Nicole Holland is our guest on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Nicole is an expert on how to guest on other people’s podcasts. Podcast guesting is an incredible way to grow your audience, gain new customers, and build relationships within your industry.

Podcasting is one of the most powerful ways to drive traffic to your site and build up a recurring audience around your product or course. But creating a podcast is not always the easiest and most convenient way to drive that traffic to your site. Being a guest on others’ podcasts can help you market to a large variety of people and create a diverse audience around your product or course.

Nicole has two podcasts, and she was a foster parent, course creator, marketing strategist, and online coach. She currently focuses on helping people get booked on others podcasts and coaching them on how they can get the most out of their experience there. Nicole has accumulated some great knowledge and expert tips on how to be a good podcast guest, and she shares some of them in this episode.

Nicole and Chris discuss unique marketing strategies and how you can implement them into your online course work. For example if you are selling a fitness related product for 40-year-old men, then you’re less likely to be successful if you market to them where everyone else is (on other fitness related sites or fitness related social media.) But if you take a different approach and research where 40-year-old men typically hang out or something they typically do and you market to them there, you are much more likely to get them to buy from you.

Dr. Charles Parker from Core Brain Journal is our guest on this week's episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Chris and Charles discuss building a brand around your product and the mind science behind that. They also get into the current state of the health field and some course opportunities in that area. Charles also has a podcast (Core Brain Journal) where he discusses topics in the medical field with other professionals.

Branding comes down to a very personal level for humans, so it is important that your audience has a way to wrap themselves around your message and really relate to it. Creating that specific branding that is only associated with your course or product is how you are unique in your industry and can stand out from competitors.

The health field is constantly evolving. And the relationship between doctors and patients is changing, because the patient is generally more enlightened than patients used to be. Creating courses in the health field helps to inform the everyday consumer about various illnesses and health conditions. Chris and Charles highlight the multitude of course creation opportunities currently available in health fields.

When creating courses it is also important to communicate your points effectively. Course creators are often experts in whatever it is they are teaching, so knowing when to break down concepts for normal consumers is a key aspect of teaching. On the other hand, it is also sometimes valuable to skip explanation of terminology and ideas when you are speaking to other professionals. The health field sees a lot of this divide between professionals and everyday people when some courses are made for doctors and some are made for the average consumer.

Tom Morkes of Insurgent Publishing is our guest on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Chris and Tom talk about event based marketing and product releases. They discuss getting affiliated with others in your industry and how to develop partnerships, joint ventures, and promotional content.

Tom is the founder and CEO of Insurgent Publishing, which is a strategic consulting company that focuses primarily on launches of products and events around releases of products. The company has worked with many influential entrepreneurs of today, including Jonathan Mead, Andrew Warner, and Dan Norris.

Chris and Tom help simplify some of the challenges that people who are not familiar with modern internet marketing face. One of the best ways to advertise your course or product around the time of its release is to have a launch or release event. These events can help spread awareness for your product and thus leading to more traffic and more conversions.

They talk about actionable steps to take to launch your course. Chris and Tom discuss developing relationships with other people and experts in your industry. Having these partnerships can help you with spreading awareness for your products because you can promote them to your audience and they can promote your product to theirs. When you do this with others in your industry, you will likely both have an audience interested in what the other has to offer. So the customers they refer to you will likely have a higher rate of conversion, meaning they are more likely to buy your product or course.

Christina Hills from WebsiteCreationWorkshop.com joins us in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Cristina shares her story of her entering the online workplace and with teaching WordPress to non-technical people.

Christina worked for George Lucas’ company Industrial Light and Magic as a special effects person. She quit working there when she had her baby. She learned how to use 1ShoppingCart, which is a online store shopping cart application. She became an expert in that and would create shopping carts for people and give them the code they could insert into their online store.

She found many people thought working with their website was too complex, and they had poor relationships with their web designers. This inspired Christina to teach people how to use WordPress so they could create their store on their own, and they would know how to modify it. She has been teaching online for 10 years now. Christina transitioned into working with newbies who are non-technical. She teaches them how to use WordPress to create websites.

Chris and Christina dive into the four core pieces of making a course, and they highlight Christina’s experience with each part. Christina strongly believes that having a passion for what you are selling is crucial to having success and happiness selling it.

Mike Hayes is featured in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. They discuss the on demand economy and how it is the prevailing state of the current economy. Mike also shares his story of working for NBC to interviewing innovative entrepreneurs.

The economic crash of 2008 caused about 2.6 million jobs to be lost. This was the rise of the entrepreneur, because the goal of entrepreneurs is to solve a problem, and at this time the economy was riddled with them. It was also during this time that full time jobs lost a massive amount of validity, because companies like Uber and Airbnb became bigger than companies like Hilton. Chris and Mike discuss this shift in depth.

They also get into Mike’s story from walking to New York and getting a job working at NBC for ten years. He also interviewed innovative entrepreneurs like Oprah Winfrey and Steve Wozniak. Working with these people gave him the inspiration to start his own entrepreneurial ventures.

The on demand aspect of the gig economy is also one of the key pieces of success. Having the ability to provide value to people whenever they demand it opens up a great potential for something like online courses where your customers can buy your information at any time.

Chris and Mike discuss the equivalence of infomercials in the old economy to online courses in the new economy. They talk about how your courses can serve as distribution, where infomercials would solely serve as advertising. It is also a lot cheaper to do work that would have taken a lot more money in the old economy, so taking risks is easier to manage.

Justin Wilcox joins us in this information-packed episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. They dive into creating successful products, drawing on knowledge Justin has acquired through his endeavors with testing and selling to the consumer market.

Justin is the founder of FOCUS Framework, which is a guide you can use to take the stress off of creating an online business. It allows you to break things down and take challenges step by step. The FOCUS Framework also helps you answer questions you may have early on in business about marketing, networking, and more.

Blogging is a powerful and relevant medium in the online marketplace today. Chris shares how blogging led him to the LMS world and how he was able to use his blog posts to test the market for interest. Justin also has experience with blogging, and he has a blog called Customer Dev Labs.

Testing the market for product interest is necessary to do. One of the biggest, most common failures in business is creating a product without testing the market and finding out afterward that there is no real interest in what you’ve created. Justin shares his strategies for testing the marketplace by offering a service before it is created.

Brian Hogg and Chris Badgett of LifterLMS discuss leveraging events and uncovering demand for an online course idea in this episode of LMScast. Brian shares his story of how he got started with web development and how he got to where he is today.

Brian got started when he was 15-years-old when he developed and produced a Bingo game that people could download and play together on the server. At its peak the game had about 800 users at one time playing. He was also able to make some money through advertising on it as well.

Brian is a big player in the WordPress community. He develops plugins and has a course on how to publish professional plugins on WordPress. Chris and Brian talk about being the best at something specific and how you can be the best at something by being very good at multiple different things.

As Chris and Brian discuss, podcasting and blogging are great methods of content marketing, and it is a great way to get started in a particular space. They talk about how Brian attended an electronic music conference and picked up enough knowledge there to start his own podcast about creating electronic music for beginners and for promoting some lesser known names in the industry.

Nate Wright from Theme of the Crop joins us in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. They discuss the difference between design and functionality of your website. Chris and Nate also dive into how you can market better online by creating a website that is easy to use and takes advantage of SEO value.

Theme of the Crop is a plugin and theme delivery company that provides high quality and compatible themes and plugins for restaurant websites. Nate started working on the business in late 2013 and has built it up to what it is today. The themes and plugins solve specific problems restaurants might face.

Using your website to give discounts, coupons, and other things like that can also help with analytics. Chris and Nate discuss the current opportunity for connecting local businesses to the online world.

The styles websites have can be good or bad for whatever purpose they are trying to serve. It is important to not get too caught up in things like animations and slideshows. It is better to focus more on functionality and putting yourself in the mindset of the customer to provide the best experience.

Hiring developers and other employees to work on your product can be hard at times, too, because you may not know what to look for in them. Chris and Nate discuss that and give you some tips on characteristics to look for in developers.

Brian Casel from Audience Ops joins Chris Badgett of LifterLMS in this episode of LMScast. They discuss the similarities and differences between productized services and online courses. They get into the strengths and weaknesses of each and how the combination of both can be very valuable.

Brian is the creator of a company called Audience Ops. They write content and summaries for your blog. Soon they will be releasing content marketing tools and a calendar software.

Chris and Brian dive into merging a productized service with online courses. They discuss how using consulting knowledge to move over into a productized service can provide much more value. It can also move your business to becoming more of a passive income source. Combining a productized service with a course around the same subject can also be extremely helpful, because companies willing to pay more money to have it done for them can do that. You can also serve the smaller budget startups that can only afford to pay less, but can do the work themselves.

Done for you services are what Audience Ops has used to create their name in the online industry. Tiered done for you services are valuable, because different customers can pay different amounts for what they want done for them. The done for you services can also allow you to make a template for employees and serve a wider audience base.

James Laws from Ninja Forms discusses using forms and delivering a clear message to your audience in the online course world with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS in this episode of LMScast.

User interaction in online courses and membership sites is continuously growing. One of the best ways to engage users is by using forms. James’s business Ninja Forms helps you create forms you can use to engage and pick the brains of your students.

James has had an interesting journey in his career fields. He started out as a grocery store clerk, then was a vacuum salesman, then a pastor. James met his current business partner when he attended one of James’s services, and their friendship grew into a business partnership. In this episode James discusses the experiences he has had with keeping morale high and maintaining a stable business.

Chris and James discuss the biggest mistakes business owners make and how James has dealt with and gone around them. One of these mistakes is not properly budgeting and spending too much during the ‘on’ season for a business. This can happen in any business, but when you experience the exponential growth online businesses can have, it can become difficult to not overspend.

They talk about building up rapport in your business space by providing free content such as blogs and podcasts. Establishing credibility is very important, and having free content will help your advertising and product growth.