In a departure from the usual focus on business, this LMScast speaks to a more altruistic purpose behind educational entrepreneurship. Chris Badgett shares his online course creation freedom secrets to help you help others and make a living while doing it.
The 14th Century Sufi poet Hafiz wrote, “The small man builds cages for everyone he knows, while the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful rowdy prisoners.” You have a unique opportunity today to drop those keys that can set people free from their cages around the world. You can create a course around anything you know well enough to teach. The narrower your niche, the more valuable your service.
This is about more than building a business and turning a profit. This can become an expression of your authentic life purpose. And what could be better than making a living doing something you know is beneficial to others, and fully aligned with your own values and priorities? That’s what LifterLMS is for us. This is the key we offer to you – to give you the tools to build the platforms by which you can share your value, your skills, and your authenticity.
You have value you may not even recognize, because you’re too close to it. So many people in the world want and need you to teach them the things you know better than anyone else. You’re caged by not knowing what you have to offer. They’re caged by their inability to learn from you. But you can make that connection through the internet. Unlike 20 years ago, you don’t need access to big money, production, distribution, or media outlets. All you need is passion for your niche and the desire to share it.
You’re standing at the intersection of education, entrepreneurship, and technology. There are no limits here to what you can teach and learn. You can locate and serve a sub-niche of your own creation, and support yourself doing it.
We at LifterLMS want to be your partner in helping you share your knowledge, skills, and expertise with everyone who needs it. To learn more about Chris’s online course creation freedom secrets and how LifterLMS can help you start your journey as an educational entrepreneur, visit our LifterLMS My Online Courses page.
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Episode Transcript
Chris: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and in this episode, we’re going to be talking about online course creation freedom secrets. What am I talking about there? What I’m talking about is the big opportunity with online courses, but not just from a business perspective, also from an authenticity, from a life purpose, and from just a freedom of expression perspective. Now to dive into this one, this episode is a little different from our usual more tactical, more strategic point of view. I’m going to start with a poem from a Sufi poet named Hafiz from the 14th Century. He said that, “The small man build cages for everyone he knows, while the sage who has to duck his head when the moon is low keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful rowdy prisoners.”
I’m going to read that to you one more time. “The small man build cages for everyone he knows, while the sage who has to duck his head when the moon is low keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful rowdy prisoners.” This is a really inspiring poem and I want to deconstruct it with you a little bit on this episode. In some ways, I’d like to consider this episode a key that is being dropped for you to help push you over the edge, to create your online course, to move forward with your expressing your value, your skill, your authenticity. One of the reasons and one of the missions behind this podcast and our product, LifterLMS, which is an online course creation software is to enable education entrepreneurs to give them the tools to build these platforms easily.
It also comes from a place of looking all around us as the world is dramatically changing and technology is accelerating. I see people who have all kinds of value trapped inside of them and it’s typically several things that keeps that value trapped or caged if you will. One is just an ignorance of the fact that it’s there which is not a bad thing. It’s just that when people or organizations are really, really good at something, they maybe humble or just may simply be unaware of the fact that they’re sitting on so much value.
If somebody is let’s say super healthy and just really developed in the health and fitness niche, whatever that is, let’s say is a yoga or some kind of specialty type of nutritious cooking or whatever, they may not realized how valuable that skill that they’ve developed is and how many people would love to learn from that person, how to become like that. In a way, they’ve have this cage around them and there’s all this other people who have this cage who were like, “Please help me. I wish I knew about you. I wish I could learn from you.” That’s the beauty of the online course opportunity is because the internet is a global connectivity device which I’ve been working on the web for a long time, but it continuously amazes me the true raw power of the internet and how powerful that connection is.
It’s not just about having websites. It’s really about those connections. You maybe listening to this podcast on the other side of planet earth from where I’m at right now and 20 years ago, that just wasn’t really possible and definitely not possible for someone without a lot of money and let’s say access to like radio stations and massive production and distribution and that sort of thing. The technology is here. There’s never been a better time at the intersection of education, technology, and entrepreneurship.
It’s all here and there’s so many people who are struggling or just not optimized where they could diversify with an online course offering in various niches, whether that’s health and fitness, business, leadership, internet marketing, relationships, even like corporate training or technology courses. There’s so many niches that you could go into and start unlocking cages for people. Part of that is when we unlock a cage for somebody else, we’re unlocking a cage for ourselves too. We’re stepping into our highest, best, most authentic self and we’re sharing that value. One way I like to say is it if you look around and you see people who have all these incredible talents, my statement is stop hoarding all that value, like stop being so selfish.
You can share that and you can also make a living and make an impact by simply sharing what you have. One of the great things about these times where we’ve never been at a better place at the intersection of education, entrepreneurship, and technology is that the niches in which you can go into of like what is that value, what is that cage you’re unlocking for people can be very, very specific and precise. That’s a change. I think it’s part of the reason a lot of people stay trapped inside those cages if you will is that they don’t realize that you only need like 100 people or 1000 people all over the world to get into your online course before you have a real business, like a full time income kind of business if you have the right pricing model and that sort of thing.
If we look at book publishing as an example, the traditional bookstore only had so much shelf space. The internet has unlimited shelf space, so what does that mean? In the traditional bookstore, you had to be a “bestseller.” You had to be popular. You had to be mainstream for the various categories. If you go into the bookstore, there’s gardening, there’s cooking, there’s business, there’s fiction, but there’s only so many categories. On the internet, what the beautiful thing is you can go another layer down. There’s unlimited shelf space. Let’s say if we go back to the health and fitness example, let’s say you do some kind of specialized yoga combined with a certain kind of diet, combined with a certain kind of meditation exercise.
You essentially created your own unique practice that helps people to transform their health and get better mental clarity and all these kinds of things. It doesn’t really fit the box for just like a general yoga instruction book or DVD or that sort of thing. On the internet, if you can get enough traction and you can get a word out about it, if your stuff is good, you’re going to develop a following on the web for that specific sub-niche of yoga which is a sub-niche of health and fitness. You can go to that lower level down. If you had 100 people paying you for $1000 course which would need to be pretty substantial and add a lot of value and even potentially have some live components and that sort of thing or a 1000 people paying you for a $100 US course.
That’s significant amount of income, but the most important thing is that if you are that person, if you are that expert, you need to partner with somebody or a company or develop a skill so that you can package all that and deliver that in an online course that make sense on the internet. I have a special video message for you about my journey in this. If you want to check that out, you can go to lifterlms.com/my-online-courses. Again, that’s lifterlms.com/my-online-courses and I talked with you a little bit more about my journey through the online course space. I’ve been in this industry for quite some time, both developing courses myself and helping others do the same all around the world. It amazes me this big opportunity of all the different niches and what people can create courses about.
The key ingredients of course is that you have to be passionate about it. You have to be able to teach, but these are things that a lot of people have. There’s a lot of people out there who are either have problems or have desires and they’re looking for somebody to come help unlock the cage or help them unlock the cage for themselves and move forward and advance in life, whether that’s in business or health or some kind of technology skill or whatever it is. There’s just never been a better time to unlock that online course opportunity and really just became an education entrepreneur. There’s platforms out there like Hosted Solutions that you can go to and you can start adding your course to those places, but you can also develop your own platform, your own hub, which is what I recommend. I’ve been around this for a while.
I’m also a big believer in posting courses on hosted solutions as a side income and as a lead generation or marketing activity. At the end of the day, I think it’s important as an education entrepreneur to own your platform and control it and have it be really just about your content and your education. Thank you for checking this out and I would encourage you to think about this opportunity of creating online courses to help other people. Again if you’d like to hear more about my journey, you can go to lifterlms.com/my-online-courses. I’m going to close out by reading this poem by a Sufi poet in the 14th Century called Hafiz, “The small man build cages for everyone he knows, while the sage who has to duck his head when the moon is low keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful rowdy prisoners.”
