3 Ways To Skyrocket Your Course Revenue with Social Learning

If you want to own your experience and your data, make your experience stand out from everyone else, and get more value out of the content you already have, then this is the webinar for you!

We’ll dive into all things with creating a great social experience for an online course or membership website along with how BuddyBoss + LifterLMS work together to make that happen.

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Grow Course Revenue With Social Learning

In this LifterLMS partner webinar with BuddyBoss, Jason Broderick walks through three ways to grow an online course business using social learning. Convert more prospects into students by raising perceived value. Engage the students you already have with cohorts, discussions, and gamification. Retain those students longer with a rich content library and regular live events. The tactics work whether you sell one-time courses or a recurring subscription.

What You’ll Learn

• The only three levers that grow an online course business: conversions, engagement, and retention
• How social learning features raise the perceived value of your course before a prospect ever buys
• How gamification, cohort-based learning, and topic discussions turn passive video watchers into active learners
• Why a rich content library outperforms scattered lesson attachments for student retention
• How LifterLMS and BuddyBoss combine forums, groups, gamification, and events into one social learning environment

Key Takeaways

• Raise perceived value with a community layer before you raise the price of the course
• Add a topic-based discussion inside every lesson so students learn from each other, not just the video
• Design a light gamification loop where points unlock real value: VIP groups, coaching sessions, or shop discounts
• Consolidate every PDF, template, and resource into one searchable content library rather than scattering attachments across lessons
• Book one weekly hot seating session on the calendar as zero-prep live content that keeps retention high

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Meet Jason From BuddyBoss and the Social Learning Promise

Kurt: Folks, welcome. I am Kurt. I’m here with the magic Will Middleton and we’ve got a guest today, Jason Broderick from BuddyBoss. We’re going to talk about BuddyBoss and all things BuddyBoss, and we’re looking to have a great conversation. Will, say hi to the audience, and then we’ll give Jason a chance to say hello as well.

Will Middleton: Hey everyone. Will Middleton from LifterLMS and the WordPress community and all kinds of other random projects. I’m excited to be here with BuddyBoss today talking through three ways to skyrocket your course revenue with social learning. We’re going to talk about different social learning options you have with your WordPress website, with LifterLMS, with BuddyBoss, and really some key strategies to building a community. It is not just the tech to make it happen, it is also the strategies behind it. So I’m thrilled to have you on, Jason.

Jason Broderick: Thrilled to be here, Will and Kurt. Thanks a lot for the intro. Hopefully we are going to talk a bit more about you and a bit less about BuddyBoss than you might think. It is not going to be a pitchfest, do not worry. I was saying that to Will when we first had our meeting. That is not the way I like to participate in webinars and it is also not the way I like to run my webinars. So hopefully we are going to give you a lot of value today. You are going to have lots of things to take away, whether or not you decide to pair BuddyBoss with LifterLMS. You should still be able to implement all of these strategies either by yourself with the tools you already have, with LifterLMS’s built-in tools, or the social add-ons for LifterLMS, or if you decide to come over to BuddyBoss, absolutely fantastic, we will help you do that too.

For those of you who do not know me, my name is Jason. I am director of content marketing strategy for BuddyBoss. Today we are going to be rocking you through three ways to skyrocket your course revenue with social learning: boost your engagement, your retention, and your conversions.

BuddyBoss is a social learning platform. It is a social community platform that enables creators like you to manage your own online learning communities. It offers a suite of features for growing your online courses with groups, forums, gamification, messaging, live events, and many more to enhance your student engagement and interaction through social learning.

The Three Big Challenges Every Online Course Business Faces

Jason Broderick: Here is the big challenge that I see for online course creators. It is split in three. Whether you are selling one-time courses or offering subscriptions, the fundamental challenges are, first, maximizing the value of the content you have already invested time and energy in creating. Second, differentiating your course in some way from your competitors, making your course stand out as a better or different experience from the kinds of people competing for the attention of the same audience as you. And third, gaining independence from those SaaS services and algorithm-driven platforms that you are probably relying on for your course engagement right now.

You have dedicated countless hours and a substantial amount of budget to creating your courses. The issue now is not just about churning out new content. It is about making the most of what you already have. Your current content, as comprehensive as it is, might not be leveraged to its full potential. That might manifest as stagnating student enrollments or a decline in engagement. You might find yourself feeling pressure to add more content, that content hamster wheel you are already on, thinking that is the only way to keep your course fresh and appealing.

You want strategies that revitalize your existing content or squeeze more value out of what you already have, making it more engaging without the burden of constant additions. You do that by integrating interactive elements into the course content you already have, gamifying it, or creating a community around your course.

Since COVID there has been a significant surge in online courses, and if you have been in a public-facing industry for a long time you know more than most how many experts sprang up out of the woodwork and decided online learning was the way forward. You need strategies that help you differentiate from that crowded market. Many of those courses are probably similar to yours, and the saturation makes it even harder for your course to stand out and capture the attention it deserves.

And the third one, breaking free from the algorithm. If you are running any kind of large social community, you are probably relying far too heavily on the social networks that shall not be named for a very important arm of your online course. Many of you probably feel like your course experience is constrained by the SaaS platforms you live inside, and that you are unable to fully control how you interact with and deliver your content to your students. That tends to manifest as frustrations with platform limitations, concerns about data ownership and privacy, and the high costs associated with using third-party services for community. You probably find yourself constantly adapting to new rules or algorithm changes, which feels like you are not in the driver’s seat of your own course or your own student engagement. The solution is embracing a platform that supports your growth and making it truly your own, a space where you have full control over your content, your student data, and the overall learning experience.

Growth Only Comes From Three Levers: Convert, Engage, Retain

Jason Broderick: Here is the big takeaway. The way I see it, there are only three ways you can grow your course and increase the amount of impact it has. Only three. You might be thinking, but I could be using TikTok for this and Shorts for that and ads for the other thing. Fundamentally all those tactics fall under one of three umbrellas, and that is conversions, engagement, or retention. Converting more students, engaging the students you have converted, or retaining those students for longer. Everything you do slots into one of those three.

Higher conversion rates translate to more students enrolling in your course, which directly leads to increased revenue, which allows you to reinvest in growing the course, growing the community, and impacting the students you probably care a lot about. If you are a LifterLMS customer, chances are you are in this because you want to serve a community, a group of people you care about. So you have a responsibility to convert as many of them as possible. If you believe your course content is some of the most valuable out there, hopefully you believe it is the best in the world, so your biggest responsibility is to try and convert as many of your potential students into your course as possible.

Convert Better by Raising the Perceived Value of Your Course

Jason Broderick: The first strategy is to create a higher perceived value for your course by integrating a social learning platform, or by integrating social learning features into your course. There are lots of course platforms out there. There are hundreds of other people probably doing a very similar thing to you. One of the best ways to increase conversions is by increasing the perceived value of your course. That does not necessarily mean increasing the true value, although you probably want to do that too. What you really care about is: when somebody comes and looks at your course for the first time, do they see, if I am paying x amount, I am getting a lot back. This is not just a video course hosted somewhere that I go take and that is it. This is a whole community I am becoming a part of. I am becoming part of something greater than just the videos and just the lessons.

Without elements that increase that perceived value, without offering different types of learning material inside a single course structure, your students are going to feel less engaged. Your course is going to struggle to stand out. You are going to be losing sales to your competitors. Consider a course in project management that does not only include recorded video classes but also simulates a module where students can plan, execute, and review a mock project in a collaborative environment. These dynamic course structures inherently boost the appeal to potential students, and that increased appeal can directly lead to higher conversions. Prospective students are more likely to enroll in a course that provides better value for the money they are paying.

Turn One-Way Content Into Two-Way Interaction Between Students

Jason Broderick: The second conversion tactic is enhancing content value through interaction. This means adding features to your course that allow your students to actively engage with each other. Student to student. Features where students can share their work, provide feedback, and participate in community-driven activities that help them internalize the knowledge you have taught them.

This approach is super effective because it transforms your course from a one-way delivery of content into a dynamic two-way interaction between your student and other students, or course leaders, or maybe people who have graduated from the course but are still inside the community.

Without interactive features like groups, forums, and messaging, your course remains static and less engaging. To avoid that, integrating features inherent in a social learning environment encourages student-to-student interactions and helps foster a more dynamic learning environment.

For instance, imagine you have created a photography course. Now imagine a feature where students can upload the photographs they have taken to a community feed, engage in peer critiques, or participate in weekly photo challenges. That kind of interactive environment transforms the course content from static to dynamic, creating a space where students are not just learners, they are active contributors.

Use Social Proof and Testimonials to Convert New Students

Jason Broderick: The third way to increase course conversions is leveraging social proof for credibility. This is particularly important at the younger stages of your course. It might be counterintuitive, but the bigger your course is, the more naturally your social proof will leverage and enhance conversions. When your course is smaller, when you do not have a huge number of students yet, it is very important that you leverage positive reviews and probably even go out and ask for testimonials or feedback about your course content, and publish that somewhere prospective students can see it. Because as an unknown entity, students are going to be wondering: is this a scam, is it legit, are other people getting value from it. So you want to be leveraging social proof to improve credibility.

The importance of social proof is the power to demonstrate the value of your course to prospective students before they have enrolled. It provides tangible evidence of what students can achieve and experience in your course. Without incorporating social proof, your course might struggle to build trust and credibility among potential students.

To effectively use social proof, showcase your student community. Show how vibrant and active it is, how many people are inside it, their interactions, their achievements. Highlight active community discussions inside your course, or feature student testimonials. The testimonials one has the highest point of value if your community is really small, because you have the opportunity to engage with students on a much more one-to-one basis and in return ask them for a testimonial that you can publish on your site. As your course grows, you have less opportunity for that one-to-one level of discussion. When it is small, that is when you really want to be leveraging those testimonials and before-and-afters. On a graphic design course, that might look like a gallery of student projects, or before-and-after examples of what someone submitted when they enrolled and what they submitted afterwards.

Offer a Learning Experience Prospects Cannot Get on Free YouTube

Jason Broderick: The fourth conversion lever is offering a unique learning experience. Creating a unique learning experience means incorporating elements that are distinctive into your course, elements that go beyond standard educational practices. A unique learning experience, particularly through social learning, can significantly enhance your course’s appeal and drive conversions.

Distinctive learning experiences can be the deciding factor for students when choosing whether or not to enroll. Students are often looking for courses that offer something more than the basics. They are looking for a more engaging and enriching learning journey. Unless you can differentiate yourself from your competitors, you might start to convert less than them.

Imagine you have students who are used to having apps in their hands like Duolingo and other learning apps with billion-pound investments and super vibrant, multifaceted learning environments. That is the experience they are bringing when they come to look at your course. They ask, what has this course got to offer me beyond just the lessons? Really, unless what you are teaching is a unique process, a lot of the stuff you are probably teaching people could find for free online. When they come looking at an online course like this, you need to be offering them a much more unique learning experience than they could get if they just sat down and watched YouTube videos. Because that is what you are competing against. You want them to part with their hard-earned cash, so you need to create an experience much more unique than just watching videos.

Focus on developing course content and activities that stand out. For a programming course, you could introduce a gamification system for solving programming questions. When someone does an assessment, you might give them a code snippet to fill out and award them points when they complete it. That might be a way to make your course or learning experience stand out from everything else they could do.

Why Engagement Sits Between the First Sale and the Second

Jason Broderick: If conversions is increasing the number of potential students who buy into your course, engagement is not only increasing the amount of your course they consume, although that is a tactic. What does engagement actually achieve for you as a business? Increasing engagement allows you to sell more to that person in terms of growing your revenue. It builds trust with that person, that they got value the first time, so if you offer them something else they are highly likely to take you up on it.

If you sell in a one-time model, imagine you have a free PDF, the ten pieces of equipment every cyclist needs. They download it and on the next page you sell them an ebook. When you deliver that ebook, you want them to consume the content and feel like they got value from the first purchase, because you are then going to say, hey, you purchased my nineteen dollar ebook on safety cycling, why not take my safety cycling basics course for forty-nine dollars. If you have not engaged them in the first instance, they are not going to spend any more money or time with you, and they are not going to engage with your community.

Take music lessons. There is a service called Playground Sessions. I have played piano for many years, gave it up, wanted to pick it up again. Playground Sessions is a music learning app. The way they hooked me was they allowed me to purchase a single track. For nine dollars I could buy Desperado by The Eagles in their system and they would teach me how to play it. Then they needed to engage me. They needed to provide a good experience so that two weeks later they could say, hey Jason, we just noticed you scored 96 percent on Desperado, why not jump on our Piano 101 course. That course costs $149 and you get lifetime access. That is an example of going from a one-time purchase to using engagement to leverage a second one-time purchase.

Group Students Into Interest Cohorts to Build Real Classroom Feel

Jason Broderick: The first engagement tactic is interest-based groups and cohort-based learning. Interest-based groups are specialized little communities inside your course where students with similar interests or levels are grouped together. These groups allow for in-depth discussions and collaborations in areas they are passionate about.

Cohort-based learning is a new buzzy term in the learning industry. It is where a whole class of students progresses together through the course at the same time. Cohort-based learning is so important because it lets students who might join at a random time gain that classroom-esque environment by joining a little group of people all taking the course at the same time. It also makes any live or one-to-one engagement content much easier to manage.

Through discussions, group projects, and peer reviews, cohort-based learning creates an interactive and supportive learning environment. Without interest-based groups there is a risk of a one-size-fits-all approach where you put lessons in the order they want to go in and hope all your students progress through in the same way. Without cohort-based learning, students can lose that sense of classroom or student community feel, and shared progress that is so vital for dynamic learning communities. By incorporating these methods you are not just teaching, you are creating an immersive, tailored learning experience where every student is engaged in the right way for them.

Add a Topic-Based Discussion Inside Every Lesson

Jason Broderick: The second engagement tactic is topic-based discussions. This means creating specific discussion threads or environments for each of the key topics or lessons in your course. Imagine students engaging in forums or group chats about a particular aspect of a module they are struggling with, or sharing ideas and tips they have learned to help newer students coming through with the same struggles, or collaboratively tackling challenges and sharing best practices. These discussions are not just about clarifying doubts. They create a platform where students can interact with each other and each other’s ideas, and that adds a rich layer of understanding to their learning experience.

Students do not just learn from the course content, they also learn from each other, which fosters a sense of belonging and makes their learning journey much more engaging. Without topic-based discussions, students may experience a more isolated journey. They might feel a bit like they are stabbing in the dark trying to find their way through your course content. The absence of these discussions could lead to a more superficial understanding of the subject matter and a lack of engagement with peers.

To implement, create discussion forums or threads for each module, or for specific topics inside your course. Encourage students to participate as part of the course content. You can even make it required. I have seen universities start to do this, where engaging in the discussion is a requirement of the module. They learn a lesson and then have a requirement to ask at least two questions about the topic to progress to the next lesson. Imagine how much deeper your students would internalize their learning if they had to ask a thought-provoking question about it, and how much engagement would come from other students responding to each other.

Gamify Learning With Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

Jason Broderick: The third engagement tactic is gamification and activity feeds. Gamification involves incorporating game-like elements into educational content. For a language learning course, students could earn points for completing speaking exercises or quizzes, or receive badges as they progress up the levels. This approach transforms learning into an engaging and enjoyable experience and adds healthy competition to increase the drive some people have to compete with themselves or with their peers, which are two different motivators.

Gamification’s importance lies in the ability to maintain student engagement and motivation over time. It adds a fun, competitive edge to learning. It encourages students to participate more actively, more persistently, and more consistently. Without gamification, courses risk becoming monotonous. You log in, watch your lesson, log out. Maybe you log in, watch your lesson, download your PDF, log out. Maybe you fill out a quiz. That is it.

Introduce points, badges, and even leaderboards to encourage healthy competition between students competing for similar things. For a music production course, you could have contests like best remix of the week where students vote and award points to each other. That fosters a lively and interactive learning environment.

Turn Gamification Points Into Real Currency Inside Your Site

Jason Broderick: BuddyBoss integrates deeply with a very robust gamification platform called GamiPress. LifterLMS also has a gamification system of its own. There are a lot of potential options and it can be a little overwhelming, but on the flip side it can also be a little shallow. If all you are doing is giving people points for doing things, that is like step one. You can smell gamification in the air but you are not really gamifying the experience.

There are two broad ways to use points beyond just awarding them. The first is a leaderboard that ranks students against each other. In GamiPress you can have leaderboards that are time-based, most points this month, most points in this area. You can award points tied to a specific topic or a specific module. That is gamification 101.

Another way is to use points as an on-site currency, letting students gain advantages on your system or redeem points for value. Someone who has earned a certain number of points might get VIP group access. Someone with enough points could redeem those points for coaching sessions instead of paying $99 an hour. GamiPress also integrates deeply with WooCommerce and becomes a payment gateway, so if you sell anything else, whether coaching or merch, students can redeem points in your shop.

Will Middleton: With GamiPress, you can also do things like automatically mark a course or lesson complete when a student earns a certain number of points. So they hit a threshold, interact with the community ten times, and that lesson completes automatically. Students who do not have the monetary resources can still invest energy in the platform, and that effort gets rewarded with points that unlock value.

Jason Broderick: Take that one step further. Imagine a discussion forum for each of your lessons. You earn points every time you ask a question in the discussion forum, and you halt course progression until they have earned a certain number of points there. Hey, you are on this topic right now, you have to go speak in this forum in order to progress. You have to ask ten questions or earn ten points, and you can earn points by either asking questions or answering other people. That is another great one. You can create your own gamification algorithm where different actions have different value. Rather than one point for a question and one point for an answer, you might decide asking questions is more valuable and award two points for a question and one point for an answer. You can shape the exact types of behavior you want to encourage inside your student platform.

Why Retention Is the Highest-Leverage Growth Lever

Jason Broderick: Retention is probably something you have talked about a lot. You have probably rolled your eyes so far into the back of your head they came around the other side. But retention really is one of the most important things for course growth and for increasing the impact you have on your students. Especially if you sell your course as anything more than a standalone product. If you sell anything on a recurring model, a membership, a course that is a subscription, or even a payment plan that goes beyond three months, I consider that a recurring revenue model.

Retention is absolutely crucial whether you run subscription-based membership or one-time purchase courses. Subscriptions directly influence your recurring revenue, ensuring a stable income over time and allowing you to reinvest more in the growth of your course. For one-time purchases, high retention actually boosts brand loyalty. It leads to recommendations and it leads to more purchases in the future. If engagement is that first cycle of value and trust, retention is that cycle repeating many times over.

In an ideal world, if we only had one hundred students but they bought every single thing we ever put out and kept all their subscriptions and paid for everything forever, we would not really need that many people. If we could just hold on to the people who say yes to us for longer.

Poor retention means increased marketing cost because you are losing as many people as you are bringing in. It creates a constant scramble for new students. You have no choice but to focus all your attention on increasing signups because you are losing so many students out the back end. It creates financial and emotional strain because you are constantly on this hamster wheel of student churn. The opposite of retention is churn. Want to reduce churn, increase retention. Good retention stabilizes your business. It lets you focus on the next most valuable thing you could be putting your time into.

Build a Rich Content Library Students Can Actually Find Later

Jason Broderick: The first retention tactic is creating a richer content library and enhancing content discovery. This might be a little unsexy, but it is one of the most important things you can do for retention. For an online course, chances are you have video lessons that live in a nice video player on a nice lesson page. You probably also have a library of other stuff spread around your site. Some links here, some things in a library. LifterLMS follows the traditional pattern where lessons have lesson materials, and that makes total sense.

The problem is students come back over and over and are not necessarily taking action on the thing as they learn it. They are asking, where was that PDF, where was that spreadsheet template. They have to go back into the lesson and dig those resources out. With a social learning environment, you can create a rich library where the videos and lesson content become just one aspect. Students can go and take the things they need when they need them in a much easier way, and it makes your content much more discoverable.

A rich content library helps keep students engaged and committed to the course. Easy access to a variety of relevant materials aids understanding of complex concepts and keeps students interested. Without resources like this, students struggle to find the necessary information when they need it. They get frustrated they cannot find what they want and potentially decrease their course continuation. They log in, cannot find what they need, and leave. Or worse, they go find the next best thing somewhere else.

As a course creator, take a lot of the content you already have and think about how to combine it into a library that becomes a living resource. Students dip in and out and find what they need. For years I had this Frankenstein of files and folders in a Dropbox with course resources and downloads. I was constantly updating links, and every time I recreated a PDF I had to hunt for every place that link lived, otherwise some poor student would go download the old version. A content library encourages you to create a much more centralized process to manage all of that.

Add Events and Live Sessions to Keep Students Coming Back

Jason Broderick: The second retention tactic is events and recurring value through social interactions. Transforming the learning experience into a dynamic one rather than a one-way delivery. Creating events and event-based learning gives your course a much more dynamic hub and keeps students engaged for longer.

Host different types of events. Workshops, guest lectures, networking sessions. Anything that offers real-time engagement opportunities. Events create a sense of belonging in the community. Without these elements, students might feel isolated and disconnected, which negatively impacts their commitment and hikes the dropout rate. Students are more likely to drop out if they do not feel connected to other people taking the course or to the course leader delivering it.

Plan to host regular events for your students and create opportunities for social interaction, ideally live. In person would be great. In a world where people are cautious about in-person, leverage virtual live events. For a graphic design course, monthly design challenges judged by industry professionals. Everyone gets on a Zoom, breaks into rooms, does their thing, comes back, and gets judged live. Or expand that to a whole one-day seminar with lots of events happening at once around one key topic.

Run a Weekly Hot Seating Session as Zero-Prep Live Content

Jason Broderick: You are probably thinking, Jason, I spend most of my time creating new course content, I do not have time for planning events. The easiest thing you can do if you are not running any event-based activities is set up a weekly hot seating session. A weekly hot seating session involves no prep whatsoever. You create a regular stream for your students, once a week you get on Zoom, and anybody who joins gets five minutes to outline whatever problem or challenge they are struggling with, and you give them a five to ten minute answer depending on how many people you get.

I like to start with two minutes and five minutes. I get maybe ten people per session, so if I want to keep it inside an hour to ninety minutes, I give five to ten people that amount of time each. It involves no prep because I do not ask them anything in advance. They hop on, a timer gives them one to two minutes to give me their frustration, then I set a timer for five minutes of me answering. Then I open it to the floor. Hey, this is my answer for you, does anyone else have feedback, does anyone else want to give advice.

Then you can take that content and stick it in your content library, and it lives there forever. You can even go one step further, take the transcript and index it so people can search for the topics they are interested in and go watch the hot seating session where you covered that thing.

That is a really easy, low-commitment way to get an event-based learning thing on your calendar. The more consistent you are, the more people you will get, because they feel like they are getting a huge amount of value and one-to-one time with you included in the cost of their membership. You are also helping five to ten people individually at a much higher level than you would with just a PDF download. Then you squeeze the value out by letting it live in the library and send that email to every other student saying, this week’s hot seating session is up, go check it out.

How LifterLMS and BuddyBoss Fit Together on One Site

Will Middleton: How do LifterLMS and BuddyBoss fit together? Do you use one of them or one or the other?

Jason Broderick: BuddyBoss has two components. It has the BuddyBoss platform, which is a free open-source plugin, and it has the BuddyBoss theme, which is a WordPress theme that lives on top of the BuddyBoss platform. So for LifterLMS customers, chances are you already have a theme alongside LifterLMS, like Cadence or Astra.

There are two ways to use BuddyBoss alongside LifterLMS. The recommended way, and then the way you can rely on if you do not want to go down that route. The BuddyBoss platform is the engine. With the lifetime deal you get the BuddyBoss platform, the free open-source part, plus platform Pro, which adds premium functionality. You install that as a plugin, and by activating it you add all the functionality to your existing WordPress site. The BuddyBoss platform is theme agnostic. I have not yet found a theme that will not run the BuddyBoss platform. We inherit the basic styling from whatever theme is active and sit within that existing theme.

However, the BuddyBoss theme adds all the styling and visual elements that make your social community look and feel like a proper social learning environment. The recommended way to use LifterLMS with BuddyBoss is to run both the BuddyBoss platform and the BuddyBoss theme, using the BuddyBoss theme as your primary theme. LifterLMS integrates perfectly. We have specific styles for LifterLMS elements so LifterLMS looks great inside BuddyBoss.

If you are not using the BuddyBoss theme, BuddyBoss also supports any theme that is a page-builder theme. If you are using Elementor with the Hello theme, Cadence Blocks, or anything similar, the BuddyBoss pages take over from the theme’s main pages, and you can build the BuddyBoss pages with your existing page builder.

Embed BuddyBoss Forum Discussions Directly Inside Every Lesson

Will Middleton: Can BuddyBoss forums be integrated into LifterLMS lessons? Someone in the chat has tried to use a shortcode.

Jason Broderick: Forums and groups in BuddyBoss are technically two separate components. You can have forums with no groups, groups with no forums, or both, and you can have them be owned by each other. You can have a forum owned by a group. Say there is a group for dog lovers and forums for different dog breeds, dog food, dog training, all living inside a group.

For courses and course lessons, what I like to do is create a forum topic for every lesson in every course. Then I take the shortcode and include just that forum topic in the body of my lesson content. When somebody is looking at their video and their quiz, right there in the course content is the discussion going. They do not have to go anywhere. If they like, that same forum discussion is the same one that lives over in the forums, but I have every single forum topic pulled into my course lessons so students can engage right there.

You could have a forum inside a lesson, which would give you multiple topics inside that lesson, but then you are getting super complicated. In that instance, why not send them back over to the forum. Take the shortcode, make sure you include the forum ID, and copy that from whatever topic you just created. Whack the shortcode straight into your course content and you have your discussion right there. The same works anywhere shortcodes are accepted, including widget areas.

Think of Your Website Like a Department Store, Not a Strip Mall

Kurt: When I speak with clients, there are two distinct thoughts about WordPress. Because it is WordPress with unbelievable flexibility, we can design what we want. Some people think of their website as an outdoor shopping center where each store or element requires exiting a store and going to another store. A lot of people think of it as a department store where there is clothing and tools and appliances and cookware, and it does not matter what cash register you go to, it is all in the website. I try to encourage people that your website is like a department store. You do not have to worry about is this platform this and is this platform that. I want to do anything I can to reduce churn in the site as a whole. I am not worried too much about each individual tool.

Jason Broderick: Back when I was a struggling actor, I used to work for a very famous department store in London. When you are at that level of department store, you focus on reducing friction for your customers. What is the journey of this customer when they walk through the door. Imagine if I took your analogy one level further. Rather than just having concessions in one room but with tools over there and cookware over there, imagine a world where when somebody walked into your store they had a concierge. The concierge says, what do you need today, what are you struggling with. You say, I need this, this, and this. They say, no problem, follow me, I know this store can be overwhelming, let me walk you from place to place. While we are going, let me recommend some things you might not have thought about. You have this challenge and think this is the solution. I will take you there, but while we are going let me present another idea, let me present something you might not have thought of.

It would be false to say BuddyBoss is that concierge, because you still have to do the work of walking the student around. But that is the way I like to think about creating a student or social learning environment. How can we learn about the individual, what their needs are, and then in the most seamless way possible hand them what they need when they need it. Rather than being like, yeah sure, tools are on floor three, enjoy, hope you do not get lost in perfumes on the way.

Upload and Serve Videos Inside the BuddyBoss Community Feed

Will Middleton: Can I upload videos directly into BuddyBoss?

Jason Broderick: Yes, and you can upload videos directly into BuddyBoss in many ways. You can upload files of any type to WordPress itself if you want to upload to your media library. However, we would not encourage you to upload your course lesson videos straight to your own server. That would be a recipe for disaster. You want to be uploading video lessons to Vimeo or YouTube.

BuddyBoss has several video features that are not lesson-specific and let you upload videos into the activity feeds. First, you can upload videos the same way you would to your Facebook feed. Create a post, upload a video, and BuddyBoss parses that video and lets it play inside your site straight from the activity feed. It also takes that video and puts it in a special folder in your WordPress so it can be served securely and cannot be accessed from outside your site.

Second, BuddyBoss integrates with a service called Offload Media. You can upload videos straight to your activity feed, and Offload Media takes the video out of your WordPress environment and hosts it somewhere else, like Amazon S3. That way your server is not carrying the weight of that video every time somebody hits play. It uses a particular technology to serve that inside BuddyBoss without your customer even knowing.

As it relates to LifterLMS, this lets you encourage video sharing in your community, if that is a way your students learn better or internalize their learning better. As it relates to lessons themselves, that is still handled the LifterLMS way, embedding your videos into your LifterLMS lessons through whatever service LifterLMS recommends.

You can also limit the size of videos and set different rules for different people. Course leaders can do one thing, students can do something else. Certain groups can have permissions others do not. Permissions work with WordPress user roles and with the six most popular membership platforms, including WP Fusion and WooCommerce Memberships. Every core feature can have permissions set based on course enrollment status, WordPress user role, or membership.

Set Up Zoom Meetings for Groups Without the Scheduling Collision

Will Middleton: Can members set up their own Zooms within their groups?

Jason Broderick: This one is slightly complicated because it revolves around how Zoom lets people interact with Zoom when you are not on the Zoom platform. You have the power to add a Zoom account to every group. You can have a single Zoom account that lives across your entire site, or a Zoom account that belongs to a specific group.

Why does that matter. You are not allowed to have two events running at the same time from a single Zoom account. If you had two groups and scheduled an event at 1pm here and 1pm here, because they are in the same Zoom account, it would break. Generally we recommend a single Zoom account across the platform and only group leaders creating new Zoom events, because that is the cleanest way to mitigate that issue.

If you want lots of Zooms at the same time, or want to empower more members to create them, you could create a Zoom account attached to each group. We have customers with three Zoom accounts. One is for events all free members get access to, so all these events happen but none overlap. Another Zoom account is for a specific group of students, maybe a VIP level, so their events can be separate and happen at the same time. Each Zoom account needs to be a Pro account to get API access, so you have to pay for each.

What I would recommend is schedule your events so they do not overlap and use one Zoom account. If you want to allow any student to create a video call at any time, I probably would not use Zoom for that. I would look at integrating Jitsi, an open-source video calling system, with BuddyBoss using a shortcode. I have done that before. I was building a social networking site for a trade union and we needed any member to create a breakout room at any time without moderation or approval. I created a custom tab in BuddyBoss groups, dropped the Jitsi shortcode in there, and Jitsi handled the rest.

Track Conversions With Off-Site Analytics and On-Site Funnels

Will Middleton: How do you check conversions? What tool?

Jason Broderick: There are two categories of tools that let you do that. Off-site tools and on-site tools. Off-site tools, the most familiar one is Google Analytics. Integrate Google Analytics with your WordPress site and BuddyBoss so you can track progression through pages for any site visitor. Similar tools like Kissmetrics work the same way. Install a tracking script and it tracks movements on any page on your site. Then you set up rules. If a customer comes to this page and then goes to that page, that means a signup page and a lesson page, they converted. I count that as a conversion. I tend to like off-site tools because tracking all the events can be resource intensive, so it is a good idea to offload that to something else.

On the other end are on-site tools. I use my funnel builder to create certain onboarding experiences for students. Imagine you were creating a funnel to buy an ebook to upgrade to a course to upgrade to a membership. Nothing stops you from creating the same funnel for an onboarding experience for your members. Page one, they fill out basic onboarding information. Page two, they check boxes to say what they are interested in. Page three, they turn on notifications for whatever.

In my instance I use Gravity Forms and Automator WP. Gravity Forms handles registration because I like a custom registration process. I can track exactly what happens at each step. How many users sign up, how many drop off at page two, who never completes their profile. I can see how many people enrolled in groups they were interested in, or auto-enroll them into groups based on the interests they checked. If they check fifteen boxes, Automator WP will automatically enroll them in all those groups, so by the time they get to the next page their whole social experience is populated with the stuff most useful to them. My favorite funnel builder is FunnelKit. I used to use CartFlows and recently transferred to FunnelKit because I also like to use an on-site CRM.

Tour the BuddyBoss Documents and Media Library

Jason Broderick: BuddyBoss has documents and media storage as part of the platform no matter what you do. Here is an example of documents belonging to a specific user. There is a whole asset library, and you can have folders inside the library. This is showing documents belonging to a user, but you can also have documents available to everybody or specific to certain user types.

Here is the main documents page. Imagine this is like your WordPress backend library, except front-end for your users, with advantages your WordPress media library does not have. You have all documents, documents you own, and documents that belong to groups. When we say documents, that is because this site is calling the media library documents, but you can call it anything. Media library, resources, whatever, and change it easily like you rename a page.

If I wanted to look at a PDF, it opens up here in a preview and lets you download it. You can set it so it either prevents you from seeing them or prevents you from downloading them, depending on whatever the user is allowed. That includes LifterLMS user role. If they are a specific user type in LifterLMS, that is respected.

We can also prevent people from uploading documents unless they are of a certain user role, like instructor. The way I use that is I have instructors allowed to upload resources to specific groups. I have a group dedicated to each course, so in effect I have a library of content resources attached to my course through a course group.

BuddyBoss supports all document types, including PDFs and ZIPs. WordPress by default does not allow ZIP files for security reasons, but BuddyBoss allows that. It supports every other file type, from MP3 to MP4. If you want to add other kinds of rich media, BuddyBoss lets you gather it all in one place and link those places from your course lessons, so you can have a dynamically updating library and course lessons always in sync.