Ultimate LifterLMS Full Review For 2023
The Membership Machine Show – Jonathan Denwood and Spencer Forman – for advice, tips, and insight on planning, running, and growing a successful membership website, plus what is the best technology solutions from WordPress and SaaS, plus interviews with membership industry experts.
This Week Show’s Sponsors
Sensei LMS: Sensei LMS
BlogVault: BlogVault
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
LaunchFlows: LaunchFlows
Episode Transcript
[00:00:03.850] Intro
Welcome to The Membership Machine Show, talking you through your membership website from initial idea all the way to finished product. Here’s your host, Jonathan Denwood.
[00:00:16.370] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks to the membership machine show this is episode nine. We recalled in this on Friday, not at our normal time of 830 Pacific Standard Time. We’re doing this a bit later, but it’s just before Christmas, so that’s how it panned out. My normal co host Spencer Forum is not with us, but I’ve got my colleague Kirk, who is sitting in for Spencer. In this episode. We’re going to be talking about all things Lift at NMS. Lifter is one of the best WordPress plugin solutions if you’re looking to build a membership website or a learning management system. It’s one of the ones that WP Tonic highly recommends. And Kirk is part of the support team that looks after clients around Lifter. So I thought he would be ideal individual to give us some insights. So we’re going to be covering everything around Lifter LMS. So Kirk, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?
[00:01:35.790] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure. My name is Kurt von Ahnenand I run a small agency called Manana Nomas based here in Southern California. I specialize in membership and learning websites, primarily working with Lifter LMS. And then of course, I help some of John’s customers come on with WP Tonic and I assist people at Lifter LMS, as he said.
[00:01:56.000] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of this show, I’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We’ll be back in a few moments.
[00:02:05.100] – Speaker 4
Folks, are you looking for ways to make your content more engaging? Sensei LMS by Automatic is the original WordPress solution for creating and selling online courses. Sensei’s new interactive blocks can be added to any WordPress page or post. For example, interactive videos let you pause videos and display quizzes, lead generation forms, surveys and more for a 20% off discount for the tribe. Just use the code Wptonic all one Word when checking out and give Sensei a try today.
[00:02:38.050] – Speaker 5
The importance of backing up your WordPress website cannot be emphasized enough. We use Blog Vault to help us do this on a daily basis with free staging, migrations and on the pro plans, malware scanning and auto fix. Blogvolt is the professional’s choice when managing just one website or many. Go to blogvolt.com and see for yourself. You seriously won’t find a better, more complete solution that’s blogvolt.com. Blogvolt.com.
[00:03:09.070] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back. I just want to point out that we’ve got some great special offers from the sponsors. Plus I’ve got a list of plugins all that are the best for somebody trying to build a membership website on WordPress. And you should really consider utilizing WordPress for your membership website. They have all listed, they’ve all been tested by myself and the WP Tonic crew. And you find the special offers and the created list of plugins and services. Where can you get them? You can go to Wponixdeals and you find everything there. Plus you can sign up for the WP Tonic newsletter, which will go into your inbox every Sunday, which covers membership and everything. WordPress. So let’s go straight into it. This goes straight into the packages because number one, which doesn’t make Learn LMS unique, but it’s one of its strong selling points is that it offers an enormous amount for free, but then it has free paid packages. Basically, the way I kind of explain this to customers or people in general is the free gives you almost 90% of all the functionality. And for the basic to sell basic courses, the only thing you really need is to buy an add on from Lifter, which is the Stripe add on.
[00:05:07.030] – Jonathan Denwood
And I think the add ons are normally around $125. I think I’m right about that. First of all, am I correct about that? How do you explain the free and then how do you explain the bundles, the free bundles, earth, universe and infinity. Over to you.
[00:05:33.450] – Kurt von Ahnen
To be honest with you, Jonathan, this is one of the most confusing things about Lifter LMS. It’s both a curse and a blessing. So trying to explain to people what they get for their dollar because people really try to pinpoint things down. The way I look at it is the free version of Lifter LMS, like you said, is powerful out of the box. It gives you everything you need to get your lessons, your courses, have membership control of your website, and even has a manual payment gateway so that if you sold courses through purchase orders or internally through corporate sales or something like that, the whole system works like it’s there. So I explained it to people, like if you just need to get a course up and you want to sample your courses before you go to market, you can do this for free as kind of a proof of concept. And it’s there when you decide that you want to make money or market your courses, then it’s time to look at the add ons. And that’s like payment gateways and marketing tie ins and integrations and the bundles they offer are a way to do that.
[00:06:37.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
So you had mentioned the free version plus like a Stripe payment gateway. Well, their new bundle that they came out with in 2022 is called the Earth bundle. And the Earth bundle not only includes the free cord Lifter version and a payment gateway, but it also gives you that account for support. And so it’s a paid bundle. It’s only, I think, $149 for the year. And it comes with support, the payment gateway, and the full free core version that does memberships and learning content.
[00:07:10.410] – Jonathan Denwood
So am I correct that if you just were buying the payment gateway, I think you’re talking about stripe, are you not?
[00:07:20.590] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. So Lyfter integrates directly with your choice. So it could be PayPal Stripeauthorized Net or of course it’ll tie into WooCommerce.
[00:07:35.170] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m just trying to clarify with the bundle, is it providing just the stripe add on?
[00:07:42.530] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s just the stripe one and then go to the Universe Bundle to get the other gateways all included.
[00:07:49.930] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. But if you are buying that add on, the stripe add on, I am correct, that would be $125 on its own.
[00:07:59.210] – Kurt von Ahnen
I believe so, yeah. I think the single add on is just $125.
[00:08:03.320] – Jonathan Denwood
So it’s quite excellent value because for almost just $30, you’re getting a year’s extra support as part of that bundle, aren’t you?
[00:08:17.470] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, so the support to me is really good. And then just to clarify, I just double checked my notes. It’s 120, not 125.
[00:08:27.490] – Jonathan Denwood
So I want to make sure I’m.
[00:08:28.160] – Kurt von Ahnen
Giving out the right information. But yeah, it’s an unbelievable value. And when I look at the support that Lifter gives, I mean, I’m part of the support team, so I sound like I’m patting myself on the back. But they answer the tickets, they have support tickets, they have an email process, they have a chat process, but they also host live calls every Thursday. So 11:00 Pacific Standard Time on Thursdays. They go live for 2 hours and they call it presales lift off session. So any questions or any stumbling blocks you had getting started with the platform, people are on Zoom that will do screen shares and help you get over those first hurdles. And then if you go for the Infinity Bundle, they have the Mastermind Call, which you’re very familiar with. I’ve seen you on there before.
[00:09:12.750] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, on reflection, what we maybe we do it now. Maybe we should have before we go straight into the Free and the Bundle, can you describe, give an outline of what you actually get with the core product, the Core plugin, the Free what? Why would you look at something like Lifter LMS and what you get in that Core free part of it, then just getting a free membership plug in. What are the extra things that you get? Can maybe you can explain that.
[00:09:50.910] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Jonathan, I worked with a lot of proprietary learning programs. I’ve worked with Moodle and some other things prior to Lifter LMS. And so I come to the table with kind of a mixed opinion of a lot of things. I even worked with things like Bridge and Learn Upon and some other kind of like hosted examples. And I have friends that do a lot with Kajabi, so I’ve got that exposure piece. The thing that drew me to Lifter was, quite honestly, they had a super active Facebook group. When I sent in a message, the owner got in touch with me directly, which I thought was pretty cool because no other software package that I ever reached out to, I had the owner of the company reach me back. So I thought that was pretty cool. And then of course, being able to try it for free was a thing that jumped off the page to me as well. So I was a customer long before I started working with them. Beyond that, what’s the benefit of it? To me, I needed a place where I could put up courses, so I needed a place where I could have lessons and courses.
[00:10:51.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
And I’m the kind of guy that has more than one course. So my site doesn’t just have one course, I’ve got a suite of courses. And what’s cool about Lifter and the membership kind of plug in that it is, it allows you to group different courses together into different memberships. So I was able to have themes, so I could have a productivity membership, I could have a leadership membership and I was able to group my courses into that and sell them and package them in that way. So I found that pretty attractive. And really, that’s about it. I mean, I try and think about.
[00:11:26.570] – Jonathan Denwood
How I use what about around Quizzes, the groups which are available in the higher bundles that we’re going to discuss in a minute, but maybe you can explain. So in Core you can have multiple courses linked to membership and with Stripe you can sell these courses because it’s got its own engine that allows you to sell courses through Stripe. But then you got the quiz functionality that’s been built and you’ve got the dashboard and the internal the email that it sends out. And also can you explain the certificates that it produces? Maybe you can give outline on that.
[00:12:27.150] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, here I am taking a bunch of stuff for granted, Jonathan, and running right through things, but you’ve nailed it. Certificates are an option straight with the free Core plugin. And what’s cool about the certificates that you make with Lifter LMS is with their update. I think it was a Lifter 6.0 when that came out. It gave you the ability to share the certificates and then print them to PDF. And so normally when you go to get a certificate out of something off a WordPress, you get kind of a jumbled mess and you have to do a bunch of work to make it look right. But the certificates in Lyfter, they exported PDFs, they’re shareable and they’re printable, which is really nice. And they’re totally customizable. You can change the backgrounds, the appearances, and when you get into some of the add ons, they’ve got the custom Fields option where you can import different custom fields to the certificate and really add the details that you need as opposed to something that’s more generic. So there’s that. You mentioned groups. That’s something that is available by itself as an add on or part of the Infinity bundle.
[00:13:34.690] – Kurt von Ahnen
And Groups is awesome because it allows you to sell to a group or an organization a set amount of seats or a set amount of students to a certain course. So let’s say I was going to sell a company 50 seats to a leadership course. I’d be able to sell one person access to a group that has 51 seats in it because the the leader is one and 50 seats and then they’re in charge. They can invite people directly through that group function via email and you don’t have to worry about anything on the admin side of it because the group leader has access to who’s invited who’s in it and they can check the progress through front end reporting along the way. So it really takes a lot of the stress off of managing it as the admin of the site.
[00:14:20.050] – Jonathan Denwood
They’ve got the free core Lifter LMS has Quizzes, but there’s an add on Quiz plug, Advanced Quizzes.
[00:14:30.670] – Kurt von Ahnen
What does that gives you? So Quizzes right out of the box comes with, I think, six or seven different question types. So it’ll have like fill in the blank, multiple choice radio button, that kind of thing. But when you go to Advanced Quizzes, you get extra selections of question types like match the image or change the order of things. And so it gives you a much more, I hate to say scorn like, but it does give you much more of a score like experience to be able to build a more can you.
[00:15:05.160] – Jonathan Denwood
Explain to listen to some views what you mean by what is Storm and what is that from Relay? Maybe you can give some little bit more detail about what you mean by having a score fill.
[00:15:23.590] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure. People in the corporate arena that do a lot of corporate elearning corporate training, they use terms like SCORM quite often. It’s a, it’s a type of file output. When you, when you use a lesson authoring tool, something like Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline 360, there’s different tools and you can build these really interactive, kind of like cool choose your past almost video presentations that can run through and they can also include the quizzing testing and knowledge checks as part of these packages. You’ll know them when you see them because it kind of looks like a video player and you’re in the course and it seems to be operating on its own. Lifter LMS is compatible for that kind of course, where if someone wants to load a score into Lifter LMS, they can, they just need to add like a third party plugin called Glass Blade, Grass Blade to be able to play a score file. But what I was alluding to earlier was some of those extra question formats that you get with Advanced Quizzes give you a more interactive feel with the student that is similar to what a Scorn package would enable, like a corporate training person to build.
[00:16:40.270] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think that’s important because, Jonathan, when I think about my corporate training experience and I worked for companies that paid, you know, a half million dollars a year to host online training and have training developed, you know, and when you look at what you know, what lifter LMS costs, what hosting a WordPress site costs, and you look at what you can do with the addons and plugins to make quality content. I mean, it rivals what corporations are doing now. And for pennies on the dollar.
[00:17:06.290] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes. So another addon is the social. I’ve got its title. Maybe you can give the proper title and maybe you can explain what that add on does.
[00:17:17.450] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Social learning. I’m going to be blunt with this one, Jonathan, because I think being transparent and honest when we talk is super important. Social learning is a super cool add on and it gives you kind of a Facebook like experience inside your own website, which is nice. So if you didn’t want to have a Facebook group, didn’t want to have a Facebook page, but wanted to have a social experience that you owned instead of farmed out to some third party like Facebook or LinkedIn or something like that, it’s cool to have it. The caveat that I give people, especially my own clients when I’m working as an agency, is before you turn on Social learning, before you try to add community to your site, you want to make sure that you have community, that you have a following to put into it. It’s one of those tools that when people activate it prior to having some kind of community built or a good mail list to promote their product to, it can seem really stagnant, which I think brings down the quality of the experience. But if you’ve got an audience, if you’ve got a good mail list to launch your project to, then social learning is awesome.
[00:18:23.340] – Kurt von Ahnen
And like I said, it gives you like a Facebook like experience in the back. For those of you that have looked at Buddy Boss, it’s kind of similar to Buddy Boss. It’s not buddy boss.
[00:18:33.530] – Jonathan Denwood
I see it as a stepping stone so you can try the waters without having to invest because Buddy Boss is a fantastic product, but as you know, it is a bit of a beast and it needs a certain level of commitment and that commitment has to be justified financially in time effort. So I see using Nifty with the Social add on as a way of building your community without having to use a third party platform like Facebook and then it’s a good stepping stone to maybe moving on to using Nifty with Buddy Boss. That’s how I see it. I think we’ve covered. Is there any other add on the video? Add on? What does that video? Obviously we have great supporters and we had Adam Presler on the Thursday Interview show, which you have become my co host of, and he has Presto player and we supply that. But I know Lyft has got a good offering there as well. So what’s the name of it and what does it do, Kirk.
[00:20:02.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
So you got two different, really, goals there, I suppose. Presto Player works great, and to be honest, I never really used Presto Player until I started working with you, Jonathan, and I’m glad you introduced me to it. I like it. Advanced Videos is a little different. So Advanced Videos only works with three ways of hosting video. So those of you that are in WordPress understand that you host your video somewhere else other than your website. So if you use Vimeo, Wistia or YouTube, you can use advanced videos. Advanced Videos enables you to control more what the student does with the video content. One of the biggest things there is you can kind of lock down the video and make sure that the student watches it all the way to the end before they can mark the lesson complete. And why that’s so important? Most of the projects I do don’t involve this, but for people that have continuing education credits, they have to make sure that the student spends a certain amount of time within a course or a lesson. And so Advanced Videos is a really good tool to have a documented way of showing that your students have spent the time in the curriculum.
[00:21:15.210] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, let’s finish off with talking about the add ons. The WooCommerce add on, what does that.
[00:21:30.650] – Kurt von Ahnen
Precisely do besides give me a headache every time I introduce a customer to WooCommerce, especially if they’re fairly new at putting platforms together, it’s always a learning experience. So WooCommerce, in its basic integration with Lifter LMS, I just want to COVID that Lifter LMS has its own direct payment gateways, like Stripe, Paypalauthorized, net boom. But if you want to use some payment gateway that’s not that that’s from another country or incompatible. There’s lots of reasons why you go through WooCommerce, because WooCommerce enables you to use a lot of different payment methods. So that’s one reason why people like WooCommerce. The other thing is, if you’re selling any kind of hard goods t shirts, coffee mugs, tapestries, fancy water bottles, anything like that, you need a way to add a shopping cart that’ll support those hard goods and take care of the shipping and the tax and stuff like that. So WooCommerce is that tool works great for that. When you integrate Lifter LMS with WooCommerce? Basically. And let me go back to when you have a payment gateway through Lifter LMS and you sell product through Lifter LMS, everything you sell is through an access plan.
[00:22:49.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
So if you have a course that you sell Ala carte, there’s an access plan that advertises and sells that course for you in the website. If you have a membership that you’re selling that includes multiple courses, that membership has an access plan. And when the customer buys that access plan, it grants them access to whatever is included in that plan. Right? And so what WooCommerce does is WooCommerce allows you to build a product in their menu and then associate that product with Lifter LMS’s access plan. And so when you have WooCommerce integrated and you build the product in WooCommerce, all you have to do is go into Lyfter, LMS go to that access plan, and when it’s activated, you’ll just click on a drop down menu and pick the WooCommerce product that you want to associate with that access plan. So once you have it all set up, it works really well. But you got to go through the WooCommerce set up to get to that level. And as you know, Jonathan, that can be a chore.
[00:23:48.650] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but it’s the Siri elements that also cause a bit confusion. First of all, I am correct that it’s not only do you need to buy the add on, am I correct that you have to buy the subscription WooCommerce add on in the WooCommerce add on library? I am correct about that, yeah, if.
[00:24:21.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
You are using your access plans in a subscription manner, yes. So if your courses are paid for them once and done, or pay for the membership once, it’s lifetime membership once they buy, they can do that through WooCommerce. But if you’re looking for that unicorn of passive income that all those fancy people that have those great training courses tell you that you’re searching for that’s based on subscriptions. And so if you have a subscription model, you need to get the add on through WooCommerce, which is WooCommerce subscriptions. And I believe at this time, correct me if I’m wrong, Jonathan is at 199 a year.
[00:24:59.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, I think it is one site license. The other thing that causes a bit confusion is that Nifty has got a great email sending platform when a student finishes a course or they pay. But by adding on WooCommerce, WooCommerce has its own shopping cart email engine as well, and you normally need to add on plug in that enables you to edit those email a bit more. The other thing that can be a little bit confusion is that by adding WooCommerce, it has its own dashboard where students if you want to do that, we tend to utilize set it up so Lifter is part of a unified dashboard. And the third thing that causes a little bit confusion is the actual when you activate WooCommerce with Lifter LMS it’s more to do with WooCommerce? WooCommerce history is a shopping cart platform out of the box. It doesn’t have a one page checkout experience. At WP Tonic, we bundle it with either cart flows or launch flows, and that will help you with Lifter with WooCommerce provide a one page checkout experience, which a lot of people are looking for, and it also provides the ability to have on one page sell people upsells down sales have a more modern feeling.
[00:27:03.030] – Jonathan Denwood
Hopefully I haven’t lost most of the audience because it’s always a difficult balance about giving this information, but not overwhelming our listeners and viewers. I think it’s always tricky. I don’t want it your fault. So I think that’s when it’s great to have the resources from Lifter through support. And also if you choose to use WP Tonic, is that we can advise you when you should look at the internal system of Lifter. Or maybe you should look at Use utilizing Lifter with WooCommerce because it’s really based on the business requirements of each customer, really, isn’t it?
[00:27:48.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Use case determines the outcome. And you’ve mentioned it a couple of times, the emails and Lifter. I just worked with a customer on this this morning, Jonathan. Their students were getting bombarded. They were getting the WordPress notifications, the WooCommerce notifications, the Lifter notifications. And I was like, look, this is easy. We can fix this right now. Screen share time, right? And so we just jumped in. Lifter LMS has its own settings menu in the back of your WordPress dashboard, and you go right to notifications and you can go in and customize the notifications or you can deactivate them. And so if your customers are already getting a WooCommerce notification for a new account, new sign up, new enrollment, all that, there’s no need to double down with the Lifter side. So you can just deactivate them or you can customize them and put different messaging in if you want, which is.
[00:28:44.630] – Jonathan Denwood
Great if you can use it on its own and just switch off.
[00:28:49.450] – Kurt von Ahnen
The.
[00:28:49.790] – Jonathan Denwood
Ones that come from WordPress. If you’re going to use WooCommerce, it’s a balance because obviously when somebody decide if you want to send a certificate or an email. But we normally when it comes to the actual invoice, the invoice that’s sent out, when somebody purchases a membership that’s best controlled by commerce, so is what it is. I think we’re coming to our break, folks. We’re going to get a load more to discuss about how to set up Lifter LMS, some insights. We go all through that when we come back. So we’re going for our breakfast. We’ll be back in a few seconds.
[00:29:43.050] – Speaker 6
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[00:30:15.590] – Speaker 7
This podcast episode is brought to you by Lifter LMS, the leading learning management system solution for WordPress. If you or your client are creating any kind of online course, training based membership, website, or any type of elearning project, lifter LMS is the most secure, stable, well supported solution on the market. Go to Lifterlms.com and save 20% at checkout with coupon code Podcast 20. That’s podcast 20. Enjoy the rest of your show.
[00:30:53.170] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back. We’ve had a bit of a dive about Lyfter. Hopefully we haven’t confused it. It’s a great platform if you’re looking to set up your membership website on WordPress. I just want to point out if you’re looking for great hosting to host Lifter LMS or one of the other great WordPress solutions, have a look at WP Tonic. We offer fantastic hosting pacifically designed for the Elearning entrepreneur organization. Plus we offer an enormous library of plugins that have been we have selected that are the best solutions to help you be successful. Plus, we integrate all the email, provide video functionality and support, excellent support through myself, through Kirk and the other team members at WP Tonic. It’s a great resource. So please go over to WP Tonic, you can book a free Zoom with me and we love you to come and host your membership website with us based on your experience. After somebody is the bundles, so this is quickly run through them. So you got the Earth bundle, which we went in on the first half. So basically get the stripe add on and you get the support. And I think, like you pointed out, it’s one of the great strengths of Lifter LMS is the community support that you get from yourself and from the Lifter LMS team members.
[00:32:53.750] – Jonathan Denwood
Universal. So the Earth bundles $149, the Universal bundles $360. What do you actually get in the Universal bundle?
[00:33:07.450] – Kurt von Ahnen
So the Universe bundle gives you the ability for ecommerce, but also starts to plug in, you know, the marketing side of things, connecting to CRMs and things like that. The other thing, Jonathan, is and something to point out, you get one activation with the Earth bundle, but you get five active sites with the Universe bundle. So if you’re somebody that is building multiple projects or has the opportunity to build multiple projects, you’ve got the ability to support up to five active sites at the same time. When I say marketing, it’ll connect to things like MailChimp ConvertKit, it includes integrations for like ninja forms or WP forms, I think, formidable forms, and it also does the Twilio SMS texting. And so folks that are really big in digital marketing, they understand the power of text versus email, and a lot of folks are really hyped up on the fact that Universe comes with that kind of connection as well.
[00:34:07.630] – Jonathan Denwood
Infinity Bundle, which is a big price jump, it’s 1200, but basically you get everything in the add on plugin library and plus a higher level of support and training from Lifter NMS. And it is that correct?
[00:34:28.770] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s it’s more than that, Jonathan. The Infinity bundle, to me, it’s like the keys to the kingdom. A you get if you’re an Infinity Bundle member, you’re able to come to that weekly mastermind call that they do on Zoom. And sometimes there’s eight people, sometimes there’s twelve people. I’ve seen calls where there’s 20 people on that call. And the community support and problem solving. And it’s not just about Lifter, right? Because these are more advanced folks. They’re talking about all kinds of stuff. And so having access to that call is amazing. The other side of the thing is I don’t think we talked about it yet, but there’s private areas. So that gives you private areas, which is access to one on one coaching, private posts between the instructor and the students. Advanced videos comes with it. The social learning comes with it. There’s a PDF add on and you also get custom fields with the infinity bundle. Custom fields, you don’t think you need it until you know that you need it. It’s like you can have registration for a student and then maybe ask them their T shirt size or ask them which company they’re from or different questions or things that you need information for your database for some reason.
[00:35:41.180] – Kurt von Ahnen
And it becomes part of the user’s profile through custom fields. And then like I alluded to earlier, those custom fields can actually get migrated into the certificate process. And so if you’re doing like continuing education or something like that, those custom fields in combination with other automations really comes in handy.
[00:36:00.770] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’m just going to throw you before we go into some insights about what people struggle when they are trying to configure Lifter LMS, I’m just going to put this statement to you based on my experience, Kirk. When people are initially starting to look at building their first membership website. And it just not only affects Lifter LMS or other learning management system solutions on WordPress, it equally affects SaaS solutions like Kajabi Learnable is that most people, when they’re starting out, they overlook at their requirements, they over inflate their requirements, and they spend much too much time looking at all these, all these different platforms. Because based on my experience on WordPress, you just need really good hosting. You need a good CRM, internal one or external. We recommend fluent CRM. And you need a good partner hosting partner. But with Kajabi, if you start off with Kajabi great SAS solution, when you’re starting out, you probably only use 50% of what it offers. And it’s the same with Lifter. It’s best to concentrate the time getting that course done and then really marketing and building an online tribe that’s really interested in what you got to offer rather than but the great thing about Nifter and some of the other solutions on WordPress is that when you’ve built that tribe and you’ve moved on, you’re not going to be confined by the platform because it’s practically impossible to find yourself in what I call a walled garden.
[00:38:09.050] – Jonathan Denwood
With WordPress, there’s always going to be the ability to build what you want for your students. What’s your reaction to what I’ve just said?
[00:38:22.750] – Kurt von Ahnen
I feel like you’re scrambling around picking up the pieces inside my spit out verbally yet, Jonathan, I mean, you’re nailing it all. When I coach clients, it’s exactly that. It’s. Let’s focus on simple, let’s focus on proof of concept. Let’s get you out of the gate. Let’s get the first because they’re worried about all, you know, this Jonathan. They’re worried about this whole world that hasn’t happened yet. And it’s like, just get the course out and get ten people enrolled taking the course, right? Just get that far. And then the cool part that you mentioned was there’s the extra tools, but there’s also the integrations. And Lifter has a Rest API that will connect to just about anything. And so the choices to add third party tools to it and customizations is all there when you need it. But be simple. Get started, get your product out, do a proof of concept and see if you can get people enrolled.
[00:39:14.290] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. So let’s go on. Based on your support experience, when somebody purchases the core product and any of the bundles and they’ve got their hosting set up and they’ve installed WordPress and they’ve installed Lifted LMS, what are the regular questions? Let’s say three to four things that you regularly see people struggle with. So is there a number one that people struggle regularly to get their mind around about configuring and getting Lifter and their membership using Nifty and the getting their membership website up and running and ready to take those first ten students there?
[00:40:10.450] – Kurt von Ahnen
Is there’s a real simple step that a lot of people miss because they can skip the Install Wizard, right? And so the Install Wizard adds the extra pages and will even add sample content for you that you could use as a template in like, the Course Builder and stuff. So the Course Builder comes with the standard core Lifter plug in and the Course Builder lets you build your courses. So it’s like an outline, it’s like build your syllabus in this Course builder. It’s kind of visual and it says Section and Lessons and then attaches to the WordPress editor and lets you build out your lessons. A lot of folks, when they’re new at this, they skip the Install Wizard and then by nature, they haven’t created the courses page, the memberships page or the checkout page and they get lost. And so there is a function in Lifter where you can go back and rerun the installation wizard and the system will set all that up for you and install templated courses for you that you can use as samples as well.
[00:41:16.890] – Jonathan Denwood
Great. I think that’s great because it does come with that wizard. And number two, I’m just going to throw this to you to see based on my experience, a lot of initial people initially that got some experience of WordPress and they like it, and that’s why they want to keep on using it for their membership website, setting up the login for students, they struggle with that. What’s your advice about setting up the logging area?
[00:41:55.110] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think most WordPress users entry to mid level struggle with the user’s pathway. They struggle with the user experience altogether. Whether it’s Lifter, a membership site, or any WordPress site, they all seem to struggle with what their expectation is or what they’re trying to present versus what the student or the user would see going.
[00:42:20.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Just want to interrupt. I think it’s cool because as admin, you’re going to log in to the dashboard of WordPress. And users of Lyft are also set up as users of WordPress, but as a student you’re setting it up. So they go and log in to a student dashboard which is set up by Lyfter.
[00:42:51.070] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yes.
[00:42:56.330] – Jonathan Denwood
That initially to somebody that’s a module user. WordPress is a bit confusing. How do you overcome that when you’re talking to people and got any insights about what’s the easiest way of getting does Lifter set up this student dashboard and give a unique Ur, which then you can do a custom menu link and then students can just go and log in? Or do they have to go through a few other steps?
[00:43:35.190] – Kurt von Ahnen
No, the easiest thing that Lifter has in place, and it’s what a lot of people miss is when you go into WordPress and you want to edit your menus, right? Typically you’ll go to your menus and in your menu selection, you won’t see it right away, but if you go up to Screen Options, at the top of the page, select Screen Options, there’s a tick box there for Lifter LMS. When you click that tick box, you get all the options for Lifter LMS menus to add your main menu. And in there is a dynamic login and log out selection. So if you add that dynamic login and log out selection to your main navigation menu, that’s direct for customers. Everyone’s used to looking at the top right of a page and being able to log in or log out based on their status. And then if they’re not logged in, they’ll go to a login screen, which is just username and password. And then if they are logged in, they can go to their dashboard and they can take a look at the certificates that they’ve earned, what courses they’re enrolled in, or make adjustments to their profile.
[00:44:41.970] – Kurt von Ahnen
But we do get a lot of requests for customizing the dashboard, and customizing the dashboard is a possibility. You can do that through CSS or there’s a couple of YouTube tutorials that we have on that, so you can make that as basic or as intricate as you want.
[00:44:58.220] – Jonathan Denwood
Now, if the student wants to reset their password, are they thrown into the normal backing the WordPress, or can they change their password inside the dashboard that Lifter provides?
[00:45:13.910] – Kurt von Ahnen
The easiest way to change the password in my circles is hit the forgotten password link, get the email, click the link in your email and then add the new password, like the WordPress style of forgotten password. But if a student wants to knows their password and wants to change their password, they can edit their profile through the Dashboard and it’ll take them into their actual user profile and they can update their password.
[00:45:44.830] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re probably losing a few people. Are you talking about the WordPress user or the Dashboard? Just throw them into your wife.
[00:45:57.170] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s actually a form that comes up. It’s like a form page. It’s a separate URL, but it is like all of the user data and you can change your password in there.
[00:46:06.870] – Jonathan Denwood
So is there a final thing that comes into your mind that regularly causes a lot of confusion that you’d like to have the opportunity to give some advice on?
[00:46:23.370] – Kurt von Ahnen
The thing that actually happens a lot is I’ve been working a lot with agencies and we’ve been talking about the Infinity Bundle. The Infinity Bundle allows you to install Lifter on an unlimited number of websites and people get lost on that. So if you go with the Infinity Bundle, not only do you get all the add ons, but you can install it on unlimited number of websites. Which means if you’re an agency, you can put that platform on as many websites as you want. The thing with the Infinity Bundle, though, is that it only comes with three support accounts, right? So if you’re an agency and you install it on a bunch of websites, you kind of have to make the commitment to either provide the support to your client, so you’ve created a relationship with the client, and you babysit them forever and ever. Or you can buy additional support accounts, and a lot of people aren’t aware of that, but you can buy an additional support account, grant that to your client, and then you’re not responsible for them anymore. Lifter takes over and does the support for you. So that’s the thing that comes up a lot.
[00:47:28.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
And we’re taking care of agencies directly at Lifter LMS now with LifterLMS comAGENCY. So we’ve got kind of a new path for agencies to follow.
[00:47:39.830] – Jonathan Denwood
I like to point out to the lists and views with WP tony, if you host with us, you get the Infinity Bundle as part of your hosting. This is wrap up with a general section of general discussion. I think the other area, this is my personal take when it comes to WP Tonic, we’re agnostic. What I mean by that is that we don’t enforce that you use a particular page builder. But I’m going to give my personal feeling about that. I personally feel that either you go with Gutenberg or you go with Elementor. At the present moment, WP Tonic, we advise people to use Elementor in 2023. That might change. We’re not going to drop our support of Aluminum, but we’re probably going to offer Gutenberg as well. And probably Gutenberg will be our main choice. Would you agree with that? What’s your own feeling in 2023? I think there’s only really two choices that somebody for their theme and for their page builder is either going to be Gutenberg or Animator. What’s your own thoughts about that?
[00:49:03.390] – Kurt von Ahnen
I did it again today just to test myself, Jonathan. I made another website using Just Gutenberg, and that’s a lie because I use Spectra from Astra and I try to convince myself that I’m ready for Just Gutenberg, but I’m not. I found myself at times wishing I could adjust the padding or the margins a little more freely or as readily as I do an Elementor. So I agree with you. I think Elementor is still very relevant, but yeah, I don’t see any reason to use anything other than Elementor or Gutenberg if you want to keep it simple.
[00:49:37.690] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think, unfortunately and endlessly discussed this in my other podcast that aimed at the WordPress community. Folks, WP tonic. This week in WordPress and SAS, there’s a host of page builders and they’re all great, but I just feel when it comes to membership learning management system. IV going to use Gutenberg with a frame theme like Cadence or Ash Spectre from Astra or there’s a couple of others or you’re going to look at elementor and Astra provides a theme there and that’s one of our main partners. But I think this causes some degree a fair bit of confusion for those that are looking to utilize Lifter. Is a lot of the support tickets around conflict or just general questions about what theme should I use Gutenberg. Do you get a lot of questions support tickets around that?
[00:50:54.450] – Kurt von Ahnen
Not so much on Elementor and Gutenberg, but we do get a lot of questions about themes and some themes are very difficult to make the sidebars work for course progress and stuff. So we get a lot of questions about themes. The other question we get a lot about, Jonathan, quite honestly, is quizzes. A lot of people are looking for a quiz bank and we don’t support a quiz bank. We have the ability.
[00:51:20.850] – Jonathan Denwood
Could you give some insight? What do you mean by that?
[00:51:24.430] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, sure. So there’s other learning platforms outside of WordPress and there’s some quiz plugins outside of most LMS packages that enable you to basically load or dump in a bunch of questions and answers, questions and answers and build what they call a quiz bank. And then when the questions and answers are in a separate bank, you have more freedom to kind of drag them and reuse them or reimplement them in different areas of your knowledge checks with Lifter LMS, each quiz is associated to its course that it’s a part of, and so it’s not really part of a bank. It’s attached to that element. And a lot of the requests we get are for people that want to they’ll say, well, how can I export all of my quizzes and combine them into a bank? And we don’t really have an answer for that just yet.
[00:52:22.750] – Jonathan Denwood
Another area, as you know, heavily invested in a great support of fluent CRM. And the team behind that do you get a lot of questions about marketing optimization and about how obviously Lifter has its set of email? We touched that in another part of this podcast about it sends out when somebody finishes a call or sends a certificate, but there’s other marketing optimization that has to be sent out. Do you get a few questions about that?
[00:53:04.650] – Kurt von Ahnen
My answer is going to sound like I’m being evasive, but I’m not. I’m being completely honest. I don’t see a lot of sport tickets on that type of automation. You got to remember, Lifter LMS has an integration with WP Fusion. I know WP Fusion is on your list of magic that you do with WP Tonic. And so WP Fusion integrates with CRMs and it’s real seamless, man. I mean, once it’s assembled and built, it works great. And the rest API that Lifter offers for other third party connectivity really doesn’t offer any problems or issues. It works really smoothly.
[00:53:42.030] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. I think we wrap it up now. I think we’ve had a real dive in the world of Lifter LMS. Thank you so much. Kirk sorry, go ahead.
[00:53:52.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
Can I just offer one more thing? Because I feel like we left something on the table.
[00:53:57.610] – Speaker 4
And I’m just going.
[00:53:58.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
To say this is someone recent with WP Tonic. I think you’re selling yourself short, Jonathan, because the packages you offer are amazing. You offer the learning management system, the CRM, the automation tools, the hosting, it’s all there. And we just had this conversation about setup and configuration and all that, but when they order a package through Wptonic, it’s already set up. Like the template is done and then it’s all there. It’s already set up. All they have to do is change the content and the pictures and start selling their courses.
[00:54:30.780] – Jonathan Denwood
And we offer great support for our ticketing system, but also Lifter does as well, but we offer even higher level, I would say thank you for that is great value. And we’re committed to those that are looking to build a business in the Elearning area. Both Kurt, myself, and the WP Tonic team are passionate about it and we really feel that if you’re looking to build that second income, that freedom for you and your family, building a membership website is a great path and a realistic path. So thanks for that. Kirk so, going to wrap it up. So, Justine Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[00:55:28.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
Kirk well, if they can spell my last name or look at it on the screen right now, the best way to find me, honestly is LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn every day. So LinkedIn. Kurt Von on you’ll find me. The other way is Manjana. Nomas. I have been under the name Manana Nomas since 2008. It is really well branded and marketed so at this point, I have no prayer of changing my business name because it’s gone too far, right? If you look up my nemada matas online, you’ll find me.
[00:55:57.320] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. We’ll be back next week at a normal time at 830 Pacific Standard Time. I love for people to join us. If you’ve got any membership problem or you’re just looking for some advice, join us live. And you can put a question to me and Spencer for like Kirk, Spencer is a real expert on membership websites and marketing optimization and WordPress in general. So you got any questions? You can join us at 830 Pacific Standard Time and answer that question and we join the show. We will answer it. Please join us. We love your feedback live. We won’t be back next week because it’s the Christmas New Year week, so we’re having a week break, but we’ll be back the following week and we love you to join us and just want to wish you and your family a great Christmas and a happy New Year. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
[00:56:59.410] – Ending
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