How to Get Your First 10 Customers for Your Course or Coaching Business in 30 Days Without Overwhelm

If you are at the beginning of your course creator journey or if you’ve started but haven’t enrolled any customers yet, this complimentary training is for you to discover the fastest path to revenue.

---

How To Get Your First Ten Course Customers Without Overwhelm

This webinar walks course creators through the exact framework LifterLMS uses to help new education entrepreneurs go from zero to their first ten enrollments in about thirty days. Chris Badgett and Will Middleton introduce the free Enroll Summit training, break down the five hats every course creator has to wear, and share how to find customers, design a course they want, and build the tech stack without getting stuck.

What You’ll Learn

• The five hats framework: community building, instructional design, expertise, entrepreneur, and tech, and how they combine to move a course from zero to ten enrollments.
• Why “build it and they will come” is the most expensive mistake first-time course creators make, and how to test your minimum viable product before you build.
• How to escape the expert’s curse and design a course around a specific student transformation instead of your own body of knowledge.
• The five hot burning pains framework for building a free-course lead magnet funnel that fills your email list without paid ads.
• Why tech minimalism on quality hosting is the difference between shipping and getting stuck, mapped through four LMS site personas.

Key Takeaways

• Enroll in the free Enroll Summit at academy.lifterlms.com. Roughly two and a half hours of distilled training that would otherwise be a ten-hour course.
• Start community building before you build the course. Do not launch into a silent room.
• Name the top five hot burning pains your ideal learner faces, then build a free course lead magnet that answers one of them.
• Grab Ziv Raviv’s six-email swipe file inside the Enroll Summit and use it to launch your first email sequence.
• Cut plugins. LMS sites work best on quality hosting with a lean stack.

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why We Made A Free Training On Getting Your First Ten Enrollments

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to this complimentary training. I’m Chris from LifterLMS and I’m joined by Will from LifterLMS. Kathy’s here on the call with us from Monster LMS. We’re excited to go over with you this new training that we’ve created. It’s actually free. It could be worth thousands of dollars.

We brought in some of our top LifterLMS customers, wonderful people, wonderful teachers, to really surround you or your client the course creator with the best kind of distilled wisdom we could find around getting your first ten enrollments.

We see a lot of people, more than we would like, that get the software or they’re kind of moving on the project. Maybe it’s been a month, half a year, even a year plus, and they don’t have their first ten enrollments or even their first enrollment sometimes. So we wanted to really focus in and create some training around how to help you with that.

Introducing The Enroll Summit And The Five Hats Framework

Will Middleton: We put together the Enroll Summit like Chris said to help course creators get from zero to ten enrollments, which is something we see a lot of our users struggle with along their course creation journey. Maybe they pick up the software, they dive into creating a course, and they kind of end up in this build it and they will come scenario, but no one ends up showing up.

So this course really focuses on how you can position your course around your students and get those first ten enrollments. The structure of the course follows a framework of the five hats, which is something we talk about at LifterLMS frequently.

We cover these five topics in the summit: community building, instructional design, expertise, entrepreneur, and tech. We have five speakers each giving two talks about each of these five topics, so ten talks total, diving into various aspects of community building, instructional design, expertise, entrepreneur, and tech.

You’ll find the link to the Enroll Summit at academy.lifterlms.com. Our five speakers cover community building, instructional design, expertise, entrepreneur, and tech. You may see some familiar faces. Chris and I give two talks in this summit around entrepreneur and tech. I just went through the summit again today and watched it. It’s about two hours, two and a half hours worth of content, and there are just some really great takeaways.

Melissa Love On The Build It And They Will Come Trap

Chris Badgett: Melissa Love is awesome. She’s built a thriving membership site full of designers, which is full of courses and other resources in our membership as well. In our summit here she gives some awesome talks around building a free community versus building a paid community and what aspects you’ll want to incorporate into each one.

Melissa Love: My top tip is absolutely do not build it and they will come. So good. I can tell you this is a bitter experience. I built out my first course. I was so sure I knew what everybody wanted. And just at the last minute, a mentor said to me, hey, have you tested your minimum viable product? Have you asked your audience what they want? How do you know this is what they want?

I said, you know, I haven’t done that. So luckily I did have an opportunity to put that out there to my audience, and the answers I got back were not at all what I was expecting. I had to rebuild the whole course. So not only had I squandered my time, I did have a lucky escape. But I could have really done myself some reputational damage or had a poor launch.

So luckily that didn’t happen to me. But thinking you know what people want is not the same as knowing what people want.

Testing Your Minimum Viable Course Before You Build It

Will Middleton: That’s a key tip from Melissa’s talk. I see that time and time again. Thinking you know what people want is different than actually knowing what people want. By answering people’s questions directly and building community before building your course, you’ll have a lot more insights as to exactly what your community wants.

I’ve experienced that exact same thing where I make YouTube videos about a specific topic that I think is going to be relevant to everyone, but nobody ends up really caring about the subject matter I’m explaining. Then I’ll make a really obscure video about a question somebody asked about integrating LifterLMS with Elementor in a very specific way, and that will be my most viewed video on the channel. So thinking you know what people want versus knowing what people want is definitely a very different circumstance. Building that community is super important.

Chris Badgett: One of those things about Melissa too is that in order to validate and build that minimum viable product, you need to test your assumptions with some real people that are in your target market. She also said in that course, go where they already are. For a lot of solopreneurs and freelancers in her world, they’re on Facebook. So she created a Facebook group for that.

How many times have you heard somebody say the importance of validating or building a prototype or MVP as something that was really a key to their success?

Will Middleton: More times than I can think of. There are some people who we featured on LMScast who are serial entrepreneur types. That’s kind of like me, where I’ll just start a bunch of projects and then see which one sticks to the wall. I have maybe like ten percent of projects actually work. That’s kind of more my style. But a lot of people just go into one business or two businesses, and they’re not doing that mass approach. If you’re not going to do that mass approach, you really want to make sure you’re hitting a nerve with your target market and knowing what content they want to see and what courses they want from you and what interaction they’re looking for.

Jenny On Designing A Course Around A Real Student Transformation

Will Middleton: This is a quick video from Jenny around targeting what students want to learn and a little bit of that instructional design piece of the puzzle.

Jenny: You want to have the least amount of material possible to meet your objective. That’s your goal. Not to cram everything you know into it, but the least amount of material possible.

So the first thing that I like to start with is think about the end. Start with the end in mind. What do you want people to get out of your course when they walk away from the course? What are they going to be able to do that they couldn’t do before? And I think the word do is a really important characteristic here. Notice I didn’t say learn. I can learn all kinds of things, but that doesn’t mean that I can do something with it. It’s going to change my life.

What we want to do is give people things that change their life. We want them to be able to take action and do something. So when someone gets finished with your course, what are they going to now be able to do that they couldn’t do before? That becomes your goal or your objective, and that’s going to guide everything about this course planning process.

The Peanut Butter Sandwich Approach To Course Scope

Chris Badgett: Jenny’s in a niche where she’s teaching child care providers. She mentioned in her interview that she was able to get up to six figures in revenue. She was able to create jobs for both her children, and her course was actually low priced. There’s a lot of buzz in the market about high ticket this or premium, go up market kind of stuff. But not only is Jenny a great teacher and a classically trained instructional designer, she also knows how to pick a market and sell a lot of a small-priced thing into a very niche market.

Jenny: I want to teach you how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. There are so many things that I could go into. I could talk about how to choose the best bread, I could talk about how peanut butter is made, how jelly is made. But really, in order to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I just need to know the steps involved to make that sandwich.

If I get interested enough and I want to learn more about how to choose the best peanut butter or choose the best bread, that can be an advanced course that I choose to take later. But it doesn’t need to be in my initial course content.

Will Middleton: That’s a big piece of it. With a lot of industry experts who go and make a course, they’ll talk about those aspects of how to choose the best peanut butter, how to choose the best jelly. But really what the beginner course students are going to want to know is how do I put together the sandwich, without necessarily those more advanced topics of knowing how to source the best materials. That can oftentimes stunt the learner in their learning journey if they’re told information that isn’t perfectly suited to what they’re looking to do in this basic course.

The Expert’s Curse And The Shift From Info To Results

Chris Badgett: Most people, especially if they’re not a trained teacher, if their project succeeds, they have to correct for that. It has a common name called the expert’s curse. There are many curses on the expert. One of them is imposter syndrome. Another one is this inward focus about, it’s me, I have to get all my value out on the table. It’s about quantity and depth.

But if you turn the lens outward from the expert, instead of focusing on yourself, you focus on your students and how far we’ve come from just the information age to the results age. People and how limited people’s attention is these days, the minimum amount to get the maximum result, not just knowledge or info. They used to be called information products. A lot of people still call courses information products. But what people actually want to buy is results products, and they want to get to that result as quickly as possible.

They don’t need to know everything you need to know. The big mistake I see a lot of people make is they get really deep into the terminology, and then you start using all these fancy words, and the person just wants to get the result. They don’t need all the vocabulary and the fancy stuff.

Will Middleton: One thing Jenny also talks about is an aspect of the tech where she started. She built her six-figure business with just LifterLMS out of the box. Now she’s gone down the rabbit hole of Elementor, which may partially be my fault. Going into those really deep design aspects and creating a really complicated LMS site isn’t usually the best thing, especially when going from zero to ten. Once you’re at that hundred to a thousand mark and you’re trying to really tailor the user experience and put tags on your users whenever they do anything on your website, that’s more of that hundred to a thousand mark. Going from zero to ten is really just about getting someone to buy your course and getting that validation for your product.

Which Of The Five Hats Do You Struggle With Most

Will Middleton: One thing I’m super curious about with all of the people we have on the call: which of these five aspects do you struggle with the most? Community building would be getting into Facebook and building a Facebook group or a Slack group or an email list. Do you struggle with community building? Do you struggle with instructional design, which would be what we just talked about with taking your expertise and putting it in a learnable format? Do you struggle with just making your course and structuring it in a coherent way?

Do you struggle with expertise? Maybe you know how to do a lot of this business stuff. You’re good with the tech, but you don’t have that industry expertise yet, so maybe you would partner with someone who does have expertise that you can complement well. Do you struggle with the entrepreneurial aspect, the aspect of building the business, making the sales, doing the marketing? Or do you struggle with the tech?

You can struggle with multiple things. I know I definitely struggled at the start a lot with instructional design, community building, and some of the entrepreneurial aspects. Struggling with the tech would mean maybe you’ve had a bad experience with a hosting provider, maybe your site’s throwing errors, and this may be caused by having a lot of plugins on your website. Struggling with the tech could mean just understanding how you can create what you’re trying to create.

Chris Badgett: Sounds like entrepreneur and community building are our top so far. I’m not saying enrollment. Enrollment is essentially sales. You may not see it that way, but that’s like an entrepreneur thing, getting people through the conversion point.

Community Building Rules For Course Creators

Will Middleton: Community building we have two talks with Melissa Love. She talks about creating a free group and creating a paid group, and how you can get people from your free group into your paid group. She does a lot of work with Facebook. Her two groups: she has the freebie group where she’ll drop all of her paid offers, but if you’re a member of the paid group you have access to all of these courses she comes out with, monthly mastermind calls, ask me anything sessions. She does a lot of community engagement. If you’re struggling with community building, be sure to check out her two talks. I’ve watched them three times over now, and I’m still getting more out of it each time I watch it.

A big part of community building is finding where your students are currently at. Are they on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, Clubhouse, Instagram, Slack? Finding the vein and the hangout spots where your community is and contributing in those communities is super important for building a community.

Chris Badgett: Just to be clear, this is a free training we created, but it’s super valuable. We could easily sell this as a product, but we made it free because we wanted to remove all the friction. If you folks don’t get from zero to your ten enrollments, you’re not going to be successful, you’re not going to be happy, you’re not going to stick around our community. So this is our gift to you.

Look at what we do. We have a free Facebook group. We have community. We also have a paid one that people get access to when they join the Infinity Bundle from LifterLMS. But we’ve been building that community one conversation at a time for many years. Lots of people have their issues with Facebook or Google, but we just go where people are. People who are trying to create courses and learn online business, they’re on Facebook, so we have a Facebook group. That’s how it works. Melissa goes over that and how she does it as well.

Rules Of Thumb For Community And Consistency

Will Middleton: I took a screenshot from Melissa’s talk. These are a few rules of thumb that will help you post in your Facebook group, on your YouTube channel, maybe you’re doing YouTube live streams, just to get momentum going in your community.

Don’t put it off. You need to build trust over time. Starting your community before you’re ready is often a good thing to do. A lot of people put together their course, they’ll have their whole website done, it’s looking great, and then they’ll go create their community. Then they have this long runway of building up their community with not a lot of enrollments in their course. If you start your Facebook group, start your YouTube channel, start hanging out in a Clubhouse room by yourself and talking about your topic, and build up a community even before you build your course.

Choose the platform of least resistance for your audience. Go where your audience is at. If they’re already on Facebook groups interacting, if they’re already on YouTube binging content, put your content on YouTube and interact with them in the comments. Get some friendly faces in nice and early. If you’re a coach and you have some clients, you can get them into your group and they’ll be great advocates for you. If you have some friends and family who are interested in a similar topic, get some friendly faces involved in your group and get them active during and around your launch.

Show up when you say you’ll show up. If you start a weekly live stream, Melissa recommends doing that for at least six months. If you can’t sustain it for at least six months, try to find a way that when you start an experiment or a project, you give yourself the time to let the fire burn a little bit and see if people interact with your content.

Make sure there are real tangible benefits even to your free group. Even though the group is free, you still want to incentivize people to interact with it in some way. Melissa does this nicely by having her paid members also interacting in her free group, so they’re helping bridge and make her sales to get people into her paid membership.

Introducing Ziv Raviv And The Provide Value First Principle

Chris Badgett: When we first met Ziv, we found out he was using LifterLMS to teach people how to tie animal balloons. He made $277,000 in 2020 doing this method during a challenging time for kid entertainers. Obviously it got my attention, so I interviewed him and I found out about his story. Ziv is such a great example of somebody who really knows how to pick a niche, do good sales and marketing, and build a great product. He’s actually done it time and time again. He has three learning projects at least that I know of.

This is some great advice about taking people off of Facebook, out of the communities you’re currently engaged in, and getting them onto your email list, getting them into your funnel. Once you’ve identified my audience is on YouTube and you start to make YouTube videos to answer their questions, or my audience is in Facebook and you start to answer their comments and find solutions for them, once you’re at that point, this is where some of the advice from Ziv is going to come in super big for you.

Ziv Raviv: The fourth principle is to provide value first. That is a huge topic in business in general, and I highly recommend you think about them first, about your clients, the people that will watch your course. It’s not about what you can teach. It’s about what your people in your tribe want to learn, and what are the problems that you can solve. If you can actually solve a few problems before solving the big problem with your course, that is way better. Then you can establish a relationship based on you having a free party and creating a reciprocity, instead of just wanting to sell immediately.

So provide value first through content, full lead magnets, freebie ebooks, through actually being active in Facebook groups. There are a lot of ways I will talk about that in the next lesson. But do that. Provide value first, and only then sell.

Momentum Over Perfection In Course Marketing

Ziv Raviv: The fifth principle is not too fast. Even marketing in business in general is a process of moving. It’s about momentum. It’s not about perfect. It’s never about perfect. So just do it. Just get that swipe file, download it, and start selling your first ten enrollments.

I think that this is so practical. I’m sharing this with you as if I was able to share it with myself like five years ago. That would be what I teach myself as well, after launching over a hundred online courses. Each of them is like a baby that I’ve grown up and nourished, and the entire operation of membership sites and coaching people, and six podcasts. Trust me on this one. You just need to do it.

Will Middleton: What Ziv got into there about getting people off of your community into your funnel. A couple of tips he had were about putting some of those freebies he talks about, like an email solving problems in your industry, some of those hot points, in freebies and putting links to those in your Facebook profile when you’re interacting in your Facebook community. Just answering questions, you’re not selling, you’re just providing value in other people’s communities. They might send you friend requests, send you direct messages, go to your profile and check you out, and they’ll find your freebies. That’s how people will end up in your funnel from your community.

Using Ziv’s Six-Email Swipe File To Launch Faster

Will Middleton: Ziv talks about a swipe file, and that’s something you can download in the course. I have problems writing emails, just getting my mind around taking the topics I know how to teach and formatting that in a sequence of emails. Setting up my Mailchimp, setting up my CRM, connecting it to my course, and just sending people emails once they subscribe to my email list. Writing those emails is a big challenge for me. That was a big challenge for me. Ziv has already written emails for you. The swipe file he’s talking about in the course is six emails that he’s already pre-written for you. You just have to change out your subject matter and your links.

Chris Badgett: It comes from the marketing world. Whenever you hear the word swipe file, they’re like templates that you can copy and paste and just switch out some words, and obviously put it in your own voice. But Ziv did a huge solid by giving his six-email swipe file to help you generate sales. I definitely recommend getting that from inside the course.

Will Middleton: Once you get to that point in your revenue where you can afford to hire some of these companies that are like thousands of dollars a month, they can do these full-time writing emails specifically for your audience. That’s more of a maybe hundred to a thousand or a thousand students to ten thousand students type area, where you can hire one of those companies. But this is a great taste of what it’s like to work with delegating some of that work, when you can take a swipe file with six free emails, change out your links, and be good to go.

Finding Your Audience When You Do Not Know Where They Are

Chris Badgett: Sometimes finding where the students are is an expert problem. It comes from not having clarity on who you’re serving. A lot of us get wrapped up in the mechanism of what we’re creating and what our expertise is and what we like to do. But sometimes just finding the one to three types of people who are your ideal customer, once you get clear on that, it’s easier to find them. Just because you’re picking your ideal, it doesn’t mean you won’t help somebody else. But if you could wave a magic wand and the perfect customer showed up on your doorstep, what are they doing, what work are they in, what career are they in, what kind of interests do they have?

With those kinds of things, you can start to triangulate on a Facebook group, LinkedIn group, Slack group. Also do a bunch of stuff in person, like which events are they attending. Customer clarity is the name of the game there, which then makes the process of making the course easier because then you can hold that person in your mind. When Jenny is talking about designing a learning objective, what do they want to do, you can actually visualize that ideal customer. Okay, well, my ideal customer wants to do this. I need to help him get there without getting overwhelmed or stuck. That’s the key.

Will Middleton: Another great thing you can do is head to Google with your subject matter and just start typing in questions that people would ask. Type in your keywords related to your course. If we use my Boy Scout course example, I would just go to Google and type “getting the Eagle Scout”, “Boy Scout Facebook groups”, “how do I get to Eagle Scout”, “what are the requirements”. I’m starting to type all these questions into Google and checking out the links. Are there Reddit threads about this? Are there blog posts? Maybe the blog post creator about a specific topic also has a Facebook group, and then you join their Facebook group and start adding value in their Facebook group. Maybe you find a YouTube channel and can interact in the comments of that YouTube channel.

Chris Badgett: Another great one is Amazon book reviews. If you’re stuck as an expert and you’re really focused on your mechanism of what it is you do, drop down into the reviews, and you’re like, oh, there’s a bunch of life coaches or dog trainers or scientists or parents. You can start to see the groupings of who these five-star reviews are coming from, what they’re happy about, what they’re not happy about.

Building Expertise By Answering Real Community Questions

Will Middleton: One point Jenny brought up about speaking to students directly is by answering questions that students actually ask, versus just putting out content that you think they might want to hear. Hearing the direct questions from them directly is honoring the knowledge that your students are bringing to the table by answering their questions directly. That’s a big part of the learning process, attaching to the mental connections in your students’ current understanding. So you’re honoring the knowledge that they already have by answering their questions directly.

Ziv has some great stuff around community building as well. If you join three specific Facebook groups and you decide to be active in those Facebook groups and just answer questions people have, even if you don’t know the answer, even if you’re not an expert at the moment, go online and try to find answers for them. You’re sourcing answers for other people, and that’s a great way to build expertise on a specific subject matter.

If you’re struggling with the expertise piece and you want to build up that expertise yourself rather than partnering with someone who’s already an expert, find questions people ask, even if you don’t know the answer, go and try to find that answer. Understanding their question, understanding the answer, that will make you an expert. That’s something that I actually did with LifterLMS. I would go into the Facebook group, find questions people were asking, and even if I didn’t know the answer, like how do I have favorites, some people wanted to have a liking system, I didn’t know how to do that. But I went and found a plugin as to how to do it, and I created a video about it offering some helpful suggestions. That’s a way to build expertise. I posted the video on YouTube then posted it in the Facebook group. That’s something that you can do in any community that you end up in to build that expertise.

The Five Hot Burning Pains Framework For Your Ideal Learner

Chris Badgett: Will and I have some models that we break down. This is just a sample of those models for some more kinesthetic learners. Five hot burning pains for your ideal learner. These are what we want to focus on. We really want to figure out what these pains are and name them.

Essentially, when people go to the internet and they do searches on Google or on YouTube or in podcast land or wherever they are, they’re often looking for a solution to a certain type of pain. So once we identify what your market’s five main pain points are, that allows us to create an ecosystem of let’s call it thirteen content items that are related to this pain.

Think of every single one of these pieces of content as a problem related to the pain, and then the content is about that pain and about how your course or your training or your membership solves it.

Building A Free Course Lead Magnet Funnel

Chris Badgett: A free course lead magnet is a free course that goes deeper on this pain point and really helps solve it. Using LifterLMS and using a free course, you get an email address, and inside the free course you add more value. You now have a lead that you can nurture if they’re not ready to buy. And if they are ready to buy, they can go ahead and make the purchase.

Will Middleton: That’s a similar thing to what Ziv was talking about, where you have all those pain points, you have your community, and your community will be talking about their pain points online. On Facebook, Reddit, wherever they’re at, you’ll hear them talking about their pain points. Chris’s presentation is about the content you’re making around those pain points and how you’re funneling your content on YouTube, Facebook, whatever it is, into your free course lead magnet, which would be your swipe file. It could be a free course, what Ziv was talking about as your sort of lead magnet. Now they’re in your community, they’re in your funnel, they’re on your website buying your courses.

Chris Badgett: Just to get a little meta on you all right now, the Enroll Summit is actually a free course lead magnet of sorts. Because one of the biggest pain points, that’s why we made it free. We just wanted to see our customers and users be successful. But one of the biggest pains that course creators have, one of the five top ones, is getting clients. So this is a free course lead magnet to help get clients.

If you’re not yet a LifterLMS customer and you’re watching this video, or you’re going through and you end up going through the course, you may end up getting our software, you may not. But we’re just trying to surround our ideal customer with support and reduce the main pain points they have. Getting clients is a huge pain point in the industry.

The Two Biggest Pains For Course Entrepreneurs

Will Middleton: Getting clients as a pain point would map right to that entrepreneur aspect of making the sale. Maybe you have an email list with sixteen thousand people on it, but I’d say that pain point is associated with the entrepreneur aspect.

Chris Badgett: There are many pains that entrepreneurs have, but the two biggest ones are leads and sales. The content strategy we’re just showing is a way to generate leads for free without paid ads. The other one that I taught in the summit is around how, once you have their attention, how do you sell them through a structured non-pushy kind of group sales format through a webinar. I took the two biggest pains that entrepreneurs had and I made some training around that.

Tech Minimalism And The Four LMS Site Personas

Will Middleton: In my talks I talk about the tech aspect of building your course site. I don’t do a specific demo because this summit could really apply to any LMS site, so it’s not necessarily just LifterLMS sites. But it definitely applies to LifterLMS and WordPress sites, especially LifterLMS and WordPress sites where you have all the control.

We end up in Easy Street Town. Easy Street Town is where we want you to be. You’re not really running into problems very often. You’re having a low severity issue maybe once every three months, for example. You’re never really going to be able to escape issues entirely. There’s always going to be technical issues popping up here and there. But in Easy Street Town, when we have good hosting and we’re a tech minimalist, it’s going to be a lot less frequent that we run into these issues, and it’s going to be a lot easier to deal with when we do run into the issues.

Instead of going live and launching an MVP, we end up in this Never Launch phase in the middle. Then we have Progress, the green bar at the top, which is where you launch your MVP, you get students enrolled, and then you make changes from there based on what students say, what students need, and what students are looking for from your platform. You’ll end up making a lot of progress.

Emergency Room Town And Frankenstein Town

Chris Badgett: I just want to highlight something you said, Will. Could you describe that first slide you had, that spectrum of like, I have good or poor hosting, and then I have lots of plugins and themes and tech, or I have a minimalist approach? Tell us what Emergency Room Town looks like where we have poor hosting and we have tons of tech.

Will Middleton: Emergency Room Town is where you have that intersection of poor hosting and being a tech maximalist. That’s where you have more than thirty, forty, fifty, sixty plugins installed on your website. You’ve got maybe multiple page builders on your website. Page builders would be like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi. Some of those can slow down your website, especially when they’re working together, like multiple on the same website. Usually you would only have one.

It’s really that point where you open yourself up to a lot of possible plugin conflicts, and you’re also on a poor hosting platform that doesn’t necessarily support dynamic websites like LMS websites. LMS websites are some of the most complicated types of websites because they incorporate logins, user accounts, user permissions. Each user can have different levels of access.

The amount of importance that’s put on having a good hosting platform is especially important with an LMS website that needs to communicate with the database, and when a new user purchases something the database needs to know about it. Hopefully there’s not a ton of caching in place on your pages that are supposed to be dynamic. That’s where you have you’re putting a lot of weight on a not great foundation. It sets you up for kind of an Emergency Room Town.

Being a tech maximalist on good hosting that does support LMS, you’re going to end up in Frankenstein Town. Even though you are on a good host, you’re still going to have some of those tech conflicts. Maybe like once every two weeks or once a month, you’re going to have a big issue on the website where you’re communicating with the support of a company, trying to troubleshoot an issue because you have a ton of plugins and themes that are interacting with each other and having some specific conflicts.

Confusion Town And Momentum Town

Will Middleton: Confusion Town would be if you’re on poor hosting and you’re a tech minimalist. You’re doing the tech minimalist thing, you have like ten or twenty plugins, but you’re still on poor hosting, and there’s still some confusion around why things are breaking. You’re using the best practices of having minimal tech, but random issues continue to happen. That might be due to having a poor host, kind of a poor foundation.

If you’re a tech minimalist and you have great hosting, it’s very easy to figure out what the problems are. For example, there was a client that emailed me today and had an issue, but he only has three plugins on his website. So figuring out what the source of the issue was, was very easy because there were three plugins: Elementor, Elementor Pro, and I think a security plugin. It wasn’t an LMS website, but it was a very minimalistic website. When you’re a tech minimalist and you’re on good hosting, it’s very easy to tell what’s going on. Then you reach Momentum Town if you’re a tech minimalist and you have great hosting.

The tech is just kind of out of your way, and it can be somewhat seamless. Like I said in the video, you can never truly escape tech issues. Even with the best hosts, things will pop up from time to time. But when issues do come up, it’ll be a lot easier to deal with them, and they pop up significantly less often.

Should Your Blog, Shop, And LMS Live On Separate Subdomains

Will Middleton: One thing I learned recently is that having all of your items, your blog, your LMS, and your shop on one website is really good for SEO. I think we might have experienced that with LifterLMS, how the blog gets great SEO but it doesn’t contribute to the LifterLMS website. Having it all on one platform. I did the same thing where I had the subdomains, and apparently that’s not necessarily the best practice for SEO.

Chris Badgett: Another thing too is if you do need to do that for some reason, Melissa Love, who we have in the summit, does that. She has a separate WooCommerce site where she sells, and then she has the LMS on the subdomain, and she links it all together with WP Fusion. So it definitely can be done. But it’s just a preference. In Will’s diagram of tech minimalism, it happens to all of us in anything when we try something new. Like going backpacking, the first time I went, I had all this gear and my pack was heavy. Now when I go it’s like a third the size. The same thing is true for building websites. When you first get started, you find a plugin for this and that, and all of a sudden it just gets out of hand. But that’s how you have to earn the right to be a minimalist, or just follow somebody who’s guiding you on the essential path from the beginning, which is what we’re trying to do here.

Picking A WordPress Theme That Styles Your Courses

Chris Badgett: Does LifterLMS give you a possibility to style courses? Styling courses is more of a theme activity. LifterLMS kind of has a base design, but you want to choose a theme that can help you give styling options, especially if you don’t want to get into coding. LifterLMS has a neutral design, and then the themes really build on top of that or people custom code. Astra is really popular. Kadence is popular. Those are probably the two most popular. They give you a lot of styling options without having to code.

The Astra theme is in the chat. There are a lot of options out there for themes that build on top of LifterLMS to give you the styling you want without getting deep into custom code.

Building An Email Audience Into A Free Course Lead Magnet

Chris Badgett: Some people call it the login opt-in strategy. That’s one way to create a free course lead magnet instead of giving somebody an ebook. You can do the ebook, but a consumable course is great. If you’re using a CRM, you could use WP Fusion to pipe that email right over and start a nurture sequence. If you’re using an email broadcast from your site, if you’re using something like Groundhog or FluentCRM, you can just start building your list and creating marketing campaigns from there.

Why We Are Trying To Reduce Friction For Course Creators

Chris Badgett: The Enroll Summit is a good use of your time. Skip one movie is what I ask. Skip one movie and take the Enroll Summit. I think it’s going to blow your mind, because really that could have been a ten-hour course. Each of those could have been their own course, but they’re super condensed, super tight. They use a similar teaching framework. Once you get in the flow, you’re going to get all this value and get in the flow of getting to your zero to ten enrollments.

Will Middleton: Get enrolled in the Enroll Summit, even if you’re above ten enrollments. There are some great tips in there, and you don’t actually have to watch the whole thing. If you are really struggling with building your community, just check out Melissa Love’s talks. It’s only about twenty minutes of content, and that’ll get you on your way. If you want a full well-rounded approach, check out the whole thing. But there are also some great deep dives as well. So get enrolled.

Chris Badgett: Thanks everybody who’s here. Thanks for staying to the end. Let us know at help at lifterlms.com if there’s anything we can do for you. Will, great job with putting this together and leading up the project. Kathy, thanks for helping put this on. I hope everybody out there has a great rest of your day. Let’s get everybody up to ten enrollments.