LMScast

In this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS we discuss a mastermind event case study about Chris Lema’s CaboPress. Thomas Levy and Ali Mathis of the LifterLMS team join Chris in this episode to share their experiences at CaboPress and talk about some unique insights in the world of online learning.

Thomas Levy is the cofounder of LifterLMS, and he is the Head of Development. Thomas writes the code that makes LifterLMS a reality. Ali Mathis is the Director of Projects, which means she handles the Done For You service, and she manages the trial of LifterLMS.

CaboPress is an event that took place in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. It was held at a resort and had about 50 to 100 people attend. Chris Lema was the host. Chris is a speaker who is very active in the WordPress community. He covers topics like WordPress products, selling, and community building. You can check him out on his website at ChrisLema.com

CaboPress is unique, because most of the meeting sessions take place in a pool or around a dinner table, so emphasis is placed highly on conversation and is heavily influenced by the people in the group. Traditional seminars and events have you sit in chairs in a conference room for hours listening to speakers, but CaboPress is a combination of a mastermind group and a seminar.

CaboPress is a truly unique experience where you can learn more about the WordPress industry and build relationships. Getting out from behind the computer screen to network within the community is truly powerful.

You can learn more about all of the happenings at CaboPress in the LifterLMS blog post about it here: blog.lifterlms.com/CaboPress-Growth

John Doherty of Credo joins us in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS to talk about marketing versus sales and how you can optimize the SEO value of your online course or membership site.

John Doherty is the founder of GetCredo.com, which helps businesses connect with people who can help them with online marketing. SEO is one of the largest forms of marketing on the internet right now, so that is something John knows how to do very well.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engines such as Google index your website based on things like relevant links to your site and the keywords contained on your site and how well they relate to the terms searched by the user. Your SEO ranking is how high your website ranks based on these standards compared to other sites. Almost all of the traffic driven by search engines is given to the sites that are on the first page of Google, so it is important to have good SEO value.

John has been working with businesses on marketing and lead generation mostly, but he is working on helping companies not only get leads, but also to turn them into sales and recurring customers. Chris and John discuss some of the different aspects of marketing and sales.

Pricing your products can sometimes be difficult when you have a product with a non-quantifiable ROI (Return on Investment). You will want to assess what the product is worth to your customers, and find a balance between what they can afford and the value it delivers. Chris and John talk a little bit about how you can find an optimum price for your product or service.

Kim Shivler reveals 23 instructional design and business practices for user centric course creators in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Chris and Kim get into how you can make your online learning content more effective and how you can better engage your students.

Kim is teacher and instructional design consultant, as well as an expert in online courses and WordPress. Kim started developing HTML in 1995, and she was involved with an IBM worldwide team. So she has a long past with online consumer content. Seeing a lack of balance between the business and learning ends of online education, she decided to step in and offer her consulting services for online learning content creators. Kim works with people to make their products more effective and profitable.

Most consumers will buy an online course to acquire a new skill or learn how to solve a problem they’re having. It is important to test out your course from a learning perspective before launching it so you can figure out if you need to make any changes or pivots. If you were teaching a class in person, you would be able to see whether or not your audience understands what you’re saying. This is harder to do with an online course, because normally you don’t see your students. So having tests or quizzes will help you figure out if they are absorbing what you are teaching or not.

Quizzes and test will also give your students a chance to apply the knowledge they’re learning, and recalling the information you’re taking in greatly improves your memory of it. It could be beneficial to use different teaching styles in your courses for people with different learning styles. Usually if you have your lessons laid out with visual aids, text, and videos you will reach the most people.

Chris and Kim talk about all of this and much more in this episode of LMScast.

Mike Morrison of the Membership Guys joins us in this episode of LMScast to talk about building engaging online courses and membership sites with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Chris and Mike talk about the ways you can use your knowledge and expertise in order build membership sites that generate recurring revenue.

Mike is a part of the Membership Guys, which is a membership site that teaches people how to create and manage their membership sites. They also have a podcast where they share strategies and tips for creating engaging membership sites.

Chris and Mike outline the differences that exist between online courses and membership sites. They discuss the mentality that you need to have when creating an online membership versus building a course. Membership sites are like marathons that provide continuous, ever-evolving value, and an online course is more of a finished product that you will generally buy once and gain access to all of the content inside.

Creating a community around your membership site is one of the key factors to its success. Mike shares some examples of events you could host to build your community online. Holding a non-topical event, such as going bowling with local members of your online community, can help establish your brand and break the ice with people. You could host a meal at a restaurant with members of your community where you let them ask you questions for a few hours.

When you have a membership site, it is expected that you provide ongoing value, but that does not mean that you have to continuously produce video lessons or new concepts. You can create things like worksheets and checklists for your students to aid in their progress. Chris and Mike talk about redefining ‘providing value’ so that you can remove the connotation of feeling pressured to constantly be producing more and more content.

Molly Mahoney join us in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS to talk about using Facebook as a course piloting software, and how confidence is key when you are delivering course content. Molly and Chris talk about all of the useful features Facebook has to offer course builders. They also discuss what it means to be a ‘salesy weirdo’ and how to avoid that.

Molly and Chris share backgrounds in that both have a common aspect of being involved with cruise ships, and they both share their stories of what they did professionally before diving into the world of technology and online learning.

Building up confidence in yourself and your course material is crucial to producing a good online course, and Molly shares some of the techniques she has created in order to build confidence. We often focus on the negative aspects of our personality or appearance, so Molly has created a fun exercise called the ‘Quesadilla of Awesome.’ In this exercise you pick out all of your positive traits and the things you like to do. Then you make a list of these things and focus on them when creating an online course or developing a brand.

Working your interests and personality into your brand is very important when creating content online. It will make the product appealing to you, and if it is appealing to you then someone else is bound to like it as well, because people are often attracted to others who share a similar worldview and philosophy.

Not being a ‘salesy weirdo’ means that you don’t use cliche sales tactics when talking with customers. Developing a relationship with your clients before trying to sell anything to them is a very important and often overlooked aspect of sales. Chris and Molly talk about the steps you can use to make your brand unique and how you can avoid repelling potential customers by being a ‘salesy weirdo.’

Patrick Stiles of Vidalytics joins us on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Chris and Patrick discuss what Vidalytics is and how it can provide you with advanced features and high-tech analytics for your videos. They talk about different marketing strategies you can use for your course or membership site and how to keep your students engaged.

Patrick shares his story of how he dropped out of high school, entered college, worked as a contingency recruiter and entered the world of software development. Chris and Patrick dive into advanced marketing strategies and how selling the result is key to success in sales.

Vidalytics is a video hosting platform that provides you with intelligent analytics for how your videos are performing. Vidalytics tells you where in your videos people are rewinding, skipping, and leaving your video. There is an autoplay for mobile devices, so when a student finishes a video the next one plays automatically. There is a banner you can put on the top of your videos so you can communicate a message to a student when they are becoming disengaged or suggest the next video to them.

What makes a customer purchase a course and what makes them stay are two totally different factors. Keeping your students engaged is very important. If you were teaching a class in person and 75% of the students left before the class was done, you would be asking all sorts of questions like, “What do I need to do to keep you engaged?” and, “What do I need to explain better?” It is easy to overlook this engagement when you are teaching online, and the high quality analytics Vidalytics provides you with help tell you how your videos are doing and when students are dropping off.

To learn more about what Patrick and his team are doing check out http://lifterlms.com/vidalytics

Gavin Zuchlinski of Acuity Scheduling joins us on this episode of LMScast to discuss how to put membership presales calls or coaching call scheduling on autopilot with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Chris and Gavin discuss how scheduling appointments and coaching calls can be made simple and stress free.

Acuity Scheduling is a product Gavin created in order to help his mom with her massage therapy business. A lot of business owners have difficulty with scheduling, especially when you have clients or employees in other time zones. Most businesses have accepted that having scheduling challenges is just something they will have to put up with, but Gavin decided that he would create a solution to scheduling chaos and thus Acuity Scheduling was born.

Acuity is designed for business owners who care about making money and the professionalism of the product. It is for businesses that have scheduling as a day-to-day necessity for their business. Gavin shares his story of how Acuity Scheduling has grown from being a software solution for massage therapists to an all around solution to scheduling for businesses.

Chris and Gavin talk about the versatility of Acuity Scheduling. Acuity can sync with your Google Calendar, iCloud, Office 365, and Exchange, so it can prevent double booking and balance your work and personal life. It also allows you to accept payments through Stripe, Square, Braintree, Authorize.net, and more.

The largest package with Acuity also complies with HIPAA laws in case you are working in the medical or health fields with your appointments. Acuity syncs up with other time zones as well, so if you have employees and/or clients in other time zones Acuity clears up the confusion with calculating appointments with them.

You can check out Acuity Scheduling at AcuityScheduling.com/lmscast to receive an extended free trial offer and to learn more about this awesome, extremely versatile scheduling tool.

The social learning add-on for LifterLMS is here, and today we talk about how you can add social learning to your online course or membership site. Chris Badgett and Ali Mathis of the LifterLMS team discuss how you can implement social learning into your online products, and how that can help your students learn.

A lot of the best learning experiences we have come from times when we were working with other people in a group. Humans are social creatures, so learning is often enhanced when we are working in a social environment. The social learning add-on for LifterLMS gives you the ability as the course creator to create social learning groups of two or three people to as many as twenty or fifty people.

This is similar to what many people do with Facebook groups for courses or membership sites, but now you can integrate that group feature into the very fabric of your online product. Coaching is a big way people learn, and the peer coaching that can occur when you have a social learning feature worked into your online course can help personalize the content and learning experience to the individuals taking your course. This makes it more memorable, and they are more likely to ask questions and finish the course or participate in the membership site.

When you have more users on your site and you add more advanced functionality, you may face some complications with hosting. Chris and Ali talk about some of the different hosting options and what you will want to look for or ask about in your hosting company when you have a lot of users on your site.

The Social Learning add-on can be used in almost any type of course or membership environment, so head over to LifterLMS.com to check it out and feel free to shoot us a message with any questions you have about the product.

Milana Leshinsky of Simplicity Circle joins us on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. They talk about building your business and finding success without sacrifice.

Business can sometimes be very complicated and stressful, especially when you are an entrepreneur facing these complications alone. Milana believes there is a simpler approach that can be taken to entrepreneurship that can free up the stress and pressure. That is why she has created Simplicity Circle and has built up an online community around the concept of simplicity in entrepreneurship.

Milana is an immigrant form Soviet Ukraine, where she was trained as a classical musician. She moved to the United States and became a web designer and programmer. Once Milana realized that was not her thing, she started a business in coaching and online marketing. She found that she likes doing this line of work much more. Pursuing the business that makes you happy is a big part of entrepreneurship, and Milana shares her story of how she went from a job that made her miserable to making the same amount of money at a job that she loves.

Chris and Milana discuss the four main factors that make you successful as an online educator. They dive into how you can take a simpler, more effective approach to each of these factors. Creating a clear starting and ending point will also help you tremendously as an online educator, because it will help you stay focused and stay clear on what your goals are with a particular product.

Chris and Milana talk about time management and how that pertains to staying stress free. They talk about specific strategies you can use when putting together your online content so that your customers can easily digest and apply the content to their lives.

Check out all of this and more in this episode of LMScast. You can find Milana at SimplicityCircle.com/GetStarted.

Mark Asquith of Excellence Expected and Podcast Websites joins us in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS to discuss how to build a marketing funnel for your online course or membership site. Chris and Mark get into the value behind being yourself and being present when constructing your online products.

Asking yourself why you do the things you do in life and course building is very important. Mark shares his experiences with coming into contact with his ‘why’ and how that changed his life, and how it has given him the drive to get to where he is today. It is also important to inquire about what other people’s ‘why’ is when you are seeking advice from them. This can help you determine whether they’re passionate about what it is they are selling you. Take this into consideration when you are creating content online. Make sure that your customers can clearly see what your why is when you create content.

Chris and Mark discuss many different styles of sales funnels and how you can integrate them into your marketing strategy to make more conversions. Adding what are known as tripwires can help get a customer to buy your product by establishing trust through discounted or free content. Mark also shares some excellent advice on how to create your course by positioning your content around the result the client wishes to buy.

Mark and Chris talk about the value behind creating a plethora of online content, such as blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, and eBooks. When you have a lot of content online about a particular subject, you establish yourself as an online presence in that space, and it will raise the likelihood that when a customer has a question about a particular problem you will be there and have the answer for them. This can still be valuable even if the customer doesn’t have a question right now, because whenever they end up having questions you will be the one they associate with having the answer, so you will have an opportunity to sell to them at that point.