How to Offer LifterLMS Website Building and Marketing Services to Grow Your WordPress Agency Business

One secret to agency success is a combination of niching and effective offer creation. If you build LMS websites for clients (or want to), come learn how to put together a winning learning management system (LMS) website service offer. And discover how to bundle in sales and marketing features into the package you offer for maximum client results.

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How To Build A Profitable WordPress LMS Agency With LifterLMS

This webinar from LifterLMS co-founder Chris Badgett breaks down how to build a profitable WordPress agency around LifterLMS website building and marketing services. It covers the minimum and advanced tool stacks, the difference between custom and productized service models, how to structure a paid discovery process, how to build a lead-generation funnel from YouTube to a paid transformational program, and how to get leads through the LifterLMS Expert Program.

What You’ll Learn

• The minimum and more advanced tool stacks for building and marketing WordPress LMS websites
• The difference between custom services, productized services, and a hybrid model
• How to sell a paid discovery process instead of giving your strategy away for free
• How to build a funnel from a free YouTube video through a free course lead magnet to a paid transformational program
• How the LifterLMS Expert Program and affiliate programs can send you client leads and revenue

Key Takeaways

• Lead with results, not deliverables, when you talk to prospective clients
• Charge for your discovery process so both sides take the engagement seriously
• Pick a productized, custom, or hybrid model and stay consistent about which one you are selling
• Build a free course lead magnet before asking anyone to buy your transformational program
• Apply to the LifterLMS Expert Program if you build LifterLMS websites for clients

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

What This Training On LifterLMS Website Building Services Covers

Welcome to this training on how to build out LifterLMS or WordPress LMS related marketing and website services together, to create a really valuable offer so you can earn more money, have more focus, get clients who are a little easier to work with, and enjoy the benefits of being focused in a high value niche. We’re going to go into a lot of detail on how to pull that off.

I’d encourage you to stay to the end. This is a presentation where I’m going to go into some key ideas on how to develop a profitable WordPress LMS focused agency, and then get into more of the details on how to execute on that. If you stay all the way to the end you’re going to see the full picture. And maybe you don’t even offer WordPress LMS related services, but you’ve done it yourself and you’re toying with the idea of helping some other people come online, because for me that’s how it started. I started as a course creator, then got into doing that for other people, so it’s something that happens from time to time.

I do want this to be super interactive, so don’t be scared of the chat or the Q&A box. I built my first website back in 2008 with WordPress, so it’s been about 11 years of being in the WordPress industry. I started as a simple blogger myself, and here I am as a WordPress LMS product creator, but I’ve also been a solo freelancer, an agency owner, and I’ve merged my agency with another company, did high-end custom WordPress LMS solutions and membership solutions, and through that we transitioned into LifterLMS, the product company. So I’ve kind of seen all sides of this. There’s not a side of WordPress, of being a freelancer, agency owner, or product person, that I haven’t been on. I hope to basically distill a decade’s worth of experience into less than a day’s worth of material, so however you want to mine my experience and my ideas based on the 10 years I’ve put into this, it’s a good opportunity for you to ask questions and hopefully avoid a lot of the mistakes, pitfalls, and lessons I’ve learned along the way.

This presentation is about how to offer LifterLMS website building and marketing services to grow your WordPress freelancer, agency, or consulting business.

Why Learning Management System Websites Are A High Value Niche To Focus On

Why learning management system websites? If you’ve ever seen a dog right before it’s about time to eat, you have their attention, you have their focus. That’s what happened to me in my WordPress journey. Once I really focused on course creation, basically the WordPress plus LMS niche, everything changed for me. It was much easier to get clients, I raised my prices, I could charge more, I could do value based pricing. It was easier to explain to people when I was networking what I do and who I help. Everything just got so much easier. I started getting calls. I even wrote a blog post about LifterLMS and affiliate marketing, and someone called me, talked to me about it, and then flew me to New York City to help them optimize the affiliate program for their WordPress LMS website and some of their other marketing stuff. And that’s just from writing one blog post.

So the main thing about why a learning management system website, why this type of membership site where it’s mostly training or coaching focused, or some people just call it online course websites, is so powerful: if you focus on it, if you have the skills, everything can get a lot easier. You can make more money, and it’s easier for people to understand what you do. It’s also easier for people like me, who have a WordPress LMS product company, to support you and send you leads, which we’re going to talk about at the end. So I’d encourage you to stay to the end so we can get into some of that.

The Gap Between What Clients Think They Are Buying And What They Actually Need

The big idea I want to go over with you today is about clients. I spent, I’m trying to think how many years it was, five, six, seven years working with WordPress clients, people who wanted a website. Whenever I would deliver a website there were all these deliverables, a scope of work of what’s going to be in it, what we’re going to do. And inevitably there’s this gap between what the client thinks they’re going to get and what they actually get. They hired you to just kind of build something, but the reality is they also need a bunch of advice, because they may not know all the rabbit holes and pitfalls they can run into, or they might not have the right words to describe what they need. You help them with that. You might understand, just by seeing other people’s successful projects, some pieces they should be thinking about that they aren’t.

So at the end of the day, if we’re focusing on learning websites, the reality is that client, who is a human being, what they really want, what’s behind the website, is they want a result. Yes, they want a website, but that’s not really what they’re buying.

Why Clients Really Buy A Result Not Just A Website

If a client is an expert who wants an online course, a training based membership site, or an online coaching program, that’s what they want, and the result is not just to take their program and digitize it and turn it into a scalable offering online. They also need leads coming to that, and on the back end, once they have successful students, those students need to be sharing word of mouth about how awesome the experience was and the results they got.

So when you really focus on results, on what you’re selling and what you can offer, and you think bigger than one company, like I build websites with Elementor, or I build websites with LifterLMS, or on the marketing side, I do SEO, or I do YouTube video marketing, this unbundling or fractionalizing of the stack is very confusing to somebody who’s trying to get a result and is constantly trying all these different tools but doesn’t know how to put the puzzle together in the most efficient, cost effective way. This is the big opportunity.

The 325 Billion Dollar E-Learning Opportunity Set To Arrive By 2025

I was just doing some statistics research, and I remember a while ago this number was like 200 billion or something like that, but by 2025, so just over five years from this live call right now, the e-learning industry is set to be a 325 billion dollar industry. That’s massive. That doesn’t mean all of those people are going to be doing WordPress LMS websites, but a portion of them are. This is a growing industry showing no signs of slowing down. Now, part of the reason LifterLMS is successful has nothing to do with, well, there’s lots of reasons LifterLMS is successful, but one of them is that we’re in a growing industry. A rising tide raises all boats, if you’ve ever heard that expression, I’m sure you have.

So if I was going to pick a focus for what kind of WordPress websites to build, do I want to do e-commerce sites with WooCommerce, or LMS websites, or real estate agent websites, or restaurant websites? I’m just saying, looking at the data, that online education is showing no signs of slowing down.

Why Online Education Kept Growing Through The 2008 Recession

If we go to the next picture and look at the bubble here, the last big market correction that happened in the global economy, in 2008, led by the subprime mortgage crisis, when that popped and things went down, you know what didn’t go down? E-learning. That industry continued to boom. That’s where some of the online schools really started to grow in popularity, for people who were trying to reskill and retool and get new jobs, get certifications, get distance master’s and bachelor’s and specialized skill programs. So even during the last bubble pop or market correction, it didn’t slow down.

Why An Economic Downturn Could Send More People Into Online Learning

I can only imagine, if I was to guess, in the next downturn in the economy, which some argue is any day now, that people will flood to the internet looking to reskill, to retool, to find new jobs and the new skills they’ll need for those jobs. And on the other side of that equation, besides those looking for work, is the creative opportunity. I’d encourage people to think about: if I were to lose my job in a downturn, do you think having the skill of running a global internet business, one that isn’t tied to your local economy, where you specialize in something like LMS websites, might be a good way to have some diversity in your income mix?

I don’t know when the next bubble’s going to pop. There’s the student loan bubble issue too, so there’s a lot of conversation now around the value of college or certain degree programs, and some people are opting to get skills more in a just in time scenario instead of a just in case scenario, through online education, right as they need it. Or they’re approaching employers directly and saying, I want to work for you, what skills do I need to get hired, and kind of self styling, creating their own employability by assembling skills from a diversified source through online learning. There’s a lot going on, and we’re seeing a lot of change and other options coming into the education space.

Why Building A WordPress LMS Website Has Never Been Easier

Another reason why now is a great time to specialize in offering WordPress LMS website building and marketing related growth services: it’s honestly never been easier. Things like LifterLMS took what used to be seven different plugins to do all this stuff and consolidated it into one system. Yes, you still need a few other tools, which we’ll get into in a little bit, but it’s never been easier for a non-developer to create a super high value website.

I want to note one of the things I like to say about the power of focus. When you build a learning management system website, it’s different from, say, a restaurant website, where the website is just a brochure for a brick and mortar business. There’s a lot of opportunity in that in most towns, but that service is only so valuable. When the website becomes the business, it becomes a lot more valuable. I’ll get into some of the numbers behind that in a little bit.

Chris Badgett’s Journey From WordPress Blogger To Real Estate Website Builder

I’m Chris Badgett. If you don’t know me, I’m from LifterLMS, I’m the co-founder, I’m the CEO, and I’m also a course creator. My journey started publishing Udemy courses and getting into the online course space in the organic gardening and permaculture niche. I started blogging in 2007 or 2008 about outdoor leadership, topics that are near and dear to my heart. That’s how this all began for me. I went to YouTube to get training on how to build a WordPress website, because I guess people like me, with no technical skills, a guy coming out of Alaska, could actually publish a website without getting into the weeds with a bunch of technical developer tools. I picked it up, and I’m still on that train, learning how to use WordPress as a regular user, not necessarily as a developer, which is one of the reasons I have this slide about there’s never been a better time, because the technology is no longer really the hurdle.

I started building websites for clients, actually in the real estate niche for a while. I sold my first website for either $200 or $500, I can’t remember. I built a lot of websites for myself for free, to generate leads for different real estate stuff I was involved in, and other people started approaching me. I did websites for auto body shops, restaurants, mold mitigation businesses, psychics, some yoga stuff, some medical and health stuff. I had websites for everything. So when I say the power of focus changed everything, it really did. In the early days I could only get up to somewhere around $30 an hour for I’ll build you anything you want, and that’s what I did. I would take anything that came at me, and I usually capped out at $1,000 to $2,000 a website. This was also before page builders were a big thing, so the complexity of the design was limited. I reached the limit of what I could do, so I started bringing on developers and designers to help me fulfill the work I was promising to my clients.

How Badgett Media Merged Into LifterLMS

After that, I merged my company with another company called codeBOX. I was Badgett Media, and there was this other company, codeBOX, we were collaborating together, and eventually it made sense to merge our companies. We focused again on the WordPress LMS membership site niche, and we started doing higher end work: $10,000, $30,000, $220,000 projects, we did some $770,000 projects, and we even had clients that paid us over six figures throughout the life of the client. All of that came from focusing on the WordPress LMS niche.

I want to add that LifterLMS, the product, we’re all about the people and the community. We were doing high end work, you have to deliver a really good product, it’s not just selling the same thing for more money. We would sometimes build custom software that sat on top of WordPress to do different things, really high end design work. We’d integrate some of the best plugins out there, but we also had to write a lot of our own code to make the website do what it needed to do. It was through all that experience that it became obvious people wanted a lot more than was possible with a hosted LMS like Udemy, or some of the ones that started popping up around this time, like Teachable and Thinkific. They wanted the power, the ownership, the flexibility, the extendability, they wanted to be in the WordPress ecosystem, and there just wasn’t a good all in one solution out there. So we built it, and that’s where LifterLMS was born. I’ve had a front row seat through this whole journey, and I wanted to share what I’m sharing with you today because there’s a big opportunity, and what took me so many years to figure out doesn’t need to take that long anymore.

The Minimum Tool Stack For A WordPress LMS Website Building Service

So what’s the minimum stack? If you’re going to offer a website building service for an expert, a leader, a mentor, a coach of some kind, what’s the absolute minimum? Let’s go back to simplicity, because WordPress is really powerful by itself, LifterLMS is really powerful with its core plugin and the ecosystem of plugins around it. If we’re going to offer services around marketing and lead generation, we don’t want to just regurgitate things we’ve heard marketing gurus say on the internet and implement that. We want to instrument the website so we can actually tell, with data, how much traffic we’re getting, where our traffic sources are, and what’s converting. That’s really easy to do with Google Analytics, and to integrate Google Analytics very easily you just add a tool called MonsterInsights, which has built in LifterLMS tracking.

So with these four tools you could start this service. Now I’m assuming we also have web hosting and WordPress installed, and we probably have a CRM like MailChimp, ConvertKit, or ActiveCampaign also operating, but really it doesn’t need to be any more complicated than what you’re seeing right here. There have been some great leaders in the space who’ve developed LifterLMS services and then developed products that add additional value to a LifterLMS powered website, so you can keep going in the value chain of serving that same customer who’s trying to deliver effective training and lead online.

The More Advanced Tool Stack For Marketing And Lead Generation

So what’s a more complex or advanced stack? This is where I see a lot of people get in the weeds. If you spend some time in the trenches and get familiar with the different tools, you can start merging other tools into your offer that help people create the course, deliver the course online, get leads, close the leads into sales, and have happy customers who got results on the other end, and who refer word of mouth. It can become more advanced than this, we can do more stuff, but here’s the cautionary tale I want to talk to you about: don’t get so focused on the tools. The tools don’t matter. I wouldn’t say I’m a Beaver Builder developer, I’m an Elementor developer, I’m an expert at WP Fusion, or even I’m an expert at LifterLMS.

Your elevator pitch has to be about, I help course creators create, sell, and deliver their training programs, and also get leads into their system so they’re successful from an enrollment and a financial perspective. The tools you use for the jobs to be done are not as important as identifying who you’re helping, explaining clearly what you do, and having data in place, like with Google Analytics, to see if what you sold and promised is actually working for the customer or the client.

Using AffiliateWP To Track LifterLMS Course And Membership Sales

Some of the things that can go into building this type of service offering: AffiliateWP, which is the leading affiliate marketing tool for WordPress. They have direct LifterLMS integration inside their code, which means they’re fully capable of tracking LifterLMS course and membership sales. It’s already built into their plugin.

Using WP Fusion To Sync Your CRM With Student Progress

WP Fusion also has great LifterLMS integration, which you can use for a variety of things. The primary place this becomes useful is, let’s say you’re using a free course lead magnet, which we’ll get into in a bit, and you want to go from something like a YouTube video to a free course lead magnet to a transformational program. WP Fusion, through tagging and various things, can help keep your CRM or your email marketing tool in sync with the website in terms of what stage people are at. If I want to communicate with just people who’ve taken my free course lead magnet, how do I do that? You’d do that from your MailChimp, your ConvertKit, or your ActiveCampaign. WP Fusion is going to build the bridge to make that easy.

LifterLMS Ready WordPress Themes To Build On

Astra, a great theme in the LifterLMS ecosystem, is a free theme with some LifterLMS features, and a pro theme that delivers more advanced LifterLMS integration. OceanWP is also a theme with LifterLMS integration. ThemeIsle has a theme called Neve, a newer one on the horizon that’s actively pursuing adding a bunch of LifterLMS features based on what the community wants. It’s a rising star, keep a close eye on them.

The Divi Ecosystem And Divi Soup Child Themes For LifterLMS

There’s a lot of people doing Divi and LifterLMS sites, and in the Facebook community I’d like to give a shout out to the person who helps a lot of people there. If you haven’t joined the LifterLMS Facebook group, I’d encourage you to jump in there. If you spend more than a week in there you’ll see him helping somebody. He knows a lot about Divi as well as other themes. Divi Soup, this is Michelle Nunan’s company, has two Divi child themes built specifically for LifterLMS, one is called Emerson, the other is called Ventura. Those are some great themes if you’re in the Divi community. And really, LifterLMS works with any well coded WordPress theme, so if you have one you like, you’re going to be able to make it work.

Page Builders Worth Knowing For LifterLMS Projects

We’ve seen the rise of the page builder. There’s Beaver Builder, there’s people with a lot of focus on that tool. Elementor has exploded in popularity in the past couple of years. Then we’ve got the Divi Builder for the Divi community, which has been around for a bit. So you can take things further from the simple stack by starting to work with your favorite themes, maybe ones that work well with a page builder.

Using Course Scheduler From Aspen Grove Studios For Cohort Based Courses

Aspen Grove Studios built the Course Scheduler plugin, which adds a cohort system to LifterLMS, so you can move different groups of people through the same course. An example of why this matters: if you focus on a really specific type of customer, say some kind of expert in a niche that helps businesses improve their leadership and their team dynamics, and every eight weeks you want to send a new cohort through with a new launch, that’s what the Course Scheduler plugin is for.

Using GamiPress For Leaderboards Ranks And Points

GamiPress has developed a couple of things for LifterLMS that some types of clients want, which are leaderboards, ranks, and points. If that’s important to you, or you find yourself in a niche where a leaderboard might matter, for example a real estate company where a leaderboard for top sales agents might be important, you can gamify your platform in that way.

Why Data And Analytics Matter More Than Design

Google Analytics and MonsterInsights are on here again, because it’s really important that, despite how beautiful a site looks with Elementor or Beaver Builder or Astra, or the professional photography shoot that got done, what’s most important is what a client is really asking when they first approach you: if I hire you, will it work for me? Am I going to get more leads and sales? Am I going to have my knowledge, my experience, my secret sauce, my process and protocols, effectively translated into an online program that people finish and happily refer to their friends, word of mouth, even if they don’t say that explicitly? If you’re talking to a course creator, a coach, a mentor, a leader, an influencer, whatever you call them, that’s what they really want. They want results, not a deliverable. That is the precise result they want.

Custom Services Versus Productized Services Versus A Hybrid Model

So there are different ways to deliver that result. You can do a custom service, a productized service, or a hybrid, and I’m going to describe what that means.

A custom service is where you have a specialty in building WordPress LMS websites, you develop your stack with your collection of tools that you like to use and can get results with, and you say you help this type of expert, this type of coach, these types of mentors. You qualify the lead, talk to them, set up a discovery process where you do an audit of their existing setup or an interview process to find out exactly what their goals are, and you kind of reverse engineer and build a solution around that. That’s a discovery process, and every solution you build is not very similar, I mean they’re somewhat similar, but they’re custom, and some people may want additional things your last client didn’t want. This is the land of custom website and custom marketing services. There’s nothing wrong with that, I did that for a long time.

How To Sell A Paid Discovery Process To Custom Service Clients

My advice to you there is to figure out how to qualify your leads. You generate leads, you have lots of conversation by email, you have maybe fifteen minute calls where you’re talking to them on a phone interview, and then, this is the main part, you’re selling a paid discovery process.

One of the mistakes WordPress freelancers, agency owners, and marketing professionals make is they don’t sell the discovery process. Then your incentives start falling apart if you don’t do that, and people don’t put any skin in the game. The way you sell a discovery process is you describe what it is: we’re going to have this interview process, we’re going to audit what you have now, we’re going to look at your goals, we’re going to come up with a solution, we’re going to spec it out, we’re going to give you an estimate and a price, and identify all the deliverables, and advise you a little bit on this call or these series of calls. For us, we charged $1,000 for that, and at the end of the call you can decide whether or not you want to work with us. Everything we discovered in this process, you get to keep, so if you want to shop it around or take it to someone else, or try to figure out how to do it yourself, you can do that. And that’s what we did.

How many times did that person become a client of ours if they went through the discovery process? How many times did they go to somebody else or try to do it themselves? Never. The reason is because the discovery process was so valuable. $1,000 sounds nice, but the money, we didn’t really care about that. That’s a loss leader that just makes sure we have a high quality, serious person on the line. Once they get to the end of that, they’re ready to go, and if budget becomes an issue we can phase it out and chunk the project into smaller pieces so we start getting results. In our past, just to give you an idea, we’ve helped people do multi-million dollar launches, but it all started with a $1,000 discovery process, and then we built a relationship and delivered results, and we built in phases, because client eyes are often bigger than the budget, and we just got results and kept going. That’s how you do it.

I’ll give you a pro tip for an advanced client services person out there: if you have a difficult client and you can’t get to a fleshed out goal or set of deliverables, you can still proceed, just go hourly. That’s doable, so you don’t always have to do the fixed price, fixed scope contract, there are ways to do a hybrid of that. But a discovery process done well makes for a great client relationship for the long term.

How To Structure A Productized LifterLMS Service Package

So that’s custom services. We’ve also done productized services, which is where the client has fewer options. You put a limit on what you’re going to do, like for example you may not be building custom software on top of the marketing and LMS package, you just have your set of what you do, and they have limited options within those areas. For example, if you like using Beaver Builder and Elementor both, you give them a choice, so if they’re already used to a website with one of those tools and your package only includes the one they’re not using, you’re going to lose a customer. So maybe you give them an option there. If you’re going to set up the course for them, you could say you’ll do it up to a hundred lessons, otherwise it’s this much extra per lesson, so if they have one course with a hundred lessons or five courses with twenty lessons each, you’re putting bumpers in place to protect yourself from going upside down on the cost.

If you’re going to do a certain kind of outbound research for them, let’s say they serve massage therapists, and part of your marketing package is to identify where massage therapists hang out online, what Facebook groups, what podcasts they listen to, you can say, okay, we’re going to identify six Facebook groups you need to join and three podcasts you need to start listening to and consider sponsoring, and so on. On the marketing side you come up with bumpers on what you’re going to do. You’re going to limit the amount of custom plugins you use, so you might say we’re only using these, these, and these. So when a client comes at you and says I want to do live event tickets and I want to use the Modern Tribe events plugin, if you’re doing a productized service you could say no, we don’t do that, we actually use LifterLMS to power events, and we can implement it this way. But if I was doing a custom services business model, I might be completely fine with that, or try to steer them toward LifterLMS, but if they really want to go down an events calendar plugin, I would do that if I was open to that in a custom service.

So hopefully you’re seeing what I mean by a productized service versus a custom service. A productized service is kind of like a car, a Tesla, a Mercedes, a Subaru, whatever you like, there are just different packages, they don’t build custom cars for you in most cases. If you’re trying to wrap your head around what a productized service is, think about the luxury model, the mid-grade model, and the base model, that’s kind of like a productized service.

To give you a very specific example, when we did productized LifterLMS implementations, which we offered for a little while several years ago, we had a $2,000 package, a $5,000 package, and a $10,000 package, so that was the luxury, the medium, and the base model, and we sold at all of those price points. The higher the price point, the more bells and whistles, features, done for you elements, and packages of custom time there were. I’d like to think that if you’re going to do a pricing model for a productized service, divide it into three options, a good-better-best option, or just one option, do one of those, but pick one.

Why Marketing And The Educational Product Cannot Be Disconnected

The next thing I want to talk about is really important from a marketing mindset in terms of talking to the expert industry: what people really want, and as website building professionals it’s easy for us to ignore this, is people want help. What they want is somebody, a professional, who understands the value of marketing and the product, in this case a course or a training program or a coaching program, together. They see it as all together. So I’d encourage you, if you want to create a high value WordPress LMS plus marketing package, don’t disconnect them. They work together, they move through the process together. Sometimes you’re using a marketing tool like getting intelligence into Google Analytics, perhaps you’re using YouTube for lead generation, and your service offering includes helping the expert get their first video on YouTube, optimizing the YouTube description, correctly getting that video to point to a free course lead magnet, which we’re going to talk about in a bit, and setting it up correctly so we can attribute that a lead came through YouTube. So later, if we want to run advertising, we know this YouTube channel is effective, and that specific video was effective, instead of just guessing.

So think about the learner journey, your customer’s customer. They need to get to know, like, and trust you, the expert, get results, eventually maybe come into the LMS and become a student in the transformational program, and then come out the other side so happy that they refer other people like them. That’s the ultimate goal of a program like this. I’m encouraging you, if you’re a WordPress freelancer, agency owner, or consultant, to not just focus on the product, which is the website or the WordPress LMS website, think about your customer’s customer’s journey. Don’t disconnect it. That’s where the big value is right now, because it’s never been easier to build a website, and people need more than just a website in the expert industry to be successful. That’s one of the most important points from this presentation.

Mapping The Learner Journey From A YouTube Video To A Free Course

So how does this actually work? Let’s look at a path I’ve talked about, but I’ll go through it. If we have SEO or search engine optimized content, I’ll just put YouTube as an example of that, if your program is about helping people with, I’m just pulling something off the top of my head, a mental health thing like depression, an SEO piece of content would be helping your client figure out what type of video he could put at the very top of the flywheel or the funnel, whatever you want to call it, that’s going to begin to attract that new student. Helping somebody realize how YouTube search works, I’m just thinking of some YouTube videos I would advise my client to make, like how to know if you’re depressed. Perhaps you’ll help that client make that first video, just by using Zoom and interviewing them, and then you edit it up, you put it up on YouTube, you title it appropriately, you put the correct tags on there, and you link it to the website. That’s a very valuable service.

Once I get to the website, YouTube, with its lower friction, short videos, in a lot of cases people have a very specific problem and they want an answer, that’s what they go to YouTube for if they don’t know you yet. I wouldn’t go for the mega long, two hour, one hour content videos, like this one, if you’re watching it on YouTube. This is a webinar for people who have probably heard about me before, so I can do longer content, but I digress.

Then adding more value for free: how do you add more value for free? You create a free course or a free membership with LifterLMS, and we go from the YouTube video about how to know if you’re depressed, and then we go through a mini course, what I call a free course lead magnet.

What Makes A Strong Free Course Lead Magnet

A free course lead magnet, I like to make it a bigger commitment but still low commitment. If the answer, in most cases it depends, but if you want a specific number, a free course lead magnet should be like a five day process, something they don’t even need to go through the cycle of a full week to get some kind of incredible result for free by investing their time and energy with you. So, how to know if you’re depressed to a mini course on the depression quick fix program, that kind of doesn’t necessarily heal them and make them forever not depressed or likely to fall into depression loops, but just helps them move the needle a little more outside of the dark place. In five days, that’s my free course lead magnet. At the end of that, I’m going to talk about my transformational program.

Why The Transformational Program Is The Core Offer

A transformational program is the big course, the training based membership that has lots of courses in it, or whatever the package is, a coaching package, a community, the eight week formula, whatever it is. That’s the transformational program, and that’s what comes after the free course. By the way, I don’t recommend going further out than twelve weeks, otherwise that should be another course. If you’re going to offer private coaching, let’s say as an upsell, that would be the next phase. They might need help figuring out what a coaching program looks like, how to structure that, how to put that on the calendar, how much it should cost, what their capacity is, because one on one coaching has a limit, so you don’t want to accidentally oversell or underprice that.

The Full Funnel From Free Video To Transformational Program To Private Coaching

And then how do we intelligently design our platform so that when successful, in this case people have overcome depression, they go become brand evangelists and share from the mountaintops how awesome your program was for them getting out of something they’ve been struggling with for a long time? That’s the referral stage, how do you set that up? I have a visual graphic to help illustrate what I’m talking about. It’s really not that complicated, and you could adjust this, tweak this, do it slightly differently, but if I was going to advise a boilerplate, it would have at least one free YouTube video, maybe three, maybe your package includes three, but that points to a landing page or the website homepage, which is where they become aware of your free training program, where they can take a deeper commitment, they don’t have to spend any money, you’re going to get them more results.

If they’re really already sold and they just want to go right to the transformational program, they can go to a sales call or a webinar with you. You could use Calendly to schedule an appointment, or put the phone number on the site, or have a webinar system in place that explains the value of the high value transformational program, which costs somewhere between $200 and $2,000 as an example, and then there’s the private coaching upsell, which costs $2,000 to $20,000, that goes on top for the people who really want to go deep and get the most results. What we’re looking at here does not separate the marketing from the educational product, they’re together.

The High Value Elements Lead Generation Requires

If you want to offer a super valuable service to help the expert industry make this happen, what are the high value elements of this? Lead generation. Experts, I know because I’ve interacted with lots of them, some know a thing or two about marketing or content distribution, but a lot of them don’t. So it’s really valuable to set up a lead engine on the front end, like from YouTube, for them, because it’s sexy and easy to go right to, let’s build your course website or your membership that’s going to be worth $200 a month or whatever it is. It’s easy to skip all these other things, but you’ve got to move a little slower and take the long road to really build something truly valuable and useful. So the high value element is lead generation.

Why The Free Course Lead Magnet Removes The Biggest Buying Objection

The next thing is the free course lead magnet. It’s the oldest trick in the book, and it’s not even a trick, the reality is the best way to sell something where what you’re selling is designed to help people is to help people in advance of asking them to pay for more help. That’s what a free course lead magnet does, it gives significant results in advance of asking for money in the sale. They get to develop a deeper relationship with you, they get to test whether or not they have the attention and capacity to commit with you, because one of the reasons people don’t buy transformational programs is they worry about their own capacity and willingness and ableness to do the work. If your free course lead magnet is low friction and gets people some serious results, and it didn’t feel like they had to totally ignore their family and quit their job and all this other stuff, you’re going to remove that objection before you even ask for the sale.

Why Every Offer Needs A Conversion Mechanism

The other super high value element is the conversion mechanism. Conversion has a negative connotation, we’re talking about moving people down through a funnel or on a flywheel and converting them, but these are human beings. All a conversion event is, is the sales opportunity, that moment when you’re going shopping and you get to the cash register and you’re actually going to buy, we’re getting to the moment of purchase. Right before people buy something, and I’m not talking about the grocery store where we have a commodity that’s low priced and people don’t really think about it much, but if you’re selling a $2,000, $1,500, whatever it is, people start thinking about it, and they need help. They need help making sure it’s the right fit, they want to make sure they’re not making a big mistake and going to embarrass themselves, they want to make sure you are the right fit as the person to help them. All that happens through sales calls and webinar trainings, even face to face if you have the opportunity. There’s got to be a conversion mechanism, that’s a super high value element.

Why Private Coaching Is Often Undervalued And Underpriced

What’s the other high value element? It’s the actual transformational program. A lot of people start here when they offer LMS website building services, but while this may be the crown jewel, if you put all this other stuff in place for that expert or leader, you’re setting the project up for success in a way they didn’t even realize they needed or imagined. You’re going to come out on the other side as a hero and a guide, not as a guru who just focused on one thing.

The other thing is a lot of people, especially in the expert industry, undervalue the private coaching thing. They’ll either just include it in the transformational program and end up not making as much money as they could, or running out of time, but if you really help them develop, put some group coaching in the transformational program, but put some private coaching at a premium price out there, you help them do that, you may unlock significant revenue, I don’t know, $2,000, $10,000, $20,000, $100,000, that they didn’t even realize they could have put into the package.

If all this works, if they’re actually bringing people in from YouTube, your free course lead magnet, people are being blown away by meeting you on a call and they’re like, yep, that’s the person I want to do business with, and then the transformational program, in twelve weeks their life has changed forever in a super valuable way, and they got results even faster with even more clarity, and even bigger results with the private coaching. This is an unstoppable system.

Applying The Same Lead Magnet Thinking To Your Own Agency Services

So those are the high value elements. I want to go back to the idea of selling your service, not their service. Your service as a WordPress LMS expert, with the same thinking as what you’re offering there, in terms of a results in advance lead magnet. So you could do a free course, but there are also other kinds of lead magnets, other early ways to earn trust for free, for the expert industry, if you’re a WordPress freelancer, consultant, or agency owner.

You can learn something from, let’s say, the SEO industry, which is personally in my opinion full of a lot of snake oil, but there are good SEO consultants out there, and one of the things an SEO consultant will do is offer a free audit of your website, then tell you everything that’s broken and how your competition is winning in all these ways, and then provide you with a solution. So you could do some kind of audit for your type of person, either low cost or it doesn’t even have to be low cost, or you could provide some kind of guide, checklist, or free course that allows them to self audit, to identify their gaps. Once they have that insight, like, oh yeah, I wanted to build this $2,000 course, I didn’t even think about YouTube and getting leads, I didn’t realize a free course was the best way to convert to a paid course, I didn’t really realize I had to get on the phone with people if they were going to spend $2,000 with me, I thought they’d just buy through the website, there are all these things you can do in your results in advance lead magnet to earn that trust, to get them to that paid discovery call, or to get people looking at your productized service offering with a high willingness to buy or interest.

How To Turn Cold Outreach Into Warm Leads For Your Agency

My advice to you is don’t go straight for the service offering, think about it a little more, three or four dimensionally, through time. How can you best position, get results for experts in whatever niche? What is it, is it some kind of audit? You can even do it outbound, you can reach out to people. Let’s say you really understand an industry really well, like leading a team, or a certain type of personal trainer, you’re a gym person and you understand personal trainers who have hit the glass ceiling and are trying to get into online programming, and they have a marketing website up but haven’t really figured out how to do the online thing. You can literally find those people, you can find the Facebook groups they’re in, and you can just approach them cold off the street, show them how you can help them implement that. Give results yourself in advance, and that’s the best way for you all to get leads.

How The LifterLMS Expert Program Sends You Client Leads

I’m willing, and the LifterLMS team is willing, to help get you leads. We have something called the LifterLMS Expert Program, we’ll put a link to that in the chat. You have to apply to join it, and part of the application process is you need to prove you’ve built a LifterLMS website before, you need to have some stuff for us to look at, to see what you can do. But we send people to this page all day long. LifterLMS is a product business, we’re focusing on the software, we know our people want these services as well, so we’re trying to connect people all the time to good people, perhaps like you on this call, who could help fill the demand of the expert industry and what they’re looking for help with. Because the reality is, a lot of the most successful experts in the industry don’t do it alone. They have somebody else to help with the marketing and the website and the ActiveCampaign and the CRM and all this stuff, they need people like you, and we do not get in the way and prevent them from finding good people like you. So I’d encourage you to check out the LifterLMS Expert Program and consider applying for that.

Earning Affiliate Revenue Without Compromising Your Recommendations

We also have affiliate partner revenue potential. I would rather pay you than, let’s say, Facebook advertising or Google advertising, in my efforts to generate more exposure for LifterLMS. So if you create a service and you’re talking to those personal trainers, and you develop your package and let them know, hey, you’re going to need to go get your own LifterLMS license, here’s my affiliate link, by the way, I get a, I’m a referral partner, I do get a commission, you don’t pay any more, but that’s how that works, just so you know, full disclosure, then you’re also getting another revenue stream. You can do that with all of these: WP Fusion has an affiliate program, Elementor has an affiliate program, AffiliateWP, Astra, OceanWP, pretty much everything on here, except for Google Analytics, I believe, has an affiliate program. So it’s just another kind of revenue driver.

I would not let that influence your decision on what tools you use. It should never be about referring the best tools, not the tools where you’ll make the most money. Unfortunately, in the web hosting space, there are a lot of web hosting recommendations that are really just optimized for affiliate revenue, not for making a quality recommendation. Don’t make that mistake, that’s hurt some affiliates’ reputations, recommending things just to optimize for money. It’s just something to keep in mind.

What The Four Basic Tools In The Simple Stack Actually Are

Mark asked what were the four basic tools I mentioned. Let me share my screen and look at that again. That’s what I’m saying, don’t necessarily overcomplicate it. It’s four tools: WordPress, LifterLMS, and Google Analytics, and you can make Google Analytics easy by integrating it via the MonsterInsights plugin, because Google Analytics isn’t necessarily as easy to set up without another plugin. So that whole flow, you could build all this with a free theme like Astra, LifterLMS, WordPress, and instead of using Calendly or webinar software, you can put the phone number on the website, and all the LifterLMS tools just make it happen. That’s the free version, or the simple version, and I’d encourage you to maybe start with that.

But then there’s more advanced stuff, where, for example, if you use WooCommerce, you could use something like CartFlows to do a multi-step checkout with all the order bumps and upsells and cross sells, if you want to build a more complex version, or you’re using WooCommerce via the LifterLMS WooCommerce add-on, you could use CartFlows to deliver that. And then it’s just a question of, if you want stuff like GamiPress, if you want leaderboards and ranks and points, you can get into all that.

What A Full LifterLMS Website And Marketing Package Should Cost

The key, especially with clients, in my opinion, is your job is not to, their head’s already spinning with all this stuff, and you’re blowing their mind with this process of how it actually works, and you’re mentioning more tools they need and more things they need logins for, is less is more. Just keep that in mind. Even like this, maybe just offer one YouTube video and not even three, less is more.

There’s opportunity for recurring revenue here too. If you want to offer this whole package you put together to build this out, if I was doing this as a productized service, I’d put it at least around $10,000. If I was doing it as a custom service, I’d probably start it around $30,000 or something like that, and that’s without a lot of custom development stuff or design, that’s just using tools like Elementor, Beaver Builder, CartFlows, whatever, and making the process flow. That’s what I would charge, but you don’t want to make people’s heads spin with too many tools and too many accounts, and having trouble getting into everything with logins and passwords.

Should You Turn A Free Training Arm Into A Nonprofit

Marissa asks: she’s been providing membership sites for some clients to help pay for her own academy site, but was given advice she should make her Parentle Academy into a nonprofit so she can grow it faster with grants and continue her for-profit business, which is helping clients with membership sites using LifterLMS. That’s a great question, this goes back to this model right here. I’m a big believer in giving away as much value as you can for free, so the free YouTube videos, the free course lead magnet, is really important. If you realize your business or your career is more situated as a nonprofit organization as opposed to a for-profit private business, that’s fine. I think a lot of the most elegant and beautiful things come from giving away a ton of value for free.

Why Giving Away More Value For Free Can Grow Your Program Faster

In a very extreme example, you could develop, if I as a course creator myself could develop a ton of YouTube videos with millions of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of people in my free course, but I only need maybe 10 people in my program and a couple of private clients, and I’m happy, I’m covered, that’s all I need to make and I’m super happy. It gets really interesting when you start playing the thought experiment of giving away as much value as you can for free.

I see a lot of course creators get stuck trying to lock things down too much, scared about people sharing logins, being able to copy and paste stuff out of there, or share the downloadable resources, or the wrong person might see one of the lesson videos. But the things that really take off, you can have a huge amount of people in the free and just a few in the paid, and make no mistake about it, all the time you spend learning marketing, automation, communication, being on video, telling a story, helping people resolve some kind of issue or take advantage of some kind of opportunity, and putting all the technology tools together, is a hugely valuable skill set. Doing this kind of work for clients, it’s easy to discount our value. Some people, just because you know how to do something, and maybe it’s even easy for you or doesn’t take a lot of time, doesn’t mean it’s not super valuable to somebody else. That could be putting these types of websites and marketing and community building programs together.

Why Shared Vision With Clients Makes The Sales Process Easier

Marissa says her clients she works with are sharing their courses with Parentle Academy because she only wants to work with companies who have a similar vision, equipping parents to get more involved. Vision is a big part of it. When you develop the service, whether a custom service or a productized service, when people resonate with you on a vision level, the sales process gets a lot easier, because you’re already on the same page. When people share a common vision, a certain interest, or way of seeing the world, it’s a lot easier to do business.

So if you’re like the person running Parentle Academy, with your experience, if you help other parenting and relationship experts do good in the world, and that’s kind of your vision, or you help stay at home or work at home or homeschooling people, when you get one of those types of people on the phone and that’s what you believe in and work on, and you have other resources for it, selling becomes a lot easier. It’s not just because you have a similar identity, it’s that people like relatability, and when they see you have the same or similar interests and values, they want to do business with people like that, because they feel like they’ll be misread a lot less, and you’ll anticipate their needs better too, which is also, I mean, it’s a selfish thing for the client, but it’s in the client’s best interest.

The Wait Staff Analogy For Anticipating A Client’s Needs

That’s how you should come off. If you’ve been at a restaurant and had a really good wait staff person versus a really bad one, an amazing wait staff experience, I know this because I used to work in ecotourism, so I know what good customer service is like and what guiding is like, I’ve seen it done really well and I’ve seen it done horribly in challenging conditions. When that wait staff is anticipating your need and they’re right there, things are moving exactly when they need to move, making correct recommendations of what you might like, it’s an amazing experience, and that only happens when there’s that kind of core connection between people on a vision and values standpoint.

How LifterLMS Supports Agencies Through The Expert Program And Office Hours Mastermind

One of the things I really want to do with LifterLMS is help the people who build the websites, do the advising, make the recommendations, and help with the marketing become more successful. We can do that at LifterLMS by sending you leads through the LifterLMS Expert Program, and you can also earn money through ShareASale when you advise a client to use our product. Those are a couple of ways I can help you. And of course we’ve got the LifterLMS Office Hours Mastermind, which is part of the Infinity bundle, where we talk about building the site, building coaching programs and stuff like that, but we also talk about building LMS websites for clients. We’re here to support you if that’s what you want to do.

Why The E-Learning Industry Is A Good Bet For The Next Decade

The big opportunity is that the technology has never been easier. The rising tide lifts all boats, the e-learning industry is $325 billion in five years from now, and the indications, at least from a statistical forecasting perspective, are good that this is a good area to focus on. Education is an evergreen need in society, I don’t think it’s going anywhere. I don’t think WordPress is going anywhere either, at 30 percent adoption of the internet. I don’t know exactly how or when the next bubble is going to pop, or which part of it’s going to pop, but one thing is for sure, the world is changing more rapidly than it ever has. Just looking at something like truck driving, when all the logistics of transport gets automated with driverless freight, and truck driving is the number one job in the United States, the most popular, if that industry gets disrupted, those people are going to need to reskill. If you’re in an industry that’s not going up like the 325 billion by 2025, and it’s going the other way, it’s time to start reskilling or diversifying income through teaching what you know, or developing a service like we’re talking about here.

Why It Has Never Been Easier To Build A Website That Matters

The other big point is sometimes things happen slowly and we don’t notice it, but I remember a world where I was offering WordPress website building services, and it wasn’t so easy to get a great looking site to connect to a CRM, to make the website do what I wanted it to do, to make it look beautiful, with tools that played well together and companies that really supported you. I remember when this was a much more immature industry, and it was a lot harder. It’s never been easier. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, and it doesn’t mean just because it’s easy for you that it’s not valuable, and you should just go to charging hourly or whatever, but there’s never been a better time.