This group is all about online learning (or elearning), LMS system, and which teaching methodologies work best on the web. If you are interested in learning how to create better engagement in your online classroom, or if you are struggling to create a online course - this group is for you.

LMScast Episodes

lifterLMS

Nonprofit niche website builder Carol Stambaugh joins us on this episode of the LMScast podcast to discuss how online course creators and website building freelancers can serve the nonprofit niche by understanding the needs, mission, and profitability options of nonprofit organizations.

Carol shares her story, along with some great community building tips she’s used over the years to build up WordPress communities and nonprofit groups. She shares insights into how she got started in the nonprofit space and building websites for nonprofit businesses, along with some industry insights you may want to consider when entering the space.

Growing a community and community marketing are two large and important areas to online course creation. Stability early on is important to fostering a growing community. Being overly accessible to everyone by having all different times available for meetings can actually end up with less community stability. The consistency really helps with scaling. If you’re doing live/online events that time or format can change, but having general inconsistency will often end up with high community churn.
 
To learn more about Carol Stambaugh be sure to head to RadiateForGood.com. She’s also on Twitter at @carolstambaugh, and her email is carol@radiatewp.com. Thanks for joining us!

349: Exploring the WordPress LMS for Non Profits Niche and Community Building with Carol Stambaugh

Advertising expert Liana Ling joins us in this LMScast episode to discuss ideas for how to market your online course and scale with Facebook ads. Liana is from Power Up Strategy, where she helps empower business owners to get as many clients or customers as their hearts desire.
 
Liana understands the overwhelm many entrepreneurs feel, and she’s really big on repurposing content. If you create something once, use that content as many times as you can, and do it intentionally. For example, if you record a podcast, take the transcript and summarize it into a blog post. Cut portions of the podcast into short videos to put on Facebook Reels, Instagram Reels, TikTok, and Pinterest. Put the full video onto your YouTube channel and on LinkedIn. And you can also use software to push these out and to schedule them ahead of time. And you can take quotes and soundbites and make images with the quotes on them and put those all over the place.

The most resilient and most sustainable type of the funnels that Liana has worked with are the ones starting with freebies to build up your audience, and then selling to them through your emails on the back end. Liana’s advice is to just jump in, test, and have fun. Show your joy. It comes through, and people will respond to it.

To learn more about Liana Ling check out her website at PowerUpStrategy.com. She’s also on Instagram as The Lead Gen Queen, so you can reach out to her there, too. Thanks for joining us!

350: 17 Ideas for How to Market Your Online Course and Scale with Facebook Ads with Liana Ling

We’re joined by Todd Brown in this episode of the LMScast podcast where he shares some expert strategies for growing your online course and membership website via marketing methods based on great ideas. Todd created a philosophy called the E5 Method, and he shares how you can use that to optimize your marketing and get on the right track for your online education website.
 
A marketing campaign's big idea is the message that underlies all elements of a campaign to resonate with the audience you’re going after. It is something that resonates with your audience and is the source or reference for the methods and messaging of your marketing campaign.
 
Every marketing campaign, promotion, and marketing message has an idea behind it. The copy, the words, the phrases, the message, and the headline of those marketing messages are just expressing the idea. But behind every message is the big idea. What ultimately determines the success of a marketing campaign is rooted in the people in your audience resonating with your idea or message emotionally.
 
You can learn more about Todd Brown and the E5 Method at E5Bundle.com. His best stuff is in there. The E5 bundle has a bunch of stuff that you can go through that will give you a really solid understanding of what Todd and Chris talked about in this episode, but is much more in depth in his book. Thanks for joining us!

351: Mastering Modern Marketing with Todd Brown's E5 Method

Join us for a discussion with Chris Badgett and Micah Mitchell about how Infusionsoft, Keap, and ActiveCampaign users create powerful automated WordPress based membership sites with Memberium and LifterLMS. Memberium is a WordPress plugin that is deeply integrated with your CRM and helps you build powerful, automated membership sites.
 
Memberium controls access to what pages and resources on a website are open to the public or are only available for certain members. The deep integration between Memberium and your CRM allows you to use the actions people take on your site to trigger actions from your system, like providing them with a discount.
 
Micah has a long history in the Infusionsoft community, and Memberium has a partner implementation program to help people build and automate all the different things on their sites. Working with an expert can help speed up the setup process that can be technical and complicated at times.
 
One strategy you can take with a membership site is if you have a free ebook on your web website as a lead magnet, you could make that into a free mini series that’s protected on your site. Protecting the content in that way with a membership can give it a higher perceived value.
 
You can learn more at Memberium.com. Their support is helpful, so feel free to reach out. Micah encourages people that if you have something to share, to please share it with the world. Make your course, and don't let anything stop you. Thank you for joining us!

352: How Keap and ActiveCampaign Users Create Powerful Membership Sites with Memberium and LifterLMS

In this episode of the LMScast podcast, we’re joined by Facebook Ads expert Shelby Fowler where she shares how online course creators can leverage outbound Facebook ads in their businesses in order to get more cold traffic to their websites.
 
The top mistake people make with Facebook ads is not spending enough money, especially if you are doing your own ads, and you don't have a background of advertising.
 
Shelby shares a great example that if you have a webinar or a presentation, a masterclass or a five day challenge, and your running ads right now, the average cost per registration is probably somewhere between $8 and $12.
 
The second common mistake is that the creative on the ads is not great. A lot of ads are just not catchy enough. Many people are constantly consuming content on Instagram and Facebook, and everybody is vying for your ideal client's attention. When creating ads, it’s important to understand that there are other people running ads and in addition to that, their family members are posting, their friends are posting, and celebrities are posting to get their attention.
 
To learn more about Shelby Fowler and the awesome work she does be sure to check out FempireMedia.com, and you can find her Fempire Ads Agency where you can learn how to leverage the power of Facebook ads for your online course or membership website. Thanks for joining us!

353: Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads For Course Creators with Shelby Fowler from Fempire Media

Have you considered adding a social network to your online learning system? This LMScast looks at BuddyPress Courseware for WordPress and how it works with learning management systems like LifterLMS. 

BuddyPress is a social network development plugin designed for online learning environments. A social network can enhance your online courses by allowing students to create profiles, participate in course discussions, and stay in touch with their instructors. It also provides for blogging, activity feeds, visual media, and private messaging, much like Facebook. 

Your network can include groups, subgroups, and forums for specific courses, as well as a social network for everyone in your system, plus free access and paid membership areas. It’s an exciting option, but only if you have a need for it. A social network requires a lot of direct involvement and could be more work than it is worth for your learning environment. 

If your students are enthusiastic about their subjects, giving them a place to discuss that with other equally involved students will enhance their learning experience. A social network also helps new students become involved more quickly, and provides a place for support and mastermind groups.

An online learning-based social network makes instructors more accessible to their students, and students can more easily interact with each other no matter what their daily schedules are like. BuddyPress Courseware integrated with a course development platform like LifterLMS can help you create a thriving, successful eLearning community for your students.

045: BuddyPress Courseware with LifterLMS

This LMScast will show you how to think about the role of the learning management functionality versus the design of the online learning environment. You’ll also learn about the release of the new LifterLMS LaunchPad WordPress LMS theme.

Choosing the right WordPress LMS theme and plugin for your course platform is crucial to its success. 

There are several things to consider when choosing a WordPress LMS plugin and theme. Functionality belongs in a plugin, and design belongs in a theme.

If you are using a WordPress LMS plugin like LifterLMS, then it’s logical to use a theme created by the same company who makes the core plugin.

082: LifterLMS LaunchPad WordPress LMS Theme vs. Plugin Debate

The world is evolving in their approach to education, and so is LifterLMS. This LMScast will explain our vision for the future of online education, the new LifterLMS 3.0 and beyond. 

Chris employs a philosophy with his children called “unschooling,” which advocates exposing learners to a variety of learning opportunities to discover what really interests them, including learning from mistakes. We made one of those mistakes when we announced the LifterLMS 3.0 upgrade without explaining why major changes were made.

Our mission is to democratize education in the digital classroom through personal leadership, rapid learning, and connection to others through progressive technology. We made some tough decisions in pursuing that vision that need to be explained, and in this podcast we offer the reasoning behind adding paid extensions and removing some free services, and we provide options for our users to maintain control of your transition process. 

The new LifterLMS 3.0 software release is a major upgrade, and inevitably some things will be backwards incompatible. To deliver on our vision for the future of online education, we’ve made progressive decisions for LifterLMS 3.0 and beyond. We want you to enjoy everything we’ve introduced based our users’ feedback. This podcast is a start to that.

LMScast Podcast

106: The Future of Online Education | LifterLMS 3.0 and Beyond

Learn how to sell and manage courses and coaching with LifterLMS Private Areas. Chris Badgett and Ali Mathis of the LifterLMS team discuss the new Private Areas add-on in depth on this episode of LMScast. They get into the different features the add-on has to offer, and they talk about where the idea came from and who it is for.

The Private Areas add-on allows you to sell a course, and then to also sell a more expensive version of the course that includes a personal level of coaching. The private area is where you can communicate directly with your student and help them out with any questions they may have or offer them more advice specific to their situation.

The idea for Private Areas originated with a suggestion from a member of the LifterLMS community. They wanted there to be an area where the course creator or coach could have a private page per student per course in order to give them some additional help in areas specific to them that are separate from the rest of the course content that everyone gets.

We floated this idea around in our LifterLMS VIP Facebook group, and a large number of people thought that would be a very useful tool to have. You can contact your students directly via Facebook or email, but it can be hard to hold someone’s attention and focus when there are so many distractions in the online space already. It also doesn’t help that contacting them via different tools can make things more complicated and can help to discourage them from continuing with your course. Using Private Areas help to increase engagement.

Course completion is something that every course provider seeks to have for their customer, and offering them the ability to have a personal contact line with the coach is very useful in that respect. But you can also integrate Private Areas on your membership site as well. Chris and Ali talk about how this add-on can work for you for both courses and memberships.

147: Sell and Manage Courses Plus Coaching with LifterLMS Private Areas

The social learning add-on for LifterLMS is here, and today we talk about how you can add social learning to your online course or membership site. Chris Badgett and Ali Mathis of the LifterLMS team discuss how you can implement social learning into your online products, and how that can help your students learn.

A lot of the best learning experiences we have come from times when we were working with other people in a group. Humans are social creatures, so learning is often enhanced when we are working in a social environment. The social learning add-on for LifterLMS gives you the ability as the course creator to create social learning groups of two or three people to as many as twenty or fifty people.

This is similar to what many people do with Facebook groups for courses or membership sites, but now you can integrate that group feature into the very fabric of your online product. Coaching is a big way people learn, and the peer coaching that can occur when you have a social learning feature worked into your online course can help personalize the content and learning experience to the individuals taking your course. This makes it more memorable, and they are more likely to ask questions and finish the course or participate in the membership site.

When you have more users on your site and you add more advanced functionality, you may face some complications with hosting. Chris and Ali talk about some of the different hosting options and what you will want to look for or ask about in your hosting company when you have a lot of users on your site.

The Social Learning add-on can be used in almost any type of course or membership environment, so head over to LifterLMS.com to check it out and feel free to shoot us a message with any questions you have about the product.

154: How to Add Social Learning to Your Online Course or Membership Website

Chris Badgett and Ali Mathis of the LifterLMS team talk about the release of the LifterLMS Assignments add-on in this episode of LMScast. In this episode the roles are reversed, and the guest Ali Mathis interviews our host Chris about what assignments can do for your online courses.

One of the most powerful marketing strategies for online courses is to sell the result the student receives. Sometimes you need to see the students take action on what they learn in your course and assignments are a great way to do that. 

There are two assignment types you can use with LifterLMS. The essay assignment allows your students to write out papers, and they can save their results in LifterLMS as they work so they don’t have do write out a whole essay in one sitting.

The upload assignment type gives you the ability to have students upload videos, photos, audio files, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, and more. Opening up a feedback loop between you and your students can be very powerful when creating successful online courses.

Pricing your digital products can be a tough thing to do. Chris and Ali talk a bit about the factors you should take into consideration when deciding how much to charge for your online education products.

If you want to integrate LifterLMS Assignments into your courses, head to LifterLMS.com/Product/LifterLMS-Assignments. You can also check out all of the other cool features LifterLMS has to offer by going to LifterLMS.com.

183: Get Your Learners Taking Action with LifterLMS Assignments

LMScast is a podcast for innovators like you in the WordPress LMS e-learning community. LMScast is produced by Chris Badgett, part of the team behind the #1 WordPress LMS plugin called LifterLMS. Each episode brings you valuable insights with one goal: to help you generate more income and impact through a learning management system built on WordPress. LMScast is for you the entrepreneur, the teacher, the expert, or the online marketer.