Learn how to design the perfect business model around content, courses, coaching, community, and retreats with Josh Hall and Chris Badgett in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by LifterLMS. Josh specialized in Divi web design, so he has sort of a niche within a niche of not just WordPress users, but also Divi users. Josh breaks down how over time he designed his perfect business model around content.
In this episode, Chris and Josh talk about the ecosystem of courses and building community. Josh offers courses, and his target market is intermediate and advanced web designers. He also has a membership that’s an upsell from his courses that encourage people to get involved with the deeper community Josh has built around the WordPress design space.
Josh does serve the beginner audience as well with some content around introductions to Divi and web design, but he has a lot of focus on more advanced courses like the web design process and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). He also has some content that gets into the business side of running a web design agency and taking it to the next level.
Josh picks Chris’s brain in this episode on some strategies he can use to further his membership site platform and community. Chris shares insights about creating three simple packages based on the setup Josh currently has:
- A self-study course package.
- The course + community package with a monthly 1-hour group office hours call with a member of Josh’s team.
- Then a membership upsell that’s ongoing.
Making a freebie piece of content for pre-sales that is a taste of your larger program is a great way to get opt-ins to an email list and create those lead generation pieces of content that can help you get SEO and become more sticky (meaning they remember you and come back to your product) with people who interact with you.
To learn more about Josh Hall, be sure to head to JoshHall.co and check out his podcast which is a mix of design and business related content. He also has a YouTube channel with 23k+ subscribers with all kinds of content around the WordPress and Divi space.
And at LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us!
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. We’re joined back by a guest. I consider Josh a brother from another mother. Once we connected, I was like, man, this guy has got a lot of the same energy and interests and overlap. It’s really cool to see our online relationship growing.
Today we’re actually just going to have some back and forth conversation between what Josh is doing with his ecosystem of courses and the community he’s building. Courses and community building are two of my favorite subjects. I’ve been in the industry now for almost a decade and I’m excited. If you’re listening to this or you’re watching this on YouTube, think of this as a fly on the wall observation of two people who are deep, both in WordPress, courses, online entrepreneurship and community building, just having a conversation of how can we help each other grow. Josh, welcome back to the shell.
Josh Hall: Thanks for having me again, Chris. I think it’s a great way to put it. I even told you, I just reached out to see, I just told you, hey man, I would love to pick your brain about some stuff I’ve got on my mind, because I coach a lot of web designers and business owners, but most of them are not, even though they’re in web design, they’re not in the course space or the learning management space or their community space. I’m really excited to just have somebody who is like-minded in this area to just pick your brain and get some ideas off of. Looking for some advice and some things that you’ve seen, because I know you’re in with a lot of other course creators and community builders. I appreciate this coaching type of call, man. I’m looking forward to it.
Chris Badgett: Well, how can I help? What’s your biggest challenge or opportunity or area you want a second set of eyes on?
Josh Hall: I actually wanted to ask you, because we were talking about this before we went live. I want to know what it looks from your perspective, knowing me a little bit over the past year or so, or actually longer than that. You’re also a part of my web design club. I have a membership which is my own personal web design club. That is for serious web designers and web business owners. That is not for people who are just starting their web design journey primarily, because it is a premium club, it’s a membership. But I do have a bunch of free resources and I have my courses, which are separate. And as you know a lot of students come through the courses, on all different levels. And then the ones who are serious about their business and are looking for more of a mastermind, more connection with other like minded people and quite frankly, more direct contact with me, because I’m getting to the point now where I just can’t be available to random people.
I was already at the point where I’m starting to set up some filters to where you’ll have to go through somebody to get to me. I don’t mean to sound a total deuce bag with that, I just mean I literally can’t answer random questions anymore and do what I do. I would just like to ask you, Chris, what are your thoughts on my current setup? How does it look from somebody who understands it, but on the outside? Because I value your opinion on what I have going.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, there’s so much in what you’ve said already to get into. The first thing just for you that’s listening to be clear, and correct me if I’ve got this wrong, Josh, you offer courses. Your target market is web designers and not necessarily super beginner web designers, but people who are serious, and working in the WordPress space. Your community is actually, the club you call it, is a membership, which is basically an upsell that people can tack on to the courses, right? That’s the business model?
Josh Hall: Yes. Yeah. Generally my students are really broke down into two categories. One is a brand new web designer looking to learn web design. As you know I’m a big Divi guy. I use the Divi theme by elegant themes. What’s interesting about my brand is, I’m in a niche within a niche. How many millions of people are learning web design? That’s not my ideal audience. My audience isn’t even WordPress necessarily. It’s Divi. It’s Divi, WordPress web designers. That’s one audience, learning Divi, learning web design, learning, a little CSS and the tech side of things. I have courses on design, basic design principles, my web design process and SEO. Those are more the technical courses. But then I have courses for the business side of stuff. I have a whole business course, which helps people either build their web design business or take it to the next level.
And then I have a website maintenance plan course, helping them build recurring income. Those are my two different people, people just learning web design or people who are starting their business or they’re ready to take their business to the next level. Because I am coaching people now who have businesses that are doing 50, 75,000 to six figures and I’m helping them get into six figures. Those are my main demographic as far as who I cater my content to. And then the membership is for the ladder. The membership is for people who are business oriented, which leads me to another question I’ll ask a little bit, but I’m finding I’m attracting more and more web design entrepreneurs. But as of right now, that’s the current setup.
Chris Badgett: Well, the first thing I would just say is, a lot of times you’ll hear advice on the internet that there’s the perfect business model and there’s not. Some people try to include community in with the courses as an example. You’ve made a decision that your courses are one-time purchases, right? Lifetime access?
Josh Hall: Yes. They are separate. Lifetime access. We have one-time purchases that is separate from the community.
Chris Badgett: Do they get any support in the courses? Or are they more just passive income style, go at your own pace? Follow along, it’s an information product that is done and good to go. Is that right?
Josh Hall: That actually is the main purpose of this call, because I’m trying to figure out how to better support my students, not my members, but most of my members are students. I think I’ve only had one person become a member who wasn’t in courses. Generally it goes to the path I just told you, from a student to they love the course. They’re getting a lot of results. Now they want to connect with me and connect with my tribe and have that community. The question is though, as of right now, I have over 800 students now in my courses, the question is, how do I support them without it becoming a separate type of membership and without getting myself into too much trouble time-wise? Because I could sit and answer questions all day. But that’s a little tricky if you have somebody who just did a one-time purchase, but then there’s an open type of forum.
What I have in place right now is, I do have a handful of Facebook groups for certain courses. Once somebody joins, I have one from my business course, my maintenance plan course, my CSS course, mainly for technical questions, and then my SEO course. Now, the trick is though, those are on Facebook. And as we’ve all learned, it’s very, very tricky to have a community like that on Facebook that is related to a certain course or a training because of all the ideas and issues we can think of. There’s distractions, there’s this polarization. At the time of recording this, we just came out of the most divisive political season ever. We’re still in the heart of coronavirus and everything going on. That leads me to think about pulling my course groups off of Facebook and maybe use Circle, which is the platform I have my club through.
And almost maybe have a Circle thread per course, because the problem is I don’t want somebody to go through one course and then have access to a different course group, because I trust most everybody, but I don’t know if I trust everybody not to share assets and checklists and stuff from certain courses with other people necessarily. That’s one question I have, is to go about it that way. I guess maybe we could start there. We could probably [crosstalk].
Chris Badgett: There’s a lot in there. The place I start with is the end, which is, the classic marketing or sales thing that I’m sure you’ve heard, that a confused mind doesn’t buy. What that means is, when it comes to packaging, what we’re doing here, we’re packaging and training opportunity. You really want to have three or less options. At the end of the day, how can we offer this with three or less options? Otherwise it becomes too confusing. Like, okay, I got this over here, this over here, this upsell, downsell, across, you can easily get in a spaghetti mess. The more creative and entrepreneurial you are, the more dangerous and likely that is to happen. There’s a couple of key concepts here I would get into. The first is, if you’ve heard of the online learning courses called masterclass, I’m imagining you’ve seen those.
Josh Hall: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: That’s where we can learn comedy from Steve Martin, or we can learn entrepreneurship from Sara Blakely, from Spanx or whatever. Those are super cheap. You get all these courses by best in the world instructors in these niches, like writing a book, being a DJ, being an entrepreneur, being funny, all that stuff, but it’s only $15 a month. The reason it’s so cheap, is because of the lack of fidelity, which means access. I can’t call Steve Martin and get some joke advice. But I could take his self study, do it yourself course, and the next month I could learn from Sara Blakely. When we think about you supporting people, either in the forum or on a Zoom office hours call or inside of a community and even the community supporting each other, these are value adds, which allows price action for you to move pricing up based on the value.
There are several factors that go into pricing, which we could get into or not. But in terms of what makes sense at what price point, but before even looking at pricing, on the other lever you have is the term. Lifetime access is very different from, for a month or for a year. Again, if we dial it back to, okay, we can only really have three offers without running the risk of confusing people. The place I would start, I always try to go to the, what is the absolute simplest solution. If I could come up with three packages based on what I know you have right now, I would do the course only option. So self study course only, there’s nothing else outside of that. Then the course plus community option and probably a minimum, a monthly one hour, office hour, that you or somebody on the team runs, that’s quite a bit more, because it has more fidelity or more access.
I would actually probably stop there instead of going to three options. We have two options with our courses. Course, option one, option two is course plus coaching plus community. And then the ongoing membership you have, is more of a continuity program or upsell that happens, that’s just there for added value beyond the focus of these individual courses. So whether to do it on Facebook or whether they do it on Circle, we can talk about that. The platform, before we get into that and price points and frequency and stuff, I think this fundamental packaging thing is important. I don’t know. What’s your reaction to that?
Josh Hall: I definitely understand that framework and there’s a lot I like about that. I’m going to put a big, however, out there though. However my courses have been out for a while. Some of them are two years old, I’m actually getting ready to revamp. And not that that would change too much, because it’s not going to change the pricing. I feel pretty good about the price points I have for the courses. My thing though is, I don’t know if I would necessarily want to, I don’t know if I would even want to offer a course without some support, I guess I do right now. A few of my courses don’t have a group with them, but any of my students are welcome to email me. I always get back with them. Not many do, but my thinking was to do something that one of my mentors, Pat Flynn does because I’m in a couple of his courses and he does office hours once a week for anyone in any course.
Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Office hours is the easiest way to add that value, and if you time box it and you do it for all courses, so you don’t have 10 different office hours, that’s pretty cool.
Josh Hall: Yes. That’s exactly what I did not want to get into was to have to migrate between all the coaching for this one, versus this one. I would be totally open to doing an on average weekly or bi-weekly office hours, which may be bi-weekly for now, because I do weekly calls for my membership. Something that I think could be really great because not only would it have the chance for everybody to join and they could ask questions, but it will also be a great opportunity for upsells, because when somebody is listening and somebody who just has my beginner’s course, maybe they hear a question about my design course and I tell them, well, here’s what I would do. And they’re like, oh, shoot, that’s a good idea. Maybe I do want to check out Josh’s design course. I can just keep on letting them know, you guys are students, you’re enrolled in my student loyalty discount program.
Remember, use your student discount code for the next course you’re interested in, or I do have a bundle option to where somebody can upgrade to the entire bundle. I have nine courses right now and they’re all in and around web design. That’s been one of the best decisions I’ve made, was to have a bundle, because people can either purchase that one time and save 700 bucks or they can just upgrade to it. It doesn’t work out to quite that pricing if they upgrade, but they still get a really good discount. That’s what I’m leaning towards, Chris, is just having a general office hours type of thing for all students, but still having those core specific groups, whether I keep them on Facebook or have Circle threads, which cool thing about Circle is you can embed a space inside a course.
I could have a forum in the course where people could go there to answer questions. Now, how engaged that would be, I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ll find the level of support that they would since people are primarily already on Facebook. I’m not for sure about that, but that would take it off of my shoulders to where I’m not doing the support myself all the time. I’m happy to jump in, but I can’t be answering every student’s question in a forum. Kind of like the membership, you’ve seen my membership now. I jumped in there quite a bit, but if it’s not something that I feel led to dive into, I’m going to let other members take care of it. It’s a self sustaining type of group. That’s what I’m looking to do, potentially.
Chris Badgett: I liked that. I liked that. To me, that’s a simple packaging. We have all a cart and we have a bundle. Then the place where I’m where I feel just a little bit of disconnect, is if we have lifetime pricing, but you’re doing ongoing office hours. I think that perhaps making it an annual subscription is better than lifetime, because you’re basically, if somebody comes and they stay with you for 10 years and they come to every single office hours every couple of weeks or whatever, the monetization is awful a little bit. I know the lifetime’s a big selling point. People are like, yeah, I want that. And then there’s no fear and less mental calculus, but if you’re literally adding recurring value, it makes sense to have recurring pricing.
Josh Hall: I still view that as a mini membership. Where I could see that getting confusing though, Chris, is if somebody has the beginner’s and they got an annual subscription to that. I might not update it for a couple years. I personally might be like, I don’t know if I want to pay yearly for something, if I don’t even know if it’s going to be updated, even with the support and all that. My other thing that could be a little tricky with that is if they want to upgrade or buy different courses, I feel that just might get a little tricky, although I know what you mean. My thinking with that though is, have a one-time payment lifetime option for all the courses, whether they want one or whether they want the full bundle.
And then as I continue to promote my membership, which is a big add, I really want most, all the serious people to go to my membership. And I’m going to be doing additional courses, that are going to be in and around web design. My thinking is, if I have office hours and a lot of people are joining for these calls, it’s not as personal as my membership, but it’s not as public as say, a live Q&A on Facebook or YouTube. They might be much more led to keep on investing in additional stuff that I’m putting out, or maybe it’ll help them get to the point where they’re like, you know what, I want to do this more. Maybe instead of every two weeks or every maybe once a month, what if they’re like, I want to have a Q&A with Josh every week, that’d be awesome. Then they can join my membership.
That’s my thinking there, almost even just keep it really simple. I definitely, I’ve learned just like you said, as an entrepreneur and as a web designer in particular, we can just make things really messy. I’m even trying to stay even more simple with that, at least to test the waters, to do something like that. I say all that to say, my goal with an office hours type of thing would be to stay engaged with students and use that as the upsell tool for additional courses, for membership and new courses that come down the road.
Chris Badgett: I like that. I like that. Simple is good, protect it like it’s the most important thing to protect. A couple of things just around packaging that I think are important. I’ve done a lot of research and just experience around pricing, packaging, and positioning. There’s a couple different vectors you can come at. One way is the who, who it’s for. This one is for the beginner. This one is for the scaler, and then this inner circle is for the lifetimer or something like that. So that when people are looking at a plan, one of the three options, they’re not just looking at the price and the features, they’re also looking at who they are. Like, is this plan for me? We see this on pricing tables a lot where it’s the starter, the small business, and then enterprise, and it says call for price.
They’re not only segmenting on price, they’re also segmenting on the avatar there. Features is one way to do it. Okay, this is one course. This one is all the courses. This one is one office hours a month. This one is four office hours a month. This one is four office hours plus this entire community thing or something. And then there’s something called fencing, which you probably don’t want to get into, where there’s levers that they could basically move, expand. That one’s more complicated, we can just skip that one.
Josh Hall: You got me thinking about, I had thought about doing different bundles. I’d have a beginner bundle for the beginner’s course, a couple of other beginners course and some design stuff. And then I would have a middle tier bundle that would have maybe more of the design stuff. And then the business bundle that would have the business course and maintenance plan. I haven’t done that yet, just because I had actually thought about taking, and I like the term you used there, Chris, beginner, starter and scaler, because I had actually thought about creating a really good funnel on my front page that helps people. Because I am getting a lot of people onto my side that are in different paths. I’m trying to figure out how can I figure out what content, because we’re just talking about my courses, but I have tutorials, podcasts and blog posts and elegant themes blog series that I wrote years ago that are still really relevant.
I’m pointing people to all these different resources. My thought was to have a funnel and it would say, if you’re a beginner, you just want to learn web design, here’s some free resources. Here’s what I recommend diving into, and then I would recommend taking my beginner’s course, that would be the funnel for that. If you’re a starter, if you ready to start your web design business, these are some free resources that will help you, and then here is the course I would recommend to help you start your business. And then the scaler, if you have a web design business and you’re ready to take to the next level, here’s what I would recommend doing, and that’s probably where I would have my membership in there. That’s my thought. I liked that idea a lot, those terms.
That’s what I was thinking. I know that would be a little bit different than just for students, but that would be the funnel that I’m thinking about creating. I think that would help the right people get into the right courses. And then again, I think if I did a bi-weekly or monthly Q&A office hours for all students, I really feel pretty strongly that that’s going to reconnect a lot of my previous students that haven’t heard from me in a while and it’ll lead to a lot more sales and and just keep them more plugged in.
Chris Badgett: I love that. I love that. As a guy who’s done a ton of office hours, I can share from experience that, yeah, it’s a sales tool. It’s not an overt sales tool, but just the nature of being there and adding value creates expansion revenue. One more packaging and positioning thing is a concept called an add-on. Your membership, your community as it exists now, I would consider it an add-on and that’s great. It’s a really good add-on, whether you’re an information product company or a software company, or even a service company, is something that not everybody needs and maybe only 20% need it or want it, but the people that do want it, really want it. You pull it out of the features in the price boxes or whatever, and this is something that is an add-on. Add-ons, if you just study a pricing expert, there’s a guy named Patrick Campbell, you can find him on the internet.
He’s one of the best pricing experts there is. I was going through one of his recent studies of how add-ons are the easiest way to just better monetize a business. And also the, the who, I know, because we do a lot of Zoom based sales calls in group and also phone sales. People when you’re talking to them directly on a Zoom or on the phone and they’re like, which one do I need? I’m always surprised how many times people ask me, do I want this, this plan, this plan, or this plan, which one’s the right fit for me? I’m like, well, let me ask you some questions. Are you a starter? Are you a scaler? I’m not using those exact words, but I’m getting into, I’m trying to identify that.
What’s your budget? What’s your goals, which has to do with what features do you need? Do you value whatever Xs, in your case, it might be community. Do you feel like an isolated entrepreneur who would benefit from not just learning how to run this thing and have my support, but also being an ongoing community where you can support each other and not feel alone? You might be a good fit for this bundle, and then I’d recommend for you adding this, add-on. If your budget’s tight, just do the training first and you can always add the community later.
Josh Hall: Yes. That was my mindset with my club. For sure was that, there’s no pressure. My big thing too, I prepared myself for this, for the membership. I know people are going to come in and come out. It’s not-
Chris Badgett: It’s churn. It’s churn.
Josh Hall: For sure. I would not take that personally. I’ve had some people already leave for one reason or the other and they feel bad and I’m like, dude, don’t feel bad at all. I realized that’s something where it might be a really good fit for a little while, but for whatever reason, you needed to step back or you’re in a new role or finances are tough. It’s no problem at all, but I always leave the door open to rejoin and that’s always the option too. I liked that idea. I think it might come down to how I phrase it, honestly, Chris, I don’t know if I’m necessarily going to tweak any of the payment options as far as pricing tiers or tables for each course.
Because again, just based off of my situation, which is a little unique, I think to a lot of others, is that, I do have people who will just buy random courses and they’re at these different levels. I’ve even had people who are on the scaling side, but then they buy the beginner’s course, just so their team will learn Divi. That’s interesting too. It’s almost its own little product that people sometimes buy as an agency. There’s all these little different intricacies that come into play. But overall I think creating those funnels and having those recommendations on what resources are the next best steps.
I think you’ve sold me on definitely doing the office hours, just to make sure all students feel they can join in. Now, I’m very aware that the people who went through a course two years ago, are probably not going to do it, maybe some of them will, but it’s going to be the active people who are more interested. Because a lot of times courses come into play when you’re in that mode. If somebody is learning Divi, once the learn SEO, they go through the course, they’re really active. Even I’ve seen this in my groups, my Facebook groups, they’re really active for a little while, but once they get past that, then they generally tail off, that’s when they drop off.
Chris Badgett: I just want to add, I’ve seen that as well, both with my office hours and other coaching programs and things, things I’m in. It’s often a surprise how few people come. You may be worried about capacity and scaling and can I get to everybody’s questions and whatnot, but like you said, you’ll have some lifers. I’ve run office hours for four years and there’s been people that have been there every single week. It’s cool. It’s awesome. But I also see a lot of people come in, come to one or two and then I never see them again, but that’s fine. That’s okay. Also if you run into scaling issues, all you have to do is open up another hour, which I know we’re getting into another hour of your week or bring in a coach to help support the business who, which you can often find somebody in your community who really knows you and your process to help facilitate a second hour, because of either for the different avatars or just because your capacity is maxed.
Josh Hall: That’s good. I like that. That’s what I’m doing with membership. Next month, at the time of recording this at least, what my SEO specialist, who I personally work with is in my membership as well, and she’s doing the presentation for, because I do a monthly training for the club. Basically, it’s interesting. I intentionally started with my membership to see how I could do that for students in a roundabout way. And again, I still, my priority and the main things that I want to work on. There’s really three things that I’m going to be working on moving forward, is to keep my courses up to date and build new courses. I guess that’s two different ones. I do have some new courses, but one of my biggest jobs over the next year is to revamp my current courses, especially the topical ones, to keep them up to date. That’s a biggie.
The other one is just the content I produce with my tutorials, podcasts and stuff like that. That’s huge because that’s basically my marketing right now. And then my membership, that’s where a lot of my attention is right now. And now that I’ve got used to it, I’ve gotten a good flow with it. I have a VA who’s going to come in and help out with a lot of the admin tasks with that, that’s going to free me up. Those are going to be the three things I focus on really primarily for 2021 at least. That’s where I was trying to figure out, how do I number one, first of all, take people into courses, that’s the big one with the funnels I’m setting up. And another question I had for you was creating more free guides and legions and cheat sheets and stuff, because I really don’t have much of that right now.
That’s a big goal for me to create a bunch of those, get more people in the courses and then the people who are serious and who are ready, then lead them to the membership, where I can really focus on quality over quantity, but I’ll still have that option to do office hours for people who don’t have the budget for the membership or who are still early in the journey. And of course I still have my free Facebook group, that’s my main Facebook group. That’s 23,000 people now. That’s always an option for free support for people who need that. Those are primarily just for web designers, not the business minded folks. That might be a good segue to the idea of the legions. I’m really trying to decide what I want to call those, how I want to position those. Should it be a cheat sheet? Should it be a webinar or should I call it a training, a webinar or a workshop? Open to your thoughts on all that.
Chris Badgett: All right, cool. Well, I’m going to tie a bow on the bundles and then we’ll go into that. Based on what I’m hearing, I know this pretty well from a software perspective, because we have all our cart and then we have two bundles. All right. Just one way I might advise to look at it is, you’ve got all your courses, so there’s all our cart. Don’t stop doing all our cart. It works now. Plus the WordPress community is really used to this of plug-in mentality where I can pick and choose what I want. But what I would recommend doing is, if we can only have three options, all our cart, and then two bundles, the starter bundle and then the everything bundle. And then the club is an add-on, that anybody can add at any time.
They could start with it. They could tack it on whenever they want. That’s probably what I would go. If I was on an individual course page and I’m looking at it, I would see, buy just this course or get with bundle. If I clicked get with bundle, I would go to just a very simple landing page that had the two bundles, the 60% bundle and then the everything bundle with all the courses lined up with check boxes, buy which one is there, so that they can choose, am I all a cart buyer or do I like to save in volume. It’s bonus points, if the bundles are positioned for the avatar, because it makes people, even, it makes the decision easier. Like, well, I’m a beginner. My budget’s less. I’m just getting the cheaper bundle. I like saving money too. I’m here to stay. I know I’m looking at this course right now, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to want that one later. I’m just going to get the bundle.
All right. And then the one thing I would do for you is to put in another add-on, I bet you have thought about it, because you’re an entrepreneur. Is this super expensive, we’re going to a tropical resort, the inner circle mastermind, that’s very expensive, that happens once or three times a year at an exotic location, that is a mastermind retreat. That would also be an add on, but what that does is, you plant the seeds to find out who’s interested in these bigger things. You know who Chris Lema is, right?
Josh Hall: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: Have you heard of CaboPress the event he runs?
Josh Hall: I don’t know too much about it. It sounds familiar though. I know there’s a lot of those where you’ll get your top 10% or whoever.
Chris Badgett: Yes. The inner circle thing or whatever. I’ve been to Chris’s CaboPress five times. That’s how much I loved it. It was great. It really connected me with other WordPress entrepreneurs. I hope to go back again in the future, but I’m sure I’m just this really small part of this bigger audience, if you will. That was more of a bonus idea. Don’t get too distracted by that. I think it’s helpful because you identify even just putting up a coming soon page, you identify if there’s interest number one, and number two, it helps with price anchoring. It makes the other stuff like, oh, well, this-
Josh Hall: It reminds me of, some business coach James Schramko, who has-
Chris Badgett: I know Jay, I don’t know him personally, but I’ve been following that dudes podcast forever. He does the Maldives thing.
Josh Hall: Oh really?
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Josh Hall: Yeah. Keep an eye out here, Chris, because he’s coming on my show. I already recorded with him. He’ll be on my podcast, episode 102. I actually have Pat Flynn coming on too. By the time this comes out, this will already be out. But Pat Flynn’s on for my 100th episode. I’ve got a couple, man, my podcast is full of gems here coming up pretty soon.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I just want to add James Schramko, I have been listening to that guy for a decade in my earbuds. This is the power of podcasting everybody.
Josh Hall: I have to let him know.
Chris Badgett: He has no idea who I am. He might be aware of me, I’ve engaged with him on Twitter, maybe a little bit. He even contributed to a guest post or a roundup post I did once, but that dude has added so much value to my life through his free content, and he has no idea, at some point I will give that guy some money, but anyways.
Josh Hall: That’s hilarious, man. You’re going to have to send me that clip. I want to send that to him. He’s been my business coach for two and a half years. I joined SuperFastBusiness membership and we have the option where I just message him. We don’t talk on calls or anything, but we just have a private thread. He’s really helped me take things to the next level. But just recently he said, “Make an offer that makes you nervous.” Number one. And he said, “You need to offer something that is only going to be worthwhile for your top 10% of clients.” And there’s the old rule. 10% of your clients will pay you 10 times as much as they’re paying.
Chris Badgett: Exactly.
Josh Hall: That’s where, my next step after all of this was to figure out something for the top tier, really top tier people. A lot of them will be in my membership, but maybe those are where we do, maybe that’s where I’m dabbing my feet into more of coaching, that coaching realm. That would be the next step. But I say all that. James is awesome, and that’s what he encouraged me with, that’s what made me think about what you were just talking there.
Chris Badgett: You’re pulling out the right words here. These helps simplify and I’m going to move on to your next thing, which is content, but the four Cs are content, courses, coaching community. And when we think about the features we’re providing, just think about content is free products for everybody. And then the fifth C, would be that premium mastermind retreat or whatever.
Josh Hall: What were the four Cs, again? Content…
Chris Badgett: Content, courses, coaching, community, these are all features. And then the other one, which doesn’t start with a C, is events. If you are going to do your Maldives trip or the CaboPress is a five star resort in Mexico that I’ve fly to or whatever. The event is another level. But basically they’re all doing the same thing, which is, we have a target customer and maybe there’s some segments in there, the beginner or the scaler, but we have this target customer and we’re trying to help them get a result. We do that through content, courses, coaching, community, and mastermind retreats. Right? If we’re going to build a marketing funnel for this and get leads, one of the important things is to look at segmentation.
When a coach or a course creator, does it really, really well, somebody may fall into this and not even realize that there’s a lower level option for the starter, as an example. If I’m a scaler and I fall into your content, I’m on YouTube, and I see this video and it’s telling me to go here. And then I buy your membership for the, I’m a scaler, I’m trying to go from break the 10K a month barrier as a web designer or something like that or 5K, whatever it is, then that’s me, I’m in. And then later I find out about your mastermind retreat, because you’re planting seeds and I’ve got an aspirational thing, but that membership, the add-on for the club, I can just add right now. But to back up and look at lead-gen, my favorite way to think about it is I have a framework I use called the YouTube traffic system, and especially since you’re on WordPress, I would look at this.
I know you’ve had a lot of success with your YouTube channel as well. Basically what we do is we create the buyer’s journey going from unaware, to problem aware, to product aware, to solution aware, and we make a piece of video content for that. I would do a separate one of those for each of your segments, of your avatar. For the starter, you’re already a professional YouTuber, but what I’m asking you to do is to make one video per stage, per avatar. An unaware video, like, hey, I want to figure it out how to work online, work remotely. That’s totally unaware. And then the problem aware, is like, I should build out WordPress agency. I liked this. I liked design, building websites is fun, some video around that.
And then product aware is like, I need a guide to help me get through this. What should I do? How do I evaluate, Troy Dean versus Josh Hall versus some other WordPress person. How do I figure this out? Who are these WordPress coaches and agency accelerator people? Then once I’m aware of Josh Hall, I’m like, what’s Josh Hall got? That’s your solution aware video, which then we have a call to action of like, if you this video go to my free course lead magnet or download this cheat sheet or whatever.
Josh Hall: I had thought about, I love where your head’s at Chris. I think either way we’ve established that I’ve got three funnels, basically. I definitely need to cater content to those funnels and help people, because it’s going to be the best for everybody, because right now my site’s a little confusing. People just aren’t quite sure what they’re looking for.
Chris Badgett: Let me give you an example from me. This is so much clearer now, because I have WordPress professionals in my audience, but I also have do it yourself experts. They need separate funnels and separate content. Once I gave myself permission to do that and not try to make something that works for everybody, it gets so much easier, right? To make content that’s really helpful and speaks directly to the person, right?
Josh Hall: Yes. Yes. That’s where I was thinking, I had thought about doing a lead gen, whether it’s a webinar training or a cheat sheet or a workshop for each course. I would do a video, a beginner, getting started with Divi, free guide kind of thing. Here’s the basic stuff, and then that would lead them into the Divi beginner’s course. I can have the same one for my process. If your process is a scattered mess, here are my five phases. Here’s the basic info on the five phases cheat sheet. But then that would lead them to my full process course to where they see the all the ins and outs of the course. And then same thing with my business course. So if you’re ready to scale your business, but you need help with these areas. Shoot the business side of things, I could make a freebie for each thing.
I could make a freebie for sales, a freebie for pricing, that could really be a massive, I could really grow as James Schramko likes to say, an octopus of arms to bring people in that way. That’s what I’m thinking. My question real quick, because I never getting tight on time, is what should I call these? Do you have any research or have you seen things that work better, whether they’re called webinars versus trainings versus workshops?
Chris Badgett: The content or the content upgrade thing?
Josh Hall: Just the content, these free resources that are lead magnets that I’m going to create. I’m still warring with myself as far as what I should call them because they’re not going to be live. These are going to be something that I put out there that people can go through and I’ll probably revamp it or create edited. But a perfect example is what Pat Flynn has in place, because this is how I got connected with him. I heard Pat Flynn on James podcast, liked him, heard his name before. I knew I wanted to start a podcast and when I checked out Pat Flynn, I saw he had a free video on getting a podcast started. That video led to a cheat sheet that had a free webinar, a 45 minute webinar. I went through the webinar, went through the cheat sheet and then that upsold me to the podcasting course, which I then went through.
Chris Badgett: You’re asking what to call the cheat sheet type thing?
Josh Hall: Yes. Yes.
Chris Badgett: What they’re called is a free resource, because if you use that word, basically when you create, let’s imagine you’re creating a YouTube video, you would see the lead magnet at the beginning of the YouTube video. I would do some interrupt, open, like, hey, are you feeling frustrated trying to find the right page builder for your business? I’m going to go over why I love Divi and all this and stay to the end of the video, because I’ve got a free resource for you. It’s an exclusive, and then mention the name it’s called this, stay to the end. And then you go into the content. And at the end of the video, you’re like, I said, the beginning of I’ve got a free resource, it’s called the Divi startup guide or the Divi whatever, cheat sheet. Then you can get specific. And if this free resource happens to be a cheat sheet, it’s good.
If this next resource happens to be a free course on your website, it’s just a different type of resource. That way you’re training your audience in a healthy way to just understand your flow of, there’s always a free resource at the end and it can-
Josh Hall: Okay. See, I can start putting this into my podcast and stuff too, because as of right now, I just leave my podcast listeners straight to courses. But I know that’s not the ideal lead. It’s helped. It’s really brought a lot of people in, but I know ideally, or maybe at least if I had free resources to sprinkle in there, that would help a lot of people.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. Just know you’re super creative. It might be a cheat sheet. It might be a calculator. It might be, whatever. It can be a lot of different stuff.
Josh Hall: Okay. Here we go, Chris, because I know we both got a roll. All right. This is why we need to play a Joe Rogan three hour call here.
Chris Badgett: We should do that. We should do that.
Josh Hall: We can talk about this for three hours. Okay. My biggest takeaways are setting up the funnels. I’m definitely going to set up a beginners-
Chris Badgett: One quick thing, you may already know about these, because you’re pretty established, you might consider adding a funnel filter. What I mean by that is, whenever you have an opt-in form, what is one question you could ask that is going to help segment somebody. Like for me, one of my segmentation criteria is, how many years of experience do you have with WordPress, zero, two or more than two?
Josh Hall: I got it. I think I pretty much have that. The questions would be, I want to learn how to build websites. That’s funnel-
Chris Badgett: Yeah, which one best describes you?
Josh Hall: Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m thinking. And that would take them to their pages with the resources.
Chris Badgett: Not only do you get the email, people end up in the right places in your CRM or however you’re doing it.
Josh Hall: Okay. Awesome. The funnels, I’m absolutely going to start that. I’m going to start the office hours for students, whether I pull the groups from Facebook, TBD on that, I’m going to decide what to do with that.
Chris Badgett: I just want to make a quick comment. It’s really hard to compete with Facebook, with the community. What you’re doing with Circle and the way it works, when I get an email notification, I click through I’m right into your site, I’ve gotten valuable relationships and connections. One of your guys have me on their podcast and some back and forth conversations. I had a job posting I put in there. It works, man. You’re doing it well, because it’s really hard to beat Facebook, but you did it.
Josh Hall: Oh dude, I appreciate that. Wow. I appreciate that, Chris. I’ll think on that, but the funnels, the office hours, the bundles, for sure, I’m going to do the two bundles, I love that idea and then the free resources. Those are my takeaways from this. I’ve got it all listed out here. I’m pumped. Thanks so much, man. This has been awesome.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, I’m serious, man. We’re going to have to plan the three hour Joe Rogan. So thank you for coming back on LMS cast. You can find Josh Hall at joshhall.co. Is there anywhere else you want to send people who are listening to this on the LMS cast podcast or on the Lifter YouTube channel?
Josh Hall: Man, I think a lot of people who listen to this would probably enjoy my podcast, which is a mix of business and design related stuff. Just head over to my podcast. You can just go to the website and just click on podcast and see if there’s an episode that’ll get you pumped up and help you out.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, keep up the great work, Josh. Can’t wait to see it evolve.
Josh Hall: Thanks Chris.
Chris Badgett: 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.
