Stephen Ladek from LMSPulse and the Elearning Success Summit shares some insights on how to build out engagement, gamification, and online summits in this episode of the LMScast podcast. Chris and Stephen dive into the summit Stephen ran in 2020 with 6,000 attendees, and how his summit for this year is focused around the eLearning space.

Stephen has seen his audience grow with people in the K-12 space learning more about possibilities that exist in online-based education. He also has quite a few students in the corporate learning development environment.

Figuring out what goal you’re trying to achieve and isolating what you need to do to achieve that learning goal for your audience is a topic Stephen shares some tips around in this episode. Many educators look at eLearning as a different realm entirely from in-person learning. And while there are differences in the interactions, the online tools don’t define the learning, they’re just enablers for the learning. We can still think about learning from the lens of learning objectives and outcomes, just with a slightly different set of inputs or tools to interact with.

The Elearning Success Summit is coming April 20th-22nd, 2021, so be sure to head to ElearningSuccessSummit.com to sign up for free and join their 3-day event where they’ll cover traditional education platforms, design principles, and building learning into the ethos of your company or audience.

The Elearning Success Summit is for anyone in the instructional design space, K-12 or higher education space, corporate environments, or anyone building learning systems for others. Stephen also has his podcast LMSPulse.com where you can learn more about these topics in the online education space. Thanks for joining us!

In this episode of the LMScast podcast Tara Claeys from Design TLC shares how she has used LifterLMS and WordPress to build websites for schools, camps, enrichment programs, and nonprofits. Chris and Tara dive into Tara’s client site Tiny Chefs, and how they’ve been successful going online with their cooking camps for kids. We also get a sneak peek into Tara’s story working in advertising and marketing before becoming a mom, and how she evolved into the WordPress space.

Working in advertising right out of college in the 90s, Tara got married and moved to Washington DC. Eventually she settled in Chicago where she worked for MCI, a long distance telephone company, with their direct mail marketing. She started to do more work from home after becoming a mom and transitioned into doing her own stationery business for about 10 years advertising through word of mouth and craft shows.

In 2010 she built a website for her business, and in 2013 went to her first WordCamp. That’s when lights went off for Tara where she realized she could build websites as a service for others. She worked with many local small businesses. After realizing many companies she worked with were education related nonprofits, she decided to focus on that market and not work with any other types of businesses.

Tara has been working with a client recently called Tiny Chefs, a company that runs camps and courses for kids learning how to cook. With the COVID pandemic, they’ve gone online promoting their course on social media and have been featured in the New York Times.

You can learn more about Tara Claeys at DesignTLC.com and about her client Tiny Chefs at TinyChefs.com. Tara is on LinkedIn and Twitter at @TaraClaeys if you want to connect with her there as well. At HallwayChats.com you can also check in on Tara’s podcast she hosts with Liam Dempsey documenting WordPress community members' success stories. Thanks for joining us!

We dive into how balloon artist and entrepreneur Ziv Raviv built his 6 figure membership site to success in an extremely tiny niche, and what he’s learned from being involved with the community as a course creator, coach, and trainer. Ziv runs a company called Kivi Media where he helps business people, relationship people, and people working in very specific niches to grow the impact they have on people’s lives.

Currently Ziv runs three main training platforms for his businesses. Balloon Artist College is his site where he teaches people how to create incredible balloon art, including life-size balloon sculptures, full outfits, etc. Kids Entertainer Academy is where he teaches people, such as magicians and others in the kids entertainment space, how to better run their businesses. And Generous Marriage is focused on the relationship space.

Each business is like a child that grows year over year to reach new spaces and grow its audience. The first business of the three Ziv started was Balloon Artist College. Then they acquired Kids Entertainer Academy, and following that started the Generous Marriage podcast and expanded to an academy for Generous Marriage. And that site will probably develop into a membership website.

Ziv shares the story behind his companies in this LMScast, along with some of the recent numbers his businesses have been doing over the past few years. In 2019, his three companies did about $277,000 in revenue, with $100,000 from Balloon Artist College, $90,000 from Kids Entertainer Academy, and the rest through Generous Marriage.

If you need help with your business, at KiviMedia.co, you can learn more about the frameworks for success Ziv and his team use to run their businesses, and he also coaches educational entrepreneurs, coaches, and podcasters on monetization. Thanks for joining us!

Entrepreneur and author Dane Maxwell shares key insights and strategies course creators can use to overcome adversity and build up their businesses in either easy or challenging times in this LMScast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Chris and Dane dive into mindsets for framing solutions and some big ideas from Dane’s book Start From Zero that you can use to help find the best offers for your students and customers.

Dane describes a system called mechanism-first thinking, where many businesses focus on their mechanism for delivery rather than the solution they deliver. For example, a restaurant that is mechanism-focused would feel destroyed by the recent events with COVID. But a restaurant that focuses on the solution they deliver may spot an opportunity to deliver that same value by a different mechanism, such as delivery.

Many course creators don’t look at the opportunity to outsource solutions to experts in the industry. Dane shares a story of one of his first businesses he started when he was around 20 years old. He asked a guitar player he admired if he’d be willing to be the focus of a course on how to play guitar. Following that, Dane rented a camera and recorded his first course program teaching people how to play guitar from his industry expert.

One great point from this LMScast with Dane is his idea that you shouldn't sell people your values. Many experts try to position their company from the perspective of their values, but when you focus on selling to customers based on their values, the sales process is exponentially easier and a lot less pushy.

If you haven’t already, be sure to head to StartFromZero.com and check out Dane’s book that outlines his golden rule of business in more depth on how you can find a clear customer who wants a clear result and find the mechanism you can use to deliver that result. You can also visit StartFromZero.com/Five to download Dane’s Five Question Framework for finding the best offer. Thanks for joining us!

In this episode of the LMScast podcast Divi expert and education entrepreneurship master Josh Hall shares how he’s built up his following making tutorials, courses, and templates for WordPress and Divi users, and how you can make the transition from online services to online courses in your business.

Josh shares his origin story, along with key takeaways you can utilize to best position your course offerings based on successful services and utilize the power of community building to create valuable membership programs.

Over 10 years ago Josh worked as a cabinet maker for a shop that customized tour buses in Columbus, Ohio. He was also in a rock band at the time and was into arts and graphic design. He got laid off in 2008 when the economy tanked, and he dove further into Photoshop and learning more about the possibilities with that tool. He would do the design work for his band for t-shirts and CD art, and as he was on tour, someone learned he did the artwork for the band and asked how much he would charge to do commissioned art. From there Josh learned he could make money with design.

After that was helping a local church, and they asked if he could manage their website, as no one was doing it at the time. So he learned Dreamweaver and basic HTML/CSS code. And as he learned more about website building, Josh would eventually find WordPress and the Divi theme.

To learn more about Josh Hall, be sure to head to JoshHall.co and check out the templates, courses, and content he has over there. If you’re an expert-type person working in the WordPress space, his content is super valuable for finding what opportunities are out there for expanding your business. If you’re an industry expert, his content is also a great example of how he’s put together some in-demand resources for a specific target audience and monetized his following. Thanks for joining us!

David Vogelpohl, VP of Growth for WP Engine, joins Chris Badgett on this LMScast to discuss how online course creators and freelance website developers can leverage the power of the new WP Engine site templates that allow you to get hosting and a live site in less than 30 minutes. And all you have to do from there is switch out the content, connect your domain, and you’re live!

WP Engine launched site templates as a way to help their customers move faster when creating any website, and a lot of WP Engine customers are creating online course websites and learning management sites to educate their customers. So they included a few LifterLMS sites in their template setup. The WP Engine templates are built off of a theme called Genesis that has many popular child themes that offer more specific design.

You can even use a theme other than Genesis if you’d like with WP Engine. They are still a core WordPress hosting company, they just have the Genesis templates available for expediting the process. But you can always choose another theme and build things from scratch if you want to do it that way.

As a hosting provider, WP Engine has terrific 24/7 chat support. That can be super useful for getting a hand to go in the right direction or if you have a tech conflict on your website.

On LifterLMS.com you can find a case study with LifterLMS user Sally Crewe where she made a course for natural healthcare practitioners, and she then started to offer a service building sites like hers for others. And that became the main focus of her business. In cases like these, site templates are huge for productivity, sales, and delivering a solid product quickly.

At WPEngine.com/Site-Templates you can learn more about what templates are available and how you can use them to power up your WordPress development stack for clients or for your own websites. You can also connect with David on Twitter at @WPDavidV

Thanks for joining us!

Virtual summit virtuoso Andy Cabasso shares some key insights on how you can successfully run a virtual summit for your audience, and what some key elements are to consider when putting your summit together. Andy and Chris talk about the summits Andy has run, and what he has taken away as far as best practices.

LifterLMS allows you to create courses and memberships on your site. But there are some creative ways you can work with it to sell other styles of products as well, such as summits where you may use a membership for signups, but from the student’s perspective, it may appear as a summit in the title and you could have some pre-summit resources and possibly courses from your summit included in your membership afterwards.

At some point you’ve probably attended a webinar, and if you’re familiar with that format, a virtual summit is a webinar on steroids where you have people attend over the course of one or multiple days where various speakers give presentations on different topics. Sometimes these events include workbooks or formulas to achieve a specific outcome for attendees as well.

One of the largest challenges with summits is getting people to register and attend, along with finding speakers. So Andy and his team developed Postaga, a free all-in-one link building outreach tool that will find opportunities for your outreach based on websites relevant to your content.

Check out more about Andy Cabasso and what he’s up to at Postaga.com. You can also find him on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Postaga is a really cool way to find people to connect with in your space based on the content you create and build up SEO for your site. Thanks for joining us!

Learn how you can upgrade your web development or coaching services in this LMScast featuring Russ Ruffino from Clients on Demand. He teaches coaches and consultants how they can build up their business by adding high-ticket programs in their service offerings at the $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000 price points even if they don’t already have an audience or large following.

At Clients on Demand Russ works with consultants of all types, including business coaches, relationship coaches, fitness coaches, graphic designers, web designers, and career coaches. He teaches them how to get clients and how to attract a continuous stream of customers by selling high-ticket programs.

Russ talks about how most strategies shared about growing your business include pumping out endless amounts of content on social media. Maybe it’s YouTube videos or blog posts, but the idea is that if you build your audience large enough, you’ll have enough organic marketing to make sufficient sales to stay in business.

The approach Russ favors that has worked significantly better for his clients is to start with getting the Facebook ad conversion formula optimized for really making sales. By focusing on running ads to convert, you’re boosting the bottom line rather than the top of the funnel, which will really help you see the core of what you’ll need to do in your business to grow in a sustainable way.

In most cases, Russ’s clients are able to take a prospect from first click to conversion within 24 to 48 hours. His clients are able to get those results by basing their business and offerings around the outcome they create for their clients rather than basing their business on their own expertise or lifestyle.

If you’re an expert or coach in the LMS space, be sure to reach out to Russ at ClientsOnDemand.com/Talk to schedule your live sales call with a member of his team that has been empowering experts to establish and scale their expert business from the ground up for years. Thanks for joining us!

Will Middleton from WPCourseGuide joins Chris Badgett in this episode of the LMScast podcast where he shares insights on best practices when starting a YouTube channel or entering the freelance website building space. Will has worked for years with LifterLMS building websites for clients, and he shares what he has learned and how he’s started his transition into a more leverageable stream of income doing affiliate work on YouTube.

At age 15 Will started doing freelance work with LifterLMS writing copy for this LMScast podcast. And after interacting with a company in the WordPress space, he used LifterLMS to build his own online course website, and then offered his experience to others. Starting at $20/hour doing user testing and content migration for LifterLMS sites, Will eventually moved to $50/hour building full websites, doing consulting work, and doing much more advanced use cases of LifterLMS.

Will shares how he was able to learn a bunch of WordPress tools including LifterLMS on the fly while helping clients implement them by focusing on what specific features he knew about and doing some free research to see if a specific setup is possible with a tool, and if so he’d implement it for the client or find some other possible options.

A strategy you can use to get started offering services in WordPress or any space is to offer basic services or what you know, such as copying/pasting work (content migrations), user testing (looking for bugs in the user experience), or even virtual assistant work with tools you know how to use such as Gmail and Microsoft Word.

Be sure to check out Will at WPCourseGuide.com/Lifter where he has a special offer for 50% off for LMScast listeners on his course about how to build super customizable websites using LifterLMS and Elementor. Once you’ve taken Will’s course and built your own WordPress site, you could apply to offer your experience to other LifterLMS users by being listed on the LifterLMS Experts page where you can take on clients and start making money building sites.

In this episode of the LMScast podcast from LifterLMS, Sally Crewe from ThePractitionerPlatform.com shares how she helps natural health practitioners start and grow their businesses. By teaching courses at and offering website building services, Sally has been able to encourage and enable many natural health practitioners to reach the next level in their businesses online.

WaaS is an acronym for Website As A Service. It is derived from the acronym SaaS, or Software As A Service. SaaS is when a company offers software on a recurring revenue model for continued support and updates of the product (LifterLMS, Elementor, WordPress themes, etc.). A WaaS is the same concept, but applied to a company that would host your website and offer you the tools you need for your site (WordPress.com for example).

Sally shares how one of the large advantages of a WaaS service within WordPress for business owners is that it gives you all of the power of WordPress without the hassle of learning how to set everything up. Clients can get into their sites, change out content, and be ready to go. The more niche your business is, the easier it is to create templates that cater specifically towards your audience, removing more of their friction with setting up.

After creating a course for others in the natural healing space on how they can create websites with WordPress to host their own courses, Sally got the feedback from students that they’d much rather pay for someone else to set it up for them and teach them how to use it. That’s when Sally really leaned into the WaaS service.

You can find out more about Sally Crewe and the things she has going on at ThePractitionerPlatform.com and TheOnlinePractitioner.com, where she has her resources for natural healers for creating their businesses and resources on getting your business shaped up and off the ground. Thanks for joining us!