LMScast

Tom Fanelli of Convesio shares how online course creators can leverage the power of his game changing hosting technology to make sure your website is always online and has the power to scale effectively and in the most cost-efficient way. Chris and Tom discuss the current state of the web hosting industry, and what course creators are going to want to keep in mind when looking for a great web host.

Tom breaks down the different types of hosting available today from shared hosting that you can find with companies such as GoDaddy or Bluehost to VPS hosting that operates on similar technology, but is dedicated and optimized a bit more for your website. Then you have cloud hosting that encompasses anything that doesn’t fit into the first two categories, such as AWS hosting or Google’s cloud hosting solutions. There’s also managed WordPress hosting from companies such as Flywheel or WP Engine that focus on WordPress rather than hosting your own coded website on something like Joomla (an alternative CMS to WordPress).

Convesio has a very cool self-healing system built in, and Tom explains the details behind how all of that works. In essence, it allows your website hosting server to automatically scan for issues with sites hosted and take steps to repair the issue.

He shares an example of before he started Convesio where this type of tool would have been extremely handy in a situation with a client’s site going down. The example Tom shares was a situation where the site went down at 5:00am and ended up being down for 5 hours. With Convesio, the system would automatically detect the site is down and restart the PHP, and the problem would have been solved in 15 seconds compared to the 5 hours with a system requiring human intervention.

At Convesio.com you can learn more about Tom Fanelli and the game-changing technology they’ve cultivated for businesses looking to host a website online. Thanks for joining us!

Jean Perpillant joins Chris Badgett in this LMScast episode to discuss how online course creators can level up their marketing strategy and web design using photography. Jean is the founder of Design Theory, a digital agency dedicated to consultation for companies around their photography, web design, and marketing.

Chris and Jean dive into how stock photography can kill the brand of a website, and how the most important thing with photography on your website is to be as original as you possibly can and as unique as possible.

Jean shares his story of getting started with Design Theory over 11 years ago, and initially his goal was to create websites for people. But as he worked with optimizing his sample websites, he leaned into his talent for improving the design via images, optimizing text, and optimizing the design overall.

Chris and Jean discuss an example of a parenting course and what could be done as a great graphic or video to communicate to possible customers what the experience of taking a course on your platform may be like. Consumers form judgements about a company or brand based on first impressions, so Jean breaks down this example in a way that could be applied to an advertisement or a graphic for your website that might be used in the parenting niche.

One great concept from author Seth Godin is to be as specific as possible with your marketing message. One example of a highly specific online course would be: “My program is for busy, homeschooling moms with more than two kids who are also living in a rural area.” Having a highly specific customer avatar allows you to target that niche specifically. And when prospects hear your message, they will feel a more personalized experience.

This episode has a lot of great content for course creators looking to level up their design, but if you’re interested in learning more about Jean Perpillant and what he has going on, be sure to check him out at JPDesignTheory.com. Thanks for joining us!

Devin Walker from GiveWP joins Chris Badgett in this LMScast where they discuss how online course creators and entrepreneurs can incorporate donations into their websites. If you’re working on a nonprofit website or any site looking to collect donations, GiveWP offers a great way to do that through WordPress.

Many nonprofits raise money offline, but GiveWP allows you to add donation functionality to your WordPress website with a highly advanced reporting system to show donors and complete donation history. GiveWP offers the ability to integrate with Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.Net, 2Checkout, and many more gateways, so you can collect payments around the world.

Devin shares a few key tips for collecting donations through your website, such as creating a recurring donation option to help scale, and how you can feature your story on your website to help promote the donation options available.

GiveWP also has some great reporting features for donors, such as providing simple donation receipts that donors can pass on to their CPA to itemize on their taxes. They also have the feature of an end of the year report that shows all donations made that year, so if someone makes multiple donations or is doing donations on a subscription basis, they’ll have a complete record of that to pass on to their CPA as well.

As a course creator, you can create some cool setups with GiveWP, such as offering people early access to a course for donating. If you’re donating portions of your proceeds to another cause, you could also say you’ll match donations up to $1,000 to incentivize people to donate, get access, and know that their money is going further to help a specific cause with you matching their donation.

To learn more about Devin Walker and what GiveWP can bring to your WordPress LMS website, be sure to check out GiveWP.com. Thanks for joining us!

StartupBros founder Will Mitchell talks with Chris Badgett in this LMScast about how course creators can deliver group coaching and sell your product before building out your course programs by interacting with your audience on a high level. Will shares his journey and motivation creating StartupBros and his business Simply Organic Beauty, along with some great tips for course creators developing a program online.

Often when building an online course, we see course creators spend months or years building out a course without an audience. And when they launch, they find no one is interested in their program. Will shares in this episode how you can engage with your audience in a live coaching format or through webinars and build your course product from the ideas they bring to the table that they want to learn.

Experimenting is key when figuring out what businesses will and won't work. Will shares an idea out of the book, The Lean Startup, that you need to get as many ideas to the point of failure as soon as possible to see which ideas can hold up and which ones will fall through. Many ideas for businesses and online courses will not work out as well as we expect, but figuring out that an idea isn’t going to work as fast as possible is key to landing on the idea that will work well.

Touching the lives of your audience and making an emotional impact is important for developing life-long customers and keeping your leads engaged. If your customers remember you and like you because the content you give them stands out and is exceptionally valuable, you will build a much better connection than you would by spamming your customers with offers and ending up in their email promotions tab.

At StartupBros.com you can find out more about what kind of online course you should build for your community, and how you can really tap into what your potential customers are looking for. You can also reach out directly to Will at [email protected]. Thanks for joining us!

Zack Katz of GravityView joins us on this episode of the LMScast podcast to discuss how course creators can unlock incredible functionality on their websites by taking advantage of how GravityView allows you to display form submissions on the front end of your website.

For anyone new to the WordPress space, Gravity Forms is a form builder in WordPress, and GravityView is a separate tool that allows you to display form submissions on the front end of your website. So if you have a testimonial form on the last lesson in your course, you may want those forms to automatically display on a page once people submit the form. That’s where GravityView is super helpful.

Zack shares some great use cases for GravityView, including how you can utilize the Gravity Forms map integration to create an online marketplace that shows users in a similar area selling products, or you could even create a social network with people in your area who share similar interests to you.

Another use case for GravityView is if you are collecting donations and want to display the latest donors on a page without having to put them there manually. By collecting donations via a Gravity Form, you can also have GravityView post in your directory setup once that form is submitted with the donor’s name and donation amount. You could even have an opt-in box on your form, so they could opt out of being shown on the list if they didn’t want to appear there.

At GravityView.co you can learn more about the setups you can create with GravityView for your online course website. Everything from testimonials, collecting donations, and segmenting leads for your email list, to building an entire directory is possible, so be sure to reach out to GravityView support or their community to see if you can create the setup you’re looking for with your online course website. Thanks for joining us!

Vito Peleg of WP FeedBack joins Chris Badgett in this LMScast episode to discuss how WordPress developers can improve the process of communicating around making revisions on websites with clients. WP FeedBack allows you to have clients highlight parts of the website and go over revisions in a layered manner that makes the process of making changes a lot easier.

Vito and Chris share how they both got their start in the WordPress space as freelancers and have since moved to the product entrepreneur side of things. Twenty years ago Vito built his first website at age 14. He shares the process of how he decided to pursue a career in music by touring the world with his band and went all over Europe. But when he found there wasn’t much money in that industry for him, he ended up building websites for clients and grew his freelance practice from there.

While Vito achieved six figures in his first year running a website development agency and by year three had 12 people in his agency, he found that all of the issues the agency was facing came down to client communications. So he became obsessed with finding a solution to this issue, and that’s where the idea for WP FeedBack came from.

Chris shares how he got started in the WordPress space by having his own blog website and using the skills he learned there to build out a skillset for building websites for clients using WordPress. He eventually built an agency from there targeted towards online courses and coaching websites that would eventually fuel his interest in developing LifterLMS.

You can save a lot of time by using a tool like WP FeedBack to optimize how you communicate with your clients, but Vito and Chris also talk about a few best practices for how as a freelancer you can set deadlines and project limits to not be affected by scope creep and get jobs done on time.

You can learn more about how to simplify the process of getting client feedback and making site revisions at WPFeedBack.co. Thanks for joining us!

Dan Martell joins Chris Badgett on this episode of the LMScast podcast to discuss how online course creators and coaches can sell premium programs. Dan shares his journey from starting out in the world of business to immersing completely and starting his YouTube channel, eventually leading to the creation of his massively successful program SaaS Academy.

About a year ago Chris enrolled in SaaS Academy, and he shares what aspects of Dan and his program made Chris very interested and eventually led to the sale. Being a lifestyle entrepreneur was a big selling point for Chris, seeing how Dan highly values family, kids, and friends really was an inspiring factor to Dan’s stack for Chris.

One great quote from this episode is, “The riches are in the niches.” Dan speaks to how he has become very focused on the SaaS company owners as his ideal customers rather than entrepreneurs in general, because it allows him to dive deep into specific use cases and really provide a high amount of value to a smaller audience, rather than trying to have everyone as his customers, as that typically ends up with no one as your customer.

Dan shares why he’s decided to adjust his programs so they are around one year or longer for the full customer journey, because when he was working with six month programs he would find there was a lot of stress to constantly be worried about enrolling new students.

Be sure to look up Dan Martell on YouTube and subscribe to his great content there. He’s got his podcast Escape Velocity that we recommend checking out. You can also find Dan on social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. He tries to use every platform differently, so be sure to connect with him wherever you're at online. Thanks for joining us!

In this episode of the LMScast podcast Terri Tutich shares best practices for WordPress course creators and knowledge from her experience building WordPress websites and being active in the WordPress space. Chris and Terri dive into why backups are crucial, and some other tips from the projects Terri has worked on.

A key WordPress tip Terri shares in this episode is that it is very important to always have backups in place. There are situations that can be out of your control, such as getting hacked due to weak passwords, plugin vulnerabilities, or you may need a backup even if you install a new theme or plugin that changes or deletes content on your site. Having backups in place is something good website hosts will have, but you can also create backups via a plugin, such as BackupBuddy.

Many course creators find themselves hung up on the tech in the process of building their websites. Either they are stuck and don’t know how to work with the tools or they are so invested in the tools and spend so much time getting into the tech that they get burnt out and fail to launch their program. Working with someone like Terri is a great way to avoid getting stuck in the weeds there.

Terri shares the breakdown of her service offerings in this episode as well. She offers backups and updates in a maintenance package as a basic offering for making sure a website is healthy and up to date. She also has workshops where she walks organizations through how to manage their WordPress site with backups, updates, staging sites, and general security best practices.

To learn more about Terri Tuchich and the great things she has to offer, be sure to check out BeyondTheOffice.com. She has a guide to WordPress ownership there, so you can opt-in to learn more about managing WordPress if you’re new to the ecosystem. Thanks for joining us!

Ali Mathis from the LifterLMS team joins Chris Badgett on this episode of the LMScast podcast to discuss the latest release from LifterLMS, LifterLMS Groups. Ali and Chris talk about the idea behind LifterLMS Groups, the problems it solves for course creators, and the opportunities it opens up for how you can offer your online course programs to companies and organizations.

LifterLMS is now about five and a half years old. Over the lifetime of LifterLMS, we’ve developed 20+ add-ons for course creators, such as additional quiz functionality, assignments, social learning components, and private coaching. Now that the fundamentals of an LMS are in place, LifterLMS Groups allows you to expand your LMS site’s reach by having the ability to offer seats in courses to companies at scale.

One great use case for LifterLMS Groups is industry training for companies. The LifterLMS voucher system filled this role before, where you can create a code employees can use to sign up for a course, but now you can give each company you sell courses to their own branded dashboard, and they can manage students and view reporting directly from your website.

Ali and Chris talk about the future of LifterLMS Groups, and what the LifterLMS team has in development for the tool moving forward. One large feature currently being built out is the ability to sell groups and have buyers get automatic access. Currently that process is manually set up by the website admin, but that will be automated with Groups release 2.0. Another upcoming feature is to have the ability to sell seats in your group with a discount if a customer purchases X number of seats. So if you wanted to incentivize companies to purchase 100 seats in your course, you could apply a discount of 10% when they hit that 100 seat threshold.

To learn more about LifterLMS Groups, be sure to check it out at LifterLMS.com/Product/Groups. Thanks for joining us!

We dive into how writing a nonfiction book can help you get more leads and sales for your online course website with Julie Eason in this episode of the LMScast podcast. Chris and Julie dive into how selling your book through Amazon can be a great strategy for spreading awareness of your course website by using profits from selling the book to fund ads to sell more books and spread more awareness for your program.

Adding a book to your product stack along with your online course is something to consider as a value add to your program as well. Delivering results to your students is important, but how you deliver that value is less important. We talk a lot about how mixed media courses can accommodate different learning styles, and adding a book to your program allows people who prefer to read to learn best.

As an expert creating a course, you’re challenged with turning your years or decades of expertise into something people can use to achieve a result. Many experts building courses can struggle when it comes to instructional design, because rather than teaching students to get results, they’re sharing their expertise, which may not be as useful for overcoming the hurdle standing in your students’ way.

Many course creators who are industry experts struggle when it comes to building a funnel for their program. Julie shares how authoring a book is a great way to take your students from a state of being problem aware to being solution aware. Then you can position your course product as one option for achieving the results they’re looking for.

Chris and Julie also cover the dangers of writing a lousy book, and how while writing a book can serve as a great tool for selling courses, it is also important for that work to be something to be proud of as a stand-alone product.

To learn more about Julie Eason and how you can leverage the power of authoring a book for your online course, visit NonfictionBookAcademy.com/LMScast. Thanks for joining us!