeing people use it. But in my mind it’s a bit of a game changer.

’cause it gives not only website administrators and owners, but also freelancers, agencies, anyone building sites. It gives them a tool in their tool belt that they can go to their client and say, Hey, we have a way we can start to transition you. And it isn’t writing a six figure check. Maybe it’s writing, giving me 5,000 a month for 12 months or something while we slowly integrate this or chip away at it.

This is very much a tool that anybody can use. Freelancers, agencies. We hope and expect that other builders, implementers will wanna take a look at team switchers and see if it’s a good tool for their clients, as well as just website administrators. It gives ’em an option to your point, LMS, if I wanna launch Lifter on my site, traditionally I would have to either switch the theme, to your theme that works really well.

Lifter or update my theme. So it makes sure it works really well with Lifter. Now you could just use your lifter theme just on the MMS sections of your website and everything else stays exactly the same. So products, I think there’s a very interesting angle here for people like you, Chris, where you’re selling a product and our product now can help.

I. You sell more of your product, right? Because it gives them an option to use your theme and have a really nice experience with the LMS without blowing up their entire website. So really excited about it. The feedback’s been great, really enjoying talking to people like you and sharing the story.

’cause this is an educational I. Piece to this so people understand what it does. But I’ve been talking a lot. I just dumped a ton of information there. So that’s where we’re at. It’s exciting. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s fantastic. And I’ve the best products, in my opinion, like the customers pull it out of you.

And I’ve literally had that question probably a hundred times in 10 years. Hey, can I use two themes on my website? And I’m like, no, you can’t use a subdomain or use creative or whatever. Multi-site was always an option too. And that’s, and we love multi-site. A lot of our clients use multi-site, so this is not to replace multi-site.

Brad Williams: There are definitely a lot of great use cases for multi-site LMS even is a good use case where maybe the second site in the network, slash LMS is your, is lifter. But not every site necessarily needs that. So this gives them some options. They don’t have to go the multi-site route, but they can still get lifter in its own containerized section of your site running, your theme.

So yeah it’s pretty cool when you start to think about the possibilities of what you could do with this. 

Chris Badgett: And for the agencies, like you’re saying. I’m always a big fan of in service work, agency, work, the land and expand. If I’m hitting you with this giant project, it’s harder to sell that, but if you’re like, let’s just get started and incrementally improve, focus on priorities.

Yeah. One at a time. Like it, it totally makes sense. The agencies are gonna love this. It’s gonna help ’em sell. 

Brad Williams: Yeah. I mean it’s, I like to, I always tell our clients, and especially new leads we’re working with I want to, we want to bring, show you the value as quickly as possible, that you’ve picked the right agency, you’re working with the right people, and we are moving the needle.

With your, initiatives online as quickly as we can. You made the right choice. The higher ups are seeing movement, they’re seeing things happening. This helps with that, right? Like I said, do you want to go through a six or eight month redesign, rebuild when all they really want to, they like their site.

They like the overall look and feel, but they hate the editor and they have struggle making good content. It’s a perfect use case for that. Let’s chip away at it. We have a client that’s using it just for landing pages. They don’t wanna swap out their theme, so they don’t plan to remove this over time.

They plan to leave it there forever, and they’re using it within two weeks. They were producing really powerful landing pages. And once you make one and the pa, the power of patterns, you make that landing page pattern. Then within a couple clicks, you’ve just drafted a new landing page. And then you can swap out content, click tracking scripts, whatever.

But very quick they’re launching landing pages within a matter of hours now and before it took weeks because they had to have developers come in and say, okay, I got all the content, but now we need you to tighten it up with CSS, get the alignment right on these images. Make it look good.

’cause it’s really hard to do that in the WY wig editor, the classic editor, just putting two images side by side. Is what feels like an impossible task unless you know how to code and the old editor. But in Gutenberg, it literally is a couple clicks put in a container. Two columns boom, two images, and you’re done.

Once you really buy into it and really experience it, and especially see it, it’s certainly on the patterns. I feel like you see this light bulb moment when people see how powerful patterns are and how quickly they can reuse those patterns throughout their website. You just see their eyes get really wide and it’s a game changer.

So the more people we can get on Gutenberg, the more people we can get building blocks and utilizing those. The power patterns, the less people are gonna be looking for alternatives to WordPress. If they’re still stuck on classic editor, probably are very frustrated with WordPress. it’s WordPress’s fault?

Tools that we’ve spent years building within the open source community.The better for the project and hopefully this is a tool that, that people can use to, to do just that. 

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk more about use cases. You mentioned the the marketer who wants to do some campaigns and landing pages. Maybe somebody wants to just redo only the homepage and start there.

Where do you see people and what would you advise agencies and brainstorm with them about where are the most high value places in the WordPress site that I could focus on first with. Block-based theme. 

Brad Williams: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think it always is gonna pin on the business and what’s, their business and what’s important to them on their website.

The big question I would say to ask is, do we want to start with a very impactful I. Section of the website, like the homepage or maybe the single article page. If you’re a media site that just gets a ton of traffic. Or do you wanna start somewhere that’s a little less impactful? Maybe your about page, maybe your FAQ something that is important but not, not the most important thing on your website.

That’s the number one question we like to ask. And generally speaking, the answer is they wanted to go with the more impactful. Which is surprising, right? I feel like most people would wanna dip their toe in a little bit. They’re like, Nope, let’s replace the homepage. Great, let’s do that. So we had a client we worked on where 95% of their traffic goes right to the single articles.

It’s a media site. People, it’s very discoverable on search engines, very shareable on social. So mo all their traffic goes to their articles, their homepage is a sliver of their traffic. So guess what? We replaced a single article page. That’s the first page we did. And then we let it ride for a while just to let the dust settle.

But not only did it work well it’s now they’re able to produce with blocks. It’s really given their content creators a lot more power in what they’re doing. But, it’s also really increased the performance of the website. ’cause in, I haven’t even touched on this, but as blocks and the way blocks work and the way it’s built are just way more performant than classic WordPress.

Immediately their core web vitals and their page speed insight scores, got much, much better and got all the way up into the green, which for a site that had a ton of ads and legacy is very hard to get to. Ads are the really, the challenge there. But very quickly, not only we’re seeing better traffic, people stay on the site longer, but also it’s just way more performance, so it’s taking less resources off the server.

Or using less resources through the server. So it just has this kind of domino effect of good things when you start rolling out blocks. Again, it’s different ways you can chip away at it. We also had another, right after we did that, we went in, started working on the homepage, but obviously the single article was the most important for them, right?

So it’s questions you wanna ask your clients. What’s the most important section of your website? If you’re selling products, your product pages are gonna be the most important, right? If it’s a service, it’s gonna be your features, your services pages, your pricing pages, people, what they’re reading to determine if they wanna make, make that purchase.

So you wanna think about that, but honestly, people like to see results. I. Companies, clients like to see results. So honestly push for the more impactful push to replace their homepage because you know how much better it’s gonna be when you get into blocks and patterns. And hell, you don’t even have to build your own theme, right?

All the demos I’m putting down on YouTube, I’m using Ollie, I’m using Astra. I’m using these really powerful free themes out.org. And they have premium versions, but the free themes are really good to start producing pages. So you could say, you know what? You could download our plugin. Download free Ali.

Activate on your site and within literally 60 seconds start producing block-based content on your legacy website using Ali or Astra or whatever you want. It’s a huge game changer. And I think it’s just understanding how flexible it is that it gives not only the users agencies, freelance, but also website owners, a lot of options and how they wanna use it 

Chris Badgett: for the technical people out there.

How does it at a high level work? Because I went, I remember when you reached out to me to test, I’m like, we’ll see, let me see how this works. And lifter LMS is complex, like WooCommerce is a platform. There’s all these custom post types and everything, and I just turned it on and all the settings for lifter components at a global level showed up.

Brad Williams: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And I like how on individual pages you can make a specific decision and everything, but it just worked. Like, how does this thing technically work? 

Brad Williams: It’s magic. It’s all pie in the sky. There’s fairies and pixie dust and no, it’s it is very technical because I think on the surface it’s okay, you’re probably just running a function or two on the back end to say, run this theme instead.

That theme. Way more technical than that. And what it really gets done to it when you load Gutenberg. Imagine I’m on a classic WordPress site. I want to use Ollie, right? So as soon as I flip a page over or whatever over to Ollie, not only does Ollie have to power the front end, Ollie has to fully load in the backend and the block editor because all the patterns have to be loaded in all the styles.

Everything that Ollie gives you, all that has to be loaded into the editor. Which I don’t think a lot of people realize, right? They think, oh, it’s just blank. Gutenberg, there’s nothing. It had to load all the theme assets as soon as you go create, add new page or add new posts, or add new whatever. That was the large technical challenge because even in the way that WordPress loads themes, it’s not early enough.

I. To, to bring in all that stuff and just switch it. It’s too late in the load process. I’m not the right person to get all the technicalities of it, but I can promise you not only have we built this in a way that just works, like you said, but it’s massively performant. The site I mentioned that does single article page, that’s a WordPress VIP site.

This is running on WordPress, VIP, and that site gets a significant amount of traffic. This has really been tested at scale. With our clients, which gives us a lot of confidence that if it works at that level, at the really kind of enterprise, big media level, it will work for 99.9, the PE percent of the people out there running WordPress, right?

‘Cause performance was such a big thing for us, we can’t roll out a tool and recommend it to our clients if it’s gonna be a massive performance hit or really any performance hit. Like it can’t. You can’t do that. Performance is so important on the web. The site has to be fast or you’re gonna drop search engine ranking.

People are gonna bounce quickly on your site ’cause it’s slow loading. We don’t have attention spans online. I want what I want right now. So we prioritize performance at the forefront of everything to make sure is lightning fast. And of course you always need good caching layers and all that stuff, but it’s built to perform so.

It does work really well. It uses all core WordPress. If you have custom post types registered, they’re automatically gonna show up on the dashboard and you can say, yep, I have my movies section. I wanna replace movies with this other theme. Ollie, it’ll start Every, every movie page will start running Ollie.

Also, since we’re talking the technical side, the one thing I do wanna mention too is, this is really built by developers for developers. So there is an admin ui that allows you to do certain things, but it’s also fully controlled through code. So you can write, we have all sorts of hooks and filters.

And you can type, you can tap into almost any WordPress conditional and do a theme switching. Case conditional. So you could say, Hey, if user Brad logs in, we’re gonna run the brad theme. Or if it’s after 5:00 PM local time, we’re gonna run the evening theme. So like you can just imagine how crazy and flexible this could be, and being able to control it by code is gonna, is really gonna be a requirement, especially at the higher level development, because everything needs to go through.

A code repository. There needs to be accountability around what’s happening, where the code’s committed. You don’t want to a client that doesn’t really understand what they’re doing to go in there and start checking features and saving it and, all of a sudden your theme switch and you didn’t realize what was happening.

So you can control this whole thing by code which is what I would expect most developers would probably want to do. 

Chris Badgett: Very cool. I. Tell us about the like page builders. As an example, elementary’s really popular. I think probably 30% of lifter LMS users use Elementor. They’re on the, either using elementary’s, hello theme or something like ASRA or Cadence or something underneath it.

Page builders are plugins, so how should people think about it if they’re, full site editing. Curious, but they’re really wrapped into this page building world. 

Brad Williams: Yeah. It does fully work with page builders, so we wanna make sure again, a number of the clients that we’ve worked as, or we’re in process of transitioning are on page builders.

Elementor generally the one we see the most. So we wanna make sure it works with all the. Top page builders, Elementor Divvy, beaver Builder cadence those type of those type of builders. But it works, right? So if your whole site’s built with Elementor, you can still go in there and say, all right, I wanna switch my homepage to Astra, or I wanna switch my single post template to.

And then when you hit those pages, it just essentially, it no longer is gonna run Elementor ’cause of the theme switching layer. It knows, hey, we’re switching off Elementor over to this. And so it’ll load all those Ollie assets or ASRA assets instead of Elementor. So you can absolutely use this with those.

And many of the clients we’re recommending to our on page builders ’cause. Look, page builders are great. There’s definitely a there is a market for page builders are a good fit for a lot of people. But what we’re seeing is a lot of companies, marketing companies, agencies, people that don’t really specialize on WordPress, but they build sites right.

Leaning almost too heavily on page builders. So we’re, there’s a lot of clients walk in the door that have this massively complex website. That was built in Elementor and it’s I, it was a wrong decision, right? A really complex website like that in my mind, should not be built using a page builder.

It just gets too hairy and too complicated. So we’ve unpacking that using Stream steam switcher to get ’em back to the block editor, remove that extra layer of complexity, right? Especially we talked for performance. Page builders, they add that, that really strong layer of complexity.

And then all those decisions you’re making on designs and layouts, that’s all stored in your database, right? So it has to be retrieved on page load. Of course it can be cash, but it’s just extra overhead that’s happening to load that page. You can get rid of all that. You can get rid of that and just go with Gutenberg.

No extra page load. It’s what’s already loading. So again it’s an option. People are on page builders and looking to transition or to use it as a a tool alongside your page builder. Like I mentioned, this isn’t a tool that you have to have a plan to remove. I. Certainly if your plan is to transition to a block theme over time, once you actually transition every section of your website, you could remove the plugin and just activate your new theme, and you’re done, right?

The plugin’s gone, and your new theme is fully active, your new block theme, or it could just be a secondary tool that you plan to use forever, right? You keep it on your website. You have your site built with Elementor, which is great, but you wanna launch an lms, right? You wanna launch Lifter? And you know what, I don’t wanna figure out how to do that in Elementor, so I wanna use your theme, Chris.

So boom slash lms and all those pages can all be, on your theme. So again, a lot of tools a lot of options, a lot of use cases, but page builders are a big part of it. ’cause there’s they’re so dominant, there’s so many sites running. Page builders wanna make sure that this fully supports them.

And it’s a tool that people could use if they’re on, if they’re using one. We talked a little bit about patterns and full site editing. I’m not a engineer, and once I realized the power of Gutenberg with, like you said, building landing page pattern template, I could reuse and. Like the copying.

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I can go to a part of my site and just copy a group of stuff or a whole page and just paste it somewhere else. Yeah. It’s so cool. I remember the old world where everything was like, all right, contact a developer. We got need a custom template. It’s not very flexible. Yeah. I couldn’t go make changes to the template when I found some kind of upgrade or something.

That’s what really sold me on full site editing, but what else do you love about it? 

Brad Williams: Yeah, and just to be clear, there’s and people listening probably know the distinction between it, but you have the block editor, which is Gutenberg, the block editor. That’s your content area, right? And then full site editing is essentially expanding that.

So you can use that editor throughout your whole site layout, header, footer, sidebars, whatever. You can use essentially blocks. To build out your site. To be clear, right now, theme Switcher Pro does not support full site editing fully. We baked in some support, but started going down a few rabbit holes, and since it’s still evolving, we’re like, let’s just focus on the block editor.

At least for the launch, it’s definitely on the roadmap as things evolve and that feature gets more tightened up. But I do see there is a use case, right? ’cause it’s the idea of a page builder, but built right into WordPress core. It still has a ways to go, I don’t know if you’ve used it on any of your production websites, like full site editing.

In fact, theme switcher.com is a full FSE enabled theme that we built. It’s, it works. It’s okay. I think it has a little ways to go. I really struggled with the menu and just adding things to the menu was a bit challenging, which was surprising. I see the direction they’re going, but it, it feels Gutenberg back when it was like the first couple releases, right?

Kind of works, but definitely needs polished. And that’s waiting for more of that polish before we bake in that full support for the full site editor. 

Chris Badgett: What those studios you mentioned like you help Medium to like enterprise and you’ve got some big brands on your site, like the NBA Campbell Soup, Starbucks.

Microsoft. Tell us. What’s a really big site? Like how many pages? Because just this problem of hey, if you land a big client, it’s hard to convince ’em to do the whole thing all at once. Yeah. And this is where a theme switcher comes in, but how big are some of these sites you’ve worked on?

Brad Williams: There are millions and millions of pieces of content. Now, to be fair on the theme switcher side, it hasn’t been at the that extreme level. These media sites we’re talking, tens of thousands of posts articles if not more. They’re producing 5, 10, 15 unique articles a day.

They have editorial teams that are writing. And that’s some of the sites we’ve integrated it with.

But in terms of just sheer size. We’ve worked on some massive things and WordPress can scale and basically do anything. I remember one of the largest projects we ever did. You mentioned Microsoft was the old MSDN developer network, if you remember.

It was really important 20 years ago ’cause it was just, it was a, it was essentially a blog network of Microsoft employees, but they were sharing a lot of information that helped a lot of us learn how to do things back in the day. Especially when T Net was new and, things like that.

So we helped them migrate from this proprietary platform over to WordPress, multi-site network, and they were, I think 90 or 95,000 when we were done sites in the network, blogs in the network for the whole MSDN. And it was, tens of millions of. Articles and content that we had to migrate into WordPress into multi-site.

It was a massive migration, as you can imagine. And it took days to even run. At scale we’ve done a lot. WordPress can do it. We’ve seen a lot of sites out there that are, just running massive amounts of traffic. And it works, it works well. 

Chris Badgett: I gotta ask you the number one question for the agencies and the site builders out there.

How do you get those medium and even big enterprise clients? Let’s say there’s an agency and they’re wanting to. Move outside a small business a little bit and get a little bit bigger client, what advice would you have for them to try to develop those clients? 

Brad Williams: Yeah, it’s a good question.

And honestly I think it’s certainly luck as part of it. We landed our first kind of, well-known client name years ago on a flight to Word Camp San Francisco, sitting next to a lady that was flying out to find developers. It was Time Magazine, so it was like our first real big brand.

And it, opened a door, gave us the opportunity and we landed it. And then once you get one it certainly becomes a little easier. ’cause you can have the logo. You can say, yeah, we did this for time, we can do this for you. But I think, aside from that I think a lot of it is projecting that you work on those type of clients, making sure your website aligns with that.

Like you hit our website and you can tell there’s some big brands on there that are recognizable. So it gives you a sense of the type of projects, the size of projects, although you’d be surprised people reach out. Have a very small budget. And I’m like, what about our logo?

These logos gave you that idea. But you wanna project that. If you’re talking to a big brand and they go look at their website, what are they gonna think? Are they gonna say this looks pretty amateur, or are they gonna think, yeah, this looks like this looks legit. Who we wanna work with?

They do good work. And just put yourself out there I, when Web Dev first started, nobody knew who we were. And we were just da getting into WordPress and we started getting involved in the community and contributing to open source. And that led to some speaking opportunities at Word Camps in there, just getting started and very quickly we grew our name for ourselves just by this kind of gorilla marketing of showing up.

Contributing. And next thing you know, our name was out there a lot. We’re speaking a lot of events and then more and more things started to show up. There’s not as many events these days, but I think even doing what you’re doing right here, Chris, this is getting yourself out there, getting me out there, getting your guests on the show out there.

So even just getting on people’s podcast, talking shop, making people aware that, what you’re talking about is helpful. So it’s, there’s no right answer, but I think one, making sure you’re presenting that you are that type of company that works with larger brands and you have those capabilities and someone, it doesn’t mean you have to have a staff of a hundred people, but project that on your website that you have not a staff of a hundred people, but you have a very solid company, work with larger.

Companies, you have support, you have what they need. And then, things will happen at this, there’s a lot of opportunities ’cause it’s right now, people are looking to save money. Even large corporations, they’re not spending what they were a year ago. So there’s good opportunities for people to come in and make some, makes some things happen.

A potentially a lower price point that gives them that opportunity that maybe they wouldn’t have had a year or two ago.

Chris Badgett: You have some insight into that, who WordPress is for, and where it fits?

I know this is a big question and you could do a whole talk on it. Whether it’s a small business, a medium-sized business, or even an enterprise, there are so many site-building solutions like Webflow and others. When does WordPress really stand out as the perfect fit for a client? Yeah.

Brad Williams: That’s the big question, right? I think that is, and that is one of the challenges of WordPress because we’re trying to be everything to everybody, and it’s no different than running an agency and saying, we do WordPress work. What type of projects? Whatever. That could be anything. It could be a $500 blog or a $500 million, website. It’s a tough question, man. ’cause it is so flexible, it can be used for everything.

So how do you focus in on what that means? I’ve always really gone to the fact that I feel like WordPress, one of the reasons WordPress has gotten so popular over the years is it’s intuitive. It’s, and it’s, there’s been a lot of focus on the ui, ux doesn’t mean there’s not more we can do, certainly, but if you just log someone into a WordPress website that’s never seen it before and say, see if you can figure out how to publish a post.

They’ll probably be able to figure out how to publish a post. It may not look great. It may just be the title and they don’t realize they need to add blocks, but they’ll probably figure out how to add the title and hit publish, right? So I feel like the intuitiveness of it has always really helped.

So I think, people looking for a system that’s, easy to use, obviously has a huge ecosystem. That’s another big, huge benefit to WordPress is the ecosystem, the products that are out there, the services, how long it’s been around, big teams behind these products or teams that you know, you can trust and support.

Intuitiveness, flexibility, ui, ux stuff, and just the ease of content. Like as long as WordPress doesn’t lose focus of its core, which is creating content, it’s content management system, it’s all about the content, then I think we’ll be okay. We’re never gonna dominate, we’re never gonna be a hundred percent usage.

We’re never gonna be, everyone’s oh no, it’s shrinking. I’m like, it’s not shrinking. It’s plateaued a bit in the last year. That’s true. But 43% even is pretty good. The end of the world. Yeah. 43.5% right now. That’s it. It’s an insane number. That’s hard to wrap your head around, like that’s a lot of sites.

A lot of sites, and that’s just the known internet, right? Forget all the local installs and all the things that people doing behind firewalls that block, tracking and. So it’s just a staggering number. So I think people may remember that even if it goes down a percent or two, it’s a staggering number, but yeah it’s a tough question.

I think it’s more about showcasing what it can do in different verticals, different angles. There’s talk about, rebranding WordPress or getting some marketing held, blah, blah, blah, like WordPress for e-commerce, WordPress for publishers, WordPress for small business, like really having these focused landing pages, sections that explain why WordPress is good for a small business, right?

Why it’s. Easy. It’s generally the costs are gonna be cheaper once you get set up, ongoing things like that. So just, there’s so many niches and verticals it’s great for, but the message of it’s everything to everybody is not a good message. It needs to be more focused. In some areas, so I don’t have good answers there.

I’m sure there’s smarter people out there, hopefully can figure it out, but it’s a challenge with any business. I always dealt with people like, oh, I want to get Should, should I get start building websites with WordPress? A lot of people say no, it’s too saturated. I’m like, do it, but just try to find a niche.

It’ll make it easier to market. Like maybe it’s Woo Commerce, maybe it’s lifter like find a niche and that way your marketing is so targeted on not just WordPress, but WordPress and you’re gonna start to stand out. You’re gonna start to stand out from the pack. Versus me. Our challenge is we do WordPress, right?

It’s not, and it’s like we do WordPress, so that makes it, that makes our marketing harder, which is why we get people to walk in the door with the $500 budget and a $500,000 budget. ’cause it’s tough to us to market just to that higher level.

Chris Badgett: In terms of the kind of land and expand approach, which theme Switcher Pro really helps with?

What advice do you have for somebody to develop a client relationship and keep it going? Like when I worked with web dev studios. It was professional all the way through, through the sales process, the communication, the weekly calls. Yeah, the scheduling, the team that came for different parts. It was like super professional.

Brad Williams: Thanks Chris. And if 

Chris Badgett: I had unlimited budget, I would just keep going. And, how do you do that? What’s some of the pro tips you have for land and expand and good? Yeah. Land expand is 

Brad Williams: a good way to describe it. And that’s really our goal, right? And we tell clients, I, I get very honest when I say clients leads walk in the door, I get very honest with them.

Look, we’re I. We’re all about partnerships and relationships. Yes, we wanna rebuild your website. Yes, we wanna help you with your online goals, but we also wanna be there for the long haul. And I always, I really appreciate my team. If we can help our clients be successful, if they’re successful, we will inherently be successful because why would they go anywhere else?

If we’re helping them succeed online, if we’re helping, increase their sales or their conversion or their bounce rates are getting better whatever their goals are, if we’re helping them meet or exceed those goals, they’re never gonna go anywhere else, right? That’s always our goal is if we’re doing a website rebuild, we want to rebuild a site, but then we also want to be an ongoing partnership.

So we’ll set up something like an ongoing retainer, a monthly retainer, maybe we have set number of hours every month that we’re dedicated to them and then we can schedule it out. And then we just work through their initiatives. I always like to also preach that we’re not task takers, we’re gonna bring our recommendations and we want to, I say, let’s sit at the table.

The client knows their business inside and out. We know word pressing the web inside and out. We all sit at the same table together. We’re gonna make the best decisions for your online goals and initiatives, right? And then we can help execute on those. So always be thinking, yes, there’s gonna be that initial project.

It might be a build, it might just be some one-off tasks they need help with. But you always wanna be thinking, how do I establish a, an a longer ongoing relationship? ’cause to be very honest, getting more retainers and recurrent revenue really helped us, especially through, the past four or five years with the uncertainty and the ups and downs and, lockdown all of that when new projects weren’t always walking the door.

We still had our monthly retainers that were keeping us going, like keeping us busy. We’re still doing that stuff. So think about that. ’cause it is, you don’t wanna just be a one and done, you jump to the next one. You wanna cultivate relationships, build those relationships, and over time you start to build a kind of a Rolodex of clients you’ve had for years that are giving you, bringing in money month in a month out, right?

And that’s how you really start to grow and to really, solid and viable business in this space. I think 

Chris Badgett: one of the key things you said is we’re gonna make recommendations, like what are some examples of like proactive recommendations that lead to more work? 

Brad Williams: A lot of it’s around performance.

Think about things that clients care about, right? And it’s ranking search engines, which is directly related to performance in a big way. That’s a huge one for us. We’re always running page speed insight tests. We’re always running speed tests and looking for opportunities that we can go to the client and say, Hey.

You just uploaded an image that’s 10 megs. We need to, let’s, we could either convert that for you, or better yet, let’s integrate a system that does that automatically, right? You upload whatever image you want and it will make a nice web p format for you. Those type of opportunities, you can always bring a client and you really will stand out as you’ll look like a thought leader.

’cause you are, you’re being proactive, right? Look at things like security, every client we engage with, I go through a checklist and we handed them and say, Hey. Here’s the things we could do to help enhance your security. Two factor authentication. We’re happy to integrate that. Maybe a single sign on, strong password policies, whatever that is.

Most sites are not doing any of that, right? That’s some quick wins. You can, and they’re thinking, oh, he’s, they’re really thinking about security. That’s great. Like you wanna be proactive and thinking about the things they’re not thinking about. But supports the goals that they are thinking about, right?

So performance and speed are gonna help them rank better, and search engines are gonna help people stay on the website longer. That’s a goal for them, right? So get that site as fast as you can. You need to be perfect if you can on core web vitals or as close as you can. Security is another one.

Accessibility is another one. It’s not only important, it’s the right thing to do. Like I preach this to my team and our clients like. We make the web as accessible as we can. I don’t care if it’s a client requirement, we’re making it accessible, and the only time we won’t is if it’s literally a client is telling us it has to be this color scheme.

We inform them that is whatever, it doesn’t pass the test. And then we would do it if they, tell us to. But generally speaking, the clients wanna be accessible too, because it could open ’em up to legal situations, right? Yes, it, generally speaking, they want. Accessible web, but what’s their goal not to get sued, right?

So let’s make your website accessible. Let’s integrate things that can help automate that. AI is a great use case for automating alt texts, the things that people just never do or forget to do. Automate it. If there’s a 15 check step checklist to publish something, they’re never gonna do all 15 unless it’s required.

How can you make that three or four things and then all those other things are automated, right? Oh, I upload an image. I forgot to fill in the alt text. AI fills in, Hey, it’s a picture of a dog on a park bench. Boom. That’s perfect. It’s accessible. It’s what it needs to say. So look for those opportunities that you can bring.

’cause those are the biggie. Speed, performance, security, accessibility. Those are some big ones that there’s almost always things you can do there. Look for new versions of WordPress. 6.8 just came out great opportunity to sit down. What new features should my clients care about in this fe in this release?

There is that pre-loading of pages and content stuff that’s interesting, right? From a performance standpoint. So that’s something you wanna research. Always look at new versions and say, what can my clients choose that are in here? And then you come to ’em and say, Hey, new versions out. Lemme walk through some features.

I think you’ll care about. Now you’re a partner. Now it’s not just client agency, you’re a partner. You’re thinking about them, you’re thinking about their success, and that stuff goes a long way towards building those relationships and getting them to trust that you’re trying to help you’re helping them make the best decisions for their online goals.

Some of the, and I’ll end it on this point, but some of the hardest challenge, toughest clients are the ones that don’t go with your. Recommendations. And I’m not saying they should always just blindly say yes to everything we recommend. But if it’s constant pushback and they hired you ’cause you’re the expert, but they’re constantly pushing back on what you’re recommending, that’s a big red flag that you might want to take a step back and say, wait a minute.

I’m like, why you hired me? I’m the expert, but you were literally doing everything I tell you, you should not be doing, it’s not gonna end well for either side. They’re not gonna be happy with the results ’cause they’re not listening to you. And you’re not gonna be happy ’cause you’re gonna feel like you’re getting blamed for things that shouldn’t be your fault, right?

So look out for that. But generally speaking, most people do want, they want your advice, they want your help. They hired you for a reason. Sometimes it’s good to remind yourself that they hired you ’cause you’re the expert. So show ’em that. 

Chris Badgett: So that’s Brad Williams from Web Dev Studios. Go check out web dev studios.com, put theme Switcher Pro in your toolkit.

It’s awesome. We’re gonna be doing some content at Lifter on how to use it and why to use it and where to use it and all that. That’s at theme switcher.com. Any anywhere else for people to go or connect with you? Brad? 

Brad Williams: Yeah, I’m on all the socials, Twitter and Blue Sky at Williams ba or Blue Sky and Brad Williams just search me.

I like linked my domain. It’s not really easy to say. And then we’ve putting out some cool YouTube videos too. So if you search web dev studios on YouTube, we’ve got a couple of teams switcher videos. I’ve tweeted them, they’re on socials too. But within a couple minutes you can see this in action.

We got, examples of from block to block theme, we got example and a one I just posted of classic editor to block and just click in that save draft button. Classic editor and seeing the whole thing flip. It is just like a whoa, this is cool moment. But do reach out if you have any questions, any thoughts?

It’s new, so really trying to get feedback. I’m doing a demo with an agency owner right after this. If anybody would like a demo or just have questions, whatever, feel free to reach out to [email protected]. But yeah, I really appreciate it, Chris. I’ve always enjoyed our friendship, our partnership you putting your trust in our company to, to help your company.

And I think this is just the next evolution of us helping each other through our products. Super excited to get this out there and really excited to know this is one that, that I know your clients are gonna be very interested in. So thanks for having me. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome, Brad. Thanks for coming on and we’ll have to do it again sometime.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [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 episode of LMSCast, Chris Badgett interviews Raquel Karina, the founder of Wonderland Curious and the creator of PressConf, a new WordPress conference aimed at businesses that seeks to replace PressNomics. She shared how to build a community.

Raquel recounts how the concept for PressConf was ignited during a 2023 hike in Taipei, where she and a friend identified a significant need for an event in the WordPress ecosystem that would focus more on founders and be more personal. Raquel leveraged her experience in organizing a variety of events, including school functions, weddings, WordCamps, and tech community meetups, to assemble a streamlined and dedicated team that made PressConf happen in Tempe, Arizona.

She talks about how stepping outside the official WordCamp structure enabled her to move more quickly, bypass bureaucratic obstacles, and foster an environment centered on genuine connections, learning, and business transactions. Raquel shares her experiences of the emotional highs and lows involved in launching the event against a backdrop of tension and division within the WordPress community. She underscores her commitment to ensuring that PressConf is a safe, inviting space for founders, product creators, and service providers.

This episode tells a compelling tale of leadership and community-building, while also highlighting the importance of remaining faithful to one’s values in the process of creating something new and necessary in the WordPress world.

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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 Raquel, who I’ve known for a decade. We first met in Mexico. Raquel just put on an awesome event for the WordPress community, the business community. Called Press Conf, and I wanted to interview Raquel about, her journey with that ideas around creating events and building community, which she’s exceptional at.

But first, welcome to the show, Raquel. 

Raquel Karina: Thank you Chris. Really happy to be here. 

Chris Badgett: I. I have to say I I made a faux pa at your event. We were going out to dinner and I looked around and I said, Hey, everybody here has been on the podcast. It’s wild. And you’re like, I haven’t been on the podcast yet.

I’m like, oh my God, I’ve known you for so long. I feel like we’ve done it. I’m like, I can’t believe we haven’t done it yet. So here we are 

Raquel Karina: making an honest man outta you now. 

Chris Badgett: Thank you. Thank you. I. So your business is called Wonderland. Curious. Yes. You can look for that on LinkedIn, social media.

You’ve got a website coming [email protected]. But first dive in and let’s start it today. What was the event that you just ran and why’d you do it? 

Raquel Karina: Oh man. Okay. Buckle up. I the event is press comp. We’ve been seeing the spiritual successor of Pressonomics, so a conference specifically for the business of WordPress.

Those who drive the WordPress economy. Essentially. You make money on WordPress, you’re invited. If you want to make money on WordPress, you were invited. But yeah, [00:02:00] we. There’s a some origin, big time origin story. But to keep it not too long, I have just really found a niche of what I’m really good at, and that’s bringing people together.

I. In real life humans, and I’ve loved volunteering and putting on events, not even for WordPress, but even my kids’ schools and other community events in the startup space in the valley in Phoenix, where I live, or even in the design space. And when there was such a need in for a business of WordPress conference to come back, I really just.

Decided. I’m like, if anyone could do it, I can do it. And I had a lot of people encouraging me and saying, yes, Raquel, we believe in you. And just took a step and another step, and. We could go into all sorts of specifics if you want, if you have any other specific questions. But it happened last week and it blew my mind every step [00:03:00] of the way and seeing everyone there, it was just so incredible and so needed for our community at this time.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. And I do have more questions, but I just wanna say at a high level, one of the frameworks I use for, helping education entrepreneurs and those that build the tech to support those industries is a challenge they have for wearing five hats at the same time. And that’s the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder.

And I think the community builder hat is the least understood with the most lacking of skills and experience out there. It’s like truly a, a unique gift to build community online in person. Just for your industry before the sale as part of the product. It can be a lot of different things, but first question about press comp is how long did it time elapsed from?

I’m gonna do this to the 140 50 people [00:04:00] or however many that showed up at the event. What was the timeframe from idea to launch for that? 

Raquel Karina: I guess technically. The moment it was happening. And there was no doubt in my mind a year. But again, and I’ve said the story, Chris, you were with me and Jason, several others, and we were hiking a mountain in Taipei.

And the conversation came up and. You know there somebody referring to Cloud Fest as the new Pronos lit a fire in me. I was like legitimately offended and not at Robert. Robert. Robert Windish is the one who said it. I’ve shouted out his name so many times. It wasn’t that I was mad at him at it at all.

It was just like, this is what we’ve resorted to. ’cause we don’t have prost stomachs anymore and. And then that was the first huge catalyst. And then shortly after I got on a mastermind, community mastermind call with other WordPresses, and the conversation came up around having a. Word Camp that was business centric.

And I know from being a long time, decade long plus word camp organizer that Word Camp serve a purpose. And the purpose they serve is wonderful and needed, and they don’t need to be all for all. And I just knew, I was like, no, this burden isn’t for Word camps to carry. I’m gonna do it. And I immediately hung up and reached out to Josh and Sally.

Immediately and that was, gosh, yeah, it was either late March or April of last year, 2024. And then having, figuring out with them going forward, will it be press stomachs, will it not? Because GoDaddy owns the trademark. And then my baby, I have adult children. My baby graduated from high school and letting the kind of summer simmer.

For me and get my act together. Doing, having conversations, playing the sort of beginning game of knowing this conference is coming and working on pr. Having lots of conversations with key people in the industry. And then came last August, I had my first meeting, started building a small team.

And really between August and November before we started selling tickets. It still wasn’t a terrible amount of time other than like setting up a quick site. But really the momentum really started in November once we started selling tickets. So yeah, here we 

Chris Badgett: are. So in summary, like what the event was, it was at a hotel in Tempeh, Arizona.

Really nice hotel. Great pool and hot tub and it had a nice courtyard in the center. It had a con, I guess you would call it a conference room. You had two days of talks. All the talks were great. You had parties on the front end and on the back end, and then an extra bonus day if people wanted it to do organized golfing or activities. I’m sure there’s more than I mentioned, but. What was easier than you thought? And what was harder than you thought? Because from my perspective, I’m like this thing felt like it had just, this wasn’t your first rodeo. And I didn’t, there was no big mistake or mix up.

Everything was fine. Everything just worked. But what was harder than you thought and easier than you thought? 

Raquel Karina: Everything was easier, but I thought it, I knew it was gonna be easier. Especially from somebody who’s run a lot of volunteer based events. When it’s volunteer based you’re volunteering for another entity. And here’s all sorts of red tape and steps that you need to take.

And I knew from the beginning I just knew that it was gonna be easier and it’s hard to say what I, what was easier that I didn’t expect it to be easier because I expected all of it to be easier other than maybe. When it really was easier, I was like, oh, okay. I was right. Because there’s that little bit of is it though, is it gonna be easier?

I just remember signing the contract for the venue, which Tempe Mission Palms. I just could, I was like, that was easy. I was literally like, just toured the space, gave them a pretty small down payment, and that was it. We’re off to the races as opposed to, I’ve done so much of that for Word camps. It’s reaching out to Word Camp, reaching out to the venue, having everybody talk to each other.

It’s seven steps before you get that contract signed and this time around. It was just, yeah, and like you don’t have to deal with things like business insurance because the hotel carries a business insurance for an event like that. So it just. It was just, that part was really amazing.

The team was so easy. So maybe that I guess I never put too much effort into it. But the team built itself when I started having conversations with others like Brian Richards. Matt Madero several from my work Camp Phoenix team were like, I’m in. And I didn’t even get to ask. I was like, oh, okay.

Yeah. Thank you. And it was like really, that part was just so easy. Carol, standby. I always joke I didn’t give her a choice. I was like, okay, so you’re helping me. And that was that. And then we continued and then. Dave Ryan was like, I was like, ’cause he’s had a lot of health issues and I was like, do you have time because I really need you.

And he was like, yeah. So the team was really easy and just and they were small, but high performers. I’m a big fan of the lean team, a lean organizing team because then you just get so much done and the, it’s less, I guess cooks the kitchen. And you basically have hired like the top chef for what they do and then things that were harder than expected.

I think I honestly ex I dealing with the drama that hit WordPress made it harder. Yeah. Because my, this event predated the drama and we announced Monday. September, or right before Word Camp US happened, and Friday at the keynote is when everything blew up and then blew up and more, and just bigger and bigger explosions.

And so that was not expected and that did make it harder but different, right? Like looking back I’m so grateful because it really changed the dynamic and the trajectory in a good way, and I was so convinced that. This is an opportunity for press comp to be a breath of fresh air that our community needs so badly right now.

And a neutral space where automatic could come, WP Engine can come and everyone else can come and have a safe space for everybody and that was harder. I loved it. I honestly feel honored. I felt like out of all the things that Raquel loves and I’m a big firm believer in, in second chances and grace and forgiveness and not cannibalizing each other.

And so it was just the perfect opportunity for an event by Raquel to happen in a time where we wanna cannibalize each other and we wanna unfor we, yeah, not forgive each other. So that was harder, but it was a good harder, I. 

Chris Badgett: It sounds like we’re already here with the why, like what is your why and both in your person that kind of goes into this project and also what made it quote easy?

’cause you’re in alignment, so what is that? 

Raquel Karina: Yeah. I haven’t done that full Simon Sinek where you have like the sentence like structured and then you could just stay it. But I know with everything that it’s in me that it’s to cultivate. Human connection. Everywhere I go, wherever my feet are, is an opportunity to cultivate human connection.

And I, it just all comes down to that whether that’s a smile to a stranger on the street, whether that’s a conference that you plan for, an industry that you love, and to do it in person. And especially in such a time as we are in, with AI and everything, virtual and even you and I can have this, virtually, and I’m so forever grateful and I’m, I embrace it and I look forward to using it as a tool.

We will always forever as creatures on this earth need each other. And so it just made so much sense, and especially with the outcry, with word word camps, almost not existing in North America. And we post pandemic and then now people are recognizing how we’re creatures meant for each other.

We’re not meant to be insular and separated. We’re meant to interact with each other. Physically in person. So for me it was simple bringing this event. But, and it’s not just that when I, whenever I travel, if I just happen to be, are you still in Maine? 

Chris Badgett: I am in Maine. 

Raquel Karina: So if I happen to go there, you better believe I’m gonna hit you up and harass you and be like, Chris, let’s have coffee.

’cause I’m near you. And 

Chris Badgett: I tell, I appreciate that. I’ve gone to Arizona on other trips and you see a picture of a cactus or something and you’re like, Hey, let me know if you want to hang out or do anything. Like it’s, I always felt like warmly welcomed whenever I’m around you. 

Raquel Karina: Yeah. That’s awesome because I definitely have that’s my thing is if you come to Arizona or Phoenix, like you better hit me up.

’cause I wanna say hi because that is just, we need it more than ever in this world. And even as we become more and more online I don’t wanna ever stop helping cultivate human connection. 

Chris Badgett: How do you think about the online versus in-person? Community building, like especially in, WordPress or online business, there’s a lot of online community stuff and social media going on.

How are they same? How are they different? How do you think about building community online versus in person? Or is it really just the same thing, different show. Or different venue? Oh, 

Raquel Karina: I think it’s a hundred percent different. Or I guess maybe not a hundred percent, but it is extremely different.

But they’re both, I guess they’re not equal in value, but they’re very valuable and so I’m very pro social media. I do think I have a little bit of a different perspective as I am not one to doom scroll, and I don’t say that as a brag. I. It’s not fair if that’s not my vice, but I am an 80% producer, 20% consumer. So I like to produce content. I like to do a lot of IG stories. If anyone follows me on Instagram I’m a big yeah. Producer and I try not to scroll. And if I do, I wanna see who am I’m connected to, right? So social media for that sense is beautiful. I love it.

And we’re. It was like, MySpace. And I really loved that and I was so careful about curating those top six photos. And then remember when it went to nine, you could do three more. It was like a big deal. And and I do love that and I love that you and I can meet virtually right now.

I love that we could use a virtual component to connect in real time. I do think that’s important, and I would rather have that today than what it was 30 plus years ago. Where we didn’t have this or we, yeah, maybe we could talk on the phone, but it’s not even remotely the same that we could see each other and we could see each other pretty well, at the end of the day though, it’s, we’ll never replace in-person connection. It is a supplement. Absolutely, and I’m very, and I don’t think I need to describe what the definition of a supplement is versus the actual thing, but when it, you and I, having this conversation right now in real time is beautiful and lovely, but if we were in person, our energies, our vibe would be felt in exchanged there because there’s a, an energy exchange that happens with people, and that’s what happens at an in-person event.

And so where I do draw a line for me personally is my online community, cultivating community building will be on social, will be in connection, will be casual, will be personal, will be real. And on LinkedIn. Sure, we’ll be business centric, but when it comes to an event. I have no desire to do a virtual event.

Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So 

Raquel Karina: if anyone wants to hire Brian Richards, he’s amazing at that. He’s also really good in-person events as well, but I have no desire and that I know my lane. And where I really see the biggest need in our world is for in-person events, and especially for more of the intimate event that we had last week, as opposed to, for instance, cloud Fest, which is a really big production or Word camp, US, Europe, Asia, thousands of people, it you obviously can still and I love them. I love them. I’m an extrovert. I love and I love the energy I get. But having that smaller, one 50 to 200 person event is what I’m just really loving right now.

Building that up. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I think one of the reasons community building is misunderstood or just not as explored is because we have our own individual hangups. It could be shyness imposter syndrome, fear of being on stage just. All kinds of anxiety and stuff. And I think in the tech community or in the online business community, there’s a lot of life that happens behind the computer and people get comfortable there.

What do you recommend to somebody or, and maybe tell us about your own journey on how to get past all that and get out there in real life and build community from a inner game or personal development perspective? 

Raquel Karina: A couple of things. Again, not exactly fair. A lot of the stories that were shared about me rich Tabor Brian Cords at all others is I’m seeing a pattern of the, like the movie up.

Did you see up? I did. And the whole beginning before the montage opening montage where Ellie just basically forces, what was his name? Carl Fredrickson, was that his name? To be friends and so I’m getting a, a sense that’s sort of me, that I’m like, I come and I’m like, you and I are friends, and that’s how it goes.

And. It’s not gonna stop. Same thing like how I remember I met you and Thomas at Cabo Press and it, we were in that, that, I forget what they’re called, but like that small group together, that lunch group. And I immediately was just like these are my friends now. And they’re, that’s just is what it is.

And so I think one leaning into the Raquel’s ’cause they’re, we’re here and actors. What’d you say? 

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The people? Connectors? 

Raquel Karina: Yes. So the ones who are like very friendly and very pull you in, let them pull you in and just in that sense, I would say be a little brave and just go for it.

The other I. And again that, there’s always gonna be one or two or three, in any given community. And I think for our audience there’s definitely, we’re a tech audience, so there’s gonna be less, of that, my personality types and more of the introverted. But I do see is a lot of I guess careful.

Timidness into getting out there. And a lot of us are really amazing on the keyboard, and like we got our avatars and there’s so many people like I know, and then I see them in person. I’m like, who are you? And then I find out, oh, actually they’re because I know they’re avatar.

And so there’s, and I’m trying to think of like different things to say that we haven’t already heard about. Be brave. But if you could take your like online reputation. Hopefully you’ve cultivated that well, and you’re not a meanie, you’re not a bully. But if you could take that online reputation and just know that people are eager to meet you in person, then yeah, start there.

Start with that. Start with oh, I see. I’ll see, and I’m already gonna forget his first name, but his handle is jazz sequence everywhere, and.

Chris Badgett: I’m not sure. 

Raquel Karina: Okay and he works for Pantheon. I think it’s Chris. And again, if you’re in tech, just say Chris or Matt or Mike, and sorry Chris, but Yeah.

And and and he’s so known it’s not everywhere. So then when and he even said, I think he made the comment at press comp that he hopes someone can pull him out off of the being a wallflower. Because obviously online he’s very open, but in, in person, maybe he just felt a little bit shy and totally using a case study, and he doesn’t even know this, but like he seemed to be very involved and very active throughout the entire conference.

So don’t be afraid to latch onto someone who’s maybe giving you a little nudges and pushes to get out there. And also use the reputation that you’ve built up. And allow that to be like a stepping stool for you to get out there. And then the other thing is just open up your mouth and give it a shot.

And our community is really kind for the most part. So I would say just do it. 

Chris Badgett: It’s really welcoming. I can’t remember the exact analogy or where I heard it, but like some it’s like when you see small groups talking. In some communities, it’s like a bagel. You can’t break in. Yeah.

Or you should be like a croissant and there’s always like room for somebody to join. Doesn’t matter like how far you are and how long you’ve been in the industry or whatever. I. I’ve always appreciated that about this community. 

Raquel Karina: Yeah, very much. We, I think there’s a big push for that too, of we know that, and any sort of trainings we’ve been a part of in this community, it’s very openly discussed to have your circle open.

I. Or if you see someone, oh. A quick story. Where Canada, last July during lunch we were, it was a group of us comfortable, knew each other, friends, and we’re all sitting at a table. And then next to us was somebody who we didn’t know by herself, sitting at a table. And James Guru got up and he is let’s go talk to our new friend over here.

Nice. And just started talking with her and getting to know her and. It’s like doing being that way and that’s the type of community that we have. We have like people like that who are making us all feel welcome, 

Chris Badgett: shift gears into content. I was really impressed with all of the talks. They were fantastic.

And I think you all did a it wasn’t like a call for speakers and suggest your topic. You guys like literally designed what you wanted and co-created it with people. Tell us about that decision and that process. 

Raquel Karina: Yeah, honestly, there wasn’t a lot of thought into it and I commend my team. ’cause sometimes I just wonder if I’ve, if I’m driving them crazy ’cause I just get these ideas and I just go with it and I’m just like, this is what we’re doing.

Come on everybody. ’cause I, we really didn’t really discuss it other than let’s just start inviting all of our speakers. And as we started inviting them, it became clear that it was gonna be invite only and I’m not a fan of that phrase ’cause it sounds so pretentious. It wasn’t about that. It was very strategic, especially with, at that point, knowing where we were with  WordPress and what was going on with the community and.

The lawsuit and all of that, and knowing the direction we wanted press comp to go in, it just made sense that we wanted to invite certain speakers. And with that meant we wanted speakers from automatic speakers, from WP Engine, speakers from the community itself. And then we told each of our speakers may inspire us, challenge us, or make us cry.

Though that was the only command and the speakers we chose, we already knew they came with it. We already knew that they’re powerhouses and a lot of them I cracked myself up. I’m just putting everybody on blast right now. But like Rich Tabor, he’s so polished and so amazing and I question if he is actually ai ’cause he’s just amazing.

Can you get raw with us? I wanna see raw rich. Raw rich. It sounds funny. And even then I was really touched because he said some things on stage that he just doesn’t ever talk about. I’ve never seen him talk about his children. It’s not that he doesn’t love his children, but this was the platform for it.

Or to share stories about what happens in his home and. Yeah, that, that’s what I wanted. I wanted on stage to, for me to experience what I experienced at previous word sorry, omics, where I was like touched or I was like offended. I wanted even a little bit of that, or because those things, if you handle them well, if you’re open, then oh my God, amazing things can happen.

Amazing. And so that was the intention. We hand selected our speakers. Not all of them came through and even some, like poor Oliver Sils got like sick right. Literally days before and couldn’t come. But yeah, we hand selected and we told them, make us cry. Inspire us or challenge us. And that was the reason.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Job well done on that. Let’s pivot into tech real quick. ’cause I think if somebody’s thinking about designing an event, they might get a little down the rabbit hole of oh my gosh, I gotta figure out lights and cameras and projectors and the pointer thing that makes the slides go and stuff like that.

Legit you said earlier that oh, you just put a deposit on the hotel and it came with its own insurance. Does did the hotel have all the audio video stuff or did you have to figure that out? 

Raquel Karina: Yeah. So those were the first steps. And thankfully having organized several other events you just know what to do.

So yes, the hotel does have their own av but that meant multiple meetings, figuring out, what they’re gonna do on stage and how much, ’cause that has its own budget and, proposals. And that was the other thing too from that standpoint is, this is not a word camp.

God bless word camps, but it’s not. So we want lighting, we want curtains, we want, all of the bells and whistles on that stage, and. Then same thing. It’s funny you say that because that is something that you think about is they’re called confidence monitors, the ones that allow the speakers to see what the audience sees and Yeah.

And the clicker and all of those are itemized on lines, on, on the proposal. And that does come with experience, but also if someone’s first getting into it, any AV company you go with, they’re gonna know and they’re gonna, they’re gonna tell you everything that you would. Need to know and they’ll work with you and what you need.

Was that the full question about Oh I would say too, there’s things as simple as like signage, and that takes design because you gotta design the signs. And I would say give you a little insider, pro tip, go with a local printer. Okay? Whatever you do, go with a local printer because.

If there’s a mess up, like you’re not dealing with shipping once, so you don’t have to pay for shipping, especially, you could just pick it all up when they’re local. But that’s huge and not a huge expense if you’re doing it locally. I’m a firm believer local is cheaper than getting it from someplace that’s shipped.

But there’s little things like that. And then obviously when you use a hotel. There’s a lot that you just have to use with the hotel, and most people know when you’re using a hotel where the costs come in is f and b food and beverage. Okay? So really you don’t even get charged to use the hotel. You promise hotel rooms and you buy a bunch of food.

That’s really where it comes in. So those parties was really where we strategized to pay. At the hotel and for the services really for allowing us to use their space. And that’s really we could go into a whole other podcast on running events and what that looks like, but those are just some little bit of the things you have to decide and deal with.

Chris Badgett: What about sponsors? How’d you get ’em? And I know you’re familiar with it from WordPress. ’cause WordPress events have always done sponsors, but. Particularly if somebody’s never done it before, how do, how should they think about finding sponsors and giving ’em booths and what makes the sponsor wanna do it and figuring out pricing and all that stuff.

Raquel Karina: Yeah, that’s it’s a big undertaking on nothing to be trifled with. That is one area that I know for me. I wanna do better just from a personal goal is like getting out in front of that quicker. And because it was the resurrection of Pressonomics, there definitely was a lot of social clout in the community for, and also with me.

And I’m very grateful that I’ve built the relationships that I have because people just knew like that they knew what this event was and they knew the value of it and, but it was not easy. I would say having a prospectus. I know even in post status, they were just talking about that and having a prospectus early on to talk about the value that a sponsor’s gonna gain from sponsoring your event.

And just go on the internet and find something and copy it or ask chap, GPT and chat GPT will blow your mind with some prospectus items. And even if you didn’t like, that was the hard part for me is I couldn’t use previous. Omics numbers, so I had to use like organic numbers. So it was more so projections and thankfully it more than delivered.

But the prospectus if this is something you think about in your future that you want start having relationships with these sponsors now and for no reason other than just to have the relationship with this person and I’m, oh my gosh, I cannot preach that more than I, I do right now. Building trusted relationships with people with no expectation.

With none. That is the biggest, best way to do this because you know that there’s trust when you know someone and I. You. And when you start to know someone, you have this trust and they decide to produce a product, then you’re like, oh, I know this person. I know their character.

I’m gonna buy their plugin or a service, like an agency or a service, like an event. People knew me, they knew my character. They knew my like portfolio of events that I’d put on. And if you do that now and you want to do an event in the future, then you’re gonna have that built in clout and people are gonna sponsor without even asking.

I’ve given a shout out to Roger a couple times from Kinta, but it was a no brainer. He literally, we had the quickest conversation in the world. He’s Hey, let’s talk press conference. I was like, okay. We got on the phone, he is okay, so we’re sponsoring and we’re gonna do notebooks and just send me the invoice.

It was just like that, like he didn’t even question. And Roger had never been to Omics. So having those trusted relationships is huge. And then, like I said though, like my personal challenge was I can’t just rely on people who know me and know omics. And we did have some new sponsors that, we’re also new to the community.

Yeah. So getting the prospectus out, really understanding what your value is. Really getting creative with your sponsor packages and how that can attract more. And understanding your target audience and allowing that to dictate how we’re to price point sponsors. That’s a big one too, because, depending on your type of event, is it similar to a word camp then that’s gonna help dictate your sponsor cost and levels.

Is it not? Is it like what a press comp was, where it’s the business side then? Yeah, that’s also gonna dictate because you need more cost is more. And then at the end of the day, of course. Everything costs money. So you need to make sure all the costs are covered because you can’t put on an event and lose money and be in the negative.

That’d be awful. Yep. Ho sponsors, 

Chris Badgett: you mentioned the power of building relationships before you need them or with no expectation and everything. Just curious if you had to guess, and I know you’re a natural and you just get out there, but like how many. Events or things at least related to this conference do you go to in a year, like once a month or even more frequent or It ebbs and flows.

Depends. If somebody’s trying to get out in their community, like it’s more than just one shot, one deal is you gotta keep going. And what do you think is a reasonable event count per year? 

Raquel Karina: It’s contingent on your availability. And budget. So pre pandemic, I, there was, I think felt like once a month, maybe once every other month.

So possibly eight times eight events. Most of those were word camps. But. Depending on the type event you’re having or you’re gonna have go to those events if you can and if you, even if cost is an issue, see if you could volunteer. For those and then you’re getting the insight scoop. And now it’s definitely my intention now as this is my business is events consulting, so I’m definitely gonna be intentional about going to other events as much as I can.

And now I have the time, which I’m very excited for. ’cause now that my kids are grown but it, I would say what do you wanna do? Do you want to plan an event? One, I’m gonna come back to this. Know your why, because if you’re wanting to plan an event because you’ve got dollar signs, especially in our industry right now with the shakeup, what that WordPress is going through.

I would say that’s a reason to not plan an event if it’s just you see a fiscal opportunity because these are big deals and people don’t wanna go to where they feel like they’re not getting value or they’re being sold. So have that knowledge now. Let’s say you want to create a word camp alternative, and I say this with an asterisk, I’m very pro word camps and feel that they’re so needed, but understanding that every community is different and that there are reasons that people can’t exactly have a word camp right now, then we’re gonna go with that.

And I already know that there’s some alternative word camps happening that are not word camps. Obviously if you’ve been to lots of word camps, that’s a really good. Indicator of what it should look like, what your sponsorship levels should look like, what venue you should use, where to price point your tickets.

Of course you get some leeway now and it can increase that because you are doing this on your own, so just consider all of that. Consider the type of event you want, why you want the event. And just start there, and then start. Oh, and your original question was like, how many events do you go to?

If it’s a work camp alternative, more than likely you’ve probably been to a lot. So there’s some options right there. Just take the, what you’ve learned. Go to some other small ones too if you have any local, like a IGA or just meetup.com meetups, things like that to get some ideas.

And if you wanna have a bigger event, then yeah, start going to Cloud Fest. And even the Figma, I forget what it’s called, the Figma Conference. It’s happening like next week or something like that. Adobe, those are some big ones. I just went to Canva. Canva create, they had a conference in LA like a few weeks ago, and I went and.

It was really very educational and a lot of what I know I don’t wanna do, it’s a different type of event. So the more you go to, the more you start to get ideas of this is what I want mine to look like, this is what I don’t want mine to look like. And all of that is data that you could then take back and come and implement.

So you, bottom line is you gotta go to some, if this is what you wanna do and see how much time and budget you have and go from there. 

Chris Badgett: So Raquel, tell us about Wonderland. Curious, your business, the event consulting. What is it, what do you offer, and then what’s your plan for the future? 

Raquel Karina: So I guess we’ll start shuffle that up.

I offer event consultancy, so if you want me to plan a conference or even just consult with a conference, you’re planning, I. For up, for contract there. And the whole reason I started it was a few things. I became an accidental entrepreneur and when I was still in my late twenties and had young babies and it was based out of the, this was 2010, so I was.

The economy had changed and I didn’t mean to, and I had no idea who I was. Zero idea. I did not know. All I knew was at that time I was a wife and a mom. And what I now know I didn’t know then is that those are titles that aren’t actually titles. That’s not who you are. That is a, that is a status that you could lose.

Technically you could lose those statuses. And in fact, I’m not a wife anymore. So throughout that time period of in my entrepreneurial space, which was when I met you, which is when I got into WordPress and I really started to discover who I am and what I’m good at, ’cause I literally did not know. I did not know.

I did not know. And then toward, before I basically was hit, gonna turn 40, my life got just thrown upside down, went through a divorce and exited the company and. Wanted to pursue. When it comes to my, my, me personally, what I knew I was good at, and that was events. So then I got hired with elegant themes to be their, at the time event coordinator, but then the pandemic hit and I quickly became the community manager essentially.

And through all that, I just really discovered my giftings was not virtual community building. Not that I wasn’t good at it. I definitely. I shocked myself because I don’t love building community virtually, but I’m still me everywhere I am. I don’t remember if that was pre-show or during the show that I refer to myself as like a walking wizzywig because I’m very mean no matter what.

And so I was really good at building community online, but I didn’t love it and I just craved the event space so much. And then I started to recognize I love traveling. I just love traveling. And as my kids got older, I was able to do more. And so just the stars aligned really. I always had this idea that I would start an event or a group travel company what Mendel was trying to do with Greek, Greek geek adventures, if you remember.

And I I had this idea in the back of my head that I wanted to do that, but my kids still came first. And so I didn’t do any of that. And I really made the choice. And I know people try to say you’re making excuses. I was like, excuse or not, it’s my choice. I’m choosing my kids. I cannot start my own business yet.

And then when, like I said, my baby graduated, that’s when I knew Pres stomachs was happening. And then throughout that summer when I told you I was letting things simmer, it really became clear that it’s not exactly the most sustainable to start a group travel company that’s hard to make money.

On that you would have to have a lot of group travel and employees really. And but then when I understood that I could do on my own and implement, of course with contracted help our events and that was really what. Led me to really start the company is I knew what I wanted and that was to be an event consultant and do group travel.

And group travel will be more like just for funsies and a little micro way to, to do what I do well, which is cultivate human connection. But to do it EEG in Iceland like I did with Mendel, taco, Robbie, et al, and to have this little time of being able to travel and being able to help cultivate hu human connection.

But really the bulk of what I would do would be in events consulting. And so I put myself through a little branding process back in August because I knew I needed to LLC and through that card deck. I got down to these six key words that describes me. And what stood out to me was back to when I was a little girl and I could feel myself getting teary eyed right now of two words, like wonder and curiosity and why am I crying?

And so I, those ones, it just reminded me so much of when I was a little girl and that part of me is still me, and I’m such an, I always joke that I’m an overgrown child and if anyone’s ever hung out with me, I have way more energy than a 44-year-old woman should have. And I don’t look my age that ne doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with this, but like I’ve always had just thi curiosity and tenacity in wonder.

And who does that remind any of us of who’s, like my spirit. Fictional character, which is Alice from the Lewis Carroll books. And so I got into those words, wonder and Curiosity, and I remember one of the famous words from his book is Curiouser and Curiouser. And then, I was like, how do I like, marry that with a name?

And so then I was like talking with a good friend and we were going back and forth. And then I think it might’ve been HI think I was, what is, I think I said Wonderland curious. And he’s yes, that. And then, so that was a lot of detail, but basically how I got to the name and the why and so like my tagline is Curiouser events.

Curious or travel because when you hire me or when you go to any of my events like press comp, which is mine, or group travel, which I’m planning it, come with the spirit of wonder and curiosity because it’s gonna be a little different and you’re gonna wanna have that playful nature come out of you. And I just really loved it.

I loved all. The way that came together, I loved that I didn’t necessarily need to hire somebody to do branding, even though I definitely have a designer who’s. Done amazing work, but because I had already been through a lot of branding processes or just even in our space we get exposed to a lot that, and because I’ve done so much work on myself, so much therapeutic work, like I’m blowing my own mind, it’s like I don’t even know who I am.

And so I was just so grateful that with all the work that I’ve done and all the growth I’ve had, that I came up with this and had friends that affirmed it and I’m just so excited. I’m so excited to offer these services and events to the world because then they get to do it too because I feel like we need it more.

I feel like our world needs more curiosity and wonder today more than ever. Sorry, I got a little soapboxy right there. 

Chris Badgett: It’s good. That’s Raquel from Wonderland. Curious, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for putting on an exceptional event. I would encourage you out there listening or watching.

If you want event consulting or help putting it on, Raquel is a natural and obviously a person on purpose, like you found your thing and you’re going with it and it shows and it shines. So thank you for being an inspiration and keep up the amazing work. Check out [email protected] website coming soon.

It’s on LinkedIn and social media. Any final words or other ways to connect with you, Raquel? 

Raquel Karina: Yeah, I’m on all the socials pretty much at Raquel, Corina most places. I’m on every WordPress, slack instance at Raquel, just at Raquel. And I love connecting, even if anybody wants to have just like a virtual talk or if you have a TV in Phoenix, hit me up.

And that’s all. I think that’s all. I wanna end it. 

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, Raquel. We really appreciate it.

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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Emily Middleton explains her different approach to creating online course websites and learning platforms, which involves working live with clients over Zoom instead of relying on the conventional freelancer model of email exchanges.

According to her, this live collaboration facilitates real-time feedback, minimizes miscommunication, and reveals crucial details that might otherwise go unnoticed such as clients’ doubts regarding pricing strategies or course structure. Through real-time collaboration, she can propose more astute business choices, like providing recurring memberships for enhanced scalability or fine-tuning marketing headlines to address the customer’s pain points directly.

In addition to the technical work, she highlights that successful entrepreneurs often benefit from robust emotional support systems, including mentors, coaches, and therapists that help them maintain resilience and motivation throughout their journey.

Emily stressed that minor discussions in these sessions can result in significant enhancements, like modifying pricing models for scalability or revising headlines to resonate more with customers. She and Chris Badgett talked about the emotional aspects of collaboration as well: fostering a culture in which individuals feel tied to the work, motivated, and eager to exchange ideas candidly.

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. We’ve got Emily Middleton coming back on the show. We’re gonna talk about some exciting stuff around the future of collaboration around building a brand and a company culture. How to immerse yourself in your project in a way that’s gonna lead to a lot higher odds of success.

But first, welcome to the show, Emily. 

Emily Middleton: Thank you. I’m happy to be here. I’m making another appearance close to episode 500. Y’all have been going for a long time and it’s been a cool journey. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it has been fun. I can’t believe we’ve been podcasting for over 10 years. That’s that’s wild. So yeah, getting up there to half a thousand episodes.

I wanted to get you on today to really dive into some counterintuitive or more just deeper insights into the learning management system projects, the online courses, the coaching programs, the membership sites. We see out there that are working you have clients in the space. You can find [email protected].

Check that out. She’s also over at Progress on Fire, on Twitter. But you work with your clients a little bit differently than a lot of web developers, WordPress developers, website builders. Tell us about. Your collaborative style of working with clients and how it’s different from the typical, I’m gonna hire a freelancer to help me build my site.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah, so I do a lot of client work, and I’ve done a lot of client work for about eight years now, and it’s all been in WordPress from. Content entry into a website, copying and pasting content from one platform to the other, to now doing like full custom coding and full website builds and all that kind of stuff.

There’s a lot of different types of service that you can get when it comes to working with freelancers. When it comes to working with consultants, for me, I have a DHD. And I like need to be live on Zoom with people. So for me it evolved out of necessity that I’m like, I, it’s hard for me to pay attention to what’s going on if I’m not like working with somebody or doing like body doubling and it turned into a value add to say I.

To clients. The primary way I work is with you live on Zoom. It feels maybe like it would be easier if you were to just send me an email and I were to do the work in the background. But what that ends up with a lot of back and forth and a lot of expectations not being hit. And I can’t ask you the small questions when we’re actually working.

So if we’re live on Zoom together, if we’re live in a format where we can directly talk, I can share my screen, you can see me do the work live. It just creates so much more of a, an atmosphere of collaboration. And that’s really big for my. Consulting and client work business that I don’t see in a lot of in a lot of other businesses where that consulting and working together really comes first and foremost.

Chris Badgett: This is really a special aspect. It’s a known stereotype that I. A lot of website builders, try to minimize the amount of client contact time to as little as possible and just get in, get out, send me the stuff, and then here you go. But what ends up inevitably happening, like you mentioned, is there’s actually an iteration cycle.

Like where, okay, now I see the finished product, but I have feedback or I have new ideas as we get into this. What about this? What about that? Yeah, so this collaborative style, it makes a lot of sense to me. When do you see the light bulb really turn on for your clients when they’re getting into it?

They’re on the zoom call with you. You’re building the site. What kind of thing happens where they it clicks and they get it where they’re like, oh yeah, I’m glad we’re doing it this way. I thought maybe I could just tell ’em, build me a site. I’m selling beekeeping courses to beekeepers.

But the fact that you’re collaborating something kind of magical happens. What kind of thing is that? 

Emily Middleton: Yeah I think it’s when we realized that there was a problem that would’ve gone completely unnoticed when it’s why do you want this feature? We want to have a course about. Clients will ask me questions about pricing when we’re building a site live.

They’re like what’s your pricing? And they’re like we just came up with this one. This is what other people in the industry are doing. Or, we asked chat, GPT, and this is what it said whatever the strategy was that they came up with their pricing. Having the insight about how they came up with that decision allows me to ask specific questions about like, where they’re at in the process.

It’s not just send me an email, tell me what the price of your course is. It’s we’re entering the price and I realize that you’re a little uncertain about how you came up with your price, and so maybe we need to dive in to be like, what pricing options do you have? Do you know that recurring membership pricing is one of the most scalable things you can do because it’s easier to retain customers than it is to sell new customers all the time and stuff like that.

And so I’m able to make those suggestions while we’re working that I wouldn’t really otherwise be able to ask without building this like insanely complex gravity form. And it’s so much easier to. Snuff all these questions out when it comes to working live with somebody. And so they’ll, when we’re asking the questions that they didn’t know they had, that’s really when it clicks.

Chris Badgett: There’s a counterintuitive product development strategy where you can actually build a whole product or business around the price is actually the very first thing, and pricing is a lot more complicated than people think. Whereas a lot the, what people usually do is they do what you said, which is they just kinda hold up a finger and guess, or do some studying or just kinda shoot from the hip.

But there’s a big difference between selling a course for 50 bucks or 5,000 or 500 a month. So whichever one of those options we pick. Your advice as the professional is gonna be completely different. So if you do want passive income, don’t want to talk to anybody, sit on the beach, we’re looking at the $50 course ’cause to get higher pricing, how are you gonna support them?

Are they gonna get coaching? Is there community? Is there other support mechanisms and so on. And that’s a conversation you can’t get a client to like just. Tell you all that without, and get all your insight into that without actually talking to 

Emily Middleton: totally. Like I was working with a client recently putting together their first online course.

It’s like an, a new kind of course for their industry. And It’s an industry that they’re putting together like a leadership course, but there’s so many courses on leadership. It’s like a generic practice, but they’re doing like specifically leadership within an industry to solve a certain problem.

And so their headline was like. Fix your productivity. It’s that’s not, I was like, or we fix your productivity or something. I was like, what if we could reframe this headline to talk about how it helps the customer? And what we came up with was something like clients tell us that they’re constantly.

Everything is on fire all of the time. We put the fires out, click below to get started. Something like that and just noticing that kind of thing from someone who’s been exposed to the industry in so many core sites for so long. If you can take the value that you innately have as a freelancer or even as a course creator and position to the customer directly, that’s such a useful tip.

You have so much insight and you wanna lean into the insight you have as a freelancer or as a course grader. 

Chris Badgett: I’m probably gonna miss some in this list, but the thing is, when you work, collaborate collaboratively, you realize that a talented web developer like Emily is not just a web developer. Emily is a graphic designer, a web developer, a web designer.

A copywriter, a business strategist, a writer, a video maker. The list goes on and on and you like, people just put somebody in a box like, oh, I need a developer to build my site. But you’re actually getting like this whole team of people and one person, but you gotta learn how to leverage their strengths, right?

And that copywriting thing. Pro tip for you out there listening an exercise. I like to do when helping somebody write a good headline or a value proposition is you think about your ideal client at two o’clock in the morning sitting up in bed at night. And this is a trick I learned from somebody named Aaron Fletcher.

So I like to give credit where it’s due, but they sit up at two o’clock in the night or they’re they go into the bathroom and they’re staring at themselves in the mirror and they say. If I could just, and then fill in the blank, so nobody says at two o’clock in the morning, if I could just increase my productivity here at two o’clock in the morning and they say, man, if I could just put out all these fires in my business or whatever, and.

Love my life and work again. These are like real living language words that people use and that’s a great copywriter will intuitively write like that and provide outside perspective. To help sharpen the message. The message is huge. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah. And I think not pigeonholing other people who are working with you on your business, like consultants into having a certain role, like you are a developer, you are a marketer.

It’s just get everyone you trust into the same room and have them collaborate on a plan that’s I feel like such a big gain. There’s like a lot of. You know how like with remote work, there’s a lot of like anxiety and depression that comes from people being alone in their cubicles in their houses, isolated from other people, only interacting.

When it comes to talking about work. Creating that feeling where everyone in your company is collaborating with each other to make a vision happen is just such a, it feels obvious. But it doesn’t feel intuitive to do. It doesn’t feel like it’s a good use of time to take your developer from Upwork. And have them talk to the consultant that you hired a few months ago. Then also sit in the room with you and figure out what action items everyone’s gonna do and what they’re really stressed about.

It’s that doesn’t feel like an intuitive, good use of time. But the things that come up in those conversations are so huge. So I recommend really just creating space for the people you choose to work with. 

Chris Badgett: Another mindset tip I’ll throw in there is coming from a place of abundance and without anxiety and just having an open mind.

And what I mean by that is you can, if you’re scared and you wanna be the boss that hired the freelancer, and you just wanna maintain the frame of control and all this, but if you actually let your guard down a little bit. I know when I work with a client that I’m subconsciously like reading them.

I’m like, all right, this person already has pretty good technical skills and WordPress, so we’re not, we’re pretty strong there. We’re gonna figure out the site. It’s fine. Oh, this person is, has a low level of design chops, or they have a high level of design chops, and whatever the answer is there. We may need to spend more time and where the gaps are so you can blend with each other and fill in the gaps and you as the, 

Emily Middleton: yeah.

Chris Badgett: The website creator you will not understand their industry expertise likely, unless it’s something you’re also very into as much as them. So they, the more they tell you, oh let me help you understand what. Beekeepers wanna learn and stuff like [00:12:00] that. It helps you better be like, oh, they really care about this thing.

Like maybe we should feature whatever. Like you’ve, it really, that’s a collaboration and you can’t do that over email. 

Emily Middleton: You can’t watch the expressions on people’s face when they’re reading your email and. I don’t know. Getting people excited about what you’re doing is so underrated and getting yourself excited about what you’re doing is so underrated.

Like I think when I got started on my entrepreneurial journey, I was really interested in creating financial freedom and it was motivating for me to get out of a tough situation where I didn’t wanna work a nine to five. Forever that was such a big motivator. But like nowadays, now that I’m like established enough to be able to make an income working remotely from home, I’m very fortunate to have that.

I’m asking questions and I think a lot of people listening are probably also asking questions like, how do I get passionate about what I’m doing? How do I like ignite my spark? And as Dan Martel says, shine your light in through what you’re doing. And I think that’s. That’s a big piece of the puzzle towards motivation for you and other people around you.

’cause you gotta light up the people around you. Like I know you do that a lot, Chris, where you’re a founder of Lifter. You’re still in the company 10 years later. You started the podcast before starting the product. You were talking to people before then and you’re like. Always trying to connect with the people that you’re working with on a personal level. So that like they can, like you. What they’re doing and you can just get them engaged in what they’re doing in their own lives and for the work that they do with the company.

I think that’s huge. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think a great coach related to that will and you mentioned Dan Martel. He was like this, he would. He sees more potential in his clients than they see in themselves, 

Emily Middleton: right? 

Chris Badgett: When you do that as a web developer and the client will feel that if you believe that, and it’s true, like they will feel that and it will create an energy around the project that is just 10 times more productive and valuable than just some transaction between two people.

Emily Middleton: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Let’s, you mentioned like. Being in an industry for 10 years or just really time in the trenches, how, what patterns do you see in successful clients in terms of immersion and their subject matter versus the opposite where maybe this project isn’t gonna work out in terms of really being deep on a topic.

Emily Middleton: Yeah, I would say something like have a therapist have someone you can talk to, like a mentor or a life coach or a therapist, someone who’s involved with hearing direct feedback from your business. If you are like internalizing a lot of the stress that comes from your business and you don’t have someone like a mentor, a therapist, a psychiatrist, a life coach, somebody to talk to and help walk you through this process wherever you’re at in the process.

It’s just really isolating. I’ve noticed like times. In my life and in my business where I felt the most alone, where I felt the most demotivated is when I was talking to the least amount of people about what I’m going through. When I have a support network, I have a [00:15:00] mentor like Chris, when I have a life coach I have a life coach named Michael who’s in the lift MS community.

I. Then also have a therapist. I’ve got a lot of support from people around me who I can take my problems to and get all these perspectives, and I think the people who really can ignite their spark and really engage in the way that you need to in order to build a business successfully. They have those support networks.

They have co-founders that they can talk to. And they have co-investors, co-owners they can talk to. They have mentors in the ecosystem and those relationships, those genuine connections. Fuel their motivation to build their product, build their brand, get out in the ecosystem, motivate others to get involved with the product, and then keep doing it better.

That’s how I look at it. And that’s very different from just opportunity chasing. Yeah. Okay. So ai, artificial intelligence is hot right now, so maybe I should make a course about that because it’s hot in a growing industry. You could. But if I’m not all in on AI and been doing it forever, and I use AI every day, but, and I will make, I am, I actually have made some courses that aren’t done yet about using AI for course creation and so on.

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But you really gotta be into your subject matter and not just chasing opportunity. It is fine to want to make money online. But if you’re gonna commit and you’re gonna get clients particularly recurring, coaching clients or ongoing relationship. It’s really important to love your topic and then surround yourself with help.

I like the [00:18:00] framework. I heard once of plus minus equal, which is that if you’re in an industry it’s really good to have a mastermind of peers trying to do same or similar things and then also get coaching help in different aspects of life and business, like with people with more expertise.

That’s the plus. And then the minus is, extending a hand and helping people who are coming up behind you. A couple years or a decade behind where you’re at. And that creates like a well-rounded kind of ecosystem of support asking for help contributing back to your industry. Networking with your peers who are having very common challenges at the same time.

Yeah that’s super powerful. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah, a lot of businesses and clients that. I’ve gotten related with that we’ve worked on their projects, it to some degree feels like a family and. I think it’s a really powerful thing to be able to relate to the people around you. And for me it required a lot of like psychological unblocking and a lot of working through my past and the challenges I had.

Why am I in business? I had such a big revenge agenda. I. As a part of like my whole life of I dropped outta high school because the principal slighted me by putting vandalism on my permanent record. And so I’m going to leave high school. I’m gonna prove that I can make a bunch of money and that I will be successful.

And then I’m like, I’m gonna prove to these people that I can do it. Be successful, but that revenge agenda ended up imploding on me. When I never was happy with what I was having as an outcome. So being able to approach business from a perspective of what do I want to create for my life?

Like genuinely with nobody else needing to see. It’s just like what internal feelings within me am I trying to create and how am I trying to help other people with my brand? With the consulting I do, with the YouTube videos I create, with the work I do with my clients and companies. I’m trying to create a feeling of peace with a lot of things.

Like you’re confused. You’re on Google and you’re frustrated at 2:00 AM Googling curse words and like, how do I fix my WordPress? Install all this stuff. And then you’ll find the videos solve the problem and feel much better about it. Or someone’s frustrated in their job day to day, like making them feel like they’re welcomed into their own life.

That’s what I. Bring just personally, but everybody brings a very unique set of values themselves to their work, and I think that’s critical to bring to the people around you. 

Chris Badgett: I will say I’ve met a lot of people who have entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs, that were at some point motivated by revenge.

Yeah. So it’s not all bad. It’s like I’m gonna show that person or that ex relationship or whatever. But I would advise like 80 20, it’s okay, that’s real. That’s natural, but 20% that 80% like positive. Yeah, mission, vision, values. It sounds like corporate speak, but it is so real and everything gets, just like we talked about, counterintuitively, you should build the price, the pricing first. Yeah, what do you want? Because that’s gonna dictate like what you’re doing, courses, coaching, whatever, what’s in the offer and all that stuff. How valuable is the result that this thing offers? Does that match up with our price?

If not, maybe we should change, but also your mission, vision and values. Life is so much easier when it’s aligned and. What’s particularly awesome, and I feel really fortunate in this regard, is when your life mission and your company mission are the same or very similar, ’cause then everything’s easy.

’cause you’re on mission like it, otherwise you’re it’s not really living a lie. It’s just you’re off you’re having to perform in a way. But when you’re on vision or on mission. It’s like wind in your sails and it’s pushing you along and your vibe attracts your tribe. So when somebody’s on mission and vision, like the right people show up at the right time.

That whole saying about when the student is ready, the master appears and all that stuff, that all comes from being on a particular mission and vision. Otherwise, you’re just wandering around and, maybe chasing some gimmicks or fads or I. Some ad that had good advertising that you could end up in some funnel or something.

But mission and vision is really cool and I would recommend that for any course creator or coach or if you’re building a website for clients, the about page, it can be hard to write an about page for a client, particularly if they’re not a copywriter and they’re like, oh, here’s my cv. I went to school here and have this thing and that thing.

But just add like the vision, like what’s the change you wanna make in the world? The mission is how you’re gonna get there, and then what are your core values? You can only pick five or six. And just doing that exercise, that’s an example of collaborating with a client. You could be on a call like figuring out the about page and literally transform their life by helping them figure out their mission, vision, and values.

Emily Middleton: Totally. That’s that’s underrated work. That’s so underrated work like we’re thinking like we need a developer to build a site. We need a marketer to tell everybody about it, and we need a sales person to make sure those sales close. But underlying all that stuff is mission, vision, values.

Chris Badgett: Once we have that, it puts the entrepreneur on path. But then they wanna enlist other people, like a somebody to help build the site. Maybe they want to get a virtual assistant, maybe they want to get somebody to help with marketing and sales. Maybe they want to get somebody to teach on the platform.

How have you seen some of your clients with a strong. Kind of company culture, it comes from mission, vision, and values, but over time it gets bigger than the, like the personal brand of the founder, even though that’s strong. What what have you seen with like [00:24:00] strong culture brands that, build magnetic courses and coaching programs and tend to, I feel like one of the most common questions we get asked, even though we’re a software company at Lifter LMS, is how do I get clients.

Do you have mission, vision, values and the company culture and have you put your brand out there and are you attracting like team members and clients? What would you say to that? I. 

Emily Middleton: I it’s so complicated. It’s almost like a paradox of you need to be engaging and you need to have an audience, and you have a community and somehow get attention.

It’s where do you start with that? Like for people who have like no audience. I feel like for me it was answering the questions that were directly in front of me, like on a Facebook groups. And I was seeing with the people that were physically around me, they were asking questions I would create YouTube videos to answer those questions and send them the answers to those videos.

I think there’s a few different ways you can go about it. My strategy was to directly answer the questions, sitting in my email inbox directly, answer the questions I heard on Zoom meetings, and directly answer the questions. I saw in the comment section. Be really direct. I think that there, there’s not a perfect place to start really ever.

And I see so many people get caught up on finding that perfect place to start. And for some people. That’s what they feel like they’ve gotta do. But what I try to do through my work and what I think others that I’ve seen are successful do with their work is that they encourage people to start with what they have and where they’re at.

They have a messaging to their audience that says, you are valid in where you’re at in your journey. Your frustrations are totally real, and we’re here to help address those concerns. They’re not like, I’m ready to be a millionaire. Check out how cool my course is. They’re not like on that vibe.

They’re on the vibe of being legitimately helpful to the people around them. And for me it took a lot of, it’s like constant. Humility, I’ll produce YouTube videos and I’m like, I hate the way I sound. I hate the way I look and I hate the way that I edited this. I’m like, I’m not happy with what I did but it helps other people and even if like just a handful of people are helped by that content or it answers a question, it’s good enough for now.

So I’m producing what is good enough for now to help somebody, and I will iterate and improve over time and encouraging others to do the same whether you are billing sites for clients. And encouraging them to launch and feel comfortable with what they’re doing or whether you’re having a course or membership site and encouraging the people who are signing up for your course or membership site to feel like they are ready to start approaching whatever problem they’re looking to solve or what they’re looking to get out of life from your program.

Chris Badgett: I agree with that. Rand and culture is built one conversation at a time and the thing that people don’t get, ’cause the human mind can’t, you can’t really comprehend exponential curves is the compounding effect. So when you show up, like you said, and I call this the ground game, when you’re just helping one person, you’re like, all right, this one [00:27:00] person, I’m gonna be a, I’m gonna be the guide and I’m gonna give ’em the solution in a free video or whatever.

That’s just one person, one interaction. Video goes up. Other people search for it. They find it, they discover you and your brand, and then they find out you have paid programs or services or whatever. And then you do that daily, weekly, monthly for years, and then all of a sudden you’re like a known entity, like you have you are recognized.

I remember getting recognized in an airport, coming back from a business event, and I thought the person that recognized me was at the business event where I’m well known. But it was actually just a regular user who had no idea about the business event. And I, they saw my lifter LMS hat and we took a picture together and stuff.

I’m like, how did this happen? But when I think about it, it’s I’ve been helping people doing the ground games for over a decade, almost two decades, and the stuff compounds and I think of it like this. It’s, [00:28:00] it’s okay to want to make money and all that stuff, but if you’re in service to your community, they can feel it.

And over time you get known, ideally as the most helpful person in whatever niche or specialty. And then, if there’s a lot of people in that niche, that’s fine. There’s only one, you and your personality, your way of delivery, how you communicate. The way you help, like through video, audio, text, all of it, whatever it’s gonna attract certain people, but it really compounds.

And I think that’s the the it’s the counterintuitive because in our industry there’s a lot of, I wanna automate everything. I don’t want to talk to people. I. And I just want my online business to cash flow while I do something else. The reality is the people that really make it are super engaged.

I was looking at a LifterLMS user site the other day who I heard about that was doing really well. Many five figures a week. I’m looking at the site and I’m like, this site from a design perspective is not great. I went to the course catalog and there were like a couple things there. Not much, excuse me.

But I went to the about page and learned about how this person had been doing it for 20 years and there you go. And they’ve just been helping people for two decades. 

Emily Middleton: And it’s I asked my girlfriend like a couple weeks ago. I don’t understand why clients pay me the money they do.

I like, don’t know all the answers. I’m like fumbling around and like I’m, I come up with a solution. We get something that works and we work our way to a solution that works for them. Something that something that clicks and, but I don’t get it. I don’t get it, I don’t feel like a professional. And I feel like I’m just like.

I don’t know, stumbling around in the woods with them. And she was like what I think people see is that you genuinely care about solving their problem. That you’re just as present with solving their problem as they are. And if that can be communicated, I feel like quality doesn’t matter.

Like as long as people are with you and you’re with them on solving their problem. And that genuineness and shining your light in whatever way that you have to bring to the world through your course membership or freelance practice. If that can be shown and we’re learning how to show that more, that’s what I would lean into.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just to throw out another Dan Martel it’s not about your resources, it’s about your resourcefulness. We all have imposter syndrome and all that. But if you can become known as the type of person who can figure it out. And maybe you don’t have the answer right on the tip of your tongue. But you know where to go to find it or who to collaborate with to figure it out.

That’s what makes nobody’s perfect. Nobody has all the stuff, but how resourceful is this person? How unstoppable are they? It’s not how. Intelligent. They are. They have 180 IQ and have every answer. Otherwise, just go to Chad, GBT. Why don’t people do that? Because they, they want people that can, be creative figure it out, get into nuances, read between the lines.

This is this is the way, 

Emily Middleton: this is the way. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Emily, this has been a great discussion. Hat’s off to you on your collaborative work style. I think it’s super unique in the space and also super valuable to people who want that. And I think the magic of it is when somebody gets into that, they’re like, oh, I didn’t know you could do all this.

And like you had these other set of skills and you’re synthesizing across these different industries. It’s like going to a doctor, right? Where you’re not a doctor and all the doctor is seeing a lot more than the patient. They’re just like, oh, this thing hurts. Or whatever. But you’re like, broadly looking at systems all over the place. And able to help with that and it’s so cool and it’s very rare in our space.

If people want to connect with you, what’s the best way for them to track you down? 

Emily Middleton: My website is wp course guide.com. That’s where all my WordPress course stuff is. You can also Google Magic, Emily Middleton, and you’ll find my YouTube content. Awesome, Emily. Thanks for coming on back on the show.

Chris Badgett: Really appreciate it and keep up the amazing work. 

Emily Middleton: 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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