How to Offer Coaching Scheduling from Your Website

LifterLMS Masterclass Series with Nathan Tyler

BONUS #1 Anybody who purchases Simply Schedule Appointments within 72hrs  from this live webinar will get their license automatically extended through January 2020 and they will bump you up to the next-level license (ie. if you buy Plus, they will upgrade you to Professional for free. If you buy Professional, they’ll upgrade you to Business for free).

BONUS #2 LifterLMS customers who purchase Simply Schedule Appointments will also get access to a quick call/screenshare with Nathan Tyler (with a custom SSA link of course). He will take a look at how you set up SSA, help you customize it to your business, and make sure you’re getting the most out of the features & flexibility, etc. It also means if you have a custom need or killer feature, Nathan will hear it out and see if it’s something they can work into the roadmap.

---

How To Schedule Coaching Calls On WordPress

Chris Badgett and Nathan Tyler of Simply Schedule Appointments show how to add live coaching or consulting calls to a LifterLMS course. The webinar covers why pairing coaching with a course increases value and completion, then walks through setting up Simply Schedule Appointments: connecting Google Calendar, building appointment types with buffers and daily limits, and embedding a booking form directly inside a lesson.

What You’ll Learn

• Why pairing coaching or consulting calls with your course increases perceived value, completion, and price
• How Simply Schedule Appointments embeds a native booking form directly inside a LifterLMS lesson, membership area, or private post
• How to set up appointment types, buffers, and daily limits so coaching calls do not take over your calendar
• How Google Calendar syncing, WordPress hooks, and CRM integrations automate confirmations and follow-up
• What to check around GDPR, VAT, and HIPAA before collecting customer data through a scheduling tool

Key Takeaways

• Add a short “book a call” link near your pricing table so hesitant buyers can talk to you before they check out
• Create a separate appointment type, with its own shortcode, for each student tier so nobody sees booking options meant for someone else
• Set buffers before and after every call, and cap how many you take per day, so coaching does not take over your calendar
• Trigger email automation or CRM tags from the specific LifterLMS access plan a student purchases, rather than building extra logic into the scheduling tool
• Confirm your own hosting and data-handling practices if you need GDPR, VAT, or HIPAA compliance; the scheduling plugin cannot guarantee that on its own

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why Course Creators Should Offer Coaching Alongside Their Courses

Nathan Tyler: As a buyer and a learner, there’s always something I’m trying to learn. When I was looking to learn Facebook advertising from scratch, I wanted a course that gave me a lot of information, but I also wanted personal attention if I needed it. Offering coaching on your site helps build your personal brand, and it lends more authority to the course itself. If I outgrow the course or run into a specific question, I know there’s someone I can reach out to, which makes the course more appealing.

Chris Badgett: I often talk about the stack: online course, plus coaching, plus community. The coaching piece is what’s missing for a lot of people, and it’s often why they aren’t getting results or why completion rates stay low.

Nathan Tyler: That was part of the differentiator for me. There are a million ebooks and two-page PDFs and cheat sheets out there, which is part of the equation, but I also wanted to get to the coaching. The course I ended up choosing also had a community, so I ended up wanting all three: course, coaching, and community.

Why Off-Site Booking Tools Feel Disconnected From Your Course

Nathan Tyler: The personal coach I was researching used Calendly, a popular hosted scheduling tool. It didn’t really fit the site. It had its own scroll bar and wasn’t quite the right width. I’d also gone through an extensive questionnaire and signed up on the site, and it still didn’t know who I was. I had to enter my name and email address again. The rest of the site was professional and clean, and then this part felt clunky, tucked into an embedded frame I had to scroll to find. It didn’t stop me from booking, but it was a glaring gap in an otherwise polished site.

Before we built Simply Schedule Appointments, we also looked at the existing WordPress scheduling plugins, and they had the opposite problem. They were integrated into WordPress, so there was no embedded-frame issue, but the booking forms weren’t as attractive, and on the admin side it took a long time just to figure out how to set things up. Most of them assumed you needed multiple staff and multiple locations, so even if it was just me selling my own consulting time, I had to set up a location I only had one of, and a staff member who was just me. It felt like a lot of unnecessary hoops.

Bringing Scheduling Directly Into Your WordPress Site

Nathan Tyler: That’s what led us to build Simply Schedule Appointments. All the data lives in your own WordPress site, so it’s easy to integrate with the other tools you’re already using, like LifterLMS, WooCommerce, and Google Analytics. When you embed a third-party script or bounce visitors off to another site, you lose insight into what’s happening in that form. Because the booking form is hosted right on your site, you can actually track conversion rates for your coaching offer the same way you track everything else.

Chris Badgett: One of the things we talk about a lot in this community is the value of an all-in-one solution, using as few different products as possible. But there’s still a case for best-in-breed, and when something crosses over well, that’s genuinely innovative. This isn’t just something that lives inside WordPress to say it lives inside WordPress. It’s fully integrated, so a visitor doesn’t have to re-enter information WordPress already knows about them.

Nathan Tyler: Right, and there’s a lot of opportunity there. We’re building the basics you need directly into the product, like collecting additional questions and collecting payment, but we want to leverage the best-in-breed products already on the WordPress platform rather than rebuild every ecommerce feature ourselves. If you want to collect a simple payment for a consulting call, that’s built in and easy. If you’re more sophisticated and already run WooCommerce, with prepaid credits, discount rules, or a VAT line item on an invoice for European customers, we don’t need to reinvent that. We can integrate with WooCommerce and other leading tools instead.

Setting Up Simply Schedule Appointments For The First Time

Nathan Tyler: I wanted to show the setup process, because in the WordPress space it’s sometimes not clear where to go after you install a plugin. Simply Schedule Appointments has a setup wizard that walks you through the basics. It asks for your license key, which unlocks automatic updates, and then some basic information like who should receive confirmation emails, what day your week starts on, and your time zone. It pulls those defaults from WordPress when they’re already set, but you can override them if you need to.

Connecting Google Calendar So You Never Get Double Booked

Nathan Tyler: The next step is connecting Google Calendar, which is probably the biggest pain point in setup, mostly because of Google’s own API and dashboard. We’ve documented every step, and it takes about five minutes. By the end you probably won’t remember exactly what you did, but you won’t have to do it again. Once it’s connected, Simply Schedule Appointments adds every booked appointment directly to your Google Calendar, and just as importantly, it excludes anything you already have booked so nobody can double-book you. You can also choose which calendars to check for conflicts. I personally exclude my personal calendar and even a calendar I sync from TripIt, a service that emails you a calendar invite whenever you forward it a flight confirmation, so I’m automatically marked unavailable any time I’m in the air.

Creating Your First Appointment Type

Nathan Tyler: The next step is your first appointment type, like a 30-minute intro call you might put on your contact page or inside a course. Instead of a wall of dropdown menus, you can set your availability in seconds and adjust the granularity down to 10 or 15 minutes if you want it more precise, though most people leave it at 30-minute blocks.

Setting Buffers And Daily Limits For Coaching Calls

Nathan Tyler: You can also set buffers before and after each appointment so bookings don’t stack right on top of each other. I usually leave a little time before a call to prepare, and more time after in case it runs long. If you’re selling an hour-long call at a high price point, giving someone an extra ten minutes rather than cutting them off exactly on the hour goes a long way. You can require a minimum notice period, like at least one day before someone can book a call, and you can cap the number of appointments of a given type you’ll take in a day, so your calendar doesn’t fill up with more calls than you have the mental capacity for. That matters even more for longer sessions, like a two-hour training call. You might only want to do one of those a day, given the preparation and follow-up notes that come with it.

Chris Badgett: This is also useful beyond coaching itself. You could use the same tool for sales calls, especially for a higher-priced offer where someone wants to talk to you before making the investment.

Nathan Tyler: Exactly, and the real power is in having a dozen or more of these appointment types with different rules for different segments of your audience. A student who bought your top package might get access to you tomorrow, while someone in an entry-level package has to book two weeks out. Setting up those rules once means you don’t have to think about it again, and it protects you from yourself: from saying yes to five calls in a day and then living with that decision when the day arrives.

Color-Coding And Organizing Multiple Appointment Types

Nathan Tyler: Each appointment type can have its own color, purely so you can tell at a glance what kind of call is on your calendar when you have a dozen different types running. It solves the problem of looking at your calendar and not remembering what a particular booking actually is.

Blocking Out Dates And Excluding Personal Calendar Events

Nathan Tyler: Once Google Calendar is connected, each appointment type can check specific calendars for conflicts and exclude them automatically. You can also block out specific dates directly in Simply Schedule Appointments, for something like a conference, rather than going into Google Calendar to block the days manually.

Embedding A Booking Form Inside A LifterLMS Lesson

Nathan Tyler: Once an appointment type is set up, you get a shortcode you can paste anywhere in your site: inside a lesson, on a purchase confirmation page, or, in LifterLMS, inside a private-area post. I pasted the coaching call shortcode directly into the first lesson of a test course, and the booking form loads right there, fully mobile responsive, without the scroll bars or embedded-frame issues you get from a hosted tool.

Chris Badgett: If you’re only doing courses today and haven’t considered coaching yet, that’s how easy it is to add. Coaching doesn’t have to be a forever commitment either. It can be a six-week or six-month package rather than an ongoing relationship. Think about how much more valuable a course becomes if it normally takes 30 or 60 days to complete and it also includes two or three calls along the way, since not every student hits the same roadblocks.

How Coaching Increases The Value Of Your Course

Chris Badgett: There’s an old idea called “a thousand true fans,” the argument that if a thousand people pay you $100 a year, you’ve turned your art into a business. Applied to courses, if you have a $100 course, you need a thousand true fans to make it work. If you add coaching and the course becomes a $1,000 offer, you only need a hundred customers, and the price reflects your personal time. If you put a link to schedule a short call right before the pricing table or the checkout, sometimes someone just needs to resolve a simple question, or check that the chemistry is right and that you’re approachable, before they commit.

Turning Course Feedback Into Better Sales Copy

Nathan Tyler: Even before you’re ready to charge for full coaching, offering a quick intro call is valuable on its own. You spend so much time building a course that you can forget what it was like to be a beginner, and a call surfaces the questions people are actually asking. If you hear the same question on ten intro calls, that tells you what belongs in lesson one, or on your sales page.

Chris Badgett: I call that a feedback loop. You have to open the loop, or you get trapped inside your own expertise.

Simply Schedule Appointments Pricing And Plan Levels

Nathan Tyler: Simply Schedule Appointments has three plans: Plus, Pro, and Business. Plus, which we’d been building for about a year, includes everything shown in this demo along with Google Calendar syncing. Pro adds built-in payments and text or email reminders. Business adds support for multiple staff members and multiple locations. Pro covers five sites, and Business covers unlimited sites. At the time of this recording a lifetime license option was not yet available, though it was something being considered for each tier.

Does Simply Schedule Appointments Work With Elementor And Beaver Builder

One attendee asked how Simply Schedule Appointments works with the Elementor page builder.

Nathan Tyler: You can drop the shortcode in anywhere, and we’ve built a dedicated Beaver Builder module you can drag in and use to select an appointment type directly. I’ve heard the Elementor question a couple of times now, so it’s clearly gaining traction. It shouldn’t be too hard to build a custom Elementor block or element, so that’s something we’d look at adding.

Chris Badgett: You can put the shortcode in a lot of places too, like inside a LifterLMS lesson or a private-area post that only certain members can reach.

Syncing Bookings With MailChimp And Other Email Marketing Tools

Another attendee asked about syncing bookings to a CRM.

Nathan Tyler: A MailChimp integration is almost done. When you’re setting up an appointment type, you’ll be able to add that customer to a specific MailChimp list, which can then trigger whatever automations you’ve set up in MailChimp. Beyond MailChimp, our plan is a Zapier integration, since that’s already on our roadmap. When someone books an appointment, we push that data to Zapier so you can apply whatever tags or transformations you need for whatever CRM you use.

Chris Badgett: At LifterLMS we support MailChimp and ConvertKit natively, and Jack Arthur’s WP Fusion add-on lets people apply tags across a dozen other CRMs. That’s been one of the main ways people connect LifterLMS to whatever email tool they’re already using.

Nathan Tyler: We fire WordPress hooks and filters at different points in the booking process, including an action hook when someone books an appointment. So even without a native integration, a developer could listen for that hook and connect it to something like MailPoet or ConvertKit with a small amount of custom code.

Automating Coaching Follow-Up From The LifterLMS Access Plan A Student Buys

Chris Badgett: If your course includes coaching as part of the deal, you can use LifterLMS’s access-plan engagement types to automate the next step. LifterLMS can trigger an engagement based on which access plan a student purchased, so if someone buys the $1,000 course-plus-coaching plan rather than the $100 course-only plan, you can automatically send them to schedule their first coaching call.

Deciding Whether Your CRM Or LifterLMS Should Trigger Coaching Follow-Up

One attendee, who sells coaching packages such as a set of six sessions, pointed out how useful it is for a CRM to recognize behavior on its own: sending a nudge when someone has used five of six sessions, or a different message when someone keeps canceling. Because Simply Schedule Appointments can fire an event whenever someone books, attends, or cancels an appointment, that behavior can be tagged into a tool like Drip or ActiveCampaign without any extra manual tracking.

Chris Badgett asked when it makes more sense for the CRM to own that behavior versus LifterLMS itself. The answer depends on the business model. If coaching calls are sold on their own, entirely separate from a course, it usually makes sense to let the CRM handle it, since you don’t want one-on-one clients seeing signals meant for course customers. If everything is driven through courses and you want a consistent experience across your whole audience, running it through LifterLMS keeps that consistent.

Nathan Tyler: Technically, firing off those kinds of events isn’t difficult to build. The harder part is knowing when someone actually attended a call versus just having it booked. There isn’t a clean way today to know if a call happened, whether that’s something you’d want to mark manually inside Simply Schedule Appointments, or something we should push to you as a follow-up email you can click to confirm.

Support For iCal, Apple Calendar, And Travel Time

An attendee using Apple’s Calendar app asked whether Simply Schedule Appointments would support iCal directly, including Apple’s travel-time feature.

Nathan Tyler: Simply Schedule Appointments syncs through the Google Calendar API, so if you use Apple’s Calendar app hooked up to a Google account, it’ll work today. Direct iCal support uses the CalDAV standard, and Apple layers some of its own features, like travel time, on top of that standard. It’s on our list, but it’s not likely in the next couple of months since Google Calendar syncing is the priority right now. If you’re using Apple’s Calendar app locally, you can point it at a Google account instead in the meantime.

Rescheduling And Canceling An Appointment

An attendee asked whether appointments can be canceled or rescheduled after booking.

Nathan Tyler: Yes. If the site owner cancels an appointment, the customer gets an email saying it was canceled with a link to reschedule. If the customer is the one canceling, the confirmation email they received includes links to cancel or cancel-and-reschedule, and they can pick a new time themselves.

Creating Separate Booking Pages For Different Types Of Students

An attendee asked whether you can run multiple separate booking calendars, for example one for sales calls and one for coaching.

Nathan Tyler: Yes, that’s what the different appointment types are for. If you embed a specific appointment type’s shortcode rather than the general one, visitors only see that type’s available times. They never see the other appointment types you’ve set up. I personally run a pre-sales call, an intro call, and a few different ongoing-consulting arrangements, each with its own rules, and I just link each one to a different page. Unlike some hosted tools, where a booker can navigate back and see all of your other appointment types, nobody sees that a page was customized just for them. It just looks like your normal schedule.

Translating Simply Schedule Appointments Into Other Languages

An attendee based in Germany asked about translations and compatibility with Loco Translate.

Nathan Tyler: Every string in Simply Schedule Appointments runs through WordPress’s standard translation layer, so it should be compatible with a tool like Loco Translate. We don’t have any official translations yet, since the interface is fairly JavaScript-heavy and building that out has taken more work than a typical WordPress plugin. If anyone fluent in another language wants to help translate it, we’d welcome that.

Connecting Bookings To Zoom Or Other Video Call Links

An attendee asked whether you can attach a Zoom, Facebook Live, or Be.Live link directly to an appointment type.

Chris Badgett: I don’t attach my scheduling tool directly to those services. Instead, I put the meeting link, like a Zoom link, in the confirmation email the tool sends out.

Nathan Tyler: That’s how I’ve done it too. You customize the confirmation email to include the link where you’re going to talk, and that link carries over into the calendar event’s notes as well, so the information travels with the booking.

Handling VAT And European Compliance

An attendee in the UK asked whether the Pro plan handles VAT, or whether he’d need another plugin.

Chris Badgett: At LifterLMS, the way we’ve handled this is through our WooCommerce integration, since WooCommerce already deals with VAT and invoicing.

Nathan Tyler: My instinct is the same: use the WooCommerce integration, since it lets you generate invoices with whatever compliance details, like a VAT line, that you need. If there’s something more specific you need Simply Schedule Appointments itself to output, reach out and we can look at whether that’s something simple to add.

Connecting To Self-Hosted CRMs Like MailPoet

An attendee asked about connecting to a self-hosted CRM like MailPoet.

Nathan Tyler: There’s no direct MailPoet integration yet, but because we fire a WordPress action hook whenever someone books an appointment, a WordPress developer could listen for that event and pass the details to MailPoet with a fairly small amount of code.

Licensing Simply Schedule Appointments Across Multiple Client Sites

An attendee who manages sites for multiple clients asked about licensing across several installs.

Nathan Tyler: The Pro plan covers five sites, and the Business plan covers unlimited sites. If you buy Pro and later get upgraded to Business, as part of the webinar bonus, you get unlimited sites at no extra cost. At renewal, a Business-upgraded license renews at the Pro rate while keeping the Business-level features.

Tracking Whether Clients Actually Attended Their Appointments

An attendee asked whether the plugin can track no-shows, and whether a client could be charged automatically if they don’t cancel with enough notice.

Nathan Tyler: We don’t currently track whether someone actually attended a call. It’s something we’ve thought about, most likely by adding a link in the calendar event notes that lets you mark an appointment as attended after the fact, so that behavior could be passed along to a CRM as a tag. Automatically charging for a late cancellation is a related idea worth exploring, maybe by letting someone cancel the appointment itself without automatically refunding the charge.

Setting Cancellation Notice Periods And No-Show Policies

An attendee who sometimes drives an hour or more to an in-person meeting asked about requiring more cancellation notice.

Nathan Tyler: Right now there isn’t a setting that blocks a cancellation inside a certain window, like 24 hours, because that felt more like a business policy than a scheduling rule. My own view is that I’d rather know someone isn’t coming five minutes before a call than have them just not show up. That said, an option to display a message, like asking someone to call your cell phone directly rather than canceling silently within a certain window, is a reasonable feature request worth exploring.

What Group Booking Events Are For

An attendee asked what “group events,” listed on the pricing page, actually does.

Nathan Tyler: Group events are for something like a group coaching call or a training session at a fixed time, for example a session at 2pm next Thursday that multiple people can reserve a seat in. It isn’t built to find a time that works across everyone’s individual schedules, the way a tool like Doodle does. It’s the reverse. You set the time, and people book into open seats, up to whatever limit you set, like three or five people per session.

GDPR And Customer Data In Simply Schedule Appointments

An attendee asked about GDPR implications of keeping appointment history.

Nathan Tyler: From our side, we’re not processing your customers’ appointment data ourselves. It lives in your own WordPress database once someone books, which means the responsibility for handling that data sits with you as the site owner. We’re adding a feature to delete a customer’s booking history and any custom fields they submitted. It’s a little more complex than deleting a WordPress user outright, since that user might also be tied to LifterLMS or other plugins, so we don’t create a full WordPress user for a booking. We can remove the appointment history and custom field data specifically instead.

HIPAA Compliance And Scheduling Sensitive Appointments

An attendee asked whether Simply Schedule Appointments has been evaluated for HIPAA compliance.

Nathan Tyler: HIPAA compliance has more to do with your server environment than with the scheduling software itself. There’s nothing in Simply Schedule Appointments that’s inherently insecure or non-compliant, but the plugin can’t guarantee HIPAA compliance on its own, since that depends on whether your site runs over HTTPS and how the rest of your hosting is locked down.

Where Confirmation And Reminder Emails Come From

An attendee asked whether Simply Schedule Appointments’ emails come from the WordPress site itself.

Nathan Tyler: Yes, emails send through WordPress’s built-in mail function, the same way WooCommerce sends its emails. If you’re using a plugin that overrides that, like one that routes email through Postmark or SendGrid, Simply Schedule Appointments’ emails will go through that same path. Email deliverability is a WordPress-wide issue worth solving with a proper SMTP or transactional email service, regardless of which plugin is sending the message.