Prefer reading? Here is a transcript covering the 3 Marketing Strategies For Your eLearning Website.
Episode Transcript
Joshua Millage: Hello everyone and welcome to the next edition of the LMScast Podcast. Today we’re talking about marketing and how in the world we could help you get your knowledge out into the world.
My name is Joshua Millage. I’m joined here with Chris Badgett. Chris, let’s just get right into it. Let’s get tactical. Where do we start spreading the knowledge that we’ve created and put into our LMS system?
Chris Badgett: You have a couple of different options there and I wanted to get into some specific strategies that you can use to grow. One is to just think about syndication. Syndicate means to get your information out through more channels, through more places so that even with a WordPress LMS website, if you’re new or you don’t have a large audience, you may want to leverage other audience as well even if you take a little financial hit.
This is something I still do to this day. When I produced the gardening course I also published it on udemy.com to give that course out to broader audience. That’s one way I pushed my course concept onto the world and looked at this other platforms and satellites around my WordPress, LMS, eLearning site is the central hub.
My ultimate goal is to get people onto my platform, but I’m more than happy to go to these other locations and engage with people and deliver LMS content over there as well.
Joshua Millage: That’s awesome. That’s really cool. I think that’s the thing is there’s always this balance between free and paid content and I think that that go into different hubs where knowledge is being shared that’s similar to yours and interacting there and sharing there and then coming back. Pulling people back into your side is a really good idea.
You talked a little bit, in the pre-interview, about taking on a publisher mindset. What do you mean exactly by publisher mindset?
Chris Badgett: A publisher mindset just means that it’s okay, this is like a mindset shift for you that you don’t have to do it all. You don’t have to be the developer, the marketer, the eLearning expert, the subject matter expert, the entrepreneur. You don’t have to do all those roles yourself.
You certainly can but you can bring in other people and in the internet marketing space, Brendon Burchard popularized this concept of you can be the role model which is like it’s me, I’m the expert, or you can be the researcher and you can connect the dots, but bring in another expert or a collection of experts to publish content, an eLearning content in this case. You can still be a leader even if you’re not the front person.
This is not a new concept. If you look at the book industry, there’s a lot of famous authors out there but they wouldn’t be here if they didn’t have a relationship with the publisher. Sure, you can growth hack that these days with self-publishing and things like that but taking out the role of the publisher, and I do this with my WordPress LMS site Organic Life Guru where my wife has a course in there so we’re the publisher and the expert but we also went and we found all over the world some of the best people in that niche to create courses with.
We would go to their workshops and film them or set up a private session where they present on a topic. We captured that content and become a publishing platform for them and work out a revenue share. What happens there, which is really interesting, is with subject matter experts they may not necessarily be as how they developed as a marketer, as an internet person, as an eLearning person.
You’re both stronger for coming together and what they often have when you connect with certain subject matter experts is they already have an audience. They’re going to spend their entire life building up this audience and then they send them to the product on your platform.
It’s a very interesting model to think like a publisher even if you’re just publishing your own content and it’s all you, I would recommend that you try to get in a habit of shifting hats. Am I a subject matter expert teacher mode here or am I thinking like a publisher? It’s kind of very different mindset.
Joshua Millage: I like that. When you think like a publisher it’s not all about you, it’s about the group and it’s about creating a community and content that benefits the group where if you’re thinking as a soloprenuer sometimes we can get egotistical and like, “It’s all mine.” That’s not always beneficial. That can leave you isolated.
When you think like a publisher, you can bring in this person over here and this person over here because we’re publishing for a specific segment of people. I really, really like that. I think that’s a very powerful mindset to adopt.
Chris, when it comes to the free and paid ratio of LMS content, what do you find is a good ratio or how do you think through what to give away as well as what to charge for?
Chris Badgett: There’s a saying in internet marketing, I think it was Eben Pagen I think that popularized the concept, but it’s called moving the free line as a way to do better marketing and get more trust upfront and also just adapt to the changing world where people just want a lot of results in advance.
The best way that I can give out that is I just check the classic 80/20. I would say make 20% your best content free and then you can lock down the other 80% if you’re in a model where you’re trying to generate income from your LMS. The way that you always wanted your introductory sales video to be wide open, you want that first intro lesson to be wide open and available and you want to take what I would say is the best one or two or three or however many that you opt to that 10, 20% threshold, then make that content for free. That does a lot of things.
That free content, now if it’s video content you can also put that on YouTube. It can go viral there. You can have it on your site. If there’s more than video and there’s text and maybe some downloadable materials with that lesson. Now opening it up, you’re building trust, you’re giving people a sneak peak and you’re also giving the search engines and opportunity to index your information because it’s not locked behind a paywall or a membership gig. There’s a lot of benefits by being very generous.
Another way to think about that is to do an entire course that’s free, let’s say the introduction, and then the advanced version is a premium course. You’re giving away an entire course for free and get people to use you to build trust and then you can sell them the more advanced version.
Joshua Millage: I like that. I like that a lot. I think we’re going to have many, many more episodes about marketing tactics and tips. I think this is just a start of a long progression, a long series of these. We want to keep it short today to give everyone enough time to go implement some of these ideas.
If you have any questions about marketing or want to ask any questions, I would love to chat. You can reach me at [email protected] or you can reach out to Chris at [email protected].
Of course we’ve got this awesome plugin coming out in the next few weeks. Chris, can you tell them a little bit about that plugin and what that’s all about.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. LifterLMS is a WordPress LMS plugin that basically gives you the tool to create a site that does an eLearning website that you can charge for or use for education based marketing or self-courses and that sort of thing. The thing that happens is we’re going to give you a powerful tool in this premium plugin to create an e-learning website, but that’s really step one. Step two is marketing it. If you’re in the ball before you even build it start thinking about the marketing strategy.
Joshua Millage: That’s awesome. On that note, get out there and get marketing and let us know how it goes. We’ll talk to you next week.
And if you’re an already successful expert, teacher or entrepreneur looking to grow, check out the LifterLMS team’s signature service called Boost. It’s a complete done for you set up service where your learning platform goes live in just 5 days.
