LMScast

Trailblazing entrepreneur Debbra Sweet shares her personal journey through life threatening injury and turning vision into victory in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS.

Debbra has been in the business culture her whole life with her family, so she has seen a lot of changes in the business world since the 1970s. One of the largest changes is how people used to compartmentalize their personal and business life. Your overall well-being plays a major role in how you perform professionally, so Debbra focuses on all aspects of her clients life when she does consulting, and she shares some valuable tips you can use to improve your overall state of well-being.

Chris and Debbra talk about the principles of VCP (Visibility, Credibility, and Profitability) as it applies to course creators. Visibility is the thing that course creators struggle with most of the time and Debbra shares some insights on how you can add more value to your content and gain much better visibility with your online course or membership site.

A lot of entrepreneurs build their businesses in a way where it cannot function without them, and that can be very dangerous as your business grows. Debbra talks about how you can make sure your business is functioning optimally, and she also shares some of the key tenets of business she has accumulated over her career.

You can head over to DebbraSweet.com and check out the consulting work Debbra offers. You can find Debbra on many social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. She is also offering a free 30 minute goal achievement session to the LMScast audience, so if you want to take her up on that offer head over to her site and shoot her an email and tell her that you are an LMScast listener!

Ali Mathis and Chris Badgett of the LifterLMS team discuss how you can increase understanding and learner results in this episode of LMScast. Chris and Ali talk about the newly released Advanced Quizzes add-on for LifterLMS and the expanded functionality of the quiz builder in the most recent update of the LifterLMS core software.

Quizzes and tests are essential for making sure your students are truly understanding the content in your course. Now it is easier than ever to create quizzes using the LifterLMS quiz builder. You can build your quizzes with three question types: multiple choice, true/false, and picture choice.

Chris and Ali also dive into the added features that come in the Advanced Quizzes add-on. Fill in the blank, short answer, reorder pictures, and the scale questions are just some of the new question types that come with Advanced Quizzes. You can also add manual grading into your course and collect testimonials with the new add-on.

Building a feedback loop with your students in order to track how they are learning is important for delivering the most value possible to them. The Advanced Quizzes Add-on is a great way to enhance the student learning experience.

You can get started with LifterLMS by heading to LifterLMS.com and checking out the 30 day demo site where you can try out all of the premium tools the LifterLMS team offers. There is also a 30 day money back guarantee with the LifterLMS add-ons, so there is no risk in trying them out!

Josh Haynam of the revolutionary quiz building software Interact joins us on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS to discuss how you can generate leads for your online course or membership site.

Josh and his co-founder Matt were working as web consultants building websites, doing SEO, and building content for clients. They noticed their clients only seemed to be concerned about one metric, and that was how many new email subscribers they had. Your email subscribers are reminiscent of a rolodex, so that is something they understood.

Noticing the clients’ emphasis on the email list gave Josh and Matt the idea to build a software company focused on building up email lists. The Interact software allows you to create survey-type quizzes like, “What type of fruit are you?” that you can put on your website and set up with Facebook ads.

Chris and Josh dive into the value behind online quizzes and how they can benefit you as a course creator. You can use quizzes to qualify your leads, so you can figure out what customers your course would be relevant to. Interact quizzes can also be used for personalization. You can set up a quiz and market to leads differently based on how they answered the questions by setting up what is called a sequence.

Head over to TryInteract.com and create a free account to check out all of the quiz templates and see if you want to build a quiz for your online course!

WPCrafter.com is a website and YouTube channel dedicated to WordPress tutorials for non-techies, and the tutorial legend behind the site, Adam Preiser, joins us in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS to share his journey with creating the channel and leading a massive community of WordPress users.

Adam posted a few videos on his personal channel for how to use a WordPress theme in 2013. He had no following and no subscribers, but people still watched his videos because he was putting out content on a software people were trying to find information on at the time.

Adam was inspired by this to create the WPCrafter.com YouTube channel, and he started to post tutorial videos about all things WordPress. The content Adam puts out on YouTube is 100% free and he uses that free information to teach, market for his channel, and market some of his online courses.

Putting yourself in a position where you are giving out free content before you are selling something can help to boost your credibility and conversions in a major way. YouTube is a phenomenal platform for hosting your videos and giving out that free information to your potential customers.

Chris and Adam talk about some strategies you can use as a course creator to reach as many people as possible and market for your courses by using YouTube SEO and engaging with Facebook groups centered around the free content you create.

Head over to WPCrafter.com and the WPCrafter YouTube channel to see more of Adam’s tutorial videos. You can also find the WPCrafter Facebook group and engage with the community he has built up over there.

Cofounder of Brainstorm Force and creator of the Astra theme Sujay Pawar joins us on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Chris and Sujay talk about professional web design for course creators, page builders, and the Astra WordPress theme for LifterLMS.

While in college Sujay offered SEO services to website owners in his free time. He noticed most of his clients used WordPress to build their websites, so he teamed up with a business partner to offer SEO and WordPress customization services to clients. They started making a few plugins for WordPress, added developers to their team, and over time assembled Brainstorm Force, which now employs 30 people.

Chris and Sujay talk about front line obsession and what it means to be in touch with your customers as a business. Sujay and the Brainstorm Force team take solving the customer’s needs very seriously when developing and designing their products.

Originally the Astra theme was just a theme used for testing out new Brainstorm Force plugins and services, but the team realized that it may be a theme WordPress users would like to utilize. So they polished up the Astra theme, and now you can download it for free in WordPress.

Astra now integrates with LifterLMS beautifully, and many course creators use it as their go-to theme. The Astra theme has support for LifterLMS sidebars, and it offers you a high level of customization on your site. Brainstorm Force also offers an Astra Pro add-on for those creators looking for more customization with the styling of the site.

Head over to BrainstormForce.com to learn all about the suite of products and services they offer, including: Convert Pro, Schema Pro, WP Portfolio, and Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder.

Founder of BlogVault and MalCare Akshat Choudhary joins Chris Badgett on this episode of LMScast to discuss professional security and backups for course creators. Akshat and Chris dive into some of the different ways you can protect your online business from malicious software.

Like everything in life, you can never have absolute security with your online business. But it is still important to take enough precautionary measures to make sure you can survive an attack. Having backups is one key way you can bounce back from an attack to your site, so making consistent backups is definitely worthwhile.

Most online hacking attacks are done by automatic systems that scan millions of sites on the internet and seek out potentially vulnerable ones. Chris shares an experience he once had where hackers placed pharmaceutical ads on his sites, and when he was logged in as the WordPress admin, he couldn’t see them.

One of Akshat’s companies BlogVault is a way for WordPress users to backup their sites and ensure that if anything happens to their site they will have a backup to lean on. BlogVault has ways for you to do daily automatic backups for your site.

MalCare is Akshat’s other company in the cyber-security area. MalCare is described as a complete WordPress security solution. Analyzing data from over 250,000 sites is how MalCare can detect if there is ever any malicious software on your site. With MalCare’s one-click cleaner you can instantly remove the malware from your site with no hassle.

Building products around the customer is the best way to satisfy customers and adapt as the customer’s needs change and evolve. As Chris and Akshat discuss, customer service is especially relevant for course creators who want to create sustainable growth.

Thomas Patrick Levy from the core of the codeBOX team joins us on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Chris and Thomas dive into the approach they take when developing LifterLMS and building products around it.

Reducing the friction in the course creation process is a key vision for LifterLMS. Chris outlines how important it is to LifterLMS development to create the most efficient process for you as the course builder, but even more importantly for your students.

WordPress is a great platform with many awesome functionality opportunities via different themes and plugins. It is important to have good hosting to cover the necessary functionality pieces that your WordPress site needs to have in order to run LifterLMS smoothly. Thomas get into some of the details as to why your hosting is important, and what specific things your host needs to do to ensure your site runs smoothly.

The course builder is one of the really novel things about LifterLMS. The course builder is flexible so you can adjust your course layout to fit your teaching style, where you wouldn’t have as much wiggle room with a hosted course creation platform. Thomas and Chris really discuss the evolution and origins of the course builder from the start of LifterLMS.

Thomas shares some of the different aspects of LifterLMS from a developer’s standpoint. He talks about why he makes some of the decisions he does with the platform for functionality, and what his approach is to modifying aspects of the platform.

Chris and Thomas talk about all of this and more in this episode of LMScast. Head over to LifterLMS.com to learn about new updates and the add-ons that are available for LifterLMS.

Incorporating quizzes and assessments into your online courses is now easier than ever with the LifterLMS Advanced Quizzes add-on. Chris Badgett of LifterLMS shares the exciting news of the Advanced Quizzes add-on launch, and talks about the different ways you can use exams in your online courses.

Adding tests and quizzes into your online course curriculum really takes your platform to a new level. They are crucial to your online course if you are offering the opportunity to earn a certification, and they vastly increase engagement from your students.

Certifications are a great way to incentivize students to finish your course, and it gives them proof of competency in a certain subject matter like online marketing. In order to give out certifications you want to know that your students are really understanding the course content, and quizzes are a great way to do that.

Establishing a feedback loop with your students is a big part of engagement, which is crucial for success with an online course or membership site. Quizzes and tests allow you to get feedback from your students, and it demonstrates to them how the content they are learning can be used in the real world.

A ton of new features have been added to the LifterLMS platform recently. You now have the ability to assign different roles to users on your site, such as the instructor’s assistant and LMS manager. These roles have different permissions on your WordPress site, and now with multiple instructors your LifterLMS website can scale with your business.

If you’d like to come on the LMScast and share your experiences with LifterLMS quizzes or your online certification program, let us know and we would love to have you on.

Online marketing expert Jasmine Powers joins us on this episode of LMScast to discuss how you can get more leads and students for your online course or membership site with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Jasmine shares a little bit of her story entering the online marketing world, and what she has learned from her experiences on how to make sales by building relationships and having conversations on Facebook.

Sometimes sales conversations can feel forced, and this happens a lot with all of the automation that happens online now. Chris and Jasmine talk about some sales approaches you can use to make selling easier and more fun. When you focus on providing a service to someone rather than getting them to buy your product, you end up selling more because you can explain more about how your product works while you have the customer’s best interests in mind.

It can be advantageous to offer different packages with your online courses. Jasmine highlights the value behind offering a free package, a paid passive course, and also a premium VIP consulting package with access to a mastermind group.

When running free or live events, it is important to lay out what it is you will be talking about during that time, and not to give away too much information with your free content. Jasmine and Chris emphasize making your packages as clear as possible for what you’re offering. If you aren’t totally clear about what you are offering, it allows a customer to step in and sort of seize control of your free, live call and define the product’s value from their own perspective. Losing your footing like this when hosting an event is a position you never want to be in.

Expert course creator Janet Kafadar joins us on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Janet shares her insights on instructional design and tips on how to prepare slides for teaching online courses. Chris and Janet talk about the many roadblocks that stand in the way of entrepreneurs building courses online and how to bypass them and create engaging content.

Janet has been working with experts in various fields to turn their knowledge into online courses for around four years now. She shares the story of the formation of her company and the key tips she has learned about course design.

Many people who build online courses focus solely on the content and not enough attention is paid to the instructional design aspect. Chris and Janet emphasize how important it is to put a lot of work into the course design and functionality upfront, so less editing and revising of course material to fit in with the outline is required later.

Course building can appear to be a daunting amount of work when viewed as a whole, but it can be broken down into segments. And with proper planning up front, a lot of the hardships can be alleviated. Janet shares the strategies her company uses to build courses with their clients, and how you can employ similar strategies to improve your course building abilities.

To learn more about Janet Kafadar visit JanetKafadar.com/quiz where you can take a free quiz that will help you to determine the next steps you need to take in your course creation.