LMScast

Tom Libelt form the Smart Brand Marketing Podcast joins us on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS to discuss online course marketing that works. Tom is a serial entrepreneur with a background in music and filmography. He and Chris discuss marketing strategies you can incorporate into the fabric of your course to engage students and generate leads.

Chris and Tom talk about the five hats problem with course creators having to do five jobs as an expert, community builder, teacher, technologist, and entrepreneur. Many successful courses outsource one or more of these jobs, as it is rare to find someone who can do all five jobs well.

For most course creators, online marketing is what will ultimately lead to sales for the courses they create. Tom and Chris discuss how it is important to build your course with the marketing in mind. This mindset will be what allows you to get in the customer’s mind and deliver the most value in your course by focusing on the end results the student is looking at when buying the course.

Tom recommends you give away some content for free on platforms like YouTube and Facebook to see if you can get people to engage with your topics and test out your demographics. Tom is a proponent of paid advertising as a way to reach as many people as possible. Chris and Tom dive into the different paid ad formats available today that produce the best results for course creators.

Chris and Tom talk about all of this and more in this episode of LMScast. To learn more about Tom Libelt, head to SmartBrandMarketing.com and WeCreateOnlineCourses.com. You can connect with Tom on Twitter at @TomLibelt and you can find the digital nomad movement he is a leader in at YourOwnWayOut.com.

Ellen Martin of CourseLauncherHQ.com joins us in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS to discuss how you can design programs around outcomes and strategies you can use to build successful online courses. Ellen shares her story of how she created a business serving online course creators, and what drives her core education philosophy.

When you are focused on generating results for your students, it can be helpful to design with the end in mind. If you start at the finish line and work backwards from there, it is much easier to create content that flows nicely. Ellen and Chris talk about creating a program rather than a course itself.

Many experts have so much knowledge in their heads that they feel they need to dump it all out into one course. In doing so they forget why their customers want to sign up for their course, which is typically to follow a process to achieve a certain result or to learn things that allow you to create lasting change in your life and the lives of others.

There are all kinds of educational resources available to everyone today via the internet, but it is still really hard to get adults to learn things that they don’t want to. In the online education space we see a large amount of resistance from people when education is presented to them in the form of quizzes, assignments, and homework. Chris and Ellen touch on ways you can make your courses more engaging via gamification and incentivization.

Ellen has been a natural teacher her whole life, and she has had a vision since she was young to provide education to underprivileged children. To learn more about Ellen Martin be sure to check out CourseLauncherHQ.com. You can also connect with her on Facebook at @CourseLauncherHQ and Ellen Martin.

John Turner of SeedProd joins us in this episode of the LMScast podcast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS to share his journey entering and finding success in the WordPress space. John and Chris cover a wide variety of topics, from finding a niche to succeeding with a freemium product or service.

SeedProd does allow you to design your landing page from scratch, but you can also choose from a template list, modify the text, and launch if you want to make it very simple. SeedProd is also connected to Unsplash, so finding images for your site is as easy as possible for the users.

Chris highlights the importance of building your content before deciding what tools you will use to deliver it. SeedProd can be very valuable for you if you do map out your content before figuring out how you will deliver it. You can put up a landing page and start generating leads before you launch.

Getting feedback early in the development process can prove to be very valuable for your project, because you don’t want to create content nobody wants. The feedback you get can help you change the product while there is still room to influence the general direction.

Education on your product or service is key. Even if you put a landing page up with no course live, you can start to improve your SEO value and product awareness on platforms like social media with blog posts.

Be sure to listen to this information-packed LMScast with John Turner. You can find John on Twitter at @JohnTurner, and be sure to check out his podcast on HookedOnProductsPodcast.com. To learn more about SeedProd you can head to SeedProd.com

Avery White of Third Person Creative joins us in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of the LifterLMS team to discuss the value behind learning from other forms of media to improve your content creation abilities. Avery shares his story, from earning a degree in computer engineering to running his company that helps creatives make money through pursuing their passions.

Avery is hoping to create a synthesis of content that inspires creative people to learn about other art mediums and gather inspiration from unlikely areas. As a writer, Avery thinks it is important to learn from other creative media formats like dancing, photography, and sculpting.

As a course creator it is important to know the level of understanding your target audience has. Avery has created a course that breaks down how to build a WordPress website click by click right from opening a browser window. He created screenshots and made it very easy for his students to follow along. Easily consumable content will help your students stick with your program and not get overwhelmed.

One key reason Avery is great at running Third Person Creative is that he is focused on providing value to his customers and partners rather than squeezing every dollar that he can out of the internet. When you focus on getting results for your students rather than what will make you money, it opens up a lot of opportunities for success you may not have otherwise considered.

To learn more about Avery White head to ThirdPersonCreative.com, and you can find him on Twitter and Instagram at @tp_creative and on Facebook as well.

Founders of LifterLMS Chris Badgett and Thomas Levy discuss how you can succeed with the new WordPress 5.0 update. Along with the release of WordPress 5.0 comes the new Gutenberg page builder for the LifterLMS core. There has been a lot of buzz around this release and how it will affect the WordPress space.

If you already have a page builder like Elementor, Beaver Builder, or Divi, then Gutenberg won’t really affect your site much. Thomas has put together a plugin called LifterLMS Blocks. It is not yet up for public consumption, but once Gutenberg is rolled out it will be free for the public.

Page builders like Elementor allow you to use templates and create saved layouts and you can do the same thing in Gutenberg. If you have a cooking blog where you constantly post recipes, you can use a template in Gutenberg to organize your post layout, so instead of having to re-write your post layouts from scratch you will have an easy jumping off point.

Thomas shares some insights on the more technical details that go into using a page builder with LifterLMS generated pages and courses. WordPress produces everything from pages, blog posts, and courses as post types, so LifterLMS introduces some more complicated post types such as lessons, quizzes, and questions into the mix. So there will be an opportunity to do some custom building in LifterLMS that you would not have been able to do before Gutenberg if you are not a developer.

Be sure to head over to WordPress.org/Gutenberg and check out their demo of the software! You can also head to poopy.life and create a free WordPress install and try out Gutenberg and LifterLMS in the same environment. If you are using Gutenberg on your site with LifterLMS, be sure to reach out to us and let us know any creative ways you have found to use it!

Gary Fox from WP Slide Sync and Gravy For the Brain joins us on this episode of the LMScast podcast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS to discuss how you can learn from the world’s biggest brands and scale up a niche subscription platform.

Chris and Gary dive into some best practices for course creators, and Gary shares his journey of creating courses for voice-over artists at GravyForTheBrain.com. Mindset is a large part of creating valuable content for your students. One important example of this is to think of students as clients rather than customers, because then you really focus on getting them results rather than making a sale, and that is when true learning happens.

Engaging people in your content is more challenging than it has ever been before. With all of the noise on the internet, everything is trying to get your students’ attention. Gary and Chris talk about how it is important to bring new ideas to the table and add value to your community. Teach in the mindset of a conversation rather than a broadcast.

Chris and Gary dive into why you should think of your customers as clients rather than customers, because then you are in the mindset of delivering results. If you do private coaching with your course or membership site, it is very important to do pre-meeting prep work to truly understand your client’s needs and make the best use of their time.

WP Slide Sync gives you the ability to sync your video with a PowerPoint presentation, so your students can click around to the parts of the video they want to see without having to invest a lot of time and effort finding the exact starting point in the video themselves. It is an interesting way to enhance longer video experiences for learners. You can find it at WPSlideSync.com.

Ali Mathis and Chris Badgett of the LifterLMS team discuss how you can use WordPress form plugins with your LMS website to create custom registration pages and have students submit forms as part of lessons. Chris and Ali dive into the newly released form plugin integrations for LifterLMS.

Along with the major update to the Gravity Forms integration, LifterLMS released integrations with three new forms plugins: Ninja Forms, WPForms, and Formidable Forms. Each of these form plugins are slightly different, so Chris and Ali talk about some of the differences and how they all integrate with LifterLMS.

The forms plugins are similar, so one is not necessarily better than the others. It is just about which is the easiest and most intuitive for you to use. If you are selling a course in multiple languages, you can check the translation on the WordPress plugin pages in the repository to see if it has been translated for your language.

One example of a case where you would want to use a form for a custom registration page would be if you were selling a course with a t-shirt and you needed to know size, color, and shipping address for the shirt. You can also use conditional logic with a form to recommend specific lessons within a course based on how the student fills in the form.

Gravity Forms does not have a free version of their plugin, but Ninja Forms, WPForms, and Formidable Forms all have free versions. In order to integrate a forms plugin with LifterLMS, you need to have the LifterLMS integration as well as a license to the forms plugin itself.

If you’re interested in trying out these new forms integrations, the products are sold on our store at LifterLMS.com/Store. The integrations are also included in the Universe Bundle and the Infinity Bundle, so if you already have an active license to either of those products you can head to LifterLMS.com/My-Account to download the integration.

Spencer Forman of WP Automation Lab joins us on this episode of the LMScast podcast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS to discuss marketing automation and learning personalization for course creators. Chris and Spencer dive into how you can integrate your WordPress website with outside tools to convert prospects into paying customers.

Marketing automation concerns itself with exclusively the top of your sales funnel to the bottom of the funnel for new prospects. Spencer and Chris dive into exactly what this means for your LifterLMS site and how these tools can be integrated with WordPress to create a personalized and engaging experience for potential customers.

There are many different aspects to a successful online course site. Social media interaction, email engagements, and gamification are just some parts of a membership ecosystem that can be integrated with a CRM, apart from the content itself. Chris and Spencer talk about the various pieces of an online course site and how you can integrate them together with automation tools.

Spencer has been working as a WordPress consultant for a while, and he has learned that perhaps the simplest way to find success as an entrepreneur is to start as a consultant and talk to people and find out what their greatest pain point is and offer them a solution that highlights one key benefit that will solve their problem.

To learn more about Spencer Forman and WP Automation Lab head to WPAutomationLab.com, and you can find him on Twitter at @WPLaunchify.

David Blackmon of Aspen Grove Studios joins us on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS to discuss how you can launch a successful online course, generate multiple income streams, and build a team. David shares his journey from working in the newspaper industry to owning a successful company in the WordPress-Divi space.

Divi is a WordPress theme created by Elegant Themes. There are almost a half a million active users on the Elegant Themes website, and most of those people are developers or they’re building sites for clients. So there are probably millions of sites online today that are using the Divi Theme.

Elegant Themes, the company that made Divi, had 87 other themes they created before Divi. This is a great example of how you don’t need to stress about being perfect when launching your very first project.

If you are looking to create an online course around a tool online, you may consider building around a tool that already has a huge audience like Divi. Many people get intimidated by a product that already has a large following, because they think there is not enough room for them to really succeed. David challenges this assumption and encourages anyone who is interested in entering a large community to carve out a niche and test their product or service.

Another part of building a successful business is networking. WordPress has an awesome community built around it. Events like WordCamp are great places to get to know other users and learn about new developments in the WordPress space. Chris and David speak to the importance of attending these types of events and getting out from behind the computer and out of the office.

To learn more about David Blackman, be sure to listen to this LMScast and check him out at WPthePodcast.com and AspenGroveStudios.com. And he is active on social media, so be sure to connect with him there, too.

Online course builder and SEO expert Brendan Tully joins Chris Badgett of LifterLMS on this episode of the LMScast podcast to discuss how you can speed up your website, improve your SEO, and create online course content that motivates students and delivers results.

Chris and Brendan dive into how you can create effective educational content. Many online course creators focus too much on creating as much content as possible or delivering the most information possible. In most cases students are looking for results, so having a results driven approach to educational resources will make your content more valuable to those who take the time to listen.

If you run workshops or do in person classes for a long time you will find yourself saying the same things over and over again. The inspiration to turn his work into an online course came from Brendan noticing he was doing just that. He was working with local businesses in Australia primarily, but now with his course he can reach a worldwide audience.

Genuinely engaging with your audience is becoming more relevant in online business communities. With so many automation tools online today, people want to know they are engaging with a real human. So interacting with people live and over the phone is a great way to market and sell products. Chris and Brendan talk about tools they use to engage with their audiences.

Speed of your WordPress website is huge for keeping people on your site. You won’t necessarily get more sales if your site is faster, but you’re probably losing sales right now if your site is slow. To learn more about how you can improve the speed of your WordPress site head to WPSpeedFix.com.

If you have a website that sells stuff and you’re looking to up your SEO game, then check out ParetoEcommerce.com. That is Brendan’s master class on how you can improve your presence online with several SEO and marketing strategies that are quick to implement and deliver results fast.