LMScast

Jan Koch joins Chris Badgett on this LMScast to discuss how online course creators can grow their communities and niche networks through a virtual summit. Having been in the WordPress space since 2012, Jan has a lot of experience working as a developer, entrepreneur, and educator. He’s recently been running virtual summits and is seeing increasing success, and he shares some great insider tips for running a successful event.

In 2015, Jan learned how he could use a virtual summit to take his freelance website development business to the next level. At the time, he was building sites for clients and had the typical feast and famine cycle. He found that running a virtual summit would be a good way to pivot his business and expand.

The technology to run a virtual summit is at your fingertips. Jan uses Zoom to host meetings and webinars, along with recording them. Then he uses Vimeo to host the videos to add to members' areas after the summit is over.

Jan’s first summit was called Ecom Services Summit. He considers that one a failure, as it had only 700 registrations when his goal was 3,000 registrations. The reason it failed was Jan’s messaging and targeting wasn’t on point. Many course creators struggle with that exact same thing. Clearly communicating the value of your event is super important for messaging to your audience.

Jan shares some methods for making sure you have a great attendee experience, but are also able to monetize your summit through sponsorship packages and possibly having summit recordings in a course format after the summit is over.

Jan runs a Facebook group called WP Mastery, so be sure to check that out and connect with him there. You can also find him on Twitter at @IAmJanKoch. And at WPAgencySummit.com, you can see how Jan is running his virtual summit. If you run a website building agency, you may get some great value out of his summit there.

Dean Holland joins Chris Badgett on this episode of the LMScast podcast where Dean shares his experience running an education company, affiliate marketing resources, and his journey as an entrepreneur from being over $60,000 in debt to running six-figure education companies.

At age 16 Dean left school and worked in a restaurant waiting on tables, and over the course of 2 years he moved up to the chef position and then to the management team. He then took the money he had and started a food truck with his industry knowledge and was doing pretty well with that, making between $300 and $500 per day.

A while into his mobile food truck business, Dean was robbed by 3 guys who stole all of his equipment, and that experience left him shaken up and back working in a pub making the same wage he had been before starting his own business. He then turned to finding ways to make money online, such as network marketing and filling out surveys for cash. But that didn’t end up working out for him.

During the years between 2004 and 2008, Dean spent a lot of money on online programs trying to make money and racked up a lot in credit card debt. He consolidated it and paid it off, but then ended up continuing to use the credit cards and found himself $60,000 in credit card debt.

Dean attended a conference where he got the advice to start a blog outlining his experiences with making money online, and that he should stop hiding the truth from himself about his debt. And that is what kicked off his journey of going from being in debt to learning how to find success in the affiliate and online education spaces.

If you’re interested in learning more about Dean Holland, be sure to check out DeanHolland.com where he has his book available called The Iceberg Effect in which he dives into more detail on finding success as an affiliate marketer.

Angela Brown joins Chris Badgett on this episode of the LMScast podcast to discuss her niche membership site journey and success story. Angela is the founder of SavvyCleaner.com, and she has a podcast and YouTube show called Ask a House Cleaner. Angela shares how she learned the world of online education and completely transformed her business model in order to provide for her family long-term leading up to a future retirement.

The evolution of starting as an expert house cleaner, to becoming a business owner, to teaching other business owners, and moving into the online space to teach at scale is a rough outline of Angela’s journey. But she really breaks down a wealth of tips for course creators new to the online space as to how to acquire the skills needed to be successful in the online environment.

Angela has now trained companies in 31 countries across the globe and over 25 years she has perfected her training process, so she can optimally teach others how to practice the disciplines of cleaning a house and what best practices work best for being successful in her industry.

Creating a recurring revenue membership site is a great way to scale your business. And it’s a lot easier to keep an existing customer than it is to sell to a new customer, so recurring revenue adds a lot of value to your business, and Angela emphasizes how important it is to build out that recurring revenue model. Keep recurring value ideas in the back of your mind when building your site, as that’s what will help you create a culture where people continue to want to engage with your content.

If you’d like to learn more about Angela Brown, check out SavvyCleaner.com and her podcast and YouTube show called Ask a House Cleaner. You can model after what she has set up, and she’s an amazing case study of the power of online education and what a dedicated entrepreneur can do with an idea and the tools to make it happen. Thanks for joining us!

This episode of LMScast is a great discussion between Mark Thompson from PayKickstart and Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. They dive into how you can launch products and how important recurring revenue is to scaling your business. Mark is the co-founder of PayKickstart, which is a tool that manages eCommerce and affiliates for product entrepreneurs online, so he shares some great knowledge he has picked up on his journey as well.

Mark makes a great point in this episode that understanding customers’ reasons for churning in your business and not sticking with your recurring payment program is key to making sure you’re able to keep people onboard. If your churn rate is 30-40% per month, then you shouldn’t be putting more resources into marketing the program to get more people in until you’ve fixed the hole in your ship of that high churn rate.

Mark also speaks to managing your relationship with affiliates for your site. One point is that you can reward affiliates for referrals even if they don’t convert. It could be something like $1 per lead, but that is a great way to keep them incentivized to participate in your program. Chris shares how in the LifterLMS affiliate program, and in pretty much every other company’s program, there’s an 80/20 split on commissions where roughly 20 percent of affiliates generate roughly 80 percent or more of sales.

One key takeaway from this episode is that the most successful product launches have a one-time price at the top of the funnel and upsells with at least one that includes the recurring revenue model.

At PayKickstart.com/pricing you can sign up for a 14-day free trial of any of their plans that includes a step-by-step walkthrough of how you can get set up and get your first product live, along with extensive documentation and guides on setting up products and being successful with sales and managing affiliates. Thanks for joining us!

Andriy Haydash shares how he helps entrepreneurs in the online course space build their websites, and some useful models for course creators and membership site owners. In this episode, he and Chris discuss Andriy’s journey as a freelancer running his own practice along with what he has learned about building successful online course websites.

Andriy is listed on Codable.io, which is a freelance directory where you can find WordPress developers to help with your website. He noticed a lot of traffic was going to people looking for help with their membership websites, rather than just general website help. So Andriy decided to focus on the niche of LMS site owners so that he could provide more specific value there and attract higher value clients.

Many people view an LMS website and a membership website as the same thing, when they are a bit different. Andriy explains how a membership site is usually a paywall to gain access to a library of content, whereas an LMS focuses more on the student experience and includes lessons, quizzes, and a more structured program overall.

If you’re working on building a membership website, recurring revenue is a great way to scale profit, but it does require recurring value if you want to keep people engaged. If you don’t have recurring value but you are offering courses, you could alternatively use a membership to offer all courses in a bundle.

One great tip Andriy shares in this episode is that you should try and keep your initial course launch minimal, so you can really see where people are interested in seeing more content. If you build out a suite of features, you won’t as easily see what features customers want, and they may not be at all interested in features you spent a lot of time and money building into your site.

To learn more about Andriy Haydash, you can contact him directly on his website at Andriy.Space. You can also find him on YouTube and his Facebook page as well. Thanks for joining us!

Marcel Petitpas from Parakeeto joins Chris Badgett on this episode of the LMScast podcast to discuss what course creators and agency owners can learn from utilizing historical data to make decisions and lead to more accurate estimations on projects, and what work is required to build a course or design a site for a client.

Marcel points out how many online business owners forget about the cost of earning their revenue when they calculate their revenue projections in a service-based business. This is often the reason many agency owners struggle with cashflow when they grow their team. With fixed project rates and scope creep, the cost of earning revenue can be much higher than many freelancers and agencies anticipate.

If you’re not performing a clearly defined process for clients, it is often wise to bill by the hour. That allows you to do complex development that you couldn’t scope out as easily and to come up with a price that allows you to have a consistently good profit margin.

A key takeaway Marcel shares in this episode is that you really need to understand your business model. If you offer any kind of service, you don’t have fixed costs, so you need to account for the fact that you need to earn your revenue.

Understanding your capacity as an agency is a huge challenge, and using a tool like Parakeeto that shows you calculated estimates on how a project is likely to perform is a great way to manage projects you take on and what resources you use to complete those projects.

At Parakeeto.com/Toolkit you can download the free template Marcel uses for calculating estimation metrics for his clients. He also has a great podcast at Parakeeto.com/Blog that covers how you can increase your profits as an agency owner and many other marketing tactics.

In this episode of the LMScast podcast, Brad Touesnard of Delicious Brains shares his story of founding several products for WordPress developers. Brad has also created a mastermind ski retreat called Big Snow Tiny Conf, and he shares the genesis of that and some great tips for how you could start a mastermind program to connect with others in your space.

Working online can be isolating, especially if you’re located remotely where there are not a lot of people working from home in your local area. In heavily populated areas there are often WordPress tech meetups and networking events that you can check out. But if you’re located remotely, there are some alternatives to look into. A remote online mastermind can be a great way to connect, and a yearly retreat is another great tool to consider.

Chris and Brad dive into Brad’s four main products built for WordPress developers at Delicious Brains. This is a high-level breakdown of what the products can do for you:

WP Migrate DB Pro: copy your WordPress website database over to another website.

WP Offload Media: host your media files (images, PDFs, etc.) on a service such as Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage and embed it on your website to improve website speed.

WP Offload SES: easily send emails through your site via Amazon SES.

SpinupWP: cloud-based server control panel that allows you to create websites without manually installing WordPress and going through the entire setup.

Big Snow Tiny Conf is a mastermind event Brad created where he gets together with other business owners to snowboard, network, and share ideas about business with one another. He breaks down how he put that event together in this episode.

You can find out more about Brad and the developments he has going on at DeliciousBrains.com and BigSnowTinyConf.com. We also discussed Brian Casel who has been featured on the LMScast, so be sure to find that along with the interview with Ken Wallace of MastermindJam. Thanks for joining us!

In this LMScast, we’re joined by Melissa Love, a professional designer who has built some amazing products for WordPress site builders and beautiful layouts for websites. Melissa runs a membership site called The Marketing Fix where she teaches business owners how to get on top of their design and make the process a whole lot easier. She also sells child themes for Divi that can help you jump start your site building process at TheDesignSpace.co.

Many website builders start out by finding a template they like online and switching out text, images, and fonts, and it doesn’t end up looking as cohesive as it did on the template. Melissa always starts out the design process offline on paper, where she’ll draw out a brand guide with colors, fonts, etc. Then she’ll design the layout of the homepage on paper before getting into the browser to start designing things on the website itself.

A lot of website builders are afraid of white space, and they end up packing in so much information that it ends up driving leads away. Melissa shares how when she has split tested white space versus the compact layout, there was a higher bounce rate with information that is packed in with little negative space.

Divi is a popular theme in the WordPress space, and Melissa shares how she was the first person to sell a Divi child theme. A child theme for Divi often includes some page templates, CSS styling, fonts, central color controls, etc. But the concept wasn’t something that was offered as a product until Melissa created her child theme and offered it to the community.

Melissa has a lot of free training on Facebook and Instagram, so if you’re interested in learning more about mastering design for your online course websites, be sure to check her out on those platforms. You can also find her at TheMarketingFix.co and TheDesignSpace.co. Thanks for joining us!

Jilt is an email marketing tool built specifically for eCommerce stores, so if you’re working with WooCommerce with your LifterLMS website, this episode of LMScast featuring Beka Rice is a great one to tune into. Beka is the product leader at Jilt, and in this episode she shares what course creators can learn about building educational products from her experience as a product leader at both SkyVerge and Jilt.

Starting out as a high school chemistry teacher, Beka became involved with the WordPress space in the classroom setting, and eventually ended up writing documentation for WooCommerce products from the user’s perspective. From there she became interested in the development of products in the WordPress space and learned coding and development skills.

Validation and iteration are key to developing a course program that really sticks with people, and Beka shares how having a freemium model with your services can be a fine thing to move into. But if you start out supporting a free tool, you likely won’t end up being able to make the paid product or course a success.

Chris shares how LifterLMS got started as a paid plugin, but then over time ended up transitioning into the freemium model where there is a core free product and paid add-ons to go on top of that for additional functionality.

Finding the right early adopters can really help you get off the ground in a positive direction. Beka shares how staying true to understanding who your customers are and what you’re building is key to avoiding bloat with your program and really staying problem-focused.

You can find out more about the suite of plugins built for eCommerce entrepreneurs at SkyVerge.com, and at Jilt.com you can see the marketing automation tool built specifically for eCommerce entrepreneurs. Thanks for joining us!

Kay Peacey joins Chris Badgett on this episode of LMScast to discuss how online course creators and membership site owners can take advantage of ActiveCampaign for automating their marketing. For those unfamiliar with it, ActiveCampaign is a CRM tool that allows you to store contact records for all of your list (email, phone, name, custom fields, etc.). ActiveCampaign is a great tool for the balance between being a powerful tool and relatively easy to use when compared to Infusionsoft.

There are a few different levels of CRMs we recommend at LifterLMS. Typically the stack is laid out as follows: MailChimp for beginners, ConvertKit for intermediate users, and ActiveCampaign for advanced users. Each CRM has a different level of depth of what you can do with them regarding automations and tagging.

One great tip Kay shares in this episode is that one easy thing you can do when setting up your marketing automation is to have a free lead magnet that can be a blog post, video, or guide that answers a question you see pop up in the community around the products you create content for.

Avoiding going over 5 lists and avoiding going over 50 tags is a great tip Kay shares in this episode to help you prevent yourself from going down the tangled rabbit hole. WP Fusion is also a tool worth checking out if you’re interested in LifterLMS + WordPress + ActiveCampaign, as it does the work of tying them all together and giving you the power to do some cool automations between the tools.

If you’re interested in learning more about Kay Peacey and how you can learn to master the ActiveCampaign CRM tool that will allow you to automate your marketing funnels, be sure to check out her free course at SlickBusiness.co. ActiveCampaign also has a free trial for 2 weeks, so you can take Kay’s course and try out the ActiveCampaign interface to see if it’s a good fit for you. Thanks for joining us!