Other Video Highlights:
- Paul walks us through how to build a Memberium site with the new BuddyBoss theme, the BuddyBoss Social Platform (a fork of BuddyPress, bbPress and a few other plugins), LearnDash and Elementor.
- The concept of “wagon wheel” dashboard pages. A member’s home page is supposed to move your members forward to the next part of your program and to the different parts that are available, just like a wagon wheel with different spokes.
- How you can include concepts from game mechanics, similar to the same ones used in Playstation or Xbox games, to your course or membership site with GamiPress, LearnDash and award points when your member completes an activity (completes a lesson, course, or posts a comment).
- What’s the difference between BuddyPress, BuddyBoss and the BuddyBoss Social Platform? A little over a year ago BuddyBoss forked BuddyPress, bbPress and a few other plugins and is now known as the BuddyBoss Social platform. We get Paul’s thoughts on what he thinks between the two platforms and which one you should use. Memberium has a built in integration with BuddyPress, and the BuddyBoss social platform that you can find out more about here.
- The BuddyBoss Platform allows you to add a social component to your WordPress site (activity newsfeeds, groups, forums, in depth user profiles and private messaging)
- An inside look at how building your courses and lessons with LearnDash works and how easy it is to do.
- We discuss the concept of game mechanics and how you can use GamiPress to add different gamification elements to your WordPress site.
- Get an inside look at how Paul worked with Cole’s Classroom to ungate their membership content and find out the outcome that had on the business.
- How ungating your membership area can be a way to leverage organic traffic and other traffic coming to your site and attract more paying members. Find out what effect this had with Cole’s Classroom and how it helped take their business to the next level.
Video Transcript
A Deep Dive On Building Your Membership Site With BuddyBoss & Other Membership Lessons With Paul Bright
Andrew
Hey, everyone, it’s Andrew with Memberium, and today we have the pleasure of talking to Paul Bright from PB Digital in sunny Queensland, Australia.
Paul
And today Paul is going to be walking us through an awesome membership site that he’s built with BuddyBoss, Memberium, LearneDash, Elementor and a few other plug ins. Paul, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. We’re excited to be here.
Andrew
Yeah, we’re really excited to show everyone this site and to give you a bit of an introduction here. When I first saw the site that Paul’s about to show us, I was really blown away by everything included with it.
Andrew
I especially like the different gamification pieces in it, how they’re all put together and just the whole experience of kind of going through the site is next level. This is a great example of the type of powerful site you can build with Memberium learned in the other plugins involved. And the other really cool part about this is Paul isn’t just going to be showing us what this membership site looks like. He’s also going to share how you can build the same type of site yourself, even if you don’t consider yourself necessarily a WordPress or coding expert.
Andrew
If you just want to figure out some ways you can better game a five year course or membership site. You also get some ideas you can use throughout this video. And I should mention, Paul does have a step by step tutorial and some downloadable files for the site that will walk you through how to set the same site up if you’re interested in that. And then in this video, we’re just going to give you a high level overview of the site and talk about some of the things Paul’s learned along the way.
Andrew
And so just to give you an introduction to for those of you who don’t know Paul, he’s a super talented Web designer, WordPress and Memberium expert. His company has worked with clients like Jay Shetty, Cole Joseph from Cole’s Classroom and lots of other successful business owners. Paul’s been kind enough to give us an inside look at the site and share some of the things he’s learned after building so many membership sites.
Andrew
So, Paul, before we dive into the site, can you tell us a little bit about your business, how you got started and where you are today?
Paul
Yes, so no, definitely, I think you’ve summed it up really well and but I guess the way I got into this kind of going back a number of years ago, you know, five plus years, I was actually a financial planner, but I could always do some coding and things.
Paul
And I wanted to like a home based business. And so on the side, I was kind of learning how to do marketing and and whatnot. So I kind of built this like learn to play guitar aside, which was kind of my kind of my entrance into this whole world and thought I was kind of, I guess, having that coding background, that experience. And I was able to kind of do some things and, you know, had a different functionality and kind of pulling, you know, trying to do different things, going to connecting to the Infusionsoft via its API, just trying to tweak some things.
Paul
And, you know, and then it was just kind of from that building up and and learning things and trying new things and whatnot and really just using Guitarist Academy, which is kind of my little thing I do on the side as a bit of a kind of a testing ground know, since you had people kind of reaching out or I’d see people in the different groups, you know, the Memberium group, how do I do this? And so it kind of started connecting with people and just trying different things.
Paul
And and I guess one thing led to another. And when essentially an agency was born and obviously that’s something that’s kind of progressed over, you know, a number of years. But it’s it’s one thing that I I really enjoy this type of work. So it’s been really kind of good to be able to connect with other people who are much smarter, especially with the marketing side, than I am, and then seeing what they are doing to kind of grow their business and then kind of combine that with kind of what I knew in my tech experience and the coding and and then working with them.
Paul
And again, how do we take things to that next level and getting there? Because I found that a lot of people would have these ideas that I wanted to do and implement, but not sure how to do it. You know, there’s no than that. For example, there’s not an off the shelf kind of plug in that does it. Or there might be a plug in that does it but doesn’t really does, you know, 80 percent.
Paul
And it’s that missing that 20 percent. How do we kind of get to use that plugin and customize it and how do we kind of leverage different technologies to, you know, to kind of implement the things that they kind of dreamt of adding to this site? And I guess it’s just one thing led to the other. And this is kind of now what we do and what kind of got myself into the team as well. That kind of help out and from designers to developers.
Paul
And yes, it’s not just kind of it’s not just myself kind of wearing all the hats. It’s all the people who are kind of helping out. And it’s been really good.
Andrew
Yeah, it’s awesome. And so when was it that you got started with Infusionsoft?
Paul
I think it would have been 30…Twenty, twenty, maybe 2014, 2015 like an hour ago, literally just a, you know, a user. And so that was just kind of me flying around. And it funny because my business at the time really wasn’t suited to Infusionsoft. It’s just doing a little bit on the side. And it was it was fun. I think what drew me to Infusionsoft, especially back then, was the campaign up. And, you know, it was I think it was using PaineWebber or something back then.
Paul
And so, you know, like there’s going to be a way that someone joins and becomes a customer, that we can do different marketing to them and they go digging. And you find that Infusionsoft is the big player in that space, you know, that kind of stuff. So I made that jump into it. And yeah. And then literally, that’s kind of how it progressed and it became a certified partner. And yeah, it literally was just kind of working with different Infusionsoft users and over the years.
Paul
So that’s kind of something that I initially started off doing on the side. And but it’s essentially grown into the full time, kind of the full time business.
Andrew
Oh, that’s cool. So to start us off, why don’t you walk us through the site you’ve built from a member’s perspective and we can kind of go through there and you could show us how it works.
Paul
Then should I probably need to share my screen beautiful. There it is coming up yet perfect. Perfect in terms of what we’ve built. So we’ve we’ve essentially built this. I guess it’s like a it’s a premade site for lack of better words. So I wanted to kind of create something, you know, how do we make it really easy for someone who’s just getting started in this kind of space with Memberium or a membership, sort of the eLearning portal?
Paul
How do you know they just want to kind of like set something up really quickly? How can they kind of do that and still have something that, you know, that looks really nice? So for us, what we what we’ve built is we wanted to build something. It’s almost like a plug and play type site, literally, you know, you install it. And as Andrew mentioned, it got some kind of some training that kind of goes through the step by step.
Paul
We like to install file that. You install one plug in and then you upload the file and all kind of deploy the site and then you add a couple extra plug ins to it. And literally within five, 10, 15 minutes, you know, you’ve got this site that looks exactly like this. And so from the reason we’ve kind of like this out this side out and kind of kind of go through it. So it’s the in terms of what we’ve actually kind of built here, that you could go in and change and make it make it your own essentially is we have this this kind of dashboard.
Paul
And for me, the dashboard is the hub of the site. So when someone logs in usually the dashboard where you can call it the member home page, you know, there’s all these different kind of terms for it. I like to usually refer to it as a dashboard. How do you kind of leverage that space and and make it something that I think looks nice, but also something useful? How do we kind of then take people from this to the other areas of your site?
Paul
So there’s a few ways you can do that, obviously, through the navigation at the top. But also you can leverage the items here on the actual particular screen on this. Remember the Home screen of the dashboard to also do that same thing. So, you know, in terms of this kind of template that we’ve created here, you know, you’re essentially, you know, someone comes in. And so for us, you always have that that nice little welcome message.
Paul
Welcome to you’d put your name in here. Welcome to the Academy. Welcome to TV Digital. Welcome to the classroom, whatever it may be. And you can have some supplemental text and all this can be changed. Then you can kind of then the next part here is the continued learning. So this is for us in terms of this site layout and what we have here. The features are, you know, it’s a e-learning site. So some courses we’ve added like a little form there.
Paul
You can add a shop here and some of these because this is just a bare bones type startup site like these are you’ll see that we just put some kind of templated type, you know, just some kind of dummy text here. And that’s why you see this Lorem ipsum. So if you see that, I’ve got some people saying, oh, this is Lorem ipsum is that so that, you know, some of the language and it’s now it’s just some kind of placeholder content here.
Paul
So, you know, that’s just the goal for, you know, you’d be able to kind of come in and literally you can change that out to read whatever you want. We can even take it out. But what we’ve got here is, you know, so we want to try again using this this concept of a member home, trying to take people to different areas of the site. How do we do that? So the first idea is trying to get people to go to the courses and engage in the courses.
Paul
And you can see here it says that there’s no courses. I haven’t started anything. OK, so this is some little custom elements that we’ve added here in the dashboard. And again, you can get no coding needed. You can grab this and you’d have this set up. But literally as as a user, they can kind of come in here. They could click on that. It would then take them to the kind of the course library and again, would just put some placeholder type courses in there and then they could go through.
Paul
But once I start a course, it then changes. So let me kind of quickly
Andrew
Ok, that’s interesting. And to clarify, these are LearnDash courses?
Paul
Yeah, correct. Correct. So these and again, we would just put these as our little little starter things. There’s no actual content themselves. We’ve just done a layout and actually we because we’re using BuddyBoss theBuddyBoss theme. So we’re kind of grabbing it. This is some of the demo content they had and we just kind of moved over as well. So, you know, the goal would be that, you know, it once you set this up. And again, I kind of covered a bit more in the training as well.
Paul
But, you know, once you install the things, you know, the theme is essentially the file that will install the theme, the plug ins for, you know, one of the steps you certainly want to do is change happening. Either delete the ones that delete the causes here, unless if you’re selling a cause at a box, you most likely will want to change that. And you can either rename the course and rename the module. And what not all the ladies had your own and then what will happen is any course that you add is going to dynamically add in to this kind of section up here as well.
Paul
So, you know, on the course of screens, anything you add will literally just show up here in this. Actually, this page here is actually part of BuddyBoss’ courses. And then if you restrict it, you can then know using Memberium, you can protect the course and then depending on how you do that, to hide off so people can access the courses they can have access to. And you can even then take it to the next level where you’ve got your you show the ones that have been locked in, the ones that people can access.
Paul
And I can show an example of how we tweak that and done it in a different spot. Also in terms of like. Yeah, yeah. OK, cool. So I’ll, I’ll show you like quickly here. So like this is the dashboard now you can see no courses. Let me just kind of as a user let me just start this course. And just to mark some stuff here as complete.
Andrew
And if you had like a video as an example, your video would go in the content area there, but nothing, nothing there to clarify for anybody.
Paul
Yes, yes, yes. It really, really startedobviously really basic. You know, I can I can show you an example, but with some content. And it’s almost like how we’ve taken this this kind of with this package. And then we have we then kind of customize. But the only thing is we’ve kind of we have put some extra customization into it. But of course, you could add a video and then anything.
Andrew
Sorry to interrupt you there. The other cool thing that you’ve done with that, how you customize the BuddyBoss theme is the the progress bar at the top and kind of the points that get awarded each time the lesson is completed. I thought that was really cool. And also the coins, I believe the coins are through GamiPress. Is that you got on there?
Paul
Spot on the yeah, correct. Correct. So I actually forgot to mention that. So, yeah, one thing that we added into this thing here was so this is this is like the levels, the points, the coins, that’s all GamiPress.
Paul
And that’s how you sort of have to pronounce it properly, but that’s what I call it. And so even in the back and just super quickly, you’ll see that on the dashboard, on the gaming press. We’ve got our levels. We’ve got achievements and the goodies and the badges and, you know, so that’s even the point types, which are the points that you see.
Paul
So the one thing I think is how do you kind of keep that you and how do you get it? So people are saying that the points are increasing. So as you see, if I mark this complete, these points will increase because I’ve set up know when someone and you can see and we had to like a little animation. So we kind of check out here. And again, there’s no content here. But if I mark as complaete, you can see I’m on six hundred and fifty points.
Paul
When I mark it as complete, he’ll go up to 750 because I think I did one hundred points per lesson. And you can customize that and do anything you want because this is literally it’s in the site and you can kind of training with what goes through, how to customize it so you can customize the levels and at what point can someone essentially level up and then, you know, the points to know how many points do they get for completing certain items?
Paul
And the thing with GamiPress is it makes it really easy because you can set these within minutes. You can say that how if someone completes a lesson, let’s give them 100 points, someone completes an entire course, then let’s give them, say, two hundred and fifty points. If someone logs in, let’s give them another two hundred points. It’s up to you what you said.
But then you can also set criteria like we don’t want you to keep logging out and logging in, logging out and logging in, to try keep boosting your point so you can set restrictions that you can you can get 100 out of 200 points for logging in, but you can only do that once per day. You can do you know, if you’ve got a forum on your site and you want to try and engage people have people taking part in doing forum replies or when they make a comment in the forum, post the thread all again.
Paul
This is part of GamiPress that you can say every time you post a comment and forum, we’ll give you one hundred points. And so the whole point with game gamification, if you’re kind of new to this area, is really how do you build in game mechanics in a typical games that you would find in the App Store for your phone or on PlayStation or Xbox units. How do you build in these kind of game, these game mechanics, into like an e-learning site to just try and make it more fun, a little bit more engaging?
Paul
And, you know, like these points at the end of the day, you know, you don’t get anything for these points and even these coins here where you can actually unlock some goodies. And I can show you because I actually love you, because you can see here because of these screens, because they’re getting confusing. But we did a way where you can get these goodies like you own these coins. And again, so you can see the way that we did it was every time you level up.
Paul
So, you know, I was on level one before and I think it was at five hundred points. I needed to get to go to level two. But every time I’ve leveled up, I get ten coins. And then what we can do here is I’ve actually set it up. And again, this is everything you see here is is you know, is just one file away for you. So it’s kind of, you know, this because we’ve had a bunch of custom things in here, but it’s literally just kind of one click, a few clicks.
Paul
It’s and it’s kind of there. But, you know, so with these these coins here. So in the case and you can customize this again, so you could say if any time you complete a course, you get 20 points. And it’s just a way of trying to make it a little bit more fun. So what we said is, you know, you can click here, which takes you to this section in your profile. And this is the member profile kind of area now where they can sit like a background image here, like in Avatar and change their name ,just logged in as admin.
Paul
But I can use my coins to a lot of different items in here. And these items are in the back end. It’s still not a GamiPress, but you can see I can unlock this like ten coins. And so let me just show you if I try and unlock this. And if I don’t have enough coins, it’s going to say, sorry, you can do it, but also we added a little shortcode here, so they’ve got to refresh the screen.
Paul
So something on our thing that we want to add. Let’s see how this kind of extra contents now showing. And so what you can do is I could change this. So instead of just being like a example, again, it’s just a placeholder item. But it’s you know, we could have had an e-book there and or a special videos like it in the guitar space. I have had a video like the top 10 called You Go Learn and so people can then use their coins to unlock this bonus content.
Paul
And so it’s kind of you can actually protect it. So it’s only showing this content. And this could be a video. It could be a link. It could be anything. And again, I’ve just probably a bad example of this, but they can get you can use those coins to unlock items. And this could link to any like a bonus, like a downloadable workbook. And so you can actually do not just have those ones, but you can actually do some value, add some things, some valuable content that people can unlock by taking part in the site.
Paul
And that’s what I think it’s all about, is really just trying to get people to kind of engage with the content. Just try to make it a little bit more fun.
Andrew
Yeah, all those little things kind of add up together to make it a lot more kind of enjoyable experience and get get people going through more, of course, than they would without it.
Paul
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. And that that’s right. And and so, you know, now you can see some of these because it’s a little bit we hear this because they don’t, you know, these ones don’t have actually any content. But if you noticed now that this section is now changed as well, because I started the course and now it’s it’s now showing the course, you know, and I can see what I’ve actually got in progress.
Paul
And I can literally they click on this. So it’s kind of a way of saying, hey, you haven’t started any courses yet going back to the dashboard. You haven’t started any courses yet here. You can you know, this is another one you can start. And that’s one example where we have another dashboard, which is sort of showing before. And, you know, in other area, we added with some brightest courses, you know, again, you could take that out because it’s somewhat similar.
Paul
It’s both there. So this is, I guess, this section know, if you ever use Netflix, it says, you know, continue watching. It knows the things that you’ve started, but you haven’t finished. And that is what this section is. This is kind of like that, that Netflix idea of being able to kind of pick up from where you left off. Yeah. And once this is done, then it goes away. So and, you know, then we’ve got our latest courses.
Paul
And again, it’s just another way. Again, it’s thinking of Netflix. It’s these are our latest. So this is what’s popular. You could do that. This is what’s trending. So you could even put in the items that you wanted to show here. And there were just some stats here just to kind of break it up into how many points of the and how many courses are completely badges that are good. And then we’ve got, again, thinking of the dashboard.
Paul
Remember, home screen is the hub. How do we get people to all the areas of the site? And we’ve got a way to show and in the latest discussions, dummy data here. But yeah, that’s kind of a way to try and get people to move over to this area of the site. And if I had other things in the site, we can we can then try and take people to those different areas as well.
Andrew
What would one of those what would some of those courses look like if somebody didn’t have access to those courses through Memberium? Yes, so if you don’t have access to a by default, it’s going to hide off the screen like it just you know, that’s kind of the good thing about Memberium is it’s if you don’t have it, it just assumes you don’t actually even see it’s there. So, you know, from a content retention standpoint, that is really, really cool because at least people can access the courses that they haven’t purchased or they don’t have access to.
Paul
The downside sometimes of that is they don’t know whatever exists. And so then sometimes it’s really nice to be able to showcase those things that they don’t have access to. And at this stage, and it’s actually something that I want to look at adding to this kind of essentially a statistical template, here is a way of doing it. Did you want to show you an example of where we’ve done this?
Andrew
Sure. Yeah, I think that would be useful for everyone. And so you’ll see a lot of similarities of kind of our test site to this site where we’ve kind of implemented those kind of items, you know? And same same idea and no courses, but once I add courses to it, it will then show up. Had the the the access of the testes or I’ve got no courses normally. Well, that’s OK.
Andrew
I guess you could see the examples are the ones that they don’t have access to. They’re locked.
Paul
Yeah, that’s it. So and so let’s let’s see if I’ve got access to just one of these courses here. It would literally show up in this kind of section here. Normally when someone gets access to it, they’ve actually got a course that that’s usually how they get access to it. So you’d normally find, let’s say, for chord study songs or let’s just play guitarist in 21 days that would show up here, but it wouldn’t show down here.
Paul
It’s kind of like you’d see they’re going to be in this section or it’s going to be in this one. And if you don’t have it, then we show it and then they can click on it. And like, for example, if I click on this, it would go like a little sales page, essentially saying how you can get all our courses and in bonuses and things. So that’s just a typical sales page that we’re trying to then drive people to join as a member.
Andrew
So, yeah, that’s cool. And then so that’s the part where Memberium is coming in and saying if they don’t have access, then let’s play it as locked and direct them to your sales page.
Paul
Exactly. Exactly. So you Memberium controlling like so I’ve set the on the backend
Paul
i’ve set the the what tag. Someone needs to have a membership level, but they need to have four on the chords first. We feel that we have done some custom work on here to kind of have a show in the the two areas, but it would then say, yeah, this is based on the tag that have, if they have access to it, shows up there and if I click on it, they can access it.
Paul
And if they don’t have access, it’s there. And then we redirect them to the to whatever page is on the on thing.
Paul
So in this case, to the sales page, the the other part that was really cool with the the challenge you is the your account area. Is there anything you think you think everyone would be interested in checking out there. Yeah. Give me one second. I just try and log in as a test user. Because the thing is, how does someone manage their subscription and so we actually built in here. So this is actually coming through as a user.
Paul
They can come in here. And this is just using Memberium shortcodes we’ve just laid it into because with the BuddyBoss it uses BuddyPress too. It’s a bit confusing, but the BuddyBoss theme that we’re using uses your BuddyPress. And part of that is this is how they do their account settings. So I’ve kind of just leveraged off that and then we’ve kind of supplemented that and added a subscription tab into the account area. That makes sense, but that’s it.
Paul
And so, again, on this part, it’s just nothing more than it just Memberium shortcodes, which just added some styling to have this kind of because one of the particular layout. And so as a user, they can click cancel. They can change their payment info. Again, this is just Memberium shortcode. So you guys made it really easy for us to do that. We didn’t have to add any functionality or anything. It’s just literally Memberium shortcodes here and sending someone cancelling it.So it’s all Memberium.
Andrew
That is cool. Yeah, but we’ve laid it out, looks really nice.
Paul
I borrowed the idea from Disney Plus I was looking at that. So that’s a lot of times what we do as well is we kind of go, if I’m looking for inspiration in this, like what works is I love to see what other people are doing, especially like the big guys in the Netflix is the Disney Plus’s, you know, these really big proprietors, even Udemy and these kind of massive sites, and then figuring out, well, because my my belief I don’t know, a hundred percent for sure, but I would imagine they’ve got great budgets for testing user experiences.
Paul
They’ll be doing this with tests and checking things to make sure it’s engaging. So sounds like I do they lay it out. So, you know, this is exactly what I did. But it’s it’s based on a Disney Plust that I had a very similar kind of layout subscription. So I thought, well, that would wonder why reinvent the wheel. Now, this page looks really nice. And I guess it’s interesting, too. When the cancel button is clicked with Memberium, you can technically automate or, well, it will automatically cancel the user’s paid subscription and Infusionsoft.
Andrew
And you could set that up where it cancels it at the end of the current billing period. So they it’s not where they cancel right away and their access gets cut off. It’s where their access gets cut off, like at the end of their current billing period. Another idea, too, is you could put a fake button there that leads to a exit survey that they have to go through to get some feedback on why they’re canceling or something you could do to try to save the sale at that point.
Andrew
And then at the end of the survey, just redirect them back to the fully the page where they can actually cancel their subscription through the Memberium shortcode. But I always find it fascinating that all that stuff can run automatically or on autopilot. Same thing with the ad credit card for like when you add a at a new credit card that automatically will get added to the subscriptions and everything else runs automatically. It’s always. That’s so fascinating.
Paul
Yeah, I agree 100 percent. And what you said about all I literally just because this is again, essentially like our demo starter site, so we just have it actually literally canceling the subscription. Like you mentioned, this is you can see this is future data. So this is going to be canceled in terms of this subscription would be would be canceled on June twenty seven.
Andrew
So with this site, you have quite a few different pieces involved. Can you walk us through the text back in building the site and some of the reasons why you chose the plugins that you did?
Paul
There’s usually two things that I use. So my first one, and up until recently has always been Astra. I love that theme. It’s sparse. It’s like white for us. It’s always been really easy to work with. You know, there’s been some things that we’ve had to work with, maybe the clients using them. But the two that we love is one offs internally is WP Astra and BuddyBoss theme. Yeah. Is really, really good. And typically that’s our go to is Astra.
Paul
And so this this kind of site that you’re seeing and time with the is actually running on the BuddyBoss theme. For me, if I was picking a theme, would be deciding what I guess is price point and because Astra free and it works really well. So that’s typically that I guess would be like if I was ever planning on putting in a forum using a BBPress or BuddyPress. If I was kind of putting any of those items on the site, I would then kind of move towards BuddyBoss because I’ve got some really nice styling out of the box.
Paul
Like even if I just go to this discussions page and this is their forums.
Andrew
Is that within the BuddyBoss social platform? The forums are included.
Paul
This is I have to admit, I got really confused with Buddy Boss at first. And like so what BuddyBoss has they have a plug in not to be confused with the theme because you can get the BuddyBoss theme and it’s free, it’s open source. And what they’ve done is they’ve taken like BuddyPress, BBPress and a few others and they’ve kind of integrated within their own BuddyBoss plugin.
Paul
And I guess that’s because BuddyPress and BBPress are open source anyway. So they’ve kind of and that’s why they’re plugging the BuddyBoss platform is a plug in, which has basically has the functionality, has the form functionality, but it doesn’t have the see you can use the BuddyBoss plug in but without the theme. But it’s going to look, it’s going to look bad. It’s going to look like how Buddy Press looks out of the box.
Paul
And so the BuddyBoss thing, which is a couple hundred dollars to purchase it, does it adds all the styling to it. And this is like what we see right here is literally their styling out of the box. So they’ve kind of lay an essentially a UI on top of it, like a user interface to those things that make it look really, I think, really nice and really appealing to a couple hundred bucks you’re getting if you’re using if you’re planning on putting in forums and those kind of discussion threads like you see here, even under the accounts like this profile section, this is all part of a kind of ecosystem.
Paul
But yeah, it can be worth just investing that a couple hundred dollars because it just saves so much time.
Andrew
And the time it takes to customize anything with BuddyPress or BBPress is really time consuming. So just, just buying the BuddyBoss theme just. Cuts all that.
Paul
Yeah, I can switch the subject, it’s almost like I can even switch the Astra and you’ll just like, see how significant the stalling changes. It’s just, yeah, they’ve done a lot of work and done a great job of it. But those are the two things. And it really just depends, I guess, on price point.
Paul
But I think the extra couple hundred bucks would make sense. But if you’ve got no plans at all to ever do, you know, to do forms and it’s a great thing, works really well in terms of plugins, then we use obviously Memberium is like on every site that we use.
Paul
So definitely Memberium. LearnDash is usually another common one, just something the other one’s GamiPress is the third one will typically use on pretty much every site unless it in the brief there’s no gamification at all and we won’t use it. But, you know, usually like I think nine times out of ten we’ve got in terms of plug ins, we’ve got Memberium, we’ve got LearnDash, we’ve got GamiPress. Let me just just don’t think of anything else.
Paul
There’s a few others that we use, but that’s depending if we’re going to customize things like I really like like Advanced Custom Fields and a few other things, that they’re a little bit more techie. Oh, Elementor. That’s the other one I was thinking of, which is a drag and drop below like I love Elementor. So that’s our favorite part of it. Yeah, those are other ones, like BeaverBuilder and VisualComposer and Thrive Architect and what not, but to me Elementor is kind of my go to.
Paul
I just love working with it. We just want it easy and that’s what this is built on. So yeah, this is like an Elementor. We have like two dashboard styles out of this side, but this is literally Elementor. Yeah.
Andrew
That’s cool. And then is that the LearnDash kind of course grid?
Paul
This is. Yeah. This is the one LearnDash course grid. And so you can see this is just all Elementor. I mean, if I want to move something out, I can just literally I don’t want to text there if I want to move things out. Yeah, but see, this is actually this one here sorry is our own shortcode, which comes out of the thing that we made and whatnot.
Paul
And that was because if you don’t have the course, it has that box that kind of locks. You haven’t started one Memberium. Yeah. So that’s that one’s a little bit different. But I think this one here is just and this is just the traditional LearnDash course list. So that is. Yeah, that’s just a LearnDash shortcode with their Course Grid add on. And then I’ve got a few GamiPress shortcode and that’s why they look funny here. We do have a couple of our own shortcode that are all part of that package that you can get from on the site.
Andrew
And and the discussions are cool
Paul
Yeah, and that’s just a typical BuddyPress, BBPress sorry, story.
Andrew
So, yeah, it’s kind of confusing because BuddyBoss had Fort’s Buddy Press and has their own version of Buddy Press called the the Buddy Boss social platform.
Paul
Yeah, yeah. That’s it.
Andrew
So yeah, within that there’s also BBPress is included within it. Buddy Press is about a year ago and from my understanding Buddy Boss has done a lot of work in improving goals in their BuddyBoss social platform. So in your experience, do you recommend people use the BuddyBoss social platform over using Buddy Press and BB press on their own?
Paul
Great question. You know, I think I probably would just use the Buddy Boss platform plug in thing because it is free, it’s just a thing that you got to pay for.
Paul
So I would just kind of get the plugin, and put it in because it’s like I only have to install one thing instead of a whole bunch. And I have like you said, they have been working on making it better. And there’s been times we’ve had to write checks. They support team and they’re really responsive and not everything can be done. Obviously, the process, you know, there’s a few things that they that aren’t perfect as well. But it’s getting it’s getting better and better.
Paul
So, yeah, it’s yeah. It’s like anything, you know, sometimes there’s bugs and sometimes there’s things that need to change your features and whatnot. But I think now if I was to even was a brand new site and we were just using Astra theme, I probably would. And we had some sort of requirement for a forum more though, the Buddy Press type groups or the things that that does. I think I’ll just gravitate towards the body.
Andrew
You got it.
Paul
The BunnyBoss plugin. And, you know, that’s good to know because I’m not that familiar with the BuddyBoss platform. Like, I’ve never used it myself. So that’s why I asked.
Paul
Yeah. And it’s interesting. I think, you know, we don’t do many sites, you know, with BuddyBoss so, like in terms of the you know, the the forums and that because a lot of people just kind of go towards Facebook using Facebook groups is is kind of the most common one because it’s definitely an advantage of using Facebook groups. There’s obviously disadvantages. But so I found, I guess Facebook groups have definitely taken over a lot of the things that sites would have forums and things for. I think I just find less and less we’re doing adding those to sites.
Andrew
So I know that Memberium has a direct integration with a BuddyBoss social platform where you can add when a tag gets added, you can auto add them to different groups and then you can also control access to the different forums and the ability to post based on which kind of membership level that somebody has. Is there any kind of Memberium stuff that you’re doing with the like his BuddyBoss social platform on the site or it’s.
Paul
It is so we’ve got to BuddyBoss social platform we haven’t done much in terms of because this is right, it’s a little, you know, kind of weird with a demo type site, you know, because we had to be careful with what we said because, you know, we kind of got a file and so people can then upload onto their site.
Paul
But there’s another one where we did a forum. And yes, we did restrict that because that’s that’s always the thing with you guys having Memberium, because it makes our life so much easier, because we can click a button type thing and we can then hide like an inside a circle, for example. I’m just thinking of an example. Know someone has like, you know, you can only access this particular forum. Will this particular was kind of group to have that you can get with Memberium you to say you need to have this this tag.
Paul
And so those things are definitely a really, really helpful. This particular site doesn’t have that. But as you mentioned, it’s so easy to hide and go through it here. It’s up to you, but it’s so easy to so easy to do. Even like, you know, along with your integration, like with LearnDash, you know, a popular one that we like to use, again, not so much on this thought because they had to walk into a sandbox Infusionsoft account, but is when someone completes a course or completes the lesson, having that apply a tag, which then you can then trigger automation inside Infusionsoft so you can set up different little campaigns that, you know, if someone completes a lesson, then you could wait a few days.
Paul
And if I haven’t completed any other kind of lesson, then you can send them a reminder. You know, you can pick up where we left off. You know how you know you haven’t done it. You haven’t engaged. We’ll have complete any lessons, you know, the last few days you should get back in.
Paul
And so those kind of integrations of applying a tag when someone does something and allows you to incite Infusionsoft and set up those automations in those campaigns, you have a step by step tutorial to walk people through how to set up a site like this, along with some downloadable files and the custom child theme you’ve built here. We’ll include a link to that that we’ll include a link to that tutorial below this video for anyone who’s interested. And so if Paul, if you had to guess how long it would take someone to build a site like this with Memberium and everything you’ve shown, assuming they have all of their course content already together, how long do you think it would take somebody to build a site like this time wise?
Paul
Using the downloading the file provided as well, correct?
Andrew
Yeah,
Paul
yeah, so I think once you set up, maybe I, I would hope within you if you had WordPress set up, you know, maybe within 30 minutes. It’s kind of our goal too and I still want to try and get that down lower. If you were really, really quick, maybe you can get down into 15 minutes. There’s still some time to WordPress oh wow, basic things. But like literally you’ll see the link. There’s that file you can download and it is you’ve got to install a plug in or WPOven one migration you upload the file and then it’s done.
Paul
Like once the file uploads, you know, all of a sudden you’ve just got to have WordPress set up first.
Paul
But once you upload the file, the child themes are all installed, the plug ins are also installed. It’s just a few, but you can install Memberium and LearnDash and the BuddyBoss theme.
Andrew
Let’s say, for example, if somebody trying to add all of their individual courses but they and lessons and kind of get the Memberium stuff functioning and kind of have a functioning site after, how long do you think it would take somebody to do that as a result?
Paul
Yeah, yeah. So if you had the content, depending on how big the courses, how many videos, but I think you could punch through them and get through them pretty quickly. You know, if it’s something simple, like you’ve just got like a video per lesson, text an error something, you know, might be a little longer depending within within it, I think.
Paul
Oh, yeah, for sure. It’s I’m just kind of thinking. Yeah, it’s really just the process of kind of going into LearnDash, adding a course, or using the ones they and just renaming them. But you probably just add a new one. You LearnDash’s visual builder is so easy, like, you know, literally you could come into this sort. So we won’t go through it here, but, you know, it’s you can go you can go to courses just to show how easy this is.
Paul
You know, you can go and you. And the tools are just getting better and better and getting faster and faster, you know, so you can have your course name goes here as. Let’s see, you put some content here and some descriptions, then you said you Memberium information and actual in the video training, I kind of mentioned things know you want to, but of course, cover photo just to make it look a little nicer and a featured image.
Paul
So then a few things you’ve got to do here. But very quickly, maybe, you know, if you had all the assets already do that within a few minutes, then go to the builder and then this is where you start building the course out so you can have your you know, your module one.
Paul
And module two and module three, and then you can start adding these in and it’s very quick and easy. So I guess my process is when I add, of course, I build the layout and, you know, just using this in this kind of loan dashboard, a tool included recently, like it’s probably been a year or something now, but and then, you know, you just kind of build the structure and then I just go in and then I just add the videos of the content.
Paul
So, yeah, I think definitely within a day you can have courses up and running and then there’s just a little bit of a step on changing some of the content on the dashboard that we’re looking at earlier. And that’s that’s literally just removing some of that placeholder content or deleting the form section. We don’t want that. But yeah, I think with analogy, you can have a course up and running.
Paul
You know, if you’ve got the stuff that I want to try and get it down to, like under an hour, you know, I just want to almost like, plug and play, you know, I just want it to be fast enough so someone can kind of install put some it’s just adding the content was really actually the part here. A lot of times. And I think this is just as technology gets better. I think the theme helps out here that you can kind of install the file and it kind of deploys all the things you need.
Paul
You know, it it’s it’s just really then then people can focus on not having to worry that login pages or creating brand new dashboards or setting up the subscription management, that’s all being done using obviously Memberium to to to to do all this. But then, you know, being able to kind of just then focus on the side, the courses.
Paul
And that’s just really a matter of kind of building, like I said, giving it an eye and putting some basic details, putting in the layout and then just adding the videos of the, you know, the the whatever workbooks or any supplemental writing or whatever you your course consists of and just put that in context and then you then you’re up and running.
Andrew
So that is cool. I guess another note, oftentimes the part that takes the longest when you’re creating new membership site or course is creating your actual content that’s going to go in your program. Definitely.
Paul
Oh, definitely. You know that. You know. You know, I think if you can spend the time planning the content, like how is it structured?
Paul
And even just mentioning it before and I’ll just add more so on the the content here and this is just learned, actually, this was a course that we we broke down into, you know, these are our modules. So, you know, the fundamentals module, week one, week two, three, four, five, six. But then as you click on it, the broken down into and you can see the video sizes and you know, you know, I try to keep these trying.
Paul
If you can try and keep your content five to ten minutes and then literally it’s then just a matter of it, of course. It’s cool, and then we have our order here, so I guess one that was compared.
Andrew
And then the example that you just showed on that previous page is that how the challenge site lessons look like? It’s a little different.
Paul
So we use this one. It’s running on the same text and then we we’ve pretty much heavily modified. OK, we went through and change changed quite a lot purely because we were just thinking how do we how do we make a different kind of out there? So like, for example, I’ll just show you the coolest on Guitarist Academy.
Andrew
No, because the way you design the site really looks really great.
Paul
And then, you know, so we custom designed this, and then I think as you get to the end, it’s going to kick things off automatically.
Paul
Yes, I kind of it automatically moves, ticks that off. And then if I click on here, I wanted to basically, you know, with this line, my goal was to instead of having the page reload, I wanted to keep it just here on the screen. And so, like, nothing to reload. It’s all done by. So this is kind of then getting into the really I guess the more advanced. But it’s it’s the things that you can essentially build.
Paul
So we designed the UI in our prototyping tool Figma and then we implement it and we have like notes here where you can add your own notes and this is just some stuff we made, you know, and it’s this this kind of site that has a lot of custom work essentially done. It’s I liken it to a pool, you know, like in terms of, you know, if you’re looking at building pool, if you have a pool here in Australia anyways, you can kind of buy these prefab kind of prefabricated type pools, you know, like a fiberglass shell.
Paul
They give you certain sizes, certain shapes. You kind of get those pools, you can put those in, but you’re limited to. And that’s what I would say that challenge is, you know, it’s it’s kind of like here’s what it is. But you can also then the benefit that you can also then customize it, because this is running the exact same text type just with custom UI and custom code on it. But then this is probably more of a site where you could then go, you know, what?
Paul
Can we you know, if I wanted to I want a pool with a waterfall and have a certain, you know, like a Jacuzzi built into it. This is, you know, where you can start getting in and being able to customize. And I’ll show you just quickly on this, and I’m getting a little off track, but. You know, we we build this like Fingerstyle Challenge and you’ll see here, it’s like. Totally unique in terms of like a path and if I go in here and it takes me this actually this is actually LearnDash.
Paul
Well, it’s a custom front end on the UI, but then it still hooks into like a LearnDash course to track the progression and handle things. But it’s just. Yes, but it gives you that idea of, you know, this is not going to be for everyone, but it’s just an idea of things you can add like like the waterfall to pool. Not everyone wants or needs. It’s just you can do it if you want to. And then it’s like a party and you click off and just quickly do one now.
Andrew
Yeah, this is great the way you’ve designed this and how how this works.
Paul
We’ve been doing a few more than we like spin wheels that you can win points and things say, yeah, that’s a it’s a it’s a bit of fun. You know, again, we just have to had some spare time and what can we do that’s different? We want to make it like the inspirational. This was like Zeilberger back in the day. Yes. So you had this kind of question, this math.
Paul
It was kind of like, how do we know this is just an awesome game of this experience and just make it a little bit different? So I feel like I’m just trying to make people feel like they’re going on a quest and that working their way through. And as you do that, you’re learning how to play. In this case, this is a fingerstyle challenge. So you learn how to learn fingerstyle guitar , so.
Andrew
I love it. That’s cool. So if if someone has an existing membership site or course on their WordPress site and they want to try to gamify it, but they don’t want to have to completely rebuild it. What would you recommend to them in terms of of what they could do in terms of some easy things that could potentially add? Yes, yes, if you if you’re thinking about your gamification and you want some easy things to add, by far, I think the best one you can do is adding badges or achievements.
Paul
And so you can do that by using game. It’s just a plug and it’s a free plug. And they do have some add ons. But the free version is incredible. You know, you can everything I’m doing here on this site and the challenge site and even on the guitar site that I was just kind of showing there with the gamification is all GamiPress just a free version of the plug in then. So you actually get that plug in if you haven’t got it already.
Paul
And then what you want to do is kind of come in here and achievement tops and create one code like badge or badges.
Paul
And so being able to give people like an award people badges by doing things, you know, completing a lesson, not so much of maybe somebody completing their first lesson, they get a badge logging in for the first time. They can get a badge, you know, completing a course, you know, completing ten courses. These badges are a great way to, you know, give people that kind of that the pat on the back that a little bit like congratulations, you did something is an achievement.
Paul
You have to be careful. You can’t just kind of do it every little thing. So you got to have some. I think the key is to mix it up and make it so there’s some easy ones to get because you want to try and give people that quick win at the beginning. So anything you can do to just kind of give people the first time they log in, the first few times that they’re getting that they’re getting you making it easy for them to do, then you need to get some badges, get a few quick wins under their belts, and then, you know, they progressively get harder to achieve.
Paul
You know, they’ve got to do more things, you know? Yeah. It’s just getting that right mix and it’s that. But badges is a great one. Points, points a good one would be another one to add, you know, as they’re getting points and then combining that with some sort of leveling up system similar to what we have here in the challenge. So that’s a little trickier to implement. Well, it’s still part of the GamiPress and whatnot, so that’s a good one.
Paul
Then you can start you can start combining leaderboards and doing things like that. If you’ve got fairly active side, you can have people as they do things. You have leaderboards and there’s some add on the GamiPress that a very inexpensive box. Well, they have that functionality for you. So that’s that’s a good one then even like other gamification elements, things like pro sports. And so you will see like in the different sites and LearnDash does this kind of natively, but having being able to show that they’re progress, that if you can figure out some sort of way of, you know.
Paul
Of doing that again, LearnDash going to do a lot of this to make it easy, it will show how many steps have completed, the percentage that completed the course. And that’s why on the different side, we’ve got these bars here, these progress items, and we try and put them on the different sides.
Paul
It’s just to show that because people will want to close that loop and then try and you’ll find that when we’re sitting there, I’ll just do a couple of extra lessons and, you know, and again, do that.
Paul
So, you know, progress bars like here. And again, this is just a LearnDash course grid. You know, they show there’s progress. So that’s another kind of easy gamification element to make sure that you’ve got on your site. That’s cool. Is there any other interesting lessons you learned after working with some of your bigger clients that you think would be helpful to share? Coming from someone when we do a lot of custom, technically when we come into a project, we’re here to know we’re working with people usually who’ve got like a seven figure talk business or, you know, and they want to take it to the next level.
Paul
They really want to you know, they want something kind of different than other people. So we come up with custom design processes and things.
Paul
But what we’ve found is sometimes just keeping it simple is better, just trying to scale things down, figuring out what is the core elements, and then just, you know, focusing on that because you can get caught up in like we need this feature. We need that feature. We need this feature. Let’s add this let’s add that box. And I can actually say from experience, because we did track some of this, we were adding all these kind of features and this is actually Cole’s Classroom.
We’re adding a whole bunch of things, but none of them. It wasn’t in terms of like changing like turn right or stick right. It just wasn’t having an impact. It was enhancing the experience, but there was no major difference. So but having the but just keeping it sometimes simple, focusing on the core elements and then just in also asking if you’ve got an existing client base, what they want, what training do they want, how can you know something?
Paul
Just asking them is the best. You’re seeing the ideas.
Andrew
And so would you be able to elaborate on what some of those core elements are that they that, for instance, on Cole’ Classroom that they ended up focusing on?
Paul
Yes, so we were adding all sorts of we had like spin wheels and, you know, that kind of added the guitarist.
Paul
There was that spin wheel example. You know, again, it’s it’s a fun thing, but it’s not going to stop people cancelling. You know, it’s just a bit of fun. So we went we actually so with Cole’s classroom, we went from having to WordPress sites, a bit of context. So we had, you know, the typical two WordPress members, you know, members like there’s a membership site and then the core site. And then we went into an overhaul because our goal was to integrate everything into one site.
Paul
So and it was really just a matter of trying to expose all of the all of the member content and expose it to the public, but then obviously had it locked down. And I can actually show you an example. So when we came into this site and we took when we kind of went through that project, we really figured out, well, what what are the core items? What what is it that makes this site what it is? And, you know, ten thousand members paying members.
Paul
So it’s it’s a big site in terms of uses revenue and whatnot. So but we found it’s that core content and also the community now they do it through Facebook, but definitely I think it’s the content. And so we’ve got like Courses here. We’ve got like a Training Vault, which is essentially like a collection of videos. So every couple of times a week, usually they’ll put up some videos, will just be on a ten minute video. It could be a longer video, like could be an interview, it could be anything and of they called it the Training Vault
Paul
But then they have this backstage pass where you go behind the scenes with a photographer and then you kind of learn how they do it. And so, like, if I was to go into the courses, but I was literally that’s what we found was the the cool things is really just the content and the community. And also you then having what, the shop. And we’ve got some some tools here and we’re doing like a photo contest we’ve built out so people can upload a photo.
Paul
They’re going to have a contest. So we built things like that to but again, it’s all just trying to be part of the community and the engagement. But even you’ll see here, this actually doesn’t have any gamification outside a few basic things like badges and and whatnot. So I just go into one of these courses. So with this, again, this is all public facing, so so you can access the first one. Yes. And so the first lesson on every course is accessible to the public.
Paul
And then anything else you’ve got to kind of upgrade to to a membership and an, that’s interesting, like a backstage pass and so.
Andrew
Well, just to go back to that example, too, so somebody doesn’t have access to that video, then you’re able to. Display that message. Yeah. To get that message through Memberium?
Paul
It’s LearnDash. So the tech stack is exactly the same as what I mentioned before, know those other sites. We got Memberium, we have LearnDash. We’re not actually using GamiPress on this site at the moment. So it’s something we’re kind of toying up with.
Paul
We add the points and things back and then we’ve got we’ve got some other plugins, but they use visual composer on this one because they already were using it. And yeah, that’s really it’s about Memberium is what’s controlling it. Now we do have you know, we we we modified we basically did our own UI for LearnDash. So but if I say if I go into like vegan, it’s mastering weddings. You know, this is this is the LearnDash essentially what it does have.
Paul
You know, we’ve just done our own custom. LearnDash page. Yeah. If you look up here courses, you know, that’s the that’s the URL kind of slug for all the LearnDash courses. So this is just a LearnDash course page now.
Andrew
What happens again when you click on one of the protected lessons?
Paul
Yeah. So we don’t to do a background video and then I saw and then we go to a sales page, are using a default excerpt there over the.
Paul
Correct. Correct. So, you know, we could we could customize it, so we’ve gone essentially, you know, we just, you know, I guess one way we to unlock mastering weddings, of course, and one of the ideas we’re playing with, but we didn’t actually implement in the first kind of version of this was you could actually, you know, join the membership. And there was an actually another section here that would say or buy this course for one hundred ninety nine dollars, whatever the price was.
Paul
So we’re going to give people that option and then we will just try to implement, you know, times, you know, we had to cut some things out and focus on things. That is really interesting.
Andrew
I was going to ask from a sales and marketing perspective what was done to also kind of grow things. But it seems like just allowing people to kind of click around and see what’s included in the membership is kind of another factor that helps kind of take Cole’s Classroom to the next level level. Am I right about that or am I?
Yeah.. No, Correct. So, yeah. And one of the things was like, how do we you know, we’re having a chat call and he actually mentions, like, you know, when we talk about the membership, so someone just comes to the site, you know, like I’m talking like someone from you because they you know, they’re focusing on traffic as well. So here on the tutorials is essentially a blog like they’re getting a good number of organic organic traffic, thousands of people a day coming from finding them from from Google or someone sharing an article.
Paul
And then it’s like, but if you don’t know that there’s a membership side or you don’t click into the site to try and go to a sales page, you kind of not you as a person who’s never maybe heard of Cole’s Classroom or, you know, you don’t know what there is and kind of even also what you’re missing out on. So that was kind of the the prompt and the like. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could somehow integrate all the member content that we had on a separate WordPress installation, put it into the main site, but then someone would like to see those people at the store.
Paul
You know how you want to try some honeyball, you know, try this loaf for bread. It’s a sample. And that’s what we wanted to do. So we wanted to expose everything. And so all their content, so that they’re kind of connection is made up of courses in a typical LearnDash course. Does the training go to those kind of videos and the backstage pass? So they kind of their main content areas that people didn’t even know about this backstage pass.
Paul
So, you know, now we hope that, you know, people can go around and kind of the next area is like, how do we. So the next thing we’re focusing on for them is on their blogs and their articles. How do we then insert ads and things that can promote that would certainly make sense to have some sort of ad that promotes the Mastering Wedding the course. And then, you know, we could link to that to that post.
Paul
And, you know, then people would see and obviously say that you only get a preview, but then naturally they might it’s just a it’s an extra opportunity where they could actually, you know, upgrade. And they had this this course and it covers this and I can see it, but I can’t access it. So I’m saying with this backstage passes, you know, you get to kind of follow along and go behind the scenes of actually a like a real life photo shoot.
Paul
And then so as users, if they kind of get I’m not logged in so anyone can do this. I was going to come have a look. But if I kind of go through here, we do the first three minutes. You can watch the first three minutes and what happens is it blocked, did you like the speaker join Cole’ Classroom to continue watching and say, oh, he’s a sample and a bit of a tease and then blocks it.
And same with the download available to members and we using Memberium like Memberium is telling. So we’ve done obviously some post here about using the video Memberium functions. But yeah, it’s so just using that as .Vimeo And so we using that combined with Memberium Memberium Memberium is telling us, did that, does this person have access to this particular content and if so, then they can watch it and they can download the resources. If not, then we do this and it’s basically the same deals here on the on the Training Vault.
Paul
So that’s basically the same idea. That’s cool. Yeah, yeah.
Andrew
A lot of people, when you’re blocking off your membership to all public traffic or, you know, free traffic, you’re kind of selling a mystery membership. And it’s hard for them to really understand your membership without being able to click around and see through it. You can try to explain it well on your sales page, but it’s a lot different when you allow them to actually click around and see what’s included. And this is a great example of that.
Andrew
So there was the before where everything was gated off and then you shifted everything to this site where everything’s kind of open but still locked. What was the difference, I guess, before and after you mentioned you were at the kind of at the low seven figures before. What we did find, and it’s it’s been a few months since I’ve actually looked at the numbers there, but we were kind of somewhat tracking the number of people who were just engaging.
Paul
And there was definitely, you know, they were at the time, you know, this is kind of early on in the piece, the hundreds of people kind of taking it. There’s going to be thousands of people now doing it as well. And that was literally just from exposing the contents to the public school.
Andrew
That’s great. And then so for anyone who’s interested in building a site like the one that has shown us, we’ve included a link to Paul’s video or the video tutorials directly below this video and a link to where you can learn more about Paul and his company, PB Digital. And so if somebody is interested in what you’re doing and possibly working with you, is there anything helpful you think they should know before before they reach out to you?
Paul
Yeah, so I think by far, you know you know, if you’re just starting out or even if you’ve got a site and you know, you want to type things out, come to the site, as you mentioned, I’ll be a link there. And you can come to the site here. And there’s this challenge. So we’ve got the videos. You don’t have to opt in. You have to do anything. You know, just some videos here.
Paul
There’s some like a downloadable resource. So just kind of go through this, start out and you’ll kind of go through the process and hopefully very quickly you’ll have a site set up similar to what we’ve kind of been gambling. And it just literally you can get to the point where you focus. I think if you’re starting out there, you know, if you’re just starting out or you know, that this would be the best thing, in my opinion, the best place to start.
Paul
And then I guess to someone who’s wanting to you know, typically we find with our clients who come to us, they like, you know, we have this idea that we want to implement, you know, they coming to us. They usually establish, you know, they’ve got the existing users that the users are telling them what they want. And they’re like, we want to do this or we want to build something that just doesn’t look like anything else out there.
Paul
You know, we want custom. We want something, you know, to look a certain way. But there’s no theme whether that does it. And so that’s when we typically then we’ll get involved with them, you know, and then we go through like a design process. And our process certainly isn’t for everybody and typically for people just starting out. It’s you know, it’s going to be a little overkill. But, you know, that’s what I think something like this kind of for us was bridging the gap between of what we were doing.
Paul
We were accustomed to build a top idea, but not everyone needs that. You just something you just need if you just need a pool that looks nice and and easy to put in. And this is kind of this is going to be an obviously, if you need help, you know, just contact us and be more than happy to help you out with anything as well. Just stuck with.
Andrew
That’s great. And then so if someone’s interested in getting in touch with you and talking with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Paul
So literally, if you come to the site here, you can do a couple of things, so you can just kind of click on to get in touch, which is just a contact form that will send it through. If also you can actually schedule a call so you can just go through there. There’ll be a little form to fill out and then we’ll get in contact and arrange of time.
Paul
Had a bit of chat, even if you just want have a what I like to call like a virtual coffee and a chat. Yeah, it’s more than welcome to do that. We love chatting with people about this, so. Yeah. And obviously anyone watching this who wants to do that more than happy to do that and have a chat with you. Just go to the site and then just get free strategy call. We’ve got those and we can have a chat or you can even use that as a discovery call or just bounce some ideas around more than happy to to chat with people about that.
Paul
So I think that would be the best way of just coming here, clicking on this button here to get in touch, ideally this one, because don’t get through the process to put that kind of strategy. Call that chat and and we’ll get in contact.
Andrew
Well, awesome. We really appreciate you sharing everything you did with us today, Paul, that was awesome. And thanks so much for joining us.
Paul
You’re most welcome. Thank you for having me. It’s been great.