PartnerShip

Chris Badgett’s Strategies for Building Lasting Partnerships

00:00 / 00:42:44

Summary:

Chris Badgett, founder of LifterLMS, a learning management system for WordPress, shares his journey from running sled dogs in Alaska to building a powerful online platform. He started Lifter LMS in 2010 after running an agency and making his first affiliate sale in 2010. Badgett’s first online course was published on Udemy in 2012, and he saw it as a partnership with Udemy. He believes that partnerships can help creators and small businesses create impactful collaborations and enrich the lives of those around them, not just the pockets of big corporations.

Connect with Chris:

Podcast: LMScast

Website: LifterLMS.co m

Twitter: @ChrisBadgett

Key Points:

Partnerships provide a strong foundation for creators, and support the evolution of their skills and interests, particularly in the context of online education.
Various types of partnerships exist from affiliate to integration to the customer relationship. Leveraging these relationships can significantly enhance marketing efforts and business growth.
Successfully managing affiliate relationships includes removing friction in partnerships, recognizing different affiliate types, and using contests as incentives to engage affiliates. Chris underscores the importance of making partnership proposals appealing and straightforward.
Adopting a mindset focused on helping others rather than simply monetizing a list can transform the approach to affiliate marketing. Affiliates should seek partnerships that align with their values and audience, aiming to provide genuine value rather than just seeking profit.
Effective partnerships can be formed with other companies in adjacent stages of a customer’s journey. For example, partnering with businesses that assist potential customers just before they need your service can create mutually beneficial relationships, enhancing both parties’ value propositions.

Transcript:

Partnership – Chris Badgett

[00:00:00] Welcome to Partnership, where your network is the wind in your sails. I’m your host, Alex Standifird, and I’m here to redefine online partnerships for bootstrapped businesses. I believe in working with top talent to expand your sales channels and enrich the lives around you, not just the pockets of big corporations.

[00:00:21] Today, I’m interviewing Chris Badgett, founder of LifterLMS, a leading learning management system for WordPress. Chris’s journey from running sled dogs in Alaska to building a powerful online platform has shaped his unique approach to partnerships and online business. In our conversation, we’ll explore his insights into creating impactful collaborations for course creators.

[00:00:42] Hey, Chris, and I’m so glad you’re here. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself so we can get started. All right. I’m Chris Badgett. I’m the founder of Lifter LMS, which we started in 2010. I ran an agency before that building websites for clients. Before that I used to run sled dogs in Alaska. I was not a tech guy.

[00:01:00] And I had my first affiliate sale in 2010. Affiliate marketing is one of the ways I got into online business and tech. That’s awesome. You’ve got so many stories. Every time I talk to you, cause you were full timing for a little while, weren’t you? If I remember, in a camper. Yeah, you did that for a while too.

[00:01:18] Did that for about a year. I’ve actually owned two RVs. I had one in Alaska. I converted my diesel truck. To run off of used vegetable oil, which I would, might can’t grow with. And by the way, I’m not that technical. I always partner with technical people. So I had a heli helicopter mechanic helped me install that vegetable oil system.

[00:01:36] That’s wild. So you’d mentioned that you ran an agency for a little bit. And of course, right now your business is Lifter LMS. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about Lifter LMS and what it does and what it serves? So Lifter LMS is a learning management system. It’s built on top of the WordPress platform.

[00:01:53] And put simply, it’s a way for creating, selling, marketing, online courses and training based membership sites, which includes like coaching programs, online schools, regular old digital courses, even online communities. And that’s the gist of it. That’s awesome. We’ve talked a little bit, cause you and I worked together doing a Udemy.

[00:02:15] A tutorial on how to take Siren and expand it with Lifter LMS to turn a course platform into a Udemy clone or something like that. And we’re going to get into all of that a little bit, but I would love to hear a little bit of your perspective on how various partnerships can benefit course creators or people who are using Lifter LMS.

[00:02:33] My first online course I built when I was living in Montana. This was about 2012. And I challenged myself to create an online course in one day and publish it on Udemy. This is early in the days of creating online courses and Udemy was like the go to tool. And. I did it. I created a cooking course. I called it the POET Omelet Method.

[00:02:56] POET stands for perfect omelets every time. And it’s still there. It’s still on Udemy. I don’t know how many students are in there now, but I look at that as a partnership with Udemy. I needed distribution and Udemy had distribution and they had a course creation platform and that’s where it all started, but in terms of partnerships.

[00:03:17] Another little fun fact about Chris is that my background academically is actually in social sciences. So things like anthropology, cultural anthropology is my main thing. Also sociology and psychology. So I’ve always been fascinated with people and groups of people and behavior. And it was through that lens that I fell in love with things like sales and marketing.

[00:03:40] I have no background in business or technology. But I do have a background in people. So when I fell in love with sales and marketing through my anthropology lens, I see it as like an interplay among people and culture and psychology and sociology and things like that. So that’s where I basically fell in love with the idea of sales marketing, and also the idea of working in groups to create outcomes, whether that’s building a software team or creating an affiliate army, finding integration partners, doing social media in a way that actually creates leads and sales, getting out from behind the computer and actually hanging out with people, investing in, you know, Friendships and business relationships and partnerships.

[00:04:31] There’s just so many layers to this cake. I look at growing a business through three primary drivers. The first one is inbound. So basically content marketing outbound, which is prospecting and going out into the world, even if that’s the in person world and then relationships and I spend equal time in all those areas.

[00:04:53] So within the relationships category, there’s all kinds of partnerships from affiliate partnerships, integration partnerships, customer partnerships, user partnerships, content creation partnerships, different kinds of co marketing, cross promotion, all those things. There’s a lot of layers to relationship marketing and sales.

[00:05:14] Yeah, for sure. And I love the term relationship marketing. That is, that’s a really great way to put it because it’s a whole facet of marketing that is in itself unique. I often think of partnerships and affiliate programs, not even just affiliate programs, any kind of, like you were saying, integration partners is a big one in the WordPress space, right?

[00:05:31] I always think of it as like a multiplier, so I can create a really good sales campaign or something that works. And then once I prove it, I can find other people who have their own audiences and they can put their own spin on it and multiply my efforts. You had mentioned that, um, your first partner in a lot of ways, whenever it comes to course creation and things like that is Udemy, ironically enough, you’ve now moved on to creating Lifter and all of this stuff.

[00:05:54] And obviously LFTR’s successful. You’ve had a lot of people using it. You’ve got a lot of users. I use it myself. It’s a great platform, but I’d love to hear a little bit about what caused you to pivot from using Udemy as a course creator to building and creating your own course platform. So when I left Alaska, I had zero tech skills.

[00:06:12] I even spent large chunks of my life without a cell phone, without the internet, without a laptop. But I was in Alaska for about a decade. But in Alaska, I started just playing around, following a YouTube video on how to build a WordPress website because I wanted to create a blog around outdoor leadership, which is a topic that’s important to me.

[00:06:31] Through that, I learned WordPress after I left Alaska where I had a stable job. For eight years, I needed a new way to make money. And I kind of fallen in love with the location independent digital nomad kind of lifestyle. So I started selling 200 websites, 300 websites, and so on. And in this period, I’m figuring out how to make money building websites for clients.

[00:06:55] I’m also really falling in love with the early days of the online course, kind of entrepreneur space. So In going to Udemy, I liked what I did, but Udemy started enforcing things like price controls on how much you could charge for your course. It was easy to get lost there in a sea of a large course catalog and so on.

[00:07:18] I also created a free course on Udemy about how to build a WordPress website in a weekend. I think there’s over a hundred thousand people in that course. It’s been taken down since cause my content got outdated and I haven’t gone back to recreate it. I even hired people for my company that said their first foray into WordPress was my Udemy course, which is wild to think about.

[00:07:40] I also put those videos for that course as a playlist on YouTube and so on. And I started focusing my agency and later partnered with another agency. And we were really focused on course creators and coaches and marketing automation. And through all that, we just realized there wasn’t a great tool. So we launched Lyfter LMS in 2014 to meet the need of the course creators and coaches and marketing automation folks who really wanted all in one solution.

[00:08:10] So that’s the transition from dog sled runner. To website builder, agency owner, to product. It’s awesome. I think the timing of when Lifter LMS launched, I was just starting to really pick up my client work as a web developer. And one of my first clients was a piano tutor. And that was actually my first foray into Lifter, but it was literally 2014 or 2015.

[00:08:32] I just want to say is a really interesting thing. I felt like in 2008, when I got into WordPress, that I was late. I felt like when my agency started doing online education sites, I was late. When I launched the product, I thought it was late. So if you’re thinking about creating any business, but like an online education business or whatever, it often feels like you’re late, but it’s not always the case.

[00:08:59] I still think there’s a lot of room and. Opportunity and innovation is going to continue to evolve in this online education space. Learning is what makes us human and it’s not going away. Yeah, most definitely. That’s so cool. So can you tell me a little bit about some of the incentive programs that either you or somebody else has done that you thought was really cool and really effective?

[00:09:19] Yeah. So it’s like the hair club for men where they say, I’m not just selling this. I’m also a client or whatever. I’m also a course creator. So back in those early days. Of me doing agency work for LMS space. I also partnered with my wife, who’s a subject matter expert in organic gardening and permaculture.

[00:09:41] And we had this idea. I really wanted to create an online business. I wanted an information product. And the first course we made was my wife teaching like how to build a healthy soil course. But then I was just joking with her and I said, why don’t you, why don’t you send an email to the bestselling author in the world on permaculture?

[00:10:01] His name was Toby Hemingway. And just let him know that we’d love to fly to one of his in person workshops, which in this niche, people weren’t doing much online at the time. And we can film it and just ask him where he wants us to send the check. And she actually sent him the email. He was like, I’m going to be in Washington state over here, which is by Montana.

[00:10:23] Come on over. And then we put together a publishing partnership agreement. I just copied what I saw, book push a book publisher contract and put it together for an online course based business. We filmed it. We launched it. He did, part of the deal is he did the marketing, we did our best at marketing, but he was a celebrity in the niche already.

[00:10:44] So I linked it up on his main website, which got tons of traffic and his course sold a lot on our site. We split the revenue and then we rinsed and repeated that with about eight other experts. One of them was with a, another influencer in the niche. We flew to Costa Rica where he was doing a workshop, filmed it.

[00:11:05] I actually. One to level up. So I partnered again with a professional videographer. I put an ad on Craigslist, flew him down to Selmet while we spent the, the winter in Costa Rica with our young kids. And we were also on location at the event, but there’s a lot of partnership going on there. And then our platform, which is called Organic Life Guru.

[00:11:28] It doesn’t exist anymore. And we can talk about that in a little bit. But we also had an affiliate program on top of that, where other people who are in this niche, who are more marketers or affiliates, or even just users who really want to be brand evangelists could make money from running the platform as well.

[00:11:46] That’s awesome. It sounds a lot like what I call royalty program, where you basically have a person who authors the content and you kind of roll out the carpet. For, I love that this is something I talk about on this podcast all the time. If you want to develop really good relationships with really effective affiliates or partners in general, you have to ask, and you have to like, think a little bit outside of the box.

[00:12:07] And a lot of people get so hung up on things like the percentage or the cookie window or the specifics of like what an affiliate program looks like. But I love that the way you presented this is like, Hey, we have this equipment. We have the ability to do this thing. Let’s work together. I will record and work with you to capture the content that you’re already creating and offer you an opportunity to make some money on it.

[00:12:31] All you have to do is be willing to work with us and share that. That’s such a powerful way to multiply. Your efforts. That’s really cool, Chris. I didn’t realize that you ever did that. That’s amazing. Yeah. I, and almost daily I get hit up for partnership of some kind. 99 out of a hundred times. Somebody is like saying something like, I think we should partner.

[00:12:51] What do you think? Let’s jump on a call. There’s no red carpet. In fact, it’s taking time. There’s no context. It’s just like a cold outreach without much. Thought, or just thinking about like the investment, the other person’s going to make, but I just want to highlight what you said is absolutely true for those experts in the gardening niche.

[00:13:12] All they literally had to do was say, yes, it wasn’t going to take them more time. They had a clear path. We were going to do the filming and everything we did everything. So literally all they have to do is say, yes. So when you’re doing a partnership. Request, particularly to a stranger who doesn’t know who you are, where you don’t have a track record.

[00:13:31] I always think about it in that lens of like, all they need to do is say yes. And if it’s a no brainer offer, why wouldn’t I? If you can tune into what’s in it for them, even as I was, I just recorded another episode, I’ll link it in the show notes if I can, I don’t even know what it’s called, I don’t remember what it’s called, but one of the things I mentioned in it was.

[00:13:50] If you go to an affiliate or a partner of any kind, and you say, I have this, I have that, and I can make you this much money as long as you do this thing, or I think I can make you this much money as long as you do this one thing, what do you think? And like you said, the answer is like literally just a simple, Yeah, that sounds great.

[00:14:08] Let’s do it. If you make it that big of a no brainer thing, that’s how you can really form these really strong, really powerful partnerships. And it doesn’t take a lot of them. I mean, it’s so cool that you said that you multiplied this with a few other ones too, but you probably had a handful. Yeah. It was like eight to 10 people we partnered with and yeah, and the site was going for five years.

[00:14:30] We weren’t charging a ton for our courses. One of them was expensive. So But it was several thousand dollars a month of quote, passive income. And, and just, I mentioned earlier, and I’ll just drop it here. The reason we ended up shutting down that business, and there’s a lesson in here is. Because I didn’t have any money at the time when I did my royalty partnerships I did.

[00:14:54] And it just wasn’t sustainable with the amount of work, hosting fees, time investment, marketing. It wasn’t structured properly. And sadly, some of those experts passed away. And so they just got really complicated and, but it was a great experience and it was a good time and it was a good run while it lasted.

[00:15:16] And I learned so much that I still use to this day. Yeah, you got paid to learn there for sure. That’s great. If you were going to do something like that again, how might you have considered structuring that incentive program? One thing, if I could go back in time and I had the financial resources is the first thing I might try is to do more of a licensing agreement where I would pay a one time fee to get the content and then potentially.

[00:15:43] Encourage that partner to join a preferred affiliate program with a higher commission than the regular affiliate program to be incentivized to not just license the content to us for a one time fee or annual fee, but also, uh, get paid more if they promote it heavily. That’s what I would do. And just look at the economics of it to make sure that there’s enough profit in the business that incentives are all aligned.

[00:16:11] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If you really wanted to sweeten the deal, depending on who it is, I can see offering two incentive programs, right? So one being the royalty program where it’s a percentage of sales all the time, but it’s like a much smaller percentage than 50 for sure. Plus on top of that, maybe whenever they generate the sales themselves, like you said, they get a healthy boost on top of that.

[00:16:32] Plus you could have the royalty fees in the business model that you’ve done here that you’re talking about. Like the offer kind of writes itself as you’re talking through it, right? I will pay you this much money to record this and have access to be able to have the licensing for this. On top of that, I will also pay you.

[00:16:47] This small 10%, it’s still not small. It’s significant, right? It adds up as a royalty on top of that ongoing all the time for every sale. And then every sale that you actually generate, this is where the sweet part is, I will give you an extra percentage on top of that. And what’s really cool about that is like you said, it rolls out that red carpet.

[00:17:03] It gets them in, it gives them money right away. It gives them an instant win, gives them guaranteed money if they do nothing, but then it also gives them motivation to promote it on top of that, all without necessarily taking away half of your business income right off the bat. Yeah. And one other mistake I made related to this is I was, because I didn’t have any money, I was super generous with the royalty shares or the percentage shares.

[00:17:25] So imagine a deal where the expert got half the money. And then I gave half of my half to the videographer who came out to film. So I was just being a little too generous in a way. Yeah, I could see that. So obviously you’ve been running LFTR for a while. You’ve personally helped dozens and hundreds of course creators, even beyond just the thousands that are using LFTR now, but I’ve actually seen you talk about case studies and success stories and things like that, where you’ve personally talked about how you’ve helped other course creators succeed.

[00:18:00] And drive more business to their courses. So we talked a little bit about how to find some initial partners and stuff like that. But I’d love to hear a little bit about your insights and your perspective on how do you take your existing affiliates and make them more effective? So one of our company values at Lifter LMS is remove friction.

[00:18:17] So rolling out the red carpet is that it’s removing friction. And sometimes all they have to do is say yes, but sometimes there is some work that the partner needs to do. So I always run it through the lens of removing friction. And I also do some affiliate marketing myself at Lifter LMS. It’s not our main focus, our main business, but it’s an important part of what we do.

[00:18:41] And when I do affiliate marketing, there’s, at Lifter as an example, there’s two types of affiliates we work with. One type is more in the technology space, whether that’s A hosting company, a plugin provider, an agency, they’re in another kind of affiliate partner who is a different kind. They’re in the course creator space.

[00:19:02] They may not even be very techie at all, but they have lots of training and coaching on how to take what you know, and turn it into an information product and do instructional design and create a coaching program and things like this. So sometimes I think it’s important to recognize it. There could be like these groups of different partner types and even a lifter is an example.

[00:19:24] Also our customers and users who may not be affiliate marketers or super techie come affiliates. And that’s kind of like a third type. So a couple of things to reduce friction with affiliates that has worked for us and our users. One is to run contests. So let’s say like in the WordPress space, we’re big on the black Friday time of year.

[00:19:48] So you can incentivize like the top. Affiliate gets this prize, could be financial, it could be a physical item. Like I’ve, as an affiliate myself, I have been in affiliate programs where the top affiliate wins a Tesla. And I have never gotten the number one spot, but I’m there and I’m participating. So there’s contests.

[00:20:11] The other thing we do, which is a little meta, And we released this maybe a year ago, is we created an actual free course using Left 4 LMS on our site that shows people how to do affiliate marketing, whether they’re brand new to the concept or they’re middle skill level or advanced. Everything from understanding how it works, getting set up and, you know, the nuances of like how to create a promotion link to a certain page and stuff like that.

[00:20:41] And another thing I really love for helping affiliates, particularly for me in that less techie, but more just create an online course business affiliate partners that I have, and there’s probably like 30 of them. Is there a way more kind of marketing focus than the tech community? So they do things like they send out swipe, swipe it’s called, which is usually a Google document that has the exact email copy that you could just copy, paste, and send removing friction again, it’s actually a unique version of the document that already has my specific affiliate link in it.

[00:21:17] Now, me, typically, when I do those as a promoter, I’m going to customize the message to my language, add my own context and stories. I rarely ever do a copy paste. That one resource of a swipe, as it’s called, can be the difference between an affiliate taking action versus saying I’m too busy. I don’t have time for this right now.

[00:21:41] If I get a swipe in my email and the, the product and the messaging is like a good match for my people in a way that adds value, I’m way more likely to move on that. Even just take 15 minutes, set up the email and so on. So that’s very powerful. And there’s one thing I want to add here, which is that.

[00:22:00] Sometimes we get a little bit in our heads about being promoters or affiliates or salespeople. And at the end of the day, I’m actually, I’ve come to the opposite stance of where I started and where a lot of people are, which is that I’m not just trying to quote monetize my list or make money online, I’m actually trying to help people with Siren, for example, I know the power of what this technology can do.

[00:22:25] I know how much value it can add for. Course creators and coaches and content creators and the sales partner ecosystem. So for me, I’m just trying to connect people and products with good people and products. So instead of being on my heels, feeling like I don’t want to sell, or I don’t want to feel like I’m just trying to claw as much money out of the internet as I can.

[00:22:51] I’m actually just trying to help people. And I almost feel a moral obligation. Like when I learned about Siren, I’m like, these, my people need to know about this. Like, but this is, this can really help them. So I’m, it’s the opposite of being on your heels, scared of selling. I’m like. How can I help Alex get the word out about this?

[00:23:10] How can I help my people have the knowledge, tools, resources, content to be able to understand what this is and leverage this so that it can help them and help their communities. So that mindset piece is like really important. And so my advice there is don’t just, if you’re an affiliate, Don’t just shop for like high performing affiliate opportunity, shop for what resonates with you, your audience, your community, things you’re passionate about, and so on.

[00:23:39] Yeah, for sure. It’s a partnership. You are pairing up with somebody, working with them closely. And there’s a lot of ongoing relationships and things like that, that comes out of that. And I love that the way that you describe that naturally as a result of that paradigm causes you to actually look at how you roll out the red carpet, because you think about it in that perspective, you are now going to just naturally reduce friction, naturally try to help these people do better.

[00:24:05] Earlier on, you talked a little bit about contests. This is something that I’ve become a real big fan of because. I find that it’s a good way to look at your existing affiliates, not only motivate them to generate sales, but also to help you as the affiliate manager, get more visibility on which affiliates are capable of generating.

[00:24:24] Those sales are in a good position. Have you done any contests that have been particularly successful or anything like that, that you can share or talk about here? Yeah, this goes back to incentives as well. I also think about how can I create recurring value for affiliates? Not just hit them excited about one campaign.

[00:24:42] A Tesla. Yeah. A Tesla is an example. And one of the neat ways you can do that, and you could do this in lieu of a cash prize or physical prize. And we’ve done this before where our top affiliate in a campaign. It’s an increased affiliate commission percentage going forward. We did that where, and I like to combine it with a prize.

[00:25:05] So we did a cash prize and in our case, I believe it was a 5 percent increase and their referral rate custom to them. And that worked, that motivated people. I think one of the things we I’ve seen in my business and users, businesses and other businesses is typically with an affiliate program, you’re going to have this Like smaller group that really performs, does well, sends a lot of traffic, gets good conversions.

[00:25:33] And then there’s this long tail of folks who do some, make some, and then there’s a some that, that just don’t perform. Maybe they signed up, they didn’t understand, or they just didn’t follow through and so on. So I see that as a business challenge. But like you said, by doing these contests, by actually looking at your partner analytics and your traffic.

[00:25:57] And your affiliate dashboards and things, you can start to identify who your partners are. And the other thing I recommend too, is. To actually do some outbound prospecting, see who’s publishing content on, in your niche or doing affiliate promotions in your niche or doing partnerships in your niche and proactively reach out to them.

[00:26:18] Don’t wait for affiliates to come to you, but could be influencers on YouTube. It can be in all kinds of different places where you got to go out and to the world and build the team in the digital space and in person for sure. What does prospecting look like for you? Cause I think a lot of people struggle with finding affiliates in the first place.

[00:26:36] So I’d love to hear how you approach finding them. There’s a great book called the Millionaire Real Estate Agent. I read back in the day, I used to do a little bit of dabbling in real estate. First of all, what a great title. But one of the concepts in there, and this has always stuck with me, is that what are the top performing real estate agents do?

[00:26:57] How do they divide their time? And they found one thing that like, that all millionaire real estate agents did, which is they spend half their time prospecting, basically doing outbound sales. I’m not there in terms of, I don’t spend four hours a day prospecting, but I do try to do at least one prospecting activity every day.

[00:27:19] So making that a habit is, is key. Now, in terms of the relationships, third of my inbound outbound relationships pie of how to do sales and marketing, there’s a lot of layers in terms of. How I think about that. So just using Lifter as an example, there’s cold outreach. Like I’ve cold outreach to Udemy instructors.

[00:27:43] I’ve done cold outreach to potential integration partners. Those folks like Udemy instructors and integration partners also reach out to me directly. I get outside of the building. I go to industry events like WordCamps. I’ve been involved in like software CEO coaching programs where I network with other folks.

[00:28:06] Some of them now use Lifter LMS to power their internal training or to create information products as a part of their business for free or. I do masterminding. So I’m a part of, I think, four masterminds, which is just groups of people that get together and just try to help each other share their wins and lows and ask for help around specific topics on a recurring basis.

[00:28:32] I approach partnerships, number one, as not. It’s like, uh, give before you get. I always try to add more value than I take or ask for. I also value the relationship, like the human relationship over the business relationship, and I always try to leave the world and people better than I sound them. So it’s not about extracting value.

[00:28:56] It’s actually about creating more value. The other thing is if you have customers for your courses or your memberships, Or whatever your business is, you can turn your free, free users and customers into affiliates, if you give them the right resources, tools, training, content, you can naturally recruit that.

[00:29:18] One of the areas I’m really fascinated with related to that and where I’ve ended up is that the difference between two programs, one is the traditional affiliate program, you send traffic with your trackable links, you get a percentage of a sale. But then there’s some kind of community or user customer partners that are just not interested, either they’re financially set, they don’t care, or they just don’t want to get involved in affiliate marketing, but they do want to refer your business.

[00:29:47] And that’s a whole thing. Like one of the guys who coached Tony Robbins and to what he is, his name is Jay Abraham. He uses Lifter LMS for his academy. I think it’s called Abraham University, but I was listening to Jay at one of Jay’s talks. And he was talking about how businesses are leaving so much money on the table because of one thing, and that’s that they don’t ask for referrals.

[00:30:13] And in this interview or this video I was listening to. He then proceeded to go over like 17 different referral programs that you could set up in your business or systems to ask for the referral. That’s like a informal relationship. There may not be monetary motivation or incentive involved in that, but just figuring out how to ask for the referral, automate asking for the referral, ask for it in different ways, ask the same person again, later.

[00:30:45] Without being annoying and so on. There’s that whole referral partner versus affiliate partner. It’s different. Do you capture what, do you capture it and make the connection? They’re just making the intro or you just let them do it and thank each other or send them a t shirt. There’s so much you can do.

[00:31:00] For sure. Um, I’m going to have to see if I can find that lesson or that video and see if I can add it to the show notes. Cause that sounds like it’s super relevant to all of this. You didn’t say it directly, but it sounds like you’re implying that particularly creating, Partnerships is inherently a sales process.

[00:31:16] There’s steps to connecting with the people, networking with them, getting to know them, understanding where they fit in your business, understanding that they don’t fit and asking yourself how you can help them and identifying the opportunities. That’s really cool. So it sounds like most of your strategies for developing your business and developing your partnerships, these relationships.

[00:31:37] Is through a lot of networking at various roundtables and conferences and things like that. Are there any lower touch things that you do that are a little more tactical to find and identify people online? Or is it mostly this higher touch approach where you just go to specific places and let serendipity take you?

[00:31:55] Mostly I’m a long game guy, but I also do short game stuff. I run ads. I’ve built prospect lists and used email outbound outreach software to reach out and try to recruit partners and users and customers, my approach to marketing and sales is counterintuitive to the idea of do one thing and do it really well, and then move on to the next channel.

[00:32:21] I do believe in that strategy and I use it. But especially when you’re earlier in your business, I think it’s important to try absolutely everything. So where we’re at now, and probably at like closer to the five year mark in business, did we start using the more conventional advice, which is to, okay, focus on one thing, like.

[00:32:42] Building your Facebook group, doing your YouTube channel, doing conference marketing or conference sponsorship and do one thing at a time. But I think it’s really important in the early days to try as many as possible because you never know what’s going to hit. So you might as well put as many lines in the water as possible.

[00:33:01] And I would say to social media can be a really powerful, much lower touch way of doing it. Like LFTR as an example has a 10, 000 person Facebook group. And I committed to that channel. Um, as a marketing channel, I committed to engage with the group every day. I didn’t just create it and be like, cool. I hope I get leads from here.

[00:33:21] I engaged in help people every day. Even if I knew this was always going to be a free user, or maybe somebody just kicking the tires and just asking questions about which. Product should I use, or should it be yours? Should it be somebody else’s? The people in there that helped other people, I would do things for us in t shirts and stuff like that.

[00:33:40] But content is a great low touch way to do it. Like you mentioned with the red carpet scenario, like we have a blog post on our site about, it’s called something like how to get more leads and sales by partnering with us. And then it goes step by step into all the different things that, of how our partnership will look and work.

[00:34:01] The stuff we’ve done with Siren, as an example, like doing a webinar, being on the podcast, getting a dedicated email. And there’s really, there’s 20 things. That resource in terms of low touch, like if you figure out what your red carpet is, make some content around that’s, and then that’s just there for SEO.

[00:34:18] But then when it comes time to either prospect partners. Or somebody reaches out to you with the, the, the vague ask of maybe we should partner, here’s our red carpet. Here’s how it works. You have that kind of automated evergreen piece of content that can do the heavy lifting of, you know, qualifying the relationship, make sure expectations are set and being clear on what’s on the offer here.

[00:34:42] That’s great. So a lot of the people who listen to this podcast are new to affiliate marketing and partnership marketing. Usually they’re business owners. They’ve been around for a while. They understand networking as a concept, but they are trying to do a better job of codifying those into formal partnerships and things that make a little bit more sense.

[00:34:57] We’re course creators who are looking to start thinking about their business with a partnership mindset. If you were in their shoes, you’ve got a course platform set up and you’re starting to use that and you’ve got the foundation of your business. Put together and you were looking to start to multiply your own efforts.

[00:35:14] Where would you start? Well, first I would make sure I was in the right rooms. So as an example, in my early days of website design, I went to the chamber of commerce in the town I was living. And I actually got a couple of clients out of there, but it’s the same. 30 people that have been having breakfast every Sunday or whatever.

[00:35:34] So there’s like a kind of cap on how much impact that room could have. So that’s one thing is just think a lot about where are these people hanging out both online and in person and how much can this group scale if I’m going to invest a bunch of time here. The other thing is really. Thinking about that red carpet scenario of what can I do?

[00:35:55] Let me like structure this program so that I’m not just sending an email that says, Hey, I think we should partner. An example of that would be leveraging other people’s audiences, which is really powerful, but instead of coming off like, Oh, this person just wants access to be a guest on my podcast, or they want me to send an email to my list.

[00:36:20] Or whatever, instead, what you do is you think higher up the funnel. So instead of asking a partner to go sell for you, have some like free resource, could be a free course. It could be just a business strategy or something that your target market, which this partner shares as your target market, where the content is about that.

[00:36:42] It’s not, Hey, buy my stuff. You’re not trying to get the guy to be like, Hey, buy this person’s stuff. It’s more, I want to introduce you to somebody who can help you. There’s going to be a lot of free, valuable insights, tips, strategies, tactics, resources for around this call. So it’s more like you’re getting a partner who’s like introducing their audience to your kind of top of the funnel, valuable resources and ideas.

[00:37:09] Then, Hey person, let’s email for me so I can get some sales from you. And there’s one more thing with this, which is. The way I think about it is this is a counterintuitive insight that has a lot of power. Sometimes when you think about partnerships, you’re like, well, this person who has my exact same audience is a competitor, so it’s not going to work.

[00:37:28] But the power idea here is to actually think about. A partner that has your same audience, but they’re in the timeline right before they need you. So I mentioned as an example, I have a lot of different types of affiliate partners. Three main types. One is my technology partners. Two is the general create online courses, business opportunity partners.

[00:37:55] And then I have like my actual users and customers. And if you think about that fourth dimensionally, like through time. Somebody may first discover this idea of creating an online course. And they’re like, what am I going to teach? How am I going to build this program? So one of the reasons why I partner with those folks, many of them don’t have the LMS softwares.

[00:38:14] They’re just teaching the business opportunity and how to get your stuff together and come up with a course idea and create content for it and build your audience before you have a product and all these things. So as soon as they’re done with that person, they’re ready for an LMS software. And then after that, they may be a user and customer.

[00:38:34] These are like three very different moments in time. So one of the classic examples I give when I’m teaching this concept, Is that if you’re a website agency owner, you build websites for businesses, there are some great partners for you. What do they do? What does a business do right before they need a website?

[00:38:54] One of the things they do is they need to legally become a business. Follow an LLC. If you partner with a lawyer or a business formation company, And there’s service, there’s like online services for this now that I forget the name of it, but so think about what they need right before they need you. And those can be some of your best partners.

[00:39:15] And there’s literally zero competition. It’s just in your value add, they’re like, cool. Now you got this, you might need this next. Man, that’s a fantastic insight. I will be thinking about that because I’m in an interesting spot myself. So I’ve been thinking about that kind of stuff a lot for my own agency side of Novatoria.

[00:39:33] So that’s, yeah, that’s a great insight. It’s one thing I want to mention about Siren, which is one of the reasons I got so excited about it is because I was thinking about time because one of the things that happens to my people is. Okay. They figure out they want a course business opportunity. Then they want to create a course and build a website to host and sell and deliver the course.

[00:39:53] That’s where Lefshare comes in. And then they have the idea of I’m really busy. I think I’d like to get some other course creators to come in here and teach on my platform as well. Oh, I need to scale my sales systems. Maybe I should introduce. Affiliates or other types of partnerships. So Siren’s awesome.

[00:40:10] And one of the things I love about it is you fit perfectly in that timeline. That next phase, which by the way, we did promotion for, and it worked and you’re a load because The timeline just, it makes sense in the buyer’s journey or the user experience journey. Totally. It makes perfect sense. Like I said, it’s a multiplier.

[00:40:28] I always think about it like that. You know, you start your business as doing it yourself. You figured out how to do it yourself and then you’re making some progress. You’re getting some growth there. And then the next phase is. Siren allows you to just completely change your business model to revolve around partnerships, to be able to potentially duplicate what you’re doing.

[00:40:46] And what I love about all of that is that like, it fits nicely into what you were talking about being like a person whose goal was to help people, right? All of a sudden you have an opportunity that you can give people with this roadmap and this platform and all of this stuff that they may not have otherwise had access to, but have the knowledge and the capacity to potentially Be a fantastic course teacher.

[00:41:07] They just need that opportunity. It’s so cool to me to think that between Lifter and Siren, by combining them together, you’re able to create something that could not just change your life, but change other people’s lives as well. I love that. That is my favorite thing about partnerships in general, for sure.

[00:41:21] Well, Chris, this was a fantastic conversation. I always get great insights every time we chat and I’ve already, just even from this call, I have a couple of things that I wrote down here on the side that I got to follow up with on my own business. Where can people find you online? So you can find me at Lifter LMS.

[00:41:37] That’s at Lifter LMS. com. Me personally, I’m most active on Twitter and X. So that’s just at Chris Badgett. And if you like listening to podcasts, I’ve been podcasting for 10 years, which is also partnerships, by the way. And that you bring in a guest expert. They may have an audience or a product of sale, but we’re just making content together that’s making the world a better place and enlightening people and developing relationships.

[00:42:03] So I definitely recommend podcasting partnerships. My podcast is called LMS cast. Fantastic. I will add all of those links in the show notes. Thanks so much for your time. And I hope you have a great day. Thank you for joining us in this episode of partnership. Where your network is the wind in your sails.

[00:42:21] I hope you found today’s discussion, insightful and inspiring. Remember the strength of your business lies in the partnerships you build and nurture. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. For more tips and insights, visit our website at partnership. fm. This is Alex Standifird, sailing out.