How to Deliver Online Learning to Over 500,000 Students with WordPress

In this episode of LMScast, Melissa Love shares her experience with her new WordPress project and discusses how to deliver online learning to thousands of students using WordPress.

Melissa shares that Cole is a friend of hers and an accomplished marketer who gave her helpful advice on how to start online courses. Due to a missed opportunity to mentor photographers, Cole had previously sold his company but then acquired it back. To help with the site makeover and migration, Melissa’s agency was engaged.

Untangling and cleaning up the current site, stripping it down to remove pointless plugins and code, and protecting any custom coding that had already been done were issues they faced throughout the conversion. They choose the Kadence theme in order to guarantee a quick and efficient website and they use LifterLMS.

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. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of L M S Cast. I’m joined by a special return guest, one of my favorite LifterLMS users. Her name is Melissa Love. She’s been around LifterLMS since almost the beginning, if not the beginning. She was. I think she created the very first child theme for Divi.

She’s a course creator. She is a coach. She’s an expert in membership, she’s a designer. She’s a theme builder. She does it all. Welcome back on the show, Melissa. 

Melissa Love: Oh, thank you. I feel tired just listening to that a lot.

Chris Badgett: You have a lot. You have a very special set of skills. You do a lot of things around WordPress and design and online business.

I wanted to bring you on to talk about one of your recent projects, Cole’s classroom. Yeah. It caught my attention when you said there was 500,000 plus users on here you also, you came from the photography niche, so this is a photography education site. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about the story of that website and what you did for the client?

Melissa Love: Yeah, so Cole is a friend of mine going way back, we probably met eight or nine years ago. And he was one of the first people who taught me something about marketing. I was just about to launch my first course, I didn’t know what I was gonna build it with. I had like two people on my mailing list, one of.

Was one of those was me with a test dress. The other one was my mom. Like, it was terrible. And I went to this marketing conference and I felt, you know, you know how they say you should never be the smartest person in the room. I literally couldn’t understand what anyone was talking about. They’re talking about lead magnets and funnels.

I was like, oh. What am I gonna do? And all, and everyone was mentioning all this different stuff for, I use this for my courses and I use that and I use this for my funnels. I was just like, this is just impossible. And he gave me, he was well into his membership journey and he already owned Cole’s classroom.

It was really successful and I was pretty intimidated at the time. And he said, look, you can, you’ve got this, you can do this. Just, you know, firstly, don’t go away and build this massive course without testing the minimum viable product. In fact, you should start selling it before you build it. At the time I was like, Oh, I’ve already built and designed this massive course in my head, but yet I haven’t done any research.

So he was the one who said to you must go and survey your audience and see if. They want this thing, you can’t just don’t build a massive course without checking if people actually are gonna buy it. So I remember getting some really good advice and I thought one day maybe I will be able to have my own course like Kohl does.

 So he has been on a journey with that. He sold his business to. Somebody, another company in the photography industry, and recently he had the option to buy it back. And he just found he’d really missed coaching all those photographers. So yeah, so we kind of hooked up and I agreed to, you know, we love building membership sites.

It’s one of our, one of our strong points as an agency. So yeah, and we’d never worked together in that capacity with me as the designer and him as the client. So we had, you know, he’s been a dream to work with. We had a great. We had a great time together and he was really open to us kind of introducing features that we know worked really well within the course experience.

And we used a few nifty little things as well for conditional content depending on what kind of journey people are taking through the site. So, you know, it is great working with someone cause I’m a marketer too, is. He approached the whole project with his marketing head on. So he wanted to know if he could split test pages, you know, how we can manage upsells and downsells and trials, and how could we show conditional content depending on what what part of the blog they were in.

Like, you know, that they should get a different offer if they’re reading this article versus that article. So it was, it had lots and lots of challenging things, which I really enjoyed. But also we just knew he would like the tools we were using. We knew he’d, like, he was, he already had. Part of the tech stack in place.

He was using Active Campaign. He’d heard of WP Fusion. He was open to moving away from a competitor to LifterLMS. So once we’d agreed that he was open to using the tech stack that we loved to work with, it was great. 

Chris Badgett: What was what’s some of the challenges of a migration like that and how’d you deal with them if they’re, you know, you’re upgrading the site?

Yeah. What challenges did you face? 

Melissa Love: Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I was so lucky that actually all of their transactions take place in Stripe and then they are passed due to active campaign via Zaia and given, and the access is given via tags. And in this by WP Fusion. So for us, actually, it was not as complex as it could have been.

It meant we could duplicate the site to staging. I was terrified of affecting the SEO in any way whatsoever. Cause they get huge traffic from their blog. So that was good. We could just, we then just stripped it out. I mean, he hadn’t meant, he hadn’t had control of that site for several years, so there was like a gazillion plugins that weren’t being used and lots of old code lying around in various different kind of, Child theme.

So it was a real case of stripping it back to lean and kind of lean and means. So we knew it was gonna be fast and you know, we chose cadence accordingly. We wanted, he wanted a really fast sight. And so yeah, so it was a kind of one of those things like a do no harm type situation. Let’s. Be super careful, but also let’s get rid of, you know, cut this back to the bone and make sure everything that’s in there should be there and deserves a place there.

So we, and we also had the added challenge of probably. Just when he first came back a year ago, he’d had some custom coding done that we needed to preserve. So yeah, it was, so the first issue of the day was a massive untangling and cleanup operation before we then brought in what we wanted to bring in, like the lifter and all that kind of stuff.

Chris Badgett: Any other advice for somebody doing a migration like that, like lessons learned or things to think about or ways to make the actual go live day easier? 

Melissa Love: Yes. I think what we didn’t do was he won’t mind me telling you this. When we went live, I decided to rely on syncing all the user roles and all the tags back it from Active Campaign into the WordPress installation via WP Fusion.

 And what that did was make the site over. So my big takeaway from this would be sync everything to the. Development site, then strip out what you don’t want, then just push it to live. So we, yeah, and we, even if, even as we ran that synchronization, we ran it asynchronously, we ran the web hook asynchronously.

I’m sorry if that’s a bit technical. If you listen this thinking what the hell’s, that basically means it doesn’t overload your system, it just keeps running the script and it pushes us through at a time. So in theory, Site’s not meant to fall over and, but with half a million people it, yes, it did. Even running it through the async.

So and then it took several, it, I could tell, I could see how slowly they were ticking in. I thought, that’s gonna take the, like it going down. I thought that’s gonna take like a week to sync up. So we just had to scrap it, put the old site, live back, live again, take it back into staging, do the sync and start again.

So, you know, you live and you learn with something like that. I just didn’t foresee how. How memory heavy, how much memory that would use. So it kept kind of maxing out their server. Even though I’d double check the capacity. And you know, it’s one of those things, you know, it’s one of those situations where everyone’s going, it’s not us posting company.

It’s not us. There’s loads of memory. I’m like, well, it’s not us. There’s only this many co active contacts and. We got there in the end. But, you know I think it’s a real, I mean, I’ve built hundreds, maybe a thousand websites and I’m always nervous about a migration and literally nothing ever goes wrong.

And I’m like, God, why did you worry about it until it’s for this reason? For one day you’ll get the site, which, you know, isn’t where it’s not as smooth going live. But you know, of course no one would’ve known that from what they saw on the front end. Only we know the stresses of that kind of size of project going live.

Chris Badgett: Why did you choose to switch it over to LifterLMS? 

Melissa Love: I, well he, it was more of the client really wanted to get away from their previous plugin and he just said, I hate it and I want it gone. So I didn’t really dive into the Wise and where Force, and he’s well, what should we use?

And I’m like, well, he’s, he had, he didn’t know about the, he was kind of, Mentioning the name of a competitor and I just said, no, actually this is what I know really well if you want. And I did. I said as well it’s light. It’s easy to customize the way we want to with css. I know how to make it, do what I want it to do.

And I showed him my site, the backend of our membership and he was like, I want that. And I was like, well, if you want that, I can do that. That’s, we can use lift. So. 

Chris Badgett: Nice. Can you tell us a little bit about the business model of a site like this? You said they got have a lot of seo. It’s Kohl’s classroom.com.

They have a lot of SEO from just organic blog content. But like what kind of platform is it? Is it multi instructor? What’s the offer? What are people buying? 

Melissa Love: It’s actually quite simple that although if you go to Kohl’s classroom.com and you click on under photo training and free tutorials, that’s effectively.

Their blog, so it needed to be really easily searchable. And they drive, you know there’s hundreds and hundreds of articles on there which pull in the traffic. So in terms of inbound marketing, their blog is really important. They have, and if you go to that site as well, you’ll see there at the top menu, there’s something that says free resources.

And if you look at that, it brings up a huge grid of all their different freebies. And they run, I believe they run them through ClickFunnels, actually. I think they, those go out to ClickFunnel signups. 

Chris Badgett: So there’s like a page of a bunch of resources, but essentially it’s like there’s like nine lead magnets here or something.

There’s a lot. 

Melissa Love: Yeah, and I think they just build up over time. And, you know, the other fun thing is if you were to go into that blog, that photo training free tutorials area, and you click on a you click on a blog post, you’ll see in the left hand side recommended for you. And depending on which category you’re in you’ll be given a different recommendation.

So if you’re in lighting, you’ll be given something relevant. If you’re in photo editing, you’ll be given a different free off from the left hand side or an office to start free trial. So we used a plug for that called, if so, 

Chris Badgett: I haven’t heard of that one.

Melissa Love: If so, yeah, it’s like a conditional content you, so you can say if they visited X, Y, and Z pages in the last kind of cookie session, show sh.

Take them to this page or show them this section or show them this offer. And if you work with any kind of, so it works on a kind of page level scale. It does work with Gutenberg, it works for the block builder, and it does work with all the major page builders. You can have this. Show them this section.

If they’ve done behave like this, show them this section, if they’ve behaved like that, or if they’re in this category of the blog, bring up this sidebar with these offers. So yeah, and you can do that right on a really granular level. So those offers in the sidebar, they’re actually just widgets in the customizer area and each widget has got a different, if so, condition.

Chris Badgett: That’s very cool. And tell us about the the member courses. Is it like one membership and you get all the courses or is it a la carte or both or what? 

Melissa Love: It’s one membership, but I do believe he does sell some of them individually. But yeah, I did set it, we set it up as one membership and there’s lots of different instructors in there, but they’re not set up as instructors.

It’s just got their name on their content.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. What are the courses like? Are they like 20 lessons or more like long webinar presentations or what? Or a mix? 

Melissa Love: They’re a real mix actually. There’s some which are, have just got one video and then others, which are quite long, like the 80 set of wedding photography is a quite a big chunky course within it.

But then there’s a single course on, you know, a certain type of photo editing. I saw all different kinds of ones. 

Chris Badgett: A question for you about the photography niche. The photography niche is so massive and you know, sometimes when you get into tech or marketing or courses and stuff like that, the, or the world gets kind of small, but there’s like these mega niches out there.

I mean, I did like some affiliate marketing stuff for a photography education site a long time ago. And I went to New York to visit them and I was like, oh my God this is huge, like this photography niche. And you’ve been in it for a while. This is Cole’s classroom. Has you know, been around for a while in the niche.

Tell us, like for the course creator or the web designers looking to niche or whatever, like, tell us about this niche and working with a big niche like photography. Like how do you stand out? How do you focus and make an impact in a niche like this? 

Melissa Love: Well, do you know what Even though some niches seem quite big like photography, it’s a pretty small world.

Okay. So I can tell, you know, when I was really hard niched down in that I was going to all the same, all the conferences couple of times to the states every year. And there were, there’s two or three in the uk, which I still speak at today and go there as a speaker. So it’s a bit like the world, WordPress world.

You just keep. Bumping into the same people and everybody reads the same magazines and reads the same blogs and belongs to the same groups. So that’s the beauty of niching down. Like people are easy to find cause they stick together, they congregate, you know? And so as long as you are, you know, happy to network and leverage.

That the places where, you know, you can find people, it’s, you know it’s relatively straightforward to start to get traction in a niche. And I think I was delivering some training essay on this very subject actually. And I think what people, when they first try niche, you have to have a lot of personalized things for that meeting ready to go.

So you need to make sure that you have an offer that, you know, even just if you’re sharing links, if you are a. Web designer and you are trying to land photographers, which is what, you know, I technically am. If I just go around saying, here’s a general article on this. It doesn’t have the same powers.

Like, here’s an article I wrote for photographers about how to do X, Y, and Z with their website. People are, oh, that’s just what I need, so, Sometimes when you’re trying to get into a niche, I think people don’t go deep enough and get specific enough. So you need those extra landing pages, those case studies, those tutorials, those tools, those kind of content upgrades, which solve a specific problem for that specific person.

So I think if you try and bring your generic lead magnets and your generic ideas into a niche, it’s never enough. You have to go much deeper, put the work in, and make sure you’ve got the resources in a much more. Curated way so that people think that’s exactly what I need. Not like not, oh, I can adapt what she’s saying to my, to me as a photographer, you have to kind of go that extra mile when you’re first trying a niche to stand out and be noticed.

Chris Badgett: I was, I know you’ve known Cole for a while from Cole’s classroom.com and his. I was looking at the mission page and it’s helping photography enthusiasts and to prof become professional photographers earning a minimum of a thousand dollars a month. So basically to help people kind of start businesses, whether it’s wedding or bourgeois photography or whatever.

 Is there anything with the way you built the site or designed the site to like, Help a learner who’s trying, who has these goals and aspirations to become this type of entrepreneur, a photography entrepreneur is there any way, how does that feed into the design of the site? Or, you know, if a client has a mission to get their learners this result, is there anything you way you approach the website to help with that?

Melissa Love: Well, it’s not just specific to this site, but it’s something that we do with all of our. Membership site builds is we really big on creating an amazing custom dashboard experience. So when we talk about lift lms, we think of the dashboard that it, that is kind of set up as a short code inside a page, which kind of gives you a nice little dashboard.

We take it and elevate it a step more than that. We don’t want, we want it to feel like an experience they’re familiar with. So most people have, at standpoint, taken a course on Udemy or, and one of those big, so we go out of our way to make sure that the member navigation is really slick. So it’s got little rows of icons so they can easily flip between, say the library and the course area and the.

Member calendar or whatever other features you wanna share. We also personalize experience. We use WP Fusion and we use a short code to pull in their first name. So it’ll say, Hey, you’re smashing it today, Chris. So they’re greeted with a different message and you can also rotate those messages. You can kind of do a kind of, depending on what day it is or what page they’re on, we changed the message, but we always have their name.

And we’ve done this nifty thing now where it displays their goals. In the dashboard where they can’t really avoid them. So they can update their goals for the form at any point. And the form is mapped through into active campaign. The goals that they’ve submitted then appear on their dashboard by using the short code, by pulling in that data back into the site so they can keep on top of their goals.

And we also set up the and automations for the client, which. Reminds them of their goals every month and offers them a chance to opt out of being notified about their goals. We embedded the widgets so they can see what they last watched. I know in Kohl’s custom dashboard, he’s also got a member of the month, which is, and I think there’s a prize associated with that.

So that’s very That’s motivating. But most importantly, all those tools he regularly talks about in the private Facebook group, like they, I don’t mind. We have member of the month. We announce it every month. So we talk about goals. We ask people to drop their goals in the threat. Same thread in the private Facebook group, that we invite them to fill out the form, which then magically appears on their dashboard.

So it’s about creating an experience that feels really kind of gently surrounding them and supporting them and not just relying on. Them remembering to log in and look at their courses. So we try and create an experience and not just, you know, a site, it should feel interactive and it should make them feel that there is something bigger going on than just the nuts and bolts of being inside the back end of a WordPress site.

Chris Badgett: Pure gold right there. Could you walk me through the technology of that, the form and the goals? Was that an active campaign form or gravity form? What was that? And then how did you get the data back on the site? 

Melissa Love: Okay, so. So our stack that we preferred stack that we use when we build these sites is we love active campaign.

Other CRMs are available of course but that for us, a tag We love active campaign cause it’s tag based and when you have tags. And we, and the other kind of partner tool is WP Fusion, which is an awesome plugin with run by an incredible team. And it gives such a deep data integration.

I’ll just give you a couple of examples of what it can do. Any custom field or any user field from your crm, from Active Campaign, you can then pull through and display with a short code anywhere in WordPress using WP Fusion so we can pull through the goals that they’ve submitted by with an active campaign form or gravity form or fluent form.

It doesn’t really matter as long as your form can. Be mapped through interactive campaign, you’re golden and you can pull all that data through. You can set up things like if somebody completes a certain lesson, you can, that can trigger an automation, which sends them an offer. If you’ve got something to sell, which specific relates to the part of a course or lesson they’ve just completed.

So you know that. And I can also see what pages they’ve been visiting in mine in my active campaign. It tracks what’s the last thing they watched? You can also gamify with it. So we have used I’m gonna forget the name now, gamer Press to to create these lovely badges and these levels that they can work through.

And that’s all sitting there in active campaign, which is anything that’s sitting in your crm. If you have that deep data integration with something like WP Fusion, you can display it on the front end of their dashboard. And that’s why it’s really fun so they can really visually see their progress.

 And so, so as long as you can get an interactive campaign, you can get it back out again and display it on the front end just using a short code, and that’s really cool. Then you get to make these really immersive, fun experiences for learners. 

Chris Badgett: How do you, as a designer design that experience? Is this start, is this like a piece of paper or is like a, or you just kind of have a vision in your mind?

I mean, I know it’s a lot of art, it’s a lot of science. Like how does that. How does one craft a compelling learning experience? 

Melissa Love: Well, I’ve gotta give a shout out actually to Kelly and Mike from the membership guys, who I’m sure you know if you’re thinking of starting a membership, you should join their membership.

 They’re the membership that teach you how to run a membership, and I first met them at their retain conference probably a few months before I started my own membership and. It was being inside their dashboard where I thought, this is good. You know, they, I, they had the icons across the top and you, it felt like you were flipping between tabs.

And I really liked that and I thought, how can I replicate that myself? But I also had some things which I wish I’d had to hand. Like I really wanted the member calendar. I really wanted the thing that I’d last watched so you could just easily pick up where you last moved. And then it evolved. We didn’t have the goals thing to start with.

But once I worked out how to do it we now have, we also have their badges that they’ve earned now on the dashboard so they can see how far they’ve got through the roadmap. So I think it was just things that I’ve appreciated as I’ve. Taken and bought an enormous number of courses, which I may or may not have finished or bought and never opened.

But we’re all guilty of that. I think they’re just things over time where I thought that’s cool. That’d be really useful. I wish I had this. 

Chris Badgett: We get a lot of questions actually about the, that roadmap concept. Can you explain that and explain how you built it? The version that you 

Melissa Love: use.

I’ve gotta be honest, mine isn’t a true roadmap where things move along it. I built a I built just a structure in terms of graphic design with couple of borders that kind of look. It looks like a nice snaking roadmap. Effectively. I used I used the timeline. It’s, I think it, there’s an extension for Game Repress, which generates a timeline based on the tracks of LifterLMS.

It’s something like that. And I divided my roadmap into four tracks. Then I made them look like they were connected just using Borders and Red Border radiuses to make it look like a nice winding track and the bad the game repress badges are displayed. And then the. Mini courses are listed below.

It’s just imagine it as a winding roadmap, but it’s a kind of a little bit of a fake one. Like there is someone who teaches how to build proper roadmaps with like, animated little boats or cars or something. That’s what I really want. So I’ve kind of got like a fakey faked up version of it and everyone loves it.

They can see how to, they can even click through to the courses that are on the roadmap. But I’ve got to admit I’m when I’ve got time to do this, I’m gonna go and hire those guys and get them to build me a proper 

Chris Badgett: one. That’s one of those things, it sounds like simple, but it’s not like to make it really good.

It’s, and even what you have, I’m sure is really good. It’s a lot of work. What keeps you going, Melissa? Like you’ve been in WordPress and learning membership sites, online business for a long time. You’ve worked with a lot of clients. Continue to improve in your own education? Yeah. What a, as a seasoned WordPress professional and education entrepreneur, like, what, where does all, where does that spark come from?

Melissa Love: Gosh, that’s a good I think we’ve talked about this before on a previous episode. I think my spark comes from the people I’m. What the audience I’m trying to serve. So my, in my kind of 32nd version of my journey is that I was building websites just for clients and I kind of got into the photography niche and, you know, I got busy and I, I had a very, I was very lucky.

I got very lucky. I had a couple of. Connections with people who really recommended me. And so I’d al always had a waiting list. And I’d put my prices up and still there were people on my waiting list. I realized that actually it got to a point where kind of people who were just starting their journey were saying, yeah, I’ll pay you 5,000 pounds to build my site.

I was like, you know, you’re just starting. You should, shouldn’t not, no, I can’t take your money. This isn’t right. Nobody should just spend five grand on the first website they ever have. So I decided to make themes and you know, then people said the themes are lovely, but I wish I knew how to use WordPress.

I was like, oh, I need to do a course. And then, you know, people were like, Hey, I’ve built my amazing site with your course and your themes, but I don’t know how to do marketing. I was like, go, I need to start a membership. So I think, you know, just listening to what people are asking for, really listening to what their pain points are.

Just always points me in the next direction, really. So that’s the next step. And you know, so I’m always thinking I know what people are asking for. So I’ve normally got some little idea ticking away based on what’s the next iteration of things that are gonna help people. 

Chris Badgett: I was interviewing a woman named Pua a couple days ago, and she was saying that she started out doing some training inside corporations.

Yeah, and the people didn’t want to, they didn’t really want to be there. It was like training they had to do. And then when she started working with other entrepreneurs who wanted to be there, like it’s a totally different experience. It, so I kind of picking a similar thread there, like when you’re helping and hanging out with other entrepreneurs, there’s a lot of energy and buzz and goals and dreams happening.

It’s a fun place to be. 

Melissa Love: Well, you know you know, it is, and I’ve often picked your brains about things and asked you how you know, people who you’ve, who you are hanging out with and you’ve interviewed friends of mine. And, you know, it becomes, you know I find marketing endlessly fascinating, you know, so, and I think it’s that blend of doing something practical.

I’m also a bit of a nerd, like, I like the techie side of WordPress. I’m not a developer in the sense that I can create plugins or, you know, write a ton of. PHP or JavaScript from scratch. But I’m a pretty good code editor. I’m like a self-taught, you know, I can turn my hand to all of things, but I do like that kind of seeing how far I can push something.

For me, it’s like a really satisfying puzzle to. Work out how to do something. So I think being in the WordPress world and training people in that and the coaching world, it kind of straddles the two and lets you help people in lots of different ways. And I find that really motivating. And I get to hang out with my marketing friends and we get my digital marketing friends and kind of nerd out about that stuff too.

Go to conferences together and. I love all that 

Chris Badgett: Marketing. I’m a nerd like you. So, so much of it is timeless, but it does change and evolve over time. What, is there any kind of new trends or I. Things that you’re seeing espe particularly relevant to somebody running an agency who’s trying to get clients or a course creator trying to get students.

Is there a new trend or anything that’s maybe not working as well? Or what do you see out in the space? 

Melissa Love: Do you know what, I see a lot of people trying to skip the basics. And for me that is, that sometimes. But I was saying to, to some, to a group yesterday when we were on a kind of conference call in my membership when we were doing a coaching session and I said, imagine there was no internet.

How would you go and find your next five clients? And everyone said, well, I’d. Probably go down into town and I’d go and knock on some doors and take a brochure. I said, I, what do you think would happen if you did that tomorrow? And they said, I think I’d get some new clients genuinely, you know, that kind of old school shoe leather marketing approach works on so many levels.

And I think sometimes I do think the Internet’s, you know, not a great thing. Cause it makes us lazy. We like, oh, I’ll just pop up a website, do some seo. Yeah, pay for some ads. It’s gonna be easy. But actually the old ways. And I know this cause I talk to lots of other marketers who are, who run similar businesses and I dunno about you, but I spend at least a day and a half, two days a week reaching out to people, being on podcasts, pitching things, looking for connections, asking for introductions, getting in front of other people’s audiences.

Those are just the new ways of doing the old fashion stuff, which is boring other people’s audiences. Trying to leverage the connections you have. And I, so if anything, I think it’s worth just checking that you haven’t missed some kind of old school tricks. And then that, and also that you, if you are doing things like you’ve got a lead magnet, you’re growing your list, just, you know, really auditing that and making sure it’s sharp, that it’s to the point that it’s, you know, just the basics, I guess is what, it’s very easy to get your head turned with the la like the latest shiny new app or this clever trick or, you know, obsess over split testing your email.

Headlines when actually the difference is very normally very marginal. And meanwhile you could have been, yeah, and also it’s a numbers game, so I think people get very discouraged. They’ll send out five emails and I’m like, guys, listen, I send 5,000 a year to people. I don’t know who looking for, you know, that connection or asking people to introduce me to X, y, and Z person, or, you know, going to online summits or going to inline, you know, speaking at conferences.

It’s hard work, so I, and I think you sometimes see gurus popping up and it seems like they’ve achieved this overnight and it’s never the case. They’ve always done their time on the various circuits speaking and promoting and becoming more and more visible. 

Chris Badgett: That’s Melissa Love. We were talking about one of her projects called Kohls classroom.com.

You can go check that out. Melissa’s at the design space.co. Tell us what’s there and what you’re up to and how people can connect with you. Yeah. So, and get into your world, 

Melissa Love: of course. So if you if you head over to our site, you’ll see we primarily sell WordPress themes for all the major page builders.

And specifically we do have three themes just for Lyft or lms. Cause we love it so much. So if you are struggling with your building the membership site, you can install ours with one click and you’ll have a working membership site. Straight outta the box. And they’re pretty as well. We like to think they’re well designed.

And then once you’ve built your site, you can join our membership, which is a marketing membership called The Marketing Fix, where we can show you how to use it once you’ve built it and you can nerd out with us. And all the other members about all things marketing. We have a lot of people who are, we have a lot of web designers who have a lot of photographers.

We have an opera singer, we have an accountant we have somebody who dies. Makes hand natural dyed ribbons. We’ve got, it’s a very interesting membership. There’s all sorts of fun, creative people there. Yes. So that’s what we do. We help people build their own site and then we help them learn to mar market using the site.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well thanks for coming back on the show, Melissa, and thanks for doing all you do and it’s great to be with you on the journey. Always a pleasure.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. 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/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.