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In this episode of LMScast, Chris Badgett offers an important perspective change for anybody making online courses: you should conceive of yourself as a media firm rather than merely a course designer. He says that since systems like ChatGPT and Claude can rapidly give answers and learning resources, knowledge is no longer scarce in today’s environment.

Because of this, merely packing content into a course is no longer sufficient to succeed or stand out. Instead, people’s attention and trust have become limited, particularly in a digital world that is overrun with content, short videos, and subpar AI-generated content. This makes it more difficult for instructors to keep students’ interest long enough for them to finish courses, which are inherently lengthy and need dedication.

Chris emphasizes that producers who regularly provide worthwhile, non-salesy material are now rewarded by platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, as opposed to those who actively attempt to sell goods. The previous approach of “create a course and then market it” is no longer successful as a result of this change. Building your audience first, providing them with useful information, and then making money is the new paradigm. With this method, your course turns into a backend product, and your main responsibility is to continuously inform, interact, and cultivate connections with your audience via various channels.

He presents the concept of a “media stack,” which consists of important platforms including blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, and email newsletters. Since the email list is a direct channel of communication that you own and control, it is the most crucial and non-negotiable of these. Over time, even a basic monthly newsletter that shares well chosen updates or insights in your industry may establish credibility and trust.

YouTube is a great place to start when creating content, particularly when it comes to responding to commonly asked questions in your area and topics that your audience ought to be asking but aren’t. While blogging can create authority, enhance thinking, and increase SEO, as long as it’s done deliberately and not just through low-quality AI content podcasting is a fantastic tool for fostering deeper relationships and drawing in high-attention audiences.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today we are going to go over an important mindset shift and framing for you to change. And that frame is going from being a course creator to being a media company. So this is the only way to win going forward. And the reason is courses alone aren’t enough anymore, so just having a course is not enough.

You gotta think bigger as a media company. This actually happened to me many years ago with LifterLMS. The software business. I refrained from thinking that, hey, we’re a software company to, hey, we’re a media company.

This podcast as an example, which has been going for 12 years. Is a part of the LifterLMS Media company, so as our YouTube channel, we also happen to provide software for the e-learning industry. But I very much see myself as a creator, a content creator, a media company, a media brand, and not just me.

Team members on the LifterLMS team are also brand personalities for LifterLMS. Anyways. It’s basically a shift from thinking of your course content first to thinking of your audience first and then monetization later. So you’re not in the course business, you are in the media business. You just happen to make courses.

So what changed all this? Why is this happen? Part of it is that artificial intelligence, the rise of that is further commoditizing information. So information wants to be free at a base level. For example, the WordPress core software is completely free. It’s just code, it’s just information. But when it comes to ai if, I want information quickly, I can just ask ChatGPT or Claude.

And we’ll get some decent information for a question I have or a skill I wanna develop or something I wanna learn. So what has become more scarce is trust and attention. For example. We can’t always trust artificial intelligence because it does hallucinate, even though that hallucination is getting a little better.

And also our attention has never been. More fractured as a human species that’s driven by so many different things. The amount of media that’s out there, the number of social media channels, the rise of short form video content like TikTok has created what people call short form video brain rot, which means our ability to hold attention and focus.

In general, as a human population has gotten a lot, worse. And if you think about it, when you create an online course, you’re actually asking somebody to hold their attention for an extended amount of time. A course is it can be varied in length, but they’re usually a very committed timeline for.

Attention that you’re asking the user to take, not just in one sitting, but sometimes over multiple days or even months, or even in some cases years. So that is a big attention ask when attention globally in general, as is that an all time low? Also, just like with the rise of YouTube where essentially everybody could have a TV channel.

When I was a kid there was like. Whatever, 30 TV channels on cable, when my parents were kids first they didn’t have tv, they just had radio, but then they had three channels if they were lucky enough to be able to get ’em. But now there’s like a billion YouTube channels. Course creation has gotten so easy with tools like Lifter, LMS, that unfortunately there’s a lot of low quality.

Courses in the same way that there’s a lot of low quality YouTube videos, channels content and so on. And then we have the AI issue of what’s known as AI slop, which is where you’re using artificial intelligence, not in a smart way to create content that’s just low quality. So that saturation of low quality courses.

Also further contributes to the challenge of just being a course creator. And then finally, if you look at the algorithms, whether that’s a social media algorithm like YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or LinkedIn, or you look at the way search engines do their rankings. They reward creators far more than they reward products, which means, especially on social media freely available, non-salesy topic driven information that’s high quality is what the algorithm rewards and helps drive attention to.

So if you’re a. Media company and not just a course creator. You start thinking about this oh if I want more eyeballs on my media, what kind of content do I also need to create? So the old model was to build a course and then sell it. The new model is to build an audience and serve a community.

So it’s about putting your. Audience, your community at the center of your business, not your product or your course. And then one way to think about this too is shifting from being a teacher or a course creator to being a publisher. So a publisher just thinks about things differently than just a teacher.

Now you will be publishing online courses, but it’s important to also publish other types of content as a media company. The other thing we want to think about here is that as a metaphor, some of the hugely successful companies are. Netflix, that’s a publishing platform for movies and shows.

You’ve got YouTube, which is a publishing platform. There are content creators on there that are publishers. There are newsletter brands out there that are publishers. So this is these are, all media companies. So it’s important for you to design your media stack, and I just want to acknowledge that.

Not everyone out there wants to be on camera or enjoys talking for extended periods of time, like in a podcast for, as an example. So you don’t necessarily have to do all of these, and I definitely don’t recommend starting all of them at once. But the media stack that comes before or in addition to your online courses.

Is number one, a email list. This one’s pretty much non-negotiable. So at a fundamental level, email never dies, and it is a key important key to your success. If you don’t have an email list, I guarantee your business as a course creator or education company is not gonna go very far. So I recommend you do some kind of email newsletter.

Now, if that sounds intimidating to you, like you have to do like a daily news kind of email broadcast thing, that’s not what I’m talking about at all. Let’s talk about a minimum effective email newsletter that takes the least amount of time, but adds a lot of value and authority and builds your email list.

So the first way I think about that is first, the cadence. Even just a monthly email newsletter can be very valuable and help you grow your list. So that means you only need to create an email once a month. Now, in terms of creating a great email newsletter, I just recommend, first thing is slowing down and creating a structure for your newsletter That makes sense.

You can re repeat and fill in every time. So the structure is like a template for every broadcast that you do from your newsletter. So the, I see a lot of these, so I’ll just share like what would be the absolute easiest email newsletter to start. Whatever your niche is, whatever your industry, you can do.

A link to five cool things that happened in your niche or in your industry in the past month. And they don’t necessarily have to be things that you’ve done and they could be, have nothing to do with what you’re working on, although I recommend including your work and, what you’re up to in your email newsletter.

But I also recommend being a reporter for your industry or your niche. Now, with tools like artificial intelligence, you can. It’s never been easier to find news and relevant things quickly, but particularly if you’re looking over the past month, just as an example if you use rock, which is the artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence tool on the X platform, it can be very helpful at finding news because.

It is, has access to all the data on X or Twitter, which means whatever news was going on or marketable, notable things in your niche, in your industry, it would’ve been talked about on X or Twitter. And if you just ask Rock to look back the past 30 days and give it some prompting about. Your niche and subtopics your audience is interested in, you could quickly source five cool things that happen this month in your niche, and there’s your email list.

Of course, you wanna put your email capture everywhere you can, or a link to it from social media profiles from. YouTube video descriptions on your website. This is why it’s really important to have a WordPress website that you own control, so that you can easily capture emails. You can use tools like WP Fusion to easily pipe those emails over to your email list service software.

You can use tools like Popup Maker to throw a popup with a message about your newsletter and get people to sign up right through the popup. So there’s so much you can do to build your email list. We can do a whole topic on email. In fact, I did do one a while back. About how I grew a, an over 100,000 person email list myself at Lifter lms.

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So if you want some deep dive on email, go find that episode. The next in the media stack if, I could only pick two, it would be the email list and the YouTube channel, particularly for course creators because. Of course, creators in general, for the most part, leverage videos in their content, which means they tend to not be as resistant or camera shy or unsure how to work with video and audio.

So you’ve already got the base skills to be a YouTube media publisher. Using YouTube my number one strategy to get started as a media creator, if you’re like, I don’t know what to make videos about or, you have the experts curse, you’re just like, I don’t even know where to start.

Here’s where you start. If you look at your niche, what I’d encourage you to do is to find the 10 frequently asked questions that come up in your industry. And I would make a video a short, like question, answer video. For example, I was talking to my wife Sam earlier today and she’s looking at some marketing for her running coaching business and if I was gonna advise her I’m on ultrarunner, so I, know what kind of questions people would ask an ultra running coach.

So it could be things like this, like one video might be the 10 10. What things do I need to know before my first 100 Mile Ultra run? I recently completed a hundred Mile Ultra, and I literally did this. I went to YouTube and I said, what do I need to know before I attempt my first 100 Mile Ultra Run?

And YouTube came back. There was a guy with a video it was about eight minutes and he went over like the top eight things that you need to know and be aware of for your ultra run. It was great. Other things like what kind of shoes do I need, how to maintain fitness in the winter. So on. These are like the 10 frequently asked questions for that niche.

So write those down for your niche. And then here’s my favorite twist on this. Then you write 10 more questions that people should be asking you but aren’t. So this is where you put your expert hat on and hey, nobody’s really as a ultra running person, everybody’s always asking about how to do your first ultra, what shoes do I need?

What’s my training plan? But you know what, nobody ever asks, but should, how do I take care of my feet when I’m running? 30, 50, a hundred hundreds of miles straight. So foot care, that’s an example. It’s not like a super if you’re not into running it sounds funny, but that’s an example of a question that my audience, if I was a running coach, should be asking but isn’t.

So I’m just gonna put that out there and that kind of content gets picked up as well. So if you do that exercise. You’ve got the 10 frequently asked questions you get in your niche, and then the 10 questions that people are asking or are not asking, but should, that gives you 20 video ideas to kick off your YouTube channel.

I actually did this a long time ago when I had a web design agency and I sat down with a piece of paper in about 10 minutes. I had my 20 questions, and then I actually went. Filmed all 20 videos all at once and batched produced those, and that kicked off my YouTube channel and it started attracting and building my audience.

So that’s how I recommend getting started on YouTube. The other thing to do is podcasting. Now, obviously I’m a fan. I’ve been podcasting for over 12 years, and even though the LMS Cast podcast. Is not super huge and famous. It is a very micro niche podcast for this audience, of course, creator and LMS website building professionals.

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And the coolest thing about the podcast as a media company, first with the audience at the center of our business, is you add incredible value to your audience. By giving them this long form content. Also, the people that listen to your podcasts tend to have longer attention span. If somebody can listen to a 30, 40 minute episode or even multi-hour episode, they have the kind of attention span required to complete an online course.

And then over time with the podcast, you’re building so much trust. And depth of relationship and authority with your listener. The cool thing I love about podcasts is a media type is they are what’s known as portable content, and there’s not that much portable content. So when you think about it, when you’re at a computer and your eyes are locked onto your computer or your phone, there’s so many different types of content.

When you’re washing the dishes or exercising or going for the run or driving, you basically need something that’s portable and you’re your eyes are busy. Your hands are busy, you’re doing other things. There’s only podcasts audio, books and music. Basically, that’s all you got. So it’s not as crowded over here in podcast land.

And you get some of the best, listeners and audience, and of course you can mention your, newsletter and your podcast, or if you do a podcast that’s another simple way to start a newsletter. That’s all it is a feed of your latest podcast episodes and that’s, how you start building your email list.

The last one I’ll say in the media stack is to be a blogger, be a writer. This is why using lifter LMS and particularly WordPress is so important. WordPress started as a blogging platform. It’s so much more than that with tools like Lifter, LMS and WP Fusion and Pop-Up Maker and so many more great tools.

But as a blogging platform you can write. You can write blogs, and that is a type of media to put in your stack. Now, I do not recommend that you use artificial intelligence to just create a bunch of quick content for SEO. You need to put your heart and soul, your unique insights into your writing. You can leverage AI tools for research and clean up and fleshing out ideas and so on.

But create some blog content. And it doesn’t always have to be long. I’m a fan of the, at a minimum 500 word article but I’ve written articles that are much longer. There are thousands and thousands of words. So writing is the ultimate skill as a communicator. It will sharpen.

Your expertise as does podcasting. One of the great things about podcasting and writing or blogging is that you can bring on guests. So you’re actually getting smarter or in your writing, you are doing research across your industry. You’re keeping up with what other leaders in your space are doing.

You’re creating opinions and thought pieces and weaving in your own expertise and experience in the blog content. So that’s it. That’s the media stack. So if you think of yourself as a media company and not just a course creator that has to do some marketing, it becomes a lot more clear of what you do.

And the course kind of moves to the background of the free other types of media. It’s basically means you want to get as much exposure to, your audience as you can in your free content, whether that’s emails, YouTube videos, blog articles, podcast episodes but in the backend you actually sell courses.

So instead of being like, I’m a course creator, I need to sell my course, what you’re saying is, I’m a media company. I work across these content types of media. And by the way, for those that are at the right place at the right time I do have a course or membership offer that you can take, up on.

So this is where you do things like. You get like for every 100 subscribers to your email list, two of them will become customers. So that’s a 2% conversion rate, as an example. So that’s the media stack. The courses are the backend they’re the monetization layer. So the audience warms up first through the content, the media content, and then they buy.

So the way to think about this in terms of what to create instead of just a course is to create an ecosystem versus a single product. So if we put our audience at the center of our business, our course, or our membership, those are just satellites on the core of our audience. But maybe we’ve got our YouTube channel.

We’ve got our blog, our podcast, and our newsletter. So all these things are in service to our audience, and a percentage of them will monetize and purchase the course. So it’s like a content flywheel. So once you start getting that traction, even at when it’s small, at first, if you only have a hundred people across your.

YouTube channel, your newsletter, your blog, your podcast. But two of them buy, that’s a 2% conversion rate. Now, if you can get those flywheels of media content, the free stuff scaling exponentially, that’s when a business can really take off. As a media company, so that means when you jump to a thousand.

Audience size: you now have 20 customers. When you jump to 10,000, now you have 200 customers. And so on. When you get to a hundred thousand, you have 2000 customers, and that math tends to scale well if you are not just chasing engagement. With your media, but actual super relevant content for your clearly identified niche market.

So just to give some examples of creators who built Media First Brands, we recently did a fame jacking video on our podcast, which was basically a breakdown of Ali Ab Doll’s. Course creation business. And the thing he does with his course is he had a huge YouTube channel before he launched his recent course.

And he just constantly interviewed his audience about what they were interested in and stayed with him. And it was through building up that YouTube channel that he was finally able to monetize it. As a as a course creator. So you can also do this with podcasting. The great thing about podcasting is particularly if you do an interview show, if you commit to say, three years of podcasting before you create your course, maybe you have an idea of what you want your course to be.

You have an idea of what audience you want to serve, and you’ve got you’re clear on the foundations of your future offer. Then you spend three years interviewing experts in the space. Not only does that make you smarter, but it also builds relationships with people who you may do business development and partnership with later.

That’s a great way to think about it. It’s like you have to give a lot of value first before you take or ask for the sale with your online course. And if I see it all the time, like if I look at the YouTube space, there’s so many YouTubers that could be course creators.

’cause they have a great audience. They’ve developed a niche focus. They haven’t monetized they’re not packaging their stuff in a course, and that’s a challenge for a different day. But a thing, when you see create YouTubers that really take off, that are more educational than entertaining and really niche focused, you can just see how much more they could monetize not through YouTube ads or a simple Substack subscription.

Patreon or something like that, but with an actual online course. So to start making the transition from course creator to media company, what I would recommend is to pick one channel first and, just stay with it. And if you ask me which one should I start with, I would say definitely the email newsletter.

’cause you need to have that email list. Everything else should feed that. It’s basically the center of your marketing engine and sales engine. So build that email list, focus on a like creating a template for your newsletter so that when you sit down once a week or once a month to create your newsletter, you’re just filling in the template and you can use.

AI tools or capture systems when you see something interesting so that you can add it to your next newsletter. And then when it is time to add another channel, I wouldn’t add ’em all at once. Don’t try to become a podcaster, a YouTuber, and a writer and a newsletter creator all at one time. If you are very comfortable with the newsletter and the writing game, I would recommend next focus on writing blog post articles. Do at least 10 to 20 before you even think about adding another media channel. The next I would do is probably a either YouTube or podcast. It’s really up to you which order to go in, but the general thinking is it’s never too early to start building your email list.

So start there and then focus on one media channel, systematize it. Get your flywheel of audience growth going first. Before you transition to another one. Yeah, you want to build that audience before you sell. Trust me when I say course creation gets so much easier when you’ve been interacting with your audience through your free media content, like in the comments or live streams or whatever you’re doing.

You know what, how they think, you know what they want. You’re not just guessing. So when you build a media company, I want to encourage you to build it on your own property since you’re essentially building an asset. That’s why having your own website powered by WordPress and Lifter LMS is so important.

You control it. It’s your website, it’s your media company. The content is in your media library. When you go with a hosted platform you’re essentially renting space on somebody else’s website, which is very dangerous in the long term. They may raise their prices on you, their business may shut down or whatever.

You basically don’t own and control it, and you, the other great thing about WordPress and Lifter is you have the flexibility for courses and memberships and online communities and newsletters. And WordPress as a content management system or CMS is what it’s all about. And as a media company, you, you have content your courses and lessons and quizzes and certificates and everything are, just a other types of content besides your articles and videos and so on.

So WordPress and Lifter LMS essentially supports the backend of a. Media business. Now, of course you can use those tools as a course creator, but from here on out I want to, I want you to think of yourself as a media company, so stop trying to sell a course and start building a media company today.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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