LMScast

Chris Badgett is joined by Elizabeth Pearson in this episode of the LMScast podcast where they discuss how you can transcend a crazy busy lifestyle and spend more time on what is truly important to you.

Elizabeth is a speaker, success coach, and author who specializes in working with women entrepreneurs and executives to increase their income by an additional six figures within a year. In this episode, Elizabeth shares her story and how her process of discovery has helped her form her philosophy for working with women to guide them through the process of tapping into their true passions.

Many online business owners, especially course creators, have a lot on their plate and a lot of things that need to get done. This leads many to become overwhelmed, and most of the time our schedules are packed and we’re too busy. Elizabeth addresses how time management is key to success, and what needs to be done in order to free up a stressful schedule.

Supporting others with your course content is something we talk a lot about in the online education space. It is very easy to become discouraged when we see the success of another entrepreneur’s project, but Elizabeth brings to light an awesome mindset shift: There are billions of people in the world, and most of them are looking for help or support in some way, so there are plenty of opportunities to provide that support and build a successful business.

Moving from a corporate environment to an entrepreneurial one can be a big jump for many people. Elizabeth shares her experience with that switch and how the loneliness was one of the hardest hurdles to overcome. She also talks about how hiring a business coach is a great way to get on the right track fast.

If you’re interested in getting in touch with Elizabeth and learning more about the course and coaching she offers, you can book a free discovery call with her at ElizabethPearson.com. Thanks for joining us!

Marisa Murgatroyd shares expert tips on engagement and making money by helping others get what they want in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Creating a successful program is something many course creators struggle with, but it doesn’t have to be a difficult process.

One thing many online business owners end up doing poorly is not focusing on one product, one marketing channel, and optimizing a product for a specific audience. Marisa recommends doubling down on a single product line before trying to scale everywhere, because at the point when you’re not making a lot of money with your business, you don’t yet have the clarity to make a large marketing machine work.

Creating a product that genuinely connects with the audience is a huge challenge in business. Rarely is the answer to create a podcast or start writing a blog, because you have to start with where the best connection is made and use media formats as a tool to add value and cultivate a relationship with the people you serve.

In the online course space, we often refer to a course full of information as a resource course. These types of courses are often the least effective, as they provide a great deal of information, but the facilitator aspect is not there and thus people struggle to get the results they’re looking for from them.

Marisa covers the 10 principles that provide good experiences for people in your program (experience escalation) and 10 principles that lead to the opposite effect and leave people with a poor experience (downward death spiral). In this episode she shares some core principles of her framework. They are built around the Zig Ziglar quote, “You can get everything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.”

To learn more about Marisa Murgatroyd be sure to check out LiveYourMessage.com/Lifter. Thanks for joining us!

Clif Griffin joins Chris Badgett on this episode of the LMScast podcast to discuss creating a conversion optimized checkout for WooCommerce. Clif and his team have built a plugin that allows you to have an easy flow for customers buying through WooCommerce. He shares their inspiration and story of developing their plugin CheckoutWC and how it may be able to help you if you're working with WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to turn your website into a store where you can sell products. LifterLMS does have a checkout system, but we also have an integration with WooCommerce if you’d prefer to use that. One key benefit WooCommerce adds to a site is the ability to work with a cart system. There are also many add-ons for WooCommerce that allow you to customize various aspects of the user experience. And if you’re working outside of the United States, you may find you need specific tax calculations or a payment gateway that LifterLMS does not integrate with directly.

The WooCommerce checkout page out of the box is generic, and it is not very user-friendly or customizable. In this episode Clif shares how his plugin CheckoutWP allows you to work with the WooCommerce checkout system and develop a user-friendly experience for customers.

Clif and Chris discuss the popular online store building tool Shopify, and how that has standardized the checkout experience for store owners online. The WooCommerce out of the box experience is not as fluid as it is with Shopify. CheckoutWP allows you to have the great ecommerce experience like Shopify has but with WooCommerce.

To learn more about Clif Griffin be sure to check out CheckoutWC.com. They have a 7-day free trial, and as a bonus for checking them out you can use the code ‘LifterLMS’ at checkout for an additional 10% off your order. Thanks for joining us!

Author Ryan Levesque joins Chris Badgett in this episode of the LMScast podcast to discuss his new book Choose, and how course creators can find a niche to serve. Ryan identifies some great questions to ask when you’re starting a business or building an online course or membership site that will guide who you should serve and how you can serve them best.

When Ryan got started with his first online business, he laid out a list of ideas around things he was not passionate about and he decided to focus on orchids and learning what people who worked with orchids struggled with, and he built content to help them through that struggle.

The beginner's mind is something that industry experts often struggle with understanding, although beginners are who a lot of their courses are intended for. Entering a space you know almost nothing about allows you to create content that purely addresses basic issues people in that industry face.

Preselling a course or membership is also something Ryan speaks to in this episode. Ryan sees preselling as a terrific way to validate your course and address students' understanding of material if you build your course as students go through it.

Ryan breaks down the five market must haves in this episode. The market must haves is a series of tests to help you figure out whether a market is worth creating a business within:

1. Evergreen Market - Will your business be viable 10 years from now?

2. Enthusiast Market - Are people open and proud to participate in this market?

3. Built-in Urgency - A brief window of opportunity. For example: infant pictures.

4. Future Problems - Are there other problems you can help your audience solve going forward?

5. Players With Money - Is yours a market where people spend a lot of money?

At ChooseTheBook.com/LMScast you can pick up a free copy of Ryan’s book Choose along with the audio book and over $200 in free bonuses, so be sure to check that out as it covers what we discussed in this episode and more.

Coach, speaker, and podcast host Tammy Gooler Loeb joins Chris Badgett in this episode of LMScast to discuss strategy behind coaching and managing time effectively. Tammy shares her story and converses with Chris about why people have a tendency to dislike their jobs, and what holds many people back from achieving goals they strive for.

Historically occupations were solely to bring in money and put food on the table, but we live in a very different time now. While it is important to ensure you have the resources to take care of the practical matters of life, there are a lot more different options for careers now than there were decades ago.

In the modern economy, there are many different ways to get to where you’re trying to go. 50 to 70 years ago, the only option people had for education was going to high school, college, and onto career from there. Now we see more people than ever trying out multiple careers in their lifetime, and there are more educational resources available, from online content on YouTube to online courses.

Tammy teaches a course called Time Management Is Self Management where she dives into how the choices you’re making and how you choose to spend your time is directly correlated to the outcomes you get for yourself and those around you. We often focus more on things that are urgent rather than on things that are important. When we do that we easily become stressed and thus become less efficient.

Tammy also shares what she got out of her MBA, and what aspects of that have helped her in business and life. The most handy tool out of an MBA for Tammy was an understanding of accounting and finance. Doing her own bookkeeping and understanding financial statements was something that has been useful for her when running her own freelance coaching practice and developing courses and programs from there.

If you’d like to learn more about Tammy Gooler Loeb head to TammyGoolerLoeb.com. Thanks for joining us!

Best selling author, YouTuber, international speaker, and business coach Sean Cannell joins Chris Badgett in this episode of the LMScast podcast to discuss how course creators can strengthen and utilize the content creation skill to grow their audience, build relationships, and sell more courses.

At any given point in time, only about 5-10% of your target market is ready to purchase a solution. There is still the other 90% that may be one the fence, but they aren’t ready to purchase at the moment. By positioning your content to help others in their time of need on a platform such as YouTube, you have an opportunity to build up that know, like, and trust factor and get someone on your email list or lead qualifying engine or sales funnel.

The best content for marketing is consistent, high quality, quick, and valuable. Creating content is similar to working out. You may go to the gym and have a great workout, but you won’t see any results until you’ve been working at it for months or sometimes even years. Sean shares a great quote to complement the idea of persistent practice, “The master has failed more times than the amateur has even tried.”

Sean speaks to the value having a passive means of making money can bring to a business. Affiliate programs offer a great way to make money on products and services you may already be recommending to clients. Joint ventures and collaborations are also a great way to expand your reach and provide value to your audience.

You can find Sean’s channels on YouTube called Video Influencers, Think Media, and his personal channel Sean Cannell. He also has a book called YouTube Secrets, and that can be found at TubeSecretsBook.com. Thanks for joining us!

Ali Mathis of the LifterLMS team joins Chris Badgett on this episode of the LMScast podcast to discuss the upcoming LifterLMS Advanced Video add-on to be released on September 15th of 2019. Ali and Chris dive into the feature set included in the LifterLMS Advanced Video add-on and what new opportunities it can bring to your course website.

Where to host your videos is something Ali and Chris cover as well in this episode. You can upload videos to your WordPress website, but often this can slow your website down. So we recommend hosting with a company such as Vimeo Pro or Wistia Pro. If you are trying to launch your course on a budget, you can also host an unlisted YouTube video, but that has lower security when compared to Vimeo Pro or Wistia Pro.

One feature we have seen a lot of requests for is the ability to not allow students to complete a lesson until they have watched the entire video. That feature is included with LifterLMS Advanced Video, so if that is something you’d like to include with your courses, that option will soon be available.

Another neat feature in the LifterLMS Advanced Video add-on is the ability to brand your video player to your company. If you’d like to match brand identity and brand colors throughout your website, you will have that option on video players now. New video analytics will also allow you to tell watch time, and you can view that data in the LifterLMS reporting. Students will also have the ability to pick up in a video where they left off if they leave the site and return to watching later.

We are offering a discount on the Advanced Video add-on if you purchase before the release on September 15th, 2019 of 15% recurring discount, so $169/year rather than $199/year. And if you purchase the Infinity Bundle between July 16th and September 15th, 2019 you’ll get three free months added onto your license. Check that offer out at LifterLMS.com. Thanks for joining us!

Success coach and equine alchemist Nafissa Shireen shares her journey entering the entrepreneur space and adapting from the corporate world. Chris and Nafissa have a conversation around authenticity and how to cultivate a lifestyle that works for you and your business.

Nafissa works specifically with entrepreneurs that are around the six figure mark and who have had business success, but not enough to create financial freedom. They have come closer to just creating a job for themselves. They have the foundation for success in business, but they need to grow and get to the next level.

In this episode she shares insights on authenticity, and how to channel that and have that contribute to finding the right path for your business and growth. Nafissa is an equine expert, so she spends a lot of time with horses, and she finds that horses are a brilliant indicator of whether people are authentic in how they are acting. She shares stories of horses understanding authenticity in humans and how they have proven to be a great indicator in her life and the lives of those she works with.

In this episode Nafissa speaks to how success in a corporate environment and success in a freelancer or entrepreneurial environment are radically different. In a corporate environment, failure is often not looked upon well. But within entrepreneurship, success is rarely found without a heavy amount of failure. That is just one example of how a fear of failure instilled by interaction with a corporate environment can stunt the growth of an individual trying to make a living or grow a business through their own leadership.

You can learn more about Nafissa at NafissaShireen.com, and you can find her on YouTube as well.

In this LMScast BobWP shares his story of how he entered the WordPress ecosystem and created a successful blog and podcast dedicated to helping WordPress users build thriving websites and businesses. Bob also shares his course creation failure case study, and he and Chris engage in an uncommon conversation around when to try something new with a course creation venture.

Bob started working in graphic design in 1989 and ran a marketing design agency with his wife Judy for 17 years up to the point where Bob started working with WordPress and doing live training dedicated to teaching others how they can get their sites functioning with the platform.

Bob decided to build a course around the knowledge he shares with his community, and it didn’t end up working out for him. People were not interested in paying for the content he was offering in his course. Chris and Bob discuss how having a course is not the only way to monetize a business, and Bob has proven that by working with more affiliate marketing strategies and leaving his core blog content free.

WIth Bob’s blog, he focuses a lot on WooCommerce. He noticed Google was sending him a lot of traffic for his posts related to WooCommerce, so he expanded his content in that direction. That is a great idea course creators can implement in their businesses. The idea of sticking to what works, focusing on that, and expanding in directions that add value and interest customers.

Tools like Analytify, ThirstyAffiliates, and Google Analytics have helped Bob out with link placement and figuring out the best directions to go and what content is performing well, so be sure to check those tools out.

You can learn more about Bob at BobWP.com and WPContentMarketing.com. He has a blog and podcast packed with information relevant to WordPress website builders, and he specializes in WooCommerce. If you’re working with those tools, be sure to find him there. Thanks for joining us!

Course building expert Amy Porterfield shares a goldmine of strategies for course creators in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Amy is the founder of the Digital Course Academy, and she dives into the knowledge she has gained from making millions with her online courses and helping others create theirs.

One struggle many course creators face is becoming demotivated by managing too many aspects of their business. Once Amy built up her team and stepped into the role of the visionary of her company, it made a huge difference in how she loves her business more. By delegating the stress of managing 100% of her operation, she is able to focus on and enjoy content creation on a whole other level.

Amy has a terrific framework for a course creation business that she shares in this episode. The framework consists of three course types you can incorporate into your business. The starter course, the spotlight course, and the signature course. Amy shares how each of these differ and how you can incorporate each into your business.

Amy and her team use a project management tool called Asana. Having these processes and tools in place to make sure processes run smoothly is something necessary to course creation operations where you are working with multiple people. Even if you are working on the project yourself, a project management tool can serve you greatly with staying organized and on track.

You can learn more about Amy Porterfield at AmyPorterfield.com where you can also find the Ultimate Course Creation Starter Kit she has developed to get your course off the ground with a solid foundation and the tools you need to scale.