LMScast

Learn how you can upgrade your web development or coaching services in this LMScast featuring Russ Ruffino from Clients on Demand. He teaches coaches and consultants how they can build up their business by adding high-ticket programs in their service offerings at the $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000 price points even if they don’t already have an audience or large following.

At Clients on Demand Russ works with consultants of all types, including business coaches, relationship coaches, fitness coaches, graphic designers, web designers, and career coaches. He teaches them how to get clients and how to attract a continuous stream of customers by selling high-ticket programs.

Russ talks about how most strategies shared about growing your business include pumping out endless amounts of content on social media. Maybe it’s YouTube videos or blog posts, but the idea is that if you build your audience large enough, you’ll have enough organic marketing to make sufficient sales to stay in business.

The approach Russ favors that has worked significantly better for his clients is to start with getting the Facebook ad conversion formula optimized for really making sales. By focusing on running ads to convert, you’re boosting the bottom line rather than the top of the funnel, which will really help you see the core of what you’ll need to do in your business to grow in a sustainable way.

In most cases, Russ’s clients are able to take a prospect from first click to conversion within 24 to 48 hours. His clients are able to get those results by basing their business and offerings around the outcome they create for their clients rather than basing their business on their own expertise or lifestyle.

If you’re an expert or coach in the LMS space, be sure to reach out to Russ at ClientsOnDemand.com/Talk to schedule your live sales call with a member of his team that has been empowering experts to establish and scale their expert business from the ground up for years. Thanks for joining us!

Will Middleton from WPCourseGuide joins Chris Badgett in this episode of the LMScast podcast where he shares insights on best practices when starting a YouTube channel or entering the freelance website building space. Will has worked for years with LifterLMS building websites for clients, and he shares what he has learned and how he’s started his transition into a more leverageable stream of income doing affiliate work on YouTube.

At age 15 Will started doing freelance work with LifterLMS writing copy for this LMScast podcast. And after interacting with a company in the WordPress space, he used LifterLMS to build his own online course website, and then offered his experience to others. Starting at $20/hour doing user testing and content migration for LifterLMS sites, Will eventually moved to $50/hour building full websites, doing consulting work, and doing much more advanced use cases of LifterLMS.

Will shares how he was able to learn a bunch of WordPress tools including LifterLMS on the fly while helping clients implement them by focusing on what specific features he knew about and doing some free research to see if a specific setup is possible with a tool, and if so he’d implement it for the client or find some other possible options.

A strategy you can use to get started offering services in WordPress or any space is to offer basic services or what you know, such as copying/pasting work (content migrations), user testing (looking for bugs in the user experience), or even virtual assistant work with tools you know how to use such as Gmail and Microsoft Word.

Be sure to check out Will at WPCourseGuide.com/Lifter where he has a special offer for 50% off for LMScast listeners on his course about how to build super customizable websites using LifterLMS and Elementor. Once you’ve taken Will’s course and built your own WordPress site, you could apply to offer your experience to other LifterLMS users by being listed on the LifterLMS Experts page where you can take on clients and start making money building sites.

In this episode of the LMScast podcast from LifterLMS, Sally Crewe from ThePractitionerPlatform.com shares how she helps natural health practitioners start and grow their businesses. By teaching courses at and offering website building services, Sally has been able to encourage and enable many natural health practitioners to reach the next level in their businesses online.

WaaS is an acronym for Website As A Service. It is derived from the acronym SaaS, or Software As A Service. SaaS is when a company offers software on a recurring revenue model for continued support and updates of the product (LifterLMS, Elementor, WordPress themes, etc.). A WaaS is the same concept, but applied to a company that would host your website and offer you the tools you need for your site (WordPress.com for example).

Sally shares how one of the large advantages of a WaaS service within WordPress for business owners is that it gives you all of the power of WordPress without the hassle of learning how to set everything up. Clients can get into their sites, change out content, and be ready to go. The more niche your business is, the easier it is to create templates that cater specifically towards your audience, removing more of their friction with setting up.

After creating a course for others in the natural healing space on how they can create websites with WordPress to host their own courses, Sally got the feedback from students that they’d much rather pay for someone else to set it up for them and teach them how to use it. That’s when Sally really leaned into the WaaS service.

You can find out more about Sally Crewe and the things she has going on at ThePractitionerPlatform.com and TheOnlinePractitioner.com, where she has her resources for natural healers for creating their businesses and resources on getting your business shaped up and off the ground. Thanks for joining us!

Groundhogg CEO Adrian Tobey joins us on this episode of the LMScast podcast to discuss how B2B business owners can grow their software leads, ARPU, customer activation, and retention by adding online courses to their business to teach users how to use their products. Adrian shares how using LifterLMS to deliver courses has increased customer retention for Groundhogg and has served as a core piece of his content funnel.

Groundhogg is a CRM plugin for WordPress that allows you to manage your marketing, sales, and fulfillment emails all within WordPress. You may be familiar with companies like MailChimp or ActiveCampaign that allow you to send emails and manage your list and automations on their platform. Groundhogg brings all of that functionality right into the back end of WordPress.

Adrian shares some insights on how he uses LifterLMS for his product, and what specific courses they’ve built. As of this recording, he has 3 courses up on his site:

- Quickstart Course: Built for new users to help them understand what they can do with Groundhogg and inspire some ideas that lead to much higher customer success.

- Course Creator Essentials: A course specifically suited for how course creators can use Groundhogg to manage their email lists easily inside WordPress.

- Certified Partner Training: Groundhogg runs a Certified Partner Program where they recommend experts who can help you with Groundhogg on your site. This course serves to train those professionals on how the program works, expectations, etc.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, be sure to head to Groundhogg.io to learn more about what Adrian and his team are up to and what you may want to consider if you’re looking for a tool to manage your email list. Adrian is also super interactive in his Facebook group: Groundhogg User Group (Official), so be sure to connect with him there, too. Thanks for joining us!

Chris Badgett from LifterLMS shares some key morning routines he uses to be more productive in the online space, and how online course creators can utilize morning and evening routines to optimize productivity and clarity throughout their days. Creating content and working on the internet often requires a mentality shift around how you interact with others compared to the in-person, live setup. Trying out some new strategies can help a lot with channeling course creation skills, and Chris shares some insights on that in this LMScast.

2020 has been a crazy year with a lot of focus being shifted to the digital space. We’ve definitely seen it at LifterLMS, and if you’re reading this post, you’ve probably seen a similar change going on.

Chris attributes most of his success as an entrepreneur over the past 10 years to his morning routine. By creating consistency early in the day when no one else is awake, he’s able to get the things done that he otherwise wouldn’t be able to get done, such as going on a walk every morning and working out. These things often get pushed to the back burner and are the things that get pushed out of the schedule if something else more urgent pops up. Learn about Chris’s routine in this episode and take away some tips to try for yourself.

Be sure to head to LifterLMS.com if you’re interested in picking up any LifterLMS products for our largest sale of the year at 20% off with the BlackFriday20 code running all November. If you’re already a LifterLMS customer and would like to upgrade, send our team an email to [email protected] and ask for an upgrade with the BlackFriday20 code, and they’ll send that to you with proration for your existing products.

LifterLMS is also running a special promotion if you purchase any products during November. Any products you purchase during November qualify for $2,400 in bonuses of extra resources for your LMS site and exclusive live group calls with Chris. Thanks for joining us!

Learn about how Malcolm Penalty started his own WordPress website agency, and the fascinating project he’s currently working on with the company 1 Million Teachers in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. The 1 Million Teachers project seeks to empower teachers in Africa to help the ever growing population by providing access to the tech they need to help students.

There is a major shortage of primary and secondary school teachers in second world countries all over the world, and by 2030 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) estimates there will need to be about 17 million more teachers in the continent of Africa and 69 million teachers worldwide.

That’s why Hakeem Subair and Rizma Butt decided to start the 1 Million Teachers project and help to empower the needed teachers across the globe to have the resources they need to teach students.

Originally the idea with solving the education problem was to go directly to students. There are many startups and support for students in these countries, but there is a deficit in teachers and leadership to help the students in those areas. That’s why Hakeem pivoted the mission to instead empower the aspiring teachers to best be able to help students where they’re needed.

Malcolm also shares how he initially got into WordPress while looking for a CRM tool that would give him a good jumping off point for sites he would build, rather than having to code everything from scratch. That’s when he found WordPress and eventually started his agency PressTitan to help business owners with the tech aspect of their websites, so they can focus elsewhere on their businesses.

You can find out more about Malcolm Peralty at PressTitan.com, and the project he and Chris talk about in this episode, 1 Million Teachers, can be found at 1MillionTeachers.com. You can also connect with Malcolm over Twitter at @FindPurpose or email at [email protected]

Omar Zenhom, founder of WebinarNinja joins us on this episode of the LMScast podcast to discuss what course creators can learn from his journey, and how utilizing webinars can allow you to have a big impact with your audience and connect with more people than you would with a traditional 1-to-1 approach.

Omar shares his experience of having a father working in sales and how that led to a volatile income for the family, so he decided to go the complete opposite direction and work in education. He worked as a teacher in high school and university for 13 years, and during the last 5-6 years of that he dabbled in making money online and learning the ropes of entrepreneurship and online business.

Since Omar was doing well with teaching, filling in for a position he was preparing to be fully promoted to, he learned from the Dean of the university that they were going to go with an outside hire. And that lit the spark that made Omar fully commit to working as an entrepreneur full-time.

As a full-time entrepreneur, Omar worked running his own business consultancy firm where he helped businesses with marketing, sales, and general practices, and he eventually turned his knowledge into an online course he called The $100 MBA where he outlines all the knowledge he has gained along his journey.

While running webinars for his course, he had many people inquire about how he was running his webinars, and he let them know he had put together a simple program with PHP code just to make the process faster for himself. He decided to test out if others would be interested in the concept, so he ran a beta test offer and was sold out of his 250 seats in 48 hours. And that kicked off the WebinarNinja product and company.

At WebinarNinja.com you can learn more about Omar’s journey and how webinars can help accelerate your growth and connections with your audience. At WebinarNinja.com/Workshop you can also check out when the next WebinarNinja webinar will be to learn if it would be a good fit for your website.

In this LMScast, we have Rohan and Shreejith from the WisdmLabs team, on to talk about what you will want to take into consideration when building your LMS website. WisdmLabs is an agency that does work in the WordPress space around WooCommerce, mobile apps, and eLearning.

If you haven't worked with a web development agency before, agencies help you to implement tools on your website, but often the relationship goes beyond just implementing the tools. An agency will work with you to choose the best tools for your project, and figure out what your goals are and the best way to get your desired outcome for your students.

It's often hard to find the right developers to help implement the tech tools on your WordPress site. But by working with companies that help you strategize on what tools to implement, you’ll end up at a solution that better fits your needs.

With website projects, you’ll find that you can have two of the following:

Cheap

Fast

Quality

When you hire for a project that’s fast and cheap, often there will be low quality. When a project is quality and fast, it will end up with a bit of ticket shock with the pricing of what it takes to get the project done.

The WisdmLabs team works with a lot of websites that have recurring revenue built into their business model via subscriptions. This is a great way to go about building your site. If you can add recurring value, recurring revenue makes scaling your site a lot easier.

Working with a technology partner on your site makes it a lot easier to focus on the aspects of your business where you really like to engage. If you like creating content and interacting with customers, working with a tech partner like WisdmLabs makes that something you can do more of by having others handle the tech.

At WisdmLabs.com, you can check out all of the resources they have available and you can learn more about Rohan and Shreejith. You can also tweet to them at @WisdmLabs. Thanks for joining us!

Podcaster and agency owner Jason Resnick from Rezzz.com shares how freelancers and agency owners can find perfect fit clients for their businesses, and what he has learned from his years running a podcast in the online business ecosystem since 2014. Running a podcast is a great way to build up content around your area of expertise establishing yourself as an expert and to expand your network.

Jason shares a key tip for freelancers and agencies in this episode about how often finding perfect fit clients comes down to finding character traits you work well with, rather than finding a specific niche you work well in. When trying to qualify perfect fit clients, freelancers will think about what niches they’ve had good experiences in. But sometimes that doesn't have as much to do with the niche as it does with the character traits that the client had that made it easy to work with them.

If you run an agency or freelance practice, try thinking about what character traits clients have that make it super easy to work with them, rather than what niche they were in. That may give you some more insight on what you should do when qualifying them to see if working together would be a good fit.

If you like working over email rather than live calls, maybe part of your qualifying process is having the client fill out a form rather than hopping on a Zoom call to see how well they can work in that format.

To learn more about Jason Resnick, be sure to check his podcast Live In The Feast at Rezzz.com. He has information on his website that helps you figure out how you can get started on the road to getting the best, perfect fit clients, and how you can change the way you view various social media platforms to figure out the best way to find more customers for your services. Thanks for joining us!

Kurt Von Ahnen joins Chris Badgett in this LMScast episode to share his journey from working in corporate training to running his own independent course creation company.

Kurt had been in the car business for a long time working on the service side of the industry, and when the economy crashed in 2008 it didn’t make sense to work for 14 hours making $30, so he wanted to figure out a way to reinvent himself. He wrote and published his own book on service writing and ended up making contact with Ducati after they read that.

A service writer is someone at a dealership that you’d talk to if you went in to get an oil change, tire rotation, or had a break down with your car, and they would document what needs to be done and pass the information on to the technicians. And specific training on optimizing service writing is a great niche that Kurt has been able to enter in his industry of power sports.

The standard in service writing for training is to have 10-12 service writers fly across the country to meet up live at a venue such as a hotel or school meeting room to go through training material live, but Kurt was able to get hired by Ducati and Suzuki to help them develop online courses to deliver their training content through a more efficient and cost-effective manner.

Near the end of 2016, Kurt was working at Suzuki and was overweight to the extent that he had real trouble riding a bike. So he and his wife signed up for Transformation Camp, and he ended up losing over 60 pounds. Following that, he became really interested in BMX biking, motorcycle racing, and challenge running-style events with his family.

Kurt now applies the knowledge he’s learned from the corporate world and health to his training at Mañana No Mas, where he teaches about service writing, leadership, and health and how they all tie together.

You can learn more about Kurt Von Ahnen and Mañana No Mas at MananaNoMas.com, and you can check out his courses at LMS.MananaNoMas.com. Thanks for joining us!