In this LMScast Chris Badgett of codeBOX talks about engaged Facebook groups, Divi, and LifterLMS with Eileen Lonergan from Elegant Marketplace. You’ll learn about building and running online groups, integrating LifterLMS and Divi with WordPress, and finding your niche.
Eileen has a thriving Facebook Group called the Divi Theme Users Facebook Group. She is one of the owners of the Elegant Marketplace website, and Divi is their showcase WordPress theme. Eileen and a co-owner, Andrew, came to LifterLMS when they needed to put together a video tutorial course. They were able to use it right out of the box and create the course using the default layout.
Starting with Google AdWords, Eileen became familiar with WordPress and themes. Then she discovered Divi and liked it so much she started blogging about it. From there she started the Divi Facebook Group community, which has grown to over 19,000 users in just 3 years.
Building a community for your online course gives it momentum. You can use the existing tools in Facebook, or use a WordPress add-on like BuddyPress to create your own community environment. And you can make it an open group or restrict it to members-only. The key to making your group successful is to find your niche, know it inside out, and build for it.
Eileen and Chris discuss aspects of running groups like being a moderator, setting boundaries for your time and accessibility, working with other group administrators, maintaining balance between promotion and support, and hiring members when they demonstrate expertise. They also talk about building your audience, finding your ideal students, and injecting a little bit of fun into your group experience. Plus they offer some great pro tips for course creators just starting out.
You can find out more about engaged Facebook groups, Divi, and LifterLMS with Eileen Lonergan at Elegant Marketplace.
Post comments and subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us.
Episode Transcript
Chris: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and in this episode I’m joined by Eileen Lonergan. How are you doing Eileen?
Eileen: I’m good. How are you, Chris? Thanks for having me.
Chris: Thanks, it’s good to have you on the show. Eileen has an amazing Facebook Group with over 18,000 people in it. It’s called the Divi Theme Users Facebook Group. If you don’t know what Divi is, Divi, is a WordPress theme, and we’re going to get into that. She is also one of the owners of the Elegant Marketplace website. We’ll discuss what that’s all about a little later in the show. But to start off, Eileen, how did you get into WordPress and Divi and Facebook?
Eileen: Okay. I, back in the day, got a degree in advertising, so I worked as a media buyer, which meant I was working putting ads into different magazines or buying time on television shows. Then I moved abroad for awhile. When I came back, a friend … The internet was in its infancy stage when I was away. When we came back I had a friend who had four different golf sites and was looking for somebody to help him do his Google AdWords. It was a natural fit for me. Then he decided to do something else and I took his clients. I was doing AdWords. Out of that, I really began to understand SEO. AdWords is awesome, but as we both know as soon as you stop paying for clicks, your content does a dive. The golf clients were getting priced out of the market. I started helping them with content. Then one thing led to another and I reconnected with a friend that I went to high school with who was developing a WordPress theme. He said to me, “If you ever built …” I’d built one website in Front Page. I was like, I am never, ever going this again. This is horrible.
He said to me, “If you ever make another website and you buy my theme, I’ll hold your hands through the whole thing.” I was like, “That’s so great, but I’m never, ever doing this again.” That’s how I got to WordPress. Just one thing led to another. I was really committed, and I am still to my blog. I would just casually post on Facebook, “Here’s another website.” Then I just kept getting client after client. Through that WordPress connection, my friend Don Campbell … He has a really cook product now called Get Five Stars, which is a review platform. He’s really doing that and not doing the themes. One of the guys from that group we were in called me one night and said, “I think you’d really like this Divi theme.” It was like, all right. I went and I bought it and I thought it was great and I love it. On my blog, I started posting some of the things I was figuring out. As I was figuring things out, I was also looking for a community who could answer my questions. Although I’m a big, huge fan of support and paying for it, sometimes you just want your little posse and you don’t want to wait around.
Chris: Yeah.
Eileen: I started the Dive Theme Users Group. Maybe two hours into it I realized, “Oh, my gosh. This is probably not the right name because as soon as you open up anything with WordPress, you start getting questions about WordPress. You start getting questions about hosting, learning platforms, plugins.” The focus everybody is gathering around is Divi. I think that gets people in the door.
Chris: That’s awesome. How many people are in there right now?
Eileen: I checked this morning and it’s almost 19,000.
Chris: That’s amazing. Just to plan a little context of where we can go and really look into that in more detail. For the online course creators out there, the membership site builders, the people trying to build community around a brand and build training around a certain brand, there’s this community piece that pops up. You can do that on our own platform. If you’re using WordPress you can use something like BuddyPress and build Facebook in a box type social networks, but you can also leverage the tools that are already out there, like Facebook or just other online community platforms. Now you get conflicting advice around Facebook. For example, I may not want people to leave my training site to go to Facebook because they’ll get distracted and they’ll never come back. The counter argument to that as well is if your stuff’s not good enough, people don’t want to come back, then maybe it doesn’t really matter.
I do understand the importance of protecting the focus. Really one of the things that make a Facebook group great is just a thriving community and numbers, having enough people to get that momentum. For example, if you have your own forum that nobody posts in, it’s a graveyard or it’s a dead forum. What are some of your key insights that you’ve learned over the years in helping to build this up to almost 19,000 people? How do you build community in Facebook? What are the do’s? What are the don’t’s? Let’s get into all that. Maybe we can start just by looking at the niching. You mentioned, okay, this isn’t just WordPress or web help that you share. This is for a very specific users of one product called Divi. In the niching department, what else would you add? What about niching has helped make your Facebook group successful?
Eileen: That’s a really good question. I think that finding your niche is a little bit of a wild card because you have to care about it. You can’t just say, “I’m going to have a group about plugins.” I don’t really care about plugins because you become very tied to these groups, I guess if you want them to be successful. You have to care about it and you have to use it and you have to like it. For me, with the Divi theme, I specifically … While I’ve tried a whole bunch of WordPress themes and I have licenses to them all, my philosophy has been get to know one theme really, really well, and ultimately it will make your life easier.
For me, I don’t necessarily have niche clients. I don’t just do chiropractors or dentists or authors. I need something that’s flexible enough that it can accommodate these different businesses, but I don’t want to be learning a new theme every time. The beauty of WordPress, or I think a lot of people come into it because they think, “Once I know this behind the scenes, the dashboard becomes really easy,” but each theme has its own little nuances. Where do I change the colors? All that stuff. I think it’s important to have a niche. It grew really quickly. I randomly posted on an Elegant Themes, one of their blog posts. We’re talking about this in a group. That opened up the flood gates.
Chris: In a comment?
Eileen: In a comment, exactly.
Chris: Okay.
Eileen: On my website, on my blog posts, I put “For more learn, visit the Facebook group.” Then people would start telling their friends about it, give you support, started directing people to it. They did a blog post on it. It’s taken off from there. I’ve definitely gotten help and support along the way from Divi from Elegant Themes.
Chris: That’s awesome. How long has it been? Going from 0 to 19,000, how much time has passed here?
Eileen: I think it’s been 3 years.
Chris: Yeah, that’s a lot in 3 years.
Eileen: It’s a lot in 3 years. Back to your previous question, what makes it a vibrant community, I think if somebody is going to start one of these groups, you have to realize that you’re not going to be the most popular person on the blog.
Chris: Because?
Eileen: Because you have to say no. You have to …
Chris: Like moderate?
Eileen: You have to moderate. Sometimes it’s really easy to kick people out because they’re posting the Ray Ban Sunglasses deal, and you’re just like, “You’re out.” Other times people are just relentless with their self-promotion and you have to decide is that detrimental to the group? Are they just annoying or are they really just … There’s a lot of cultural differences between Americans and other countries. You have to say sometimes to people, “You really don’t want to say give me your login and password in a Facebook group because that’s dangerous. People are just going to view you as a spammer.” You might spend a little time saying, does this person really have a skillset that they’re bringing to the table or are they just creepy?
Chris: Right.
Eileen: Right.
Chris: Yeah.
Eileen: Because there’s some of that out there.
Chris: Yeah, Facebook’s wide open. A lot can come in there. If you’re looking at it for an online course or your learning platform, I think there’s really two approaches, kind of like how you guys with Elegant Marketplace. We can talk about that in a moment. You can have a Facebook community that then a piece of that points to your online course, your membership site, or, in your case, your marketplace. Or you can go the other way where only people in your course who get in are allowed in a group and it’s very tightly restricted. I think that’s just a question of what’s your model? What are you trying to do? Are you trying to funnel people from Facebook into your platform or is it really just that’s where the community lives for your members only?
Eileen: Yeah.
Chris: How does a Facebook group … First of all, what is Elegant Marketplace, and then how does the Facebook group and Elegant Marketplace interact with each other?
Eileen: Yeah, that’s a really good question. Elegant Marketplace is a marketplace for child themes and plugins and other creatives. We have everything from style packets for if you’re maybe not a designer. One woman has put together a style packet focused on travel and tourism. I don’t want to pick fonts and colors. That’s in their image packs are in. We had one guy do a whole writing series on client contact, everything from initial reaching out through the either great job, you were an awesome client, to this isn’t really working out so well. You can buy all those emails for a pack. We’re also moving into Elementor and other page builders, themes, and layouts for those.
That’s what Elegant Marketplace is. That fell out of a group of people I met through the Facebook group. It started with more people. Now there’s just two of us, Andrew Palmer and I. Andrew is in London. We try to come up with a delicate balance of promoting our developers and keeping things open and informing people of what’s going on in WordPress with hosting. You and I did an interview, which is great, introducing the Divi community on using Lifter. We try to work with our developers so they’re not posting on their own in the group. We don’t want to over-do what we put into the group because we want people to be happy to be there.
We don’t want them to feel overwhelmed. We get a lot of questions. People will say, “I would like a plugin that …” Or, “Does anybody know how I can have this same image appear on the bottom of every post?” You know what? We have a plugin for that and you can respond. Sometimes people respond with sharing the code on how to do that. Other people … Google fonts is a great example. How do I add Google fonts? You know what? We’ve got this 10 dollar plugin. People are like, “Done. I don’t want to deal with the code.” It’s a bit of a balance. Hopefully we strike the right balance of promotion and satisfying peoples’ needs.
Chris: That makes sense. I mean, it’s challenging to moderate and to have it be top-down. At the same time, these other great things happen in the Facebook group where peer to peer conversations and new relationships are forming in the community. How does that work out for you? What kinds of things do you see people, like new relationships forming, or how do, without getting you or your partner involved, what other kinds of things are happening in there?
Eileen: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s really been amazing to me. Thank you for asking because I’m really proud of it. I think that we have had life-changing results. Organically from that group peoples’ lives have changed.
Chris: Has anybody gotten married?
Eileen: No, I know, I know. I do know of one relationship. At some point maybe there will be a little Eileen, or I’ll get a wedding invitation. Yeah, I don’t know. If anybody has gotten married they haven’t told me about it. I get really nice emails. I got this one from this woman who is in Ireland. She said, “Because of this Facebook group and these tutorials and learning, I’ve been able to move back to my hometown.” Yeah, so we get those a lot. I can’t reveal numbers, but we have paid out a lot of money to the developers who have created the child themes and the plugins. I hear of people who got a car, paid my rent, I’m no longer living paycheck to paycheck. It’s definitely significant, from that end. Then I get the people in South Africa at Word Camp who are all Divi users from the Facebook group who met up and had lunch. There was like 8 of them or something. Yeah, so it’s great.
Chris: That’s awesome. My business partner, he’s one of the organizers of Word Camp Los Angeles. He was talking about there was this group of Divi users. It’s what you’re talking about. It’s one Facebook group, but there are happenings where they get together in person, which is amazing.
Eileen: It is amazing. I was at a local meetup last night. The guy sitting next to me was talking about themes. He was like, “I had to leave one of the Facebook groups.” I was like, “Really? What happened?” He said, “Just so time consuming. There was so much going on. I would just go on there and I would forget about all my other work.” I was like, “What group was that?” And it was mine. Dude, you’ve got to get back in there.
Chris: Right.
Eileen: Come on.
Chris: Right. Let me ask you one … For the online course creator out there, if you’re building a community, sometimes things happen in your community that you don’t intend to happen. Sometimes it’s serendipitous and really positive, and sometimes it’s negative or sometimes it creates chaos in your business. What I mean by that … This is just a simple example. We have a Facebook group around LifterLMS product. It’s called the LifterLMS VIP Facebook Group. When you join or whatever, the about thing is like, “This isn’t the official support channel.” We get lots of questions for support.
What’s really cool is some of the other people in there will start helping each other answer their questions, and sometimes people will start tagging me and stuff where they’re trying to get me to answer support, which I can do and I’m happy to do sometimes when I have the answer, but we also have our formal both free and paid support channels. We have a process and a whole team ready to roll on that stuff. People break the rules, but it’s not that big of a deal, but it is … I don’t know. How do you deal with that? Do you guys get support or customer service questions in your Facebook group about Elegant Marketplace or do the developers or is that not really an issue for you?
Eileen: No, we definitely get support. I think support is unbelievably challenging. People are in the moment and they want an answer, so any way they think they can find you, they will utilize. I’m guilty of that as well. Though, yes, people will tag us. We, for our developers, offer the first line of support. Frequently it’s the, “I forgot to unzip the zip file.” I mean, that’s the number one. Or somebody customizes some code, and then they can’t. Andrew is in London and I’m on the East Coast. I’m wearing my Maine, my LL Bean sweater in honor of Chris, my main friend. We have a little time zone, and then we have somebody on the West Coast and we try to patch together answers. It is hard. We both keep Facebook open all day long and jump in and try to answer.
Chris: Do you guys answer support questions in Facebook?
Eileen: We do.
Chris: Okay.
Eileen: If somebody posts on Facebook we’ll answer in Facebook. Sometimes we’ll say, “Let’s touch base privately because it’s complicated.” I was helping some woman on a Sunday night at 7 o’clock. We were going back and forth, back and forth in Facebook and then realized she’d edited her code. I was like, “You know what? I’m not getting into this on Sunday night.”
Chris: Right.
Eileen: We do answer. I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do or not. Sometimes it’s just easy and it takes two minutes. It also shows people that we’re paying attention. To your point about having a private group if you’re running a class, it’s great because if somebody else knows an answer, then they jump in and solve that for you. On the other hand, if it’s your group, do you want to work Sunday nights at 7 o’clock? I can’t answer that for you.
Chris: I think part of that, too, which I can relate to as well with the Sunday night example that you mentioned, is that if you’re going to run a Facebook group there’s some really smart people out there who design user interfaces and software to literally be addictive. It takes some serious self-control, especially if you use Facebook for personal stuff, just keeping up with friends and family. When that red alert goes off, or whatever, I think it’s helpful if you’ve been around the web for awhile to try to figure out some boundaries and just some healthy habits around, okay, I’m only going to do Facebook group between this and this time or five days a week, not seven days a week, or whatever. Eventually, the more you do it, you’re going to need to have some boundaries. That’s been my experience. I guess for email and for everything else, too, but Facebook groups, or Facebook in general, is helpful to at least be aware of how you use it and when you allow yourself to use it.
Eileen: Yeah, I totally, totally agree with you. I know you and I both like to get outside and get some exercise. It’s important. I mean, I had one guy … I’ve never talked about this before. I think maybe I mentioned it to you. Last year I was going through chemotherapy and I was literally, literally in the chair hooked up. The nurse is there in her hazmat suit and the whole thing. This guy is just pinging me. He wants to put his … He’s putting his link to his product in the group. I just kept saying, “We’ve got to talk about this. It’s too spammy. Now is not a good time for me.” Then now is not a good time for me became you know what? I’m getting chemo right now. It’s really not a good time for me.
Your business is not my priority. I said no, and just kicked him out. I just can’t deal with it right now. That’s extreme. Hopefully nobody is getting chemo as their problem. After that, I realized, yeah, I need to be a little bit less tapped in all the time. That’s when not being popular comes in where you just say, “You know what, dude?” Not everybody is right for your group, and you’re not right for everybody. That is something that is sometimes you have to do your deep breathing and remind yourself of if they’re not right for me, I’m not right for them, and it’s okay.
Chris: Absolutely. That just in general is just a challenge for being online. I mean the internet never sleeps. It’s not a 9 to 5 thing. It forces you to either get really good at boundaries or not so good and watch some important things slip away, whether that’s just taking care of yourself or spending time with friends and family or sitting down to dinner and those kinds of things. It’s amazing how it can take over.
Eileen: Right.
Chris: I think that’s one of the dark sides of online community is just to make sure you have healthy boundaries.
Eileen: Right, I totally agree. Having a partner with Facebook group … When I first started the group, anybody who was in admin had the power of … They could only be an administrator and then they had the power of kicking you out. I was a little hesitant as to who I made my partner because I didn’t want to be kicked out. Now you can have people do administrative stuff and not have that power. You can have helpers who are under the radar checking for appropriate … For me, I always want positivity. You have to start somewhere. What’s a silly question to you today may have been the question you were asking a week ago, so there’s no judgement.
Chris: Absolutely. I think getting people familiar with the search function is always good so that they can find stuff before that might have been asked about that sort of thing.
Eileen: Yeah.
Chris: Any fears about Facebook changing? For me as a business owner, I know … I can’t remember when it was, a year or two ago when Facebook made it so that your Facebook page, the reach of it go much smaller. Then you have to pay or boost posts to reach more people, even your own people that like to post. Otherwise it’s going to reach a small fraction, like 1 or 5% of them. I mean, I understand why Facebook did that from a business model perspective. Right now groups are amazing. In the back of my head, I’m waiting for that shoe to drop, but I’m not that worried about it because, well, I think that would be very damaging to Facebook. If I have a strong community and we need to go somewhere else, I know we can. I’d hate to see it go away, but do you have any fears like that or any reservations with Facebook at all or issues with them and having privacy or anything like that?
Eileen: The privacy thing I think is really interesting. I fully, in my heart, believe if you … Anything you put out there, you might as well just do a mental check. Would I mind if my grandmother saw this? Would I mind if my children saw this? My future clients, employees? Perfect example is we have some people in the Divi group who post mean things about their clients, and their clients are in the group. If you find the National Inquirer, you deserve to be lied to. It’s like that kind of thing.
I totally hear what you’re saying. What I always tell clients … It doesn’t come up anymore, but people used to say, “My business is on Facebook.” I’d say, “That’s really not a great plan.” We have a strong website and a strong blog and directing people there for more information is always a good thing. If the group went away I would be really sad. I think that groups are where it’s at on Facebook right now. If that changes, like you say, I think that we’re nimble enough or responsive enough that maybe we’d figure out the next place to be. It’s really easy and it’s really fun, but I don’t think maybe 19,000 could be replicated quickly.
Chris: Right.
Eileen: But I think we could make it happen, don’t you?
Chris: Yeah, yeah, I do. I mean sometimes change is … Not all Facebook changes are negative or anything like that. All the new Facebook Live stuff and the focus on video. The whole live thing, especially, for a learning environment is a great opportunity to blend in not just passive video courses, but also some live sessions in the Facebook group or whatever.
Eileen: Yeah.
Chris: Cool.
Eileen: Yeah, I know. I think that’s part of the attraction to this business maybe for you and I because we both love to learn and we both love what’s next and staying current. Maybe it’s not as nerve-racking to me as other things.
Chris: Absolutely. Yeah, I just go with the flow. That’s it.
Eileen: Yeah.
Chris: That’s it. Cool, well, for the listener out there who’s just getting started and they’re at day one and they’re clicking the create group button, it sounds like if we were going to give a few tips of how to grow the group, it sounds like for you being in a strong niche with a lot of people that are just hungry for a community that doesn’t necessarily exist yet in a super micro-niche is one, your community is related to a certain product, or at least it started that way. Having that other company getting involved on there in their social conversations, whether that’s blog comments or they even write a post about your group, that was a big accelerator. What else has helped the growth in general?
Eileen: I think having niches within the niche. We have a huge amount of people in the group who are photographers. They tell one another about it. We have a lot of virtual assistants. They’ll say to their virtual assistant gang, “You should join this group.” Our own little helpers, we definitely have done some boosted posts. Anytime we write a blog post, or I write a blog post, where I may say, “This question came up in the Facebook group, Divi group.”
Chris: You link to it.
Eileen: I’ll link to it. Then we’ll get people to join that way. I think that slow growth maybe isn’t bad either because it’ll allow the person setting up the group to find their feet and figure out what works for them. I think definitely highlighting some of your power users is good.
Chris: The super connectors?
Eileen: Yeah, because they’re great. Sometimes I see people just answering all these questions. I’m like, “Who are you?”
Chris: I have a couple names in my head. I’m like, yeah, I know who comes to mind when I think about that, which is amazing.
Eileen: Yeah.
Chris: I have hired some of those people. I need to hire somebody for support, guess where I’m going first.
Eileen: I know. I know, I was speaking with Robby from Beaver Builder yesterday. The person that does all of their tutorials was one of their power users.
Chris: Yeah, it’s only natural.
Eileen: It makes perfect sense and it’s great, which is another thing is you don’t really know where your career opportunities are going to come from. Like we said earlier, so much business has come out of people answering questions because you say, “Man, she’s the Gravity forms guru,” or, “That person is the anything related to wedding photography websites.” We’ve got a whole slew of those people in the group. I’m going to this person who … I know Melissa Love. She comes to mind. She’s used Lifter on a new course that she’s launching. Michelle Nunan is one of our shared power users. I think it’s a great way to increase your own profile if you’re trying to get business or set up your own tribe by being active in a group.
Chris: Absolutely. Sometimes, like you were saying, the groups overlap. In LifterLMS, we have a segment of people who are really passionate about Divi. Then I’m sure you have some Divi people, there’s a small segment who’s interested in online courses. There’s other Facebook groups overlap, and those users move between. It’s really fascinating when you think about it. It’s just another way to grow is to not be an isolationist.
Eileen: Right.
Chris: Perhaps there’s other … I’m a member of probably … I mean, I’m a little obsessive about it, but probably 30 or 40 Facebook groups related to online courses. Do I spend all day and every day in there? No, but at least once a month I just like to drop in and check out, okay, what’s going on over here? What’s the conversation about? I know that person, that person, that person. You start recognizing faces and you can see, like you were saying where it’s helpful to be helpful, not just promotional all the time. If you are jumping around, I think that’s a beginner, newbie mistake is to always be slinging or promoting your stuff or whatever. I try to always be helpful. If it makes sense in LifterLMS or link to something, depending upon where I am, if the person is asking about I’ll do it, but I’m very sensitive to try to be helpful in the group and always give before take.
Eileen: Yeah. When I first started in my first Facebook group, which was my friend, Don, from high school who had the WordPress theme, I had this personal standard that I really tried to adhere to, which was for each question I was going to ask I had to have already answered or shared three things. It could be I found Unsplash, and I’m sharing it with you guys, or I found this plugin or somebody has a problem. You know what? I know how to do this. Let’s jump on Skype and I’ll help you solve it or here’s the answer or whatever. Whatever it is I’ll Tweet your blog post, whatever it was. I was really, really religious about it. The upside was whenever I had a question, people were so pleased to be able to answer. When you have a question you’re in that moment of frustration, which is why they’re pinging you on Twitter and Facebook and all the rest because they’re just desperate for an answer. I think you’re right. It’s fine to go into a group and poke around, but try not for your first post.
Chris: Buy my Ran Ban Sunglasses.
Eileen: Buy my Ray Ban Sunglasses. Definitely.
Chris: Right, well, let’s talk a little bit about just where LifterLMS and Divi overlap. If you’re new to all this, just to make sure everybody knows, LifterLMS is a WordPress plugin that makes it possible to create and protect online courses. It’s mostly about functionality. It does have some design elements, but you still need a hosting account. You need to install WordPress, and you need a theme. That’s where Divi comes in. Can you tell the uninitiated what is Divi?
Eileen: Divi is a WordPress theme from Elegant Themes. They have, I don’t know, maybe a hundred different themes. That is I think their showcase theme. What makes it so popular is their page builder. You can drag and drop, have columns, different modules. You can export and import. If you like a layout from one website, you can send it over to another website very easily. It’s very portable. Then within Divi, Andrew and I came to Lifter because I had a course. We had somebody give a whole video tutorial series on Essential Grid and as a free course, Andrew has done a course. For us, we used right out of the box. Your default layout and styling was just fine for what we need. As we mentioned before, Melissa Love has used it. She did some styling. Then Michelle Nunan has a theme, which I have been lucky enough to see. It’s a child’s theme, and she has … Because the LifterLMS pages are really custom post types, you can put a little snippet of code, which she’ll share with you right into your WordPress, I guess, page functions and post functions. Then you can use the Divi page builder. She’s come up with this child theme with the previous or next lesson and previous lesson in the side bars. Everything is really styled, and she’s got columns where you can download the audio, the video, the PDF documentation, whatever. It just looks great. If you’re really wanting to customize, then I wish her theme was live right now, but you’ll it hopefully in just a couple of days. I think you’ll like it.
Chris: Awesome. I can’t wait to see it. If you’re listening to this, by the time this goes live, it should be out. Where would people go to find that?
Eileen: Yup, it will be at ElegantMarketplace.com. Thank you.
Chris: That’s awesome.
Eileen: Anybody who is looking to get into the e-learning space, which you should be because the possibilities are limitless and especially with all of the features that you have from membership to audience engagement or whatever it is, it’s an unbelievable platform. You guys have thought of everything.
Chris: I appreciate that. The thing that we don’t have is just not a super heavy focus on design, so when someone like Michelle comes along and is like, “All right, I’m going to bring some awesome design to this,” that’s next level stuff. I mean, that really completes the picture.
Eileen: Right.
Chris: That’s really cool and I encourage anybody to go check that out.
Eileen: Yeah, yeah, I do, too. I can’t wait to see it or have everybody see it.
Chris: Awesome. Eileen, I want to thank you for coming on the show. What’s the URL for Elegant Marketplace if anybody is going to check that out?
Eileen: ElegenatMarketplace.com.
Chris: Awesome. Anywhere else you want to send people?
Eileen: We have all the usuals.
Chris: Okay.
Eileen: The Twitter, join the Divi Theme Users Facebook Group. What else? Pinterest. I typically will do the Pinterest stuff under Eileen Lonergan just because I’m addicted to Pinterest in my spare time.
Chris: Good to know. Let’s leave people with one pro tip for their Facebook group or creative ways to use Facebook groups. For me, I’m just going to say that if you’re just launching your course and you’re in the marketing phase, or even while you’re building it you should go ahead and start building your audience. It’s really important to get involved in Facebook groups where your ideal students hang out. For example, if you have a photography education website, it would be important to not just join Facebook groups with other photography teachers, but go find where your ideal photography aspiring photographers are hanging out, whether that’s a beginning photography group, and iPhone photography group, architecture or landscape photography group. Whatever it is, you can go somewhere and you might find an area with 30,000 people already in there that are within the range of who you’re trying to teach to. Go get involved. What’s yours Eileen?
Eileen: That’s a good one. I like yours a lot. I guess my tip is for the moderator or the founder would be don’t be afraid to inject a little bit of fun. We had a little ugly sweater party. Everybody posts their photos of them in an ugly sweater. In order to allow people to promote themselves or share what they’ve done or their successes, a lot of times on Friday I’ll post like it’s a virtual cocktail party. I’ll post, “Okay, drink time. Share what you’ve done this week.” Then people can put the sites that they’ve completed or the clients that they’ve landed. Some of the stuff people come up with is like, I’m so proud of you. It’s awesome. Don’t be afraid to have the human element in your group.
Chris: Awesome, well, Eileen Lonergan, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for coming on the show.
Eileen: Thank you so much, Chris. I appreciate it.
