How to Build an Online Business Doing Spiritual Healing through the Internet with Shaman Carla Meeske

In this LMScast episode, Carla Meeske, discusses the definition and origins of shamanism, how one can discover their shamanic destiny, and her personal journey of integrating the worlds of online marketing and shamanism.

Carla describes shamanism as the ultimate energy medicine, where shamans are the people in a community who can cross between the worlds to speak to spirits and bring back healing and information for themselves and their community.

She discuss that people who feel drawn to some kind of metaphysical discipline are likely to discover that they have a shaman destiny within them, and that shamanism is the root of all things, allowing them direct access to the information they need from their spirit guides.

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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 guest. Her name is Carla Meki. She’s from spirit healer circle.com. She’s a shaman. She teaches shamanism, she’s done it through the internet for a very long time. She’s using LifterLMS to power some of her online learning stuff. Welcome to the show, Carla.

Carla Meeske: Thank you Chris. It’s so lovely to be here.

Chris Badgett: I’m excited to get into it with you today. You know, there’s a lot of healing folks that come to lifter and do different things, and I just want to kind of unpack the niche just a little bit. Excuse me, in case people haven’t heard of it. How do you define shamanism to the uninitiated?

Carla Meeske: Well, shamanism is the ultimate woowoo. It’s the ultimate energy medicine. Shamans are the people in a community who can cross between the worlds, between the veil to speak to spirit and bring back healing and bring back information for themselves and for their community. And we’ve been doing it for how long? How old have people have been around now they think 20,000 years, 30, whatever it is, shamans were there at the beginning of human beings.

And all your, all your woo woo wallet arts, your reikis, your energy healings, all of these things have shamonic roots because we’re all working with spirit guides who are smarter, wiser, filled with compassion, and they’re coming through us physical form channels. And at Spirit Healer School, I teach you to have that direct communication with your spirit guides to bring through healing, to bring enhancement to whatever your energy medicine is. So that’s what shamanism is.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So it’s kind of like going back to the beginning of time for humans. Like there’s lots of different personalities and like archetypes of people, but humans have always had within the community a healer of sorts. The shaman is the original healer and it’s right the base of everything. That is so cool. Yeah. How did you find out that you were, that I read something on your side about soul retrieval and also just if somebody is ha is feeling called to becoming a healer, how does someone like kind of discover that they may in fact have that, that shaman destiny within them?

Carla Meeske Great question. Generally, a person feels drawn to some kind of metaphysical discipline. Maybe you like to read tarot, maybe you’re interested in talking to angels. Something, something pulls someone into the metaphysical arts and at that point, when they start exploring, they may begin to understand that their ancestry is speaking up through their bones, that they’re remembering something that their ancestors did or that they did in the past life. And as their curiosity grows, they start reaching out and dabbling in.

And eventually they’ll land on shamanism because that being the root of all things gives them direct access to the knowledge that they’re seeking from their spirit guides, not from a human guru. So that’s, that’s it. Mine started when I became interested in the eing in seventh grade. And that’s when I realized that I wanted to understand the mystical side of things, the truth behind the veil. And it’s that, that quest that led me to shamanism.

Chris Badgett: One more, we’re gonna, this is gonna be a meandering conversation. Sure. But one more thing kind of on your or origin story. You, you have a background in teaching online marketing and sometimes in my experience, these worlds of quote alternative healing and, you know, business like marketing, they don’t always mix. They’re like separate.

But you, for some some reason way like became very integrated between the, the online and the business and the marketing and the healing and the shamanism. There wasn’t like, they weren’t like separate worlds. Like some people tend to polarize these types of people or something like that. How did you become so integrated among those two very different disciplines?

Carla Meeske: You know, it’s a, that’s such a great question and it really is a life path question. When I started college, I wanted to study mystical arts. I wanted to understand what was behind. So I went to a crazy school called St. John’s College, and I studied the great books and that led me to a vast understanding of philosophy, religion, and all these things, and no ability to make a living at all. Right? So I’m, I am cutting salad at Chelsea’s restaurant in Salem, Oregon. During the recession in the seventies, nobody on my block had a job. We were all flat broke and I said, this has to end.

I have a college degree, I can’t get a job. I have to go to graduate school. So I had two choices, business school or law school, and business school is two years with no test. Law school is three years, and then you have to take a test. So I chose business school and that landed me at Columbia University. And I thought, oh, I’ll go into finance cuz I’ve always wanted to be a stock trader. Terrible at that. I looked at my resume, decided marketing would be it. And I ended up with a marketing degree at, in the toy business at Kenner Toys in Cincinnati, Ohio. And that’s where shamanism really took off.

I was in charge of running the Batman toy line among other toy lines. And we, I was given this, this edict by our president to develop a new Batman toy line and six months flat because there was this thing going on with toy Biz and they had the line and blah, blah, blah. So I would ride my bicycle doing intervals on the hills in Cincinnati and ask Batman to speak through me to tell me who he is, what he’s all about. Because I had to take one Batman figure and make eight different characters out of him.

You know, cuz you gotta collect them all. And that’s how it all started when I was driving, riding my bike, getting into this sort of metaphysical trance, doing intervals. And Batman would come through and I’d get all these different characters and we’d put ’em into the toy line. Huge success. And then I started to dabble in Shamanism. That’s when I started to really go further into it. So there’s my business, I’ve got an M B A from Columbia, I was marketing director at Hasbro.

Kenner became Hasbro, and then ding, ding ding. I got a calling to go to Eugene, Oregon. I was going to become a software person and get in on the.com. And that was a, a crashing failure from a business point of view, but it landed me in Eugene and in connection with a whole bunch of people who were studying shamanism. And so my shamanic life started to bloom then how do I make a living. I got hired at University of Oregon to teach marketing and there you go.

I always liked to be on the forefront, always like to be on top of the thing that’s coming. And I created internet marketing as a category of schooling at University of Oregon. I taught internet marketing. Teaching people how to use a dream weaver to make a website and affiliate websites so they could start their own businesses. A whole bunch of people went on to become important in the internet marketing world outta my courses.

I mean, crazy talk. And I realized I had a skill that I could apply to my burgeoning shamanism. And I, when I launched my, my my shamanism business, instead of just becoming a yet another healer in Eugene, I segmented into animal healing because I’m an animal person and I went on to the internet. So I started spirit healer.com way back in the day when you could could get a.com like that. And I have been teaching online ever since.

Chris Badgett: What year was that approximately?

Carla Meeske: I think that was 2000.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s cool. Yeah, when I saw

Carla Meeske: It was two, two,

Chris Badgett: When I saw that domain name, I’m like, wow, that’s a really good domain name you got on that early, so. Yeah. well, I kind of want to go to the end and then we’ll come back and fill in the story, or at least not the end, but where we’re at today. What are you doing with LifterLMS on your website now? Like what is what’s happening there? And we’ll kind of connect the dots from you, you launching online and back in 2000, but what, what’s, what’s the site and the business look like? Now?

Carla Meeske: I’m gonna tell you that, excuse me, lifter is the dream. Lifter has made my dream come true. My dream was that I could have online classes where I could see everybody and we could all talk together. That was way before Zoom, but Zoom made that happen and that I could have a catalog of my courses with all of their iterations and all of that beautiful, everything Lifter gives me. And you made it come true. So where my business is now, since I finally launched my Lifter site, I have my membership where I am anchoring the people who are the most loyal customers and the most interactive customers.

And I have a variety of courses that can bring new people in and help people grow and develop. And I feel like I’m just getting started. I’ve got 58 I think courses right now, which is nuts, but almost none of them is on demand. So they’re all basically a course where somebody came to the course and then they can see the recording afterward. And in 2023, my mission is to create a series of five entry level on demand classes. Those will feed into intermediate Zoom classes and into the membership program.

Chris Badgett: Wow. Here we go. That’s awesome. And working backwards a little bit, how did you choose LifterLMS?

Carla Meeske: Oh my God, that was a search I dug through every one of the competition

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Carla Meeske: And you’re, you just, you were the best. That’s all. I mean, I did learn Dash for a while when Learn Dash was first starting. Nice guy. Really sweet guy. Yeah. but it wasn’t, it was awful because I can’t remember exactly why, but somehow the backend and the front end tangled and, and the user had to unwind that entanglement and yours was intuitive and you’ve been around for a while, and actually you wanna know the real answer. It’s you Chris, because you are the face of lifter, you’re brilliant. You answer the questions, you engage me the customer, and I trust you. And Will, let’s not forget Will Yeah. Who held my hand and still holds my hand every step of the way, will is my hero.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I definitely can’t take all the credit. There’s a, there’s a great team at Lifter is as well. But I appreciate you saying that, you know, business is people, you know, especially even tech, you know, there’s a lot of automation and everything, but there’s, there’s people on both sides using the software, making the software and, and yeah, we, we never forget that at LifterLMS. It’s kind of part of who we are. So thanks for saying that. Can you tell me how you got into WordPress? You mentioned Dream Weaver a ways back, and as you’re talking, I’m just gonna put a log on the fire, so when I disappear, keep talking. But tell me how you got into WordPress.

Carla Meeske: Don’t you love that? He’s putting a log on the fire. Dude’s in Maine, he’s putting a log on the fire next. He’s gonna bring out a lobster. Oh, what was the question? Why WordPress? Yes.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. How’d you get into WordPress as like a part of your technology stack? Because you’re obviously really good with it.

Carla Meeske: WordPress was primary to the, the other page builders to Wix and Squarespace and that sort of thing. So when I left building off of Dream Weaver, WordPress was the first data-based management wizzy wig that I could use. So I built a WordPress site and it was a nightmare to manage. It was a nightmare to manage the backend. So out of frustration, I moved to Squarespace, which seemed like a really great solution, but the reality is Squarespace is not a great solution.

God bless them, they’re sweet and lovely, but they are not a great solution for a whole bunch of reasons. And one of them is that my sight went stagnant and in order to upgrade it and make it fresh again, I had to completely rebuild it in Squarespace 2.3 point. I don’t even know. And there was no way to do any kind of a, the net spirit healer.com. My legacy site I’m talking about. And there was no way to do any kind of a learning management system integrated with Squarespace.

So then I look at learning management systems and everybody’s on Kajabi, but oh my God, talk about cookie cutter and expensive nuts. I have 58 courses. How in the world could I go on to Kajabi? I couldn’t do it. Can’t do it. So I went back to WordPress, realized that with Gutenberg blocks, everything had changed. It was super easy, super sweet, backend, way better than all those other builders. I mean, it’s just great. And then putting Lifter into it, bing butter, boom, I’m very happy.

I just closed just two weeks ago. I closed the Squarespace legacy site, I moved it over to my, oh, let’s take a plug Four Site Ground. Yay. Site Ground. They are the best hosting service hands down yet. And I’ve gone through a lot of them. Site ground is awesome. Any problem, you go to chat, they help you. It’s perfect. So I put spirit healer.com, my legacy site is now on my site ground account, along with Spirit Healer Circle and milky knight.com, which is my astrophotography website.

Chris Badgett: Wow.

Carla Meeske: That was, and I’m a totally hooked on WordPress now. I want everything in one place. This morning I finished moving my c r m from Convert Kit to fluent c r m hosted on my Spirit Healer Circle site. Yes.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. So you’re like, you’re really into owning the platform and the flexibility of WordPress and it can involve, it can evolve with you and, and stuff like that. What about, and

Carla Meeske: I can control my costs. Yeah. Holy cow.

Chris Badgett: Yeah,

Carla Meeske: I was gonna be looking at a thousand dollars a year on my Convert kit. Are you kidding me?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. That’s

Carla Meeske: Who CRM is. $120. Thank you very much. Cha-Ching Chaun.

Chris Badgett: There you go. And tell us about especially just, I’m thinking of other healers out there who are looking to teach online or, or you know, be more online with their business. Are you doing this all yourself or do you have like a technology partner that, that helps? Or you, that’s you. And I mean, I, you’re a little special cuz you have this, this history with internet marketing and business and the, and the internet basically.

But what would your advice be to somebody who’s, you know, maybe they got, they’ve got their WordPress side and they know how to update some pages on it for their healing business or whatever. When can they do it? Like, a lot of people say WordPress is hard, you’re obviously proving that wrong. And sure it’s not always easy and there things get complicated sometimes, but when does it make sense for a healer to DIY or hire like a, a WordPress professional to do stuff for them?

Carla Meeske: I think it depends on the human being. Yeah. I’m right now hiring, I’m, I’m looking right now for a backend person because that has finally my, you’re busy. There’s no way I can grow where I wanna grow and do it all anymore. Yeah. But before then, you know, until now, I’ve, I’ve reached a breakthrough level of revenue and before that, there was no way I could afford somebody.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Carla Meeske: And the other thing is, oh, healers, your brain needs to do math. You need to do logic. It’s really, really important. If you’re in the healing arts, don’t let the math and logic side of your brain atrophy. It grounds you, it keeps you human. And there are nothing like wrangling a database to do your math. And that’s all WordPress is, is database. It’s just logic.

Chris Badgett: Could you, could you explain that to the uninitiated? What do you mean by it’s just database?

Carla Meeske: Well, every single thing in WordPress is, it’s all zeros and ones, it goes back to the, the basics of what a computer is. Th it’s either this or that. And every action that happens inside WordPress is a choice. You want this or that, this or that. That’s all a bunch of decision trees. And they get lumped together by the, by the backend framework to appear like a cluster of something. But it’s still just a bunch of this and that.

So if you look at it that way and you back up and you say, all I need to do is figure out the this and the that and the this and the that, and I’m, it’s like chaining together a beautiful chakra necklace, you can do it. Just take your time and realize it’s just a logic chain. That’s awesome. So my advice is try the learning that you’re going to get, the brain power you’re gonna get from trying is a hundred percent worth it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s great.

Carla Meeske: That alone is a gift. And that, other than that Upwork, I don’t know.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, there’s lots of places to get help, but it’s empowering to like, at least figure out the basics on your own makes you better capable of, you know, getting help and knowing what you want and that kind of thing. Let’s put our instructional design hat on a little bit. It sounds like a lot of what you d you’ve done is you deliver a lot of your trainings and sessions online in Zoom and then record it and it goes into the L m s and you have plans for some more on demand, more pre-recorded training. Yeah. you’ve got what you call courses, memberships and circles. Can you kind of explain how you think about creating the content?

Carla Meeske: Sure, yeah, yeah. The base content is well, I don’t know if there’s a base, I’m just gonna, I’ll just go through those like that. Membership, my membership is a monthly fee membership that gives people access to come to three Zoom events that I host four memberships only every month. Plus it gives them access to a pre-recorded catalog of my short little courses. So if a course is a, is three or four sessions long and it takes me a whole lot of work to do it and it’s, you know, 10 hours of training, that’s an extra fee.

But if it’s a one-time course, like I’m gonna have one January 3rd called calling in the Spirits one hour. How do you call in the spirits and how do you make that practice your own? That’s free to the Mastery Circle members, but it’s $29 to non-members. So I’m encouraging people to join Mastery Circle if you get that for free, and then be able to come into all the others. So tho those I call like mini classes or mini courses.

And what I have not done much of is on demand classes where you’ve got a little video. Some training, some questions, little video, some training, some questions. And I really didn’t understand how I wanted to structure that until recently. And so I’ve got an idea now, and believe it or not, I’m gonna base it on Yost on yo’s trainings.

Chris Badgett: All right.

Carla Meeske: Because as I went through Yost Pro in order to to do my search engine optimization their training is incredibly good.

Chris Badgett: What do you like about it? They have just

Carla Meeske: The right length video. They have just the right length conversation, just the right amount of quiz to make sure that the person gets it. It’s really good. So I’m gonna develop a whole bunch of entry level SHAMONIC classes on that format.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m also thinking about a healer who might be just getting started and one of the first things they might do in terms of an online business is actually do some of the healing work through the internet before they get into courses and stuff like that. Yeah. What have, you’ve obviously been doing that for a while, like, and maybe some people have a limiting belief about what’s possible through the internet, but how do you do healing online? And and how’s it different from doing it together in the same geographic location?

Carla Meeske: Oh, yeah. Well, I think that that I’m gonna break that into two different kinds of questions. One is remote healing. How does that work? And healers who feel comfortable doing remote healing will understand the answer to that, right? They’ll know that when they’re in non-ordinary reality, time and space disappears and they can appear spirit to spirit with their client. So that’s pretty straightforward. A bridge between totally remote and being together, but not in the same room is to do your sessions over zoom.

So the vast majority of my sessions now are done over Zoom, where the person just sees me drumming with my eyes shut, and talking. I speak out loud everything that happens in the spirit world. And I record it on Otter, oh, thank God for plug for Otter AI as a way of automating your recordings and getting a transcript of them and sending those to your customers. Awesome. Otter ai.

So that’s how I do that. But the other half of that question was how you use the internet for reaching clients. And the answer to that is Yost Pro. You’ve got to learn search engine optimization just by Yost Pro. I should have, I should have affiliate links on all of this, but I’ve, I’ve been through a lot of different stuff and Yost Pro I think is just excellent. If you can follow their steps, do their little training, follow their steps, optimize for your keywords, you will rank and Google and you will get customers.

Chris Badgett: That’s great.

Carla Meeske: I’m sure you use Google Local, all the local search stuff.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. There you go. What, what other technology do you, is kind of essential to you? You’ve mentioned LifterLMS, fluent crm, you’ve had some great success with Site ground hosting.

Carla Meeske: Hmm. 

Chris Badgett: You mentioned Yost. What other, is there any other just essential tech that you know, really makes your business happen?

Carla Meeske: I would say groups io, but I want to switch from groups IO to using your online discussion platform.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Carla Meeske: Because

Chris Badgett: I’m not even familiar with what groups IO is. Is that like a sort of like a private Facebook group or something?

Carla Meeske: Yes. Yeah. Yes. I can’t stand Facebook groups. I just, I’m sorry, I just can’t stand them. It’s just, Ugh. But I remember back in the day when I started Yeah, no kidding. I started Animal Communication on one list, which became Yahoo Groups. Right. We, I started the first animal communication online discussion list.

Wow. It’s crazy, isn’t it? So Yahoo. That, that the people who started one list and then it eventually became Yahoo Groups started this new thing called Groups io. And it’s a very inexpensive discussion list platform, but it’s a pain in the neck for me now because now that I’m moving my whole database onto my Spirit Healer Circle, lifter site, I wanna have everything contained within that lifter site. So my next step is to buy more stuff from Chris

Chris Badgett: All right. Any like hardware stuff? Like, I just mean like video camera and stuff. Obviously when you get really busy, there’s only so much you can do for production value. You still gotta do all your, your work. And but like right now, just talking to you through Zoom, you have great lighting, great background, but what, what, what tech do you use for the video work and stuff? Is it you just keeping it simple with your webcam and a nice microphone and don’t, would your advice be just keep it simple or what would you say to that?

Carla Meeske: Well, you know, Mac, and don’t go back. I, I have a new M two at MacBook Air. I don’t even use my studio mic anymore.

Chris Badgett: All right. So it’s, it is just, I love this. I love this. So it’s just the MacBook Air, the newer one.

Carla Meeske: It’s my MacBook Air. I’ve got, this is a tapestry I bought off of tapestries.com or someplace.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah.

Carla Meeske: And when I wanna change my set,

Chris Badgett: There you go.

Carla Meeske: I’m an astrophotographer. That’s my hobby. Ah, yeah. It’s not a hobby. I, I, I sell, but I can switch my set to astrophotography background. So I just basically have a corner of my office that is my set and one studio light

Chris Badgett: Now. There you go.

Carla Meeske: Which is a simple light from B n h photo. That’s it.

Chris Badgett: Ooh, I love that. That’s some pro tip right there. A great computer, a decent studio light, a tapestry, and like some nice photography on the wall. And, and you’re good to go. That’s awesome.

Carla Meeske: You really are. I mean, yeah, I used to think you had to do all this stuff and you need a backlight, you need depths. So I have a backlight and it’s woowoo, it’s a,

Chris Badgett: Which is like a salt crystal or something. What is that?

Carla Meeske: Yeah, it’s a selenite crystal that I have a, an IKEA light in the bottom of it.

Chris Badgett: Nice. Nice. So if you’re listening to this on the podcast, just jump over to the Lift Rails YouTube channel. And this is, this is some awesome advice cuz a lot of people get hung up in all that studio stuff and green screen and all that stuff. Just keep it simple.

Carla Meeske: I have one more piece of advice for all of you who need to buy lifter. Start with your Woo commerce plugin for the, for the checkout.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Carla Meeske: If I had done that, I’d be happier right now because then I could be able to sell my healing sessions and have it on the same database. I could sell product and have it on the same database. But now I have to talk to Chris after here about how I convert from the Lifter checkout to the Woo Commerce checker out on a site that’s got 2000 customers.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we can, we’ll make some time to chat about that. And for those of you that are listening so Lifter has a native e-commerce functionality which integrates with Stripe and PayPal and authorized.net. And it’s more simple, streamline one time recurring payments, but it also integrates with WooCommerce, which is the, you know, the leading shopping cart solution for WordPress.

If you’re gonna do, like, if you’re gonna have like physical products and a bunch of different types of things in addition to courses and memberships, it makes sense to go with the WooCommerce route. So we can, I can help you get sorted there. So we’ll, we’ll chat some more about that. It is an important decision at the beginning of your l m s is what are you gonna do with the shopping cart? Some people use even some something else offsite and then they just use the l m s for the learning.

But like you said, moving everything to WordPress, trying to consolidate, keep it simple, one, one kind of site to rule them all is, if I could start all over again. We’re actually doing that at Lifter right now. We’re, we’re moving some of our sites all into one site just for our, our software e-commerce and everything. Cause we have a bunch of sub-domains. But yeah, keeping it keeping it as simple as it’s easier to maintain one website and have the parts talk to each other than to do that across multiple websites.

Carla Meeske: Right.

Chris Badgett: What are, where are you going in the future? Like what what’s your vision for the, for the future of spirit healer circle.com?

Carla Meeske: Well, if my dream comes true this year, I will triple the membership in the Mastery Circle. And that will give me my base income. I will have a lot of downloads of free one onesies and twosies and lots of sales of on demand product. I don’t even know what lots means, but in the hundreds, that’s likely for me. And I will have freedom to go out and photograph the Milky Way more than I am right now.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. What else? Like, what else lights you up about your business? I know you have the astrophotography that you, that you do mm-hmm. but like, where does the, you know, these businesses can be hard and you’ve been doing it for a while and you know, sometimes there’s you, you know, you face new technology challenges and so on. Like, what keeps you motivated through all this for all these years?

Carla Meeske: That’s that. Yeah, it’s interesting. Some days I feel like I wanna quit, but then I wouldn’t know what to do. Where would I find my connection to my people? The, your lifter l m s has changed my life because by creating the membership circle and having that really tight group of people who I love and who love me, and we get together all the time and we back each other up, we support each other.

We are a, we’re a tribe and that became because of Lifter. And so for me, you know, I’m looking at when I might be able to retire and then I say, what would I retire? And so as a promise to myself I called up Will the other day and I ordered an either, I don’t know, three years or five years of Lifter in advance prepaid by Bill.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Awesome.

Carla Meeske: I locked myself into lifter and into site ground for at least five more years. So that’s where I’m headed.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. One more thing just to kind of land the plane on our conversation here. Education entrepreneurs one of the things they have to do is build community. And you’re talking about your tribe and these people that you serve other, other healers and aspiring shamans and, and people who need healing themselves and stuff like that. I understand after the people join your world and they, you know, buy more and more courses and memberships and circles and stuff like that.

what advice do you have for somebody before the sale or before they join your world to kind of build community of, of prospective buyers or learners from you that, you know, haven’t bought anything yet, but you, you’ve talked about Yost and SEO and stuff, but any other tips you have on building a community, like whether they’re doing, whether it’s of healers or any niche of people, like how do you kind of begin that, that flywheel of building up your, your community that you want to serve and attracting people into your world?

Carla Meeske: Well, you know, it’s gonna go back to basic marketing. The first thing is what, who are you and what is your core offering? And that, that’s is only, only valuable if it’s understood that it’s for whom. Otherwise you’re just talking to yourself. So when you’re talking about what you do, you have to step outside of yourself and put yourself into the role of the person you’re doing it for. And then you can look at yourself as a dynamic relationship between what you offer and who is your customer.

And as soon as you do that, you can start wrapping your hand around who the customer is, and you can start doing all the marketing techniques on target marketing. Why they are, what their demograph, all that stuff. And you can begin to focus on those people who are most likely to be attracted to what you’re doing. And so then you make your website to reach them with your search engine optimization, with your blog posts, with your photography, your images are critical, understanding copywriting so that you are getting to the point and not blah, blah, blah.

Having a good looking site, which is so easy on WordPress, don’t go, don’t work too hard, just download Astra, take some Gutenberg, throw it in there and don’t mess with it. Yes, simple is better. And I think the best advice I’ve heard is start local. Hmm. So use the Google local marketing stuff just web, text, Google, you know, Google, Google Local, and you’ll learn how to get a local listing and how to start building local clientele and offer something, offer something that you’re going to give away in exchange for getting people to sign up and then send them interesting emails that make them wanna stay on your list.

It’s very straightforward. It’s just a question of deciding what you are. Why are you different? So the best marketing slogan I work with is only this product, only Spirit healer Shamanism allows you an animal lover who’s a spiritual seeker to get this benefit to develop your ability to connect with your sacred spirit, your spirit guides. Because Carla, the teacher behind Spirit Healer School has 30 years of experience in the shamonic field, 20 years of experience teaching Shamanism and understands the animal shaman connection because she originated shamonic animal communication and has a form full of critters herself.

So that is a slogan of, of framework for creating your positioning from one of my mentors, a guy named Doug Hall, and he has a company called Eureka Marketing in Cincinnati. Hi, Doug . He’s fabulous. His books are fabulous. And that framework has been what I taught at University of Oregon and what I live by now. So I hope that helps.

Chris Badgett: Oh, that definitely helps. I love that you’re this mix of, of, of marketing and shamanism is so cool, so awesome. Any, and I’ll just ask for a little quick piece of marketing advice here. One of my challenges is like the people that we serve, or what I call education entrepreneurs like yourself, but they’re, it’s not as specific as somebody called to the healing arts who’s an animal lover and somebody who’s an education entrepreneur like yourself doesn’t call themselves I’m an education entrepreneur. Yeah. so I sometimes I wonder like, well, who am I helping?

Like how, and they’re often in all these different disciplines, like, you’re in healing this other person’s on this business topic, this other person helps people find their, their soulmate or whatever. Like there’s all these like different niches. What do you, what, so what do you like, what do you consider yourself a an example of? Some people would call it like a subject matter expert, you know, that’s kind of dry and plain, but that’s what it is, what it is. Like you said, you have 30 years in the shamonic arts. Any other words that you could throw my way

Carla Meeske: To be more broad scale on it. Someone who’s striving to make their voice be heard and to publish, publish in a way that they have ownership and a platform for broadcasting that they own. Something like that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s some good stuff to work with. I appreciate that.

Carla Meeske: I mean, when I think about Lifter and I think about, for me, what was the key competition? It wasn’t learned Ash in any of those things. It was the choice between going with Cajabi, who, who tells you that they’re gonna hold your hand and give you the formula that’s gonna make you successful. And lifter doesn’t do that. Lifter says, we will give you all the tools for you to apply your wisdom to become successful yourself. We’re going to, we are the framework that allows you to be successful.

And you’ll, you’ll need to have some concept of funnels. You’ll need to have some concept of what it is that compels people to give a damn about what you’re saying. And to me that’s everything. Because if I ever find myself writing an email that starts with, if you are like me, you’ve suffered because of, and I have an answer that, ah,

The formulas are the your enemy, the, the, the truth of who you are and why your product is valuable to people. That seed, that core, that has to be given your own voice. And when it is and you make that the centerpiece of your marketing, that’s when you attract an audience that truly cares about you. That’s what I think.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Carla, this has been amazing. Any final words for the people that you wanna leave ’em with today?

Carla Meeske: Yes. Buy Lifter, first of all, buy Lifter. Second of all, buy Lifter for many years because you’re gonna need it. Third, use the Woo Commerce right up front, even though their shopping cart is so attractive, because as you grow, you’re gonna wish you had. And fourth, take Convert Kit. Take MailChimp, take all of it, toss it out the window, go with fluent c r m or Mail Poet or something like that. And run your own database. Own your own ship

Chris Badgett: Wise words. That’s Carla from spirit healer circle.com. Go check out what she’s been building over there. It’s amazing. Thank you for being a shining example of what people can create. And I like to think of Lifter as a tool that kind of sends out a positive ripple out in the world. So you take it and you apply your knowledge and expertise and wisdom to it, and then you help all these other people and this, you know, kind of positive ripple goes out in the world. So thanks for being a part of that story. And we’ll have to check in with you down the road and do this again sometime.

Carla Meeske: Thanks, Chris, I really appreciate it.

Chris Badgett: 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 [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.