I was winding down after a long day feature planning, handling support, and executing on marketing for our WordPress LMS product, LifterLMS. It all started with a tweet, that led to a blog post, that led to a marketing page. It was for a mastermind event called CaboPress, put on by Chris Lema. I remember standing there looking at the webpage seeing the picture of the beach and the resort. I work standing up, and boy did those poolside chairs overlooking the infinity pool, overlooking the ocean, overlooking the sunset, look appealing. We see that kind of luxury imagery all the time in advertising and media. That’s not what got me. I’m a client communicator, a marketer, a strategist, a crafter of messaging, and a leader of teams. That means I have a super sensitive BS meter. But then it happened. I love good copywriting. As those of you who appreciate the art of good copywriting can attest, the holy grail of influence started happening to me… The words on the page came alive and entered into the conversation I was already having in my head. Finally, I was on the receiving end of that art I do all day at codeBOX for our WordPress LMS clients and LifterLMS customers. This time the tables were turned, and I was the target. It was kind of fun actually to be the hunted … to appreciate that experience from the other side, while simultaneously admiring the skill of the marketer. I’m over simplifying and being dramatic here, because it’s obvious Chris cares about much much more than writing copy to sell mastermind tickets. Chris has given so much to the WordPress community. It’s obvious how much he genuinely cares about helping other entrepreneurs grow and helping them create first class products and services. What It’s Like to Work with Chris Lema You see Chris Lema always resonated with me, even before I first met him in person on a call when we hired him for some 1-on-1 consulting. I think the main reason I feel virtually simpatico with him is the strategy strength we share. In a popular strength finder test, I tested out at just about a true strategist from the strengths perspective. I feel we share that strategic element at a deep level. Like Karim Marucchi says, “People don’t fully grasp how strategic Chris (Lema) is. I love that about him and count on it all the time.” You know the other thing I relate to Chris on is the obsession with elearning, memberships, selling online courses, business leadership, and the quest for the perfect tools to serve these ends. When I first noticed Chris online and how obsessed he was on these topics, I felt a little less lonely in the world. It’s comforting when you discover a fellow person for the first time in a micro-niche who shares not only your passion, but also a similar intensity level. My obsession (with the help of a great team) evolved into LifterLMS. It’s a powerful WordPress LMS plugin that makes it easy to create, sell and protect engaging online courses. The main problems it solves are two-fold.  First LifterLMS makes it so you don’t have to string together a frankenstein of plugins to make a paid online course website with WordPress. Second we’ve taken our experience from Infusionsoft and other marketing automation work to solve what we call “the dirty little secret of membership sites” through built in engagement tools. I’m so obsessed with democratizing online education with WordPress, I even created a podcast with my business partner Joshua Millage specifically for the WordPress LMS niche called LMScast. As …

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Niche Online Education Platforms Having a specific subject matter expertise is not the only way to approach building your online course or LMS (learning management system) platform. If you have more of a publisher’s mindset, you may want to start with a niche that has a solid market size and demand behind it. Perhaps you’re not planning on teaching on your platform at all. Rather you’re building an online school or learning management system for others to teach inside of. The Hedgehog Concept for your Learning Management System Niche Wether you are more of a subject matter expert or online education publisher style entrepreneur, Jim Collins’ classic hedgehog strategy is important to consider as you evaluate your niche. Your niche needs to have an overlap of these 3 things: Passion What can you or your platform be the best in the world at What drives your economic engine (Profit per x) Success Leaves Clues Smart entrepreneurs know how to leverage the depth of already existing knowledge. If we’re looking at niches, we can leverage the existing category architecture at Amazon’s bestsellers for books: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ Arts & Photography Biographies and Memoirs Business & Money Calendars Children’s Books Christian Books & Bibles Comics and Graphic Novels Computers & Technology Cookbooks, Food & Wine Crafts, Hobbies, and Home Education & Teaching Engineering & Transportation Gay & Lesbian Health, Fitness & Dieting History Humor & Entertainment Law Literature & Fiction Medical Books Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Parenting & Relationships Politics & Social Science Reference Religion & Spirituality Science & Math Science Fiction & Fantasy Self Help Sports & Outdoors Teens Travel This category structure at Amazon, reveals some organization around the demand for what the world’s population is looking for in terms of knowledge and/or entertainment. This is fertile ground for online courses. Now the categories are way to general by themselves. We need to go out the long tail a bit in these parent categories to find some true niches. I’m going to provide some long tail niche online courses/ learning management system platform ideas inside each category. Profitable Niche Ideas for Online Courses Arts & Photography Boudoir Photography Selfie Photography Grafitti Art Biographies and Memoirs Startup Biography Writing Career Development How to Write Your Own Memoir Condensed Biographies and Key Takeaway Lessons for Entrepreneurs Business & Money Black Swan Investing Strategy Leadership and Management for Remote Teams Crowdfunding for Education Entrepreneurs Extreme Frugality Calendars Calendar Entrepreneurship for Mass Distribution Calendars for Radical Social Change Calendar Entrepreneurship for Healthy Body Transformations Children’s Books Children’s Book Entrepreneurship for Unschoolers The Parent – Child Book CoCreation Method Children’s Book Entrepreneurship to Fight Nature Deficit Disorder Christian Books & Bibles Modern Church Leadership Spiritual but Not Religious Learning from Saints Comics and Graphic Novels Manga Art New Superhero Creation Graphic Novels Story Development Computers & Technology Raspberry Pi projects for kids WordPress Application Development Digital Nomad Freelance Career Development Integrated User Experience Design Cookbooks, Food & Wine Vegan Athlete Cooking and Nutrition Detox, Juice Cleanse, Water Fasting Organic Distillery Local Food Based on Region Crafts, Hobbies, and Home Drones Micro Farming Homebuilding Basics for Young Adults Tiny House Deign Education & Teaching Unschooling World Schooling Interdisciplinary Learning Track Design Engineering & Transportation Bicycle Only Lifestyle 3-D Printing Zero Carbon Home Design Gay & Lesbian Gay & Lesbian Parenting Gay & Lesbian Travel Entrepreneurship Gay & Lesbian Philosophy Health, Fitness & Dieting Raw Vegan Lifestyle Ultra Endurance Work from Home Healthy Lifestyle History Recent Startup History Exponential Technology History Obesity and Diabetes History Social Media History Humor & Entertainment Magic Tricks Low Budget Movie Making with iPhone Only How to …

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Course Tracks Many LifterLMS customers have been asking for an easy way to create online certification programs with their WordPress LMS. Today we released the ability to create course tracks and trigger engagements off of the completion of the group of courses in that track. The certificate engagement triggered off of a completion of a course track allows you to deliver 1 certificate for multiple courses. The same course can be included in multiple tracks too if that’s what you need in your use case. Keep an eye on our podcast, LMScast, where will be releasing a new episode about creating online certification programs. In this video, we give you a tour of the new LifterLMS track feature. Course Reviews We’re also pleased to announce the arrival of LifterLMS reviews functionality for your courses. This feature allows your users to leave reviews on courses. Course reviews or testimonials are a powerful part of marketing and selling online courses. Most of us gravitate to reviews, like when shopping on Amazon. Reviews strongly inform our buying decision at a conscious and subconscious level. Now you can add automated review functionality to your course pages. See how it works in this video: Course Categories This is way cooler than you think. You can now insert courses in any content on a page by category using the LifterLMS shortcode functionality. This would be super helpful if you want to go pretty custom on your LMS homepage design and layout. Create whatever layout and add any content, and then drop in only the courses you want to show up by category. LifterLMS Version 1.3.0 and 1.3.1 are live! Here’s a complete list of all the innovations that happened in today’s release. Improved popover behavior in course creation. BugFixing. Prevent multiple lesson and section form submission Fixed typos at backend quiz page Fixed check for update bug when plugin isn’t properly activated. Bug Fixing, quiz post type should show author metabox Added course category filter to lifter_lms shortcode Bug Fixing, typo in [lifterlms_course_progess shortcode] BugFixing, Analytics shouldn’t fetch students meta info from users were deleted. Adds in basic review functionality Updates plugin-updater to remedy PHP conflicts Fixes date bug in Analytics Cleans up jQuery console messages Adds in course tracks P.S. Have you heard about the LifterLMS Giveaway?

Introducing the New LifterLMS Course Builder Why was the Improved Course Builder the Most Recent Feature? We decided to develop the new course builder interface because that’s what our existing customers were most asking for. They wanted to make the process of building a course even easier and more intuitive. They wanted to more easily see and adjust their courses and all their elements on one master course page. They wanted to be able to quickly create lessons and add them to courses on the fly. At LifterLMS we value what our customers and prospective customers are asking for. As we detect trends in requests received in the forums or by email, we plan new features and optimizations, and that’s how we develop our WordPress LMS plugin Product Roadmap. For those of you who are wondering what’s just about to roll out next, it’s some upgrades to the Infusionsoft extension and the Stripe extension. The Stripe extension will allow you to accept one time and/or recurring payments by credit card for your online courses and memberships. We’ll let you know when this launches if you’re on the mailing list. If you’re not a customer or on the mailing list, keep an eye on the Store. One Way to Build a Course with WordPress and LifterLMS’s New Course Builder Building an online course doesn’t have to be complicated. With LifterLMS, here is a simple way to build a course quickly: Come up with a course idea Log into your WordPress site, go into the LifterLMS area, create a new course, and give it a working title From that same screen invent your sections and lesson titles on the fly Just add content Creating the first version of your online course can really be that simple. Of course the goal is to create high value impactful courses, so you’ll really want to dig into the Engagement features of LifterLMS to make your training high impact. Lesson content is of course critical to your success as an education entrepreneur, so make sure you make multimedia lesson content that your market is hungry for and truly life changing. If you are not already a LifterLMS customer, and are ready to join our community of education entrepreneurs, you can get LifterLMS here. Enjoy the new LifterLMS course builder, and let us know what you think about it in the comments below.

The team at LifterLMS reached out to thought leaders from around the internet to weigh in on what you should consider when creating your online course. Avoid these mistakes … John Lee Dumas “Hey, this is John Lee Dumas the founder and host of EntrepreneurOnFire, and I want to share with you today the number one mistake to avoid when creating an online course. And you better believe I have made this mistake more than once, I’m a little ashamed to admit. Make sure that you have a starving audience for that online course. The only way that you can verify that the audience is starving is if they actually pull out their wallet and pay for a preview version of that course, or locking down early access to that course, or getting a discount for the future release of that course. If people are not willing to do that, then your audience is not starving enough to purchase in the quantities that you’re going to want them to when the course is actually created. So for both Podcasters’ Paradise and Webinar on Fire, we held live webinars explaining what the course would be when we released it down the road, and if you want to be an early bird, you can lock it in right now. And guess what? You’ll get a great discount to boot. Those presales ensured that we had a starving audience so that when we put our heads down for the next 30 to 45 days to create the content, we knew that there were dollars at the end of that road for our hard work. For the time, effort, and energy we were putting in. So get that starving audience, get presales by actually talking to your avatars, that perfect client, and having them pull out their wallets and pay for something that hasn’t been created yet. It’s a tough ask, but it’s a lot tougher to flop and to get no sales. Believe me, I’ve been there, done that. Do this, and you’ll be prepared to ignite!” John Lee Dumas is the founder and host of EntrepreneurOnFire, a podcast providing daily interviews with today’s most successful and inspiring entrepreneurs. He’s also the founder of Podcasters’ Paradise and WebinarOnFire. Yaro Starak “The number one mistake I see when creating a course is working hard to create a program upfront, without knowing whether there are any people who want to buy it. In particular I find that course teachers are good at teaching, and not marketing, hence they are not aware of the best message to use to present their course to the audience. Sometimes just tweaking the message can make all the differences between no sales and a profitable course.” Yaro Starak is the author of the Blog Profits Blueprint and founder of the Entrepreneurs-Journey.com blog. He began blogging over ten years ago and has mentored thousands of other experts, authors, coaches, consultants, speakers and trainers on how to turn their expertise into a profitable online business. Andrew Warner “The big mistake is not asking potential customers what they want to learn before you create. After I recorded my 1,000th interview, I decided to create a course on how to build an interview-based business. From the questions I read online, I assumed the biggest issue people had was figuring out how to record. You know, the right mic, software, etc. When I checked with my audience, they told me that they know that stuff, or could Google it, but what they were really struggling with is how to make an interview interesting. Until I asked them, I …

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Leading into the mid February release of LifterLMSWe’re excited to share with you what we’re working on with course analytics, student analytics, and student management.

We’re also finalizing our Infusionsoft integration.