TL;DR – It’s Black Friday and everything is on sale!
Most software companies like Adobe and even Apple is offering some discount on their products. WordPress plugin and theme companies are following this trend as a major event every year offering the highest amount of discounts on all of their products.
We at LifterLMS have also prepared a roundup post to help you choose the best resources you can get this Black Friday.
LifterLMS Recommended List of Resources can be found here.
Our round-up of essential Black Friday Deals for Course Creators can be found here in our blog section.
In today’s podcast, Will Middleton from the LifterLMS team joined Chris Badgett to discuss what we have to offer on this Black Friday. We are focusing more on our existing users who can take a leap from the Earth Bundle to the Infinity Bundle and the 3-year plan get the best out of this sale. We are offering a 30-day money-back guarantee and our deal will be available till December 5, 2022.
Here’s Where To Go Next…
Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.
Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.
Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.
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Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch and scale, a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you, enjoy the show.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast, I’m joined by a special guest Will Middleton from the LifterLMS Team. And we want to wish you a Happy Black Friday this morning. If you’re new to the tradition, if for some reason you haven’t heard of it, the history of Black Friday is it’s the Friday after Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. And in the past, retail businesses, main street businesses would have a lot of sales during that time period. But us people of the internet started to you know, kind of latch on to that. And then we’ve kind of extended it to the weekend to Cyber Monday. But first Will, welcome back to the show.
Will Middleton: Yeah, thanks for having me. Black Friday is always a great season Black Friday, Cyber Monday to Cyber Monday like you just described Black Friday, Cyber Monday is like another extension on to the Black Friday tradition, which is deals on tech. So there’s just so Black Friday, Cyber Monday is just like a weekend where a lot of companies have sales and at LifterLMS we are doing a sale this year right, Chris? So can you let us know, you know what the deal is with LifterLMS this year and what customers can take advantage of? Yeah, so if you’re listening to this, and you want to get into LifterLMS, which is the leading learning management system for WordPress is the most powerful, customizable, secure, stable, independently owned, and operated LMS. It’s the main sponsor of the LMScast podcast. You know, we’re the same people that also make LifterLMS, that’s not completely clear. But the discount is we’ve never done one this big before, which is 30% off. So basically all you need to do is to go to LifterLMS.com put whatever you buy, and use the coupon code at checkout BlackFriday22. that’s all one word Black Friday two two. And that’s going to drop your price by 30%, which is a huge amount of savings. And you also get $2,500 worth of bonuses that we put together just to make the deal even sweeter. And that’s for new people and what they get. So check that out. If you’ve ever thought about creating an online course or training based membership site or really any kind of eLearning project for yourself, or if you’re a website-building professional for your clients, it’s a great time to pick up Lifter as well. If you’re a freelancer or agency owner, we’re here
Will Middleton: And you can put Thank you Sekander in your order notes, basically he is our marketing guy. He’s an expert. He’s been in the LMS industry for a while. And I think he’s the one who pushed us hard to do 30% this year, because I know that’s the best deal we have ever done. LifterLMS 30%. And so that’s the coupon code you can use. And I know we have some offers for existing customers, we who can leverage this Black Friday sale as well. I guess Chris, do you want to fill us in a little bit on how existing customers someone who already has a LifterLMS subscription could use this 30% offer during this Black Friday to Cyber Monday season to you know upgrade? Or what kind of benefits existing customers can get?
Chris Badgett: Yeah, our philosophy is we want something for everybody this Black Friday season. So whether you’re not bought anything from lifter, or you’re an existing customer, or you’re an affiliate marketer, or your WordPress professional, we got some for everybody. But we do have a lot of existing customers. And, you know, we never want this Black Friday to feel like it’s always just a marketing thing for them to get new customers. So you can also take advantage of the Black Friday deal as an existing customer, it’s a great time of year to upgrade. We’re seeing this year in particular, a lot of people going for our infinity bundle, which is $1200 a year full retail price with a 30% discount that comes down to I’m having to do public math here. So I may be wrong, but I think it’s around 860. Maybe well, you can correct me if that’s if I’m wrong.
Will Middleton: That’s right. 33% would be 800. So it’s about 860. Yeah,
Chris Badgett: Yeah, so but let’s say you already maybe you even just recently purchased the universe bundle which is $360. So basically you can get prorated and then take 30% off. So it’s the best time of year to upgrade and if you’re an existing customer, the license that you have has some value to it. So you just shoot us an email to help at LifterLMS.com. And we essentially make a custom coupon code for you to upgrade. The other cool thing we’ve got is, we also have the ability to go, let’s say you already have the Infinity bundle, or you have the universe bundle, or even the earth bundle, we have a three-year offer, you can take advantage of here during Black Friday, which is you get three years for the price of two. It’s like an extension. So basically, instead of paying for three years of the Infinity bundle, you can pay for just two, we’ll give you three more years tacked on to your license. And you can also take 30% Off the top of that, which brings the price way down, it’s almost to the point where you’re getting three years for the price of one, it’s not quite down there, but it’s getting pretty close. So if your business is here to stay, or your agency if you’re building these sites for clients, and you’re going to be around for a while, and you plan on using LifterLMS for a while and you want to keep your costs down and save some money, you can get one of those three-year plans. So if you’re having trouble finding it on our website, just do Google Search LifterLMS infinity bundle three years or LifterLMS universe bundle three year. We don’t promote them as hard because so as not to confuse people with too many offers and that kind of thing. But if you’re a power LifterLMS user and have a bundle, and you’d like to upgrade, it’s a great time to get that as well.
Will Middleton: Yeah, definitely I just did the math here, if you use the 30% off code on a three year infinity bundle, right three years for the price of two, it brings the price to looks like 1680. At about. So that would actually be like over 50% off. Because you know, if you get three regular years of the Infinity bundle, that’s 1200 a year 3600 total. So you’re paying 16, about 1700 bucks for three years, which is, you know, a little bit over 50% off at the end of the checkout. So that’s a really awesome offer. And the Infinity bundle, like you said, has a lot of value packed in it. It’s all the software that we offer. And it has an unlimited site license. So it’s perfect for agencies and freelancers who are building sites for others. And I know that’s a big thing in our community is people who build sites for others, not just course creators themselves. We do have a lot of course creators who are independently buying LifterLMS. But there’s a lot of agencies out there as well. And so on that topic of agencies and freelancers, I guess Chris, why do you think this time of year with Black Friday sale and everything going on is a good time for agencies to pick up LifterLMS and add it to their tech stack? Is it just because of the sale or is there anything else going on that should help agencies with adding LifterLMS to their tech stack?
Chris Badgett: Well, this is the best time of year to get LifterLMS in your toolkit as an agency and I used to run an agency for a long time before I had the product and urandom simultaneously. And if you’re an agency owner or freelancer and you’re listening to this, perhaps you are aware of like this kind of December slowdown that happens with client work because a lot of people around the world are taking vacations and stuff like that. And then in January, things start to pick up really pick up people have plans and goals and bigger companies have budgets set for the year and money to spend and agencies to hire. So this is a good time to kind of get Lifter, especially with the Infinity bundle at a great price on an unlimited license. And then you’ve got that in your toolkit for when the demand for client work really picks up in the new year when people are setting new-year goals. Companies have the budgets, you know people are have businesses they want to launch. They’re, they’re setting their, you know, 2023 goals and what they want to do. And also, we have some other videos like this on our YouTube channel where we get into the benefits of having an agency focused in the eLearning niche, but it’s a great niche. So perhaps if you run an agency and you kind of do like I used to do and many WordPress professionals do is you build sites for whoever you can find on Main Street, who’ve just random people that come into your website. When you focus on this eLearning niche. It’s kind of like the eCommerce niche. It’s a great niche to be in. These are sites you can charge more for. There are more recurring revenue opportunities through maintenance plans and continual upgrades and improvements to the site. The site itself is actually the business it’s not just a brochure for business somewhere else. So your client really values it. And it’s super and it is valuable because it’s literally the business machine that creates the value that you know creates money. and also on the other end creates value for your, for your clients and customer whoever that learner is. So yeah, a great time of year to get your tools for LifterLMS. And also join the community, we have other agencies that come to our Office Hours Mastermind call, which is part of the Infinity bundle. And it’s a great way to connect with other people who specialize in this eLearning niche and learn from each other. And, you know, just even just stand out in the LifterLMS community, it’s really a neat thing we have here where we have subject matter experts, and we have website building professionals and they’re both here together. And by participating in the LifterLMS community, which we have spent a lot of time and just care building and making it a nice, fun, safe, helpful place. It’s a great way a great place to just naturally get clients by becoming somebody with skills with LifterLMS and WooCommerce. And everything else. So yeah, it’s if you’re if you haven’t niched, your website business considered niching it to the eLearning space doesn’t mean that’s all you’ll ever do. But there’s a lot of opportunity there.
Will Middleton: Definitely. And like you said, with the Office Hours Mastermind, there’s people in all kinds of niches that are using LifterLMS there. And we talk about all kinds of tools, like OBS camera setups, just really any questions people come to the call with. It’s a completely open forum. But there’s a lot of great discussions that happen on Office Hours Mastermind, is just kind of what we call it, it’s a weekly zoom call that’s included in the Infinity bundle. That’s a really awesome resource, for sure. And with that idea of other tools in the space, I guess, are we doing a roundup blog post this year? Chris, do you know if there’s going to be I know in the past, we’ve done a roundup blog post where we feature a bunch of other community tools that are running Black Friday sales, are we going to do that again this year?
Chris Badgett: We’ll have that as well, we’ll have that. And then we’ll also if you’re kind of looking to make your shopping list. And my advice is don’t go crazy. Don’t buy things you don’t need. But if you just do a Google search for LifterLMS recommended resources, we get asked all the time to make tool recommendations for things that are kind of outside the scope of what we offer at lifter. So we’ve really put a lot of work into the LifterLMS Recommended Resources page to make a few targeted recommendations that are, you know, in a category that lots of people ask us all the time, and many of those companies will be having Black Friday sales, one of the big ones to really think about is hosting, it’s the best all the hosting companies run Black Friday sales, if you’re happy with your host or maybe you’re not and you’re thinking about switching, you know, we have a shortlist of about six hosts that we recommend. All the ones on that list are going to be running some kind of Black Friday deal. And you know, it’s a great time to switch hosts but then a lot of more niche things like form plugins. Other great tools like WP fusion which connects your LifterLMS your WooCommerce to your CRM like Active Campaign, MailChimp, ConvertKit Infusionsoft, whatever, you know, gravity view, there’s all kinds of you know, tools that are that we recommend. Document Library pro by barn2 is a great tool if you’re like, including a bunch of templates and files and stuff inside your membership site. It’d be a great time of year to pick that up. You can find all that stuff on our website, we’ll go to the LifterLMS blog, it’s just LifterLMS.com forward slash blog and look for a recent post around recommended around Black Friday deals. But then also do a Google search for LifterLMS recommended resources.
Will Middleton: Awesome. Yeah, there’s a lot of tools in the ecosystem that all work together really well to create all kinds of different client sites, you know, clients have all kinds of different requests for you know, project specifications and all that so a lot of times you know, you’d use LifterLMS and something like Gravity Forms together to you know, build exactly what a client is looking for. In most cases, a lot of clients or you know, like you say 95% happy with what LifterLMS has out of the box because it has so much functionality of memberships, courses, certificates and all that kind of stuff. For an agency that’s not using LifterLMS or freelancer, or someone who just wants to explore the tool and see maybe how they can offer client services. What do you think you’d recommend as the best way for people to start out, trying LifterLMS exploring the tool and kind of getting involved to see if they want to take advantage of the Black Friday sale?
Chris Badgett: Well, the first thing I would say is to just LifterLMS has a free plugin that’s in many ways more powerful than all the other paid solutions on the market. So try that out, just go to the WordPress repository and, and download the free LifterLMS plugin, we also have a 30-day demo site you can get which only costs $1 It’s on our site. And basically, it’s a website on our servers at LifterLMS you buy, you get a custom one, it lasts for 30 days, it has all our tools installed with a bunch of demo content sample users, you have full control over the site. So you can do whatever you want to with it, play around with it. And really see if it’s a fit. You know, if you’re an agency and you’re, you know, a client asks you to, you know, build it LMS site, you can also just get one of those, and then use it as a way to show the client what all the different things they can do. Because the thing we found with LifterLMS users is people have a lot of ideas of what they think they want to do. But once they get into the tool, and they realize like, oh, it can do all this other stuff. It’s helpful to like work with a client, to just show the tools that work out of the box, and then kind of narrow the focus to what the client actually wants to do or what’s best for their business model. But yeah, the demo site is great for that. And I also just want to mention, we have a strong, you know, 30-day 100% refund policy. So you can also just jump right in, and get the stuff. And if you’re not happy for any reason, in the next 30 days after your purchase, you can just send us an email, and we’ll go through the process and get you all your money back. So there’s really no risk.
Will Middleton: Definitely. And one interesting thing, we talked about course creators and agencies kind of being two types of people we have in our community, but we also have a lot of people who do both, like they create courses, and also offer services to other course creators, because it kind of starts with, you know, a new member in the community asking a question in the Facebook group, and then an existing member, you know, has all this LifterLMS knowledge because they built a couple of core sites, and then they kind of transition into becoming a freelancer or agency themselves. And we’ve seen that transformation happen a few times in our community. And
Chris Badgett: Other way too. I’ve seen people that do an LMS project for a client, and then they launch their course for their thing next. So it goes both ways.
Will Middleton: Yeah, yeah, that’s a super interesting thing, how that happens and goes both ways. To anybody who hasn’t ever offered LifterLMS services before they’re like a course creator. Or maybe they’re struggling to get enrollments on their site, but they learned the course tool really well. Do you have any advice for people who might want to try transitioning? Maybe they’re an agency and maybe some advice to help them create their course or maybe their course creator? And any advice you have that would help them offer some of those clients services?
Chris Badgett: Yeah, well, the first thing is to get involved in electoral illness community. The two places the two main places to do that online are the Facebook group. So lifter, LMS has a Facebook group, go find it, join it. There’s experts, you know, subject matter experts in there that are trying to teach something. And then there’s a lot of WordPress professionals or agency people in there as well. And then we have our Slack community, which is more developer focused. But the easiest way I found and as a guy who ran an agency for many years, both as a small freelancer and then up to a larger team of I think at most 17 people, the easiest way to get clients is to just get involved in a community and you know, answer questions when people get stuck, not just go into pitch mode, like hey, let me DM you and let’s start let me sell you my service like just start publicly helping people or even post a like a quick video or some pictures of a cool LMS site or thing you did with Lifter into the social media on the Facebook group. And that naturally attracts people to you. So it’s kind of like that give-before-you-take kind of mentality. And if you’re a course creator and you’re looking at becoming you know, offering services and I was talking to one the other day who is a course creator for Lifter. He’s in meditation niche like mindfulness meditation niche. Then he became a LifterLMS expert about a year ago and started offering services. He was coming to the office hours mastermind call, which means he started connecting with people and then through through just connection people started hiring him to do some stuff, you know, we have this page on our site to help, you know, kind of have a directory of people that we know that have left our experience. And then and just most recently, he became an affiliate and started making some affiliate income after so that’s there’s even another layer to that cake you can go to if you really want to go deep in the LifterLMS community, but you know, freelancing and building sites for clients is a skill. There’s some training out there on how to, you know, become a freelancer and start that kind of business. But my advice, if you’re just getting started is to keep it super simple. You know, you can, the most simple way to request an invoice from somebody is just to use a, like a PayPal invoice or use something like Fresh Books, or what was the other one that started with the H harvest? I think there’s probably others. Are you gonna say? Well, for sure,
Will Middleton: Yeah, that’s what I had done. And what I still do for some of the freelance work, is just this WooCommerce setup where I just create an order because, you know, I had a bunch of WordPress sites. Okay, great. So I just have this WooCommerce invoicing system through Stripe. So it’s, I set that all up for free, because I already had a hosting plan. Okay. That was just kind of my way of launching invoices. And I haven’t changed it in like five years. So that’s awesome. Yeah,
Chris Badgett: So getting the money is it doesn’t have to be complicated. And and then I mean, you know how to build the site, because you’ve done it for yourself. But I would ask, I would turn it over to you will, like managing a client or project managing and communication are important. What tips do you have around? community not just building like collecting money and building a great site? What’s that, that that work that goes in the middle so that everybody has an enjoyable experience and the right project gets built?
Will Middleton: Yeah, I think like you said, keeping it simple, is really important and communication. I love to hop on Zoom, and kind of figure things out on Zoom, I know a lot of people go back and forth via email, and I can have, in my business, at least making it work for me, I found that I got lost a lot in email threads, and people kind of, you know, maybe would miss an email or two, and there’d be multiple people in that email chain. So meetings are just the way I went just hourly work, I did a few project-based projects, when the customer really wanted that, or it was very clear start to finish what this project would look like. But mostly, it was just hourly work. And as I expanded my skills over time, I just increased my resume and what I could do, and as my capacity filled up, I just raised my hourly rate incrementally over time, and then kept the same formula of keeping it really simple with my billing system, keeping it simple by just doing meetings on Zoom regularly and working through a project. And just looking at the client specifications of what they’re looking for and exploring options in LifterLMS like how we could create a certain setup or what other tools like we had talked about Gravity Forms, WP fusion, you know, MailChimp a bunch of other tools in the community that can integrate with LifterLMS to create even more advanced setups than what LifterLMS can offer just by yourself out of the box. So it was really just that repeated process of keeping it simple. And, you know, answering questions and being involved in the community. And I think like you said, being involved in the community was a big thing. A lot of what made me successful as a freelancer, and a small agency at one point was making YouTube videos,
Chris Badgett: Demonstrating your knowledge, right or tutorials. Right?
Will Middleton: Exactly. It was tutorials, answering questions that people were asking in the Facebook group answering questions that clients would ask me, when I couldn’t find a resource online that answered that sort of topic in a video format, I would just make a video and publish it. And that even that turned into a marketing engine for me the content marketing. So there’s all kinds of avenues that you can go down to have success as a freelancer or agency. And I think like you said, being involved in the community, and really just helping lift up the community through any means possible. Maybe it’s a course maybe it’s offering freelance work, maybe it’s creating YouTube tutorials, there’s all kinds of ways that people can get involved and, you know, become successful and profitable in the space.
Chris Badgett: And I just want to say one of the bonuses. There’s $2,500 worth of bonuses in the lottery illness Black Friday sale. One of those is a training I created called the YouTube traffic system, which it can work for you as a freelancer or agency to get clients but it can also work if you’re a subject matter expert, and you’re like I want to make this course but I’m not really an influencer or famous or whatever. How do I start getting my first leads? We found a system that works I’m making three or four very specific YouTube videos to start getting your marketing, machine rolling and how to think about that, and what videos to make and all that. So that’s just one of the bonuses. So go check that out. Yeah, that’s a thing. And you know, it’s, it’s a busy time of year. So I think we should probably wrap it up and let you get on about your day. But just, this is a time to get LifterLMS if you do not have it yet, if you’re already a customer, it’s a great time to upgrade, regardless of which scenario you’re in. This is the best time this is the best price, you get a bunch of cool bonuses, if you can get into the Infinity bundle, this is a great time of year to do it. And also just use that energy for the new year that’s coming up to like, really push your online learning or your agency forward. You know, people set goals, I never want to make it sound like creating an online course. And making money online is easy, because it’s not as hard and takes a lot of work, you got a lot of pieces you got to put together to do a strong LMS business or to build a great agency. But this is a great time of year, especially in the world of so much remote online opportunity, whether as a service provider or as a content creator, or course creator or coach. You know, let’s make 2023 Awesome, and how about you pick up some great tools to help you at a great discount. Any final words for the people, Will?
Will Middleton: I guess I love math. And I think the and we do honor this right with the three-year infinity bundles, usually for extensions, but if someone did want to pick up a three-year for their first purchase, we can just create them we’ll still hook you up. Yeah, right. Yeah, so if you buy that three-year license at this current time of year, that brings the price to about 560 per year right if you buy the three years and you do the math, it’s about 560 bucks a year for the LifterLMS infinity bundle, which is like cheaper than a lot of our competition and it’s you know, the most premium solution in the marketplace so that’s kind of my final words there is it is the best time and..
Chris Badgett: and that I did I did the math there too at 560 That’s $1.54 a day. So it can you see yourself using that investing in your tools for what you need to do to reach your goals? All right, well, thank you for checking out this special episode of LifterLMS LMScast will be back to our regularly scheduled programming where we support you with all kinds of expert interviews to help you in your WordPress journey or as a course creator and in marketing and instructional design and all those things. So this is just a special Black Friday episode for you.
Will thanks for coming on the show. Head on over to LifterLMS.com the coupon code is Black Friday two two. All one word. Get your discount contact us help at LifterLMS.com If you’re looking to get a pro-rated upgrade or have any questions, we’re here for you have a great rest of your day.
And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS.com forward slash gift. keep learning keep taking action and I’ll see you in the next episode.
