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Chris Badgett and Emily Middleton from WPCourseGuide examine the quickly changing effects of artificial intelligence on online learning, course design, WordPress, entrepreneurship, and the nature of employment in this episode of LMScast. They talk about how AI is enabling creators to develop courses, produce content, build software prototypes, and automate complex tasks more quickly than ever before. Chris provides real-world examples of utilizing AI to produce comprehensive product specifications and functional software prototypes in a matter of minutes, while Emily discusses how course designers may utilize AI tools to develop course structures, lesson content, and learning materials.

They stress that while AI makes it easier to create, it also increases the bar for quality, making knowledge, originality, and well-considered user experiences more crucial than before.

Key points from the discussion include:

• AI is speeding up software development and course design, enabling developers to transform concepts into functional products far more quickly than with conventional techniques.
  
• The threshold for quality is rising, so merely producing material is no longer sufficient. Delivering original ideas, improved learning opportunities, and superior instructional material must be the main priorities of successful course designers.
  
• AI helps entrepreneurs, educators, and company owners boost areas in which they may lack experience, acting as a potent helper rather than a total replacement for humans.
  
• Because students still need human connection, individualized instruction, accountability, and mentorship all of which technology cannot offer coaching and community are still very important.
  
• With AI technologies improving website development, content management, and commercial operations rather than displacing these ecosystems, WordPress and open-source platforms are well-positioned for the AI era.
  
• Self-directed learning is becoming more and more crucial as people who constantly acquire new skills, explore, and adapt will be better equipped for possibilities in the future.
  
• With AI offering immediate access to knowledge and human educators increasingly concentrating on deeper learning, critical thinking, mentoring, and practical application, traditional education paradigms are under increasing strain.
  
• AI-related fear and anxiety are understandable, yet history demonstrates that technology advancements can bring forth both disruption and new opportunities.
  
• As mundane jobs are automated, human abilities like creativity, leadership, empathy, communication, and relationship-building become even more vital.
  
• Both speakers urged audiences to embrace innovation while remaining connected to real-world experiences, communities, personal connections, and well-being, emphasizing the need of striking a balance between technology and humans.

The episode’s main takeaway is that AI is radically altering how individuals start companies, design educational opportunities, and pick up new skills. But those that mix the effectiveness and power of AI with genuine human skill, creativity, mentoring, and community-building will be the ones who prosper.

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Episode Transcript:

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. She’s back on the show, it’s Emily Middleton, and today is gonna be a little bit of a different episode. We’re gonna dive into some trends, some changes that are happening in society that affect online education, website building, how we work as humans with technology, and we’re just gonna dive into some various issues from artificial intelligence to the changing landscape of education, what we’re seeing from our different perspectives.

We’re gonna discuss WordPress. We’re gonna discuss how the economy and economic pressure is affecting things like course creation, building websites, and so on. We’re gonna dive into the interplay of company… Or sorry community coaching and courses, and how that’s changing. But first, welcome back on the show, Emily Middleton, and that’s from wpcourseguide.com.

Welcome, Emily. 

Emily Middleton: Thank you, Chris. I’m excited to be here. And you said we’re gonna jump into talking about AI, is that right? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah let’s start there.

Emily Middleton: Okay.

Chris Badgett: What are you doing with it today? The thing is that blows my mind is that AI just moves so fast. In fact, I love… ‘Cause I’m a technologist, so are you. I like opening Twitter, or X, in the morning, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, Claude does this now. Claude does this now, Claude does this now.” And there’s this master class of somebody of, like, how to do X with AI, or ChatGPT’s doing this now and it’s just increasing exponentially.

But what’s your experience with AI recently? What excites you? What’s going on? How are you using it? 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. I, okay, so I do a lot of vibe coding stuff when I’m putting together prototypes, and you use VS Code now, and I was like, I never thought in my life that Chris would open up VS Code and be, like, building prototype products.

You were like, “I’m never gonna learn any CSS,” and now you can build products, especially prototypes, without it. And so prototyping things that we’re trying to do in WordPress is really awesome. I’ve been releasing some videos on my YouTube channel a bit more lately about how to use AI. For example when creating courses in Lifter, which a lot of the listeners are probably doing, you can consult a bot like Claude now and say “Hey Claude, here’s an export of my LifterLMS course.”

It’s a sample course that LifterLMS imported so that Claude can get a feel for the JSON structure. And then you can talk to Claude and it can build you a course to say “Hey, this is the example course that I want you to learn the structure of how LifterLMS technically works, and I want you to interview me and build a course in the same format that I can then import.”

So there are some things to speed up the course creation process like that, but then it also raises the bar for what a good course looks like. Because I can create a course really quickly with AI, so can everyone else, and so what really makes a course good, I think, will be pushed. It’s I don’t think you’ll have to put less effort into making courses.

I think if you do put less effort into making courses, you’ll have more competition ’cause more people will also be doing it because it’s easier. But then you as a course creator, at least me as a course creator, I spend more time quality assurance. I spend more time picking certain images, creating images, working on the artistic user experience side of things.

So that’s primarily how I’m using AI and helping my clients in their business using AI. 

Chris Badgett: That’s a really interesting point. It reminds me of YouTube. So like when I was a kid, I remember, I remember my parents’ generation had first of all no TV, then it was radio, then they had TV with one or two or three channels.

And then there was cable. And fast-forward, now we have YouTube and everybody has a TV station, and which one is the most popular? It’s MrBeast, who does these giant million-dollar productions, right? So just because now you’re more empowered the bar goes up in terms of quality. So it’s just an interesting thing to look at.

And I heard this idea that one of the cool thing about AI for meetings, like as a in a company, whether you’re building websites and you’ve got like project managers, developers, designers, or you’re building an education company and you have all these ideas and all these things you wanna do, is it instead of showing up to a meeting with some words for the agenda, you can actually show up with a functioning prototype.

And what that like really accelerates things. And I, when I got that idea I was writing a spec for a new product for LifterLMS called Name Your Price, which is where people can, the end user can select a price. Maybe there’s a minimum, maybe there’s a maximum, maybe there’s a suggested price.

And there’s all these like details with this kind of pricing add-on for Lifter. But AI helped me come up with a spec, fill in the gaps of the things I wasn’t looking at, analyze a similar product that w- is in the WooCommerce ecosystem, and at the end of creating this awesome spec, I was like, “Hey, can you just build that for me as an installable plugin?”

30 seconds later, I had it and I put it on a site and it worked, and that just blew, blew my mind. When it comes to an organization, like in LifterLMS as an example, we all wear a lot of hats, and course creators do, too. Let me try to do this quickly, and then I’m gonna pass it back to you, Emily.

So in a software company, there’s seven hats, right? There’s product, there’s engineering, there’s marketing, there’s sales, there’s operations, there’s customer success, there’s design, and then there’s like the CEO role. That’s actually eight hats. I’m decent… a lot of entrepreneurs can wear multiple hats.

I can do all of that to a base level, and some things I’m better at than others, but engineering I could never do. But now I can with AI. Now you can. That doesn’t mean that I want to s- become the lead developer of Lifter. No, I want real developers classically trained to understand everything, like how code works-

and AI has to be managed. But it’s like a huge unlock. So for course creators, we look at the five hats, which is being a subject matter expert, being a teacher, being a technologist, being a community builder, and being an entrepreneur. And wherever you’re weak, just like I’m saying I’m weak on engineering, I can augment myself with AI, and that’s really fascinating to me.

A- even, like- Yeah … where I’m strong, like I can get stronger. If I have a subject matter expertise, I- I’m good, but I can actually f- get… fill in gaps with AI. Yeah. Or if I’m a decent entrepreneur and I’m good at marketing but not great at sales, AI can help me with sales. Or if I’m good at marketing but I don’t really…

I’m not really good at business structure stuff like accounting or should I do a L- LLC or an S corp or whatever, AI can be my little sidekick legal advisor. Just help me figure that stuff out. It’s amazing. But ta- talk to me about multiple hats and how you think about using AI for yourself and with clients and whatnot.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. I, the five hats framework that you came up with is really good. I think things like community building are gonna be really hard to replace, and AI doesn’t really get humans the way that humans get humans. I think it calls for a further development of what art means. How when… I it’s a scary time because things are changing quickly.

There’s a lot of socioeconomic tension on people in a lot of levels But it’s similar to times when cameras were invented, and then portraiture artists were out of business. They were like, “These cameras are just gonna do our job for us. They’re not- They’re gonna capture reality better than we can.”

Abstract art then took off. And then when it came to personal cell phones, all the photographers who existed and had professions in photography their profession diminished a bit. And because everyone can take photos on their cell phone, and it’s a little more rare that someone would hire a professional photographer, but they’re still needed in the ecosystem.

And so I think more people will be building things with AI. There will be more opportunities for mistakes, and so those technical engineers, I don’t think they’re gonna get replaced. I just think there may be more specialization coming to that field to where those experts are gonna be studying things at a higher level rather than a lower level.

Rather than how do we build things, it’s how do we think about building things? Because we can think in ways that AI can’t. That’s how I see it, and people like you and me are product people. We can come up with interesting ideas, solve problems in interesting ways. Now we can talk to the AI and get a technical solution for us in just a matter of minutes.

In a matter of hours we could have a product that’s actually working really well. But if we really want to make that product solid and ship it, we need the, that support from the engineers. But I think it’s creating new categories such as product, and more specialization in categories such as engineering.

What do you think?

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Yeah. That’s very well said. I’m personally an optimist. I do have concerns with AI and the Terminator and everything, but- … for the most part I see it as an accelerator and a amplifier than a like something that’s just gonna replace me. It- or team members.

I just wanna see people using it to do more faster, cooler, better. Yeah … if you look at intelligence as a technology, like artificial intelligence, it’s just another tool. In the same way that WordPress allowed non-technical people like me to build a website, AI is just another layer of abstraction to allow somebody to do something that they previously couldn’t do or do to a level that they can do now.

One interesting thing I know you’ve experienced with your work with LifterLMS I can just have a thought as an entrepreneur and then immediately send a PhD-level intelligence out to do it. And whereas before I- dude, I’m an entrepreneur. I have ideas all the time. But I can’t act on them ’cause I’m limited by capacity.

But with AI, I’m not limited So for example you and I both know there’s this question that comes up with LifterLMS “Hey, I’m not sure what is free and what is paid.” It’s a friction point because there’s only so much information you can put on a pricing page or on product sales pages and product descriptions and whatnot.

But we have an AI agent at LifterLMS named Maurice, and I was like, just in a, as a passing thought on the weekend, I’m like, I’m using WhisperFlow to talk to Maurice so I can get a lot of information across quickly. I’m like– And Maurice is tied into all our code bases and everything, and I’m like, “Hey, Maurice, sometimes we get this particular person who’s like really wants like a super detailed, like spreadsheet report of what is free, what is paid, not just like which products, but like features, like everything.”

I’m like, “Can you create like a co- like look at all the code bases, look at every line of code that makes LifterLMS across the free plugin and the 25 add-ons, and build me a report. By the way, here’s our brand guideline, here’s the Figma files that we use to design our website so this thing can look awesome and really professional.”

So when somebody comes back to us with that question, frustrated ’cause they can’t quite figure it out from our pricing page and our add-ons pages I came back like 15 minutes later and saw the most beautiful 15-page report that was like beautifully designed, and it just blew my mind. Like that’s amazing.

Like you, you and I have dealt with that issue at Lifter. Yeah, I remember at one point you had a, I think it was like a saved reply in Help Scout or something that was like, “Hey, this is what’s free and paid,” and there’s all these bullets and these lists. Like we’re trying to help people. But now I got like the ultimate answer that’s dude, this is the compromise, comprehensive 10-page report organized by category, and it was made in six minutes.

This is, it’s mind-blowing. 

Emily Middleton: Literally. And I love that, and it’s a little bit scary because some people were paid, and the time they spent was g- in generating those reports, right? And now it can generate that 10-page report, something can take someone 30 hours now takes an AI 10 minutes. And so like you said, getting people using AI and learning like how the skills that we have contribute to how we think about things versus just what we think about.

I like the quality of information I think is gonna have to go up across the board for courses, for us as software creators. Like LifterLMS is releasing like a lot of add-ons. I have no clue if Brian is a coding god or if both coding god and AI are a part of the picture. But it creates a software product that can develop faster, online learning that can develop faster, and it gives more power to the hands of those who are those independent creators or doing something on WordPress.

So I’m super optimistic. People say all the time, I- “You’re still building websites with WordPress? There’s AI now.” But people said there’s “You’re still building websites with WordPress? React is faster.” They’ve been saying this kind of thing for a long time, and I think AI is just gonna accelerate the space that WordPress already occupies.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, 100%. And WordPress can move slow because it’s like this open source community project with this core and it is harder to steer a like established thing than it is for like a scrappy startup. And because WordPress already powers, 40% of the internet or whatever, like it’s not a scrappy startup anymore.

Even though it is free open source thing, it’s like it’s… It can be slower, particularly with all the community aspects of it and like collaboration. But at the end of the day, I am… I’ve never been more optimistic about it- 

Emily Middleton: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: because of the open nor- open source nature of it, which means like AI tools can just like immediately extend it and ingest it.

So whereas like a closed software company, they may have an API- 

… 

Chris Badgett: But they don’t… Their entire code isn’t visible. They may use AI internally inside the company. But when you have this ecosystem of creators, like LifterLMS, or WooCommerce, or Pay Memberships Pro, and Barn2 plugins, and PapaMaker, and WP Fusion, all these like creative entrepreneurs who are all not working at the same company, like innovating faster on top of WordPress, it’s super interesting.

And WordPress I believe 7.0 just dropped, which has the AI connector stuff built in. Like it’s getting there. Yeah. And I’ve built like a, I’ve vibe coded a landing page for whatever project I’m working on, like a sales page. But the first thing I do is let me convert that to a structure of WordPress blocks and whatnot that I can, suck into my WordPress site, ’cause I’m not trying to have a static site.

I get it. There’s a place for those kinds of things, but WordPress isn’t going away. It’s like that whole… It feels really familiar to that idea that as a marketer I’ve heard forever, which is like, “Oh, X is dead. Email is dead.” No, email is not dead. Email is alive and well. Are open rates lower?

Emily Middleton: Sure, 

Chris Badgett: yeah, everybody’s overwhelmed. Email is not dead. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Blogging, is it dead? No, people use articles all the time. By the way, most of what the AI is trained on are, is blog articles. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Do you- Is Facebook dead? No, Facebook isn’t dead. Yeah, like older people use it in general, but it’s not dead.

It’s not- 

Emily Middleton: Do you think anything is gonna go away? Do you think anything is gonna is there a- any kind of online product right now or thing people do that you think is going to diminish significantly or go away? 

Chris Badgett: I’m sure it will. Like creative destruction is a part of the process.

I forget the name of the documentary, but there’s an awesome movie about how life is basically death. For example, I forget the s- the science, but did you know your skin is brand new every year? Interesting. Most of what your skin does is die. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And then you get a new one, right?

So there’s this … Yes, things will be disrupted, but it will create new opportunities that we can’t even imagine yet. But if you wanna get ahead of it, the best advice I could give is be a creator more than a consumer. Use AI even if you don’t know what you’re doing. I am writing … I’m in VS Code now, and I never thought I would do that.

Luckily, my business partner has helped me figure out how to just use the basics of a IDE or terminal with Cloud Code, with our custom agent. I’m really fortunate to be more on the cutting edge of what’s happening. But this is why you need people. I need smart engineers who are, like, way in the fut- they’re, like, on the bleeding edge of AI.

What Jack Arturo has done with AutoMem is part of our AI agents. It’s mind-blowing, and it’s so cool, but these are all humans that are leveraging technology. It reminds me of, … with, there will be a ton of d- disruption, so when we talk about economic pressures, sometimes things have to die, but new things will be reborn.

And the key is to be on the path- Yeah … of you don’t have to have it all figured out, but just be working towards where the puck is going. And- 

Emily Middleton: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: be, like, play around, just experiment. Try. Try and fail, try and succeed. If you succeed, do more of that.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and having a content management system like WordPress and all the cool software that exists in the ecosystem of entrepreneurs and agencies like yourself that support businesses and people that have projects, it’s like, this isn’t going away.

It’s actually getting even more exciting. And by the way- Yeah … let’s figure out how to do all this without exploding, because everybody I know that’s using these tools are not working less. They’re actually working more ’cause they’re so excited. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah, that, that is a really interesting point. I- they’re working more because they’re excited.

I feel at the same time the terror that I’m not gonna have something to provide for myself. If I don’t have this job, if I don’t have this position, if I don’t have this skill set that the industry needs from me, then I’m gonna have to change my career, and that might just be too hard.

I have that fear of change going on inside me, but I also am embracing things and I have enthusiasm. I’m building products in a new way. But it’s forcing me as a person to change faster, get comfortable with risk faster, try out more things faster, and so there’s an adjustment there. What do you think about that?

This

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reminds me of the internet. I’m old enough where I remember the pre-internet world. 

And the whole reason, like- some of the success that I’ve had is because in the early days of the internet, just like we’re in the early days of AI right now, I really leaned in and figured out this internet marketing thing, this how a non-engineer can build a website thing, how to be a content creator on YouTube and write blogs that the whole world can see, not just a billboard or something I put in my local paper.

Be early is key and and don’t be afraid. There’s, I was listening to the Moonshots podcast recently with Peter Diamandis and some other folks, and there was a conversation around how in this rapid AI and technology change period we’re in, there’s an immune system response when somebody feels like their career is threatened, which I totally get, which is what you’re talking about.

Yeah. And I, and I feel it, dude. I feel it also. There will be a day when an AI will be a better small company CEO than me. I need to come to terms with that and not just reject it and put my head in the sand, right? And by the way, there’s probably a future in which the human is still needed to collaborate with the AI.

In fact, we’re probably already there. As a CEO, I use AI a lot. It’s not replacing me, it’s making me better. But how do we avoid that immune system response? So if we look at education as an example, what’s the first thing that happened when ChatGPT came out in education? I have friends that are teachers, their very first concern is, “Okay, these kids are not doing the work.

AI, ChatGPT is doing the homework.” And then that we can tell “Hey, this 17-page essay was not written by Billy. This was written by OpenAI,” right? Yeah. And now so Billy is cheating, but what is, Billy is actually doing is actually cool, like experimenting with AI. In the same way that students got graphics calculators or they got laptops or iPads came in the classroom or whatever, so we gotta adapt and, but I totally feel it. If we look at education specifically if you wanna learn something AI is putting a lot of pressure on traditional education in terms of learning something. So what does that… If I was a teacher, I would feel very threatened, like my job is at risk.

But what do you do about that? Like- I think the I think the AI teacher, I what it does is it changes roles. So if an AI- like, if a teacher is gonna use AI to help build curriculum, cool. If the AI’s gonna help grade papers, cool. If the AI is gonna provide more personalized tutoring, that’s awesome.

It’s what… It’s the whole point is, like, how do we do education and scale better? That’s the whole point of the modern education system, and you have this technology that’s helping, but it’s disrupting people. What if the AI has better content than the t- human teacher because it’s more relevant, it’s more plugged in, it has a PhD, genius IQ, whatever.

It’s totally disruptive, but that doesn’t mean that teachers like human students won’t be in a human classroom, and the teacher, they need an adult to facilitate a learning process. It’s just changing, and, like, how do we- … bring technology in a classroom? In my day, as a young man or a young boy the teacher would literally wheel in, and you probably remember this too, like a TV on, like a rack with wheels, and we’d watch a documentary about cane toads in Australia or whatever in biology class.

So that TV and that video, that piece of content was, like, a piece of technology, and it actually- Yeah … enriched the classroom, and the teacher’s still there but educ- Yeah … let’s nerd out on education. And there’s so many different types of education, but what are your thoughts? 

Emily Middleton: I have been a firm believer in spiral learning since I heard Julie Dirksen talk about it on your podcast and read her book.

Spiral learning, for those who don’t know, is the process of learning where you learn the basics of something, you learn the intermediate of something, and then you learn the advanced of something. Sometimes when we’re learning, we get a deep dive on one specific component of a learning process. So for example, if we’re talking about a course on cooking, we don’t need to know about every single type of pan, like before we start our cooking process.

Maybe we just need to learn something basic about how to make a rice dish. It doesn’t necessarily matter what kind of pan you use, whether the heat’s too high, too low. We’ll talk about that later. You just need to get access to a pan for step one. But then maybe we could come back around. You’ve made your first couple dishes.

Now it’s time for step two, and we wanna talk about the quality of the pan, whether it’s steel, cast iron, or coated with something that’s hopefully not a PFOA different types of pans. And then we’ll go even more advanced and say what pans should we aspire to have depending on what kinds of food we’re cooking.

We learn about things as we go in deeper and deeper levels, and I think AI will inspire definitely the first level of learning. When you get access to information for the first time, you hear about a subject for the first time. AI can give you really good overviews that we used to rely on humans- we used to rely on industry experts to get an overview on accounting.

We can talk to the AI and have an overview on accounting, and then when we talk to an actual accountant, we take an actual accounting course, what we’re gonna be diving into a little bit deeper with that subject matter expert is that next level, the intermediate level. Why would we consider this? Why would we consider that?

What are the things a real person encounters in the job that an AI wouldn’t think to tell you? That’s how I see it impacting education. So most websites I see will be using AI at least to create their basic content or even have a little AI chatbot talking to people about their subject matter, and then you can take that real human-made content for that deeper learning.

What do you think about that? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. It’s like a dance. Humans have been in a dance with technology and machines for a long time. Just like we dance with cars, like we dance with computers, like we dance with the internet, the AI is just… we’ve basically already become cyborgs.

There’s this whole idea that Neuralink, once we get the internet in our brain we finally become cyborgs. In my opinion, as soon as we got laptops and iPhones and our smartphones in our hands, we’re already cyborgs. We’re already connected to the technology. Yeah. So it’s already here.

In terms of the education, s- if we look at it through the LifterLMS lens or the online education lens, there’s this concept of courses, coaching, and community. And one of the, one of the things I’m thinking a lot about is- The course aspect of a learning management system is rapidly influenced by AI in terms of creating content or creating course outlines and things like that, worksheets, quiz questions, curriculum basically.

What- and that’s true, that’s can also be true for the in-person classroom as well. But what is not going to AI is the coaching and the community. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Yes, we can have an AI tutor, which I 100% am a fan of, ’cause one of the problems with the traditional education system is that humans are not robots. In a cross-section of 30 students in a class, there’s all kinds of personality types, learning styles, learning disabilities, levels of motivation, all kinds of things.

So having personalized AI tutoring is great, but there will always be a place for human coaching and community connection ’cause nobody is like, “Hey, seriously, I wanna be in the Matrix. Just pl- put me in a bathtub and plug something into my brain, and I never wanna talk to another human again.” That’s not really the human experience.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Coming in, in 2028, your brain in a bathtub. You have that opportunity. I love that. You, so you mentioned community. And that, there’s so much more to the human experience, like you said than just this mental work that we do. There’s physical touch. We hug people, we talk to people, we get a sense…

h- human body warmth is fundamentally important to us. You know how you, you have this background in, in human studies and how there’s a sense of community. It doesn’t just cr- created through the people we’re even talking to. In-person meetups, they feel so great. I’ve been in a course program- Yeah

for three years, and I’ve just met the people who do that course program in person in Texas a few months ago, and they’re actually a LifterLMS customer, and I, It just was so different 

Chris Badgett: to see those people. It’s pretty cool to pierce the veil, right? To pierce the veil- Yeah … of the internet. Just going to a WordCamp or going to a, an event that you always did online.

It’s it’s amazing. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah, there’s so much more to that human experience. Giving hugs, sharing meals, discussing things. What information gets retained in our mind is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. So like oftentimes I need a certain person to tell me something, someone I view as an authority or someone I trust rather than just having the information told to me.

So if the AI tells me a bulk of information about a subject, but then someone in person who’s a professional in that career tells me that thing, I’ll take it a little bit more seriously. And so there’s that aspect too of what information do we retain and that comes a lot from community and coaching rather than just the stuff that we watch.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s super interesting time and, in many ways I think we have to lead because as entrepreneurs we’re, we have a n- like apparently, I read somewhere 3% of the population has the entrepreneur personality type, whatever that means. But what entrepreneurs are good at is risk, chaos, creating value, making sense out of nothing organizing things.

This is, th- these skills are becoming more and more value, valuable. So for example let’s say the truck driving industry, the most popular job in America is a truck driver. There’s a lot of them. If and when self-driving long haul trucking is completely taken over by autonomous driving without humans, that’s gonna disrupt a huge part of the population, right?

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And th- this is what I’m talking about. First level there’s that immune system response. Let’s form a union as teachers or truck drivers or business owners or accountants or lawyers to not let AI take our jobs. That’s level one, the immune system response. But then there’s the way technology works is like it will break through.

It always does. The internet became… It just did what it did, and there’s no turning it off. And people like it because there’s demand for it, right? And it created so many n- new opportunities. True. And then there’s this concept of unschooling or self-directed learning. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: I think the folks that have already been doing that in a way need to help others just through leading by example.

For example, you built a career in web, in learning management systems, in building sites for clients, in customer success. You figured it all out on your own, not by yourself. You were in programs. You’ve got mentors. You showed up every day. You studied things on YouTube. You just did trial and error, saw what worked, what didn’t work, optimized.

I, I don’t have a academic background in business or engineering, but here I am the CEO of a business with- … a software business and I can’t write a line of code. Why is that? Like how did that happen? And it’s that self-directed learning, entrepreneurship, surround yourself with other humans that can support and you can align based on common vision and goals, and create value together and be on the journey together so you’re not just isolated and alone.

And I think we just need to keep doing that through the AI era. 

Emily Middleton: I completely agree. Completely agree. I, I think about how the working for, like you said, the internet changed a lot and it has a lasting impact. For example, the work at home experience is now a thing. E- you know, the work at home experience, it didn’t used to be a thing. There are some people who prefer working in person and going to work every day, working at an office in person.

There are some people who prefer working at home and not going to the office. And so probably at the end of all this, like you said, with the internet and the wave that it created, AI will create a wave, and at the end of that wave things will go up and down, but we’ll probably be better off overall than we were before, right?

That’s how I see it. 

Chris Badgett: I think so, but it t- it also takes a serious… Like when all the, with all these economic challenges and economic pressures and you gotta provide, you gotta add value, and now this AI thing is competing for market share of the value that humans can create. It’s it’s a challenge, but if what it feels like is like, “Oh my God, I’m too late,” but you’re not.

I thought I was late to WordPress in 20 13 when Lifter launched. 

I wasn’t. I was solidly working from home starting in 2010, and then it was a decade later with the pandemic situation where oh, here comes everybody to work from home, right? And many returned to the office and so on, but many like stayed working remotely or moved forward with a hybrid approach, and the world was just a lot more accepting of remote work or working online or conducting meetings on Zoom instead of spending all this money to get on planes and hotels and all this stuff.

It forced people to upgrade. But it took that event to cause, to force people to upgrade. Yeah. And I think we just need to have an open mind and explore and cross-train and get outside of your lane. What I mean by get outside of your lane is- I try to do stuff all the time that I don’t know how to do.

But that’s never been easier nor more fun with AI to help support me, yeah. ‘Cause I’m not bugging somebody to “Hey, can you show me how to do this thing?” Or whatever. I had the opposite problem. I’m like, “Oh my God, I coulda had my AI agent working for 12 hours on this thing, but I don’t even know what to tell it to do.

I’m too productive.” Yes. I have too much productivity. It’s a weird, it’s a really weird thing to think about. But I do have concerns about … not everybody has the same personality type and thrives in chaos and everything, and I do see a a really challenging time ahead, particularly with like the cost of college education, for example.

I’m a parent with teen- teenage kids right now, and I’m looking at the cost of a college education and I’m like, man, that is serious,

But then there’s… I heard a statistic, I don’t know if it’s true or whatever, but that there are… Right now there’s more unemployed college graduates than high school graduates.

I don’t know if that’s a true thing or not, but it’s that kind of stuff that makes me like, “Wait, hold on a second. Let’s… Maybe the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed, and we need to figure out different ways to learn, like through actual internships or self-directed learning or pop-up educational entrepre- education opportunities through courses, coaches, and communities or mastermind groups.”

There’s lots of different ways to learn. And so it’s exciting- Yeah … too, but it’s also scary as hell, particularly for people that are just not as used to living in this kind of chaos that entrepreneurs just, for whatever reason, innately do. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a really good point. Reexamining who we are as entrepreneurs and going back to our roots, people who are willing to step out and take risks and try new things.

That’s… Yeah. I think that’ll be a really awesome experience. We’re those people who would put together a boat and see if we could sail across the ocean and inevitably die in the ocean. But we’re the curious humans who wanna push things and see. I like AI also as a forcing function.

For our society, we need to generate things like power in a cleaner and efficient way, and that issue’s being pressed as a part of AI taking up so much power. And there’s a lot of risks that didn’t go well in the past, like nuclear power plants. There were some really bad accidents that happened, and there’s much more safety and governance that needs to go into that kind of thing.

But the- there’s no cleaner generation of power that we have yet, and that’s the kind of thing that’ll support us in our AI journey and quantum computing. I know everyone’s talking about quantum computing as if it’s the thing that’s gonna come next, but it was crazy. AI came out, and it just has been taking the whole world by storm.

Yeah I think that there’s definitely value to giving AI credit for having been a part of your process as well. A lot of people try to take credit for the things that AI makes, and so if you say that your stuff is made in support of AI or it’s very clear that it is, I also make sure to endorse that because there will become a real distinct feel and value to creating something that’s human versus creating something that’s human plus AI or mostly AI.

And so- Just think about that. It makes it easier for- Yeah … yeah. 

Chris Badgett: I think about that kinda like organic food. 

Like organic food is healthier, more nutrient dense, and lacks poisons in other food, right? And I’m not making this the exact analogy, but I feel like organic art, organic music, organic writing, organic videos, like with zero influence of AI, will always be important.

Yeah. But it’s al- it’s also okay to augment those things with AI, right? 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But to take credit, there is like a plagiarism thing there, and to you can lose your humanity by pretending that whatever you create with AI was 100% done by you. And I think that’s disingenuous in the same way that, it’s kinda like pretending you’re at a organic restaurant and, a lot of the food that’s being served on your table is actually full of pesticides and glyphosate, hormones and chemicals or whatever, and you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t actually organic food,” but you said organic like on the menu or on the name of the restaurant or whatever.

Yeah … so like that raw, organic thing is cool. I, that’s a pro-tip I just wanna put out there is like- I’ve always felt that one of the things that keeps me going in technology and entrepreneurship with all the stress, all the chaos, all the ups and downs, the good times, the bad times, is my connection to nature and also fitness.

If I didn’t have this grounded human experience th- without technology, like this organic experience that keeps me grounded, I would go insane. Sure. And I’ve seen a lot of people burn out or not necessarily go insane, but just have a challenge because they- you lose your humanity.

And having parts of what you do that just remain organic or disconnect or unplug has never been more important to to do that. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So like- Yeah … n- don’t lose your humanity in all of this opportunity is what I’m saying. ‘Cause if- it’s like just chasing money for money’s sake and f- and losing sight of your values and humanity and all the non-monetary values of life, you can get really lost.

And unfortunately, I think a lot of people are gonna get really lost in this technology revolution because they’re losing touch with their organic human side. So keep that even if it’s… It doesn’t always have to be, like, perfect, like you live on a island and there’s no te- there’s no t- electricity or whatever.

It’s just don’t lose your humanity in the process. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a really good point. And if you don’t have any more questions, we could end on that point. I think that’s a really good point. Don’t lose your humanity in the process. Watch your immune system, and take advantage and try to leverage the things about you that make you unique as both a person and an entrepreneur.

Chris Badgett: I’ll end it there, and I’ll just say I’m a fan of the barbell strategy. This is from Nicholas Nassim Taleb, which basically means the barbell strategy is put the extremes in your s- in your strategy and forget about the middle. And I’ve never felt more strongly that the barbell strategy is more relevant than what we’re experiencing now with technology.

So what that means is if you’re in the middle, you’re fighting AI. You’re also really digging into your current ways of thinking, and mindsets, and everything and productivity, and all the news, and it’s all just crazy, right? But what’s on the end is go be an extreme human.

Get offline, touch grass, hug people, hold hands walk in the woods, put your toes in the sand and in the ocean. And on the other end, be like Chris, who n- who never thought he would code before and start coding apps and stuff with AI, right? Like, why not? Do the extremes. The middle is danger zone.

So w- if you’re having an immune system response with disruption, I would encourage to, you to push out both directions. Be more human, and be more leaning into technology and innovation for good with ethics. So that’s it for this LMScast episode. Emily, thank you for coming on.

In the spirit of being more human, if you want an awesome human on your team, I would encourage you to reach out to Emily at wpcourseguide.com. ‘Cause for one, you’re an awesome human. Two, you’re awesome with technology. You’re on the b- you’re on both sides of the barbell, and you’re delivering that to the people that you work with, which is amazing.

Thank you. So go check out Emily at WP Course Guide. Any final words or any other ways people can connect with you? 

Emily Middleton: No. That’s the best thing, wpcourseguide.com. 

Chris Badgett: All right. Thank you for coming back on the show. And Emily and I have worked together for a long time. It’s great to be with you on the journey.

Reach out to her. She’s a great resource if you’re looking to connect, and we hope you have a great rest of your day. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Chris Badgett argues in this LMScast episode why LMS and CRM should be handled as a single, integrated system rather than as distinct tools by any professional online learning company. He highlights that whereas CRM technologies handle marketing, automation, and customer connections, platforms like LifterLMS handle the learning process. WP Fusion, which serves as the connection layer that synchronizes student activity with marketing platforms and enables sophisticated automation across WordPress-based educational websites, is the missing component between them.

He explains how WP Fusion unifies important WordPress plugins and features into a single solution. Supported platforms mentioned in this LMScast episode are below.

LMS Platform

• LifterLMS

Form Builders

• Gravity Forms
• WPForms
• Fluent Forms
• Ninja Forms
• Formidable Forms

E-Commerce Platform

WooCommerce

CRM & Marketing Platforms

• ActiveCampaign
• HubSpot
• FluentCRM
• GoHighLevel
• Salesforce
• Mailchimp
• Kit (ConvertKit)

Course developers may automate tagging, segmentation, and customer journeys based on actual student activities, such as enrollments, lesson progress, quiz completions, and payments, thanks to this broad interoperability. Chris also emphasizes how these linkages produce actual business results. After a student enrolls in a free course, for instance, they may immediately start a nurturing sequence; after they finish the course, they may get certification emails or upsell efforts. He highly advises creating a free course lead magnet as a growth engine and maintaining a straightforward CRM structure that relies on tags and custom fields for segmentation while utilizing a few core lists (prospects, free users, and customers).

He adds that strong eCommerce automations like cart abandonment recovery, refund-based tagging, and lifetime value tracking are made possible by integrating WP Fusion with WooCommerce. In general, the episode presents WordPress as a more adaptable substitute for all-in-one platforms such as Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, or Podia because LifterLMS, WooCommerce, form plugins, and WP Fusion combine to create a fully customizable, scalable, and automation-rich ecosystem for expanding online education businesses.

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Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Episode Transcript:

Chris Badgett You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show 

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name’s Chris, and today I’m doing a solo episode about how every LMS website needs a CRM and a bridge that connects them, and that bridge is WP Fusion. If you’re building an LMS website, every single one I’ve ever built, I would recommend to every single LifterLMS user to also install WP Fusion for seamless connection to over 60 plus CRMs.

Now, let me unpack this a little bit. There’s a lot of terminology here. So LMS stands for Learning Management System. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. But a CRM also includes the basics of just having an email list that you can send broadcast emails to, and doing advanced marketing automation And there’s other things you can do in CRMs as well in terms of having sales pipelines and other fancy lead scoring and contact records and all of this.

But at the fundamental level, the most important thing is that a learning management system is where students or learners take action and they do things. The CRM is where the business decides what to say and how to automate parts of their business process. The sad truth is that many learning management system owners don’t even connect the CRM or marketing automation to the LMS.

So what ends up happening is they have two separate systems that aren’t even talking to each other. They may do something where they’re doing some marketing and a lead comes in through a form from the CRM, and then they promote the course, and then somebody goes to the LMS website and buys the course.

But these two systems aren’t linked together. That’s where WP Fusion comes in. And WP Fusion doesn’t just work with learning management systems, it works with WordPress in general, it works with contact form plugins in WordPress, it works in WooCommerce and many other systems in WordPress. So if I could only install five plugins on a website a learning website LifterLMS would of course be in there, but so would WP Fusion to connect To make the connection and the automations, which we’re gonna talk about in a little bit, totally possible. And by the way, I personally am a very heavy user of WP Fusion myself, both for e-commerce and learning management system work, so we’re gonna dive into all of that. But essentially, the most important thing about WP Fusion and connecting your LMS to your CRM is that you can personalize and segment and do behavior-based actions and create automations.

I was looking into some 2024 data, and currently almost 35,000 sites rely on WP Fusion to connect their WordPress sites to their CRM. And WP Fusion also supports 60-plus CRMs. So some of the most popular ones are ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Salesforce Zoho. There’s Kit and MailChimp as an example as well.

So there’s all kinds of… And many more. So there’s literally… If there’s a quality CRM out there WP Fusion integrates with it. So first I wanna talk about LifterLMS and WP Fusion So first of all the, team at WP Fusion is amazing. There’s Jack, the founder, and Steve, and many others, and they just do amazing work.

So first, I just wanna give props to some great people. And me personally, I like to do business with people that I know and trust, and the folks at WP Fusion, 100%, I like them, and also I very much trust them, and they’re also super smart. So just to give you a little story LifterLMS natively in our add-on bundles has a ConvertKit, now called Kit, and a MailChimp integration add-on where, which are plugins that you add that do some of the things that WP Fusion does for just MailChimp and Kit.

And it was back in around 2016 or so where we were getting ready to add another add-on for ActiveCampaign, which is actually the CRM marketing automation platform that I still use today. And I actually did a crowdfunding campaign to raise $10,000 to fund the development of an ActiveCampaign integration, and we raised a bunch of money.

We didn’t quite meet our goal in the way that Kickstarter works is, and the way we did the crowdfunding is if we don’t hit our goal, we don’t get the money. So we almost got there, but we didn’t get the money. But still we’re weighing on this decision, should we focus on building a bunch of add-on plugins for Lifter because every LMS website needs a CRM.

We knew that 12 years ago, and it’s still true. But what that does is that distracts us from developing the core learning management system and focusing on all these CRM connectors. And that’s when we met Jack from WP Fusion, and Jack literally built the ActiveCampaign integration with Lifter, but n- not, through just ActiveCampaign, but adding LifterLMS to his, at the time, new w- newer WP Fusion platform.

And then it w- it could automatically connect to ActiveCampaign, which was what we were trying to do along with many other platforms. So it was in that moment when we decided, hey, we’re not gonna chase all the 60-plus CRMs that people are using. For example, some larger, more enterprise corporate clients will use a fancy CRM called Salesforce.

You may have heard of it. It’s very enterprise. It’s expensive. It’s, but it’s like the standard CRM for big companies. And then there are certain people that use other platforms like Zoho or ActiveCampaign or many, others. There’s Keap. Lately, there’s a platform called GoHighLevel that’s gaining in popularity.

And instead of us having to chase all of those integrations, WPFusion just made it possible, so then we could focus on just developing Lifter. So anyways, that’s it for story time. What you can do with LifterLMS and WPFusion is pretty remarkable. So the most basic way to think about it is when a student enrolls in a course or membership powered by LifterLMS they jump in and then they start, for example, in a course start on lesson one.

But what WPFusion does in the, background is a student enrolls in the course, it takes that student, remember WPFusion is the bridge to the CRM, it goes to the CRM, and in the CRM it creates what’s known as a contact record. So what that means is the person’s name and email address is added as a contact.

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But not only that, the CRM knows which course or membership on the Lifter site that person came in from. Certain tags can be applied that allow for segmentation in the CRM or the marketing automation. But the most simple way to think about this and the core value is similar to how you really shouldn’t host your own website videos in WordPress we use and recommend platforms like Vimeo Pro for hosting the video.

When it comes to broadcast email and doing really fancy marketing automation that’s often better done by a separate CRM system. So WP Fusion is the bridge. Now, there’s a nuance to that, which I’m gonna talk about, which there has been a lot of innovation in the space, and WordPress-hosted CRMs, like FluentCRM, that live in your WordPress site are really powerful and cool too.

By the way, WP Fusion helps you integrate with that, with FluentCRM as well. And the other really neat thing is some people are more LMS-focused, and some people are more CRM, marketing, automation, business-focused. It’s actually a two-way sync. So what that means is you can do it in WP Fusion, where if somebody in the CRM, let’s say ActiveCampaign, gets a certain tag, that can then…

It can go the other way. It can create the user on the WordPress site and enroll the user in a specific course based on the tag that was applied in the CRM, which is super powerful. And these kind of tagging situations can happen when a course is begun, when it’s completed, when a lesson is completed, a quiz is attempted or passed, a membership is joined or canceled.

A specific access plan in LifterLMS is purchased can fire a specific flow in WP Fusion. It also ties into LifterLMS tracks, vouchers, and groups. So there’s really so much you can do, and you can get really advanced. But what I’m saying, if you’re kinda new to this concept, the first thing you need to do is go get WP Fusion, put it on your site, connect it to your CRM, and then your WordPress and LifterLMS install, and then do the contact syncing and the segmentation by just applying tags based on what the what the user enrolled in, whether that’s a specific course or membership or a specific access plan and if you’re new to setting up a CRM, I’m just gonna give you a couple of tips that I’ve learned over the years.

I like to have minimal numbers of email lists. I actually recommend three at most, and then everything else you can do with tags and something called custom fields, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, which WP Fusion also helps you with. But the way to th- think about lists and tags differently is that you may have…

I like to build three email lists. The first email list is the prospects list. The second one is the free user list, and the third list is the customer list. So you really only need three email lists. You don’t need a separate email list for every course. For example, if you had 500 courses on your website, you don’t need 500 email lists.

What you need is three email lists and one tag per course so that you, if you wanted to just send an email to people in a certain course, you just send it to all the customers that have that course’s tag. It’s a little nuanced if you’re new to it, but the difference between tags and custom fields is a, user can have multiple tags, or a contact record in a CRM can have multiple tags.

But a user, when there’s fields, can only have one option in the field. So an example of that would be like a level. Like you could have a bronze, silver, gold version of the membership, and you can only be at one at a time, and those are custom fields and not tags, as an example. That’s a whole rabbit hole to go down to learn the difference between tags and custom fields, but I’m just going over that with you to discuss the nuance of tags, lists, and custom fields.

And remember, WP Fusion allows you to create all this automation. LifterLMS, as an example, has… Over the past decade, we’ve had around 120,000 people join our email list. WP Fusion has been involved with every one of those interactions, as an example. The other thing to think about with using LifterLMS with WP Fusion, if you go to the LifterLMS Academy site and you enroll in the LifterLMS quick start course- That is a free course.

So when somebody enrolls in that course, they basically end up on our free user list if they’re not already on a customer list, and then they get tagged as having come in through that course. And then what we can do is we can build marketing automations, which is a series of nurture emails that don’t go out all at once, but are spaced out to nurture that student enrolling in the free course.

So if you’re looking for something to do, a project to do with WP Fusion and LifterLMS, this is my number one tip for you, which is to create what I call a free course lead magnet. So for us, the LifterLMS Quick Start course is that. It’s had about 50,000 people enroll in it over the past 10 years.

We’ve rebuilt the course several times to keep it current, and all of those people enrolling are getting passed to our CRM for nurture through email automation via WP Fusion. So that’s how to think about LifterLMS connecting to a CRM through WP Fusion. The other big elephant in the room is e-commerce.

So in WordPress, the largest e-commerce platform is WooCommerce. Now, LifterLMS integrates with WooCommerce. So if you’ve been listening to this and you’re thinking, “Hey, that all sounds great, but I don’t use LifterLMS’s payment system, I use WooCommerce integrated with Lifter,” which we have a Lifter add-on for that hey, it still works.

You can get the best of both worlds. You can use WPFusion to work with LifterLMS components like course enrollments or course completed, but you can also integrate it with WooCommerce as well for the e-commerce stuff. Tags can be applied and removed, and people can be unsubscribed and subscribed based on refund status or new orders and so on.

There’s so much that you can do. So LifterLMS itself when we first started, we actually used Infusionsoft for our marketing automation CRM. And about 10 years ago, we switched to a company called ActiveCampaign, which is where we still are today. That’s our CRM. And the LifterLMS software is actually s- sold through a WooCommerce store.

So we use WPFusion with WooCommerce. Anytime anybody buys anything from LifterLMS it’s creating, it’s adding context to our ActiveCampaign through WPFusion. It’s triggering automation nurture sequences based on what somebody is buying. It’s checking to make sure somebody doesn’t already exist, so we don’t send too many emails and all of that stuff.

So we’re- we deeply use WPFusion with WooCommerce as well. And once you get super big, like you get a lot of traffic, you have lots of orders every day and everything, a lot of the management of all that is fully automated using WooCommerce, WordPress, and WPFusion. Another cool thing you can do with WPFusion and WooCommerce is cart abandonment.

Now, LifterLMS has a cart abandonment recovery system that does what it does But you can also do another cart abandonment campaign using WP Fusion as well. And then the cool thing is WP Fusion also has even more advanced e-commerce integrations where, for example, with ActiveCampaign, it can push ActiveCampaign data or WooCommerce- advanced WooCommerce data to ActiveCampaign and vice versa.

Things like lifetime value, deal stage and whatnot to the CRM. So it’s the same thing like with LifterLMS, with WooCommerce. You can– WordPress, things can happen in– with WooCommerce checkout, and tags get applied over in the CRM, but it can also talk back the other way and create things to happen in the WooCommerce store based on what’s happening in the CRM.

This episode of LMScast is brought to you by WP Fusion, the powerful WordPress software that connects your website to your CRM and marketing automation platform, whether that’s HubSpot, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, GoHighLevel, and many, many more. If you’re selling online courses, memberships, coaching, digital products, and more, WP Fusion turns your WordPress website into a smarter, more personalized, and more automated online business.

With deep integration into LifterLMS, WooCommerce, the popular form plugins, and many more top WordPress tools, WP Fusion lets you automatically create and tag contacts, unlock course and membership access, track student progress, recover abandoned carts, and trigger powerful automations based on what your users are actually doing on your LMS website.

We use WP Fusion ourselves on our LifterLMS website, which is powered by WooCommerce for selling software subscriptions. But we also use WP Fusion on the LifterLMS Academy, where we are selling access to courses and memberships powered, of course, by LifterLMS. WP Fusion connects our websites and CRM seamlessly together so that we can create a better customer journey, deliver the right offers, and automate follow-up based on user behavior.

If you wanna sell more, personalize the learning experience, and build a more connected, automated online business, check out WP Fusion today. Go to wpfusion.com and use the coupon code LifterLMS to save 15%. Now back to the show. 

Speaker: So it’s super powerful The next one is probably even easier to understand and more basic than LifterLMS or the WooCommerce integration with WP Fusion, and that’s using WP Fusion with form plugins. So these are form plugins like Gravity Forms, WPForms, Formidable, Ninja Forms, Fluent Forms, and so on. So the simple way to think about that is when you get somebody to sign up for your email list on your WordPress website, they need to come in through a form.

Now these CRM platforms like ActiveCampaign, GoHighLevel, HubSpot, and so on, they do have form builders where you can kinda create a form on the CRM and you take this embed code and you stick it on your site. But often they don’t look very good. They look like a different design ’cause they came from somewhere else.

They’re not aware of the site you’re putting them on. You can do that, but what most people do is they will use a WordPress form plugin and then basically get the, sign-up, the name and email address through the form plugin, like Gravity Forms, and then via WP Fusion, pass that, that data and create that contact and deliver the lead magnet, or deliver the newsletter, or sign them up for whatever list in whatever CRM they’re using, passed over by WP Fusion.

So we do this all the time at LifterLMS. So on our site, we have a lot of Gravity Forms, and whenever somebody completes a certain form, it could be something like a automated webinar, that Gravity Form will capture the name and email, and then it’ll pass that data to the in our case, ActiveCampaign to deliver whatever needs to happen behind the scenes by email or just segment the contact with certain tags or custom fields and so on.

So this is the power of automation. If you’re new to using form plugins, this is the first thing I would do with WP Fusion, is to create a newsletter sign-up form, make it easy to f- to find on your site. And once you learn the basics of that, you’ll be ready for more advanced marketing automation that you can do.

But the, form, like a newsletter sign-up or a lead magnet form, like to get a e-book or a PDF or a worksheet or something like that, is a great place to learn the basics of using WordPress, WP Fusion, a form plugin, and whatever of the 60 CRMs you are using. And just a pro tip for you out there if you’re beginning- there’s some great CRMs that come with a free plan.

So for example, MailChimp has a free plan and many others have a entry-level thing. WPFusion also has a lite version that you can get for free, which you’ll need the pro version to do stuff with LifterLMS. But if you wanna just kick the tires and learn the basics of syncing users on a WordPress site to your CRM you could check out WPFusion Lite.

So- In terms of the CRM landscape, C-CRM is one of the most cluttered, crowded markets there is. There’s so many CRMs out there, it can be mind-blowing. So if you’re trying to choose, I’m gonna tell you what’s the most popular today from what I’m seeing. So the, biggest ones right now are FluentCRM, which is a different one.

That one is hosted inside WordPress itself. And there’s still a lot of great reasons why to use WP Fusion to keep them connected, even though they can exist on the same site, or maybe you have the FluentCRM on a different site, and there’s all kinds of reasons to still use WP Fusion. ActiveCampaign is still popular.

It is in decline. I’m an ActiveCampaign user, have been a long time. Their pricing is getting a little out of control, but it is still popular and it does what it does well. HighLevel is growing fast. It’s more kinda popular among the marketing crowd, the scrappy entrepreneur crowd.

HubSpot is kinda mid-market very popular as well. Infusionsoft, later rebranded as Keap with a slightly different offering, has been in com- decline for a while, but there’s, many more. There’s, Drip, there’s Zoho CRM, there’s Brevo, Mailchimp, Kit, Klaviyo, Ontraport, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Customer.io.

There’s Groundhogg, another WordPress native CRM, Mautic, AWeber, Bento, and many more. The most important thing you need to think about when choosing your CRM is to pick one that you can live with for five-plus years. Like I said, I’ve been with ActiveCampaign for almost 10 years, I think, and it would be very hard for me to move because I have so many automations and so many things built in there.

So it’s choose wisely ’cause you’re probably gonna be there for a while, and it’s kinda painful to move later. However, WP Fusion actually makes it easy if you do wanna switch CRMs and stuff. It’s not as challenging or as hard as you might think. And particularly today, with the help of artificial intelligence and the AI tools, these kind of migrations have gotten much, much easier the next thing I wanna talk about is what are the real automation unlocks that you can get when you add WP Fusion to connect your learning management system website to your CRM or email marketing, automation platform?

The first thing is you can do personalized learning paths. So based on all the things that happen in an LMS that can trigger a tag or sends, send a behavioral note to your CRM you can customize. So if somebody fails a quiz as an example, and you want a coach to be notified via your CRM to engage with the student and recover them before they get lost, that’s an example of a personalized learning path.

The other big automation thing is really just for sales. So- There’s this saying that your– somebody has to touch your marketing like seven times before they buy from you. So they visit your website, and then maybe they come back later and they join your newsletter, and now WP Fusion captures that lead and sends it over to your CRM, and then they forget about you.

But because you’ve p- used WP Fusion and passed that lead to your CRM, let’s say a five-part nurture sequence that fires every three days or so sends an email just adding value about the niche that your LMS website problem solves. And in the last one, there’s a message to come back and try a free course.

Now they come back, they sign up for the free course. WP Fusion passes that detail over, which now adds them to the free course nurture sequence and so on. And then it just– it keeps rolling until they become a customer. And it’s not about… The beauty of this kind of work is it’s not one size fits all marketing, sales, or learner experience design.

We’re actually creating a lot of personalization. So if they’re– It’s meeting them exactly where they are. It’s sending emails when it makes sense to send them because they just got this tag, because they just completed X action, and so on. And when they become a customer, it’s smart. It knows it’s not gonna send them marketing-related emails anymore.

It’s gonna switch to sending customer success-related emails. And now it’s possible for the site owner to send segmented emails to just the students in that one course via a broadcast email. We know that WordPress can, and LifterLMS as an example, can send these one-off emails for different things.

But when you’re doing these big broadcast emails whether it’s twenty people or two hundred thousand, this is where the CRM and the email broadcasting tool, that’s what it does really well you can also do win-back sequences. So for example, if a customer hasn’t completed something or, cancels and you wanna do a re-engagement campaign to see if there’s anything you can do to help them or save them or point out resources that they missed, the marketing automation and tagging that you can do with WPFusion to your CRM allows you to build those win-back sequences.

So basically, your students will feel seen, and as a business owner or web professional your business is running much more efficiently, so both the business and the student win bigger. And this whole thing with WPFusion and LifterLMS or WooCommerce and the four plugins, it really illustrates what makes WordPress and LifterLMS far superior to a platform like Kajabi or Podia or Thinkific that does– has one way of doing things, and maybe you can send us some emails, but they’re just not customizable in the way that you can customize with WordPress a CR- your own CRM in a tool like WPFusion that is a two-way sync that keeps them talking.

And these are things that just aren’t possible at all to customize and innovate on with platforms like Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, or School. They may have some email capabilities, but it’s gonna be very limited compared to the kind of marketing automation, segmentation, and just communication that you can do with WordPress, a CR- a good CRM, and LifterLMS.

In terms of our stack at LifterLMS, we do– we use WooCommerce, we do LifterLMS, we do Gravity Forms, and we do ActiveCampaign, and WPFusion is the bridge between those. But you can swap any of those out. So for example, WPFusion also works with LearnDash. It also works with other WordPress e-commerce solutions besides WooCommerce, like Easy Digital Downloads.

It works with many other Gravity f- form plugins besides Gravity Forms. And like I said, there are 60 CRMs. I’m on ActiveCampaign a- actively looking for something else, but I– Just check out the WPFusion website. I bet the CRM you’re using or thinking about using is already on there the other cool thing with WP Fusion from a pricing perspective is it doesn’t scale with your size of your email list.

So you could have a 200 people in your LMS, or you could have two million. WP Fusion is not gonna cost you any more. And the same is true for LifterLMS as well. Now, the CRM platforms will charge you, which is one of the reasons why FluentCRM is becoming so popular is ’cause now you have a WordPress solution that’s not charging you based on the size of your email list or, and all of that, the number of active contacts that you have.

So go check it out. That’s at wpfusion.com/pricing. I believe they do have a lifetime option available as well. Yeah, WP Fusion is one of the top five plugins I would install on any site. The first thing I usually do is okay, I’m putting LifterLMS in there. I’m putting the LifterLMS Stripe payment gateway in there.

I’m putting WP Fusion in there. I’m putting the Switch User plugin in there, and I’m putting the Sky Pilot theme on there. And just with those five things, you’re basically unstoppable, and you have a system that is so powerful and actually quite affordable as well. So go get your license of WP Fusion and connect it to your LifterLMS.

If you’re using WooCommerce, connect it. Connect it to your form plugins. Also keep in mind, WP Fusion has some of the best written documentation I’ve ever seen, so if you’re ever trying to figure out how to do something and sync your contacts or, connect something in a certain way, their documentation is just phenomenal.

So go check out WP Fusion. I highly recommend it. And if you just wanna kick the tires, you could try the, lite version and start playing around with it. But if you’re- have a serious LMS business or a serious WooCommerce or e-commerce store business, I would encourage you to jump right in with the Pro version.

So that’s it for this episode of LMScast. Thank you for checking it out, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Jonathan Denwood talks about how WP-Tonic makes it easier for instructors, coaches, owners of membership sites, and educational institutions to create robust WordPress-based learning management systems without having to deal with complex technical settings.

He clarifies that WP-Tonic is a comprehensive solution that includes managed hosting, premium plugins, CRM tools, email marketing systems, templates, support, and website development services. Jonathan emphasizes that their hosting packages include with useful technologies like LifterLMS, FluentCRM, WP Fusion, and other automation and performance tools, which help customers save money and avoid the hassle of handling numerous subscriptions and integrations on their own.

Jonathan and Chris Badgett stress the value of quickness, clarity, and professional understanding while developing online learning companies throughout the discussion. According to Jonathan, many developers find it difficult to select themes, plugins, hosting, CRMs, and automation tools on their own. WP-Tonic makes this process easier by offering a carefully chosen and fully maintained technological stack designed especially for LMS and membership websites. Additionally, they talk about how WP-Tonic helps companies switch from systems like Kajabi to WordPress, offering consumers more long-term flexibility, scalability, ownership, and customisation.

Heal Your Heart, a multilingual international coaching platform with thousands of facilitators, and Psychiatry Education Forum, a professional medical training platform, are two real-world examples that Jonathan uses to illustrate how WP-Tonic assists businesses in creating scalable, high-performing educational websites while offering continuous support, upkeep, and strategic direction.

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Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Jonathan Denwood from WP-Tonic. That’s wp-tonic.com. Jonathan runs a hosting company and a services company. It’s all under WP-Tonic. He has a e-learning focus, has done a lot of great work with LifterLMS.

But first, welcome back on the show, Jonathan. 

Jonathan Denwood: Oh, it’s a pleasure to be back on the show, Chris. It’s always great having these discussions with you. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And hosting in the WordPress space is a little interesting. There’s huge players like a GoDaddy, for example, and then there’s n- micro niche players like WP-Tonic- Yeah

which provides hosting, but is really focused on courses, coaches, training-based membership sites, LMS sites. And you do something particularly cool where you bundle in, It’s not just hosting. You’re not just getting a rack of server, taking a monthly fee for that, and then crossing your fingers and hope the client figures it out.

You take a totally different approach. You also include software, which is awesome, and one of the unique advantages of WordPress and the general public license and strategic partnerships that you do and all this stuff. But let’s start there. Describe what WP-Tonic offers for hosting and how it’s different, and what does the plus mean.

Plus what? Hosting Plus. 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. It’s a all- it’s a all-in-one service really. It’s a hybrid. Hosting’s really important. We p- we provide hosting, but hosting plus, which includes a suite of the some of the best plugins if you’re looking to build a coaching learning management system membership website in e-learning, or you’re looking to build a community educational website, which a lot of people are looking to do.

We provide all the best plugins that WordPress can offer, so you don’t… And we, provide- We find out what you’re looking to do, and then we install what we feel is the most suitable from our library, and they’re all fully licensed. And then we can build websites out for the client as well if they haven’t got the time but they still want to use WordPress for all the benefits it provides, but they just don’t wanna do it themselves, we can do that, or they can build it out themselves.

We provide some templates, some starter websites based on Kadence that are quite good to start out with. So we offer a load of options if you wanna do it yourself or you want us to build it out. And then our hosting, we specialize in coaching, in membership, in learning management systems, so we can advise.

We do offer support from our lowest plan. We offer more time on our larger plans. And then we’ve got separate support plans for those that want more time or don’t even have to host with us. So- It’s comprehensive 

Chris Badgett: I love it. And when you look super closely at what’s included in the plans, it’s a ton of value.

Jonathan Denwood: It is. 

Chris Badgett: And you pass most of that value on to your customer. So for example, I’m just looking at some of your plans. You can find these at wp-tonic.com/price, prices. It includes the LifterLMS Infinity bundle, which is huge. Even just that alone is right around the monthly cost, but you get so much more.

You get the hosting, and there’s so many things on here. I’m not gonna name them all, but you have you can add FluentCRM as an example. You can do WP Fusion. You can do a booking system like FluentBooking. You can do Document Library Pro and, which is awesome for membership sites and e-learning for having a r- a well-organized resource library.

You have performance stuff, caching stuff, CDN stuff and I’m just naming 10% of what’s in these plans. And it’s super cool. This is the, really the beauty of open source, and I’ve always wanted to see more people build these kinds of websites as a service and kind of get outside the mindset of, oh- Yeah

we’re a technology company. We offer hosting. No you actually have a full service solution for the e-learning entrepreneur or skill- or school or organization that doesn’t have to get in the weeds of all the tech. You’ve already curated and assembled the stuff, and you’ll also help set it up. You can do everything from basic templates to full service.

So you can meet the client where they are, and it’s an incredible value for the monthly for the monthly investment. 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, if you pay yearly on our microsite plan, which covers most people starting out, and it will cover them quite a while, it, and they pay yearly, it’s $35 a month which is amazing value, or you can pay month to month, and it’s $55, and you get all that value.

But I think the other factor is the support, we have knowledgeable people. I do the support tickets. Kirk helps. Got a couple other people help. And we- It’s a ticketing system but we respond p- normally in less than an hour. And your problem will, we will be able to help you when we know about WordPress and we know about these platforms, where you’re not gonna get that from GoDaddy or something else.

And the truth is, a learning management system that starts to get some traction you do need good hosting. And the other factor I wanna point out is that we provide all the email functionality as part. We don’t provide inboxes, but everything else, transactional and marketing email, we provide that through FluentCRM and our partner SendGrid, and that’s part of our package.

So you’d be able to send loads of email, newsletters, email, transactional email and you won’t have to buy another service to do that. That’s part of the hosting package. 

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing. And for you out there listening or watching, I just wanna do a quick educational marketing positioning thing here.

I always… There’s three things that we’re s- whenever you have any business, you’re selling only three things, and there’s actually a fourth, which I’ll tell you about. And one of these is primary, and I’m trying to figure out which one it is for WP Tonic, which I’ll touch on in a second. But people buy, and companies buy, and schools and organizations buy three things: speed, certainty, or insight.

One of those is primary. And the fourth thing, which is funny, is staying out of jail. So when you hire your tax accountant, you are basically hiring them to stay out of jail. When I buy a plane ticket to cross the country instead of using a car, I’m paying for speed, as an example.

So anyways, just to tie this into WP Tonic, we’ll leave staying out of jail off the table, but I think you’re actually hitting all three, speed, certainty, and insight really well, and let me explain that. The first one is speed, which I think might be your primary. And the reason I can say that is because I know when I talk to LifterLMS prospects, people who are- haven’t bought yet, are exploring the options, they’re absolutely exhausted, ’cause there’s 500 LMSes out there.

There’s several in WordPress. There’s all this research. And by the way, even once you get your LMS, you start missing other things like transactional email CRM. You are saving people so much time by just including it all together that’s just a beautiful thing. ‘Cause just doing one of these things, like figuring out which theme should I use or how to set up Kadence or whatever you’re saving so much time.

So that’s speed Certainty. You’ve been doing WP-Tonic podcasts since before LMS Cast started. And you’ve been in, you’ve been in this membership site, WordPress, LMS, and all the surrounding utilities and other needs as well. So when somebody purchases a plan from WP-Tonic, you’re also paying for certainty that you’re getting the best tools that have been thoroughly vetted, researched, and correctly implemented.

So that’s certainty. And then the insight piece, you mentioned the support, and even just talking to you now about your system, whenever somebody partners with WP-Tonic or becomes a customer or client, they, they get to learn. They get to learn tips and tricks from the industry. They get to learn how to think about things like marketing automation and SEO and website performance.

They’re getting insights just by being a customer from working with you. So anyways, I just wanted to take my hat off and congratulate you on nailing all three, which is speed, certainty, and insight. 

Jonathan Denwood: Thanks. 

Chris Badgett: What do you think is your primary in working with your people? If you had to pick one, is it more the speed from idea to website?

Is it more the certainty of having the best tech stack while saving a ton of time? Or is it more the insight of we’re gonna be your trusted advisor and partner, your secret weapon to your L- LMS business? 

Jonathan Denwood: I think it’s difficult because one of, one of the great things about WordPress is you get all sorts of clientele.

But I suppose you could say that in all software offerings. You get people that really are not DIYers, but they like WordPress. They’ve used it before, and they like the flexibility. Then you get the DIY type, and then you get the people that are, that DI- that can do it, or from the two groups that I’ve just mentioned, but they just want it built out for them, and then they want a, player that…

Basically what WP Tony is a reverse, host, a reverse agency. There’s a lot of agencies that do hosting. We emphasize hosting and support, but we also are agency as well. But we also work with other agencies, and that’s quite common as well, isn’t it? There- there’s loads of agencies that specialize in one thing, and they do work for other agencies as well.

So we do a bit of that as well. WordPress, but we specialize in the hosting and the, and that. Because I think we’re really offering something unique which you don’t see that often now in the marketplace. That seems to be a big statement, but I think you would agree with it, wouldn’t you?

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show.

Chris Badgett: I would. It’s clearly one of the situations, and this is something I’m always harping on, which is the best companies put their customer at the center of the business, not their product. And when I look at what WP Tonic offers, clearly you’ve put the customer at the center, and then surrounded them with what they need, which is the hosting, the services, the vetted licensed plugin packages and all that.

And it’s not like a fractured solution, it’s the full solution. Like even LifterLMS, we say it’s all-in-one, and it truly is, it does a lot of things, but you still need to go out and get web hosting, you still need to figure out what to do with your CRM and that kind of thing. And 

Jonathan Denwood: you- Yeah. I just want to, I just want to interrupt.

It just occurred to me what we’re doing is we’re trying to get you at the place where you would be if you bought a kind of SaaS competitor to LifterLMS. We’re trying to get you… That you’ve still got to configure everything, and you’ve got to get the course in i- if you don’t want to hire us to do it, all that for you, which we can do.

But we’re getting you… And it’s the same with, there’s loads of consultants in the SaaS world the leading competitors in there that will set it all up and put your course content in. There’s a whole industry around some of these SaaS products. But we’re, getting you to that level where all the main plugins, if you’ve got some that you want installed we’ll install them for you, but we’ve got an extensive library, and then we configure everything, and then it’s there for you at a much higher level, configured for you just to concentrate in getting your courses and getting your course live.

So we’re removing a lot of the time delay That’s what we’re doing 

Chris Badgett: That’s the speed aspect. 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And my hat’s off to you because I think I- if I’m doing the math right, I’ve been in WordPress for about 18 years, and I think you’re the same, maybe 19, maybe more. Yeah. But so we take it for granted as power users of WordPress, like we got the lay of the land, we know how things fit together, and we keep up with news and all that.

But for the average busy membership site owner or company that needs to spin up some kind of training or entrepreneur that wants to get into courses, coaching, online community, and these kinds of projects, they don’t have all that 20 years of experience in the industry. They need a tech solution, but they don’t wanna get…

They don’t necessarily have the time or the desire to get involved in all the minutiae of the details of setting something like that up. But WP Tonic is the answer to that, and I think it’s important to recognize that and commend you for what you’ve done as you’ve… People, when they buy software, it’s, they don’t just wanna buy software, they want a solution.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Y- you have the full solution. It’s not just like a piece, it’s like the whole thing. So good job on that one. Can you tell us a story of Heal Your Heart as a recent customer? 

Jonathan Denwood: They’ve not been, they’ve been with us for over, oh, five or six years. Okay. They they’ve been a great client.

They are in the spiritual educational coaching space. 

They they license the intellectual property from a founder that died a while ago, but is very well thought of and has a number of books out there still in pu- being published. And they provide education courses ar- around the books and thoughts of the the founder.

And they have over, over 4,000 coaches. Each coach has a place on the website, and they run live courses in the area, i- in their location, and it’s a global website. What I mean is it’s running LifterLMS, it’s running a number of plugins. It- It offers, it’s quite a large website, and it also does internal courses as well.

And it offers all these in multiple languages. 

Chris Badgett: Wow. 

Jonathan Denwood: So we’re running a, la- trans- TranslatePress on it, and it’s running about seven languages, and it’s running WooCommerce. It’s running a lot of software, so it’s on quite a large server. And we’ve got it on one of the fastest bare metal servers that we offer, and we maintain everything for them.

And being up and keeping the website running is really important to this operation, Chris.

Chris Badgett: This episode of LMScast is brought to you by WP Fusion, the powerful WordPress software that connects your website to your CRM and marketing automation platform, whether that’s HubSpot, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, GoHighLevel, and many, many more. If you’re selling online courses, memberships, coaching, digital products, and more, WP Fusion turns your WordPress website into a smarter, more personalized, and more automated online business.

With deep integration into LifterLMS, WooCommerce, the popular form plugins, and many more top WordPress tools, WP Fusion lets you automatically create and tag contacts, unlock course and membership access, track student progress, recover abandoned carts, and trigger powerful automations based on what your users are actually doing on your LMS website.

We use WP Fusion ourselves on our LifterLMS website, which is powered by WooCommerce for selling software subscriptions. But we also use WP Fusion on the LifterLMS Academy, where we are selling access to courses and memberships powered, of course, by LifterLMS. WP Fusion connects our websites and CRM seamlessly together so that we can create a better customer journey, deliver the right offers, and automate follow-up based on user behavior.

If you wanna sell more, personalize the learning experience, and build a more connected, automated online business, check out WP Fusion today. Go to wpfusion.com and use the coupon code LifterLMS to save 15%. Now back to the show.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Congratulations on that. And even you just describing that of courses and coaches and internal training and all this stuff happening, that’s a complicated project to build, and it’s

I don’t wanna discourage somebody who’s a do-it-yourselfer from dreaming and rolling up the sleeves and is gonna learn WordPress and gonna learn all these different tools and servers and scaling or whatever, but for most clients, they just want the solution for their dream to come to life, which you provide to Heal Your Heart, which is awesome.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, they were in a bit of a mess. They had gone to another developer or developers, and they had a build out, and it hadn’t really gone very well. So they came to us, and we had to build out the whole website for them. Act- Kurt was involved in this, and we had to build it out and- They had a, so it’d been built out in WordPress, but they had a learning man- a custom learning management system done for them and it wasn’t working.

So we suggested that we use LifterLMS and adapt it, and we added a load of other functionality that wasn’t working. We replaced it and customized it slightly. Where the original build-out was really customized a lot and it just wasn’t working. So there’s a sweet, point to this. You can customize things, but I would suggest that you don’t go totally the full custom route because you might have to pay a fair bit of money, and then you might have to junk it all 

Chris Badgett: Yeah

Jonathan Denwood: If it doesn’t work out. And they were between a rock and a hard place. They’d spent a fair bit of money, and they just didn’t have a functioning website. So we came in, and we quite rapidly saved the situation, and it’s been running now for six… And they’ve grown from a couple thousand to getting close to 5,000 students and facilitators.

I think that’s what they call them, these people that run courses locally. And they’ve got a big presence in India, in the Far East all over the world, so that’s why they have these pages in multiple languages as well, Chris.

Chris Badgett: That is really incredible. Yeah I think what’s important to mention there is WP Tonic is not just for first time LMS projects.

Often you’d come in at… This is a WordPress story, but it’s also more specifically a WP Tonic story, where most pro- in my experience when I ran a agency, a lot of projects were not starting at ground zero. We’re taking a solution that somebody’s not happy with, and we’re upgrading it to a solution that’s more customizable a- and even more affordable with WordPress.

So the fact that you do the migrations from whether it’s a mess from a previous attempt either on somebody’s own or with a an agency or an app builder or whatever it was that didn’t work out, or maybe it did work out, but it’s really limiting and not customizable. We see a lot of people coming over to WordPress and LifterLMS from Kajabi, and I know that’s a sweet spot for you.

‘Cause when somebody gets some traction on Kajabi and they’ve, they get things moving, but then they start to realize how un-customizable, how locked in they are and they start seeing all the potential of having their own platform that’s more customizable. WP Tonic is a great fit for the Kajabi site owner that doesn’t, that wants the performance, customizability, and affordability of WordPress, but they don’t want to actually figure out all the tech details themselves.

They, WP Tonic can just move you over, and then be your r- your right hand and your more customizable LMS. 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. I think this is the area where AI is really helping- Yeah … because when you’re on one of the, one of these SaaS platforms like Kajabi, actually moving to WordPress or to any other platform another SaaS, is such an undertaking that most people only consider doing it even though they’re fed up with the platform they’re on if they’re gonna do a whole redesign of the website, or because there’s no way- Easy way of getting all the content and the pages out, out of Kajabi.

It has to be done manually. And if you’ve got a reasonably large website y- taking all that content and putting it somewhere else. Using AI now, it can be done a lot less painfully and at w- at a sl- slightly lower cost. But it’s just, gonna be less painful to get stuff moved.

And I think it’s the argument if you’re gonna spend a lot of money on your website, on your marketing, on your students, on your course, having the maximum control, which you do get with WordPress, I think that becomes very important, doesn’t it, Chris? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it does. When the, when a client or a customer realizes that the LMS and the hosting and the setup there is not a commodity, it’s actually an asset of the business, they s- that’s, those are the folks that are a great fit for a solution like WP-Tonic.

I’ve 

Jonathan Denwood: got another client that we’ve been helping. I’ll put it into chat. Psychiatry Education Forum. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Jonathan Denwood: They’ve been with us for a number of years as well. A great client. This is in the medical field, but it’s, they provide training in psychiatry to other psychiatrists. 

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Jonathan Denwood: And resources, books and they do a course.

And they’ve been with us for y- a number of years as well, and it’s quite a nice website. It’s using LifterLMS as well. And, Yeah, he’s he the guy that runs this, he’s a psychiatrist himself, and he runs this course, and he’s been with us a number of years as well, Chris 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I get that.

A lot of times somebody, a professional, is so busy in what they don’t have time to figure out all the tech. They need help, and that’s- 

Jonathan Denwood: Oh, funny enough, this guy, I think he is a bit of a DIY. Is he techie? Okay. But I think he does it to relax his mind. Hey, 

Chris Badgett: that’s good psych- psychology if some- someone out there is listening would like to have a chat with you you have on your website, Get in Touch, there’s a big button at the top at wp-tonic.com. They can schedule a 30-minute call. Can you tell us what happens on those 30-minute coaching consulting calls? 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. Basically if you’re looking for any advice, it’ll either be me or Kurt that will take the, your call.

We normally do it over Zoom. And basically, we just find out if you’re looking for general advice, or you’re thinking of moving hosts or providers, or you’re thinking of having a website built out, we can give you some general advice. Most people- They’ve done now, especially with the age of AI, they’ve done a much deeper dive, they- they’ve they’ve been recommended WP Tonic by AI or they’ve just gone on the web in general. People still do a kind of mixture of AI now and going to people’s websites and… But they normally check people out through AI now, and then they go to the website, if you’ve got a product or service.

Or the- or they find two to three and then they go to the website. But they are either using AI overviews, Google, or they- they’re using chat or Claude, whatever, Perplexity, whatever their poison is. Gemini. They’re using those to much more detailed questions. But a lot of people don’t even know what the questions to ask.

So they know that’s where normally the conversation starts. They have some questions. They can put them in chat, but that can lead to even a bit more confusion, because it tends to give them even more options. They- they’re trying, to find what would be the best solution for their particular…

And sometimes chat can do that, but a lot of the times it can throw out even more questions. That’s my viewpoint. I don’t know if you agree with that, Chris. So we get a lot of people that book a chat because they basically, they’re thinking of using us, but they also want to see what are the best options for their particular needs on WordPress.

So that’s why they’re booking that con- that initial free consultation with us, Chris. 

Chris Badgett: And you should do that and talk to Jonathan and/or Kurt. Again, that’s on their website, WP-Tonic. And to go back to our three-part framework, speed, certainty, and insight, this is the insight piece. Like, when you’re a good coach or advisor and a client is considering working with you, that’s a lot of they may not have the perfect questions to ask and but that’s how it starts.

You just start by having a conversation and and, get good advice. And the cool thing about WP Tonic is- It’s not For LifterLMS as an example, we’re all about LifterLMS, obviously. But WP-Tonic is more about a lot of different things. It’s about LMS, it’s about videos, it’s about hosting, it’s about performance, it’s about CRM.

And all, within all those categories, there’s lots of areas to explore and figure out. And even a client may come to you and ha- and may not have even thought about having an email list, but you know if somebody comes to you in that way, that part of the package includes some CRM and thinking about that email list stuff.

So you’re gonna help them do better and fill in their blind spots by simply having the package put together and the coaching and consulting you do on the call to help people build a well-rounded solution and be set up with the highest odds of success as possible. 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: All right. Thank you, Jonathan, for coming back on.

It is awesome, it is truly awesome what you have built. And I wanna encourage you out there listening or watching to go check out the WP-Tonic website. Schedule the 30-minute call. And also Jonathan is a prolific podcaster. Check out the WP-Tonic podcast. It was… It’s does lots of different things.

You’ve done different types of shows over the years. 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, we also do the Membership Machine show, which is spe- 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, tell us 

Jonathan Denwood: about 

Chris Badgett: that. 

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah … which is specifically do with Kurt, and we discuss WordPress marketing and anything else that will help somebody build a membership or build a community- Yeah

on WordPress in 2026. We c- we’ve been doing that for a couple years now, and it’s got a lot of information that really helps somebody starting out or thinking of moving to WordPress or just the different plug-ins. But it’s all around the subject of membership and learning management systems, basically.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Keep up the amazing work, Jonathan. Go visit wp-tonic.com. And thanks again for coming back on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you for being a great partner with LifterLMS and most importantly taking good care of the course creators and education entrepreneurs in our community who need a full solution like WP-Tonic.

Thanks for coming on the show, Jonathan. We really appreciate it. 

Jonathan Denwood: That’s all right.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett discusses how clever popups may be effective tools for increasing course sales. Also, learner success on an LMS website.

Chris illustrates why popups should assist, support, and customize the student experience rather than just interrupting users for marketing goals by using Popup Maker in conjunction with LifterLMS.

He investigates tactics including employing targeted upsells or cross-sells following course completion, providing discounts or lead magnets to reluctant customers, and recovering abandoned carts with exit-intent popups.Chris places a strong emphasis on student engagement in addition to sales, demonstrating how popups may greet new students, promote community involvement, assist students in picking up where they left off, or offer extra assistance when students seem to be having trouble with a subject.

Additionally, he talks about creating tailored learning experiences by utilizing behavioral triggers like quiz scores, time spent on sites, course progress, cart value, and membership engagement.The program also discusses gamification strategies like Easter eggs and celebration popups, free course lead magnets, and operational notifications like event reminders, time-limited deals, or geotargeted pricing depending on purchasing power. Chris stresses throughout the conversation that the best popups are purposefully created to enhance user experience, offer value, and assist students in successfully completing their learning journey rather than seeming invasive or bothersome.

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Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name’s Chris, and in this solo episode, we’re gonna be doing a deep dive on how to use pop-ups on your learning management system website for your courses, your coaching program, your membership site. However you’re doing online education, we’re gonna show you how to use pop-ups not just to make more money, but to also improve your student experience and improve your learner results.

So almost everyone hates pop-ups, but that is only because you’re being confronted with pop-ups that weren’t designed well, that weren’t designed to add value. We’re gonna go into how to build pop-ups the smart way. But even though pop-ups in general are disliked, it’s really interesting that eight- almost eight hundred thousand WordPress websites all use the same pop-up tool, which is Popup Maker.

That’s at wppopupmaker.com. Go check it out. They are actually a sponsor of this show. But hey, I use pop-ups powered by Popup Maker all over my websites, whether that’s for e-commerce, learning management system. I’m gonna give away all the best tricks, but go to the LMScast website. In the show notes, you’ll see a link to go get WP Popup Maker.

That’s at wppopupmaker.com. This is Code Atlantic’s pop-up tool. It’s awesome, and there’s some really interesting stats around it. Those pop-ups powered by Popup Maker have been triggered over thirty-two billion times around the world, which is crazy. It’s a hundred and forty-eight pop-ups every second.

It’s kinda mind-blowing. But again, I’m gonna show you how to do pop-ups and how to think about pop-ups in a more intelligent way in this episode, and we’re gonna dive deep. But be sure, again, to go to the LMScast website, find this episode, and look for the link to go get Popup Maker at a fifteen percent discount.

That’s something the creators of Popup Maker had made, has made possible for you. And just to drive the point home I’ve used Popup Maker to, drive over half of our a hundred and fifteen thousand email subscribers at LifterLMS, and that’s just collecting a lead. I do all kinds of other pop-ups with Popup Maker.

To recover carts, do exit intent to do remarketing, to guide users where to go after they make a purchase, or how to get the most value out of a course, and so on. We’re gonna dive into that today and tour the six categories of how to use pop-ups. Now, you can use pop-ups to make more money, but the whole point of this episode is we’re gonna show you everything else you’re gonna do.

So I’m gonna go over six ways to use pop-ups. I am gonna start with pop-ups that make you more money, but stay tuned for the full episode, ’cause we’re gonna dive deep into other kinds of pop-ups, not just ones that make you that, that make you more money. So w- we’re gonna get into the technical details of how pop-ups work at the end of this episode, so if you hear any lingo that I’m gonna discuss here I’m gonna do a deeper dive at the end to talk about the technical implementations and things like targeting and triggers and actions and all these things that Popups Maker does so well.

But to start with making more money with pop-ups, the baseline problem is that cart abandonment is actually a huge issue in e-commerce in general. So there was one study that showed that 70% of carts, meaning somebody adds a product to the cart and is getting ready to check out, 70% of people do that and then leave.

Now, some of those people were never gonna buy anyways. But that, there are some that maybe they got confused, maybe they got stuck, maybe they have a question, maybe they would buy if they had a little discount, and so on. So this is where cart abandonment comes in. So cart abandonment is really cool.

Now, by the way, LifterLMS has a cart abandonment add-on that’s awesome that can send automated emails that are already designed. You basically just install the add-on, it’s included in the Infinity Bundle, turn it on, and it’s gonna start working for you immediately and recovering lost carts by sending three follow-up emails that are spaced out, pre-written, and the third one even has a coupon discount that’s automatically set up that inspire- expires in three days, and so on.

There’s more info about LifterLMS’s cart abandonment recovery system add-on that you will, you can find on the LifterLMS website. But using Popups Maker, I would do both. I would use the LifterLMS cart abandonment recovery system. But on top of that, I would use the exit intent pop-up. So for the LifterLMS cart abandonment system to work, a user has to type in their email before they abandon.

That’s how we can follow up with them. But sometimes they don’t even get that far, and they start they don’t type anything in and they abandon. We can still capture them using exit intent technology. So what is exit intent technology? So basically, when somebody’s on your website, and we’re talking about the checkout cart abandonment, but you could literally do this in any part of your website.

When somebody moves the mouse up to the top left to close the window or close the tab or navigate away that’s called exit intent, and Popup Maker can detect that, and that’s a trigger where you can present a popup. So if you’re doing cart abandonment, exit intent-based popups, a couple of the classic things you can do is, one, just offer a discount.

So that’s something you can do. Oh, maybe they’re leaving ’cause they’re trying to find a better deal or go find a coupon code. Just go ahead and hook ’em up with a coupon code on exit. Another thing you can do on a exit intent on a cart is present a lower price product or even a free product that they’re gonna need to warm up later and they’ll decide to buy later.

The other thing you could do is just give ’em some kind of lead magnet. They’re not ready to buy right now, so I’m just gonna nurture ’em with some free value through another resource. The the other place you can look at for making money with popups and Popup Maker is targeted upsells.

So for example when somebody completes a lesson in LifterLMS, and it’s the final lesson or completes an entire course, you can instantly have a popup that recommends the next course or upgrading to a membership or all access pass or whatever. So that’s an, example. And Popup Maker is super intelligent in how, all this works.

It hooks into a lot of things inside LifterLMS so that as certain triggers happen, like completing a course, this popup can just fire. So not only is Popup Maker of general use for any kind of site, it has a ton of LifterLMS specific triggers inside of it that you can use to do upsells, cross-sells, down sells to make more money.

So I’m not gonna go super deep into the making more money with popups. We’ve gone over the main stuff with upsells, down sells, cross-sells, cart abandonment, LifterLMS behavior triggers in the LMS, using as an opportunity to automate sales through popups. There’s a lot there. But the next one- type of popup that I wanna go over with you is popups that engage your students.

So this is where we flip the script. It’s not where we’re using popups to try to get more money out of the audience or to close sales. It has everything to do with students finishing what they start. So this is where popups are not annoying, as an example. So the way I think, like to think about this is you have a website students are progressing through various lessons or flows, quizzes, assignments, so on, but they’re alone.

And by having intelligent popups that are aimed at the learner, not the buyer, there are certain things you can do. So one example would be to increase engagement. When a student enrolls in a specific course or any course, or maybe it’s their first purchase on your site, you can have a popup that encourages them to introduce themselves in your online community, which we know is really important for helping people stay committed, stay motivated in online training, is to get involved in a community.

This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful and trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or building a membership site, Popup Maker helps you grow your email list, boost conversions, and engage your visitors with highly targeted customizable popups.

You can create smart popups for things like LifterLMS or WooCommerce cart abandonment recovery, upsells, course engagement, activation, targeted offers based on exactly what your students are doing inside LifterLMS. I personally use Popup Maker on all of our websites at LifterLMS for lead magnet opt-ins, cart abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to the right next step.

Popup Maker is essential for growing my email list and making more money through my website. Are you ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast to save 15% off on your order. The discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has a free version, so you can start with that too.

So go to wppopupmaker.com/lmscast now to save 15% or sign up for the free plan, and start getting more leads, sales, and student engagement today. Now back to the

show.

And sometimes there’s so much going on, they just made the purchase, now they got content to learn. There’s so much on your site, they can get a little lost. But by using a popup based on a certain trigger, like first time purchase, now this popup can be like, “Congratulations. Welcome. I’d like to invite you to join our community.

Here’s exactly how to introduce yourself, and how our community works.” That’s like a user experience or learner experience design flow that you’re making possible with popups. So one of the cool things about popups is they can pop up, but they can also hold focus, so it’s, can gray out what’s behind or even be a full screen popup.

So it’s a, very powerful tool to use popups to create focus and to give people an opportunity to say yes or no to something. So the beauty of popups too is it… Let’s say somebody bought the course, they’re super motivated, they’re not interested in the community. That’s fine. They can actually close that popup and not introduce themselves and continue.

So you’re never forcing somebody to do something, you’re just providing a little nudge a lot of, a little guidance, but it’s optional. So the other thing you can do is what’s known as a course re-engagement popup. So this is where somebody returns to the site, and you can guide them to where to pick up where they left off.

So that’s another cool thing. Pop-up Maker also ties into LifterLMS’s engagement system. So you could do things… Let me back up and say that the LifterLMS engagement system has several things it does. You can create automated emails that fire from your site. You can do achievement badges that pop up on the screen.

You can do certificates that are dynamically created. You can send te-text messages through our Twilio integration. So Pop-up Maker has a feature where you can tie into those things and trigger engagements, like automated emails and achievement badges, text messages, and so on. That could even be from a button click on a pop-up.

So if you start thinking about this is where the architects and visionaries out there listening and watching who build systems and flows and think four-dimensionally through time, you can really start customizing and guiding the learner experience. The other thing you can do is be proactive.

So a lot of us build learning management system experiences that are just reactive, like the student’s just driving the show. But an- another example of an engagement for students pop-up would be a s- a stuck point rescue pop-up. So part of the technical details of a pop-up is there’s… It can be time-based or scroll-based and so on.

But let’s say somebody’s spending 30 minutes on a lesson that’s only supposed to take 15 to 20 minutes. You could have a pop-up automatically pop up that does deeper explanation of the content or the assignment or whatever was going on that lesson. So you can be proactive and think about if somebody’s slipping away after X amount of time, what could I present to them to try to save and capture that person from getting lost, getting distracted, or worst case scenario, abandoning the course?

So learners who feel seen finish more courses. That’s just a part of the psychology or the pedagogy of learning. Pop-ups can be the cheapest kind of ICU signal that is really valuable in online learning experiences. So this is being an instructional designer or a teacher and leveraging pop-ups as a tool in your toolkit to create more engaging online 

This episode of LMScast is brought to you by WP Fusion, the powerful WordPress software that connects your website to your CRM and marketing automation platform, whether that’s HubSpot, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, GoHighLevel, and many, many more. If you’re selling online courses, memberships, coaching, digital products, and more, WP Fusion turns your WordPress website into a smarter, more personalized, and more automated online business.

With deep integration into LifterLMS, WooCommerce, the popular form plugins, and many more top WordPress tools, WP Fusion lets you automatically create and tag contacts, unlock course and membership access, track student progress, recover abandoned carts, and trigger powerful automations based on what your users are actually doing on your LMS website.

We use WP Fusion ourselves on our LifterLMS website, which is powered by WooCommerce for selling software subscriptions. But we also use WP Fusion on the LifterLMS Academy, where we are selling access to courses and memberships powered, of course, by LifterLMS. WP Fusion connects our websites and CRM seamlessly together so that we can create a better customer journey, deliver the right offers, and automate follow-up based on user behavior.

If you wanna sell more, personalize the learning experience, and build a more connected, automated online business, check out WP Fusion today. Go to wpfusion.com and use the coupon code LifterLMS to save 15%. Now back to the show.

Learning experiences that students actually finish So the next type of pop-up we’re gonna get into are pop-ups that grow your email list.

This is super important. A lot of times we think, “Oh, if I could just make more sales and make more money.” The reality is you have to nurture an audience and a community. You build trust over time. You add value in advance of making the sale. So getting people on your email list that you can nurture that are a great fit for your offer is the name of the game.

And most sites are just under optimized in terms of capturing people who are interested but not ready to buy right now. The classic pop-up to build here, to build your email list, I’ve already mentioned it on the cart abandonment aspect, but you could do it on any page or even site-wide on your site where you offer a lead magnet based on exit intent.

So when somebody starts to abandon the site, maybe they’re reading your blog posts, maybe you have a podcast at part of your site or other content pages on your site that are not part of the training and people try to leave, that’s fine, but right… “Hey, before you go,” we throw a pop-up and offer some valuable resource that they need to give their email address for.

That’s a super powerful thing to do. So the way that works technically, in Popup Maker, you can embed email opt-in forms into the pop-up. Those could come directly from your marketing automation CRM tool, whether that’s ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, ConvertKit HubSpot, GoHighLevel, and so many. There’s also advanced connectors you can do with WP Fusion and Popup Maker.

You can put a WordPress form solution like Gravity Forms in the, pop-up as well and pipe that, opt-in to your CRM or marketing automation. Anyways, that’s just some of the technical aspects of how you insert a form in a pop-up. The other thing you can do is capture not capture the lead on exit intent. But capture it based on a certain amount of time or even what’s known as scroll depth.

Let’s say you have a long article that’s three thousand words. If you don’t really want people who just land on the page and they exit and say, “That’s not for me.” You want people who are more qualified and more interested. In what you’re doing. And in that case, when somebody scrolls like 1,000 words through the page, then you throw the pop-up offering the lead magnet, ’cause that’s a more qualified lead that’s actually interested in what you have to say.

That’s another way to think about a lead magnet. One of my favorite lead magnets to do for an learning management system platform course. Our website is to do a free course lead magnet. Maybe somebody’s not ready for your big paid program. Whether that’s low cost or high cost but you have a free course that would be perfect for them to just think about it, get some results in advance, maybe become even more ready to be a good fit for your paid offering.

So think about using a free course lead magnet as one of your top opportunities in a learning site for a a lead conversion, lead magnet capture through pop-ups. The other thing you can do is just guide the student to the next thing after you do the lead capture. Let’s say somebody’s in a free resource like a blog series or something like that, and you wanna push ’em.

You can do like a slide in from the side after a certain amount of time that gets somebody opting in off your free content or potentially opting in to a later stage in your sales process to another free re- resources that makes them even more qualified to become a paying customer. There’s all kinds of things you can do to generate leads from pop-ups.

It’s also important to note that there are so many different triggers that you can do to cause a pop-up to happen. So it’s not always just about exit intent, time on page, scroll depth. You can also do a click triggered pop-up. For instructional designers, I love these and for marketers because what this means is you could have a link or more likely a button on your site.

It can be anywhere. It can be on the side. It can be in the content. It can be on your main menu. It can be anywhere you stick it on your website. And when somebody clicks that button, it triggers a pop-up with a clear call to action. So it’s a way to create signal when there’s like a lot of different options on a website.

You can do a button click That really focuses the user on “Hey, enter your email here to get X, Y, and Z benefit.” They do that, they close it, it adds value, everybody’s happy. So think about it that way. Think about designing the lead capture pop-ups that you would want, that you wish existed on your favorite brand websites or tools that you like to be using.

And if you look closely, you’ll start noticing how pop-ups, also known as modals, and different kind of guided experience things exist in the world. There’s a lot, including like the GDPR consent pop-ups that we see on a lot of sites. Now we’re gonna get a little creative into the fourth type of pop-up for online course and membership sites, and that is the ones that surprise and delight.

So not every pop-up is about making you more money. Some of them we just wanna surprise and delight our user. One thing, one way this is called in s- software or application design is, or even video game design, is a concept known as an Easter egg. So an Easter egg is when you hide something inside of a experience, and if somebody happens to find it they get some kind of crazy cool virtual high-five or even some monetary reward, like free access to an expensive paid thing or crazy big discount.

An Easter egg is something you hide in your LMS site that nobody finds it. And you can do Easter eggs a couple of ways. You could just keep it a secret and not tell anybody about it, and if somebody happens to find it, they get the reward. Or you could challenge your community, which is a gamification motivation thing you can do, and let them know about a Easter egg that exists.

Maybe you give them a hint or two, but it’s on them to try and find it. So we did a episode on this podcast about designing Easter eggs and gamification fairly recently, so go look for that episode. Another example is you can just have fun. Like on April Fools, Daniel Iser from Popups Maker built a like a funny pop-up that does what you don’t want pop-ups to do, which is when the pop-up would fire, the X to close it would start running away when somebody tried to close the pop-up.

Obviously, that’s not something we would wanna keep until after April Fools. But Daniel Iser from Code Atlantic, the creator of Popup Maker, created this fun… He called it Twitchy the Close Button thing that was just a fun little game to in- inject a little fun and humor. So the reason why these Easter eggs and popups, the surprise and delight work, is that the human brain remembers a surprise.

If you hide something in a bonus lesson somewhere, or even like something as silly as… This isn’t Popup Maker, but I’m just giving you some ideas. There’s another tool called WP Confetti, which explodes confetti on the website virtually when somebody purchases a LifterLMS course or membership, or completes a course or lesson, and so on.

It’s these types of surprise and delight that we can have a little fun with our popups. And if you create a interesting or fun popup, please share it with the LifterLMS community. We’d love to learn from each other and help do gamification that actually works and is fun and that users love.

So another and f- the final type of popup that you can create that’s not just about making money is to do operational and announcement-based popups. Again, most sites owners don’t really think through time. They think in a static kind of just like everything all at once kind of way of thinking about it.

But if you think through time, there’s so much you can do. So you can do time zone popups. If you want popup to announce a sale during a certain time window, you can do that. If you have a announcement about, let’s say, access to private or group coaching or a new event has been created and so on, you can do that.

You can do news announcements. “Hey, we’ve hired new coaches or tutors. We have a new course available,” and so on. You can do geographically targeted popups. So there’s a concept called price localization, which just means that different people in different parts of the world have higher or lower ability, to purchase based on the value of their local currency.

So an extreme example of this is the Nordic countries like Scandinavia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and so on- Have a high, the highest willingness to pay for products. Whereas there’s other countries like Argentina, a lot of Southeast Asia is an example, where traditional American or Western Europe or Canadian-based pricing is cost prohibitive.

It’s way too expensive based on their ability to pay. So you might wanna do geo-targeted pop-ups that promote your offers to people in various countries that have a much lower purchasing power. So you wanna give them either higher discounts than you would give in other parts of the world, as an example.

If you really care about engaging the whole world with your offer, it’s good to look into that because this price localization and purchasing power is a very real thing, and it is not equal around the world. So if you wanna help the most people possible, eventually you’re gonna look, run into price localization and making your training accessible to all the world’s people based on their purchasing power.

That is the fifth type of pop-up, so for operations and announcements. And you can see that through most of what we’ve talked about here, it’s not just about making money. What we’re actually designing through time is an experience. It could be a prospect, somebody who might be interested that we wanna get their email.

That’s like a user flow through our website. It could be somebody who’s becoming a customer, and we’re trying to help them grease the wheels of the checkout, and we use pop-ups there. We could be helping students right when they first buy to join the community or sign up for their first coaching call and so on.

We could be trying to re-engage learners who are falling out of losing focus or motivation and so on. So there’s so many different types of jour- or, I should say landmarks or places on the journey for different scenarios that pop-ups can be very helpful for. Just to get into some of the tech details, everything we just covered with pop-ups is covered from three main building blocks.

Once you understand them. You can build any kind of pop-up you can imagine. This kind of abstract concept of the learner journey is gonna start to become more specific and concrete. So when you come up with an idea, you’ll know exactly what you need to do and which levers to pull. So by levers to pull, what I mean is there are three aspects To all pop-ups.

The trigger, the targeting conditions, and the actions. So the trigger is when the pop-up fires. So there is a free version of Popups Maker, by the way, that you can go find that at wppopupmaker.com, and that’s gonna give you the basic triggers, which is the click, the time delay, the scroll position.

It’s the pro version of Popup Maker that adds th- triggers like exit intent and event-based triggers, like LifterLMS course or membership added to the cart, or LifterLMS course progress, rated events. So if you’re gonna get serious about pop-ups, I definitely recommend getting one of the premium plans from Popup Maker.

Again, you can get a 15% discount. Go find this episode in the link below. But after triggers, we have the targeting conditions. So this is who and where the pop-up fires for. In the free version of Popup Maker it handles basic page-level targeting. So this is a key concept. It’s one thing to set up an, a global exit intent pop-up that fires across your whole website, yes, you can do that.

But for a lot of these kind of user experience design, customer experience design things we’re doing very specific targeted things based on specific pages. And but you can get much more fancy with the pro versions of Popup Maker. For the LifterLMS integration specifically, Daniel has done so much at Code Atlantic.

There’s 50 plus conditions including course enrollment, quiz score, group membership, cart value, lifetime customer spend, subscription status, and more. So what does all this mean? It just means let’s take cart value as an example. If there’s a certain amount of money in the cart at checkout, then a pop-up could fire to do something like, “Hey, ’cause you’re purchasing the, all of this awesome stuff, I’m gonna give you a little discount if you add this other thing or upgrade to the even bigger membership,” as an example.

A course, a quiz score as an example. This is a fun one. So if the score is high, you could celebrate. You could do a gamified pop-up. If the quiz score is low, you could actually have a pop-up that’s designed- to save that customer. It could be to schedule a tutoring session or a coaching call or whatever.

So in addition to triggers, targeting, there is actions or calls to action. So what does the pop-up do when it’s clicked? All right. Does it apply a coupon? Does it enroll a user in a course? Does it award an achievement badge? Does it trigger LifterLMS email engagement? Does it add a specific LifterLMS access plan to the cart?

This is the layer most pop-up tools don’t have. They’re much more simple. Pop-up maker over at wppopupmaker.com is super advanced in this way, and that all the ver- different things that can happen based on a pop-up engagement directly tied to pop-up maker’s integration, deep integration with LifterLMS.

And I should mention, pop-up maker also integrates with other tools like WooCommerce as well. So if you’re using that all these concepts map over to WooCommerce as well. So, basically the mental model for all of this is to de- detect a behavior, that’s the trigger, decide who this applies to, that’s the targeting, and then take an action, that is the call to action.

Every pop-up in this episode is one of these if this then that combinations. So if you’ve never run a pop-up, I know I’m getting super advanced ’cause I’m a marketing nerd, a user experience design nerd, an instructional design nerd, so I know we’re getting detailed. And this is the hard part about pop-ups is because they’re so powerful it can begin…

come overwhelming, and you can just start getting messy and just making all kinds of things. I would encourage you to slow down and think strategically and pick very targeted specific pop-ups. Do one at a time. Make sure it’s working well before you move on to another one. If you have not designed a pop-up before, my recommendation for the very first one you should design is an exit intent lead magnet.

So a lot of course projects unfortunately never work out simply because a lead was never captured and nurtured. So if you want something super simple, the first place to start, I would do a global exit intent lead magnet email capture pop-up for your site. You can do that with pop-up maker. If you have any questions on how to do that, you can ask in the Lifter community or in The Popup Maker community.

Again, there are almost 800,000 websites using Popup Maker. So there’s so much cool stuff going on, and Daniel over at Popup Maker has a community you can engage with, share ideas, and whatnot. So again, this is all about… It’s popups do not need to be annoying. They’re not just for trying to squeeze money out of people or force them to give you your email address.

It’s more about delicate, strategic, intentionally polite, designed user experience elements of which you use a popup as a tool to engage. So if you wanna see a bunch of popups in action that, in my opinion, are intelligently designed, just go to the lifterlms.com website, abandon our cart, abandon articles.

Go to the LMScast podcast website, which is a subdomain, and you’ll notice after a certain amount of time, we have a popup that captures an email in exchange for giving you the five most popular episodes on the LMScast, which has been running for 13 years. We have popups on the LifterLMS Academy.

That’s at academy.lifterlms.com. You can see how we’re doing those there. But most importantly, head on over to the LMScast website, find this episode, scroll down below the episode, and look for the link in the button in the message to get a pro version of Popup Maker for 15% off. I highly recommend it.

I use popups myself. I love helping people design user experiences that are profitable and helpful, that the end user actually loves and actually finds helpful. So if you need any help with that or ideas, just reach out. Thanks for checking out this LMScast episode, and be sure to go get yourself a copy of Popup Maker.

That’s at wppopupmaker.com. They do have a free version, so you can always start with that. But I definitely recommend getting the 15% off coupon from the LMScast website and getting a pro version, and get started today.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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According to Alex Standiford from Siren Affiliate, affiliate programs should be much more than just discount systems or referral links in the modern era. According to him, companies particularly those that provide courses and software should consider themselves to be media and education enterprises that require ongoing content, collaborations, and audience trust in order to expand.

Alex advises locating niche specialists, bloggers, podcasters, influencers, and producers who already cater to your desired audience and offering them incentives to produce worthwhile material about your product or sector rather than attempting to produce all of the content yourself. He refers to these individuals as “multipliers” since they help you reach audiences that you would not be able to reach on your own. Additionally, he stresses that consumers start their trip long before they are prepared to make a purchase, so companies should provide content for earlier phases of the customer journey rather than just product-focused searches.

He also makes the important point that AI is revolutionizing this process by assisting companies in finding SEO possibilities, identifying possible partners, automating outreach, and eventually developing AI-powered partnership platforms. In general, his argument is that rather than depending solely on direct sales or conventional affiliate marketing, modern growth comes from creating networks of rewarded connections, content collaborations, and community-driven marketing.

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Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Alex Standiford from Siren. You can find Siren at Siren Affiliates. Alex and I have done a lot of work together over the years. We co-created some content on how to build a Udemy clone website, i.e.

a course marketplace using LifterLMS and Siren. He’s been on the podcast multiple times. Siren is not just an affiliate program, it’s really about incentivized partnerships, of which affiliate is just one of those. Before we dive in, welcome back on the show, Alex. 

Alex Standiford: Hey. Hey, Chris. I’m super glad to be here. I always, glad to be on the show.

I could talk to you about this stuff all day.

Chris Badgett: I like that. I laugh because Alex has what I think is one of the best-kept secrets in this kind of incentivized partner program development. There’s… It is so cool, and I feel like more people need to understand and know about it, and it’s so much bigger than just an affiliate program, which, by the way, Siren does better than any other solution in WordPress, and you just released your Siren 3.0.

But to start to get people excited, we’ve done… We’ve talked a lot about affiliate programs, and yes, you can do that with Siren whether using LifterLMS, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, other solutions. But tell us about creating a incentivized partner program or content engine with Siren and why that’s important today.

What’s happening t- that makes this even more valuable in the world we live in today? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, okay. Whenever people think about affiliate programs, what they usually think about are the, I always hear coupon coupon sites or media buyers where people are basically traditional affiliates.

The ones that you can find on ClickBank or sh- you know, things like that, those, the affiliate marketplaces. And while those are a potential option for some markets definitely not all that is just one very small way you can find partners and find people to work with. And I pitched this idea about talking about this with Chris because he was recently talking in a previous episode about, You were talking about how different how AI is impacting course creator discovery and how you can’t necessarily hide all of it behind a paywall anymore, and some questions and things like that kind of have to be out in the public so that your course can be discovered in the first place.

And I think 

Chris Badgett: that’s- And that you’re a, and that you’re a media company. You’re not just in the course business. Exactly. You’re, in the media business too, whether you realize that or not. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, exactly. And that is… That really struck a chord with me because I realized that I am using a strategy in my own media business with Siren that with using Siren, right?

I was lit- I’m literally leveraging Siren to do this. The thing that really struck me about what you were talking about before was sharing sharing all those details and sharing making sure that the content is discoverable by AI and figuring out how to make sure that you’re able to give the information that people want while still be, and to be able to provide value and get them into your top of funnel that leads them to still being able to buy your course.

And the thing that really, I really that struck me was the way that you can… That a lot of– There’s a lot of situations where the content that you’ll find that you’re gonna publish, that you want to publish or you want to rank for, like if you’re doing SEO keyword research or you’re trying to figure out what…

You’re, looking at different watering holes like Reddit or something like that, and you’re finding questions that people are asking. Sometimes, obviously, you can answer those questions yourself, and you can publish that content directly on your site, and those are great cases. But there are also situations where you can’t.

I think about, for example in the context of Siren, right? I probably can’t write a review about one of my competitors directly on my site. I can’t do a compar- I can write a, I can create a comparison page, right? And I can make a case for the pros and cons of both and talk about how Siren is different and all those things.

But I can’t necessarily do that, or I can’t write a tutorial on a specific aspect for a very specific market in all cases. Or if I do, it won’t be that impactful. That’s, the basis for what I’m wanting to talk about and what I wanna… How, we’re using Siren. What we’re doing to basically find people who can publish that content for us, right?

We find basically partners or affiliates if you can call them that content partners who you incentivize to publish content on on their site to be able to talk about your product or link to it or discuss it indirectly or otherwise. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the, an affiliate who just does a link versus becoming part of your content engine.

Alex Standiford: Yeah, 

Chris Badgett: so- And by the way, that, that affiliate or partner could publish the content on your s- on, your site- Yeah … or their site. So talk about the difference between that and how Siren solves that. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. There’s a few different ways that you can leverage that. So the first thing that comes to mind is for me, for example, I am literally…

I’ll do keyword research with various SEO tools, whatever, and I’ll find a keyword. For example, the other day I just found a keyword for Siren that was, like, how to start an affiliate program or how to start… Yeah, it was literally how to start an affiliate program for your veterinarian business, literally for vets, and that is so hyper-specific.

I could publish that. I could write that post. But whenever I look at that, I see that as there is somebody out there, there’s a coach, there’s a podcaster, there is a person who does nothing but talk to medical professionals about how to grow their business, right? They’re, they exist. I don’t know who they are, but I know they’re out there, and I know they would rank for that keyword way faster than me, and that we could have a really fantastic conversation, and I could create something and really pitch something fantastic to them.

So this is how I’m identifying what I call a multiplier, right? A person who I can pitch an idea to, and then they multiply that idea to their audience, and it, ends up translating into a sale. You’re actually seeing this happening right now as I’m talking to you, Chris, right? ‘Cause I’m literally talking about Siren and how it coincides with your own business, right?

So that’s one example, right? But then the other one is, of course, like you’re saying where they can publish content directly on your site. If you find… The, a different route here could be that you need a series, you want a series of professionals to write content on your site. Maybe you have a bigger platform, a learning platform or something like that, and you have a series of courses that you wanna publish publicly and/or that you have published publicly and you’re selling online as an upsell, and you need a large body of content on your site to talk about these things from different aspects, and you wanna have professionals, or maybe you need to have licensed professionals or something like that, having a conversation about these things with real authority.

You can use Siren to be able to incentivize those people to write that content, where they get credit if somebody reads the blog post, and then it converts into a sale for the course, right? So there’s, those are two different ways that you can leverage this tool as a piece of your your, media company to be able to form a team of people who are able to support you and multiply you in the process.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. There’s several big ideas here which I wanna zoom out on. Yeah. One is we’ve mentioned every company is a media company, whether they realize it or not. Related to that, every company is a education company, whether they realize that or not. And then the third big idea here is that if a business puts their core customer at the center of their business, not the product, it changes how you look at things, and you actually build a more effective company that grows faster, which creates some content challenges, which I’ll explain.

So if I put LifterLMS at the center of the business, in s- in many ways, this podcast doesn’t make sense. But for over 12 years, we’ve done this podcast to help our customer, ’cause remember, they’re at the center of the business, with issues even not related to LifterLMS. Now, Alex and Siren adds value as another technology you can plug in to create incentive referral programs.

There’s all kinds of interviews we do on this podcast about things like instructional design, community building entrepreneurship topics that are really outside of the scope of what the LifterLMS software does, but our core customer needs to know in order to be successful. So you create this web of subject matter experts and valuable content.

But we were chatting about the other day, sometimes, if I really look at my customer and go really far back in their journey, before they’re actually shopping for learning management system software, just as one entry point, they s- one place people start, and this is way before they’re aware of the LMS world, is they have a thought, which is, “I hate my job.”

And it’s this thing that they’re about to transition into wanting to become an entrepreneur, and then they figure out how can I make money online?” And then, “How can I build a location into business, independent business? What types of businesses are like that? Oh there’s courses, coaching, services.

I think I like the courses thing.” And now they’re ready for us. But for me to make enough content ab- about I hate my job, what should I do next, and then put that in different niches, like I hate my job at the hospital, I hate my job at the school. There’s so much content that I could create to help my customer.

Remember, the customer’s at the center of the business not the, software. But I can’t make all that content. And like you said there’s somebody else out there who’s probably written a book. I remember, for example, this is super random , but a woman named Pamela Slim wrote a book called Escape from Cubicle Nation, which is about helping people who hate their job figure out plan B in life.

If she wrote that content and pitched Lifter as a solution, it would be even more valuable, ’cause she’s the expert on that topic of job dissatisfaction So I don’t know, jam with me on that- Yeah … context. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. I I, was just– Yeah, that’s exactly a, such a great example of what I’m talking about here.

And I love that you brought up the fact of before in the journey, right? Like you– ‘Cause that’s… And I think that’s a big piece that I’ve actually been exploring a lot lately as well and, that’s why all this is so fresh in my mind, right? Because I’ve realized that there’s about– That by the time they get to Siren, right?

By the time most people are at a spot where they’re leveraging Siren affiliates, they’re ready to start using it, they have gone through a lot, right? They’ve already decided they were gonna quit their job, decided they were gonna make a switch. From a, founder standpoint, they decided they were gonna quit their job, they decided they were gonna switch over to something, they decided on WordPress, they decided that they were gonna use e-commerce and sales tools to be able to grow their business.

And there’s, so many things that has to happen before they’re even in a spot to be able to even have a conversation about Siren. And the earlier in the life cycle I can be there, the more likely they are to choose me whenever that moment comes, right? And especially with something this is maybe a little, off-topic, but especially with something as powerful as Siren because it has so many different ways it can be used.

If I can start having conversations with people about that, every time I have a meeting with people and I talk about Siren and I start listing all the different ways they can use it in their business, I see their eyes light up. I see them realize all the different possibilities of things that they can do.

And if I can present that to people earlier in the life cycle more often, then I am more likely to be able to start to find people coming to me and gravitating toward me naturally. And I think that’s a lot of what you were alluding to there, especially around the idea of being customer-centric instead of product-centric, right?

‘Cause honestly I published, I just published an announcement post the other day for the 3.0 version of Siren, right? And I did it because, of course you have to do that, but it is not something that is… But there’s like a whole bunch of other content that I published at the same time around the stuff I published there that is on several different blogs, right?

So on some partner blogs, on my own website on different, platforms like Medium and, off, off-site as well. Not to mention on X, podcasting, all that stuff, right? There’s so many different channels these days, and I am but one person. You know what I mean? I can only do so much to be able to manage and write all of that content, even if you’re using AI to help you or whatever.

But then more importantly, like I said, a lot of that content is going to be better served by somebody else who is helping that customer through the current journey, current phase of whatever journey they’re in. So if I can look back earlier in the journey and I can say, “Here are the steps that they’re going through.

Who are the people-” that are the key piece of that conversation, those are my affiliate, those are my partners. Those are the people I need to be talking to, right? Those are the people that I wanna connect with, I wanna work with, and I wanna have conversations with them, and I wanna think deeply about how I can provide value to my future customers that are in their audience at that point in their life.

And w- it’s really convenient whenever you’re a founder building products for founders because you’re, by the very virtue of existing, a few steps ahead of them, so you’re able to have those conversations, which is very convenient, of course. But so that, that is a lot of what I’m talking about whenever I think about reimagining what it means to have different partnership programs and, programs like that.

It’s not just affiliates with links and coupon codes. It’s genuinely finding people yourself, prospecting, finding them, identifying them, and having real conversations just like what we’re doing right now.

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Chris Badgett: Yeah. Incentives and relationships, and then a s- a tool like Siren to manage all that is really mind-blowing when you think about it.

It’s that whole African proverb of you wanna go fast, go alone. You wanna go far, go together. Or I might have gotten that backwards. But the going together is better, which means you need relationships to be successful in business. There’s a lot of buzz around the solo one-person company, of which I’m a fan.

I love that kind of idea and thinking. But if you really wanna go far getting partners and not just affiliate partners on board is, can really help. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. And- 

Chris Badgett: Let’s do the l- Go ahead … do the bullet points of high-level different types of partnerships. We have affiliates, affiliate sales partners.

We have content creation partners. 

Alex Standiford: And then 

Chris Badgett: there’s- And within that, there’s a specific one the Lifter integration that Siren has is for course creation partners. 

Alex Standiford: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: But what else is in these list of, to get people’s juices flowing? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah the course creation one is particularly interesting ’cause, like you said earlier, you could create a, essentially c- we talked about this a lot, right?

A Udemy clone where you’re able to basically pay course creators for their own course content, and it’s, I call it a royalty program, basically. And what’s interesting is there’s a variation of that I’ve seen that’s been truly awesome, which is I have a customer right now who has Dungeons & Drag- they build this really awesome Dungeons & Dragons table that doubles up as a kitchen table, right?

And they’re, about to launch, and they’re all excited about it, and I’m, excited to be there with them, right? But what, one of the things that we’re, they are, they’ve launched is they have these, mats that cover the, cover their tables, their, the Dungeons & Dragons table, and they can print art on those.

And instead of, and I told, I directed them that instead of just finding and paying, just solely paying artists, use this as an opportunity to create a program. So he created a royalty program where artists are able to provide art that can be printed on these mats. And he also doubled it up as an affiliate program on top of that.

So it’s an incent– an affil– So they get paid every time their mat is purchased, a mat with their art is purchased. But then they also get paid more if they use an affiliate link to actually direct the sale, right? And it flipped the script for artists because now artists always struggle with promoting or selling things online.

This flips that. It gives them a way to be able to incentive or to earn money with their, they, what they can do, right? It gives them a really cool product to talk about that’s relevant to them in some way. And it also gives the company both a way, a couple of channels to get their product promoted, and also helps them improve their product at the same time because people are able to directly contribute to them all at the same time, right?

Royalty programs are so cool and so underutilized, I think, in, in a lot of businesses. There’s a lot of opportunities for that kind of thing. But then of course, like you said there’s, the traditional affiliate program where you have people who are promoting your product, talking about it.

This is more aligned with what you’re talking about with influencers. Today, that’s usually what I think about whenever I think of them today is, an influencer who is on TikTok or YouTube or something like that talking about your product in some way. A lot of them often want to have some kind of cash paid in addition to actually doing the program, and I don’t think that’s a problem, especially the first time around, ’cause they’re just trying to de-risk it, right?

They don’t know you. They don’t know if you’re gonna convert. So they have to, you have to do that. But what I’ve found is a lot of times if you do convert and you do lead to sales and it does work out, they’re a lot more willing to do the follow-ups without necessarily needing a giant pay, like some kind of paycheck up front, right?

Because you, they are now de-risked. But then, like you said, there’s also the content program, which is like a variation on the royalty program, and the beauty of it is you’re solving two problems at once. One, you’re getting content published on your site regularly, and two, you’re able to incentivize people to publish content that converts.

So, those are the big three that I really think about. Whenever you start getting into bigger, sales and higher dollar things, there’s also more traditional sales programs that you can do where you have direct outreach campaigns where people are being directly contacted, emailed, demos being shown, things like that.

A lot more similar to what you would think of in a, in a sales kind of scenario. Those are probably the big four that I think are relevant to this audience. There’s- So many more that are also potentially doable. I had another one where somebody created a program where every time somebody purchases a product on their- at their- through their business, a part of their business is they donate a portion of the proceeds to a different 501 nonprofit.

And what they did was they set it up to where you can pick at checkout which nonprofit you want your donation to go to, and they’re using Siren to track that, right? So that is so far removed from the idea of an incentive program. It’s not even about incentive at that point. It’s just about keeping track of who do I owe, and things like that.

Chris Badgett: Now you, have, I noticed on your site, now, if you go to sirenaffiliates.com, you have a beacon GPT to help people figure out their programs. Can you tell us what that is, how it works, and the problem it solves? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. So one of the biggest problems that I’ve had with Siren historically has been that it doesn’t, It is powerful, and it is capable of building a lot of things, right? You can build almost any kind of program you want. However, the challenge I’ve run into is a person who comes to me and says, “I just want this program.” They’ll say it to me in words, right? And I realize every pers- whenever you buy Siren, you get a– you are able to schedule a one-on-one with me, where I basically help you onboard it.

I look at it, I help you. And almost every one of those calls was basically me helping them set up their first program. And I realized, oh my gosh, this is th- this is how I’m overcoming that onboarding process, and I’d really like to do a better job of making sure that people, if they wanna just describe the program, the vision that they have for a program, that they can just get that back, and that they can get exactly how it would be built in Siren and have it with a one or two-click setup on their Siren install to be able to build it for them.

So what I ended up doing was I ended up creating what I call a beacon, which is my AI system. It’s an MCP server technically, but it’s also, there’s also a GPT on ChatGPT, so you don’t even have to set anything up. You could just talk to it. And what it does is it does exactly that. You can have a conversation with this AI agent, and it will look at all the knowledge that it has about Siren, and it will help you build out exactly what your program would be in Siren.

And then once it’s done, you click a couple buttons, and boom, it adds it to the system for you, and it’s installed. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And tell us about the recipes that just released. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. So that’s the, that’s the underlying magic of it is the word to put it. AI, the AI agent, the beacon agent uses, creates recipes.

It can create its own custom- recipes, but then the site itself has also a series of recipes on it that are published that you can also one-click install as well. And basically, a recipe is a combination of Siren, what I call primitives, basically Siren th- pieces, right? So programs, distributions program groups are really the big three.

And it can, it- they are basically pre-made combinations of those things that build the different programs you want. So instead of me saying you’re gonna create in order to be able to, for example, create a program where some affiliates get 10%, but you have a set of super affiliates that are getting 15% but you don’t want those beams to cross.

You only want one person from those programs to win. How do you set that up in Siren? Technically, it’s with two programs in a program group, right? So all of those things put together allow you to do that. But a customer, the person, doesn’t think about it that way. You don’t think about your affiliate program as two programs in a program group, but Siren does.

So there was a disconnect in that thought, so I ended up creating all these templates where you can go to the site and say, “I want an affiliate program. How do I do that?” And then it shows you, here you go. This is exactly what you need. You click a button to add it to your site. It asks you what percentage rate you would want for your affiliate program.

You give it your s- your website so it knows where to go, and you click go. Goes into the Sir- your Siren website where it’s installed. Of course, if you’re logged in, it only does it if you’re logged in. And then it allows you, it says, “Hey, did you wanna build, did you wanna import these programs into your system?”

And you say yes. It goes through, and bing, bang, boom, it’s added those different programs to your system and set up your program for you. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So you’ve solved the blank page or the blank screen problem with pre-configured recipes or- Yeah … templates. Yeah. That’s awesome. 

Alex Standiford: So it solves, for me, it solved both onboarding, the onboarding challenges for my customers, while also solving the sales problems, because now people can look at it and say, “Can Siren make an affiliate program?”

And the q- or, “Can Siren create this wild, wacky program that nobody’s ever thought of?” And the answer is always yes, but now I can prove it. I can say, “Here you go. Here’s exactly how you would do it in Siren. Do you wanna buy it?” 

Chris Badgett: I was just trying to count. There’s so many recipes you have on your site.

These are sirenaffiliates.com/recipes. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah.

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Chris Badgett: And just to name a few, obviously there’s the basic affiliate program. There’s the fixed rate affiliate program, the refer a friend program, blog content program, sales team commission program content creator profit share, and I’m just naming a few of them.

Yeah. And these are like, yes, you could read the documentation and build all these from scratch, or you can just pull a recipe in and then just make some minor tweaks however you want, and you’re good. 

Alex Standiford: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: My, my hat’s off to you for that. 

Alex Standiford: Thank you. 

Chris Badgett: I’m also a big fan of the freemium model, and you have a Siren Lite version.

Yep. Can you tell us what that is and how people should think about that? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. I I, genuinely was afraid that I was giving away too much. And I- Which means 

Chris Badgett: you’re making a very good free product. Yes. It is always uncomfortable to give away- Yes … like your best stuff for free- Yeah … but literally that’s the point with freemium- Yeah

right? 

Alex Standiford: For sure. For sure. So the free version has the ability to create multiple programs. And it’s, Siren. It is everything that makes Siren great, makes Siren powerful and capable. The things, there’s some things that you don’t get that require an upgrade, such as distributors, which are insanely powerful.

I I’m still learning about the different ways you can use distributors. That’s a whole nother conversation, but like I had a customer come to me who wanted to build a multi- not a multi-level marketing kind of company, but a company that had sales teams that had trickle-down commission from, like a sales manager earns commission from their team, and their team earns commissions from…

It’s a whole architecture, and I was able to build that whole architecture with one single well-built distributor, and it just- Wow … It, just cra- it’s insane. So a lot of power there, but that’s, a paid feature. But the fe- the free version gives you a more than enough, more than pretty much any WordPress paid plugin, free or paid plugin gives you out of the box.

I, honestly think that the o- I wanted to make sure that it was enough that if you were considering Siren and you just needed a relatively simple program just to get started, or you, and you needed to know that you had a little bit of, you had wiggle room to grow if you decided you wanna do other programs as well I wanted to make sure that you would be able to do all of those things without needing to upgrade right away.

So it does all of that. And I honestly, I think that if you’re looking at any other tool in the WordPress space right now, it probably covers, I’d say, 80% of the use cases that a lot of people are paying for right now if and several cases that still can’t be done by competitors even at the free level.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m a big fan of that model. And I’ve, seen this movie before, like with LifterLMS as an example, the free version being more powerful than a lot of paid versions or most of paid versions and so on. So go check that out. That’s sirenaffiliates.com. On the pricing, you can see the free- I wanna just explode people’s minds in the last part of this episode.

You’re somebody who I really respect as a creator and an innovator. I know you’re leveraging AI ’cause you, you’ve mentioned building a GPT, a custom GPT in your MCP and all this. But AI, there’s a little bit of overwhelm, but also excitement. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So when people think about… I’ll just rattle off some things, and you can build on it.

Like, when I think about incentivized programs, how could people use AI? Now I’m a fan of human in the loop and the co-pilot concept and not just trying to let AI do everything. But- 

Alex Standiford: Yep … 

Chris Badgett: For affiliates, AI can write swipe file. So if you’re an affiliate, you know what that means. It’s starter content that you give your affiliates to remove friction, to give them some email messages to send as is or tweak, social media posts and so on graphics.

If you’re doing, 

Alex Standiford: You’re gonna love this, just 

Chris Badgett: a sidebar … if you’re doing outbound sales and stuff like that there are AI agents that can… Let’s say there’s an expert who’s gonna promote you and get sales commissions kinda different from an affiliate. That person may– could leverage AI prospecting tools for the– even voice agents and all kinds of stuff.

That– it could get wild. You mentioned graphic design competition for artists. AI is pretty good at generating images and things for design contests, and that’s just- Oh, yeah … a really niche thing. 

Alex Standiford: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: But I’m sure you have a billion ideas. I just wanted to wet the whistle and pass it over to you.

What kind of AI innovations could people who are in these incentivized programs and relationships what’s possible, and where are we going? 

Alex Standiford: So one thing that comes to mind immediately is, again, Beacon with the MCP and being able to do that kind of thing. It’s become my swipe file.

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Alex Standiford: You know what I mean? Because it’s, there. It exists. People can read it, ke- they can, they can– my affiliates can actually use it to be able to riff on ideas and understand Siren and be able to do those things deeply. But also whenever I think about incentivizing there’s, this entire concept that isn’t quite here yet, but where you can literally leverage, you could potentially leverage AI, where the AI itself represents an affiliate 

Chris Badgett: Like the agent is an, a partner.

The AI agent is a partner. Not a human partner, but a, AI partner. 

Alex Standiford: Right. 

Chris Badgett: Where the- Like it’s agentic. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, literally it’s agentic. Yeah, there’s, there is a world where that could exist. There’s probably some places where that is a thing. I don’t, I can’t speak to that a lot because it’s still a new concept, but the tech’s there right now.

We have everything we need. You have the ability to create affiliate links. If you create the right program you could absolutely do 

Chris Badgett: those things. That’s the thing too, just with that, is agents cost money via token usage and stuff. Yep. So therefore, but if you remove that, this is where incentives matter.

If somebody who’s the mastermind behind these agents if now they’re getting paid via Siren for being effective at whatever they do is profitable above their token expenses, then it makes sense. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, totally. I, have this vision in my head of there’s probably gonna be some personal brands out there that are going to end up creating their own MCPs that are literally just AI servers that are literally their AI agent, right?

That literally just takes care of, manages their content, understands the wealth of information from that person, and provides responses, advice, and input in that way. It’s almost like a branded version of that person, right? That can then sell products, recommend products genuinely, right?

Based on what its pool of affiliate links are and stuff like that. This is a little bit, out there but those are some of the things that come to mind for me. But in terms of how a person can use AI, what I’m really excited about today, right now, is how people can use AI right now to find those partners.

That’s been a lot of my a lot of the stuff that I’ve been doing a lot of. I have a, machine that runs a background task that does… uses data for SEO, which is a an MCP that allows you to basically connect to it and very inexpensively do SEO research and search for keywords and stuff like that.

I’m using that with a really well-curated feed of different RSS feeds of podcasts and stuff like that to basically bring in stuff and have AI automatically find an opport- find and identify potential affiliates for me, right? So it’s helping me do a lot of that stuff, and it’s allowing me to, Riff with it on how this could potentially work, what kind of a how that affiliate would work, how the positioning works, how all of that aligns with whatever whatever agenda I may have, whether it be promoting Siren or whatever.

And assisting that audience, right? Just like what we were talking about. So that’s been a pretty big thing that I’ve been pretty excited about from a str- strategy standpoint. It’s basically what I’ve always historically done when I’m looking for affiliates, which is, like I said, primarily keyword research, finding the words or finding the terms, and then identifying where my customers are in that journey and who was talking to them at that point, and then trying to make– working to make them my partner.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And just for those of you that are kinda newer to the AI conversation you probably know about the AI chat interfaces like ChatGPT or Claude.ai, but when something goes, an agent is– can do a lot more and can be outcome-focused. They loop back and can keep improving on a task or even spin up sub-agents.

So what Alex is talking about with partner recruitment, I did something similar where I wanted to source information that adds value to our core customer outside of Lifter that’s just going on in the industry around things like instructional design, technology, community building, entrepreneurship, and so on.

And I have an AI agent that just weekly searches the entire internet, not really the whole thing, but it’s looking through YouTube, Reddit threads, social media, Twitter, all kinds of places, finding interesting content that would be of use to my core customer. But this idea of there is a, role when you are more of a professional affiliate program operator where you hire a affiliate partner manager, but it, that only makes sense when you’re at a certain scale or size business.

Yes. But if an AI agent can f- help you find partners, create swipe files re-engage partners basically look at your Siren program analytics and whatever so that you can get weekly reports and there’s just so much you can do. That can be an AI team member, basically- 

On the partner program. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it is, It’s pretty wild, to be honest the automations that can come out of that stuff. And in particular, finding and identifying those questions. Another thing that I’m doing- My idea of prospecting or trying to find potential affiliates in this context isn’t even necessarily directly looking for their content.

It is trying to find and identify questions that people are asking at earlier phases in what I call watering holes, so like Reddit and, stuff like that. And if it finds questions there, I take that question, I do a little bit of research, and I find out who’s answering it, right? If it if, it’s, if it can’t be me or it shouldn’t be me one step in my process is always: Is there somebody who’s better equipped to answer this question than me?

And if the answer is yes, then the next question is: Can I get that person to become an affiliate to talk about Siren? Or can I get that person… Can I– Or if not, can I get on that show or on that blog and be a guest writer to provide that value to those customers from my perspective and kind of blend in my, my perspective on things, and then work my way from there?

And I think that’s really relevant to knowledge, to, to knowledge workers to… Not knowledge workers, but to course creators and things like that, just simply because that is a great way for you to be able to bring people into your, net, and it’s a great way to prospect. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And we’re, definitely gonna have to do another episode in a year, whatever- Yeah

and see where we’re at, ’cause all this stuff is moving so fast and is super interesting. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, for sure. 

There’s probably gonna be a service that exists that just descri- does exactly what I just described. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Alex Standiford: You never know. 

Chris Badgett: So for those who are out there watching and listening, what’s the best way to get started?

You have Siren Lite, the free version. I see a try the demo on the site. Tell us about that. You also have… People can just buy it and then get on a call with you. They got the GPT. H- how else… Those are– You have a lot of cool ways for people to get started, but let’s hear the what you’d recommend.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. I think the first thing that comes to mind is if some of this stuff is like resonating with whoever’s listening to this and you think that there’s potential value in this kind of thing for you the first thing I would do is start with you, of course, you could download Siren and try Siren.

I- by all means, please do. I’ll be here. There’s a little chat bubble in the corner. I’m always answering questions there when I’m, awake. And then of course, there’s the AI agent where you can have those questions answered figure those things out and think about it. I, love talking about different ways to use Siren and will always be happy to have conversations.

The free version is always going to be a great place to start, just simply because it allows you to try things out, see where things work, and then understand why or if you even do need the paid version. So that’s where I would recommend starting is what you just described.

So if you’re, if you like to use AI agents and you like to, and you’re comfortable with ChatGPT and you wanna just kinda riff on an idea, start with the GPT. If you wanna kinda shop around and see what different things are that Siren can do use the, look, take a look at the recipes or take a look at the demo, which is at demo.sirenaffiliates.com.

That demo is actually it’s literally the entire front end of Siren, and the only difference is instead of it being stored into a long-term place, it just stores it in your session storage on your browse- in your web browser. So you can just, you can use it to try out creating programs and kinda get a feel for what the interface is like.

But it doesn’t actually install or anything like that. It’s just a, it’s a down and dirty way to get in there and take a quick look at how Siren functions and things like that. The interface also will look pretty different in terms of color scheme to what you’ll see in WordPress because I have some plans with with Siren in the future that doesn’t necessarily involve relying on the WordPress dashboard specifically.

But the interface is identical. The only difference is the colors are different. So that’s another option. And then obviously if there’s something that you need to know or you’re not sure about, there’s always just that chat bubble. You can just ask me a question directly, too.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m so excited about Siren Affiliates. Go check it out. That’s [email protected]. And again, if you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together. That’s the African proverb. And using relationships and incentivized partner programs, there’s nothing like Siren that makes this possible in a way that where you can create the program, manage the program, automate the program.

It’s– And create different types of programs. It’s so cool. It’s so flexible. Thank you, Alex, for coming back on the show. We really appreciate it. 

Alex Standiford: Thanks for having me, Chris. Always a pleasure.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this episode, Chris Badgett provides a thorough guide on how contemporary course designers are use Claude to greatly expedite and enhance the process of creating and marketing online courses.He says he switched to Claude because it is better at handling long-form content, retains more context, and generates more dependable, less “hallucinated” outputs all of which are particularly helpful when working on big projects like entire books, courses, or sales pages.

In addition to the chat interface, he breaks down the larger Claude ecosystem, which includes tools like Projects for work organization, Claude Design for making slides, visuals, and even interactive lessons, and Cowork/agents that can connect with tools like Google Drive, email, or analytics to automate workflows and produce insights. He emphasizes useful applications for course designers, such converting student support letters into new lesson ideas, translating courses for international audiences, developing sales pages and email sequences, summarizing and making FAQs, and building quizzes from lesson content.

Additionally, he places a strong emphasis on advanced use cases, such as evaluating business data (such as student behavior or course performance) and enhancing coaching through knowledge structuring, gap identification, and learning path customization. Despite all of this power, his main point is that AI should be used to enhance human expertise rather than replace it: in order to create high-caliber, influential courses, creators should give the initial guidance, let AI handle the majority of execution, and then refine the output with their own voice, experience, and insight.

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Here’s Where To Go Next…

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Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. This is a solo episode. Today we’re gonna dive into using Claude, the artificial intelligence tool, and why smart course creators are al already running some smart playbooks using Claude. I, myself personally, switched my primary use of AI from chat GBT to Claude.

I’ve been blown away with the results, and I want to give you all the things I’m seeing across my work, my view on the industry, what I see team members doing with Claude what I see Lifter, LMS and other course creators and education entrepreneurs doing with Claude. But first, the reason why I switched is I just saw.

So many people who are developers. I have a lot of engineering friends. I saw them primarily using Claude and not using chat, GBT. There was a lot of, particularly among developers praise for Claude Code. And we’ll talk about the different types of Claude in a little bit. I still use chat, GBTI haven’t fully abandoned it, but I’m definitely all in on Claude.

And if you’re listening to this episode, you’re probably a forward thinker, early adopter of technology if you’re using chat GPT and haven’t tried Claude yet. I’m gonna give you some unique insights today into how they’re different and the suite of tools that Claude has that you may not know about that are super relevant to course creators.

So this is gonna be a tactical playbook with ideas and action items that you can take away if you use the full anthropic suite of tools. Anthropic is the company behind Claude, and there’s a lot of different things that Claude can do, which we’re gonna get into in a little bit. So the main reasons why Claude is really a daily driver for me over chat Chi PT these days, is I find that it works better.

For long content. It could be a long sales page, it could be a giant course project or book project or sales page project that I’m working on. And Claude has seems to have a better ability to just hold context for larger amounts of information and memories that needs to have. Claude projects are awesome.

So that you can organize and categorize better different things that you would be using. The Claude tool for, I believe Chat, GPT has folders. I just find that Claude’s Projects system works a lot better. I’ve also found that Claude Hallucinates a lot less than chat GBT according to Anthropic.

Claude is trained to flag what it doesn’t know, so you’re less likely to get. Inaccurate information that is hallucinating. I already mentioned it, but the develop, all the developers I talk to prefer Claude over chat, GBT. And then the pace of innovation at Claude, particularly recently in the past 60 or 90 days is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

It’s almost like every day I wake up, I see something new on YouTube or on social media. About some new capability or tool that Claude has added. And I’m really impressed ’cause even though they’re moving fast and shipping a lot, everything that I’m seeing is really relevant to education entrepreneurs well thought out and just makes sense.

And in my experience using it, I’m super happy with it, despite the fact that it is changing so much, I’m still able to keep up with it. And that’s the goal. Of this episode is to help you keep up. Anybody I talk to, even if they’re on the bleeding edge of using AI tools, they all, everybody feels like they’re falling behind.

So first of all, if you’re listening to this episode, I guarantee you’re not at the back of the pack. You’re not falling behind a continual investment and learning and keeping up with artificial intelligence, I find is very important. I’m not one of these people who thinks that AI is gonna do absolutely everything and everything’s gonna be replaced.

I’m just more optimizing pur purposely to augment my capabilities and my strengths and help cover my weaknesses by using Claude. And we’re gonna make this super relevant to you today as a course creator. So the first thing that’s important to go over is the clo, the Claude Product family in Plain Eng, English.

’cause this can get confusing often find that when people start using a tool, they stay with it and they don’t necessarily notice the other developments that’s going on around it. So there’s four levels to Claude. The first level of Claude is claude.ai. Which is just like the chat GBT chat interface.

You’re basically have the thread going and you’re chat chatting via Claude through their large language model. And that’s very effective and it can do a lot of different things. But that’s really level one. Claude Cowork is a different level, so that’s an Ag Agentic desktop app built around deliverables, not prompts.

So if you haven’t done it yet first use claude.ai, create an account. But if you haven’t done, if you haven’t done that, do that first, then go get the Claude Desktop app, and that allows you to get into cowork as well as regular chat. And then the third level is called Claw code, which is like a terminal grade for developers who are.

Creating code and coding with ai. And the thing is, I’m not a developer, but my business partner recently got me set up on cloud code with an agent that we’re custom building and taught me the basics of using the terminal and the command line. And this is where it really stuck for me, the whole concept of vibe coding and how.

Even if I’m not a developer, I can do this stuff. I don’t have intention to like ship lifter LMS product features or anything like that without the talented development team at Lifter LMS being involved in really leading the the code level of the software. But I do find that working in cloud code, I get the and, our custom agent that we’ve developed.

I get some incredible output that is way far and beyond just working with the regular chat interface. As an example, Claude also released Claude Design, which is part of the desktop app, and that is pretty awesome. It is also inside cloud.ai where you can design prototypes, slides, social assets.

Interactive prototypes, even entire websites. And even one of my favorite for course creators is inter interactive content that you can put into your lessons. I’m playing around with club design and it is blowing my mind. If you’ve been in our space for a while, you’re probably familiar with Canva as a graphic design tool that kind of made.

What power users of tools like Adobe’s Photoshop were doing made it accessible to the average person like myself, who’s not a trained designer. This is like that feeling again where you know, you can create great designs in cloud design even faster than what’s possible with Canva as an example, and then.

The final thing is agents. So agents can operate within all four of these layers. And like I mentioned, we’ve been developing a custom agent at Lifter LMS and what makes agents different than, let’s say just working through a chat interface is. One, they can have a lot of memory and additional context and things like certain skills that they’re trained on or, and processes to follow that are way more in that is way more advanced and outcome focused than a call and response through a chat interface.

The first thing I just want to get into is what you as a course creator can do with Claude today to get started faster and to basically accelerate what you can do in a given day. The first is just quiz creation at scale. So if you’re creating a video lesson. The cool thing is a tool like Claude can read the summary like in a second and then help come up with knowledge, check multiple choice questions and things like that.

So quiz generation can really speed up rapidly and it doesn’t mean that you should never like review the quiz questions and put your own human touch on things. But if you find the creation of quizzes to be tedious, you can use Claude to really speed that up. You might also have different content that’s repeatable, that you could build a process around and use Claude for like lesson summaries.

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So let’s say your lessons are really long. They’re one to two hours a piece of video content. You may have the transcript below. A video, which I definitely recommend in a lesson for accessibility. But you can also use Claude to generate a lesson summary, a lesson objective an FAQ library on, the lesson or quiz level as well.

I find sales page generation as a really great place to use Claude, particularly if you’re not a copywriter or a sales professional. One of the great tips for AI is to give the AI an example of what you think is a great looking sales page, and then that, allows the AI to very quickly map what your course is all about to that kind of sales page structure, which you of course can modify and make your own course descriptions and email se sequences.

These are other just great places to use Claude. Translation and localization for international students is a great place to use Claude to really free up your time. I see this a lot in French Canadas as an example where there’ll be an LMS has to be in both French and English, and there’s different ways to do a dual language LMS but.

One of the things you can do is if you have a quiz and there’s a, the English version and then the French version you can do all that translation really fast with Claude. Same with things like lesson transcripts. Let’s say you have in a lesson, a French video and an English video, and you want to crank out those French and English transcripts.

You can do that. Really fast, which is great for accessibility of course as well. And the cool thing too when you think about Claude is you can use the projects to organize what you’re doing. So you could ha you start developing processes around, let’s say creating a sales page for a course. You could have a sales page project, you could have a quizzes project, or.

Maybe you want to use projects where each course has its own project, and that way all the context is related within there. So those are just some pro tips on getting going with Claude. But there’s also an easy way to get started. We’ve actually already solved this for you with chat GPT some time ago.

We have a free course for this. That already exists and it’s, here’s the trick. It has all the prompts and everything in it. You just need to use claw.ai instead of chat GBT to create an entire course from start to finish. So if you go to the Lifter LMS Academy, that’s at academy lifter lms.com, and you find a course called How to Create an Online Course with Chat, GBT.

Take that course and then just use the prompt templates that are in the course. You just copy and paste them over to Claude. Just copy and paste ’em over to Claude instead of chat GPT, and you can use the, same, the exact same flow. The other cool thing about that course is it shows you how to not delegate too much to the AI and not get your leverage, your own unique special.

Experiences and skills. I call it a human knowledge dump. And that’s a great way to add, that’s a great thing to add to as a permanent file in your Claude setup so you don’t have to paste it into every thread. And, because Claude has a longer context window, it’s called, it just means Claude can hold.

More information at one time. You can do huge knowledge dumps and it all fits inside of the context window, which just means that Claude is gonna be more efficient and better to handle large volumes of kind of reference material that you put into an area in Claude while you’re making your online course.

So Claude also has this concept called artifacts that you can use as your lesson canvas. Chat. GBT also has a concept called Canvas that you can work on, but basically it’s side by side editing in real time. So you’re chatting with Claude and on the other side you’re seeing the lesson come together and as you make edits and revisions or add more information.

It’s a more iterative process, which people really like the way that Claude does that. So take the free course on the LiFi MS Academy and just swap in Claude for chat, GPT and you’ll, and use the prompts that exist there and you’re gonna love what you create. And you’re basically getting a ton of instructional design.

Context added in, you’re getting website building LMS website building context added in. So that course is, can really supercharge your output while also still leveraging the best parts of your knowledge, skills, and life experience into the training. So the next thing I wanna talk about is Claude design.

So this is for creating visuals. Even interactive lessons. So we all know you can use a tool like chat, GBT or any kind of AI to create a picture real quick, but cloud design is more higher level than just creating one picture. You can create much more complex projects. So things like course covers, slides.

Social media assets even an articulate storyline replacement that nobody saw coming, you can do with club design. So what are some obvious places that you need visual help as a course creator or a WordPress LMS website builder? We’ve got the featured images for courses and memberships featured images for blog posts and other content outside of your courses.

We’ve got lesson graphics. Could be diagrams, could be info graphics. We have sales page banners. There’s all kinds of things we could do. We could do slide decks. You could export to PowerPoint, PDF, Canva or even HTML. Somebody showed me recently how to do a presentation that I developed in Claude.

But export it as A-H-T-M-L file and then it actually works like a slideshow presenter. So I just jumped in my Zoom webinar that I was doing, and I had this HTML file that included my slideshow presentation that I co-created with Claude. It was amazingly fast and efficient. And the cool thing about claw design is you can put in a bunch of context before you get started on stuff like.

Your design system. So what is a design system? If you don’t know? A design system is everything from your brand guide, maybe your logo, variations of your logo. Your fonts, your typographies, your colors all that stuff that creates a unique brand. Then a design system. Maybe you have certain ways of doing different com components, like a testimonial tends to look like this.

Our headlines call to action. Sections look like this are grid of featured content like blog posts or podcast episodes or courses, looks like this, and so on. And once you give that to Claude Design, it has all of that concepts con that context there. There’s so many artificial intelligence, image generation tools out there, but I would encourage you to check out what you can do with Claude.

And the other thing I just wanna mention in terms of interactive lessons I’m trying to remember the guy’s name. I think it’s Tim. I saw a video. He’s an instructional designer who I. Has an instructional design community and he was showing how to create interactive content that you would make in a tool like articulate storyline or rise.

But doing it inside cloud design, which basically means club design can do what a really expensive. Tool like articulate storyline can do. And it’s not just like a one shot, Hey, build me a course about X. Or a experienced instructional designer is going to approach the claw design tool with a storyboard, a bunch of reference material, and so on.

So we’re building like a complex interactive lesson. What I love about this in the WordPress LMS space, like with lifter LMS, is it’s, you don’t have to just do videos or text space courses, like digital textbooks. You can give fancy, you can build interactive experiences teaching aids, quizzes and things like that.

That’s what the H five P. Technology is for, and there’s a WordPress plugin for bringing all that H five P interactive content in all. That is to say all these tools like the e-learning authoring tools like Articulate storyline, and many more, as well as interactive e-learning content creation tools like H five P Claude Design allows us to create these kinds of interactions.

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And then just easily embed them in our WordPress LMS lessons, which is pretty incredible that you can do that and essentially replace a really expensive tool, like how cloud design can replace Canva, it can replace Photoshop. There’s a lot of interesting things happening in terms of the power you’re getting with these AI tools.

And not only are you replacing a tool, it’s helping you actually use the tool and get the most out of it. So let’s talk about how to get leverage with Claude Cowork and the connectors. So it’s one thing to chat with ai. It’s another thing to give it access to your Google documents your calendar, your email inbox, and so on.

But this is where you go from chat to a agentic use of ai. You’re actually creating projects that maybe they’re on Aron job or a timer, and this, they’re gonna happen every day. So what am I talking about? The first thing to think about with Claude Cowork is that you can do file organization. So you can do research synthesis, you can do document prep, you can do data extraction from unstructured, files.

You could scrape content from an external resource to add to as raw materials for whatever you’re doing. So what are some of the most common connectors that you can connect with Claude? We’ve got Gmail, we’ve got Google Drive, we’ve got calendar systems. We’ve got Notion we can integrate Canva, Stripe, Figma.

These are all just example, other software tools that we could integrate with our connectors. So then instead of us as the human doing something, the Cowork tool could do that for us. What’s a practical example for a course creator? If the cowork has access to your email and you do email support for your students in your courses powered by lifter LMS, you could ask Claude to summarize last month’s student questions by Gmail, and then turn the top three into new lessons in your course.

So that would be an example of really. Leveraging Claude to look for patterns and not just find patterns and report back, but also create a learning asset that you can use going forward. You can also do business intelligence. So if Claude Cowork is connected to your Stripe account let’s say it could look in and just immediate, you could just ask it like, Hey, which one of my courses.

Converted the most last month, and then what do you recommend I focus on? Or something like that. Let’s say you have a huge catalog of courses. You can think about it as like chatting to your e-commerce analytics and that sort of thing. It’s super powerful. I’ve connected our Claude AI agent to our Google Analytics as well as our.

Podcast analytics. And now that because this business is almost 15 years old, been podcasting for almost 15 years. All, there’s so much data in the analytics, it’s almost overwhelming for me to look at. But I can talk to our Claude powered AI agent and just ask it to look for, Hey, what are the most popular topics?

It can basically look through Google Analytics, cross reference what’s going on in SoundCloud, our podcast hosting service, and help figure out like what kind of episodes are people most excited about and so on. It’s really blowing my mind of what, because the AI kind of has unlimited shelf space, whereas my brain can only hold so much analytics and data and reporting.

I’m able to be much more data-driven, informed, and deal with that data lake of a large amount of data that’s hard for the human to gr that the artificial intelligence can. The next thing I wanted to mention to you is using Claude to become a super coach. So what do by becoming a super coach.

The thing is, first we have the experts curse, which means sometimes it’s really hard for us as subject matter experts to teach to a beginner. ’cause we were already so far along, we kinda lost the beginner’s mind. Maybe We have so much information and skills and we’re not trained as a teacher, so we don’t know how to organize it or coach somebody effectively.

But. Using Claude you can take that body of knowledge and extract frameworks that are approachable to your coaching clients at the stage of development that they’re at, and solve the experts core curse In that way, the Claude can also help you construct your offer.

That’s a big part of the expert’s curse in that we have too much information. We tend to make our signature course too big ’cause we don’t know how to trim it down to what our target market needs. We’re building a, what I call a giant resource course, which won’t be effective. We may need to brainstorm the actual offer that we have with.

Ai how do I support my people? Should I do an online community? Should I do private coaching, group coaching? Should I do virtual events, office hours, all these things. And figuring out your offer as a coach is, super helpful. Especially even refining the basics like the customer avatar, who is my.

Coaching, ideal coaching client. What’s the ideal customer profile or student avatar? Some, a lot of great coaches will do an intake process where they need to take various data points on where the client is at. So if it, was a fitness coach, it might have to do with the fitness level, current fitness level.

If it was a business coach, we might need information around. The niche how, much our annual revenue is our team size and so on. If it was a relationship coach, we may need some history of what are the, your biggest parenting challenges or dating challenges and so on. And then what Claude can do is can help the coach prescribe and go into the course catalog.

Of resources already available that are relevant based on this person’s intake form of data for that client to get started with. So that’s just one example in terms of speeding up with the intake process. And if Claude has eyes on your current frameworks and stuff and you’re getting these intakes, it may identify a gap of a new.

A new framework that you could create or resource to help your clients get results that may be missing from your current offer. And I also just wanna men mention one of the things with Claude is a pro tip, A friend of mine over at very good plugins the team behind WP Fusion built a tool for persistent memory.

It’s a persistent memory layer for Claude called Auto Mem. So that’s at auto mem.ai. We use that with our agent to have the persistent memory. And once you get going with Claude in this way you, it’s almost like you can’t go back, like your mind’s blown when you first use chat GPT or where when you first use claude.ai, the chat interface.

But once you start working with agents, then the persistent memory comes into play. It feels like a super superpower. Yeah, so it’s, all about amplifying yourself and not replacing yourself. And these are just some pro tips on how to best use Claude. But I’m also just encouraging you to just go learn.

If you haven’t done the desktop app for Claude yet, do that. If you haven’t done cowork yet, do that, which is gonna get you started on the basics of agents. If you’ve never done Claude code, try it. Even if you’re not a developer, and learn how to type in the command line. I never thought I would do that in my life, but now I spend most of my time in Claude Code and I’m not a developer.

The output, my understanding clog code is the most powerful way to use that. And there’s different. Plan levels, right? So there’s like the $20 a month level, and I’m sure these prices can change. And, then there’s like the a hundred dollars a month level, and then there’s something called Max, which I think is $200 a month.

I’m currently at the $100 a month level. But just get started do the free stuff if you can afford it, get on the $20 a month starter premium plan to get more tokens, which just means that you’ll be able to do more with Claude. And then once you get up and your output is really getting strong, it makes sense.

I was like glad to upgrade to the a hundred dollars a month point because of how much value and time saving I was getting. It is, it’s a total. No brainer. Claude is a co-pilot. It’s not the captain. Do not give up your seat at the front of your education company. I have to do that. I have to try hard not to try, give too much to Claude.

And what I mean by that is. If you do the first 10% of the, like setting up the project, then Claude does the the middle 80% and then you do the last 10% to like Polish, introduce your unique insights and so on. That’s what I find is like really good. The idea that you spend the first 1% to give something to Claude and whatever comes out, it’s the finished product and you walk away.

That’s, I don’t recommend that. Even as Claude continues to improve always inject your humanity in the beginning, the during and the after. ’cause it’s gonna make a superior product. Whatever it is you’re working on, you still need other tools besides flawed. So Claude is disrupting a lot of things right now.

But you still may use other AI tools to do various things. You’ve still got video editing to do, video hosting to do. You’ve got your learning management system, lifter, LMS, and your WordPress site. This is a pro tip for you. I just want to encourage you, if you’re not necessarily all in on WordPress, keep an eye on the space because because of the open source nature of WordPress and the community around the project it is getting easier.

Even with Claude to quote Vibe code a website. But trust me, when I say at the end of the day, 95% of people are gonna want and need a content management system like WordPress and the LMS that sits on top of it like lifter LMS, to actually run the day-to-day and be a tool that both the AI and the humans.

Can really feel comfortable, stable, strong, and secure. And so Claude is the multiplier. Try it out if you have not done it yet. The smart playbook is augmentation, not replacement. The course creator, the top course creators in 2026 are using artificial intelligence as a force. Multiplier on top of human judgment.

And I would encourage you to do just try one cloud upgrade this week. Try the desktop app if you haven’t yet. Try cowork. Try design try cloud code if you haven’t tried it yet. And most importantly, if you’re really trying to get a course out and you haven’t done that yet. Go to the Lifter LMS Academy, that’s at academy dot lifter lms.com.

Look for the free course called How to Create an Online Course with Chat GBT. Jump into it. Every lesson has training, and then below it has a prompt that you can use to move forward in the course creation process. And just swap out Claude for chat, GPT. And I think you’re gonna be blown away at the results that you get.

If you know somebody, a course creator, who is just using cat GBT currently and hasn’t tried Claude and you’ve tried Claude yet, I would encourage you to tell your friends to give Claude a try, and also check out our course on creating an online course with ai. Always keep the human in there.

We want to amplify ourselves. Not replace ourselves to create the best work to help the most people with the impact from our online courses. Thank you for checking out this episode. We really appreciate it, and we’ll see you in the next one. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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Most membership sites do not die from lack of effort. They collapse under their own weight. In this solo episode of LMScast, Chris Badgett walks through why most membership sites fail, and the three-part alignment model that keeps the winners standing. This one is for course creators, coaches, and education entrepreneurs running (or about to launch) a membership site on LifterLMS or any WordPress LMS. If you have ever added “one more” benefit to your offer and quietly regretted it, pull up a chair.

The failure pattern is almost always the same. Creators get excited, they hear about group coaching, template libraries, second memberships, surprise upsells, and they bolt all of it onto the site. What started as a clean offer becomes a Rube Goldberg machine that nobody wants to run, least of all the owner.

Chris breaks the fix into three pieces that have to align: the business model, the pricing, and the offer stack. Miss one and the site stops paying rent on your time. Get all three in sync and the membership starts to compound.

He walks through four core subscription-style models worth knowing. Training-based. Resource library. Community-first. And the Netflix-of-learning catalog. Each one has its own rhythm, pricing ceiling, and content obligations. The fastest way to kill a membership is to build one model while secretly trying to run another.

Most membership sites collapse under their own unnecessary complexity.

Chris Badgett

Take Funk Roberts and Over 40 Alpha. Training-based model, weekly live coaching, a clear niche (men over 40), tens of thousands of paying members at $29 to $49 per month. The business model, the price, and the offer stack all reinforce each other. Or Ziv Raviv and Balloon Artist College, a six-figure business in a niche with roughly 3,000 people in the whole addressable market. The alignment carries the day.

Chris also covers three off-pattern models worth a look: one-time lifetime deals (great for early-adopter funding), cohort memberships (group moves together through a defined stretch), and continuing education or professional association memberships. CE memberships are quietly one of the most durable and profitable categories on WordPress right now, especially in regulated fields like healthcare, legal, and the trades. The LifterLMS Continuing Education add-on handles compliance tracking end to end.

On pricing, Chris leans on a story from SaaS pricing legend Patrick Campbell, who famously tells audiences, “Let me guess. You just guessed.” Most creators do. The fix is good, better, best tiers (three, maybe four, no more), annual over monthly when the price allows, and a real free or $1 trial at the front door to filter serious buyers from tire-kickers.

The offer stack is what sits inside the box once somebody joins. Courses are the anchor. Templates, live events, coaching, community, members-only newsletters, all of it can compound value, but also compound your workload. Add it only if you can keep the promise.

Chris closes with a three-question gut check. Does your model fit your niche? Does your pricing match your member’s willingness to pay? Does your offer stack support retention without burning you out? If the answer to any one is no, that is exactly where the collapse is starting.

Here’s What You’ll Learn

• Why complexity, not demand, is what usually kills a membership site
• The four main subscription membership models (training, resource library, community-first, Netflix-of-learning)
• Three alternative models worth considering (lifetime deals, cohorts, continuing education)
• How to price using good, better, best tiers, plus how to think about annual versus monthly
• How LifterLMS access plans map to any membership model you can imagine

Key Takeaways

• Align three things before adding anything else: business model, pricing, offer stack
• Cap pricing plans at three (four max). More tiers confuse. Fewer leave revenue on the table
• Default to annual pricing with a 20% discount when your price point allows
• Offer a free or $1 trial to lift conversion and filter serious buyers
• Play inside the LifterLMS access plan UI until the settings feel native. The tech is already there. The work is the business thinking
• Use the three-question gut check: does the model fit the niche, does the pricing match the value, does the offer stack support retention without burning you out

Resources Mentioned

• LifterLMS Academy (home for the free and paid training memberships)
• Course Pricing Focuser (free course on the LifterLMS Academy)
• The Perfect Offer Playbook (premium training on the LifterLMS Academy)
• LifterLMS Continuing Education add-on
• LifterLMS Social Learning
• Document Library Pro by Barn2
• BuddyBoss
• Funk Roberts on Over 40 Alpha (LMScast episode)
• Tim McIvor’s CPD platform for school psychologists (LifterLMS case study)
• Ziv Raviv on niche membership sites (LMScast episode)
• Ziv Raviv on $377K in 5 years (LMScast episode)
• Alex Standiford on Siren Affiliates + Netflix-of-learning (LMScast episode)
• Siren Affiliates
• Dan Martell’s SaaS Academy
• Patrick Campbell on ProfitWell (sold to Paddle)

About the Host

Chris Badgett is the co-founder and CEO of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Chris hosts LMScast, the #1 podcast for course creators, membership site owners, and education entrepreneurs. Together, we build the future of online education.

2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

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Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay tuned, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and in this solo episode we’re going to look at why most membership sites fail, and a model that you can use today so that your membership site does not fail and has the highest likelihood of success. Most membership sites collapse under their own unnecessary complexity and lack of key missing pieces that we’re going to talk about in this episode. The winners keep three things aligned. The first thing is the business model, the pricing, and then the offer stack.

Just to jump in, why membership sites collapse is like why WordPress websites collapse. When you’re new to WordPress, you get really excited about all these different plugins, and you start installing all these things, and you hear about this tool so you add it to your site. You just overcomplicate and build a Rube Goldberg machine of a website.

The same thing happens with membership business models. Part of the reason this happens is because education entrepreneurs and coaches and course creators, they get really excited, and for good reason, and they hear about a new idea like, oh, I should host office hours, so I’m going to add office hours to my membership site. Oh, I should add a template library. I’m going to add that to my membership site. I’m going to do one-on-one coaching, group coaching. I’m going to do this upsell. I’m going to do this continuity offer. I’m going to create a second membership about X. I’m going to put part of this course in the membership, and then the rest of the course in another membership. You see where I’m going. Things start to get overly complicated without a structural foundation.

I do want to highlight, we do have a training course on the LifterLMS Academy called the Perfect Offer Playbook, which gets into the offer aspect and building up your offer stack. It’s a really in-depth training, so go check that out.

As we discuss this, I want to define some terms for you because it’s easy to get a little confused. We have the LMS, the learning management system like LifterLMS. We have courses, so you could have big courses or mini courses, which are basically structured content of lessons that provide structured data that a student can learn from through videos, content, quizzes, assignments, whatever.

Then you have the concept of a membership. The way I’m using a membership is to define what content is protected. Perhaps you want to put multiple courses inside of a membership, so you’re creating a course bundle. You can also use a membership to protect and sell access to other parts of your website, outside of courses, like a template library, premium blog content, a calendar with events on it, and so on.

Then there’s the concept of the subscription. That is a recurring payment usually at a fixed amount, a recurring payment mechanism. In the world of LifterLMS, we have a concept called access plans. What an access plan allows you to do is you can put one or multiple access plans on a course and/or a membership that defines the pricing and the access rules around accessing that course or that membership.

It’s important to get clear on the difference between a course, a membership, a subscription, and an access plan. The LifterLMS access plan is the most flexible system that I’ve seen on the internet for pricing. You can do any pricing model and access model you could possibly think of, from one time payments, to free trials, to lifetime access, to payment plans, to group access plans. What else could we do here? We could do yearly, we could do monthly, we could do daily. There’s all kinds of start dates, end dates, enrollment periods. All this is possible with LifterLMS and the access plan system.

The main thing so that your membership site does not fail is to align three things: the business model, the pricing, and the offer stack. If you miss one of those, or overcomplicate one of those, your membership site is just going to collapse under its own weight. Let’s plant ourselves on the membership site business models first.

I’m going to go over four subscription style membership models and start there. The first one is one of my favorites, which is what I call the training membership, or a training based membership site. This is where you usually have a catalog of courses, or potentially one big signature program type course.

Example. LifterLMS user, and we did a podcast with him. Funk Roberts has a training membership called the Over 40 Alpha Brotherhood, which has 10,000 paying members at $29 to $49 a month with weekly live coaching calls. You can check out the case study we have on Funk on our membership site.

A training membership, or a training based membership site, will have courses, but then often other benefits like access to group coaching, whether that’s live or virtual, and so on. We’ve got some exciting stuff in LifterLMS 10.0 for group coaching events, virtual and in person, and how you can integrate events into your LMS. But that is a conversation for another day.

The next membership site business model I’d like to explain is what I call the resource library membership. This is courses plus a searchable library of downloadable templates, swipe files, and tools. For example, LifterLMS has its own media protection mechanism that solved one of the biggest content privacy issues in WordPress, which is that when you upload a file to your WordPress media library, it’s public. It’s not actually private. Anyways, LifterLMS users can actually protect files that they upload to their WordPress media library and include them in their courses and memberships. That could include downloadable templates, PDF documents, audio files, video files, whatever.

There’s also a really sweet implementation you can do with a third party plugin by Barn2 called Document Library Pro. If you’re going for a very resource rich template library that has a ton of files in it, you need a lot of organization and filterable, searchable document libraries. Check out Document Library Pro, which works great with LifterLMS. We also have a blog post on our site, as well as on the Document Library Pro or Barn2 website, about how to use LifterLMS and Document Library Pro together. Essentially the second membership site business model is the resource library. You may not be leading with the courses, but you have some, but you also have this rich collection of files that helps the ideal learner in your membership.

The third business model of subscription style membership is the community first membership. This is where courses plus community is the primary product. You could have forums, live events in person or virtual. You could have peer accountability. You could have mini mastermind groups. Essentially the content supports the tribe, not the other way around.

In this age of artificial intelligence and isolation, and people going more and more to the internet to connect with other people, community-based membership sites are very important. When you throw in the education component, so we have courses inside of our community, community can become a very sticky type of membership when they’re well designed around a specific customer avatar or learner profile. That is the community first membership. I should also mention LifterLMS has a social learning add-on, so you can quickly turn your WordPress LMS website into a social online community site. It’s sort of like having your own kind of private Facebook group, but on your website that you own and control. So that’s the community first membership.

The fourth subscription style membership business model is what I call a Netflix of learning. If you think about Netflix, it’s like a collection of movies and shows, and you pay a subscription every month for access to the catalog of content. One subscription unlocks the whole library. A Netflix of learning is an awesome opportunity. Those are great for broad audiences with lots of niche interests.

In my early days of building membership sites, I worked with some photography focused membership sites where they had courses and lots of niche topics within photography, from wedding to product shots, to portraits, to architecture, and so on. It was like a Netflix of learning for photographers. This is a really cool membership site if you are prolific, and/or you’re also leading a community and getting a bunch of creators together to all contribute to the Netflix of learning.

We also did a podcast here on LMScast with Alex from Siren Affiliates, where we go over how to exactly build a Netflix of learning with Siren Affiliates, WordPress, and LifterLMS. There’s also a dedicated YouTube video that shows click by click how to build a Netflix of learning or Udemy clone type site on our YouTube channel. Go subscribe to the LifterLMS YouTube channel if you have not done that yet.

I’d like to give you three other popular alternative membership site models. The other three models change the pace or the cadence. One of these is called the one-time or lifetime payment memberships. This is something like a course plus lifetime access paid once. It’s basically evergreen content with no ongoing deliverables. You could think of it like an AppSumo style, lifetime deal pricing. Zero churn risk, one shot at the revenue.

Sometimes when you’re first launching your membership, you might want to do an early adopter or founding member offer like this, where you plan on doing one of the subscription or recurring revenue based memberships later. For those people that take the plunge into your membership early, join you in the early days, they might get a lifetime membership for one time cost, and they get rewarded by not having a recurring payment. It also helps you fund the early days of your membership site, and also to test and validate your membership site idea.

The other thing you can do is cohort based memberships. LifterLMS, as an example, has a concept called course cohorts, where you can have different cohorts that use the same course over and over again, but for different groups of people moving through at a different time. You can also do this at the membership level, where you have cohorts of people that belong to say the 2026 spring membership, which has its own course catalog, community, and other features. Cohort based memberships are really about a group of people joining at the same time, at a similar stage, and then moving through the training in the membership or in all the content and resources together, which can be very powerful.

I joined a great program by Dan Martell called SaaS Academy. That was a membership I was in for two years. It was not cohort based. I came in and there were a couple new people around when I came in, and then every week or month there were always new people joining, and so on. It was still great, but it wasn’t cohort based, and it actually worked really well. I liked the way he had it. For some membership sites, it might make sense to really lock in, move people through together, particularly if you’re doing a lot of instructor led training in person or virtually, and you’re working through a process, so everybody is on the same page as they work through the membership.

The other type of membership site, which we’re seeing more and more of in LifterLMS, is the continuing education or professional association membership site. This is where you have things like courses for continuing education units, or CEUs. LifterLMS has a dedicated add-on called LifterLMS Continuing Education that has everything you need to build a compliance tracking and continuing education business from your WordPress site.

It’s very popular to see these kind of membership sites in regulated professions like healthcare, legal, and the trades. There’s often a recurring need to stay certified, recertify, or get new credit hours every year. We’ve done a couple interviews on LMScast, like with Tim McIvor, who does continuing education for school psychologists. There was another one we did a while back on pharmaceutical continuing education. Continuing education is a major profit center for memberships, particularly around industries that have an ongoing need for recurring continuing education. These membership sites can be very profitable, successful, and sticky.

Alright, so we talked about the membership model. You just have to get really clear on what it is you’re building, what is the business model, and you need to challenge your assumptions. Sometimes just get started. You don’t have to figure all this out perfectly, but it’s important to keep revisiting and ask yourself, do I have the right membership business model for my membership site that’s in alignment with what my market wants, the pricing, and what it is that I actually offer?

Let’s talk about the offer stack. The courses are the fundamental piece of the offer. They’re the anchor. If you’re using LifterLMS and LifterLMS’s membership functionality, the offer stack is the courses plus everything else you layer on top. It could just be more courses. You’ve got that, start there. You can do course bundles where you do all the courses, the Netflix style, or you could do groups of courses and course bundles. The offer stack can continue to grow. By offer stack, I mean once somebody purchases your membership and now they’re an enrolled active user on your learning management system website, what do they get? What’s inside the box?

We talked about courses. What else could they get? They could get templates, they could get swipe files, they could get downloadable assets, they could get other files. Or even I see people doing things like custom GPTs, or certain spreadsheets, or Canva files, or other kind of newsletters that are for members only. These are fast to consume, high perceived value, easy to add monthly.

It’s really important if you’re charging a recurring monthly fee to add recurring value, which means you’ve got to keep those things up to date. You’ve got to keep adding new templates, downloadable assets, resources. If you do a members only newsletter, you’ve got to keep that rolling monthly. You want to be sure not to over commit so that your offer stack is sustainable for you as a creator.

The other thing that can add an incredible amount of value to your membership is live events. LifterLMS has an events add-on. When you’re watching this, it may have come out, or it is about to come out as of this recording. We were just testing, it’s in the final stages of testing for a launch. That basically allows you to do virtual and in person events from your membership site, whether they’re location based or virtual. We’ve got direct Zoom integration and so on.

It’s in the offer stack that we can add things like group coaching calls, or one-on-one private coaching calls, or an in-person event, like on location somewhere in the world. It could be a hybrid model where we do both. These synchronous, or asynchronous but replayable, events like webinars, recorded workshops, guest trainer sessions, all these can get added into the offer stack in addition to courses.

Just a pro tip for you. If you ever do guest instructor stuff, some people use LifterLMS, they use a structure of a course, they use each lesson to house a specific webinar or workshop. That way you can use the existing course structure in a slightly non-traditional way to put all the webinars in one place, or put all the guest workshops in one place, and so on. Just an idea for you.

The other thing is the community part of the offer stack. You could do that with the LifterLMS Social Learning add-on. You could do that with tools like BuddyBoss, or a forum, Slack community, Discord, Circle. There’s so many different ways to do online community. You can even do in-person community if your target market is in the same geography.

I just want to reiterate in the offer stack, some kind of coaching or one-on-one access can be very powerful. This could be one-on-one private coaching monthly or even weekly. It could be group based. It could be a private forum that the site owner is active in. It could be like a red phone where you can call the coach in an emergency. It could be email access, it could be text message access, or something like a Telegram community for support. When you give one-on-one level support, this really needs to be priced appropriately or in the premium tier. That’s a very important part of your support mechanism, which by the way, we talk about in the Perfect Offer Playbook training course, which is on the LifterLMS Academy. Go check that out.

The subscription economy is estimated to hit 330 billion in 2026, growing at roughly 12% annually. This stack matters because there is a lot of demand for subscriptions in the world. A lot of us think, oh man, I don’t want another subscription that I’ve got to sign up for. But if you do your offer stack correctly with your membership site, you can take a piece of that $330 billion subscription economy. That statistic is from InternetRetailing.net.

The next thing I want to talk about is pricing. Now that we’ve figured out our business model, we’ve figured out our offer stack, how much do we charge for that? Let’s talk about the pricing. Before I dive in, I want you to know that we do dive deep in a free training on the LifterLMS Academy, a free course called the Course Pricing Focuser, which is going to go super deep on pricing. I would encourage you to look at that. I’m going to remind you at the end on how to get access to that and a lot of other things through a free membership. So stay tuned.

The price is really where most membership site owners guess. The winners of the membership site game don’t guess. They match the price to the model. I remember being at one of Dan Martell’s in person SaaS Academy events, and there was a pricing expert and a subscription economy expert there. His name’s Patrick Campbell. He sold his Price Intelligently software to a company called Paddle, I believe, for $200 million. This guy is one of the top pricing experts in the world.

I was basically learning from him about software pricing. One of the funniest things he says when he does a talk on stage is he asks the audience how they chose the price for their offer. Then he says, wait, let me guess. He holds up a finger in the air, like he’s just going to lick his finger and he’s just going to guess. What he says is, let me guess, you just guessed. That’s exactly true. Most people don’t put a lot of effort into pricing, or they just do a quick look at competitors and fall somewhere in the range. But there’s a whole science and art to pricing.

Again, the Course Pricing Focuser course goes into a lot of detail, and I highly recommend that as a takeaway so that you can nail your price. But the first thing is recurring versus one-time pricing. Recurring is obviously better because it compounds over time. One time is great, but you limit your revenue. It’s just per user. You’re constantly needing to get new users. Basically you have to get really clear and honest with yourself about the recurring value that you’re going to do if you want to do recurring. You need to make sure that you can sustain the promise that you’re making for recurring value over the long term.

One of my favorite pricing tricks I learned from a pricing expert named Marcos is the three tier pricing approach. He calls it good, better, best. It’s like bronze, silver, gold type pricing. According to MembershipSolutions.com, good, better, best pricing generates roughly 60% more revenue per cohort than single plan pricing. It’s really important once you start building pricing plans to not overdo it. I recommend not doing more than three. You can probably get away with four. But any more than that and you’re just confusing people and overcomplicating your offer.

Really, the reason a good, better, best pricing plan makes more revenue is because you’re able to capture more of the market. You want the middle plan, the better plan, to be the one that most people buy. The cool thing about having one lower than that is that if the middle plan is too expensive but you can still add value in a lower plan, you get somebody else in the door. Then there’ll be people in your market who are not price sensitive, who want everything. Let’s say you offer the private coaching in the top plan. It costs five times more than the middle plan, or even more. You can charge a lot more for that.

There’s always a segment of your market that is where your primary offer is just out of reach, while at the same time there’s people in your market who could afford to pay way more and get more value. That’s why good, better, best pricing works. There’s other reasons it works, but those are the main reasons.

Then there’s the decision of annual versus monthly. If you can go annual, I recommend that, because annual subscribers are roughly 40% less likely to cancel than monthly subscribers and carry significantly higher lifetime value. That data was found on the MembershipSolutions.com website. Monthly is cool because what it allows you to do is, if the annual price is really expensive, it’s much easier to charge, let’s say, a thousand dollars a month than $10,000 a year in general. In that case, if I was at that price point, I would probably consider monthly.

If you’re in a lower price point offering, annual only is a great idea. Let’s say your membership is only $50 a month, and let’s say you do it annually for $499 a year. That’s still within reach. What you can also do is put a toggle on your website and give people the option to do either, where they could do annual or monthly, then leave it up to them to decide.

The other thing, when you do an annual and monthly offer, just a pro tip for you out there, the annual plan in general is recommended that it’s discounted by 20%. When I say a thousand dollars a month or $10,000 a year, what I’m saying is it’s not $12,000 a year. I’m giving you two months free. That’s another way to think about that 20% discount if you’re trying to nail your pricing. If you give them monthly and annual, on the annual option you can just multiply your monthly price by 10 and not 12, which gives you a good spot where if they commit to annual they’re getting two months for free, which incentivizes people to go for the annual to save money if they’re going to be in this for the long term.

I’m a big fan of trials for membership sites. There’s a couple types of trials. There’s free trials, there’s cheap trials, and then there’s expensive trials. What do I mean by that? A free trial is fantastic because you’re literally saying, hey, I’ll give you a day for free, two weeks for free, a month for free. I believe so much in my product that I’ll let you in the door, and then after that trial period is over, your credit card or PayPal account will start getting charged. And by the way, you can cancel if you don’t like what’s going on.

I’m a huge fan of free trials. I think they’re great. I also like paid trials, a little bit of skin in the game. I’m a big fan of the $1 trial. Just getting somebody to pay even a nominal amount of money is really helpful as a filter for serious buyers and to lift the conversion and eliminate some kind of lower quality folks that don’t really have any intention. They just wanted to see what was in here for free, but they’re not that serious. By having a $1 trial, it really filters out and you get some really great leads in your platform.

If you want to do more sales by having that dollar there, that paywall, it reduces the amount of people that you can reach out to if you’re trying to promote your main offer, or do some live connecting with them to see if they’re a fit, answer their questions, and make sure they stick around and decide to stay. So it’s trials. LifterLMS has trials built in. It’s optional. You can turn it on in your membership access plans.

Then the expensive trial is where the first payment is actually much bigger than the ongoing payment. This is what’s also known as a continuity offer. The trial period might be a thousand dollars the first month, and then cheap, like $30 a month ongoing after that. That’s a different style of trial or continuity offer where most of the value comes in the first month, but then there’s still ongoing value but a lesser amount until they cancel.

In terms of churn, when you’re pricing, nobody is going to stay with you absolutely forever. There might be a few, but it’s important to figure out what’s an acceptable churn rate for you. I’m a fan of recurring cancel anytime forever access plans, but I also like to hold in my mind that I want to get my person in my membership successful and have the transformation, solve their problem, help them discover the opportunity in a set period of time, ideally.

As an example, when I joined the SaaS Academy membership, I looked at it as my version of graduate school. I did not go to graduate school or university, but that’s typically in the United States a two year program. I was like, you know what, I’ll try this thing, and if it’s good I’ll renew for a second year. They did annual, by the way, and it was good. I stayed for a second year. At the end of the second year, I decided to move on, and I was super grateful for my time and I learned a lot. My business grew by 2.6 times. It was awesome. But it had a shelf life of about two years for me.

Some people stayed in there for one year. Some people, there’s people in there that have been in there probably for seven years or eight years, however long it’s been going, and there’s a couple different tiers in there. My whole point is to think about healthy churn. Churn, if you’re not used to the terminology, is what percentage of your people cancel every month or every year. It really depends on the industry.

Usually if you’re going after the higher end of the market, more enterprise or more professional into the market with whatever your membership site content topic is about, you’re going to have a lower churn than something that has more of a market that’s more price sensitive and maybe more hobby based, less serious or professional. That’s okay. Figure out your churn rate. If you could do 3% or 5% monthly churn, that’s pretty healthy. That’s a good target.

The goal, if you really want to get into the math of it all, is where you have net negative churn, which is where your existing members are referring so much that even with the natural churn rate that is there, more people keep coming in the site. It just explodes exponentially. Or maybe if you’re using something like LifterLMS Groups, people keep adding more team members. It’s known as net negative churn, where you’re just doing amazing.

The final piece of pricing math that we’re going to talk about today is the lifetime value, or LTV, to cost to acquire a customer, or CAC, ratio. Basically what that means is that if we do a three to one ratio of lifetime value to CAC, that’s good. What that means is if it costs me a thousand dollars to acquire a customer, that’s my CAC, my cost to acquire a customer. Let’s say the average lifetime value, or LTV, of one of my members is $3,000. That’s great. That means that for every $1,000 you spend to acquire a member, you get $3,000, which is basically the average of retention and churn and all that baked in.

You’ve got to find your healthy customer acquisition method, whether that’s paid or organic, and also get super clear on your churn and your lifetime value of your average member. All that comes together to create a training based membership site that is aligned.

I wanted to give a specific example of a membership site where this alignment was really done well with the offer stack, the business model, and the pricing. He’s been on the show several times now. His name is Ziv Raviv, and he’s an expert at building niche membership sites. He’s a really interesting guy. He’s in a lot of different niches. I like one of his early projects, which was Balloon Artist College, which is a membership site that helps child entertainers or balloon artists start and grow their businesses.

This is a really unique niche. There was only like 3,000 balloon artists in the world, or in the addressable market that Ziv was going after. I find incredible that he made $277,000 a year when I interviewed him, and this was a while ago, about his membership site. The business model works here because it’s in a tiny niche, and the pricing was good. It wasn’t super expensive. The balloon artist has a lower willingness or ability to pay. His offer stack really matched up with what the community needed. So he had courses, community, tactical resources. Nothing extra, nothing missing. Ziv is one of my favorite education entrepreneurs. I look up to him and see him as a shining example of lifting up others through education, our company mission. If you want to learn more about Ziv, I would encourage you to go listen to all the episodes we’ve done with Ziv Raviv. I think there’s been three of them.

I want to just go over a little bit of the technical pieces of how to think about putting all this together. This is the part that most people skip, which is that the technical mechanism for setting up your membership site is already in your learning management system. The LifterLMS access plans, you’ve got to get Zen with them. Play around with them. Try to come up with your good, better, best strategy. Play around with just the settings, so you can see, oh, I could do the sale pricing, I could do a trial, I could do a free thing, I could do sell to groups. It’s just going to stir your imagination.

You’ll see the payment flexibility options, like one time, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or until cancellation. Duration can run indefinitely, or you can, if you have an eight week program and that’s it, you can do that. Look at the visibility options. Plans can be public, featured, or hidden. If you need to create a secret backdoor plan to your membership to let somebody in who’s doing some testing for you, or as a benefit to an industry partner, you can create these kind of secret backdoors or hidden access plans.

The main point is that every one of the models we covered here maps to a specific access plan configuration in LifterLMS. The tech is already there. The work is the business thinking, not the setup. Get your offer stack together, choose a price, choose a business model, and then come up with pricing and keep working on it. This is one of those things where for your membership site to succeed and not to fail, you’ve got to test all your assumptions and keep tweaking and fine tuning. Sometimes a little change can dramatically impact something.

For example, if you have a more expensive membership, let’s say it is a thousand dollars a month, and maybe you’ve got a couple people in there and it’s going all right and they love it, but you’re just not closing sales. Potentially introducing a one week free trial or dollar trial could literally be game changing. Just by removing that friction and letting people basically try before they buy or commit to the ongoing payment.

Here’s the whole alignment right here. It’s just answering three questions. Does your model fit your niche? That’s question one. Does the pricing match your value, your member’s willingness to pay? And does your offer stack support retention without burning you out? If the answer is no, this is where the collapse is happening, or something is missing that you really need to fill in.

I would also encourage you to keep simplicity in mind. It’s really easy with a membership site to try to add in too many bells and whistles, benefits, different options, pricing tier complexity. Keep it super simple. You can test things. If you add a benefit that nobody really uses, take it away. Or if you’re unsure if a benefit’s going to work, add it, see what happens. If it works, great, keep it.

I wanted to encourage you to check out a real membership using LifterLMS. If you go to the LifterLMS Academy, that’s at academy.lifterlms.com, I’ve got two memberships for you. One is free and the other is paid. No matter what, definitely get the free one, which includes our Course Pricing Focuser course, as well as a bunch of other free trainings to help you. If you want to go big and get all our free stuff and all the premium training on the LifterLMS Academy, sign up for that one. Just go to academy.lifterlms.com, click on memberships at the top, and you’ll see that.

The LifterLMS Academy has a bunch of courses that you can get into individually if you want. Some are free, some are paid. We have two memberships that basically give you access to some or all of the courses. Go check that out.

Just keep in mind, your LMS is a membership site. Align the three pieces and let the complexity collapse into something you can actually run and manage for your membership. Last time, those three pieces are your membership site business model, your pricing, and then your offer stack, what’s included in your membership. I’m Chris from LMScast. I want to encourage you to keep building your membership site. Keep going. Keep taking action, and we’ll see you in the next episode. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett takes a deep and honest look back at more than 12 years of creating LifterLMS, detailing seven big blunders that molded both the product and his evolution as an entrepreneur. He starts out by discussing content and SEO, stating that one of his first regrets was not learning how to write effectively for search engines earlier.

Even while the team regularly produced blogs, videos, and podcasts, he subsequently came to the conclusion that they might have had a greater early edge in search visibility especially in the cutthroat WordPress ecosystem, had they produced more strategic, technically optimized textual material. He then discusses supplementary aspects that are under-marketed. Although LifterLMS is well-known for its ability to create courses, he notes that many users were unaware of the full potential of the platform since significant features like memberships, social learning, and coaching tools were not adequately articulated.

He also questions the widely held belief in entrepreneurship that markets act rationally. Chris discusses how branding, emotion, perception, and “vibes” frequently influence user decisions rather than just rational comparisons. This is evident when rival WordPress tools become dominant not usually because they are objectively superior, but rather because they rose to the top of their respective categories early on and gained a great deal of reputation and trust. Design is yet another important lesson. He acknowledges that design was not given enough attention early in the company’s expansion.

Over time, he discovered that even in cases when the core product is solid, UI/UX, branding, and visual presentation have a significant impact on trust and conversion. He considers how the product and brand impression were greatly enhanced by subsequent investments in expert design teams. After that, he discusses operations, stressing the significance of recording standard operating procedures (SOPs).

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today we’re doing a solo episode about seven things I got wrong over the 12 plus years of building lifter LMS. Now, it’s important to note that I’m gonna be talking about my journey with lifter LMS, but the failures that I had, these top seven failures that I have.

Apply to any entrepreneur, but especially to education entrepreneurs. So I also wanted to note that normalizing making mistakes and failures is something I really believe in. As a parent, as a boss in personal development, all of that. So as an example on our all hands meeting, we have at Lifter LMS, there’s a section in the meeting called Failures.

And in that section anybody can add anything that they failed on since the last meeting. Because failure is just feedback. It’s essentially a learning opportunity. And if you pretend they don’t exist, then you’re really limiting your ability to grow. I wanna celebrate the failures here. Be open and honest and vulnerable and share them with you.

And if I could go back 12, 13 years, I would try to help the earlier version of myself avoid these failures. So as a brief origin story of Lifter LMS, I used to do nothing with web technology at all. I used to. Live on a glacier that you can only get to by helicopter and manage a sled dog tour business.

There’s a couple hundred dogs up there, about 30 people, and that’s what I did for almost a decade before lifter LMS. After I left Alaska I started building websites for myself, then for clients. Then launched my own online courses in the permaculture niche. Also partnering with experts. I focused my web design agency on the LMS or course creator coach Niche.

I merged my agency with another agency who had some bigger clients, and we joined forces and went even deeper into courses, coaching, marketing automation, WordPress, custom development, and through some of our clients over there, we developed. The LMS that never existed in WordPress that we really wanted, and that was launched in 2013 or 14.

And when we first launched Lifter LMS, we got 42 customers in that first week, and that was the beginning of lifter LMS. And here we are 12 years later, 12 plus years later, it’s been a very windy road. There’s been some ups, there’s been some downs. We’re gonna talk about the downs today, and I want you to learn and grow and try to avoid these mistakes in your business and your entrepreneurial venture.

So the first failure I made when looking back over the past 12, 13 years is not developing early as I could have as a SEO writer. So what do I mean by that? I have been blogging on the literal LM s website and not just me team members as well since we first launched, even before we launched. But over time, I wouldn’t say I became a decent content writer for my type of business until about five years ago, and I’m still a work in progress and improving all the time.

But what I noticed is in the software space where we exist some other. Brands who got on the content game earlier, the written content, the blogging game earlier with strong SEO skills really got a huge advantage in the early days. And it’s not that I wasn’t blogging or writing, but I just didn’t have the deep technical SEO skills as well as I was a decent rider, but I really hadn’t mastered the skill of.

Technical writing and storytelling and so on that to the level that I now possess. And I could have developed that sooner and gotten some of that SEO advantage. And it’s not that I didn’t do anything else. I also poured a lot into YouTube. Even this podcast you’re listening to is older than lifter, LMS plugin.

We launched this back in this podcast back in 2013. So I’ve been creating audio, video, and text content for a very long time. But if I could go back in time, I would’ve put more focus on the early text and blogging content, and particularly for the education entrepreneurs out there. One of the challenges we have is that a lot of our content is behind.

An enrollment or a paywall. So we spend all this time creating video content, audio content reports, text content, but we’re not really putting as much effort as we could in that SEO driven blog content and pages on our site. So the lesson is to diversify your content types early and make sure you have a lot of great free written SEO optimized content, which also becomes extremely important.

For AI to train the large language models on so that you have some freely available text-based content for the artificial intelligence to ingest. The second big failure I had at lifter LMS was under marketing secondary benefits. So what do I mean by that? The primary benefit of lifter LMS is related to the courses feature.

So you can create, launch and scale high value online courses with lifter LMS. The course creation is like the main thing that makes lifter LMS special and unique. Chris, myself is an online course expert, excuse me. And but. Because Lifter is a platform, it’s a learning management system.

There’s so much it does in addition to courses. A perfect example where we under marketed is the membership features of Lifter LMS. So Lifter, LMS has been a membership plugin since the very first version, but a lot of people don’t even realize that they think they need Lifter. And another membership plugin, which it does work with other membership plugins like paid memberships Pro.

Lifter’s own native membership features are very powerful for creating course bundles, locking down other parts of the website and so on. But we under marketed that. Another example would be the social learning add-on that lifter makes. It basically allows you to create an online community website similar to having a private Facebook group, but on your WordPress LMS website that you own and control.

When I look at something like Buddy Boss, which is an online community building WordPress plugin, which also integrates with Lifter Al Mess, by the way, which we’re grateful for. Buddy Boss did an exceptional job marketing the online community system to the WordPress website. And of course they did ’cause that’s their main feature.

But for us at Lifter, that’s a secondary feature. Social learning solution that we offer. So we under marketed that. And there’s many more inside of Lifter as a complete system, a learning management system. There’s so much that it does that we’re not telling the full story and we hear this we, know we’ve made this failure.

When I hear from the market, it’ll say something like oh, wow. I’ve been using your software for years and I didn’t even realize. You guys had memberships or that I could build an online community here, or I could do my coaching business, or you had this email system and marketing automation system built directly inside lifter LMS.

So that kind of thing is what I’m talking about. So it’s important to know the main thing, the one thing, your primary benefit, but also be sure to market your sub benefits and other aspects. I would use the rule of thirds here, by the way. So think about your primary benefit and then what are the three sub benefits below that, and then go out three more.

So like primary benefits, number one, then the main three, then the main nine, and that’ll keep you busy for a while. So focus on that in terms of marketing and. Content and social media and selling and landing pages and design for all those things. The next big mistake that we made was thinking that the market is rational.

So what do I mean by that? The market is, and I think there’s even a book by this title called Predictably Irrational. So I used to think that the best product would become the most popular product, and that’s not the case. It’s almost never the case. One might argue that in very few cases, is that actually true?

It could be. There’s other factors like cost and stuff like that. But what I mean here is. In the market. So what do I mean by the market? The market is your niche. It’s the people, it’s your target market. It’s the prospects that are a good fit for your service or product. Those people are not rational.

They are irrational. And by the way, I say that with love because when I’m a consumer, I can also be irrational. So a market is irrational and is driven by. Things like emotion vibes cognitive biases, misinformation, group think social pressure, all kinds of things influence a, market and makes them not critical thinking, looking at base reality with a complete logical and objective perspective.

So how has this hurt us at lifter LMS? I realized early that we really, this software does a lot. We need to tell the story of it. It has a lot of features. We need to basically be sure the market understands all the features that we have and those benefits. So we spent a lot of time in documentation, YouTube tutorials informational pages, blog content on our site, but then.

What I noticed is the I’d see in the market when, like on social media, like on Reddit or in a Facebook group or in Twitter somewhere, a lot of the stuff people say when they compare our solution to other solutions were factually inaccurate. Lacked complete information, even lies and misinformation.

I was like, why is this happening? I’m like, oh, okay. Yeah, the market’s just being irrational. And a lot of people are just going off vibes and jumping on the bandwagon of this or that. If you look at the WordPress ecosystem WordPress has this challenge called the king maker problem. So what do I mean by the king maker Pro problem?

The king maker problem is where an early winner kind of dominates for a long term. So even if they’re not actually. The best or based on pure value, features, benefits, all that. Like they have an unnaturally king size portion of the pie that’s irrational if you were to just compare apples to apples across the various solutions.

So in WordPress, as an example, the divvy theme and page builder, if we look at WordPress page builders, now, a lot has changed with full site editing and Gutenberg and all of that. But at one point, divvy really nailed the WordPress premium theme market. They got early traction. Elegant themes used to have a lot of themes.

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Speaker: Then divvy really took off. They focused on divvy. They built a page builder around Divvy, and they got huge. At one time, the Elegant Themes website was one of the most trafficked websites in the world, so they really got that king maker crown. And over time, other page builders came like Beaver Builder or Elementor, and many more.

A lot of times Divvy has always had the biggest market share, I believe. And is that rational, is divvy better than Elementor or Beaver Builder or some of these other ones? This is the king maker issue and I’m a fan of Divvy. I’m not a, an expert at page builders. But this is what I’m talking about and it, you has this tribal mentality.

Like I was a, I used Beaver Builder for a long time. I really loved it. And I see folks in elementary using elementary really loving it, see people using divvy, really loving it, and they’ve been using it forever. The same thing happens in the WordPress form space. If we looked at the early winter there, that was a company called Gravity Forms.

I’ve been a Gravity Forms customer for probably about 14 years, something like that, 15 years. I use it on the Lifter LMS website. Lifter integrates with it. It’s an awesome, huge solution with a awesome ecosystem. Tools like Gravity Kit or out there that work with Gravity Forms, and some of those have lifter integration, which is awesome.

And. But there’s other forms. There’s like a lot of form plugin solutions in WordPress and a new one, like a newer one. It’s not new anymore, but WS form by Mark West Card is an awesome form solution, but I know it’s hard for Mark West card of WS form to compete with gravity forms simply because of that kingmaker issue.

Some of the, there’s stuff that WS forms does that is so awesome. Gravity formed, can’t do, doesn’t do, and so on. They’re both great solutions, but this is what I’m talking about. The market is not rational and sometimes that early dominant player their snowball just gets bigger and bigger, and it takes on its own life and vibes in terms of popularity that’s not really based on rational analysis.

In terms of as a creator it’s important to build things like audience trust and a brand that basically play the irrational game, but do it with ethics. So what I mean by that is build a strong brand. ’cause people want to do business with people that they know and trust. One of my big things, particularly in tech that I find.

Amusing just from or more sad is actually the word. If I go to a start a software company’s website and I go to the about page and I see no human faces, I see such a lost opportunity. ’cause people want to connect, they want to do business with real people. They want to take a quick peek at the people behind the company and so on.

While building a personal brand. May feel like a sideshow to your actual product. It’s a big part of just building the vibes that the market actually responds to in addition to the logical analysis of your features and benefits. So the next big fail that we had at Lifter LMS was not elevating design to the executive level sooner.

So what do I mean by design? Design is a lot of things. It is for an online business, it is graphic design. It’s website design. It’s user interface design. It’s user experience design. It is if you’re doing courses, there’s instructional design. There’s all these different flavors of design that are super important, and let me back up and say that any online business, I divide into seven categories, and design is one of those, but I’ll just list them off here.

One is product, one is engineering. One is marketing. One is sales, one is customer success or support. One is operations. And then the final one is the CEO hat and design is of course in there too. So all of these areas need to have a baseline level of proficiency for a business to do well, and design often gets ignored for too long, or overemphasized in the beginning.

So in my case, we had, we were underpowered on the design front in the early days. So I heard it on a podcast, I can’t remember where, but I’d cite the source if I remembered. But it was something like, investors looking to invest in startups. They look at three, they want to see three main characters in the founding team, the hipster, the hacker, and the hustler.

The hacker is the engineer. It’s the coder. It’s the person doing the tech, the hustler. That’s a person like me, who is the visionary, who gets the people together, who goes out and does the marketing, sales, what we call hand to hand combat to get your early first customers. But then there’s the hipster.

The hipster comes in and sprinkles all kinds of design. Goodness on top of what the hustler and the hacker are doing. So to give a specific example, the hacker or the engineer is building interfaces for lifter LMS as an example, like interfaces for the software. The designer comes on top as a UI or user interface designer and makes them pretty standardized, intuitive.

User experience aspect of design comes in and knows exactly where to put tool tips and helpful pointers or informational text to make an interface clear, and that’s just one little spot. The designer might come in and help the hustler with a slide presentation or to make the product graphics look better.

Or to make the website key sales pages, landing pages and homepage look 10 times better. That’s what the designer does. And we’ve been lucky at lifter LMS to get some quality design leaderships at several points in the business, but I did not do it soon enough. And if you happen to be early in starting your business, one, I’d recommend don’t do it alone.

See if you can assemble the team of the hipster, the hacker, and the hustler, which one are you most like? And then find the other two. Not being alone is key. Having a partnership is great, but having the hipster hacker hustler trifecta is an unstoppable unbeatable, beautiful team. So that’s what design is like.

And to give you some examples of. Where design came in and really helped lifter LMS and it was way too little, too late kind of thing. In a perfect world, I’m very grateful for everything that we did, but I made, I prioritize those design needs too late. Okay? The first one was about three years into the business.

When we actually got lucky. We used a service called 99 Designs to do our logo. Our colors, our typo typography was known as a brand kit, and we should have done that way earlier than with the scrappy design we had. I definitely admit if you’re just launching a product or business, don’t overfocus on design.

Don’t spend a lot of money on a logo or anything. You can just go minimum viable product and find your product market fit. Once you have it, assuming you succeed and you have some traction, invest in that design for the brand kit early. We got lucky with 99 designs and paid about 300 and got basically the brand kit that we still use today for almost a decade, which is awesome.

Now the next big move we did was around I think it was 2020 or so. We hired web dev studios to come in and help do a redesign of our whole website, help with the design of the lifter LMS screens, how our launchpad theme, or I’m sorry, our Sky Pilot theme would look. Web Dev studios is awesome. We’ve done some webinars and they’ve been on the podcast.

They also have a product called Theme Switcher Pro. I’d encourage you to check that out. Which allows you to switch. Your theme, but only on certain parts of your website. But anyways, the design team at web dev studios did an incredible job building designs that we could then implement. So that was a huge win.

And that wasn’t cheap either. We invested many tens of thousands of dollars in that design but it really paid off. It wasn’t just like the website. It was also software and interface and all these things. So that’s web dev studios design, overhaul of lifter LMS. And then the next one is when Kim Coleman joined the leadership team as a co-owner of Lifter LMS with Jason Coleman.

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Kim has a really unique ability. She’s an amazing designer, but she’s also a fantastic entrepreneur, developer, marketer, and so on. She’s super strong on design, so she was able to, in a major way, help implement the designs from web dev studios to create reusable templates for all kinds of things like YouTube thumbnails, webinar slides, product shots, and everything inside Canva so that our non-designers, including myself, can implement great designs using templates in Canva.

Kim did so much to and, also in the interface and the UI and just her design sense was so strong. It is just just a wonderful thing to have in the leadership team of lifter LMS. But, so if I could rewind the clock and go back to the early version myself, I would have prioritized that design.

Leadership sooner. And that also feeds into the last failure I mentioned where the market is not rational. It took me a while to realize that having good design can help with your vibes. It’s not rational, but it’s true that sometimes people buy from. If they’re exploring product A, B, and C, they’re gonna go with a ’cause that website has the best catchy design.

Apple as an example, has great design. People talk about it all the time. So design is a huge part of the irrational mind buying on vibes. So the fifth failure that we made at lifter LMS in 12 years. Was not documenting standard operating procedures or what I also call business playbooks early.

And these are standard operates. Standard operating procedures are like having a baby. There’s never really a convenient time to make them, but you should, so if you’re new to SOPs or standard Operating Procedures playbooks, it’s essentially documenting your systems and processes so that it’s easier to delegate and make your brain hurt less when you’re doing a task.

For example, publishing a lifter LMS podcast episode has 40 steps. So Nadia on the team will publish that and she’ll follow the steps. If she’s away and I’m publishing it or somebody else is publishing it, I’m gonna follow those steps. Even though I’ve done it before, I can never remember. And it takes such a mental tax to have to try to recall the 40 steps without looking at the documented steps that I wrote.

The other thing is getting your team to contribute to the standard operating procedures is. Really powerful. We actually use lifter LMS on a site, not our main site that’s public, but it has our private site on top of it so the public on the internet can never get inside of the site and see our standard operating procedures.

But we use lifter LMS and courses and lessons to organize and catalog and index all of our standard operating procedures broken down by department. Like sales as an example, or product as an example. When you’re, when it’s just you, if you’re a solopreneur and it’s all in your head and you’re never delegating anything, fine, you don’t need ’em.

But as soon as you need somebody else to do something for you, I’d recommend slowing down and documenting your processes, whether for a team member, a future team member, a contractor you’re gonna hire, or even just for yourself to make your brain hurt less. If you ever have, like when I do I do like this biweekly payroll, cashflow accounting, invoices, money management thing for the business, right?

Every two weeks, it’s 57 steps every single time. I’ve done it many times, every time I pull out the list and I just start working through it. If I didn’t have that playbook, my brain would hurt trying to remember everything that I have to get done to execute that process. If I had done this earlier, it would’ve helped my brain hurt less for some of the complicated things I would do, like product launches as an example, like we have our product launch process documented.

If I had done this earlier, it would’ve been easier to delegate. There’s a great book by a guy named Sam Carpenter called Work The System, which I, read that book man 15 years ago and it really sold me on the power of SOPs and playbooks. I recommend you check that out if you haven’t listened to that.

It also helps your team member do better. It also helps you delegate things better. You can delegate if some, you have more options of who you can delegate to if a process is really dialed in and clearly laid out. Whereas if you don’t do that, if you try to delegate something, you’re gonna need somebody who’s more like you, who’s just gonna figure it out and it’s gonna be really inefficient time-wise and so on.

So document how you do what you do. And if you use the framework I gave you earlier about the seven parts of a business, each one of those has processes. Design has processes, operations, like I mentioned, payroll has processes sales, how we do product launches, marketing. These all have processes. So document those.

Check out Lifter, lms, private site if you want to put all your playbooks inside of an LMS. The next thing that was a big fail for me in building lifter LMS over the past 12 years is stressing too much, which some find funny hearing that coming from me because I seem like a chill, laid back, slow talking person.

But that is just me on the outside and it’s not a front, it’s just who I am. But I do get stressed. I take things seriously. I take a lot of responsibility. There are families including my own, that depend on me for food on the table or depend on the business for food on the table. There’s all kinds of relationships to maintain across team members, customers, users, community industry, partners all kinds of things.

There’s changes in the macro economy, the geopolitical situation things happen. And that affect the business both for good and for bad. And we all would like to have less stress. But what I find is there’s this weird thing with entrepreneurs. And I, want to hear you or find a way to reach out to me if you’re listening to this and you agree with what I mean, by the way, I don’t hear that much from the podcast listeners.

You folks are always like listening in your earbuds while you’re doing the dishes or exercising or in the car, whatever, and commuting. But I’d love to hear what you like about this show. But anyways, here’s the counterintuitive insight about entrepreneurs. I look around YouTube as an example, and I see all this content about like motivation and how to find your motivation and all this stuff, and I’m, I’ve never needed that my entire life.

Like I am born with the batteries included and I have the opposite problem of motivation. I have too much motivation, which creates stress ’cause I can’t, there’s so much I want to do and can’t get done. BA based on constraints, whether that’s cash or time or capacity or skills, that’s stressful, right?

So I think the counterintuitive thing and hit me up if you agree, is I look out the world and sometimes I see a lack of motivation, but when I look inside myself, I see too much motivation, which causes a lot of stress. So for me, it’s actually counterproductive. To try to get more motivated. ’cause I don’t need more.

I actually need less, which is weird to say. Luckily for me I’ve had some things that help me manage the stress. The big ones are, and I’m just speaking for me personally. The big ones are rural living. So a slower pace lifestyle in the country. The second one is nature connection. I do spend a lot of time outside.

And the third one is exercise. If you know me I’m an ultra runner. I can run far along and I didn’t always used to be this way. I’ve always tried to keep moving and stuff like that, but once I really found Ultra, I’m like, oh yeah, this is what Dan Martel means by train the body to tame the mind.

So when I get to the. Out there in the distance far, not just like on a big thing, but even just even today. Today I’m gonna go run eight and a half miles after I get off this podcast later in the day. And I’ll feel way better after that. But anyways, going back to the earlier days, stressing too much particularly in the early days, I did it the way where.

I didn’t try to start I didn’t try to start it as a, my business as a side job. I did the burn the boats thing, which just means for me, I left Alaska. I stopped what I had been doing for almost a decade. It’s 100% on me to figure everything out while I also have a young family. So that’s pretty stressful.

When you cut off your, dependable income. Do that. And it was really rough in the beginning, particularly going from that zero to like sustainable level. So there’s just so much stress in that period. And part of it, I do believe in the early days of a startup of any kind, you do need to grind. You do need to have some late nights and put it all out there, leave it all out in the field.

But as much as you can build in stress reduction, things that work for you, whether that’s. Massage walks, hanging out with friends, doing something with your partner. Nature connection, some kind of sport. Maybe it’s a float tank, a sensory deprivation chamber, whatever it is for you. Try not to stress too much because unfortunately I see so much burnout and so many people that quit.

Or flame out that shouldn’t in, in the space of entrepreneurship and stress is really the killer. It’s the, it got outta control and for whatever reason mostly luck. I would say just with how I’m wired and what I’m into, I was able to tame the stress to a manageable level through the movement, the exercise, the nature connection, and so on.

So find what that is for you. Find it as soon as possible, and just remember that entrepreneurship is a personal development program. So the biggest personal development thing you can do is figure out how to be an entrepreneur without burning out, blowing up, or getting super stressed out. Or if you already have.

To move forward in a better way to learn to transcend and learn how to manage stress in a much healthier way. The last failure I had with lifter LMS over the past 13 years is two things, hiring too fast or hiring too late. So both extremes hurt. Hiring too fast is an example. As an overwhelmed, stressed out entrepreneur, you want to delegate, but everybody, all the advice is like, oh you gotta, delegate, you gotta build your systems and delegate.

I’m even telling you that here, but before you can afford that you, can’t do that. Here’s what I mean by that. In the early days of Lifter LMS, we had two support team members. In addition to the founding team, lifter, LMS is way, bigger now over a decade later. And we still have two support team members in addition to the rest of the team.

And that’s good. But those early two I, we hired way too early. And it could have just been one is what I’m saying. There’s. Hiring is really hard. It’s it’s extremely hard. I could do, I should do a whole episode. I’m taking a note to do one on hiring ’cause I’m actually pretty decent at it and I’ve learned a lot over the years.

So I’ll look forward to sharing that with you in a different episode. But the other thing is just hiring too late. I mentioned the design situation, figuring out how to get design hired into whether it’s a contract project. A team member, a new business partner, doing that sooner would’ve been way better for the business.

So that was an example of a too late situation. So one of the ways to think about it is to hire at an inflection point, not based on emotion. ’cause sometimes we’re just like, oh my gosh, I’m so stressed out. I’m so burnt out. I just need another human to dump all this work onto or whatever. That’s not a healthy way to think about it.

You want to think about it as an inflection point. So an easy way to think about that, like in software as an example, is when you’re doing support. You get like a certain number of tech support tickets or emails a day. You can look at that oh a support team’s capacity is about X tickets per day on average.

Once you’re consistently past what your team can do on average, that’s just an inflection point where you either have to hire or some other members of your team or maybe even you need to also help to keep up with the demand in that need. So try not to hire based on emotion or desperation or frustration.

Hiring should be more mechanical, methodical. If you look, we have a free course on the academy about end of year planning and 10 year plans, five year plans and all this stuff. Go check that out. But one of the ways I like to think about hiring at the right time is to build your dream org chart like how you want it to look.

For example, if Lifter LMS were to double the revenue of where we’re at right now. I already know that what the org chart would look like and what roles to hire, and I know when at which revenue milestone we could afford to hire, which role next. Now, that might change. Plans can change, but I already have that figured out, so it won’t be an emotional thing for me.

I won’t know if we have the budget or not for it. It’s already planned out. And the other thing I’ll just add with hiring now is. If you look at artificial intelligence, there’s a lot that AI can do to increase existing team capacity, including yourself. And there’s just more AI can do, even ag genetically as a higher of sorts.

So you may hire AI in some cases. And that’s one of those areas I’d look out for is. As artificial intelligence moves from the chat interface to agentic to agents you want to think about how the agents can fit into your org chart or augment your existing human team members in the org chart because with the pace of change with ai, you really.

This whole problem of hiring too fast or too late is gonna become even more and more of a problem. So by hiring too fast, what I mean is bring in an AI sales, outbound sales rep that’s gonna do all this emailing and calling for you, but you haven’t even figured out what your selling, how you sell, what your sales motion or sales conversations look like to train the agent.

So you’re just, you’re hiring way too fast and you’re just gonna cause problems or. There’s a ton of stuff you can do with AI for graphic design as an example. There’s people that are doing things with Nano Banana, which is a AI graphics tool. And other tools too. I’ve done some great designs with chat GPT and Canvas AI tools.

But if you find all that stuff too late you might be, you just might be underdoing your design capability. ’cause you, tell yourself the story. I can’t afford to hire a human at x dollars per year to do design. But you could actually get started with AI like right now. So a couple of themes from these mistakes or failures I’ve made.

There’s imbalance whether that’s content or. Marketing or team or mindset. So it’s all about balance and we’re all unique individuals, unique snowflakes, if you will. We have our strengths and weaknesses. We have these different aspects of our business that are either doing great, average or below average.

But when there’s imbalance, that’s where a lot of the biggest failures come from. So I like to think of balance in this way. You don’t have to bring everything to exceptional, but everything does have a baseline. And then there’s gonna be a couple things you do really well. It might be product, it could be operations, it could be the tech side.

But you definitely need a baseline across those seven parts of the business as well as an education entrepreneur. The five hats that we talk about all the time on this podcast. I would just encourage you to become more well-rounded and first of all, don’t be too hard on yourself. Like to me, even just telling you these stories, there’s a lot of pain When I look back at all that stress and struggle and bad timing or a decision we, I made that was suboptimal, but hey, this is how we learn and it’s okay to be an imperfect human.

That’s why. I like to say that entrepreneurship is a personal development program. You just gotta keep going and, learn from your mistakes. Be honest about them. Pretend they don’t pretend they don’t exist and work with them. Examine them. Look for patterns. Try to improve. And yeah. I want to thank you for listening to this episode.

I’d love to hear from you. Which one of the lifter LMS fails over the past decade plus resonated with you the most? And yeah. Just send me a hello. Let me know that you listened to this episode and you appreciated it, and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Take care. 

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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In this episode of LMScast, Chris Badgett offers an important perspective change for anybody making online courses: you should conceive of yourself as a media firm rather than merely a course designer. He says that since systems like ChatGPT and Claude can rapidly give answers and learning resources, knowledge is no longer scarce in today’s environment.

Because of this, merely packing content into a course is no longer sufficient to succeed or stand out. Instead, people’s attention and trust have become limited, particularly in a digital world that is overrun with content, short videos, and subpar AI-generated content. This makes it more difficult for instructors to keep students’ interest long enough for them to finish courses, which are inherently lengthy and need dedication.

Chris emphasizes that producers who regularly provide worthwhile, non-salesy material are now rewarded by platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, as opposed to those who actively attempt to sell goods. The previous approach of “create a course and then market it” is no longer successful as a result of this change. Building your audience first, providing them with useful information, and then making money is the new paradigm. With this method, your course turns into a backend product, and your main responsibility is to continuously inform, interact, and cultivate connections with your audience via various channels.

He presents the concept of a “media stack,” which consists of important platforms including blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, and email newsletters. Since the email list is a direct channel of communication that you own and control, it is the most crucial and non-negotiable of these. Over time, even a basic monthly newsletter that shares well chosen updates or insights in your industry may establish credibility and trust.

YouTube is a great place to start when creating content, particularly when it comes to responding to commonly asked questions in your area and topics that your audience ought to be asking but aren’t. While blogging can create authority, enhance thinking, and increase SEO, as long as it’s done deliberately and not just through low-quality AI content podcasting is a fantastic tool for fostering deeper relationships and drawing in high-attention audiences.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

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Episode Transcript:

You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today we are going to go over an important mindset shift and framing for you to change. And that frame is going from being a course creator to being a media company. So this is the only way to win going forward. And the reason is courses alone aren’t enough anymore, so just having a course is not enough.

You gotta think bigger as a media company. This actually happened to me many years ago with LifterLMS. The software business. I refrained from thinking that, hey, we’re a software company to, hey, we’re a media company.

This podcast as an example, which has been going for 12 years. Is a part of the LifterLMS Media company, so as our YouTube channel, we also happen to provide software for the e-learning industry. But I very much see myself as a creator, a content creator, a media company, a media brand, and not just me.

Team members on the LifterLMS team are also brand personalities for LifterLMS. Anyways. It’s basically a shift from thinking of your course content first to thinking of your audience first and then monetization later. So you’re not in the course business, you are in the media business. You just happen to make courses.

So what changed all this? Why is this happen? Part of it is that artificial intelligence, the rise of that is further commoditizing information. So information wants to be free at a base level. For example, the WordPress core software is completely free. It’s just code, it’s just information. But when it comes to ai if, I want information quickly, I can just ask ChatGPT or Claude.

And we’ll get some decent information for a question I have or a skill I wanna develop or something I wanna learn. So what has become more scarce is trust and attention. For example. We can’t always trust artificial intelligence because it does hallucinate, even though that hallucination is getting a little better.

And also our attention has never been. More fractured as a human species that’s driven by so many different things. The amount of media that’s out there, the number of social media channels, the rise of short form video content like TikTok has created what people call short form video brain rot, which means our ability to hold attention and focus.

In general, as a human population has gotten a lot, worse. And if you think about it, when you create an online course, you’re actually asking somebody to hold their attention for an extended amount of time. A course is it can be varied in length, but they’re usually a very committed timeline for.

Attention that you’re asking the user to take, not just in one sitting, but sometimes over multiple days or even months, or even in some cases years. So that is a big attention ask when attention globally in general, as is that an all time low? Also, just like with the rise of YouTube where essentially everybody could have a TV channel.

When I was a kid there was like. Whatever, 30 TV channels on cable, when my parents were kids first they didn’t have tv, they just had radio, but then they had three channels if they were lucky enough to be able to get ’em. But now there’s like a billion YouTube channels. Course creation has gotten so easy with tools like Lifter, LMS, that unfortunately there’s a lot of low quality.

Courses in the same way that there’s a lot of low quality YouTube videos, channels content and so on. And then we have the AI issue of what’s known as AI slop, which is where you’re using artificial intelligence, not in a smart way to create content that’s just low quality. So that saturation of low quality courses.

Also further contributes to the challenge of just being a course creator. And then finally, if you look at the algorithms, whether that’s a social media algorithm like YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or LinkedIn, or you look at the way search engines do their rankings. They reward creators far more than they reward products, which means, especially on social media freely available, non-salesy topic driven information that’s high quality is what the algorithm rewards and helps drive attention to.

So if you’re a. Media company and not just a course creator. You start thinking about this oh if I want more eyeballs on my media, what kind of content do I also need to create? So the old model was to build a course and then sell it. The new model is to build an audience and serve a community.

So it’s about putting your. Audience, your community at the center of your business, not your product or your course. And then one way to think about this too is shifting from being a teacher or a course creator to being a publisher. So a publisher just thinks about things differently than just a teacher.

Now you will be publishing online courses, but it’s important to also publish other types of content as a media company. The other thing we want to think about here is that as a metaphor, some of the hugely successful companies are. Netflix, that’s a publishing platform for movies and shows.

You’ve got YouTube, which is a publishing platform. There are content creators on there that are publishers. There are newsletter brands out there that are publishers. So this is these are, all media companies. So it’s important for you to design your media stack, and I just want to acknowledge that.

Not everyone out there wants to be on camera or enjoys talking for extended periods of time, like in a podcast for, as an example. So you don’t necessarily have to do all of these, and I definitely don’t recommend starting all of them at once. But the media stack that comes before or in addition to your online courses.

Is number one, a email list. This one’s pretty much non-negotiable. So at a fundamental level, email never dies, and it is a key important key to your success. If you don’t have an email list, I guarantee your business as a course creator or education company is not gonna go very far. So I recommend you do some kind of email newsletter.

Now, if that sounds intimidating to you, like you have to do like a daily news kind of email broadcast thing, that’s not what I’m talking about at all. Let’s talk about a minimum effective email newsletter that takes the least amount of time, but adds a lot of value and authority and builds your email list.

So the first way I think about that is first, the cadence. Even just a monthly email newsletter can be very valuable and help you grow your list. So that means you only need to create an email once a month. Now, in terms of creating a great email newsletter, I just recommend, first thing is slowing down and creating a structure for your newsletter That makes sense.

You can re repeat and fill in every time. So the structure is like a template for every broadcast that you do from your newsletter. So the, I see a lot of these, so I’ll just share like what would be the absolute easiest email newsletter to start. Whatever your niche is, whatever your industry, you can do.

A link to five cool things that happened in your niche or in your industry in the past month. And they don’t necessarily have to be things that you’ve done and they could be, have nothing to do with what you’re working on, although I recommend including your work and, what you’re up to in your email newsletter.

But I also recommend being a reporter for your industry or your niche. Now, with tools like artificial intelligence, you can. It’s never been easier to find news and relevant things quickly, but particularly if you’re looking over the past month, just as an example if you use rock, which is the artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence tool on the X platform, it can be very helpful at finding news because.

It is, has access to all the data on X or Twitter, which means whatever news was going on or marketable, notable things in your niche, in your industry, it would’ve been talked about on X or Twitter. And if you just ask Rock to look back the past 30 days and give it some prompting about. Your niche and subtopics your audience is interested in, you could quickly source five cool things that happen this month in your niche, and there’s your email list.

Of course, you wanna put your email capture everywhere you can, or a link to it from social media profiles from. YouTube video descriptions on your website. This is why it’s really important to have a WordPress website that you own control, so that you can easily capture emails. You can use tools like WP Fusion to easily pipe those emails over to your email list service software.

You can use tools like Popup Maker to throw a popup with a message about your newsletter and get people to sign up right through the popup. So there’s so much you can do to build your email list. We can do a whole topic on email. In fact, I did do one a while back. About how I grew a, an over 100,000 person email list myself at Lifter lms.

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So if you want some deep dive on email, go find that episode. The next in the media stack if, I could only pick two, it would be the email list and the YouTube channel, particularly for course creators because. Of course, creators in general, for the most part, leverage videos in their content, which means they tend to not be as resistant or camera shy or unsure how to work with video and audio.

So you’ve already got the base skills to be a YouTube media publisher. Using YouTube my number one strategy to get started as a media creator, if you’re like, I don’t know what to make videos about or, you have the experts curse, you’re just like, I don’t even know where to start.

Here’s where you start. If you look at your niche, what I’d encourage you to do is to find the 10 frequently asked questions that come up in your industry. And I would make a video a short, like question, answer video. For example, I was talking to my wife Sam earlier today and she’s looking at some marketing for her running coaching business and if I was gonna advise her I’m on ultrarunner, so I, know what kind of questions people would ask an ultra running coach.

So it could be things like this, like one video might be the 10 10. What things do I need to know before my first 100 Mile Ultra run? I recently completed a hundred Mile Ultra, and I literally did this. I went to YouTube and I said, what do I need to know before I attempt my first 100 Mile Ultra Run?

And YouTube came back. There was a guy with a video it was about eight minutes and he went over like the top eight things that you need to know and be aware of for your ultra run. It was great. Other things like what kind of shoes do I need, how to maintain fitness in the winter. So on. These are like the 10 frequently asked questions for that niche.

So write those down for your niche. And then here’s my favorite twist on this. Then you write 10 more questions that people should be asking you but aren’t. So this is where you put your expert hat on and hey, nobody’s really as a ultra running person, everybody’s always asking about how to do your first ultra, what shoes do I need?

What’s my training plan? But you know what, nobody ever asks, but should, how do I take care of my feet when I’m running? 30, 50, a hundred hundreds of miles straight. So foot care, that’s an example. It’s not like a super if you’re not into running it sounds funny, but that’s an example of a question that my audience, if I was a running coach, should be asking but isn’t.

So I’m just gonna put that out there and that kind of content gets picked up as well. So if you do that exercise. You’ve got the 10 frequently asked questions you get in your niche, and then the 10 questions that people are asking or are not asking, but should, that gives you 20 video ideas to kick off your YouTube channel.

I actually did this a long time ago when I had a web design agency and I sat down with a piece of paper in about 10 minutes. I had my 20 questions, and then I actually went. Filmed all 20 videos all at once and batched produced those, and that kicked off my YouTube channel and it started attracting and building my audience.

So that’s how I recommend getting started on YouTube. The other thing to do is podcasting. Now, obviously I’m a fan. I’ve been podcasting for over 12 years, and even though the LMS Cast podcast. Is not super huge and famous. It is a very micro niche podcast for this audience, of course, creator and LMS website building professionals.

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And the coolest thing about the podcast as a media company, first with the audience at the center of our business, is you add incredible value to your audience. By giving them this long form content. Also, the people that listen to your podcasts tend to have longer attention span. If somebody can listen to a 30, 40 minute episode or even multi-hour episode, they have the kind of attention span required to complete an online course.

And then over time with the podcast, you’re building so much trust. And depth of relationship and authority with your listener. The cool thing I love about podcasts is a media type is they are what’s known as portable content, and there’s not that much portable content. So when you think about it, when you’re at a computer and your eyes are locked onto your computer or your phone, there’s so many different types of content.

When you’re washing the dishes or exercising or going for the run or driving, you basically need something that’s portable and you’re your eyes are busy. Your hands are busy, you’re doing other things. There’s only podcasts audio, books and music. Basically, that’s all you got. So it’s not as crowded over here in podcast land.

And you get some of the best, listeners and audience, and of course you can mention your, newsletter and your podcast, or if you do a podcast that’s another simple way to start a newsletter. That’s all it is a feed of your latest podcast episodes and that’s, how you start building your email list.

The last one I’ll say in the media stack is to be a blogger, be a writer. This is why using lifter LMS and particularly WordPress is so important. WordPress started as a blogging platform. It’s so much more than that with tools like Lifter, LMS and WP Fusion and Pop-Up Maker and so many more great tools.

But as a blogging platform you can write. You can write blogs, and that is a type of media to put in your stack. Now, I do not recommend that you use artificial intelligence to just create a bunch of quick content for SEO. You need to put your heart and soul, your unique insights into your writing. You can leverage AI tools for research and clean up and fleshing out ideas and so on.

But create some blog content. And it doesn’t always have to be long. I’m a fan of the, at a minimum 500 word article but I’ve written articles that are much longer. There are thousands and thousands of words. So writing is the ultimate skill as a communicator. It will sharpen.

Your expertise as does podcasting. One of the great things about podcasting and writing or blogging is that you can bring on guests. So you’re actually getting smarter or in your writing, you are doing research across your industry. You’re keeping up with what other leaders in your space are doing.

You’re creating opinions and thought pieces and weaving in your own expertise and experience in the blog content. So that’s it. That’s the media stack. So if you think of yourself as a media company and not just a course creator that has to do some marketing, it becomes a lot more clear of what you do.

And the course kind of moves to the background of the free other types of media. It’s basically means you want to get as much exposure to, your audience as you can in your free content, whether that’s emails, YouTube videos, blog articles, podcast episodes but in the backend you actually sell courses.

So instead of being like, I’m a course creator, I need to sell my course, what you’re saying is, I’m a media company. I work across these content types of media. And by the way, for those that are at the right place at the right time I do have a course or membership offer that you can take, up on.

So this is where you do things like. You get like for every 100 subscribers to your email list, two of them will become customers. So that’s a 2% conversion rate, as an example. So that’s the media stack. The courses are the backend they’re the monetization layer. So the audience warms up first through the content, the media content, and then they buy.

So the way to think about this in terms of what to create instead of just a course is to create an ecosystem versus a single product. So if we put our audience at the center of our business, our course, or our membership, those are just satellites on the core of our audience. But maybe we’ve got our YouTube channel.

We’ve got our blog, our podcast, and our newsletter. So all these things are in service to our audience, and a percentage of them will monetize and purchase the course. So it’s like a content flywheel. So once you start getting that traction, even at when it’s small, at first, if you only have a hundred people across your.

YouTube channel, your newsletter, your blog, your podcast. But two of them buy, that’s a 2% conversion rate. Now, if you can get those flywheels of media content, the free stuff scaling exponentially, that’s when a business can really take off. As a media company, so that means when you jump to a thousand.

Audience size: you now have 20 customers. When you jump to 10,000, now you have 200 customers. And so on. When you get to a hundred thousand, you have 2000 customers, and that math tends to scale well if you are not just chasing engagement. With your media, but actual super relevant content for your clearly identified niche market.

So just to give some examples of creators who built Media First Brands, we recently did a fame jacking video on our podcast, which was basically a breakdown of Ali Ab Doll’s. Course creation business. And the thing he does with his course is he had a huge YouTube channel before he launched his recent course.

And he just constantly interviewed his audience about what they were interested in and stayed with him. And it was through building up that YouTube channel that he was finally able to monetize it. As a as a course creator. So you can also do this with podcasting. The great thing about podcasting is particularly if you do an interview show, if you commit to say, three years of podcasting before you create your course, maybe you have an idea of what you want your course to be.

You have an idea of what audience you want to serve, and you’ve got you’re clear on the foundations of your future offer. Then you spend three years interviewing experts in the space. Not only does that make you smarter, but it also builds relationships with people who you may do business development and partnership with later.

That’s a great way to think about it. It’s like you have to give a lot of value first before you take or ask for the sale with your online course. And if I see it all the time, like if I look at the YouTube space, there’s so many YouTubers that could be course creators.

’cause they have a great audience. They’ve developed a niche focus. They haven’t monetized they’re not packaging their stuff in a course, and that’s a challenge for a different day. But a thing, when you see create YouTubers that really take off, that are more educational than entertaining and really niche focused, you can just see how much more they could monetize not through YouTube ads or a simple Substack subscription.

Patreon or something like that, but with an actual online course. So to start making the transition from course creator to media company, what I would recommend is to pick one channel first and, just stay with it. And if you ask me which one should I start with, I would say definitely the email newsletter.

’cause you need to have that email list. Everything else should feed that. It’s basically the center of your marketing engine and sales engine. So build that email list, focus on a like creating a template for your newsletter so that when you sit down once a week or once a month to create your newsletter, you’re just filling in the template and you can use.

AI tools or capture systems when you see something interesting so that you can add it to your next newsletter. And then when it is time to add another channel, I wouldn’t add ’em all at once. Don’t try to become a podcaster, a YouTuber, and a writer and a newsletter creator all at one time. If you are very comfortable with the newsletter and the writing game, I would recommend next focus on writing blog post articles. Do at least 10 to 20 before you even think about adding another media channel. The next I would do is probably a either YouTube or podcast. It’s really up to you which order to go in, but the general thinking is it’s never too early to start building your email list.

So start there and then focus on one media channel, systematize it. Get your flywheel of audience growth going first. Before you transition to another one. Yeah, you want to build that audience before you sell. Trust me when I say course creation gets so much easier when you’ve been interacting with your audience through your free media content, like in the comments or live streams or whatever you’re doing.

You know what, how they think, you know what they want. You’re not just guessing. So when you build a media company, I want to encourage you to build it on your own property since you’re essentially building an asset. That’s why having your own website powered by WordPress and Lifter LMS is so important.

You control it. It’s your website, it’s your media company. The content is in your media library. When you go with a hosted platform you’re essentially renting space on somebody else’s website, which is very dangerous in the long term. They may raise their prices on you, their business may shut down or whatever.

You basically don’t own and control it, and you, the other great thing about WordPress and Lifter is you have the flexibility for courses and memberships and online communities and newsletters. And WordPress as a content management system or CMS is what it’s all about. And as a media company, you, you have content your courses and lessons and quizzes and certificates and everything are, just a other types of content besides your articles and videos and so on.

So WordPress and Lifter LMS essentially supports the backend of a. Media business. Now, of course you can use those tools as a course creator, but from here on out I want to, I want you to think of yourself as a media company, so stop trying to sell a course and start building a media company today.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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In this episode, Chris Badgett explains how AI will significantly reshape online courses by making creation faster, cheaper, and more accessible, while also increasing competition and lowering average quality due to an influx of generic AI-generated content. He emphasizes that although those who use AI as a co-pilot, combining it with their own brand, voice, and expertise, will stand out and deliver higher-quality courses, those who rely solely on AI will suffer.

He highlights that the value of information diminishes as it gets simpler to provide, and the true premium moves to human components like coaching, community, accountability, and change. AI will also make it possible for more flexible course delivery, intelligent student assistance, and customized learning experiences.

AI may serve as a tutor by assisting students, bridging knowledge gaps, and dynamically modifying curriculum. Additionally, operational and student support systems will become more sophisticated, with AI assistants proactively assisting students, providing real-time answers to inquiries, and even stepping in when students are ready to lose interest.

It will be crucial for creators to post public material and maintain visibility as marketing and discovery grow more competitive and move toward AI-driven platforms. Additionally, Chris promotes openness and human supervision while cautioning about ethical issues, including authenticity, false information, and data privacy. Ultimately, his main point is that creating a comprehensive, AI-augmented education company with a human connection at its core is more important for success in the AI future than simply selling courses.

2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

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Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. My name’s Chris, and today we’re gonna do a solo episode. We’re gonna talk about AI and course creation, but it’s gonna be a little different than probably what you’ve been thinking already or what you’re already seeing happening. We’re gonna look into the future and look at 10 ways.

AI is gonna be different in the life of the course creator. What’s gonna change in the course creation economy because of ai, things are already changing. Things are already happening now, but we’re gonna look a little further out into the future. And the reason this is important is when you think about.

How AI is changing online education. It opens up opportunities for you. It also creates risks for you. So the more that we can see what’s next and get a feel for what’s coming, the better we can prepare to take advantage of the opportunities and remove the risks. Where are we at today? AI is already here.

It’s also not something that is equally. Used or distributed. There’s early adopters, certain types of people who are leveraging and using AI a lot more than others. Some may not even be using it at all as course creators, but most techie folks are in some ways experience experimenting, playing with ai, using it at work.

So in terms of course creation, we’re already seeing course creators. Use AI to help create outlines, to create lesson drafts or talking points for slides, or even slides themselves. Create quiz questions from a body of material to do support in some ways with chatbots. We’re using AI and video editing.

This podcast is actually edited in a tool called DE Script, which has AI video editing we’ve been using for a long time. People are using AI in marketing copy, and, but still most course, creators are under using it. This is like the early days of email marketing or social media and even online courses themselves.

So the first prediction I have for you of what’s coming in the next five years with AI and course creation is that. Course creation is gonna get a lot faster. Cheaper. Cheaper and easier. This is good and bad. It’s bad because it lowers the barrier to entry so that kind of, anyone can create a course. But it’s good for people who are not trying to replace themselves entirely by ai, but they use it to create a small team effect so that they can get things done faster.

Video editing curriculum, design, lesson content, using AI to accelerate those things. Course creation gets faster and cheaper. The next prediction I have for you is that average course quality goes down but the top tier gets a lot better because of ai. So the, low end of the, course creation market actually gets worse.

And the reason that is, is that course creators will, or entrepreneurs will chase opportunities and create what’s known as AI slop and just see an opportunity, oh, here’s a hot topic. I’m gonna have AI a hundred percent make a course for me and I’m gonna sell it. And it’s gonna sound like every other generic AI generated course.

On that topic. So the low end course creation, because of the barrier to entry, is actually going to get worse. We’re gonna get flooded with more and more lower quality AI slop content. We’re already seeing this on social media and YouTube where AI content is flooding. And so it creates more noise but the creators at the top end of the market who are leveraging AI in an intelligent way are actually creating even better courses, higher production value videos, websites, and so on.

The next prediction I have is that. The personal brand aspect becomes even more important in the future of online education or as an education entrepreneur. So personal brand has always been a thing. You have one, whether you choose to accept that idea or not. I’ve always been a big fan of not hiding behind a website and really putting yourself out there as much as you can.

In your online education business as a teacher, as a coach, as an entrepreneur, as a topic brand personality, all these things are really important. They’re just becoming more and more important. Humans have never been more lonely and isolated because of technology. So the desire to connect in an educational format with a real human and not just with robots and artificial intelligence is only gonna increase.

Your personal brand really matters, and even if you’re augmenting yourself with AI to be more productive increase your production value and so on. I recommend just keeping that personal aspect of you in the business and that could be things like just having an, even if you use a lot of AI in creating your course, you could have an ask me anything office hours once, a once a month, and that keeps the human in, that keeps the personal brand strong do not let AI slowly take over your everything and now your personal brand is completely gone from your online education company. The next piece related to the human side is that coaching community and accountability becomes more premium in the course creator education offer stack. So what I mean by that is as content becomes more and more commoditized with ai, it’s the other aspects of learning, the coaching, the community, the accountability systems, the peer-to-peer connection the masterminding if you will, the social learning things like memberships, cohorts.

Private communities certifications that include a, human aspect of certifying this. This makes premium content in the future. So information at the end of the day wants to be free. And what I mean by that is your course content, the information in your training. There’s much pressure on that.

The, just the info part of what you do is a, in some ways a commodity. You can have unique ideas and unique insights and blend unique things together, but at the end of the day, information wants to be free and in an AI world, which is unlocking information at scale the things that are valuable going forward or add more value or premium value.

Are the human things. That’s the private coaching, the group coaching, the online and in-person communities, the event-based learning, any kind of social learning or certification and continuing education that requires a human component. This is why we have all those great tools in lifter LMS, so that. You can, what we’ve said since the beginning of lift drill LMS is you can scale the human touch with robotics.

We’ve always said that, and what that means is even before AI was a big deal, we believe that the technology of building a website, using WordPress, using lift drill LMS will accelerate you, but you are still a human in the machine and we are scaling the human, not replacing the human. So my next prediction is that personalized learning will become the new standard.

So what this looks like, some call it adaptive learning, but essentially if we look back to the old in-person classroom education style learning is not very personalized. There’s a teacher in front of the class, it’s one to many. There’s instruction and mass, everybody’s hearing the same thing at the same time, at the same pace, taking the same tests.

What personalized learning is where and this is where AI provides a big opportunity and unlock, is the learning can adapt to the learner. So if there’s knowledge gaps that one individual’s having. The AI tutor as an example, could revisit concepts until that knowledge gap is filled or could adjust quizzing and knowledge assessments based on that learner’s strengths and weaknesses to make sure whatever the gaps are filled.

So how does it, what does this look like? It looks like having a, let’s say, a AI tutor on the site. Or even just some kind of monitoring that’s happening, that’s looking at the progress tracking and the grades and the reporting and the content consumption. How much of a video has been watched and so on, where the AI can help guide that learner to more content if they need to, fill in some foundations before they move forward, or if there’s some kind of competency that’s already met.

That learner can move forward and move on into something new, something else. So personalized learning is becoming more and more powerful and possible with ai. If you think about it this way, in the old days, there were like three TV channels on a television. If you were lucky enough to have a TV and now.

There’s unlimited content on the internet and there’s all these algorithms and AI running in social media or YouTube as an example, just feeding you and adapting to you the type of content that you like to watch or sh have shown interest in. That same thing has not progressed as far in education, but now it is.

It’s happening. And we’re just gonna see more and more personalized learning. The next thing that’s gonna really change with AI and education is the student support and the operations of education of the classroom. So what do I mean by that? Think of. An AI tutor. Think about AI agents or assistants or bots that are available to or questions or to proactively help in the tutor context or nudge based on progress.

If you think of something like an exit intent popup, by the way, if you’re not using popup maker, you should definitely use that to get more engagement, sales and retention on your lift LMS powered site. But there’s this concept with a popup called an exit intent. So what happens is when the mouse is going to the top left corner to leave.

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Speaker: A webpage that creates a trigger that causes a popup. So you can put whatever you want in the message to get people to stay or use a coupon code and complete their purchase. But that kind of, thing applied to learning. You can actually do this with pop-up maker. If someone’s trying to exit a lesson, you can throw a up to encourage them to stay.

That’s something you can do with pop-up maker. But now imagine an AI assistant is there notice somebody’s about to abandon the training that they’re supposed to be doing or said they wanted to do. And not only can we throw a popup or a message, we could actually immediately initiate a conversation.

That’s the power of AI in terms of responding to user behavior on the site. It’s, it basically creates a better learning experience that’s much more scalable. So it’s like AI student support. Ai, LMS Automat automation. So again, we’re scaling the human touch with robotics. There is a lot we wanna do with automation and robotics and artificial intelligence, and having helpful AI assistance in the learning experience.

Is, or we’re just gonna see more and more of that. And if you think about how that might change in traditional education I could see the role of the teacher changing to be more of a facilitator and a coach than how they currently work, as an example. So as some of the more operations side of.

Education folds into artificial intelligence. The human teacher can be there to more facilitate a process, hold space, provide the human connection even help improve AI systems and so on. But at the end of the day, keeping the humanity in the education will always be important. So in terms of. AI in the future.

My next prediction for you is that the marketing side of online courses is gonna get even more competitive. So gone are the early days of online courses where if you happen to be early and you really put up a quality course on a topic, and nobody else had done it. You could scale huge, particularly on a platform like Udemy.

In the early days I saw people teaching basic Excel courses making millions of dollars as an example. But as this market gets more and more saturated as artificial intelligence accelerates the marketing and advertising of courses, coaching programs, membership sites and so on, it’s just.

It’s gonna get more noisy and harder to stand out. So folks are using AI for their blogs, for making video content, writing emails. Some of the ai innovations in the paid advertising department that are happening right now are really interesting. And in five years I having an AI. Run your ad campaigns and optimize them over time is awesome, but you’re still gonna need to be a human and participate in all that.

So AI doesn’t, it doesn’t remove the need for marketing. What it does is it punishes lazy marketing. So if you just create AI slop blog posts with a very lightweight SEO strategy. And you don’t even edit the posts or put your personal touch on it. That’s AI slop. That kind of garbage in, garbage out is not gonna be productive from a marketing standpoint.

But those that use AI for ideation, repurposing SEO optimizations, funnel optimization. Testing, split tests playing with hooks and offers and all these things. This is where AI really shines I just wanna throw a plug out there. I use a AI tool called Ojo that’s at ojo.ai. And what’s cool about that is one of, I’ve been in internet marketing for about 20 years now.

It’s a couple decades. And one of the early internet marketers I followed, his name was Frank Kern. He’s a great marketer, direct response copywriter interesting guy. He’s done a lot of different things in marketing and information products and ads and all the rest. But a, marketer like Frank, you could probably hire him and pay him like $30,000 to write one sales page for you or.

What you could do is, and this is fairly recent, within the last year, you could pay $50 a month for his AI tool that has been trained on how he thinks and his style and his structure of copywriting and creating marketing, advertising, communications, messaging that works and converts. I love using that tool and it’s not like I just put a quick prompt and out comes a sales page.

It’s I, won’t say annoying to work with. It’s just time consuming because if you’re gonna do a sales page with ojo.ai, as much as Frank would like to say it’s easy, saves you a bunch of time, which it does do all those things. It’s gonna ask you like 20 questions and dig into you’re, you have to talk to it for about 30 minutes at least to come up with a good sales page.

But once you put in that work and you really jam with it as the human and tell your story and your voice and all these things, the actual sales page content is pretty awesome. So that’s but it’s not lazy. It’s not like a one-shot prompt to chat GBT. Hey, build me a sales page about my. Course, and here’s, the, here are the lessons in the course, and you’re done.

It’s not like that. It’s, much much more in depth. So use AI to co-pilot, not to replace you. Another trend that we’re gonna see more of is that search and discovery. Is gonna change dramatically beyond traditional Google, SEO. So what do I, mean about Google? SEO? For those who are early adopters of ai, you will have noticed that you use things like a Google search.

A lot less than you used to. For me it’s probably about 50% less. So I’m going to tools like chat, GBT, Claude and so on to search for answers, not just Google. So what does that mean? That means as a course creator AI. Tools, the language models will surface your course and people will find you and find links to you or at least discover you there on on a chat with an AI somewhere.

In addition to traditional methods like Google search, YouTube, social media, AI is gonna become a bigger and more and more important category. This is where all the opportunity is though. So when you have an AI optimization plan as a course creator, let me share some things that will help you stand out in a, in AI tools.

I’m learning this from personal experience and I’m, I found myself actually grateful and really lucky for some decisions I made over 13 years ago at the beginning of lifter LMS. Those decisions are this we have created a podcast. You’re listen to now, we’re somewhere around 500 episodes.

Each episode is on average, somewhere around 45 minutes, so I don’t do public math, but whatever, 500 times, 45 minutes, that’s a lot of minutes. All those episodes are out in the public domain where AI can crawl. Information. We also publish our podcast to YouTube. YouTube is al is also ingested by all the ais all the transcripts and all that stuff.

And that’s just our podcast. We have over a thousand pages of documentation on how to use lifter LMS. We have about a thousand blog posts and many pages on our website, informational pages. That describe what we do. We have our own social media presence in public discussions. We’ve been involved in on Reddit x YouTube comments and so on.

So because we have this large surface area of publicly available open content.

Theis know who we are. They found us like we’re not hiding. The problem with course creators is if you put all your intellectual property is basically inside the course or the membership, and the only public thing you have is a sales page and a checkout, you’re almost invisible to ai. This is why it’s important to do things like start a podcast.

Start a blog if you do a newsletter. Which I highly recommend publish the newsletter, the historical newsletter, post publicly on your site so they don’t just disappear into the email EERs make, start a YouTube channel. Get involved in conversations and help people. Don’t just be salesy and spammy, but help people in your industry, in your category.

For free. In places like Reddit and other public social media places, the AI is gonna be scraping. If you think about grok, that’s the the AI from X. So Grok obviously has optics on everything happening on X. If you’re not doing anything on x, gr is less and less likely to be aware of you.

This is all to say that Google search is not going to die. It’s gonna evolve. Google itself has its own AI tools, Gemini, which is awesome. But put, my advice is to put at least as much public content out there that you have behind the paywall so that the AI systems can discover you and help people find you when they’re looking for people, courses, resources.

Like you have. The next thing that I see in the next five years in an AI driven world is an increase in bigger issues around ethics, authenticity. And just doing the right moral thing. So what do I mean by that? One, AI today, if you look at. Video generated content or even text content.

You can’t always tell if it’s AI or not. So the line, it used to be obvious when something was ai, particularly in in video. But even videos as we call it, a deep fake, is now pretty possible. Like I know I’ve seen some AI content that I thought was real that is actually. No, not, and AI is just gonna get better and better the worst ai today is the worst AI’s ever gonna be.

It’s just gonna keep getting better and better which creates issues. So it’s okay to create a digital version of yourself. Whether that’s like a chat bot that’s trained on your knowledge base and helps people it’s okay to. Use AI to help with your writing and so on. But what’s not okay is to mislead people into, people need to know when they’re dealing with a human or not.

So I’m not this is just for informational purposes. I’m not a lawyer. Consult a lawyer. Get your own legal advice. But in your terms and conditions and your privacy policy page and everything on your website, I would encourage you to think about if you are using ai, how to incorporate that fact into your terms and conditions and your privacy policy and so on.

For example, with a privacy policy, if you are doing coaching and you’re really getting unique personal information from your clients and. You as a coach are leveraging AI to help you process and best coach those clients. If you’re sending that personal information away to another tool like chat, GBT, or wherever that’s a privacy policy issue.

So you just need to be upfront around all those things and be careful as well. Like it’s one thing to share that information to an AI tool about a coaching client with zero personally identifiable information. Versus actually like just dumping in their real name, their real email address.

They filled out this form with all this data, their company name, all this stuff, and you just push that out into chat GBT servers or whatever. You have to think about all of that. And the other thing too is AI tends to be affirming and it also can hallucinate. So sometimes we, don’t want AI to always be saying, Hey, good job.

You’re so smart, you’re doing the right thing. We sometimes we, need to do a little bit of tough love or not always be so positive. I am a very positive person. I love positivity. I like to default positivity of ai. But when it comes to education and learning and coaching, sometimes you have to give a little tough love or a little hard feedback or disagree.

With your client or your student. So think about that. And also sometimes AI will hallucinate, it will give incorrect information or straight up lie. And you need to have safeguards in place for that. Some, one way we talk about it is, we call it human in the loop, where a human will always review anything AI creates before.

It goes out. Or if you’re not gonna do that, let’s say you have an AI chat bot that’s trained on your knowledge base or whatever you wanna have a big disclaimer up front like, Hey, I am an ai, this is, I’m an AI chat bot. Sometimes my results may not be a hundred percent accurate or whatever. So just think about all that.

The authenticity, the ethics and the morals and all that stuff are really important when we’re using AI to accelerate us. We don’t want it to move, it go so fast to a point where we’re crossing ethical boundaries and not being authentic and true. Then my last thing is that AI for the course creators, it’s so much bigger than courses.

It’s about building AI augmented businesses. So as I was saying earlier, course content is somewhat becoming commodified and the value of it’s going down and down. So for an example of that is. Why would I sign up for a course about X when I can just ask AI to get the same information or even better information?

One reason is the course. There’s only one you teaching that course, and maybe they have a feel a connection to you or you have a unique style and, the people want you. Again, this is why your authenticity and personal brand really matter, but outside of courses. The winners will be building they’ll be accelerated by this AI content and research got, gets a million times easier than it is today.

That’s gonna lower the barrier to entry. Like part of me loves course creation because it had a little bit of a barrier to entry. ’cause getting on camera and building a website, a LMS website and everything. It’s not as easy as opening up a social media account and becoming an influencer.

So there’s a little bit of a barrier to entry AI’s blowing that all out of the water, even in WordPress. Keep a close eye on WordPress, the new AI stuff that’s coming into core WordPress. Basically where it’s going is you’re gonna be able to chat with your website and what that means is, think of it like chatting to chat GPT, but you’re actually chatting with your website like, Hey, add another service offering for this.

Create a new product for that. Change this sales page in this way. Replace that image with different image. So we’re moving to conversational interfaces. We’re already, there in many ways. But we haven’t really done that with our website. You know what the conversational interface for our website was in the past and is today for the most part.

It’s a developer, it’s an agency, it’s a freelancer. So what that means is it’s not that AI is going to take jobs from website builders, it’s just that will happen for people that don’t. Evolve as freelancers and developers and agencies to better serve their clients in the AI world. But you’re gonna be able to chat with your website and get stuff done just by talking to your website.

This is one of the cool things about WordPress and where the, AI map is and direction is going with that. Scale with automation. And, but don’t over automate, don’t remove the human entirely. Think bigger than just courses is where you can get into the memberships and the course cohorts and the community and the social learning and the the private coaching, the group coaching, the office hours, all of these things are becoming more and more important so that you can build a full stack AI augmented education business.

I’d recommend that if you’re behind the curve on ai, just start playing with it. It’s changing so fast. The main thing is just to start playing with it. Try to make videos with it. Try to make images with it. Use it for some research. Use it for some of your content things. Double down on niching, double down on your personal brand.

Double down on community and really obsess about human transformation and not just giving people the best information, help your target market transform into the better person that they want to become. So I want to encourage you to own your platform. Build your online education business on your own website, please do that.

That’s what WordPress is there for. That’s what lifter LMS is there for. Remember, these are open tools. You know where we’re going with ai. Let’s say you wanted to customize your LMS that’s so much easier on a platform like WordPress that you own and control that’s open source than some closed, hosted, overpriced, expensive course tool.

So build your AI augmented education business on your own website with WordPress and lifter LMS. And remember, AI lowers barriers. So it creates a lot of noise, but it also creates opportunity. So chase the high end of the market in terms of becoming an AI augmented. Education entrepreneur that’s building even better learning experiences with the help of ai.

So that’s it for this episode. Thank you for listening. Don’t forget with all this AI and technology and website building, it’s good to go outside and take a break and connect with humans in nature and we’ll catch you in the next episode. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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In this episode, Joe Gorup goes into great detail about how his platform CourseAvenue uses a highly developed AI system called Course Advisor to transform complicated, dense source materials (like technical documents, PDFs, or government regulations) into fully structured, instructionally sound online courses in a matter of minutes.

Joe Gorup founded CourseAvenue and is a software developer and innovator in e-learning. Using API interfaces, these courses are then smoothly distributed via LifterLMS, enabling student tracking, course structuring, and lesson development to be done automatically. In contrast to simple AI prompting tools, his system employs a multi-step “AI factory” process that evaluates the length, context, and purpose of the content, applies instructional design frameworks such as Bloom’s Taxonomy, and creates assessments and lessons that are appropriate for various learning levels.

He emphasizes that the true issue this addresses is that the majority of subject matter experts such as attorneys, engineers, or compliance officers are not qualified teachers, which makes it challenging and costly to transform their expertise into useful training (which often costs up to $100,000 per course). Beyond creation, the platform offers sophisticated learning analytics that analyze everything from individual question performance to completion rates, assisting in the identification of gaps in learner comprehension and course quality. By utilizing a specially designed bridge to enable bookmarking, scoring, and progress tracking, it also tackles important technical issues like SCORM integration within WordPress. Additionally, it guarantees complete accessibility compliance (WCAG/Section 508), making courses usable for students with disabilities.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Joe Goup. He’s the founder of course avenue.com. You gotta see what he is built [email protected]. Which is a super cool implementation, of course, avenue’s, unique way of creating course content and then feeding it into a lifter LMS site.

But first, welcome to the show, Joe. 

Joe Gorup: Hey, thanks a lot, Chris. I appreciate the chance to chat with you and the folks. Yeah it’s a wild rule in the LMS and education and content space these days and to throw our hat in the ring and show people what we’re doing. So I appreciate the opportunity.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s a, it is a busy space. There’s literally 500 LMSs out there. AI is taking over the world. The economy’s in flux and everybody’s just trying to figure things out, and you’re doing some really interesting stuff at the intersection of all those. Tell us about gov. Do education, what is it?

Why’d you build it? How does it work? 

Joe Gorup: Great. It came from the notion of as a company course avenue, which I started early on works a lot in the federal government. People use our core our, authoring tool to build courses on everything from inspecting meat packing plants to ethics compliance for federal lawyers.

And so over the years, we just saw this kind of huge gap between there’s dense regulations. Are hard to understand. And then the volume of time it takes to actually educate someone on what is in these regulations. And the one rule of thumb that we’ve used within the federal government is a hundred thousand dollars per course.

One of my associates, director of training, yeah, I had a million dollars budget and I had to build 10 courses in one year, stressed out to the to the max. But he did it. And I can I can vouch for that. Yeah. It a fully baked compliance course that, that the, to transform that dense regulations into education.

It’s a very expensive process. So with that is my background as, yes, the AI train is, in full of gear here. We were fortunate, one of our one of my co-founders was early on in LLMs having to write Python code before there was any chat. He would talking to LLMs through writing Python code and having Python code, write other Python code.

And we started playing around with. The AI with the goal of, I know instructional systems design. I know the time delay, I know the source content, and we saw what could be done not in chat, and what government education represents is the end of, I don’t know, 15 years of experience management and work in the federal government.

And it, what we do is we take regulations, use AI to transform it and to make courses so people can actually understand what’s in the regulations and yeah. And so we go from federal register document, a document comes out in the federal government and in about four and a half minutes. We have a course, a marketing page, and a course in lifter.

And there could be a lot of skeptics out there. What are those? Oh, how is that possible? And I know in the l in the in the AI space there’s a lot of talk about you can’t use, you can’t really build a course with an LLM and just ai. And I’m here to tell you it, it can be done, but not through a simple chat interface.

And so that making sense? Am I 

Chris Badgett: That is making sense. You get the document from the government, you full, you fold it through your course advisor software. 

Joe Gorup: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And then it creates course content that you then feed into Lift rails. You’re doing it through an API. Tell us about your setup. Like why does WordPress, and why did you choose WordPress and Lifter as part of this stack?

Joe Gorup: WordPress. It was just handy. It’s ubiquitous. We can pull in plugins as needed. The eco, I didn’t have to worry about the e-commerce interface. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, 

Joe Gorup: and so on a pure convenience and it as a software engineer, as my background, I cringe a little bit about the underlying WordPress ecosystem because like I know we’re, down in the Willy weeds, we’re down in the PHP, we’re down in the code.

And sometimes it gives me heartburn. But from a convenience standpoint, for me to st for me to custom build something, to do everything WordPress does, right? That’s outta the equation. Then we looked at delivering, so we’ve been in the LMS delivery space tangentially, right? Because we have people use our software to build courses.

We have our own little mini LMSA little tracking system. And, but we go, we didn’t wanna have to modify ours, and we looked around on the, like most people do Google searching AI things and Lifter came across our desk and we poked it. We used your trial period and we said, Hey, we kicked the tires, but we wanna kick ’em to kick the tires from the bottom.

How scalable is it and a thousand courses later using your API? It’s been rock solid. And one of the things we struggled with out in the market was our output from our product is a storm compliant. Or 10 can compliance course. And there’s that little bit of a gap of how do I launch those?

And there’s some solutions out there and I didn’t like. We tried one and it was it was klugy and it was funny because we like the lifter API, we know our code and we just need something to bridge the gap. So we wrote a little thin interface layer between a course, avenue course that I can create publishes score.

I can put it in my corporate LMS or wherever else I wanna put it. But then we can also just put that in lifter, like you said, we create the lesson, the course wrapper for that lesson. And then. Our course shows up as a little piece that gets launched in track. So all the bookmarking, the things you want, the book especially bookmarking and completion status are the top couple things that we leverage back and forth.

It’s a very, so we, again, we love the scalability the fact that we can talk to it. The API has worked to the tune of I think 1,005 courses. 

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s amazing. And can you tell more about how you solved the SCORM WordPress problem of playing SCORM content and tracking in WordPress?

Because there are some off the shelf solutions, a couple players out in the market, but it sounds like you built your own, which is awesome and it’s always been a little bit of a friction point between. Because WordPress native people see WordPress as a content management system. So they’re gonna create their content in WordPress, right?

Not necessarily separately, but when you do create SCORM files or some benefit to that, 

Joe Gorup: right? 

Chris Badgett: But as well. So how did you bridge those worlds? 

Joe Gorup: What? Having been in this role a long time, the essence of what people want is I wanna launch a course, I wanna know who’s taking the course. So from a, if I had my course perspective hat on I wanna launch, it.

So I have to know those per in score, right? It’s just a set of parameters, the CMI data of the for the learner. And so our little, it’s basically a little shim. I, call it, it’s a, it’s not a massive piece of software that’s, below. It’s basically, I know the, I can talk to the lifter side, you’re gonna tell me who this person is, and then we have a little piece that just launches our course, pretending like it’s being launched from a score compliant system.

And we have a little, and in there we have a log file. So I can tell you like every time we send a bookmark, so any learner that takes a course in lifter from a course avenue built course, I can tell. I, our log file will tell you the learner id, the learner name, all the communications back and forth, and it’s just, it came natural to us.

’cause that’s, we’re software company and that’s what we do. So we weren’t trying to solve the, I have course builder 3000, the publishes score. ’em and, now I want to use WordPress to connect the two. So we aren’t trying to mill. Ubiquitous. We’re not gonna try to retire on a, scoring to lifter tool, but for anyone that uses our product, they can press a button and with our little, with a plug, with a little course avenue plugin, your course and Lifter will communicate back and forth.

We will set the completion status back to lifter. And as they’re going through, the course of the bookmarks are all stored, which is usually that’s the, those are the main things people want. And then if I could plug one more piece to that puzzle what we know is people like bookmarking, they like completion status and they like scoring.

And the one problem it’s, it goes deep into the whole scoring of 2004 revision you on. I wanna know. Is everyone missing? Question five, is the question bad? I have knowledge checks Are PE what Most everyone puts knowledge checks in their courses or they should, or they like to question. How do you, how are people doing?

Do you have any notion of not you got storing ’em ’cause they’re just knowledge checks. Course avenue we have for years we’ve had this module called Analyze. Where we, track that. And so the people that take our courses in Lifter, if they launch the course with, I can, if I look at my analyze reports, I can tell you, I can tell you how many seconds someone took, to answer a question.

We have a whole suite of learning analytics down to that individual learner, taking an individual question. Data, which is extremely helpful. One of our customers is the Federal Aviation Administration. Medical doctors that wanna be certified by the FAA have to be re-certified, right? So in that level of high consequence training, knowing they got a 75% on the test isn’t good enough because again, like I said, maybe everyone’s missing the same 25%.

The questions are bad. 

And, I kind and without knowing, is everybody missing these eight questions or is everyone choosing C and the actual is B because the distractor is wrong? And so I, it’s so I’m That is a, very powerful element on top of the fact that yes, it’s just scor we know score.

It’s been confusing from the score world of tracking individual or responses. There’s, It is not standardized, but we’ve standardized it and it’s, it works extremely well. So we get not only just bookmarking data completion status scoring, but then scoring down to the, if you check a box to track it, I can track it down.

Or of course, avenue courses can track down to the individual response the individual response and just That’s awesome. Yeah. And just a page, just to how that works is, you build your course in course Avenue Studio when you hit the publish button, we have, this is really fascinating when you’re looking at the course from a course developer standpoint, if you click on the learning analytics tab, we will tell you up to the, basically within probably four hours, we summarize all the data.

So you can literally click on a section, a lesson, an exam, a question, and get the individual learner responses, including survey questions. That’s a very powerful piece of the puzzle. And that’s how people that use Course Evan do to build the courses. It’s not just publish and forget it, it’s, it becomes, if you’re using that analytics, you get learning analytics as a part of the development process.

So you can go and fix the question that everyone’s missing, republish it and see how, see what happens next. 

Chris Badgett: Does that, mean that Course Avenue is a learning record store as well? So this, L-M-S-L-R-S, all these, 

Joe Gorup: yeah. 

Chris Badgett: 10 can API. It gets a little confusing, but is it 

Joe Gorup: I guess if I put my 10 cat, 10 K or XAPI.

In that respect, it’s an option when you’re using our product. And so we, we’ve literally had this before TinCan came out. And so I was at the conference when, at the TinCan announcement. I’m like, we’re already doing that. And yes, if people want that data, you check a couple boxes, enable this for this.

Maybe I don’t want analytics, I want the final exam, whatever it is. And we will send back that data and we do store it in course Avenue Studio. Some people hate that idea. I just want just, I wanna publish it and get it outta your authoring platform. Hey, I got that. That’s fine. A lot of people are wanting to know the effectiveness, of their learning by measuring and seeing that level of detail.

Chris Badgett: But on Gov education 

Joe Gorup: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: Does the SCORM file live on that website? 

Joe Gorup: We have a storage mechanism within Course Avenue. So it, you, the courses are, does 

Chris Badgett: it kinda I frame in or does it actually serve from your WordPress 

Joe Gorup: site? It’s, it serves from our WordPress site. 

Chris Badgett: Okay, 

Joe Gorup: cool. So you’re in Lifter and you take, you click on Launch My Lesson and it just, a window appears.

Yeah, and that’s our course. And it’s talking, it talks back to the WordPress site that. We have hosted and then it updates the score or lifter with the status 

Chris Badgett: and talks back if they choose to. The course Avenue Analytics as well. 

Joe Gorup: Yeah. Yeah, we do. And I, and part of that is for those that are skeptical of an AI created course, and I get that we have literally spent, like I said, we were very early on in the AI world before there was a chat, and so we have refined the process of creating education.

And I was, one of the courses we have is on maritime education and I was really proud that people were taking the course and the feedback has been extremely positive and it’s one thing to build a course, and in our case, we don’t know, course Avenue was not a maritime cybersecurity expert, but we sell a course on it that was created by a course advisor.

I’m like and, we knew it was good. We’ve done enough of, and enough QA know, like we think it’s, but to have an external third party who we’d never met before, right? Some company in Ohio bought the course and then bought 10 more copies for their folks and. So for us, from a validation standpoint, a director of cyber security for a company in this domain took our course, liked it so much that he bought 10 more copies.

And for that we, our custom order, we actually manually sold them that. So we, did the manual enrollments in in lifter for 10 of those folks. But so that was another, I guess another feature was the fact that we could, API it people could make it self development and then. We put our, LMS management hat on, and we just use, we use the lifter manual enrollment, which worked great, and they’re all there and it’s in there my courses list.

Yeah, so not only did we develop the course took, the maritime san course took about, I think four and a half minutes to create. It’s sold through our lifter L-M-S-L-M-S piece and it’s revenue positive. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to be clear course avenue.com is like your course creation, content creation business.

Joe Gorup: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And Gov education is an example where you’re using your own software to create profitable training, even though you’re not like a maritime No captain expert. Your process is able to create valuable training materials for an industry. Yeah. Which is really cool. 

Joe Gorup: Yeah. What you mentioned the the subject matter expert ker.

So like how do you extract this information and what we wanted to do with gov education, it’s a real thing, right? There is a problem with, there’s new HIPAA compliance laws federal man derivatives trading, new rules, regulations from the SEC, it’s 

Chris Badgett: say 95, I just wanna say 95% of subject matter experts are not trained as educators, teachers, or coaches.

So this is the huge problem. There’s a lot of great subject matter experts that maybe they make a technical document, like in this case, a legal 

Joe Gorup: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Thing. But it’s a great problem to focus on and I’m so glad you’re doing that at Course Avenue. 

Joe Gorup: Yep. Yeah. And yeah, but you hit the nail on the head.

Course Avenue is the authoring tool, the product that we have that has course advisor built in and to quell the, or the, naysayers. We created Gov education because it’s like we’re gonna, we’re right, we’re gonna use our own tool. We’re gonna automate like the 

Chris Badgett: hair club for men. You’re also a client, right?

Joe Gorup: Yeah. Yeah. My, my hair’s a whole nother story, but but yes. But yeah, that we wanted to make it, is it scalable? Is it repeatable? And it could produce high quality. And we saw that for, we have basically every significant federal regulation since, 2024, is on government education. So we skipped some of the little the, Prune Festival celebration in in, Georgia.

We’re not gonna build a course on that. But again derivatives training, maritime, cybersecurity, huge changes. Food stamp program, the SNAP program. I one, there’s 200. When they change, they’re actually changing the packaging rules for products at the USDA. And we have a course on it, but it’s buried the logic, the actual what is happening is buried in that document.

So for anyone that’s listening, if you do have those, you’re the subject matter expert in whatever you’re, in. If you have some source material, as Chris mentioned, that transformation part. It’s not easy. You’re not trained in ISD. And so our thought is, hey, if we can augment that, take what you give us.

We do the ISD, and then your job is to just correct if it’s wrong. So we have our, marketing phrases, AI powered, human refined, and that’s what we believe in. They aa might, they might get it wrong. You may want to t you’re gonna want to tweak things. You wanna put your own stamp on there, personalize it.

And that’s, so you use course, so we generate it, it’s in course Avenue Studio, which is targeted towards non-tech. Gees. If you wanna get down and use the course Avenue API, you can do that. But we’re really about enabling subject matter experts to edit Main, and we’ve been doing that for a good long time.

Mostly in the US government is helping people do just what we’re talking about. And now we see we can actually enable lots of people, with all the content we do have and or reaching out folks like you guys to help spread the word that, yeah, we wanna solve that problem. 

Chris Badgett: Cool. Who, are like some of the clients, like what type of person is a really good fit for course, avenue or company or business or organization or whatever, 

Joe Gorup: someone that wants to, to what?

We’ve used the term measured communications. In other words, you have, like today, what we see is a lot of companies are struggling with the fact that I have again, standard operating procedures, rules, regulations a manual. And that transformation has taken so long using traditional methods with instructional systems, designers sitting down, it can be very expensive.

And so if it, and then, so having people that, that have those problems, if they want to transform it into education, that would be a great. C prospect for us. Also it’s like folks that are currently today, they’re taking their p their, domain experience. Their domain, I’m sorry, their domain expertise.

They’re putting it in a PowerPoint and posting it somewhere. Or I’ll put it in a, I’ll take my notes. They’re in A PDF or create a YouTube video. I did a demo. You did a demo of your product. It’s in YouTube. You may get some little analytics. You may. You may see how many views you had in A PDF. You post somewhere, it’s you may, you hope someone read it.

But what about if I took your PDF and transformed it into an education piece that was now measurable? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Oh, 

Joe Gorup: I can now tell you how many minutes the person spent on it. I’ll generate questions based on your PDF and you, the person that wrote it, can see how they did. And then you know how long they spent on it.

And did they get it? So as opposed to just throwing stuff out in the ether and like hoping, and I hope they get it, the education aspect and what course advisors can do is can transform that into something. Now you have a shared context. You’re, setting a learning objective and the things that don’t come natural to.

Expert, right? A subject of expert is not gonna think in terms of learning design, but what that power that does is it, now makes it your communications from this linear PDF out or YouTube out in the ether to a measurable element that you can gauge and understand how people are they learning something, which is really what you want.

So that’s the, kind of a big picture. The second picture as I think I mentioned. For people that are trying to sell content online, right? And again, we big fans of your product and lifter, we, I say big fans, there’s a thousand horses in there. It’s help helping people with that problem.

Your domain experts, you’re not ISDs are you hiring people? You hire, you got the course out there, now you, oh, geez, you wanna make some changes, right? We’ve seen a lot of cases where a subject matter expert really knows tax accounting, really knows how to grow fruit trees in Arkansas. Like they just wanna, they wanna make some money on that.

They hire someone to develop the course and then they, oh, how we make an update. There’s a, new frost thing we learned. They have to go back to the person they paid to create the course, all the content and that can time consuming and expensive. It can be really expensive in some cases.

So all about pushing, enabling people to build and manage their own education without, and making it key is instructionally sound and available just quicker. A lot quicker. And then self maintainable. That’s we’re about. An 

Chris Badgett: AI question for you. ISD instructional design curriculum design course content creation.

It sounds easy, but it’s not, and 

Joe Gorup: no. 

Chris Badgett: And if a human steps up to an AI like ChatGPT, with my. Let’s say I wrote a nonfiction book on a topic and I plug it in and tell Chad, GBT to make me a course about this. That’s like a very junior way to do it. I’m sure what you’re doing, there’s there’s way more that goes into working with AI to actually create a valuable course.

Like what’s an example that a non-instructional, a concept that a non-instructional designer would be helpful to just learn. 

Joe Gorup: I, in our experience you see all the stuff online about ai either a, it’s gonna actually change the world. Everyone’s gonna lose their jobs. We’re gonna be doing as humans are gonna be doing nothing.

On the other hand, epic failures, it deleted all the code and it, aired out and as a train wreck. And so what we’ve seen is you could, the chat gpt of the world from an end user perspective are deceivingly powerful. You can create an outline of a course. It gives you this positive feedback.

You can, you could do some things, but how do you operate? The key is operationalizing that and to the essence of your question is, that how can I not just have it do something but actually manufacture and make it part and do this process because ISD is not a one stop, press the button and get something out.

And so I, wish I had a great answer for people. Other than with my self-promotion hat on of use Course Advisor. But there’s that gap between I wanted to use chat to get some valuable information out and fully operationalize it as we have is huge. Again, and under our covers we’re, an education company, but under the covers we’re a software engineering company, so our techniques have been working on.

Interface like we interface with you guys with, lifter, LMS, user API, we use the APIs of the LLMs to have a, it’s an extended conversation when it takes four or five minutes to create a course. In our world the conversation that’s going on, how much content do we have? What’s the essence of the content?

How do you maintain context? When you’re going after building a given page of content versus in 155 page document. So there’s all these tools that unfortunately today they require programmatic conversations. And so I don’t have any handy tips for your listeners that say, oh, if you just do this prompt it’s not, it’s prompt engineering and software engineering combined with.

Our 20 plus years of doing course development put into a big, we call it the factory. So our gov education is run by our AI factory, which is a very complicated piece of software. I give you one a quick example. It’s like you can’t be generic. So if I have 150 page document. How the structure of that’s gonna be different than a 10 page document.

And so we have different models that we’ll use depending on, we analyze the, so we analyze the source material dynamically. Oh, this is this, I don’t want, I don’t want one section, in one lesson in 50 pages. I don’t want in my course, but I don’t want that the, but I don’t need 50 core, 50 sections, 50 lessons and isn’t going support so much.

So what we do is we actually have this conversation with the content and ai, with our own knowledge to actually construct, to like literally hand build just really, quickly. Of course. And so, for example, that again, that differentiation of. What is the overall source material? Girth, for lack of a better term, and I just wanted to use the word girth, but and then that’ll affect the output of the course. And then there’s still another dimension of that, which, let me stop for a second if you have any other questions, but I wanna talk about the source material can provide a course, but that’s just the first leg of the journey, am I making sense about your AI question?

Did I answer that? 

Chris Badgett: You are making sense. I have a another question about accessibility. I’m not sure to drop that in here or not 

Joe Gorup: Sure. 

Chris Badgett: But okay. Yeah, keep going. 

Joe Gorup: Okay. The okay. I’m trying to think of what I kinda lost my train of thought there when I, paused. Oh, the I know. But, so we talked about the course. So I upload my PDF and we’ll take, I’ll take a a, federal government example, look at watershed management and all the elements. There’s new regulations about what’s a watershed and how we’re gonna maintain it, and how you do these measurements.

It’s a 95 page dense regulations headache inducing, written by extremely savvy. Subject matter experts, right? The team that built that, they’re half lawyers, they’re half geologists, and this thing will just it’s brutally hard to understand. We can build a course on that. We call it a baseline course.

When we come in and the topic is the document. Educate me on what’s in this thing. Overall that’s valuable. ’cause I can’t sit through the 85 page document, but it’s again, it’s a baseline course and what we know, right? In good learning design, you’re targeting a topic, an audience to a certain depth of learning.

And I think that’s one of the other things that we see with the people that use, that try to generate a course with Chet ut of why they fail so often is because they’re not factoring those other dimensions. So in my watershed example, I create a baseline course. I can give it to you, you can buy it from us, and hey, great, I now understand what’s in the document.

In course advisor part of the, magic, if you will, is I can then press the button that says, run me a training matrix, build me a training matrix. We then look through the document and identify the main topics. It’s watershed surveys. It’s watershed soil recognition. It’s water it’s stream development and water flow diagramming.

And then there’s compliance, and then there’s fines. And what happens if you do something wrong? So our training, our course advisor will run through the document, pick out the topics. For every given topic, we’ll identify reasonable target audiences. Is it an inspector, is it a landowner, is it a developer?

So given topic, I have a set of audiences, and then this is really cool. Then it comes down to what level of detail and to put my learning geek hat on using Bloom’s taxonomy. Are we talking a level one, an awareness level or an application level? Course, and I can then check a box. I literally check I want, give me four watershed management, soil analysis composition elements.

Give me an awareness level course for landowners, and then an application level course for inspectors. You press the button, have a grab a cup of coffee I’m not kidding. Come back and you’ll have the courses ready to be edited and reviewed. And, now then you edit them, tweak ’em, change ’em. And then just for those, not in the tech geeky world, like what does it mean by this taxonomy level and level of detail?

What’s fascinating is when you look at a an awareness level course, you just wanna know Hey, yeah, there’s soil, there’s composition, and I need to type. There’s four different types. Got it. Now an application level. You just can’t know. There’s four. You have to know the four, and you have to know why it’s a 1, 2, 3, or four.

And what’s what I, this gives me, this is fascinating to me. In our courses that we create, you can really tell by the assessment, by the questions that are generated. And it is fascinating to see that the questions for level one will be that are there, how many different types of soil compositions are there?

Four. In the application level, it’ll give you a case study. In the case where soil composition is 87% manure with a hydro acidity level of 6.2, what is the most appropriate level or assignment for this next step? I’m like, wow. We can literally create that level of education that challenges people to understand.

And you can’t, I, you can’t, you can guess. You may get it right. But I will the every course that we’ve seen that does that, it is a the, you just can’t really, you have to know it. Like I hydroxy level is the type two I it’s fascinating. So bigger picture, yes, it’s a course. But then the course matrix is what is extremely powerful.

’cause I can now target a, securities dealer in New York, or am I talking to the broker manager or am I talking to our SEC regulator all on that route document. So again, from a. Not everyone has federal documents, but everyone hopefully listening, you have some domain experience. You’re trying to educate somebody on something.

So what? Do whatever you have of it’s like that transformation and I’ll call it like transformation plus. That’s transformation. Plus a matrix opportunity to target the learners as opposed to trying to create one giant course. For everybody. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a tough one. Yeah, so there’s that.

And then you asked about accessibility. Should I talk about that for a 

Chris Badgett: second? Yeah, go for it. 

And I just wanna say for those that don’t know, accessibility is really important in online education. It could be somebody using a screen reader who had, who doesn’t have vision, or somebody who can’t hear if there’s audio content and all kinds of stuff.

This is what accessibility is if you don’t know. 

Joe Gorup: Yeah. And another, a good example is lapu. Some that don’t have hands. Simply use voice command software. We’ve seen people have disabilities where they literally will say the word keyboard tab. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Joe Gorup: And then they’re it’s not really a screen reader, it’s a voice recognition software will actually issue the tab.

And so all that is essentially, it’s kinda like you can’t build a restaurant with having, without having a handicapped access bathroom. Yeah. Or yeah, go up the spiral staircase. In your wheelchair. Like you can’t do that in the online world. There’s WCAG is the foundation of accessibility rules, and there are a set of rules, like how do you make something bold and HTML there’s a rule for how you make something accessible.

And HTML and those rule sets, it’s coming called WCAG which is part of WAI, which is part of W three C, the overall, so we’re talking foundational internet. Operations. It’s extremely difficult to achieve that. I’ll just tell you a lot of other tools out there will say, yes, you can build accessible e-learning with our product.

Step one, become an accessibility expert. Here’s wca.com. Oh gosh, no, very few people can do that. And let alone know what this, so if step one is learn how to build your own wheelchair ramp oh gosh, that’s a tough road to hoe. So what course avenue is done? We’ve actually integrated in.

The accessibility rules, section 5 0 8 and WCAG. Section 5 0 8 is within the government W. So if you’re a government supplier, you get to be quote section 5 0 8, which is basically just the rule. It’s the rule set for government. Outside of that, it’s WCAG. We build it into our product. So we’re like the only e-learning offering company that will say, if you build a course in our product, we will guarantee the output.

The output will be five away compliant. And we have a built-in accessibility analysis tool that will actually run through and, tell you page by page, object by object, if it’s good or bad. I’ll give you one, one common example that most people can relate to, and most people are probably guilty of this too, right?

You’re in Microsoft, I’ll give you a word example, but this applies to a course as well your honor. You’re writing a document. You have a, please remember the following, four key, ethical the following requirements, and you take the requirements sentence, please. Please review the following requirements.

You highlight it, you make it bold, and you increase the font a couple notches. So most of your body text is 16. Now you have a 20 pitch font bold. It’s ah. And then you have your list, right? That’s a violation of five compliance. That’s a violation of accessibility right there. Why? Because visually that looks like a header.

The person using the street mirror that’s blind doesn’t know that. It just says the following. Now they can infer it, right? They can infer like the, if you literally say the following, four things are important, colon. But there’s a zillion cases where they don’t know that, and then it gets really complicated because if you have these following in these three sections, and then the three sections has another subsection, visually you can see it looks like subheading, subheading.

The person using the screen reader can’t, they can’t see it, so they rely on it being header tagged. In our product, if you, we actually have like fuzzy logic in there that says if we see a page and we see something bold with a colon after it. So all these little rules that we have, we’ll call it out as an implied header.

Do you, are you really. Like ahead of us. It maybe not be, but it probably is. And then, by the way, here’s the fix, highlight it format. H three, make it a heading. Visually, you probably won’t even know a difference, but it’s literally the difference between making it accessible or inaccessible.

Yeah. And so if you’re, working off of a grant with the federal government, the document you sign says is five W. It needs to be accessible. And I it, is literally part of just it’s federal law. Not many people do it well, and we do it well. And so I give talks on five away compliance and all that kind of stuff.

So I, I can go on for a lot more, but I won’t. But if you’re concerned about that the people that can’t tab. Keyboard accessibility is so huge, especially we’re seeing more and more of that, of everything from, I had personal experience with returning veterans that can’t use a mouse. And if your course or your content says, welcome to our course, click here to begin.

And you have to, you don’t recognize the keyboard. It’s just, not cool. It’s, doing a disservice. And as more content’s being pumped out. That divide that gap between people that need to get the content that just happen to have some kind of mobility issue. They can’t use a mouse.

It’s not all about the people that just visually can’t see. That’s a big part of it. But again, the key is another thing that is, is big. It’s important ’cause you, it just, again, it’s the right thing to do. And I’m, proud of what Course Avenue has been able to do in that community to, to, and generate.

To make it, so again, I call mere mortals, normal people can create something and then the output is five away compliant. And if it’s not, if there’s a question, we as a company will back, we’re there, we have your back. And I can say that because we do work in the government. We have literally millions of learners that have used our courses and there’s never been a, technology issue with a course having a course.

So that’s all about accessibility for now, 

Chris Badgett: working with government that you would have to meet the accessibility need or requirement. But that’s awesome that you’re so passionate about it anyways, that really every course creator, it’s like a cherry on top. Not only are you helping subject matter experts solve the experts curse.

By turning volume of content into actual usable online course, but you’re also making it accessible to all types of people. 

Joe Gorup: Yep. That’s 

Chris Badgett: great. 

Joe Gorup: Yeah, it is. The funny is we got, started in the whole federal government because of our promise, inaccessibility. ’cause that’s a, it is a really hard problem to solve and I’ll just.

It bothers me when I see a sexy demo. So I authoring tool out there, look at all these cool flashing lights and bells and whistles and whirling fans. And then they’ll also say, you can make five way compliant software e-learning courses. And what they don’t tell you is the demo you just saw.

Isn’t fine, isn’t accessible, it just looks really good. And then so I’ve seen people have that buyer’s remorse where it’s like they realize it, they did all these, things. And then they found out later that, oh yeah the questions aren’t really accessible or if you want to use that interaction type.

The whirling fan interaction? That’s not really accessible. Oh that’s horrible. So interactions, of course, avenue Studio are accessible. Flip cards, accordions, drag and drop even. You build a drag and drop interaction in our product and we spend a lot of time, effort, energy to make sure that it’s available using keyboards.

It’s a keyboard accessible. Oh, drag and drop element. So 

Chris Badgett: that’s incredible. Yeah. That’s Joe Gora. He’s from Course Avenue. Go to course avenue.com. Also check out Gov Education, which is an implementation using Course Avenue’s technology called Course Advisor. 

Joe Gorup: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: And Joe, thank you for telling your story.

Thank you for being a shining example of a innovator and technologist using lifter LMS, but also with a lot of. Strong values of helping subject matter experts and making the web accessible. It’s really admirable. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. 

Joe Gorup: Oh, I appreciate it.

Appreciate Chris. Thanks a appreciate.

Speaker 2: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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