LMScast

In this information-packed episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS we discuss the online education results revolution with expert business mentor Adam Urbanski. Chris and Adam talk about how to turn your done for you service into a scalable online course.

Adam is from TheMarketingMentors.com where he teaches skilled entrepreneurs how to turn their expertise into a business. Adam has worked with many entrepreneurs and has consolidated a formula for creating a profitable course online. Delivering results is the main focus of buyers in the economy today. Many buyers today don’t want the fluff. They don’t want the process. They just want the result fast, and they’re willing to pay for it.

Being able to solve problems and being resourceful are two major skills necessary for success as an entrepreneur and course creator. Sadly, the current setup of the school system does not teach people how to be creative and solve these problems. The system teaches people to learn and follow a set of established rules. But today the rules change so quickly that by the time you learn the established rules they have already changed and no longer apply.

Chris and Adam get into what it takes to create effective training online. In order to create effective training, you have to be able to consistently, predictably, systematically, and profitably produce results. Accepting full responsibility also is a very key part to running a business or being an entrepreneur, because when you learn to accept this level of responsibility, you can learn how to ask the right questions which generally revolve around what you can do as the course creator to better suit your clients.

Taking action is a major part of content creation as well. Adam says that, “implementation is fundamental, information is supplemental. If you don’t bring action plans into your course, then all of the information you teach can easily go to waste.

Pro podcaster and community builder Adam Silver shares expert tips on how to create a community around your online course in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Adam shares his story of how he got involved in the WordPress community and how in person Meetups have greatly influenced his WordPress experience.

Chris and Adam discuss the benefits and downsides of giving your customers lifetime access to your course versus limited time access. They also talk about the differences between evergreen content and content that dates itself. They get into some of the different situations where you may want to grant customers different access levels and times based on the relevancy and expiration date that your content has (when it outdates itself or is no longer applicable).

Adam has two podcasts called The Get Options Podcast and Kitchen Sink WP. He shares his experiences with creating and running these podcasts. He shares strategies that you can use to make your own podcast to add to your online content suite or market for your content.

Adam also has a company called ConciergeWP where they take care of your WordPress website so you can focus on other aspects of building your business. Adam also hosts a WordPress Meetup in his community for people in his local area to get together and share ideas and connect about a common interest. Sponsors will also occasionally pay to host one of these Meetups to gain access to Adam’s audience, but to maintain the authenticity of the group Adam stresses taking only the sponsorships relevant for his group members.

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

Facebook ads expert, membership site owner, and mastermind creator Kamila Gornia joins us to share her story and discuss expert marketing tips on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Chris and Kamila get into the details of how Kamila has built up such a strong online brand. She has maintained the authenticity that being herself and expressing her creativity in business has brought to the table.

Kamila has been doing marketing since she was twelve-years-old. She focuses primarily on marketing consulting in her business. But she has done a lot of general business consulting, because when discussing marketing, her customers have had questions about pricing and creating offers. This has led her to focus on the creative process behind business strategizing.

Kamila has focused a lot of her course and membership site content on integrating the artistic mind and the business mind. There is a lot of skepticism in the field of entrepreneurship about mixing business with pleasure, but leveraging your interests to empower your success in business can prove to be very beneficial.

Chris and Kamila discuss the five steps to creating a business: Think up, set up, blow up, scale up, and free up. They talk about what specific points along the way many people get stuck in course creation, and how to overcome those challenges. A lot of first time course creators don’t think they have enough experience in an area to create a course when someone who is more experienced in that industry creates one that is more advanced. In that case Kamila explains that you have to understand that the people who are taking your course are coming in with no experience, so you can still serve a community where you don’t have as much authority as someone else.

Kamila and Chris discuss all of this and more in depth in this episode of LMScast.

Calvin Correli joins us on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Calvin shares his story and how he approaches life and business from a spiritual perspective. He shares how he has integrated the mindset of putting himself in the customer’s shoes in order to create a product that is efficient and easy to use for the consumer. Chris and Calvin dive into these topics in great depth in this information-packed episode of LMScast.

Calvin’s business, Simplero, is an all-in-one online software tool that businesses can use for almost everything they need on the digital front. Simplero acts as your consultant and business partner. They provide you with advice on things such as email marketing automation. Simplero also comes with a website, affiliate tracking, statistics on revenues and so much more. It is really an all inclusive answer to conducting business online.

Chris and Calvin discuss connecting with your spiritual side and figuring out what your true motivations in business are. Calvin repressed his spiritual side for many years, and he shares how he found his moment of clarity by learning about himself and consulting with a spiritual teacher. Often times we find our ego getting in the way of our true happiness, and being in touch with your spiritual side in business and life can help you achieve success without being too concerned with other people’s opinions of you.

When conducting business, it is important to always make sure you are comfortable doing what you are doing. When you are uncomfortable, you will often find that something is not right with the situation at hand, and if you consult the deeper source of your uncomfortability you will probably find that the partnership or business deal is not right for you or someone else involved.

Learn how to sell and manage courses and coaching with LifterLMS Private Areas. Chris Badgett and Ali Mathis of the LifterLMS team discuss the new Private Areas add-on in depth on this episode of LMScast. They get into the different features the add-on has to offer, and they talk about where the idea came from and who it is for.

The Private Areas add-on allows you to sell a course, and then to also sell a more expensive version of the course that includes a personal level of coaching. The private area is where you can communicate directly with your student and help them out with any questions they may have or offer them more advice specific to their situation.

The idea for Private Areas originated with a suggestion from a member of the LifterLMS community. They wanted there to be an area where the course creator or coach could have a private page per student per course in order to give them some additional help in areas specific to them that are separate from the rest of the course content that everyone gets.

We floated this idea around in our LifterLMS VIP Facebook group, and a large number of people thought that would be a very useful tool to have. You can contact your students directly via Facebook or email, but it can be hard to hold someone’s attention and focus when there are so many distractions in the online space already. It also doesn’t help that contacting them via different tools can make things more complicated and can help to discourage them from continuing with your course. Using Private Areas help to increase engagement.

Course completion is something that every course provider seeks to have for their customer, and offering them the ability to have a personal contact line with the coach is very useful in that respect. But you can also integrate Private Areas on your membership site as well. Chris and Ali talk about how this add-on can work for you for both courses and memberships.

Online church volunteer training entrepreneur Scott Magdalein joins us to discuss living the life of a digital nomad and creating customizable training courses on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS.

Having the freedom to travel and own a business that is not bound to a location is one of the best aspects of being an online entrepreneur. Scott has taken advantage of this opportunity to travel by boat with his family. They are currently anchored in the northern Bahamas. Chris shares his experiences with traveling around in an RV with his family for nine months. They discuss the positive and negative aspects of living a life on the road or water. They get into what some of the difficulties they have faced are and how they overcame them.

Scott has an online course to train church volunteers and teach them the basic skills they will need to lead a children’s ministry or the position they are volunteering for within the church. Scott has taken an interesting approach to his course’s setup. He has already created some training skills such as how to change a baby’s diaper. But what makes his course unique is that he also has given the church itself the ability to add in content that might fit their church specifically, such as policies that their church has.

Chris and Scott discuss how Scott has made excellent use of filling a very specific problem. Training church volunteers is something churches have been doing for decades, but Scott has brought a more efficient and easy to use method for doing this to the table. He serves a very specific niche, and he focuses on the absolute best ways to serve that niche. That is a large part of success in an industry.

Joe Casabona shares his experience with teaching technology, the art of metaphor, and his journey with online education in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. They discuss interesting ways to make your courses engaging and memorable for your audience.

Chris and Joe discuss Joe’s love of teaching. He has taught at the University of Scranton, and he has done a lot of teaching online. Joe majored in computer science, and he earned a master's degree in software engineering. Joe also has a podcast called How I Built It where he interviews entrepreneurs and examines how they built up software businesses.

Joe has an online course on how to build a WordPress website using Beaver Builder. In that course he uses an interesting teaching style where he builds a website in the videos for the course and explains the features he uses, but he does not go too far into depth on the features he doesn’t use for that website. This makes his course much easier to follow, because he has a reason for why he uses the specific features he does. And by attaching that meaning to the features he makes the content more memorable and engaging.

Chris and Joe get into the difference between a resource course, a process course, and a behavior change course. Joe’s course fits into the process course category, because he is explaining a process as he goes through it himself. A resource course is generally more valuable for someone who already knows about the subject matter at hand and is just receiving a library of knowledge. Most people will take a process course with a set end goal in mind anyway, so mostly it is not necessary to provide them with a library of knowledge.

In this episode they talk about all of this and much more, including the difference between face-to-face interaction and learning from recorded videos or pre-created content.

Podcasting expert Bill Conrad joins us on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Bill shares his story and some tips for podcasting he has acquired through his years of podcasting. They discuss ways entrepreneurs have disrupted the conventional flow in order to add innovations to the world and sometimes save lives through doing so.

Bill attended West Point, and he was a crew chief on a helicopter. He also attended flight school at age 27, after applying five times. Bill got out of the active service after nine years and started doing some construction work, because he had always liked three-dimensional design and construction. He became half focused on the military after 9/11, and when he wasn’t doing military work he would be helping his wife’s real estate companies build.

Chris and Bill discuss new media and how it has played a role in our economy with podcasting and course creation as available ways to learn online. New media includes pretty much all of the media sources that were introduced to us with the integration of the internet. So podcasting, online courses, social media, and YouTube are all forms of new media.

Chris and Bill also get into the way of thinking entrepreneurs have, and how causing disruption to the natural flow can create a lot of value and sometimes save lives. With Uber having been integrated in Reno, Nevada, the DUI rates have gone down 25%, and fatality rates have gone down there as well.

Bill has a podcast aimed to help real estate agents get better training. He also has an online course that is free at this time about how to start your own podcast in four hours or less with just an iPhone. He is also soon to be rolling one out that is about starting a podcast in two hours with an iPhone and a Mac.

Jonathan Denwood of the WP-Tonic and Mail Right podcasts is our guest on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Jonathan shares his story of how he became interested in the online education field. Chris and Jonathan discuss some expert tips on how to enter the world of online marketing, building relationships in the online education community, and how to beat your competitors before the battle even starts.

Jonathan got started with WordPress when it was around version 2.8. He was building websites for a lot of small businesses, with a few medium-sized clients. At the time he was living in northern Nevada and infrastructure was booming, so business was great. It was hard to find a booking at any kind of restaurant in the week. But within a six month period all of that disappeared.

Jonathan was going to look for some more clients when his future co-host Bill Conrad, a man who was big into podcasting, suggested that he start a podcast with Bill as his co-host. That project sat around on the drawing boards for six or seven months, because Jonathan wasn’t motivated to do it. But from that he learned that it is the first step that means the most, and the biggest enemy he has is doing nothing.

Chris and Jonathan discuss the importance of doing research before entering a field in the online education industry. Making sure you know your opponents in business is very important. It is also necessary to be doing things differently or better than them. They talk about this in depth and more in this episode of LMScast.

Course creator Joseph Michael joins us on this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Joseph shares his story of how he went from working at a corporate job to making his way into the online education industry. Chris and Joseph also discuss some tips on how to find your niche and how to build a community.

Joseph has created multiple courses, including Learn Scrivener Fast and Easy Course Creation. He got started in the online education world when he was working his corporate job and he was looking for something to do on the side, but he was turned down for multiple jobs delivering pizzas. He learned about Scrivener and he noticed that many people had a lot of questions about how to use the software. One of the people in the community commented that they would purchase a course on how to use Scrivener if one was available. Joseph was not an expert on how to use Scrivener, but he decided to create a course on it while he learned how to use it.

Finding the time to work on online courses is difficult. But Joseph overcame that obstacle by working during his lunch breaks at his job. There is currently a lot of opportunity in the online education field, because companies that make a software generally are not the same people that teach you how to use it.

Joseph and Chris talk about niching down to make your course target a very specific audience. This helps your course be heard through the noise of all of the other courses. They discuss this in depth and many more tips in this LMScast episode.