Learn how to set up your online course website with LifterLMS expert and WordPress LMS freelancer Will Middleton in this episode of the LMScast podcast from LifterLMS. Will can be found at WPCourseGuide.com where he builds websites for clients and creates tutorials in the LifterLMS and WordPress spaces.
Will started working in the WordPress space at age 15 doing work with LifterLMS copywriting for this LMScast podcast and built his own LifterLMS website about how to navigate the Boy Scouts program to get to Eagle Scout. From there he started offering services to others in the LifterLMS space who needed help copying over content into their sites and doing user testing. And he eventually extended into offering site building services and tutorials on how others can do the same.
The rate Will started at when he joined the LifterLMS experts page a few years back doing copy/paste work for content on LifterLMS sites and user testing was $20/hour. He eventually extended his services to offer more full site building work, WordPress installs, consulting, live coaching, etc., and is now working at a $50/hour rate. Doing the same yourself can be a great way to get started if you have a set of skills you can offer to course creators or any audience, and you can extend your services over time to offer more complex services and grow your freelance business.
Will’s strategy for helping clients implement tools while learning them is to dive into what the tools can probably do, what their specific feature sets are, and what similar tools can do. He doesn’t over promise, and instead speculates and lets clients know he can try it out, which makes the burden of over promising a non-issue.
If you’re interested in getting started offering services in the WordPress space or for any online tech tool, take what you already know and offer that. There are some basic things such as content migrations (copying and pasting work), user testing (testing for bugs), and other offers that most anyone can do. Then from there, you can expand your services as you work with a tool if you want to dive into more photo editing or another direction, you can branch out based on what clients ask you to do.
At WPCourseGuide.com/Lifter you can pick up a 50% off deal Will has running for LMScast listeners on his LifterLMS + Elementor course which teaches you everything you need to know to integrate LifterLMS and Elementor to build highly customizable and dynamic LifterLMS websites. And after taking that course, you can even apply to offer site builds as a service on our LMS experts page once you’ve built some LifterLMS websites.
At LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett:
You’ve come to the right place if you’re a course creator looking to build more impact, income, and freedom. LMScast is the number one podcast for course creators just like you. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of the most powerful tool for building, selling, and protecting engaging online courses called LifterLMS. Enjoy the show.
Chris Badgett:
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest, Will Middleton. He’s from WPCourseGuide.com. Will’s a LifterLMS expert, he is an Elementor expert, he’s been around WordPress for a bit here, and he has a freelance business where he helps clients with LifterLMS sites. He’s also been a big part of the LifterLMS team helping out with some of the podcast production, so he’s actually listened to a lot of the episodes here. Before we go more into the many amazing talents of Will, welcome to the show, Will!
Will Middleton:
Yeah, thanks for inviting me on.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah, I’m excited to get into a conversation with you. You have lots of talents, but one of the things that is, I think, really interesting is your age. You got into working for hire, for WordPress work and other kinds of tech and media work, at age 15. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Will Middleton:
For sure, yeah. So I first got started, actually, with LifterLMS when I was 15. Chris invited me to do a test to see if I could do well with writing the copy for the LMSCast, the actual podcast we’re on now, and just kind of transcribing things and writing out the body and all that, and then from there, I learned a little bit about WordPress, built my first WordPress website, actually with LifterLMS being my introduction to WordPress, and then it has expanded out from there into Elementor and other tools.
Chris Badgett:
I think your WordPress story is really fascinating. You kind of remind me of me a little bit, in that I realized I can do all right with design. I’m not a developer, really, but I can use these tools, and especially now with page builders and whatnot, I can put together some pretty awesome stuff, and I’ve watched you go on this journey of learning WordPress, learning page builders, learning other plugins. What’s it been like, let’s say, when you first started versus now you’re a power user in three years or whatever? How has that journey been?
Will Middleton:
Yeah, I think it’s been a lot of the same type of thing when I first got started, and now it’s all about, for me, asking questions about what can I do with the tools. For example, when learning Lifter or learning any tool, really, I would just ask, “How could I reach this specific goal,” or I’d have clients ask a question like, “Can we do this?”, and I’d figure out a way to do it with LifterLMS. It’s pretty much myself asking a question and then figuring out the answer to that question, and that’s kind of been my journey, and I still do the same thing now. When learning a new tool or even when a new Lifter feature is released or a new setup is proposed, “Can I do this with Lifter?”, I’ll just kind of approach it on a question basis. “How could we have a redirect after an access plan”, or something like that, and just addressing the question, framing questions and addressing them.
Chris Badgett:
That’s cool. So where do you go to learn? Google, YouTube, or just pull up the tools and just start seeing what you can do? What’s your learning style?
Will Middleton:
It’s kind of a bit of everything. Mostly it’s pulling up the tools and seeing what I can do, and naturally, as I try and explore what I can do with Lifter and other tools, I learn about specific features of those tools, and sometimes it’s referring to something like YouTube or Google if I don’t know how to do something or I’m working with a new tool, maybe how could I change the margins on maybe … The Avada theme builder is one I’ve been working on a little bit that I don’t know too much about, so I’ll just Google something small, but figuring out how to phrase the question is a huge part of figuring out the problems, like figuring out exactly what you’re trying to do. So really, I’ll consult anywhere, but framing the question really helps figure out how to solve it for me.
Chris Badgett:
You come off to me as having a really healthy level of confidence. Where does the confidence come from, because you have to go into the unknown not knowing the answer, confidently, like, “I’ll figure it out,” or working with clients. You may be confident in your ability to solve the problem even if you can’t answer immediately on the call, “This is exactly how we’re going to build that whatever out.” Where does your confidence come from?
Will Middleton:
I guess from a young age, I’ve been in programs like 4H and Cub Scouts and in karate, some of those programs that help you kind of build that confidence, and as far as my confidence inside of WordPress and through my experts journey, I would always say things accurately. Some people will over promise when they’re talking to a client. I’ll try to take the mindset of, “I’m not sure if we can do that, but let me look into that,” or, “I think we can accomplish it this way. I’ll look into it and get back to you more.” So I don’t over promise, and that was a big thing helping me learn, is just not over promising what I can do, but just saying what I know how to do and what I think might be a solution. So that’s kind of how I can approach talking to clients confidently, even if I don’t know if what they’re talking about can be done.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. I love that. You’re not over promising or over committing, but you’re like, “I can figure it out. Trust me, I’m confident in myself.” That’s cool. I’ve seen you work with clients in all kinds of different ways. Some clients just want to learn how to do something and they want a high touch help, or maybe they want you to do it once and then show them. Some people just don’t want to touch it, they don’t want to log in there. They’re just like … What are some of the different general client personalities types or operating styles that you’ve come in contact with?
Will Middleton:
Yeah. The main types of clients I’ve come into contact with have been the people who want to do it themselves, and they’re interested in me teaching them WordPress. That often comes in the form of hopping on a Zoom meeting like this and sharing screens, and I’ll talk them through things, or if they want to shoot me log-ins, I can share my screen and kind of go through things. So the people who want to hop on live and share screen and learn kind of what I’m doing, and then there’s people who want to just pass it over to me and say, “Here, can you build the website and then manage it for me?”, or sometimes people will want me to build a website and then teach them how to use it. So all my clients have had different kinds of levels of engagement in what they’re looking for, but it has been a lot of hopping on Zoom and teaching people how to do things and kind of walking through, and that’s kind of when I started doing tutorials like that. Doing the live help with people helped me figure out what to address when doing tutorials and things like that for you too.
Chris Badgett:
How would you describe your perfect client? If somebody is listening to this or watching this on YouTube, what’s a really good fit for you in terms of what are they up to, what are they trying to accomplish?
Will Middleton:
For sure. Yeah, I can help all sorts of people, but I think the client I’m really figuring out that I work well with is people who do want to learn to do it themselves and setting up one hour meetings and are interested in learning different tools like Lifter, Elementor and navigating through WordPress. So my ideal client at the moment is people who want to learn WordPress or learn more about a specific tool and just want to hop on live on a call with me and either have me walk through it or talk them through it.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. Well, before we get into the website tools, you’re also a prolific video maker and have doven into YouTube, which is awesome. I’m kind of a hobby YouTubist myself, YouTuber, and I think we’ve both done, at some point, a 30 day daily video challenge or something. Definitely making video, editing video, publishing video, marketing video, these are all very important skill sets, I believe, going forward. What’s your relationship with YouTube and video making? How’s that evolving for you?
Will Middleton:
Yeah. So when I first got started making videos … I’ve made videos in school and whatnot for school projects, so I generally understood video editing tools, and then a couple of years back, I built a Boy Scouts course, and so I got a little more course video experience there, but that was sort of diving into teaching people things in the tutorial space, but I think in 2018, I think it was January 2018, I did … It was sometime back. I did one video on how to use LifterLMS with Elementor, just how to answer the integration, because I was seeing that question all the time. It’s a very simple thing. You just go into the Elementor settings and enable for … You can use Elementor on courses, but I did that one video and I got a lot of views on that, so that kind of formed my philosophy for videos, of forming tutorials around questions people are asking.
Will Middleton:
Then one year, I think it was 2019, my new year’s resolution was to make a video a day for as long as I could, and so I was able to do it for three and a half months, and then I kind of ran out of burning questions to answer. So that was my saga, and I built up my whole YouTube channel that way, and then have been doing the occasional video on how to do various things.
Chris Badgett:
I’m a big fan of video, and if you can do daily video, especially a tutorial where you’re just cracking open a website or doing your thing, what you do every day anyways, it just happens to be recorded and there’s an imaginary person around that you’re teaching. What tips do you have for just doing daily video and not making a big deal out of it and just getting it done and having fun and not over complicating it?
Will Middleton:
Yeah. So what I did with my streak of making videos was I wouldn’t always record one video a day. I would just make a list, and these videos were about two to five minute tutorials, so they’re nothing too big. Just how to answer this one question and/or change this one setting. So the easiest thing to do is to set one day a week aside, or just one day whenever you have time and make as many videos as you can and produce those, and then throughout the week, you just publish one a day, even though you recorded all of them maybe once a week. So you recorded seven in one day, and then just publish them out that way.
Chris Badgett:
That’s a good tool. I believe they call that batch processing.
Will Middleton:
Yes.
Chris Badgett:
That’s a good pro tip. Well, let’s talk about the tools. If you’re going to build a site with Lifter and you’re going to use a page builder, what’s your go-to essential plugins and just tech stack?
Will Middleton:
Yeah, so my tech stack with LifterLMS is the Astra Theme, Astra Pro and Elementor, and then there’s all sorts of tools you can use from there, but Elementor is my go to page builder, and that question comes up a lot, “What’s the best page builder?”, and there’s not really one best page builder. It’s just whatever one works for you. I like to compare it to car brands. There’s not necessarily the best one, even though everyone has their own opinion on what’s the best. It’s really just about what works for you, and so what I find works for me and most of my clients is Astra, Elementor and Lifter. The trifecta there works pretty well together.
Will Middleton:
But if you’re super new to WordPress and are not interested in diving into a page builder where you can customize everything and you want to keep it a little more simple, the WordPress editor, just out of the box, can create beautiful websites. I know you’ve been creating a lot of demo sites with just the WordPress editor and Astra, and those sites can look pretty great. So you don’t always need to go with a page builder, but Elementor and Astra are my go-to stack.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome, and you have a page on your website, there’s a link on your menu, this is over at wpcourseguide.com, free how to video. You’ve got a YouTube video, it’s an epic video, I call it, I think it’s four hours where you go from zero to hero of a website with no steps skipped, and it’s more of a fancy website with a lot of tools and functionality. It’s still no custom coding or anything, just using off the shelf tools, configuring to have a really advanced website. Tell us about Lifter Elements. That’s part of what’s in that video tutorial. What does Lifter Elements add to Lifter plus Elementor?
Will Middleton:
Yeah. Lifter Elements allows you to integrate LifterLMS and Elementor in a pretty neat way, where you can take the LifterLMS default content and put it in Elementor. So you can style things up like you can in Elementor with the LifterLMS pieces. You can, with just LifterLMS, without Lifter Elements, you can enable Elementor on each individual lesson and customize each lesson individually, but that takes a lot of time, especially if you have a lot of lessons, and then if you want to change something later, you have to go through each lesson and make the change in every one of your lessons. What Lifter Elements really does well is it lets you use templates on lessons. So you only have to make the change in one place and it will affect all of your lessons. It’s kind of like using Elementor to make styling that all of your lessons follow.
Chris Badgett:
Can you describe in a little more detail what templating is if somebody is not really aware of it? What are some more examples and how does it work?
Will Middleton:
Yeah. So when you create a page in WordPress normally, it’s just one page you’re working on. With Elementor, you’re just styling that one page, you put an image here and it’s going to affect only the one page, but what a template is is it’s something that will affect all of that type of thing. So for example, a blog post, it would affect all blog posts. If you created a template that said, take the title for the blog post and put it here, style it with a 20 pixel font and this specific font style, and all of your blog posts will follow that template, and you could say, take the featured image for the blog post and put it under the title, And all of the blog posts will take that instruction and follow that style guide, and the same would work for lessons. So take the lesson title and put it here, take the lesson video, put it here, and the lesson content goes here. That way you can just fill out the fields on the back end of WordPress, and it makes it super easy to just automatically pull in that information if you’re using a template.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. Well, Will’s at wpcourseguide.com, and he’s got something special for you over at wpcourseguide.com/lifter. What’s over there for the people?
Will Middleton:
Yeah, so I’ve built a course, and that’ll be live by the time this episode goes live. It’s a $99 course on how to use LifterLMS, Elementor and Lifter Elements, and a few other tools to build a website from scratch. We cover the whole process step by step, and there’s also templates included with that. If you just want to take my templates and skip right to the end, you can just download the templates, upload them to your website and you will be done, or if you want to follow along with the course and build it out yourself and learn each of the pieces, you can do that as well.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. Thanks for putting that together. Go ahead.
Will Middleton:
At the wpcourseguide.com/lifter, you’ll get a 50% off deal for LMSCast listeners for 50% off that course there, but it’s normally [inaudible 00:15:59].
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. Well, thanks for that. If somebody’s considering becoming a LifterLMS expert, at what point … You felt comfortable hanging your shingle and taking on some client work. What do you think needs to happen for somebody to be ready? I see some people kind of go too early, and I see some people wait way too late, and there’s all these people they could help if they just were open to it. What do you think needs to be in place before you can really serve a client well?
Will Middleton:
I don’t think there’s that much that needs to be in place before you can serve a client well. You just need to know what you can do and what you’re willing to do. When I first got started, I didn’t know a whole lot about Lifter. I built one course website, I knew how to build courses and some of the general settings, but I didn’t know a lot of details about it, and that’s where I was really framing things up as, “I’m not sure if we can do that.” When I’m talking to a client live, I’d say, “I’m not sure if we can do that, but I’ll note it down, figure out how we can do that, what tools we would need to create that setup, and I’ll get back to you.” Just kind of being honest about where you’re at and what you know will really help you frame what you can offer clients, and I first got started doing the copywriting work. It wasn’t even WordPress work, but it had to do with WordPress, and that’s how I learned.
Will Middleton:
So if you’re not fully comfortable teaching people WordPress yet, maybe you could offer quality assurance testing or user experience testing, so you go through their program and you can kind of teach whatever you know, and as I learned, I was teaching as I was learning. That’s how I got started with Lifter experts.
Chris Badgett:
How about getting started with a YouTube channel? What advice do you have? YouTube is one of my favorite recommendations for especially an expert in whatever niche to start building an audience and giving away some value for free, practice being on camera and everything else. What tips do you have if somebody is going to start their first YouTube channel?
Will Middleton:
Yeah, I would say there’s many things people can get hung up on with creating a YouTube channel. One of the things is the quality of your content if you’re a little bit anxious about the quality, or like, “I don’t know if this is good enough. It’s not as good as this other YouTuber who’s been doing it for years.” For me, it’s about the quality of the results you deliver rather than the quality of your production. The quality of the production is going to be much less important than the results you give people. So I would get started with just answering people’s questions. If you’re spending time on Facebook or wherever you are, wherever you work, if there’s a question you see asked a lot, you can create a YouTube video about how to solve that problem or answer the question, and that’s kind of how I would get started, is just creating videos answering questions, and then seeing how people respond to it from there.
Chris Badgett:
Once you get a little more advanced in YouTube, just for a more advanced user, they start getting into thumbnail art, and you hear these things like the thumbnail, which is the little picture that’s on the video, and you press play and then it starts that picture, apparently is really important for getting clicks or getting people interested in your video. What advice do you have for people who want to level up their game with thumbnails? If you don’t do anything, it’ll just pick the beginning, middle or end frame from your video. I saw you having fun with thumbnails, so tell us what you did.
Will Middleton:
So I use Google PowerPoint as a photo editing tool. So what I would do is I would put together the elements in PowerPoint and then take a screenshot, and that would be like my thumbnail. So you don’t have to know how to use very advanced tools in order to make pretty great looking thumbnails. What I would do is generally take inspiration from what the people who do really well on YouTube are doing, where your recommendation was having faces in the thumbnail, so I went to this free online tool that lets you cut out pictures, and I would cut out a few different pictures of myself and I would drag those into my backgrounds, and then just take the Google presentation text and write out the title of my video or write out a shortened version of the title of my video, and then just colors and kind of have fun with it. Kind of going off of what the successful people do is what I am kind of working with.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. If you pay attention to your own behavior when you’re on YouTube, you can see what draws your eye and what you want to click on. You can kind of model that. Podcasting is another great way for course creators to get influence, practice teaching and connect with other people in their industry and surface ideas, add value to their community. You’ve helped with this podcast, LMSCast, you help with the post production and writing the blog posts that comes with it. Tell us about that. If somebody is thinking about getting into a podcast … Let’s say they’ve gotten over it, they can record it, but they’re a little worried about all the other stuff that happens. Creating the post for the podcast, what do you do? What’s your process?
Will Middleton:
Yeah. My process is I receive the transcript from Rev, Lifter has it transcribed through Rev and then I receive the transcripts, and then we’ll read through the transcript, highlight important parts, and then take those and turn that into the body and just kind of summarize what the episode’s about, and if you’re first getting started with a podcast, you can always just work with the video. The most important step is to get started, and if focusing on getting the whole body and building out everything perfectly and getting perfect SEO is holding you back, I would just publish the video. You can always come back later and add the text to it, but if that’s something that’s really holding you back, I would just go ahead with the video, but then adding the individual pieces from there, like just adding the transcript, I think Rev is a dollar a minute, and if you can just get your episode transcribed and you add the transcript to your posts, that’s going to add a lot of SEO for your blog post. Then just adding pieces individually from there.
Will Middleton:
With the LMSCast at this point, there’s the transcript on each post, there’s the blog post, the body, the summary, and then the meta description is something I write as well for SEO. If you’re using Yoast SEO, that’s a popular WordPress tool for SEO, you just paste in your meta description, and that’s what will appear in search results for Google right under your link. Then I also do an iTunes summary. The LMSCast is also published on iTunes, so there’s a different summary than the blog post that goes up there. Then a few tweets, I write out that tweet to go out about the LMSCast episode, and then the social sharing summary, which goes on a few social posts. So that’s a lot to the stack, and I’m sure Lifter has evolved that over time, but if you’re just getting started, writing a summary of your episode with the most important pieces and the transcript is huge for your SEO.
Chris Badgett:
What are some of the things just in handling all this information, like hundreds of episodes, what are some either a-ha moments that you’ve seen as a course creator yourself that you’ve gleaned from one of the episodes, and also recurring trends you see come up over and over again that must be pretty important from the guests and what they’re saying?
Will Middleton:
Yeah. Yeah. I’ve kind of been reflecting some of that in what I’ve been saying, because that was a big part of my learning experience. Just writing the copy for the LMSCast has helped me with a lot, but it’s a great resource, and some of the most popular things that come up is just publish content and get out there. That is probably one of the largest themes. A lot of course creators get hung up at various points along the way, and sometimes it’s right at the finish line where they have their course published, but then they don’t know how to do the marketing for it. Just getting out there and talking to people and putting your content in front of people and getting feedback as fast as possible is one of the largest tips, that … Most recurring things I’ve seen.
Chris Badgett:
What’s one of your favorite episodes? So somebody is listening to this right now, and there’s only a few people that know the episodes as well as you and I do, and I know we have some fans listening and watching who may know as well, but what are some other standout episodes that you really enjoyed?
Will Middleton:
Yeah. Let me think about that. Sometimes there are some episodes that just really, really stand out with a whole lot of tips in there. I think Nick Osborn had a pretty good episode with a lot of tips in there around marketing and writing copy for your course program.
Chris Badgett:
Yeah. Nick Osborne, conversational copywriting is kind of his thing, and he had a great episode.
Will Middleton:
What I do is I’ll glean the tips from them. In some episodes, we’ll just have one killer tip that’s totally worth the value of the episode, worth the price of admission, and then …
Chris Badgett:
Do you remember the one that was like, how to do X without Y, whatever that was? Was that from Nick or was that somebody else?
Will Middleton:
I think that was from somebody else.
Chris Badgett:
Regardless of who it was, what was the statement? It was a titling or copywriting thing. What was it?
Will Middleton:
Yeah. It was about how to frame your ads for Facebook and how to make a simple sentence that’s a great-
Chris Badgett:
It might’ve been Justin Wise.
Will Middleton:
Yeah, I think it was Justin. It was … Oh yeah, I can’t remember exactly. It’s how to do X without Y so you can Z. Three variables, you had them arranged. I forgot the episode, but that was a great tip, and I think Tom Wiebelt might’ve had a pretty great episode too, but yeah, there’s a few of them that are just super tip packed, but then there are those ones that just have one killer tip and it’s totally made a great episode based on talking about that one tip.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. Will, tell us more about … Once you get really proficient, one of the things I think you can help people with is the first time they build their site, it may take a long time, but then once you get good at it, you can get pretty fast. What’s some advice you have for people who are building sites with LifterLMS, Elementor, to help them speed up and not get in the weeds. Where do you see people get stuck the most?
Will Middleton:
Yeah. I see people get stuck the most when they dive into a lot of tools. Maybe they have installed multiple tools in their website that they don’t know how to use. So if you were to install Elementor and you’ve never worked with WordPress before, that might not be the best place to start. If you first learned WordPress and kind of understand how pages and posts work and how WordPress displays information, and then you might get into a page builder where you begin to understand that a page builder can overwrite the content on this page and split it in a more stylized way with more options.
Chris Badgett:
I think that’s a great point. I just want to park on it a second. If somebody is going to go launch their first course, first WordPress, first Lifter site, I think my advice, and I think you would agree, is go ahead and launch it with WordPress and Lifter. You can always make a fancy sales page with a page builder later. It’s better to go to market and start and start getting students enrolled. I like to say a launch is a process, not an event. So yes, you’ve launched it the first time, but done is better than perfect in a lot of cases.
Will Middleton:
Oh yeah, for sure. Done is definitely better than perfect, and unless you’re following along with a tutorial, even if you watch the four hour video on YouTube or the course I have at WP Course Guide there, you still kind of are going to want to review that content again and go through it and then kind of go through it and make sure you understand it, but you’re still, to some degree, getting hung up on the tech. If you can make your course program work with just WordPress out of the box, then done is definitely better than perfect, and getting students in there taking your program, you can always optimize later. I think that’s a great point.
Chris Badgett:
What are some of the advanced tools for the power user out there? Are there any other Elementor add-ons or other plugins that are more advanced, but you like, in your case? Y.
Will Middleton:
Yeah. Typically with the Elementor add-on packs, there’s ultimate add-ons, essential add-ons, happy add-ons, all sorts of information to overwhelm you, but what most people will be looking for is that there’s one piece in Elementor that they want. In Elementor, it’s broken down into widgets, so you can drag a text widget or an audio widget, and these add-on packs come with more different types of widgets, like dynamic audio might have more style options for your audio player. Things like that. It mostly comes out of a pain point is what I recommend for add-ons. If there’s something you’re personally finding missing in Elementor and you can find an add-on pack that has that feature, then I would recommend going for that add-on pack, but I would definitely not recommend just buying all of them and throwing them on the site, because that’ll often lead to overwhelm.
Chris Badgett:
What’s your approach to designing before you have content? Do you stick Lorem Ipsum text in there, or if you’re going to do a site, do you try to get the content first, or you’re just constantly going back and forth a little bit of design, a little bit of content? How do you approach the challenge of content and design?
Will Middleton:
Yeah. I’ll typically work with clients who are trying to model a specific type of program. Maybe they have a specific website they like, or they’re doing a migration from a different LMS. Then I can kind of form the pages, and they’ll go in there and change up the content or send me the content to change it up for them. So typically, I’ll recommend finding a website you like, and we’ll model your website after that, or if you find two websites you like, we can kind of merge the two design types together, and that allows my clients to really figure out what they’re looking for and put their content in ahead of time. In their mind, they can kind of change out, “What do I want to do here?”, and I’ll model after that website, and then we can tweak it from there.
Chris Badgett:
For the clients you’ve worked with that have last [inaudible 00:31:03] hosted at LMS, like Kajabi or Thinkific or Teachable or something like that, what brings them to WordPress? What do they want, and what do you help them get to over on the WordPress side?
Will Middleton:
Yeah. The biggest thing I help them get to is … The people who are doing migrations are mostly already validated, and this is a point brought up in the LMSCast a lot, that it’s great to validate on a hosted LMS, and then switch over to a self-hosted LMS like Lifter, and for the switchers, they’re mostly already validated, so they’re looking for more freedom, and that would be no profit sharing, since as the self-hosted LMS owner, they own all their content and 100% of the profits in most cases, and then they’re also looking for a little bit of design, but mostly it’s for the bottom line, mostly it’s for the cutting out the middleman of the hosted LMS, but then there is also design perks, as you can totally customize anything with a page builder.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. So if people are going to go watch your four hour video, what can you tell us? Take us on a tour? If somebody’s thinking about getting on the train, what can they expect to get out of that video which is over on wpcourseguide.com, and then look for the free how-to video?
Will Middleton:
Yeah, so that four hour video was something that you had asked me to put together and see if we can make it happen, like an epic video using all the tools we can kind of jam into one site, in one video there. So if you’re interested in checking that out, what you can look for is, from a blank WordPress install to a customized Elementor website using WooCommerce and CartFlows and kind of all the tools. I would definitely recommend checking it out on YouTube, and in the video description there, we have timestamps, so you can actually skip around if you know LifterLMS and you know WooCommerce, but you don’t know CartFlows, there’s a CartFlows section, so you can just skip to the CartFlow section and see how I integrate those, but if you’re interested in learning about WordPress and really diving deep into the tech, just sitting back and watching the video is something you can do as well, and seeing how it all comes together.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome, and also, go check out wpcourseguide.com/lifter. Will’s got a training course over there showing you how to do what he does in Elementor, and he’s got a discount for you available, so go check that out. How else can the good people of the internet connect with you, Will?
Will Middleton:
I think wpcourseguide.com is the best way. I’m also on YouTube, and if you’re in the LifterLMS space, you’ll probably see me pop up somewhere in a Facebook group or in Mastermind. So just wpcourseguide.com, and if you have any questions for me, feel free to get in touch via the contact form there.
Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. Yeah. So go check out that website, definitely subscribe to Will’s YouTube channel. It’s called WP Course Guide, and it’s just a good channel just to be in the loop, cause Will’s always pumping out … He’s got a lot of good videos around Elementor, around LifterLMS, around WordPress, and you do a lot of … Most of what Will does is not episodic moving length. It’s short, it’s problem focused. So subscribe, and if you see a problem come across that he’s solving and like, “Oh, I always wondered how to do that!”, that’s what I love about your YouTube channel, and it’s really helpful, especially for course creators.
Chris Badgett:
So, Will, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for all the work you do in the LifterLMS community, and all the educational content you’ve put out there as well. We really appreciate it. Yeah, head on over to wpcourseguide.com/lifter.
Chris Badgett:
That’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I hope you enjoyed the show. This show was brought to you by LifterLMS, the number one tool for creating, selling, and protecting engaging online courses to help you get more revenue, freedom, and impact in your life. Head on over to lifterlms.com and get the best gear for your course creator journey. Let’s build the most engaging, results-getting courses on the internet.
