 I have never been introduced at a conference where I do not understand what they just said about me. I have no clue if what he said was nice, or like, hey, would you all be nice to this guy, right? Like, you just don't know. Well, for those of you that don't know who I am, my name's Chris Lama, and I think I heard San Diego, so you likely know that I came from San Diego, California, Southern California. It's probably not the farthest that you could go to a work camp, but it is the most delightful reason to leave San Diego. We have a beautiful place and city that we live in, and yet, we spent yesterday here, my wife and I, in Puerto, and you have a beautiful city. The river, all the shots, the food. I ate more food than I've eaten in the last week just yesterday. So, and I eat a lot, so that's saying something. So thank you so much for having me here. This morning, what I wanna do is talk to you about root commerce and building online courses. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, we good to go? All right, let's do it. So when we talk about online courses, right, at the core, what are we talking about, right? What is it that we're thinking about? Now, if you are a freelancer, if you are a developer, if you work in an agency, someone will come to you and say, I wanna build a course. And how successful you are at building it is gonna be predicated on how many questions you asked up front. I was telling the guys in the back this morning, I have a friend of mine who built for himself, just he only had one or two courses. He built his entire system on Senseit, this is several years ago, right? I don't know if you know that, it was a plug-in built by RooThemes, right? Now it's owned by Automatic. He built it on Senseit and it was great. And then eight months later, after having pretty good success, he said, oh, I need this other feature. And I said, you're never gonna get that from Senseit. So he replatformed everything to use WP coursework. Now he was using WP coursework and that went great for eight months. And after eight months, he came to me and said, hey, I need these other features. I said, WP coursework will never do that. He said, all right, so what do I do guys? Well, you're gonna probably want a little learn-dash. So he moved to learn-dash, right? Replatformed everything again, use that for about eight months. And I said, I mean, I wanna be able to trigger these other emails, I wanna do these other things. And I said, well, you may wanna look at Lyft or LMS. And so he replatformed again. So lo and behold, as you can imagine, a few months ago, he and I were talking and he said, I need this as it stopped talking. Go get Thinkific or Teachable, just go somewhere hosted, drop it all there and stop writing code. Because you're spending a lot of time building and rebuilding and rebuilding and rebuilding your platform. And the thing is, that's his own sign. The guy's made a million dollars or more in revenue so he can afford to waste his time on that. But most of us, when we're building a platform for other people, we're only gonna get paid once. Right, if that customer comes, and this never happens to you, okay? But there are other people that have customers that show up two weeks before the end of a project and say, you know, I was thinking I would also like this other feature. And you're like, this plugin that I chose is not gonna do that. We're gonna have to redo everything. And the customer's like, oh, okay, whatever you need to do. You're like, no, no, you're gonna have to pay me more. No, I'm not paying, I pay for what I want, right? So all of it is predicated on the kind of questions you ask. And you can see here a whole bunch of different features, right? Do you need to support course pre-rex? Course pre-rex is the notion of being able to say you cannot use this course, you cannot subscribe to this course if you haven't done this other thing, taken this other course. That's a course pre-rex, right? You might say, okay, I need to be able to embed audio or video. You go, great, what about question types, right? When you're gonna create a quiz, can you support different kinds of questions? What about passing scores and retakes? The notion that if they don't get a certain score on that quiz, they can take the quiz again, or, right, they can't, depending on if you support retakes. Engagement, gamification, right? Letting people have that little green check mark, right, that says you passed this lesson, go to the next lesson, right? Or you passed this quiz, now you can go to the next lesson. Progress emails, right? Those emails that get triggered when you finish one thing and then we send you an email that says, hey, good job finishing that. Now get started with this next one. Oh my gosh, when you're building an online course, you can do, and then we got lesson timers and drip release, right, where you're doing sequential release of content, question timers, right? You go, what's a question timer and how is it different than a lesson timer? Well, again, none of you have ever done this, but some of us, right, they're in California and in the United States, right? Sometimes we drive too fast. Sometimes. And then we get a ticket. The policeman, when he doesn't shoot you, gives you a ticket. So you have the ticket and now you have to go to driver's school. But instead of going to a physical building, they now let you watch online. And the first time, I guess I'm divulging more than I want to, the first time I had to do that, right? Well, they didn't know anything about technology, so I basically scrolled to the end of the video and then I was done. I was done with an hour video in about one minute. And then I take quiz, take quiz, pass course, done, I'm out, right? So then smart people started building lesson timers. You must stay on this page for an hour or for 58 minutes, even though the video is 60 minutes, and you go, oh, I hate web developers, right? Because now I gotta wait, but that's what a lesson timer is. A question timer is when you're taking a quiz and they're like, you only have this many minutes before you have to go to the next question, right? If you don't know the answer, tough, moving on. And you go, certificates, course assignments, scheduled release, and completion tracking. There's a whole bunch of stuff. And this morning, I'm not gonna spend all my time talking about every one of these features and all the plugins and how those map. I have another presentation. You can go find that online at Slideshare and go, oh, I literally, I show you all the features and then I show you which plugins do which features. So if you're trying to figure that out for yourself, for a customer, that's a different presentation, right? Today, what I wanna talk to you about is the fact that if we're trying to build something where people can make money online, selling their knowledge, you really only need these two things. Video embeds, completion certification tracking. That's it. You go, wait, what about all that other stuff? It's noise for most of the customers you interact with who are trying to sell online knowledge. What they're talking about, even though you are like going ahead and you're thinking about, oh, you want this, you want this, you want this, you want this. Trust me, you can generate the same amount of revenue from a customer, building them a site that has two features rather than one that has 25 features. Because at the end of the day, what matters most, right, is that they get to sell their knowledge. And if you're building an online course, what matters for you is that you're selling your knowledge. And so you need, okay, I need to be able to present video and I need to be able to track how you're moving through things. So I want to tell you about three moments in my life where I had to reflect on whether or not I was making good life choices. There is a service called clarity.fm. If any of you have ever been there, right, it's clarity as in like get more clarity, clarity.fm. And the way the service works is entrepreneurs, predominantly, call, they go online and they see this whole directory of experts and then they schedule a phone call with an expert and they call a number and the expert calls a number and you're on at the same time and the system tracks how many minutes you stay on the line and then they charge the customer by the minute, right? So I, up until recently, I haven't checked, but up until recently I was the third most called expert in the network, right? And so I get a lot of phone calls, a lot of people to call and predominantly they call about membership and online learning, right? So I answer a lot of these questions. And so I got a call about two years ago from a guy who said, I've created 16 videos and I wanna turn it into an online membership or an online course, 16 years. I said, what are you doing with the videos today? He said, I burn into DVDs and I ship the DVDs out to customers. So I would like to stop doing that and just go online. And I said, okay. I said, what are your videos about? He says, well, I'm a barber, right? And I have created these videos that help other barbers learn how to cut hair. And I said, oh, okay. Yeah, that's cool. 16 videos to cut hair, right? He goes, yeah. Specifically, I do very special fades and other styles for African American male hair. Now, now you're speaking my language, right? Because if you can niche down, right? He would have only been better if he said, I teach people how to cut African American male hair for men under 40 who are right handed. And then I would have been like, yeah, right? If you can niche down, niche down because it makes it easy for everybody to know this is for me or this isn't for me, right? And I said, great, what answer? How popular is this? And he said, oh, I made a million dollars last year. I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where someone can answer one question, how popular is it, right? And in the same moment that he answered the question, he makes you reflect on all your life choices. I'm sorry, you recorded 16 videos and shipped them out on DVDs and you made a million dollars last year. I hate my life. What am I doing wrong? I gotta get into this business. He said, well, I can ship you 16, 16. I don't want your DVDs, man, right? But you know what he had? He had a system that all he needed to do was just put it online, protect it, and let people buy assets. And he went, okay, I got another guy with clarity, 12 video lessons. This time he had homework. I said, oh, how do you do the homework? He's like, oh, I just send an email. I said, okay, so you have video email? Yes. What do you do? I teach vocal lessons. What is this? Is that school? Okay. He said, I do it, I'm here in Manhattan. I do it in New York City and I do it for people who are trying out on Broadway to be Broadway stars. They're good at acting, they're good at dancing, they're not so good at singing. Do you mind if I ask you, how's it going, how well does this with how many people are walking in concurrently that I'd like to understand to help you make a suggestion about it? Well, it's pretty good, right? Over a million bars in revenue last year? I suck. I have not had one single year of a million bars in revenue, much less than a million bars in revenue from 12 videos. Right? There's another guy who created 50 videos. I respect him, because that's work, right? 50 videos. One of the first guys to build a, learning how to be a web developer from scratch. How do you know nothing? And then you become a web developer, right? Sold it on Udemy, and 50 lessons, 50 videos, most of the videos under five minutes, right? 50 of these videos, 2012 to 2015, generate a million bars a year off 50 videos. You go, wow. I gotta figure out what I can teach that will generate that kind of meaning, but what I do know is, when we're talking about an online system, right? I need to be able to do two things, right? Protect and present content, and help people understand how to progress. Because here's the thing, when we talk about buying, and you may have had this experience, how many of you have ever bought a book at a bookstore or Amazon? Doesn't matter how you bought it, right? You bought a book, right? Now, keep your hands up. Keep your hands up. You bought a book online or at a physical bookstore. Now, keep your hands up if you didn't read the book. It's amazing. I'm in a whole room of liars. Or psychopaths, right? Many of us have bought books we haven't read. And do you know why? From a neuroscience perspective, in your brain, the chemical release that happens when you make a purchase is virtually identical to the chemical release when you complete a book or a course. Anything about what that means, right? It means that you congratulate yourself for the purchase, even if you never read the book or watched the course. How many of you have bought an online course that you have not finished? See, it's a little bit more honesty now. You're starting to wake up. Yeah. Yeah, we all do. The release, the chemical release in our brains that says, oh my God, I'm so glad I finally bought that domain. I mean, none of you have that problem, right? You're like, oh, I bought that domain. I bought that video course. I bought that book. I bought, I bought, I bought. You're like, yeah, but what did you do with it? Yeah, I'm gonna get to that. I have a rule, I'll just give it to you for free, right? I have a rule that says if you buy a domain and then you do nothing with it for 365 days, I am not allowed to renew it. Why? Because for 365 days, I did nothing, right? So clearly, it's not gonna happen even if, of course, there's not gonna happen. The average rate that people complete an online course is less than 30%. You go, wow, that sucks. Which is why it's important when we're building online programs, right? Our goal has to not just be to protect and present content. Our goal also has to be to make sure we're tracking completion. So we can follow up with people and help them get over the finish line. Right? Another guy in the Wordpress space, right? The guy named Troy Dean has created a bunch of online material. And one of the things that Troy and I talked about a long time ago, one of the things that the key focus on is just completion, right? I think they're getting their students to complete their courses at a rate of 60% on them. That's double the average, right? You know, that's fantastic. More people will, because they got to the end and they learned something and they're able to actually have some mastery, they will come back and buy the second thing and the third thing and the fourth thing to keep you from them finishing. Does that make sense? So there are, and I mentioned this earlier, right? There's a whole bunch of different plugins, different ways. If you were building an online course on top of Wordpress, there's a bunch of different ways you could do it, right? WP Courseware, LyftOS, Sensei, WP Lunchbox, LearnDash. We're gonna talk about WooCommerce. That's the point today, is to show you how to do this in Canvas. And some of you are gonna say, yeah, but can't I use WooCommerce with these other plugins, right? And you go again. Yeah, you can, right? At the end of this presentation, I'll give you a link to a free online course for video lessons of how to do WooCommerce with WP Courseware, right? So you can see it and go, oh, that's another way to do it. Today, I'm gonna show you how to do it just with WooCommerce and one or two additional plugins, but not a learning plugin. And that begs the question, right? If you can use one of these guys, which are great, LearnDash is incredible, LyftOS is great, Dougi Courseware is great. If you can use those, why would you not use them? And it goes back to me telling you, every one of these plugins, while they have tons of features, are also opinionated about their features. This is the way to do it. And it would be awesome if all our customers have the same opinions. They don't. Most of our customers don't even have opinions. They just have ideas. And many of those ideas, after they have other ideas and some of their new ideas are exactly in the opposite direction of their earlier ideas, and yet they have no additional budget ideas. So in that scenario, I try and restrict the kinds of plugins I'm going to use that will lock me into a particular approach that means later on I have to do a lot more. So what we're gonna do is walk through a very simple approach today so that you go, oh, okay, that works, I can do that, I can do that, you can do that. And if we have to make some modifications, I'll show you how I do it, right? But before we do that, right? I wanna talk about the design of your course, right? If you're creating a course for someone else, or if you're creating something for yourself, I wanna talk about the design, because here's the thing we call, we call pricey, right? Here's the mistake many of us make. We think that we need to focus on the mechanics, the specifics, the how-to's, right? How to click through and do each of the steps. And if you're an engineer, right? You've already gone through all the other reasons in the astronauts for why you're gonna do it. And when you go looking, you're like, let me just find how to do this. I just need to get to the how part. Most customers need more than half, right? So don't just focus on how, focus on why. Why do we do this? Why do, I have yet to show you what we're gonna do in the commerce. Most of what I've been doing is talking to you about why, why to do this, why not to do that, why to use this, and why not to do that. The whys are incredibly important because they help you stand out. They help anchor you as an expert or with expertise. They help you if you're working with a customer and they help your customer working with their audience to know, ah, this is part of production. Now, this is why we're doing what we're doing, right? Not just this is how to do it, does that make sense? It didn't, does it make sense? It didn't, awesome, all right. All right, so one more last thing. If you're doing this for yourself, if you have, if you've developed new knowledge and you wanna present that knowledge to the world, right? I wanna tell you that most of us do this backwards. Most of us start with number three. Let's build our website, build our online learning course. Then let's put our content into it and then let's go build the community. That's exactly the opposite of the way to do it, right? The right way to do it, build an audience, build a community, build a group of people who are begging you to create content, build the content, get the feedback of the content, work with customers, work with prospects, help refine your content and then package it into a course. Packaging into the course is the last step. I have, over the course of the last, I don't know, it's 13 years that I've been using WordPress, I have created a whole bunch of content for this one.com. I've written e-books on a bunch of different things. I've created online courses, I've done all sorts of stuff, right? Almost everything that I've presented, almost everything I create, comes after I've been doing it with people. I want to make sure you're clear of that, right? Almost every sentence that I have used in this talk so far has been tested with other people. Every story, every notion, every strategy, every approach has been born out of conversation, communication, community interactions so that I understand what people are thinking about, what questions they have, what they're working through. By the time it comes out in presented formats, I know what kinds of questions you might have and then I go and try and answer them before I use the next piece. All of that is done. Many of us try to just jump straight into, let me just produce the content, let me produce the site itself and push it out and then we're wondering how come no one's boning? How come this didn't hit the sales I wanted? I can't tell you the number of friends I have who say, I'm launching a new course and great how to go and at the end of like three months and I've watched Facebook ads and I've watched Twitter and I've watched all their emails coming to me and all their friends and our friends have all emailed those emails out. We're all said and done, three months later, I'm like, how many did you sell? Well, it wasn't as good as I wanted. What does that mean? 12, 12, you sold 12 seats and that's 50 bucks, right? That's 600 bucks, 600 US, right? 600 US, that's enough to motivate you to get them to start working on anything. Why would you do it for a second? Well, I thought it would be a lot more. But did you test it? Did you work in the construct of a community of group of people? Did you work it through so that you knew exactly what their challenges were? What they were asking? Not looking in your head, but what they need, right? Did you skip over the wine and straight to the hour and realize that most people were back on the line before they were about to the hour? So we gotta get the order right. Does that make sense? Awesome. Okay, so what we're gonna do today, what I'm gonna try and do, right, is I'm gonna try and do some things by showing you some stuff live, right, from our computer, go through that everything doesn't fall apart. And I'm gonna show you with just a little plug-in. And by the way, I know some of you are taking pictures of the slides. I'll also show you where all the slides are, right? So you can have the slides. They're already posted online, right? But I'm gonna use WooCommerce. I'm going to use my favorite WooCommerce extension, which is called Memberships, from a company called Skyverge. I'm also gonna use a little plug-in most people have never heard of, although it'd be complete, but I'll call Jarvis and back over. And then I'm gonna use the Astra theme. It is a free theme. It's also pretty darn fast. My friends and I over at Liquid Web evaluated 50 different WooCommerce themes. And Astra was the fastest of them all, even faster than Skorpa. So that's my kind of default when I'm playing this stuff. So I'm gonna show you how this all works together. That make sense, right? But I wanna have that one last thing. I know some of you are like, when is he gonna get to the keyboard? But I wanna take one last thing. You're gonna see that in my sample here, as much as I wanted to, right? I really wanted to create the entire course for you to watch as we do this. That it's all about cutting and lighting cigars. Because I feel like you need them, right? But that would've been too difficult to do and not light up the cigar while I was doing it. And then sprinklers and then it would be a mess. And so we just said, let's skip all that. So I'm gonna show you a little course I just created, right, on Facebook ads. And one thing you're gonna notice, none of the videos in this course are my own. Turns out there's as much value in knowing how to develop curriculum as there is in knowing all the content. If you know what questions should be answered in what order, then you go online and find videos that match those curriculum sets and put them in. And you can create your own courses with content you didn't even create. Does that make sense? It's not illegal. It's not wrong. All of those, of course, all those videos are out there on YouTube with it with you. The question is, do you have a way of structuring the why before the how? So you're gonna see a sample portion of that I created. I didn't create any of the content. I created the curriculum behind the content. Does that make sense? All right, let's get into the demo. Now you know this, right? You know that the moment we go to a live screen that there's just a good chance all this is gonna break and go wrong, right? I don't have to tell you that. You guys are experts at this. By the way, I told you that I was sharing, oh, now I'm not seeing my screen. All right, let's put a Mary display. Because this is VGA, so we're gonna have a lot of fun there. All right. Slideshare.net, if you wanna see these slides, there are slideshare.net, slash. C is in Chris, F is in Frank, lemma, L-E-M is in Mary A, right? So if you go to slideshare.net, slash, C-F-O-M-O, the very first presentation there is gonna be V-slot. That makes sense everyone? You got it? Okay. So now you're seeing my screen, right? So this is the screen, this is the homepage for the site. You'll see that it's already showing me the mobile piece because of my display. I don't think there's, does that help at all? Not really, okay. So this is a local environment, right? My local computer, and it's wcportard.local. It's on my box, it's on my, you're gonna be able to hit it. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come in here and I'm gonna show you what we have going on. So let's go down to our plugins and we're gonna talk a little about these plugins, okay? So I told you that I was using Astra as the theme. They have a pro plugin, if you bought it. Excuse me. They have a pro plugin that allows you to do some additional loop-on stuff. I'm not doing a lot with it, but it's just here. Also have code snippets, and we're gonna talk about code snippets, but just by show of hands, have you ever heard of or used code snippets before? Just a couple of you. You're really gonna like that code, right? I was gonna, at one point, I was gonna show you that you can do the same stuff with Sensei and the first part, but I'm not gonna show that to you today. So this is WooCommerce, right, and we have, and this is membership, which we talked about from Skyverge. I just dropped in PayPal, that's not any kind of commitment to telling you PayPal is worth using. That's just saying it exists. WP Complete, which we talked about, Zach Norbert and Paul Jarvis, and another one called WP Disabled. How many of you have used WP Disabled? Only a few of you, right? You should also check that one out. It's by optimization.io. It helps you clean up a whole bunch of extra little things, right? So it turns off some things, et cetera. So here we are, right? We have a very limited number of plugins talking, right? And if I go to the settings for WooCommerce, right? You are gonna notice when I get up to memberships, right? I'm saying hide the content only, but don't hide the whole thing, right? So I'm sure 404, just say, hey, heads up, right? You don't have access to see it, right? I'll show you how we do that. In products, right? Hey, if they push it and then they push it again, right? Layer on the additional membership link if that's something that's going on. We don't have any membership link. And lastly we have messages, right? And these messages will say, hey, let's look at page restrictions, right? Because every single lesson I created here is a page. And so I can say, hey, I can change the text instead of saying to access this page. I can change the text to simply say, hey, access this lesson you must purchase in the name of the product, right? This lesson is only available to course members, not to members, right? And this lesson's part of the membership and not yet you'll gain it after you're dripping out, right? So I'm not writing any code. I'm just literally going into the messages and making tweets to make it a little better when someone gets to a page so that they don't have the right to see. Does that make sense? Okay, that's the configuration options in the settings for WooCommerce 4, Skyverge's product, right? If I come over here and take a look, let's see, don't be complete this year. In the settings, we're gonna be complete. There's almost no settings, right? There's almost nothing I can be worried about. What kind of student role was a subscriber? I'm mostly doing this on pages. The button text will say, mark is complete, make it red. When it's done, make it dark gray. When it's showing you a graph of progress, dark gray and light gray, and say changes. Not a lot to this, okay? Pretty, pretty simple. So what we're gonna do is come back out to the site. I have a site. I've created a little ad on the right-hand side, but it's also in the navigation, right? Buy my course. When I say buy my course, I put the image there, and then you see, this is my Facebook ads course from 1999. I have to write sales copy, right? Sales copy says, here's what you're gonna learn. And also, who are you? How do you know that you're the right person to buy? Okay, I'm trying to qualify, and I'm trying to let you self-select. Yes, I'm that person. Yes, that's what I wanna know. Now I'm interested in buying. Does that make sense? Too many of us are just working under the assumption, hey, I have a course to buy it. You're like, sell me one, right? So, have the right content for that, right? And then you have the ad to cart. So let's talk about that product. So this is the product. This is a WooCommerce product, right? And the WooCommerce product has, it's in a course called Horses, right? It has an image, it has a price, it is a virtual product, right? I'm not shipping anything. It's a simple product, I'm not making anything complex, no variations. So simple product, virtual, 9.99. And here's a couple things that are fun, right? So I can say, hey, this is only sold individually, meaning there's no quantity of them. I don't expect that you're gonna buy for me versions of the course, so I can mark it as just buy it individually so that I don't have one more thing the user has to click on before they add. It's just ad to cart. There's no quantity by saying, hey, so. Now, if I wanted to say there's only 20 spots, only 20 seats, I could check managed stock and put 20, and it would show, hey, there are 20 items left and then 19 items left, and then 18, right, so you have a natural count. Now, you probably have to go in and override the text so they don't say 20 items left, you might wanna say 20 seats left and then 19 seats left, et cetera, but there is a way for you to do that very easily within the system, right? So sold individually as a key part. I put all of the product description in what's called the product short description, that's when it shows up right there on the page, and then we get this guy, right? This is the memberships meta box that shows up after I've created a membership. So let's go create a membership showing you how it's done. In WooCommerce, the moment I activated Skype versus extension called memberships, the moment I did that, I got this menu item. So when I go to that menu item, I include membership plans. Here is my course. So let's talk about this for a second, right? I am creating a membership, and you're saying, wait, I thought you were talking about courses. Yes? What I'm doing is creating a product that you can buy from WooCommerce with a price that product was 9.99. That was a simple product, right? A simple, virtual product. But then what I did was I linked that product to a membership. I said, when you buy this product, automatically put them in the membership. And I'm gonna show you why that becomes really, really powerful is because then you have the situation where people can buy one course, then buy another course, and buy another course, and just be in multiple different membership. And you can layer on additional benefits from that, which is not always the case with if you're using other membership plugins, or you're using other solutions, and they don't let you have multiple concurrent players at the same time. My favorite membership plugin that doesn't support the dual concurrent membership is Restrict Content Pro. I know they're working on it this year. I know they'll eventually release it, but until then, you're okay. Let me use another solution. So this is, I buy the product, I get put right in the membership. So you go, yeah, well what does membership do? Well the membership's gonna protect content, right? So that's what you're seeing here, right? You go, hey, I am the general, that's the definition of the product. It's based on a product purchase. When they purchase this product, I wanna tie them in to membership, they have unlimited, right? And then I come over to Restrict Content, and I say, I wanna give Restrict Pages, and then I put the main table of contents, and the five steps, I put them in here. What does that mean of course? It means I have to have created this page, right? Now, what I normally do when I create pages, is I just go create empty pages, like I can always put the content in later, right? But I first create those pages, after I create the pages, then I go to the membership and I create the membership, right? Then I go to the WooCommerce product and create the product, link it to the membership, and go to the membership link it to the pages. Does that make sense? Do you work almost in reverse order? Start with the final step you need, and back your way into putting it all together, right? So here we have the instruction, what you need. Now let's take a look at this page because it highlights, right? What I was telling you before. Okay? Notice that only one lesson is teaching you how to Facebook ads. Number five, creating high converted ads. It is 47 minutes. There's a lot of material in it. That's awesome. But you know what? Introduction to this course, what should you know before you get started, right? Hey, I spent six minutes on the intro, I spent 23 minutes just telling you what you should know before you even do anything. And then why is this even important? It's been another five minutes helping you understand why you need to be picking up Facebook ads. And then, right, the biggest mistake you wanna make, I don't care if you have a clue what's hidden behind that title. You know you wanna watch that, right? Because I just told you this is the biggest mistake you should not make. You're like, wait, I have to pay 9.99 and find out. That's how that works? Right? Notice five lessons and only the fifth one is the, hey, I'm gonna keep the content, I'm gonna tell you what you gained your report. The other four are the why, not the how. Does that make sense? It's critically important you get that right. Because if you just jump into all the technical house, you haven't motivated anyone. But if you groom the on-rounds, so they are more and more interested, look what happens, right? Introduction, okay, I want that. Okay, let's go, let's go. Oh, six minutes, I'm done already. Awesome, check the boss, I'm 20 seconds late, see if I'm all right? Boom, I'm feeling good. Then, let's go to the next one. What I need to know in 20 minutes. All right, let's get through it. But yeah, okay, okay, I'm with you, I'm with you. All right, important space, get them fast, five minutes. Okay, let's do it, I'm ready, okay. I'm so ready, oh wait a minute. There's one more before I get to the good stuff. This is the mistake, don't make this mistake. Don't make this mistake, I swear to God you don't want to make this mistake. Anyway, okay, now I'm super, I'm so jazzed. Now, what happens? What happens? They've invested six minutes, 23 minutes, five minutes, four minutes. They've invested all this time before the last one. And they're also gonna be told that the fourth fish of their work is done. They are 80% complete. How many of you would be motivated to finish if you were 80% complete? Who said that? All right, of course you would. If you were like, yeah, I'm basically done. I should just watch the last 45 minutes. There is a science to creating curriculum. There is a science to thinking through the psychology of wooing people into the course and getting it done right. And when you do it right, people are 80% done before they're ready to put the main thing in the kitchen. And they're like, yeah, now I gotta watch this. So, we create five pages. On five pages, we put five videos, right? What you need to know before you start it here is the page, right? The page says what you need to know before you start it. It's the video, right? I swear, I didn't make this video. Someone else made it, I just found it. Right? But what I had to do, some of you were like, cheeky bastard. But here's the thing, right? Here's the thing, I promised a teacher, I didn't promise to offer every window, right? I promised to collect the right information and present it to you. And I went and looked at a whole bunch of videos before I said, this is the right one for here. It's the right one on topics, the right one on leg. It's the right one to embed. And then I just embedded it. I don't know who this guy is. I don't know if you can be happy that I put it in my paper, but you know what, I'm super happy that I did it because that means I didn't have to create this one. Right? I didn't have to create this video. But look at the model, right? Mark is complete. Here's the great thing. When I click Mark is complete, it's gonna make it complete. But do you see what happens on the right? Oh man. You don't feel as good as I feel because you didn't click the button. Yeah. But I'm feeling really good right now. And look, I don't have to edit the checks, right? I'm progressing. And that is critical. There's actual science, right? Two Stanford brothers wrote a whole book on this, right? And what they did was they ran this experiment, right? They ran the experiment at a car wash, okay? And the car wash had a little coupon card, right? So they would punch for the whole, so every time you went and got it in a car wash, you get a punch. And it was a car wash that had eight stars around and then they would clip each time. And so when you got eight, you got a free car wash, okay? And so they said, that's great. Let's come help you, right? The Heath brothers basically went to this car wash and said, this is your normal card, let's make another card. We'll put 10 stars around it. You have to get 10 stars to get your clips, right? 10 whole punches in there to get your car wash. Except when you get your first car wash, we're gonna give you two for free. So it's the same. It's exactly the same. By the time you're done, you either have one of eight complete or you have three out of 10 complete. Statistically speaking, right? You still have seven car washes at 10 hours each. You still have the exact same amount of money that you have to spend to get a free car wash, right? So those should be the same, right? Wrong. The people who got three whole punches checked came back more often and got three ones done soon. Because they were three tenths away down their journey. They were committed versus people who were one eighth away and not committed to it. Are you creating your course the right way? Probably not. Right? This is the benefit of creating video lessons that are two minutes or three minutes long. Because before you know it, you're done with that one and then you're done with the next one, and then you're done with the next one. How many of you have kids? Okay. I have children. I love reading. But because I have children, I have no time to read. But my favorite American author is James Patterson. And if you've ever seen a James Patterson book, the homework of a James Patterson book is that every chapter is about two pages. Maybe two and a half. Which means I don't think I've got a whole chapter done before the next crisis in our house. Right? I'm like, okay, keep my son screaming. Rack! My wife is yelling back. Rack! And I'm like, I just got one paragraph. Just one paragraph to go, okay, now I can finish chapter 37. Right? I'll check for 106, right? But I don't care how many chapters in the book. Because I get a sense of the completion every two and a half pages. When you're creating your courses, create them when the law starts and stops. Create them so that people feel like they are accomplishing things quickly and easily. Right? So I created five pages. Then I took five videos to put them on the five pages. That's just regular, that's not complicated stuff, right? Let's go to this page real quick. Right? I'm gonna edit page. I wanna show you how complicated this page is. But you gotta wait for it to load. Don't start, like, it's just something that's not correct. That's what it is. Right? That's all. Then at the bottom of this, right? Don't be completely in the middle of it. I want this page to be completable. I think they made up my room. I name it, this is my basic task force. And then I say, hey, when you have completed it, where do you want me to redirect people? Redirect them to the Federal Conference page. This is not here, I'm not racking. I just go here, here's URL. I just put it there, you go, okay. So you remember, right? I was here, I was there, I flipped it, and then what did it do? It took me back here. Automatically, I didn't have to create initial navigation. I didn't have to create different write problems and everything else, right? Because it's all right there. I just say, okay, mark is complete. Same thing, same embed, same pages, right? So you know, okay, so you did this by going to the membership area and you loaded in a plan, and in the plan, you went to the protected content or restricted content and you put it on the pages. Is that it? Are we done? Almost, almost. Because here's what's gonna happen, right? People are gonna go when they, when they after they bought a course. Oh, by the way, the buy course, I didn't show you that, I'll show it to you real quick. The buy course is a custom link. What is it a custom link to? The actual cross. Deep all through commerce, it's gonna create shop and put shop in your navigation. Do I wanna show shop with one product? No, it makes me look like I'm a loser. Because I only have one product. So I just go to the navigation and I put the link to my one product and I'm a loser. Now I'm just focused, right? There it is, buy course, one page. So, that's fine, it's fine, right? But now let's say they did buy it. They're gonna go into the my account section. And in the my account section, we'll see membership and look, here's all my content. It's all in this specific space. They also have, you know, nodes and whether or not I wanna manage this account, right? This is it. Now, when you look at this and you see this list of courses, this way, you're gonna go wait. If I did it at home, I didn't see it this way. I saw the exact opposite, five and then four and then three and then two and then one. Anyway, yeah, because the membership plugin, when it defaults to present content, automatically presents it in a descending order, right? And if I wanna do a descending order, I have to change that. Well, remember I told you about WP snippets, right? So, let's go find out our snippets here. So, these are our snippets and you go wait. What was WP snippets again? WP snippets allows me to have one plugin, the WP snippets plugin, that acts like my functions.php. So, if you've ever been on a lab and you've read something that says, just take this code, stick it in functions.php, that's sticking it in your feed. This is a plugin, I'm sticking it in a little repository of code as a plugin rather than tied to the feed. I can change things and I have any thing break, right? And here I have three different little snippets to code, right? So, one of the things membership does is it shows you all the protected content that you have rights to, but it shows you the content type, like page, page, page, page. I don't need to show you that. So, this is a snippet that says, hey, remove the content type and also remove the S-er. I don't wanna show you that. By the way, I have an S-er. I just uploaded someone's video or their I-frame into my, I have no S-er, so it's gonna be blank anyway. So, I have a blank column. So, just go and un-set these two columns and then return whatever's left from the columns. Here's a beautiful thing. I didn't write this code. Skyverge, the company that's behind the membership code and has a GitHub repo for the one that you just put in. So, you just go to their repo and you see everything and you go, yeah, I want that, I want that and you bring it in and drop it in, put it in, set it up. You go, oh, Chris, you're really good at not writing any code. Yes, I am. What about sorting the content so that it shows lesson one and then two and then three and then four? Yeah, guess what? They wrote it as well. Paste it in. You know, I know you probably know this. You're paid the same when a customer site is complete whether you offered everything you wanted to code or whether someone else did. Right? So, the trick is, get really good at some things, deliver that value and let some other tools, right, particularly those that have a lot of flexibility, become the ones you stick with. It's why I love the commerce, it's why I love membership, because I can do a million things with these things and all I have to do is open in three snippets and make it possible. There's another snippet, I just had a time, right? There's another snippet that will come in here, right? In my account, instead of saying membership, it will say your courses, right? I'll show you this way, right, because I just didn't drop it in. This is one of my buddies that I helped build his online course. We did three launches last year. We opened the course thing for a week and then closed it down. Each week we generated over 150,000, three or four weeks, right? So almost half a million dollars was new from three weeks of letting people buy this course, right? Now we've launched two more courses, it's a blast, right? So I'm gonna come in here, go to my account, just to show you this, right? When I log in to my account, membership isn't there. It's the same, too, I'm in the same place, right? I just added a snippet the less we put the purchase courses instead of membership. Now, you can also put another snippet that replaces this membership with whatever, right? You just get the title and then send the title back instead of their default, right, the slot. But here's the courses that are purchased. Send it, these are membership. They're membership, they're just called courses and the title. Does that make sense? If I'm right, I'm gonna come take a look, but I think I've shown you everything that's in here, I've shown you snippets, I didn't show you the P-disabled, so I'll jump over here just for a second. One of the things I like is it has some MWU-commerce options that help me optimize the site, right? So, hey, disable the scripts, all the different MWU-commerce scripts to load up, disable them on pages that are not MWU-commerce pages. Right? In this case, I have no reviews, I don't need any reviews, so get rid of those, defer the card payments, I can even make it so that MWU-commerce has an option when they add to cart, they immediately go to the cart. In fact, I don't know if I have that set here, but I will show you setting that because that's an important one. Yep. Redirect to cart after successful addition, right? So what I normally do is I just say, hey, if they add it on a site like this when they're buying the course, when they add it, take them straight to the end, get them to pay, get rid of all the distractions, you don't need to know anything else, just try it from there. All right, so I think that's all that's there. And then I promised you one last thing, so you should see this, yep. So I created another four video lesson, these are actually my videos, I didn't just take them through someone else on YouTube. These are four videos on how to create an online membership, online course, using MWU-commerce, but in that case, I did it without any coursework, which is one of my favorite coursework plugins. So if you do need timers or question banks, if you do need certificate completions, if you do need some of those things, this URL will have the four videos, the Center for Pre-Event, the registry, you just go and watch them, and I'll walk you through exactly how to do it there as well. My name is Chris Sama, as you work at the web, you can find me on Twitter at apprissama. Thank you very much. Yeah, you mentioned people get tired when they click the button, the mark is complete, and I know that happens, but a big problem with these courses is people actually, they don't engage and they don't complete much of the courses, like you said. So I'm wondering if you have any insights or tips on how to increase that engagement, because on projects we've done for courses that ends up being the problem in the long run. So the best approach that I know of is to make the videos short. Most people don't finish, not because they hate your content, although if you have really pretty content, you should fix that. But most people don't stop because you have pretty content, they stop because someone's crying in the other room or there's an issue of work or they have to do something urgent and so they leave and you're in the middle of a 29 minute lesson. Don't make it a 29 minute lesson, make it a two minute lesson, followed by another one, followed by another one, hence the James Madison reference. The more you do that, the more people feel like it's easy to get through the next thing rather than having big long lessons. Even if you record it big long, you can edit it afterward and break it up into lots of little ones. So the length of the video is one of the most significant ways to help people feel like they can get through it. Now, if that still doesn't work, right, there are other plugins like LearnDash that will put timers on it so you don't have to wait a certain amount of time before you can click the mark that's completed. That button will show up, you know, basically bring out and not enabled and then after the time has passed, it will become enabled and then you can click it. So that is an alternative way to do it. Thanks. So that's something around accountability. So other people making the learners accountable for what they have learned. Have you tried something like that? Yeah, sure. We've got accountability. Again, there are different plugins that do more elaborate work, right? And the elaborate work, and even with this, right, you could hook into the fact that someone completed it and then trigger off an email to tell someone else they completed. They also have short codes for showing you, right? One of the most effective ones, WP Complete has a short code that will show you how you're doing compared to everybody else who's in that course, right? So pure pressure is one of my favorite tools. It's not accountability, it is that notion of you realizing everybody else is ahead of you and then you suddenly want to start moving a little faster, right? So WP Complete has that other plugin type that's called Leaderboards, right? A different LMS has a lot of Leaderboards stuff that, you know, if you present it, then you realize, ooh, I'm a sucker. Okay, I should watch two more videos real quick. I did this years ago, we built an internal LMS for employees, right? Our company had 200 employees and the CEO was not convinced that we could teach basic business to our first level managers, right? He's like, these names don't suck, right? And I said, well, many of them do, but I think there's a few that are probably, they just need extra training. So we built this online system where people could get additional training and he was like, I just don't know, I don't know. So then I sent him a login, right? It's an internal WordPress app, but it had a leaderboard on the side, right? And we were giving points for achievements as they moved through and if he was last, because he hadn't logged in and done anything. So I just took a snapshot of him being last and sent him the text. By the end of the weekend, he was in first. He didn't care about the materials. He just hated being last. That works, right? So, I'm going to leave you with your pressure. That can also help you. Thanks for that question. Any others? Hi, Chris. I'm assuming you have a system that you show us today and you can integrate it with our subscriptions and do, let's say, monthly subscription for our work. My question is, do you, let's say a user, they pay every month, but they stop logging in? Yeah. So that's an indicator for you that's, okay, these guys, we're losing them. So how can you integrate that into some market innovation tool to send them reminders and some stuff like that? Yeah, you can definitely do all of that. Here's the one thing that I saw in most people building courses. Charge people once a quarter or once a year and give them the opportunities to actually get through more before you ding them on their cart again. When you start building people monthly and they haven't achieved as much, they're going to have their own incremental regret. If you ever, you guys look very, very fit, okay? So I'm just going to tell you from my experience, I once, this is hard to believe, right? I signed up for a gym membership and I didn't go. But they paid me or they charge me every month, right? The first month they charge me and I didn't go, I didn't feel that, it's like 10 bucks, right? The second month I'm 20 bucks in, right? Still not feeling too bad, it's 20 bucks, right? Third month, fourth month, fifth month, sixth month. Now six months in they've been charging me this whole time, now I'm mad. My incremental regret has gotten bigger and bigger because they have a system, they know that I haven't walked in the building. So they should contact me and go, hey, dude, you're not using it but they're never going to do it, right? So what happens when I'm filing the system apart? I call them and say cancel, I don't ever want to go, oh, let me try and recover you, let me try and I go. My incremental regret has layered on so much that at this point I'm past the breaking point. I want nothing more for you. I call you memberships, right? So we all do the same thing, if David's 10 bucks and another 10 bucks and another 10 bucks, we're super happy because they haven't quit yet. But when they do call the quit, there's no getting them back because they are tired of paying for something that I'm using. So spread out some of the payments, then do the follow up, right? If they hit a certain amount, send me an email, tell them a great job. If they have logged in a certain period of time, cash it, send me an email, hey, let's see you back, right? Here's some quick things you can do to get caught up, right? Here's the peer pressure. You want to do all those things, all I just want to mention, right, is when you're building them every single month and they're not logging in, you're gonna have a harder time if you're not following up, you're gonna have a harder time than they do call to try and do a downgrade offer because at that point they're just done with you. Does that make sense? Thanks. All right, I think you have a break, so let's do one, or we have one right down here and then I'm gonna let you go get your copy or whatever else you're gonna do, Greg. Do you have a mic that we can have here? We have been discussing a lot about optimizing and trying to make the client complete the process, but when it's one-to-one like about the process from a business perspective, we don't even care if you finish it or not, right? It's just about the debate, if the content is good and the user does not finish the process, use a call. We do our best. We put the content together. What's like the business purpose of trying to optimize for that is like in the future to try to sell more courses and that it's the probability of them buying more if they came to desire. What's like the main business purpose of trying to make them finish? Totally makes sense and I know that's where a lot of people sit is the whole, hey, it's a long time, the dating, if they watch it great, they don't have to care. Here's the thing, right? I, oh, let's do my bad. I have an iPhone X, right? It's like a $1,000 phone. Do you know why Apple sells a $1,000 phone? So they can sell a $100 case and then a $50 screen protector and then a $30 charger, right? Because if the phone was 200 bucks, I'm not paying more than five bucks for the cover, right? The reality is when you build courses, what you don't wanna do is build one course and then go after a whole new topic and build a second course because you have to go get new audiences. What you wanna do is build one anchor course and then build a lot of satellites around it but they're all add-ons, right? Because then you get return purchasing and if you make the main course expensive, say $299 and every add-on is $299, you're gonna get a lot of those $299 hits but you're gonna get them if you can help people get across the pinch line for the first time, does that make sense? So the business value here is that even though you may have $299 for the main course, you can potentially generate 50 to 100% more revenue on additional courses, add-ons, right? I think they need to be much shorter because now you can realize, okay, this is the main content I covered but while I did this, let's say I was doing the Facebook ads, right? And then I said, oh, by the way, here's the copy, here's a little course just on copywriting to convert ads, right? Here's another one on design elements, okay? And I just create all these little guys and you go, I need that, I need that, I need that, all right, so that's the business case. Thank you very much, and may you guys have a great year's rest. Thank you.