 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Joe Casabona. I have been tasked with making sure we don't fall asleep from a post lunch coma. Myself included. If I fall asleep up here, that's okay. I just ate too much at lunch. So let's talk about animation for a second. How many of you have heard of the podcast drawn the story of animation? Cool. A couple of you. This is one of my favorite new podcasts. It's by the how stuff works people and they talk about everything that goes into creating cartoons, the history, the techniques now, and everything that people are doing from voice acting to sound effects. I love this podcast because I am obsessed with the life of Walt Disney and Walt Disney World. If you know me, if you've seen me speak before, you will know that I reference Disney a lot. And today happens to be the day that Toy Story Land opens up at Walt Disney World. So I figured that this would be a nice homage to that as well. So Walt Disney did a lot of things to pioneer techniques in animation. Steamboat Willie, a famous Mickey Mouse cartoon, was the first to have synchronized sound. And the way they did that was by using a metronome to keep time throughout the cartoon, and then they marked the beat. And then when the beat hit the right count, they would add sound effects, which is crazy interesting. I actually linked to the source of that on the bottom. There's like a whole white paper about it if you are as big of a nerd as I am. The multi-plane camera is something that Walt Disney and his animators came up with to give cartoons, animated films, that 3D effect. So essentially, I actually have a picture of that one. You have these, a camera at the top, and then multiple areas for those like transparent color sheets, they get painted on, and then you move them at different speeds and up and down, and it gives a 2D animated movie a 3D effect. Walt Disney came up with that. He also insisted on all of his animated films being in Technicolor, even though most people had black and white TVs at the time, because he knew that people would eventually get color TVs. And so he didn't want to have to go back and repaint all of his black and white cartoons. Instead, he just insisted that even though it costed a lot more, they were going to do that right from the start. That was a new tool that he could use to his advantage. And then finally, computer animation, right? Pixar, if they weren't the first, which is debated, they definitely pioneered computer animation with Toy Story. And with every new Pixar movie, there's new tech. So with Frozen, they added new tech to figure out how to make snowflakes look real. With Tangled, they pioneered new tech for the way that Rapunzel's hair moved. And a lot of really cool things. Actually, with Monsters University, they did some really cool things with lighting. So these are tools that were pioneered by Walt Disney and the Walt Disney Company for animation. Walt Disney didn't settle on the tools that he had. He could have easily just done what everybody else was doing, and he could have made status quo animation films, but he didn't. He believed that animation was bigger than just a few cartoons before a feature-length film. And then he made Snow White, which was a feature-length film, right? So I kind of felt the same way. WordPress has... I just equated myself to Walt Disney. That's okay. WordPress has so many tools at my disposal. I'm a developer. I can actually build tools for WordPress if I want. Why am I going to settle with some of the things that I have? So I want to tell you about a website that I used to sell my online courses called Creator Courses. Creator Courses is something that I started... It's like first phase three years ago with a website called WP in one month. That's a bad name for a lot of reasons. But I decided this year to revamp it and actually turn it into a real business and rename the business and make it a thing that would support me and my family. About a year ago, I went out on my own full-time self-employed. I wanted to make sure I was doing things right. And when I started WP in one month three years ago, I thought I was going to do live-in-person classes. So I just had a paypal form and then I was going to do webinars. So I'm like, all right, well, I need registration. And then I was like, okay, I'll do online courses. And I added an LMS, Learn Dash to WordPress, and then I added WooCommerce. And I was like, this seems overkill. Learn Dash can actually accept payments with PayPal or Stripe. And I went back and forth. Why am I going to add a whole e-commerce portion and a bunch of overhead when I just want to sell online courses? Well, I decided if the title of this talk didn't spoil it for you, I decided to stick with WooCommerce for e-commerce on top of Learn Dash. And today I'm going to tell you why. So first of all, Creative Courses, like I said, is powered by Learn Dash, a fully featured LMS that works with WordPress. It is fantastic. I'm a big fan of it. I've been using it for a few years now. And just every release it gets better, and I'm a big fan of the tool. It does everything I need to create engaging online courses. That's the most important part. I want to be able to create engaging online courses. It also does everything I need, strictly speaking, to sell those courses for money. So with Just Learn Dash, I can set up a closed course that you have to pay to get access to. So why am I adding an e-commerce component? Well, I'm glad you asked. It's because I wanted more. Learn Dash gives me the ability to sell courses. I want the ability to understand and better sell to my customers. So, yes, I have students taking courses. I know when they complete the course. I know when they're halfway through the course. I know what other courses they've bought. But I want to be able to understand better their entire purchase journey. So e-commerce gives me that. Chris Lemma gave me some fantastic advice last October, and he said, understand your customers' intent. That's not something that I was doing until this year. And it has been a lot better for me to understand why they're coming to my site, why they're looking at my courses, why maybe they didn't buy, and why they did buy. So what can an e-commerce component give me to help me understand my audience? So first of all, I use WooCommerce. I'm using WooCommerce because it is free and because it integrates with a lot of stuff. So I just said that. It's free. It works with LearnDash so I can create a product in WooCommerce and connect it to a LearnDash course. It allows for new features I want in the future, like memberships. It allows me to sell memberships and subscriptions really easily with some other really cool tools that are built for WooCommerce. And there are deep extensions with other products as well. I have a little asterisk. I'm going to talk about those other products that it has deep integrations, deep extensions with. There are also some features that just get added to my online courses right out of the box just with LearnDash, like related products and upsells. I can do that very easily with WooCommerce products. I categorize them the right way. I can directly associate other products with the product. And then I can display those related products. I can get upsells and say, hey, if you're purchasing this, maybe also purchase this. I could do other products besides courses. So if I want to sell an e-book or a t-shirt, maybe not a t-shirt, if I want to sell an e-book or some other thing, maybe just a video, that's not a course, I can do that with WooCommerce. And it gives me the ability to add coupons. So I create all sorts of coupons for everything, for work camps I speak at, for online events I do, for cart abandonment, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And I can do that all with WooCommerce right out of the box. So let's talk about the tools that I want, the ones that I need. Just like Walt Disney needed a multi-plane camera, there are a couple of tools that I needed to really understand my customers. Like better stats for the e-commerce part of it. Again, LearnDash has stats for how many people are taking the course, how many people have completed the course, how many people are some percentages of the way through and what they're doing and everything like that. Assignments, they submit it if they have assignments. But I want, how many people are visiting the product page and how many people are purchasing the first time they visit? How many people are purchasing the third time they visit? If they bought more than one product, how much time goes between purchasing the first and the second and the third? Understanding those things allows me to more effectively market to my audience. So that's better stats I use Metric. Abandoned cart emails. Maybe you guys have gotten these before, you go, you put something in your cart and then you're like, I don't know, I'm not ready to make that purchase or maybe I don't need that anymore. And then the next day you get an email that says like, hey, I noticed that you were hanging out on my site, you put something in the cart, buy that. So I wanted to be able to do that too because cart recovery, you can recover, I think it's something like 30% of revenue, just by adding abandoned cart emails. I wanted to add an affiliate program. So I wanted other people to help me market and I wanted to help those people make money. So students who are taking my course can register for the affiliate program. If they like the course, they can tell other people to take the course. Freelancers who take my course or my courses who then want to train their clients can send their clients an affiliate link and say, hey, I built you a site using this thing, register for this course and here's the training for you and they get a kickback. And then finally I want a link to ConvertKit, which now you can actually do with LearnDash, like there's an extension for LearnDash to do that. But with ConvertKit I can get a full picture, build my mailing list and again, better understand my customers. That's what all of this is about. So I'm going to talk about a few tools. The first is Metric, which I kind of just talked about. This is better stats for WooCommerce. How many of you use WooCommerce? How many of you just, the stats leave you wanting more? Yeah, so I live in Pennsylvania and in Pennsylvania, even if you sell a digital product to somebody else in your state, you have to tax that. You have to charge sales tax. More accurately, you are going to get charged sales tax. So usually I'm going to add that cost on top. And actually the Supreme Court just ruled that states can now charge sales tax for people outside the state. So you live in the great state of Michigan, if you buy my online course, Michigan can decide that I have to pay Michigan state tax for state sales tax. Anyway, I want to do things the right way. I want to do things by the book. I don't want the IRS to come knocking on my door. And I thought, hey, WooCommerce probably has a way for me to see my sales by state. One would think, one would think. It doesn't, or it doesn't have an easy way to do that. So I was like, okay, so I can dig into the database. I have the ability to do that. Why would I want to do that? Instead I just got Metric. So that was just one thing. I was like, Metric is going to make this job a lot easier for me. I can now sort sales by state. But Metric does a whole lot more. I should have blurred out probably part of this screenshot. It tells me recent orders. It tells me how much I've made in some quarter. It tells me what coupons are used and what people are clicking on and all sorts of other stuff. And now I can understand my customers better. And I could say, hey, again, it takes people 14 days from the time they first see my course to the time they purchase. What can I do in those 14 days to expedite the sale? Or maybe I can use the next 14-day cycle to sell them something else that will be really helpful. That's what Metric does for me. And it's well worth the money. I think it's like 20 bucks a month to start. Or you can pay like 200 bucks a year for it. And you know what? That 200 bucks a year means I don't have to go digging through my database for stats that I need or want. And presumably I could use that information to make that money back very quickly. Then there's Jilt. So Jilt is abandoned cart email stuff. You, like I said before, you go to a website. You put something in the cart. You don't buy it. Later you get an email saying, hey, you should buy this. So I picked up Jilt. Jilt is free up to, I think, 25 recovered orders. And then it's like, I think, 20 bucks a month after that or something like that. It's some preposterously low number based on what they save you. So I'm going through a few changes with my site right now. I'm revamping a couple of courses. But they've been able to recover about 10% of the revenue I lost. That's 150 bucks that I got for free because I don't pay for Jilt yet. So it's just found money. And what it does is you can set up a sequence and you can say, an hour after the abandoned cart, email them. A day after the abandoned cart, email again. Three days after the abandoned cart, email them and say, hey, you win. I want you to buy this. Here's a coupon so you get some money off. So that's the thing. If you go to my website today and you want to buy one of my courses, just put it in your cart and leave it there for three days and you'll get 15% off just for waiting three days. But this is a great tool because now, again, I can understand more of my customer's journey. How many people are putting it in the cart but not buying it? Why aren't they doing that? What's giving them their buyers remorse? How many people come back? I also encourage everybody to respond to those emails. And I say, hey, I get it if you don't want to buy this. Can you tell me why? I'm really interested. Is there something I can do to make you buy it or to get you to convince you that it's worth the money? So that way I can communicate better with my customers or my potential customers, right? So that is jilt, big fan of jilt. Affiliate WP is a plugin for WordPress that integrates with WooCommerce and Edd and a few other things. And what that does is it allows people to apply for your website to be an affiliate. They get an affiliate code. When they refer people to your website and they make a purchase, you can give them some percentage of the purchase. So there are, I have a report, how much money has this person referred to me and I just pay them out with PayPal very easily. The nice, one of the nice things about Affiliate WP is it's a one-time, it's like a one-time fee if you buy the lifetime thing. So I think I paid 500 bucks for the lifetime. That's like that. And then all of the extensions. And I only have to pay for that once, right? So if Affiliate WP eventually makes me 500 bucks, it's made its money back, right? Because now I have people promoting my courses who maybe otherwise wouldn't have. Who say like, oh yeah, this is a great course. Let's click this link and buy it, okay? So it's kind of organic marketing. Now the thing that the plug-in doesn't give you but some of the things I've learned from using Affiliate WP is like communicate with your affiliates. Let them know like when stuff is coming out. How many people of you are part of any affiliate program? How many of you feel that the affiliate program communicates well with you? Okay, a couple, maybe a little bit. Most affiliate programs that I'm a part of don't, right? StudioPress, they do a really nice job. LiquidWeb, they do a really nice job. I actually know the affiliate manager and I know that she does a fantastic job. I don't do a great job yet. I'm really trying to be better about it. I have like all of my affiliates in a mailing list and I've now made it part of my workflow and I update a course to email them and say, hey, I've updated this. Here's some graphics, here's some language you can use. Those things are all really helpful. Here's some talking points if you want to write a blog post about it. Those are some of the things that you can do to help your affiliates and those are the things that I'm trying to do to help my affiliates. But this tool integrates very well with WooCommerce or EDD or some other e-commerce solutions. And then the last thing is ConvertKit. I was using MailChimp until last October. I didn't understand anything my mailing list was doing. I didn't really know who they were because you can't really segment lists or you can't really segment people based on actions in MailChimp. What I can do now is if a subscriber hits a page on my e-commerce site, I can tag them as interested in the course. And then maybe a month later I say, hey, looks like you've expressed interest in this. They didn't put it in their cart, but I've associated an email address with their interest. Or maybe, and this is better, they purchased the course. Now I can tag them as purchased the course and when I send out a marketing blast saying, hey, there's a mega sale on this, get it for cheaper than everybody's ever gotten it or anybody's ever gotten it, they don't get that email. Because then they'll be like, hey, what's the deal? I paid full price for this. Or maybe better, they don't get an email asking them to buy it again. How many of you get those emails? Hey, this thing's on sale today. I bought this last week. I don't need this email because I have it. And then, again, the one-two punch of that with learn-dash, I can tag when people complete a course and I can say, hey, you've completed this course. Go to the next one. Take it to the next level. And that's what ConvertKit does for me. Again, I'm a really big fan of ConvertKit because I understand my subscribers better than I ever have and I've been able to effectively market to them. Everybody, the best or biggest piece of advice I often get from people is it's easier to sell to current customers than new customers, right? If I keep pushing out courses, I'm going to market to them first. My current customers will say, hey, you've taken this course. I think you'd really like this course as well. And because you're a current student, I'm going to give you this discount if you buy it today. They already trust me and they like my teaching style. So putting it all together, I just threw out a bunch of tools and how I kind of use them and here's what I do when I create a course now. First of all, when I set up the site, I enabled Jilt, Metric and Affiliate WP. I create a course. I create a product for the course and I connect them. Then I set up ConvertKit to tag students who look at, buy or complete the course. And now with all of this, I can fully understand my students. This allows me to track intent, people who are considering the course, as well as actions, people who have purchased the course, people who have created or completed the course. And I can now market more effectively. So that's what I've got. My name's Joe Casabona. I'm an educator, a developer and a podcaster. You can find me at J.Casabona on most social networks and if you wait like 15 minutes after this talk, Casabona.org slash WCGR18 will have the slides and some other resources for you. Thanks so much. Do you guys have any questions? Yes. Yes, so I am, so there's a way, so Learn Dash has a WooCommerce extension and what I do is I close the course so that people can't hit the courses purchase page and instead they purchase the product. And by doing that, I can track everything in MetaRick. I can tag them through ConvertKit and I can get kind of better stats on my overall sales. Yes, that's exactly right. So yeah, what they do is they purchase through WooCommerce. The Learn Dash for WooCommerce extension says, oh, somebody purchased this product which is associated with this course. Give them access to the course. Yeah, that's pretty nifty. Learn Dash also has that with some of my other features like I use BBPress, yeah, I use BBPress for forums so that students can interact there. And it's the same thing. Learn Dash connects to BBPress and says, if somebody has access to this course they also have access to this forum. Any other questions? Hopefully I kept everybody awake enough post lunch. All right, great, thanks so much. We're out a little bit early which is generally how I run my college courses as well. If you do have any questions, I will be around the rest of the day or you can tweet me and ask me questions or anything like that. Thanks so much everybody, yes. Oh, back one slide, sure thing. Two slides, this one, thank you. I should also say that these slides will be available on that link but I have an obsession with fountain pens and I like writing stuff down.