How To Apply Great Design To Your LifterLMS Site

In this complimentary training, website designer Melissa Love will show you how to plan a captivating, beautifully-designed user experience using LifterLMS. She’ll show you the WordPress tools she uses to give you unlimited design control over your membership and course and to add extra features to create an intuitive user interface that your students will love to use.

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How To Apply Great Design To Your LifterLMS Site

Great design on a LifterLMS site is not decoration, it is what keeps members engaged long enough to get a result. In this training, WordPress designer Melissa Love walks through the dashboard, onboarding, lesson layout, and tech stack behind her thriving Marketing Fix membership. She covers UX principles, Advanced Custom Fields, WP Fusion, page builder theming, and the retention levers she learned by watching real members struggle.

What You’ll Learn

• How to think about user experience and user interface for a course website that people actually finish
• The dashboard patterns that rescued Melissa’s members from onboarding overwhelm, including a getting started pathway and a need help section
• The three engagement triggers that predict whether a new member stays or churns
• How to combine LifterLMS, a page builder, Advanced Custom Fields, and shortcodes to build any lesson layout you want
• How WP Fusion and ActiveCampaign turn LifterLMS into a fully segmented, tag driven marketing system

Key Takeaways

• Design skills are learned, not innate. If your first course site looks generic, it is a starting point, not a ceiling.
• Kill the emergency before you polish anything else. Overwhelm on onboarding will churn members before design will save them.
• Say the things that make members stay in multiple channels: welcome email, welcome call, personal video, in app callouts, weekly roundup, and Facebook group. Assume nothing is read the first time.
• Use Advanced Custom Fields plus your page builder’s theme builder to add multiple videos, notes, resource sections, and FAQ blocks to a single lesson template.
• Track engagement per member with WP Fusion and reach out personally when the signals go quiet. Automation gets them in the door, human touch keeps them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why Design Matters For A LifterLMS Membership Site

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to another LifterLMS training. I am here with Melissa Love from themarketingfix.co. You can also find her at thedesignspace.co and melissalove.co.uk. Melissa is an awesome long time member of the LifterLMS community. She has been using LifterLMS for a while, she has done a lot of great work in WordPress, in the Divi community, in the photographer niche, and all kinds of stuff. She has been on our podcast, she is a case study on our site, go check all that stuff out.

Melissa Love: Thank you. I feel really honored to be here, actually. It is always lovely when you get to come and talk about one of your favorite tools with nice people, so it is brilliant.

Chris Badgett: In many ways, you complete what we do at LifterLMS. We are primarily a plugin, a functionality shop, and you bring design and the coach and expert layer. Together, something amazing comes out the other side. So I am really excited to get into it. This is going to be an interactive session, so Melissa is cool with taking questions as we go.

Melissa Love’s Journey Into Design And WordPress

Melissa Love: When Chris says I bring design to the party, what I think he means is I am the one that nags him constantly about various UI and UX features. LifterLMS is a brilliant plugin. I remember going back four or five years ago, I was in Nashville at a mastermind with some friends who were all very brilliant marketers. We were all sitting there going, what do we do to sell courses, what are you using, and I get kind of tool paralysis where I think, I cannot make a decision, what if it is the wrong one and I have to redo everything.

So I remember deciding on LifterLMS and thinking, right, I am all in for this, because I think it is an amazing community and it has the potential to do exactly what I want. It is very shortcode driven, which I will come to in a moment, and I just thought, this is a company that listens. I am not going to solely focus on design. What I have come at this from is the user experience, the learner experience, make it delightful. That does not just mean visually, it can mean little touches, personal touches which really delight people and make them feel like it is a very tailored experience.

From Graphic Design Parents To WordPress Templates

Melissa Love: My name is Melissa, my company is thedesignspace.co, which was my first company. It sells WordPress themes, mostly for small creative businesses. Lately I am moving more into course creators and online shops with marketing templates, which are a bit broader than my previous niche, which was photography.

I actually grew up with two graphic designer parents, except it was such a long time ago that graphic design was not actually a thing. My mom had an IBM Selectric with a golf ball font, and she would change the fonts and print it all out. My dad was a paste up artist. He would take mom’s type, cut it up on this board that we were never allowed to touch, stick it down on a board, and take it to the print shop. If you made a form back then, you did it with a ruler and a pen.

I got roped into the business when I was about 12 or 13. I did all the crappy proofreading and typography jobs nobody wanted to do, but it was a very good grounding in design. My mom was one of the first people in the UK to use Photoshop and QuarkXPress. Obviously I did not want to do anything my parents did, so I did anything but that for at least 10 years. I traveled the world, I was a snowboard instructor, and I said the thing I will never do is be a graphic designer working in my spare bedroom. And yet here we are.

From Custom Photography Sites To A Course Business

Melissa Love: I was a one to one custom website designer for a long time for photographers. I got a little bit burnt out. Also, the more successful you become, you put your prices up and you do not get to work with people who are just starting out, who are my favorite people to work with. So I released The Design Space, which is beautiful templates for WordPress.

Then I built a course, and that was when I first got into LifterLMS, because I realized I had these beautiful templates but people did not really know what to do with them. Once I had a load of people who built beautiful websites, they did not know how to use them to market their business. So I thought, I am going to turn my course into a membership and teach people how to market their business with digital marketing, automated marketing, building an email list, Facebook ads, social media, all that.

Because I am not busy enough at all, last year I became a co-owner of three different plugins in the WordPress space. One of them is SitePresser, which is for packaging up WordPress themes for sale, giving you a beautiful one click installer. That also includes Page Builder Cloud and Layout Cloud, which give you your own cloud storage so you can save layouts to the cloud and grab them down into any site you are working on.

Design Skills Are Learned, Not Innate

Melissa Love: If you look at your website, and especially if it has got a technical back end like a course website, it is very easy to get discouraged. I am living proof that design skills are learned, not innate. I did not grow up a precocious three year old who picked up a mouse and started designing websites. My parents drilled it into me for years and years. So if I can learn it, you can learn it. I was determined not to learn it, so you have got every chance in the world.

If you have made the decision to choose a website system like WordPress, it does come with its own special set of challenges, but the rewards are so much greater. A lot of people try and then they go, screw this, I am going to go and try Kajabi or another platform we shall not mention. WordPress five years ago was agonizing. The world of page builders has opened up design, democratized it, made it a much better drag and drop interface.

What a lot of people miss is that you can go further. They think, oh well, I can design my main pages with a page builder, but I still have to stick with the outputs that my plugins send out, the ugly WooCommerce checkouts, the output that LifterLMS puts out. We do not have to. There are some really great hacks. I want you to be reassured that anyone can do this.

Great Design Meets Great Learning Experience

Melissa Love: This session is for you if you want your LMS to look beautiful. I will not sacrifice good design for functionality, as Chris knows. I am such a bore. Every question I have ever posted in the group is about how do I make this look better, what is the way around this, can this be made to look more beautiful. If you are all about the visual, I am right there with you.

It is also for you if you want to improve your learner experience to increase engagement and retention. Believe me, this has been a I am a year and a half into a membership, and it has not all been a smooth path. I am going to tell you all my mistakes so you can avoid them, plus some little hacks which really help people get on board with you and create loyalty.

How It Starts Versus How It Actually Goes

Melissa Love: This is how it starts. When you open your course doors, you are like, come aboard everybody, I have thought it all out and it is going to be wonderful. You have this idea of how they are all going to interact with your website, and it never normally works out that way. Suddenly people start running around, jumping overboard, climbing ladders. You are like, guys, stop it, you are not meant to do that. No, you do this first. They are not listening to you, they are not following your instructions.

What it actually ends up feeling like is you are running around trying to clear a pathway and make it look like you meant it to happen that way. You are trying to ease their path and make it a great experience for them, but often it is like you are doing it behind the scenes going, oh my god, why is that broken, and why are they going there, how did they find that, that is meant to be a member only page.

I was lucky. I had a big launch. We got up to around the 350 to 400 member mark within a couple of months, and I was firefighting all of this. Things were breaking, I was changing things, people were saying, I am just overwhelmed, I am leaving. I went to hell and back in those first few months. I had email automations spamming thousands of people the wrong thing. I have made all the mistakes.

User Experience Versus User Interface, Explained Simply

Melissa Love: Before we get too deep into why I made some of the decisions I made with my site, I want to recap on some terms. I am all about the user experience. The user experience is how someone feels when they are interacting with your site. We might design people to walk around the path, but they are just going to cut straight across because it is better for them. They will do that in your course site, and in the end you have to make it easier for them.

The other part of this is the user interface, or UI. The user interface is what creates the user experience. Should the button be at the top of the page or the bottom of the page? Those kinds of decisions. For me, this is where I get frustrated, when a plugin system spits out a template layout and you are like, ah, but I just want the button to be up there. Those are the hacks I am going to walk through, how I have made the UI work for me.

One illustration. Here is UI based on what a designer thinks a classic ketchup bottle should look like. This other one is better, because it is easier to use, and that is what creates the user experience. It might be a classic design, but if you have ever tried to get ketchup out of a bottle, you know it does not end well. That is why it is important to make sure the UI is causing a better version of the UX.

Using Mouseflow And User Testing To See What Members Actually Do

Melissa Love: There are a couple of tools I use. Mouseflow is great, you pop a little bit of code in your site and you can see a live heat map of how people are moving around. I had a massive onboarding crisis where hundreds of people were saying it was too overwhelming. Considering my slogan is banish marketing overwhelm and everyone was saying they were overwhelmed, I was like, oh god, this is a disaster.

So I got Mouseflow out and I literally sat there watching people onboard. I watched where they went and I realized some incredible things. I could not believe they did that, I could not believe they did not watch that, why can they not find this. It really showed me everything that was going wrong. I knew things were broken because people were telling me, but I did not know exactly why. Mouseflow was a brilliant tool for that.

The other one is user testing. There is a site called UserTesting where real people, often retired people living in Florida so they are not always that useful and sometimes quite technologically challenged, will follow your onboarding and record a video of themselves talking about what is amazing and what is terrible. Sometimes it is great advice, sometimes not, but if you get the right person, it is brilliant. You can also put in a profile of who you would like as your tester.

A Tour Of A High Retention LifterLMS Dashboard

Melissa Love: When I first decided to have a membership site, I joined about three other memberships and I was like, how did they do that, I love that. I cherry picked features. It took me weeks to work out how I was going to create this magical dashboard experience. When you first install any kind of LMS plugin, it spits out a dashboard with just a few links and you are like, huh, that is not quite the immersive experience I was hoping it would be.

On my live dashboard, the top of the page has the member’s first name. I knew I wanted some way of personalizing the experience, randomizing the phrases at the top of the page so people felt like they were seeing something new even when there was not a lot new. I wanted this page to feel dynamic. So I have what they last watched pulled in, and I have a quote randomizer. I also add in the wins that my students have posted in the group. We have a Wednesday wins thread, and I often cherry pick a few of those. Sometimes people see their own name popping up with a quote from one of their wins.

This is dashboard version 2.0, because version 1.0 left everyone lost and overwhelmed.

Adding A Start Here Pathway And A Need Some Help Section

Melissa Love: My additions from after version 1.0 were these. The first is Need Some Help. No matter how many times you say post a question in the group, they cannot find it. Need Some Help takes them to a help area which is basically, should I be filling out a ticket? It challenges them, because you do not want to be inundated with calls and tickets. It makes it clear they can book an SOS 15 minute call, but it also says, but do you really need to, have you been through all these steps? If they have a tech problem like they cannot get access to their course, they fill out a tech support ticket. That was a big turning point in stopping everyone endlessly posting help I am stuck in the Facebook group.

The second was, when I first started, I did not have a pathway through the course for them. It was just a load of courses and they did not know where to start. So I added a Start Here pathway with the three things they should do first. This has been my biggest lifesaver. I hammer them: have you watched this, this is how to use the site, have you watched this, it is a 10 minute video which tells them what they can expect for the year ahead. I do not let them start properly or come into the Facebook group until they have watched that video and confirmed they have attended a welcome call.

The Three Engagement Triggers That Predict Retention

Melissa Love: That sounds a bit tough, but I have discovered three things. If they do not join the Facebook group, I lose them, they do not convert, they cancel their membership. If they do not ever log into the website, they will cancel it. If they do not actually start the work, or they believe it is a quick fix and do not understand it is a period of time you have to commit to, I will also lose them and they will cancel.

So all of these things I implemented after discovering that. We now have a weekly new member call. I have just got off one, it takes me 40 minutes where I get to welcome them face to face. If they do not attend the weekly new member call, we cross reference against our purchase database, and I will personally email them or send them a Bonjoro to say, hey, I have not seen you face to face yet and I really want to see you this month before it is time to renew, because I want you to smash it, get on a personal call with me if you need it, I am here. I basically stalk them for their first month to make sure they have taken some action.

In my first few months I was too busy firefighting and keeping up the workload. I did not have time to fine tune these systems until we got three to six months in. Then I thought, right, there is a bit more churn than I would like, there are people getting lost, it is time to step up again with these features.

Custom Post Types For Monthly Events, Resources, And Calendars

Melissa Love: We have a monthly event and it does not really fit into a course structure. It can be done in a random order. If the course outline had thumbnails that could be sorted, maybe we could put them in a course structure. But I actually ended up making my own custom post type for these monthly events so people can easily filter and see what is going on. I also record our monthly calls, so all of that ends up in this custom post type structure. I use a grid plugin to make it look beautiful.

I did the same thing for resources, because resources do not really fit into a course structure either. I created another custom post type called resources. Sometimes our special guests, our marketing experts, come in and we make a corresponding resource to help them do that thing quicker or better.

My other top tip is the calendar. Have a member calendar. The number of times I still get asked two or three times a week, how do I find the link for the call, when is it, oh I can not believe I missed it. So have a one click subscribe. We also send a weekly roundup on a Monday with all the links and times, and we have events in the Facebook group with all the links and times, and still people ask, and that is okay. My other top question is, will this be recorded? Even though I say it 15 times a day, I record everything. Be prepared to ask the same question a lot.

Personalization And Human Touch At Membership Scale

Melissa Love: Most people associate learning marketing with absolute misery. So when I put the brand together, I deliberately chose really sunny colors, bright colors, fun fonts. Our main brand image is a flamingo sitting in a puddle. It has been really memorable, and people say they actually enjoy signing in because it feels fun and it does not stress them out.

When members first join, I have a few custom landing pages. Instead of the normal your order page, they get sent to a welcome page. They will get their order confirmation in the email anyway. I looked at my mouse tracking and said, why are they not reading the information, people are spending like 10 seconds, 30 seconds on this. People are so excited they click off and go check their email confirmation to get their course site login, and they do not realize they are already logged in. So I had to amend the email and just accept, although it hurt me, they were not going to read that welcome page.

Within 24 hours of joining, I send them a Bonjoro, which is a video task. It is all automated, so I get a notification on my phone that this person has joined, and I go, hey person, this is Melissa making a personal message for you, I am so excited you have joined. There are a couple of key things I need to tell you. Do not forget to go to the welcome area, you are going to get an email inviting you to a call, the people who show up in the group get the most out of this, I am going to come and find you if you do not do any of these things.

A Multi Channel Onboarding That Actually Sticks

Melissa Love: You have to be reiterating. You have to decide what are the key triggers which lock them in. Facebook group, logging in and experiencing some content, welcome call. If they miss any of those three markers, we know they are in trouble. Create a high level program overview like my Getting Started section, that was a lifesaver.

We have now got a 90 day onboarding. We have emails spread out over two week periods telling them, do you know about the live events, do you know about this. If they have not logged in for 30 days, they get an email going, what is up, yeah how is it going, my robot spying system tells me you have not been logging in and I am worried about you. That keeps the nurturing going. We reach out to them if they are not engaging.

It has to be multi channel. You have to have a calendar, Facebook events or whatever you use, a roundup email. They are still going to ask you and tell you they do not have the information. Keep asking questions and keep listening. I survey them on exit if they cancel their membership. I survey them when they first start. I survey my group with random casual questions two or three times a month. I ask, can I get on a call with you and see how you are finding it. Everyone knows this in my membership, they are sick of me asking questions, but if I had not listened in the first three to six months, it was going to be a car crash.

The Essential Tech Stack Behind The Marketing Fix

Melissa Love: Here is my essential tech stack, the stuff I cannot live without. Obviously WordPress and LifterLMS. For cart, LifterLMS has an excellent cart of its own. The reason I use WooCommerce is I like to future proof for what I might do next. My scenario is, what if I want to sell another thing that is not a course in the same basket, like a t shirt or an event ticket or a download or a theme. WooCommerce lets me have a multi product basket experience. If that is not you, or your downloads are going to be part of the course, you can just create an area called bonus downloads and stick them as lessons in a course. I am planning a live event next year, so that is why I go with WooCommerce.

My desert island luxury item is WP Fusion. Before I discovered WP Fusion, my whole system was held together with sticky tape. My CRM is ActiveCampaign, my email platform, which I love with a great passion, but I could not extract all the data I needed. KPC, the email automation queen, who started out working with me in my business, said, I have found this amazing thing called WP Fusion, it sucks all the data out of your website and puts it into ActiveCampaign.

When you have those two things together, you get the ability to have micro actions. If someone completes a mini course called Launch Your Lead Magnet, it triggers a three email sequence which offers them a lead magnet template. You can do a lot of that in LifterLMS natively too. The email notification system in LifterLMS, achievements, and certificates are amazing. But because everything happens in ActiveCampaign, we track the engagement, and it is easier to make an ActiveCampaign email look beautiful. If I was not at the stage where I needed a bigger email platform, I would be using the native LifterLMS tools. I did for my first iteration of my course.

Optional Extras: CartFlows, Custom Post Types, And More

Melissa Love: For my actual website builder, I use Divi, and I am also happily using Elementor. They both work in exactly the same way when it comes to something like LifterLMS. To make a site look good, a page builder is key.

The optional extras that let me do all the bells and whistles: CartFlows. What I do not like about product based checkout systems is you have to add to cart, then go to the cart, then go to the checkout. You can construct a URL to bypass the cart and go straight to the checkout, but the free version of CartFlows gives you the fast jump to checkout, and the pro version lets you upsell and downsell before and after checkout. That is one of my hidden tools you cannot see, but I use it all the time.

For custom post types, I use the Custom Post Type UI plugin to create my library, my resource custom post type, my monthly fix, and my mastermind core. Anything in WordPress is a post type. A WooCommerce product is a post type, a blog is a post type, a lesson is a post type, so is a course. This plugin lets you create and name your own custom post types and give them their own category hierarchy.

I pair that with The Grid, I think it is by Theme One, which creates beautiful grids for those custom post types. There is a free plugin called Post Views Recently that I use for the last watched dashboard block, so members can easily pick up where they left off. There is a free plugin called Quotes Collection which powers my randomized quotes. Both took a little bit of CSS to make look really attractive, but not lots. I also use a WordPress user notes plugin, so in my lessons you can click Take Notes and it pops up a modal where students can write notes and review them from their account.

Why A Page Builder Is The Key To Custom LifterLMS Design

Melissa Love: Out of the box, LifterLMS styling is very simple. If you want to edit the native output templates, if you want to move a button to a different place or a box to a different place, you are going to need some knowledge of rearranging PHP files in your functions.php, and that is a bit daunting for most people putting together a course website. I could do it, I have the skills, but there is an easier way.

Page builders offer theming, which gives you the option to pick and mix the elements you want, because shortcodes are your friend. LifterLMS, more than many other systems, has got a bundle of shortcodes. I think you even added one at my request. I was hounding you for weeks for a shortcode for the complete lesson button. LifterLMS is very responsive to creating more shortcodes.

That combination lets you go into the theme builder in Divi, or the equivalent Theme Builder area in Elementor, and build your own lesson layout. That is how I get to lay it out however I want, without ever touching a PHP file.

Building A Custom Lesson Layout With The Theme Builder

Melissa Love: Here is what my lesson looks like on the front end. I have got a little sidebar that pulls in the featured image. I have got the mark complete button where I want it. I have my own advanced custom fields, which I will come to. I can separate those and keep them nice and tidy. And there is my little note taking widget.

In the back end, my lesson menu is actually a bit of a bunched job, just columns with little blurb modules with an icon, a piece of text, and a link. It looks a bit random because I did not want it taking up too much space on mobile. On mobile, I wanted the icons to line up horizontally, so a different version is hidden on mobile. I have two versions of the menu. This is set as a global module in Divi, which means I can drop it in one place and it updates everywhere.

In the theme builder, all I have to do is choose the advanced custom field I need. That means for any text based module, like a blurb or a text module, I can hit the dynamic content button and pull in an advanced custom field. So if I want to change the layout of all my lessons, I can do it in one place. Any notes I make, any videos I drop in, they all appear in the same theme controlled layout.

In each lesson I do not put anything in the LifterLMS lesson settings or in the post content. I use my advanced custom fields for up to six videos. All I have to do is put the Vimeo link in. Then I have fields for notes, resources, embed for FAQ, and a primary image. In the theme builder, I lay them all out with the LifterLMS shortcodes, like course outline and course progress. That combination, custom fields plus page builder plus shortcodes plus the theme builder, is magic. You can basically make your lesson however you want it to be. That is why I am so shortcode thirsty.

When To Add Advanced Custom Fields To Your Site

Chris Badgett: For those getting into Advanced Custom Fields, it took me a while for it to click. When someone wants to do something above and beyond what a LifterLMS lesson template has out of the box, when would you say, you should get that plugin?

Melissa Love: This is a really good example. I wanted a really beautiful notes field below the video, and then a separate field for downloads or resources. On some of our lessons there is an embed from an FAQ that we keep updated in Airtable. I wanted these to all be separate. I tried to do it in the block builder and it looked terrible, I could not style it nicely. Once I started doing the theming, and I already used advanced custom fields for blog posts, I thought, maybe I can make it work here.

So I like it for adding extra functionality, creating separate areas, and making it look nice. When I am actually building a lesson, it is really easy. I just open the lesson, drop in the notes, drop in the download link, and I know it is going to appear nicely formatted below the lesson exactly where I want it.

ACF picks up everything, courses, lessons, memberships. It is fully integrated with LifterLMS, because it picks up any post type. That means for your course, you could have some advanced custom fields, for your membership, you could have some advanced custom fields, and you are just going to do your own layouts in the theme area and pull in your custom fields.

Personalization And Tag Based Access With WP Fusion

Melissa Love: In the advanced tab of a Divi module, under visibility, I can require certain ActiveCampaign tags to be able to view a section. There are lots of sections in my website where if you are not logged in, you will not see any of this. It is WP Fusion that makes it happen. WP Fusion checks whether they have got the tags in ActiveCampaign, and then either hides or displays certain sections.

Through the magic of WP Fusion, I have a personalization user meta tag on the page. That is how I get their first name to pop up. Depending on what page they are on, I have a different phrase, like keep going, you are smashing it, or download something great. I change them all the time when I am feeling a bit bored with them.

Look at ActiveCampaign for one of my members. These are all the ways she has been tagged. She is an affiliate, she has bought my Smart Facebook Ads course, she has bought templates, she was a founding member, she is an annual member. I create Facebook audiences which are automatically pushed through to Facebook based on my best engaged people. The better I track the engagement, the better I can target on Facebook.

I can see her lifetime revenue, the payments she has made, the emails she has had. My WooCommerce is synced. I can see the site tracking. Yesterday she went to look at something on the support site. She logged into the affiliate area. She has been browsing some of the designs in my store. That means any time anybody hits any of these things, I can set up an automated action. So if anyone even logs into this lesson, this thing should happen. It is the ultimate in segmentation.

For me, if someone says, oh I got this email, or why can I not see this, I can just see everything. If I think, have they joined the Facebook group, I can see that at a glance. If I am worried about someone on a trial who is not going to convert, they have not joined the Facebook group, they have not logged in, I can write to them personally. Even though I have a healthy membership, I am still hustling to convert people. Putting in the hours on sales matters.

Choosing Facebook Groups Over BuddyBoss For Community

Chris Badgett: Boyd has a question about the BuddyBoss theme. It is like a Facebook on your WordPress website kind of theme and plugin combo. You chose to use a Facebook group. I am sure at some point you considered BuddyPress or BuddyBoss and then you ultimately decided on Facebook. Community is important to you. You said one of the things that activates people is joining the community and supporting each other. How do you think about community, and why did you choose to roll it on Facebook?

Melissa Love: I came from the photographer niche. Photographers are in more groups than any other type of user I know. Creative businesses tend to be lone workers at home, so we gather in groups to chat and network and not feel so alone. Everyone says, oh but all my clients are on Instagram, but we do not really mean it because we are actually busy hanging out chatting in Facebook groups. Whether you are an artist or an Etsy maker or a performer, I guarantee you are hanging out in a Facebook group.

I have a free Facebook group with about 8,000 people, and that is a big feeder for my membership. It is a natural progression for them to move from one Facebook group to the other. It might change in the future, I am not averse to it, but I am in another membership where they tried to make everyone go onto their own community app. About three people went, and it was, uh I went there and there was no one there. Nobody wants another app, everyone is already on Facebook. I do get the odd person who says I just do not do Facebook, and I say, cool, maybe just do it for this, or do not, you still get to come to calls, you still get to come to co-working.

Do You Need An Extra Plugin For Vimeo Videos

Chris Badgett: Katrina is asking about Vimeo. What was the extra plugin you needed, or what else do you need to do to get Vimeo into your site? You can just drop a link and it will display wherever you put it.

Melissa Love: Back when I first started doing this, the block builder did not have all the cool embed stuff. It needs a bit of an overhaul, we are coming up to two years since I built this. It is entirely possible I could just drop the extra lessons in without the ACF Vimeo add-on. What I would love is a video carousel with the thumbnails, so people can work through the videos with all the timestamps and intervals. I would much rather use the native LifterLMS video, but I historically have quite a few lessons with several videos. I think what I might try is dropping them as an embed straight into a Gutenberg block and see what happens.

How Melissa Got 300 Members In Her Membership Launch

Chris Badgett: You dropped in and you got 300 or so people in your launch. What were the main things that contributed to that traction?

Melissa Love: The first thing is I already had quite a big list. When we launched The Marketing Fix, I had about 15,000 people on my list.

Chris Badgett: That is not cheating. You had already been building, giving value, and giving things away.

Melissa Love: That came from building my list to about 10,000 people by selling the templates and spending a lot of money running traffic to lead magnets on Facebook. That took my list organically from about 200 to about 10,000 over three years. I then launched a course, and about 1,000 people went through it over the next couple of years. So I had a pretty good base. My Facebook group was growing, and I was pushing people onto my list all the time. I knew a percentage of those would convert.

I also had an eight week runway. That was really important. I created a series of five emails called five minute fixes. One of them was a little task on stepping into your own authority as a business owner and changing your personal Facebook banner. I gave them a Canva template to do it. It went a bit viral in the photography community. In the lead up to the launch, I must have seen 100 photographers on my friends list change their Facebook banner. They all looked very similar. I was like, what is going on, is there some kind of cult, and it was, no no, Melissa is launching The Marketing Fix. I had huge word of mouth from that little viral task. There was real FOMO going on.

I launched to a previous student cohort through a private webinar where I answered all their questions, because a sticky point was how do I say to people who bought a lifetime course thing that they still have their lifetime license, but I am going to give them an absolute cracking deal if they want to become a member as well. They all got grandfathered in at a lifetime price. That got it off to a good start. Then we did the live public launch. I spent a bit on Facebook ads to drive people to the live webinar. It just went crazy. There was something about the way it looked, bright and sunny, that hit the right note. It seemed like a simple solution. The first week we did 250 members, then the next couple of months we added about 50 members a month, and then it was March, and then there was a pandemic. I got a bit stuck.

How To Keep Iterating Without Burning Out

Chris Badgett: How do you keep iterating and improving without exploding? Sometimes it takes a hit and it can be frustrating when people are like, I cannot find this thing, and you are like, I have got to make it easier, I have got to keep improving it.

Melissa Love: You have to prioritize urgent versus important. In the early days when people were saying they were overwhelmed, they did not know how to do it, people were messaging me saying I do not know if this is for me, I thought, I have to do something radical about this right now. It does not matter that I have not finished the course over here, it does not matter that I have not got my funnel up and running or finished the onboarding. I have to fix this right now. So I dived in and started recording the welcome video, the read this, the start here, the welcome call. It stopped that problem dead in its tracks. Then I thought, oh, I can relax now, I have put these measures in place and it is working really well. Now I can double back and start testing lesson layouts and all the fine tuning.

In terms of iteration, I am always listening. We did a big challenge in October, and this is six months into the current world situation. People were saying, photography is screwed, a lot of people have not shot a wedding for two years, they are having to launch a new business, they have got a business idea, they are going to pivot. Have you got any content on that? So I wrote a whole new mini course. We did a challenge, used that to drive a lot of new members in. Just listen, listen, listen to what people need.

Also be very honest with your membership. Do not ever try to hide anything. I always say, I literally do not know the answer to that, but I am going to get an expert to come in and tell us this. Or I do not know if this pods thing is crazy, we might not work, but let us give it a whirl. Once you have that, you are going to be saying, does this work for you, what do you want to do better, how do you feel about this. It is important to know how people are feeling.

The SOS Call And Weekly Co-Working Model

Chris Badgett: You have an SOS 15 minute call thing. If you are doing a membership site or a coaching program, I think that is really cool. I see a lot of people try to automate everything and just disappear into the background as the bank account fills up, but you are saying, hey, I am here to support you, I am not going to let you fail. What is up with the 15 minute SOS call?

Melissa Love: I probably get about one a month. The reason why is I actually give them plenty of other avenues first to get one to one help. I onboard them with a welcome call. My big thing which has been a game changer is every single week on a Tuesday from one to four in the afternoon, which covers both time zones, I do co-working. Everyone shows up with their cameras on and their sound off, and we just get work done. At any time you can put your hand up and go, I am stuck, and I take them into a side room for 10 to 15 minutes and I solve their problem right there. That weekly co-working gives me a chunk of three hours every week where any member can get one to one help. I block that off in my diary. I know that is what is going to happen.

What that does is concentrate everybody’s little stuck questions into one block of time for me. We now use the final hour of co-working for pods. If I do a live event, the following week in that final hour we do a Q&A on what we learned. I have three other pods too: web designers, course creators and membership site owners, and service based businesses like photographers and copywriters. I do 10 minutes of teaching, then we talk about what is going on in the industry and who has got problems they need solving.

We also have a monthly mastermind call. If you are a stuck member, the new members welcome call is also open to you. I am effectively blocking off five hours a week serving the community, but it is time boxed. Because of all that scalable group support, the number of people who actually need a private SOS call is one a month at most.

Hosting And Backups For A Site At This Scale

Chris Badgett: What server spec or hosting do you use to make this possible? Certain things like web hosting, CRMs, page builders are like religions, people have all these different thoughts about it. What is your take on web hosting if it is going to be a membership site like this?

Melissa Love: I have to say, I actually run about 50 sites, because I sell templates. I have about 30 demo sites, my main site, my design free site, and this membership site. I am on SiteGround Cloud. Everyone is going to be like, what. I probably pay about 250 GBP a month. I do not rent an office, I do not have a shop, this is not going to break the bank, I consider that my investment. I probably spend the same again on backup systems. So my cost for hosting and backup, and being able to sleep at night, is around 500 pounds, about $700 a month. There is a cost to doing business, and the cost does increase as you scale.

Wrapping Up And Where To Go Next

Chris Badgett: That was awesome, Melissa. I love what you said at the beginning about WordPress being harder, but infinitely more powerful. If this seems a little overwhelming, because we went into some more advanced territory, this is the cool thing about WordPress: you can go further, you can customize, you can do all this theming stuff.

Melissa Love: Yeah. If you are a bit bamboozled by this, I have a free mini course at themarketingfix.co/learn. It covers WooCommerce and LifterLMS, and you can experience the back end of this site as a student. You can see how the onboarding unfolds. You get all of my Divi LifterLMS page and lesson layouts, so you can swipe them and stick them straight in your theme builder. I have two really detailed blog posts about using LifterLMS on my blog. If you have got any questions, my free group, The Design Space Lounge, is there for you.

Chris Badgett: LifterLMS does not have a native ActiveCampaign integration. Once WP Fusion rolled out their plugin for integrating LifterLMS with ActiveCampaign, that is kind of the standard people use now, and since that solution is so awesome, it is not a high priority on our list to make one ourselves.

Chris Badgett: Melissa, thanks so much for coming to us across the pond. I want to thank everybody who is on the call or watching this later for showing up and investing in your own learning, exploring what it is like to build a high value membership site like this with great user experience. I loved it. Thanks, Melissa.

Melissa Love: Thank you. I hope everybody has a great rest of your day.