One thing we started last year and I'd like to repeat it again this year is all these lovely people who came here on their own dime and I like to give them a few minutes to either talk about their latest project or something that they find interesting or just something they want to talk about so Alan you're down at the end. I got my MBA from Kellogg back in 1982 and you know I went to school to learn how to beat the market in the long-term for Malkill's random walk down Wall Street. You know Fama French is a little new in investing since then but behavioral finance is a subject that really excites me. I don't know how I graduated thinking that was a logical rational being. I'm using hindsight bias to see that. Projects I'm just starting, writing the book was the hardest thing I ever did. I'm a math and Bill Fallinan who I guess is not here giving me a contract with a due date who guided the discipline to do it. I'm just starting to get the itch for a second book which would be a little bit broader than investing and include you know all the aspects of financial planning from taxes, estate planning, budgeting in kind of some simple terms and would be called something like Roth's rules of common sense because common sense is not really all that common. You know just a couple of philosophical newsings. I considered myself unbelievably lucky I didn't have to get paid $1,550 a year for my medical school tuition and my graduate school I got for free and then I started working in 1980 and got the soccer lace on the scene amount of money with the pension rules and then got these you know security returns in the 80s and 90s that were just beyond believe. I sort of felt sorry for you know until very recently for the kids who you know were dealing you know with you know coming out with enormous amounts of debt from school and with overvalued securities to buy into their retirement plans and I sort of almost felt guilty about it. Now I don't feel so guilty I think you know someone who was 25 or 35 years old who was socking money again is going to get you know more than agreeable returns perhaps the kinds of returns that I thought. I mean a good creek in 1981 you could get 13% CDs you know which have a real rate of return at 9% or 8%. In terms of you know where I'm going and what I'm doing I'm always writing. I'm always trying to be on this learning curve and I've got to explain to a lot of you I've got a project that I'm working on on communications technology and politics and political power. It's about 93% done and hopefully it will be out next year as far as financial publishing. I don't have any great plans. I'm thinking of doing some de-publishing just just you know putting out cable books on my own maybe not even books I mean you know somebody explained to me several weeks ago a book is a social contract it's becoming a social construct and you know there's no reason why you can't sell 10,000 words for you know for two dollars as easily as you can sell a hundred thousand words for twenty five dollars so I may wind up doing little trips and drives so you know encapsulate the subjects and doing it that way. You can find the ones you want and believe the ones you don't want. Is Mike Piper still here? Mike are you still in the audience? Where are you? Oh he had to leave too bad. I can say this without even being here. I'm embarrassing him. Mike is 27 years old and he is the future of our organization. Him and others like him.  I thought he was in his mid 40s or 50s even in the 60s who had been retired and he turns out to be had been about 25 at the time. Mike is doing what Bill is talking about. He's publishing small books and he's financing his this is how this is his living selling these books but the way he's doing it he's using the internet in the medium of the young folks if you will to get the message out about the Bogle. It's not unlike what we're trying to do in the board but just taking it to three or four, five or 25 different levels. I was at the pleasure of being a financial blogger's conference the very first one they had a couple weeks ago it was all these 20-somethings out here and they're all networking and interconnected and doing all this thing and Mike is in the middle of all that spreading the Bogle head message and so he's the future and the young people of the future of the Bogle Heads and if he was here I would have recognized him and he's got the right idea with small books and I think Bill has realized that and I've realized that and the projects that I might be working on in the future are just going to be if I was going to have a 300 page book I just break it down into three or four sixty to eighty page books and you know sell them for what I'm going to sell them for but in order to try to spread the Bogle head message you know we're doing a wiki is fantastic I don't know if you had a chance to look at what we're doing out there with wiki it's wonderful and what they're doing and and now we're on Facebook and now we've got people like Mike Piper out there spreading the word to the young community I mean this is this is the future of the Bogle heads this is spreading the message and e-technology if you will is one way of doing it and I planted to do what I can so that you know that's that's what that's what I'm doing and then I just wanted to give credit to the young folks that are here today that are say under the age of 40 because you are the future of the Bogle Heads. I'll second the endorsement of the wiki site I did just before coming here I sent a message to some of my colleagues at Morningstar.com saying that what you all have done there I think has evolved into the most useful deep resource for personal finance on the web so I just think it's an extraordinary achievement I'm sure it'll continue to grow and get even deeper and broader but what you've done so far is absolutely tremendous I'm honored to be here honored to be up on this panel as Mel's intro of me alluded to I spent most of my career at Morningstar focusing on mutual funds and helping people select mutual funds and the longer I did that the longer I became convinced that we were just sort of toiling in the margins of people's financial lives so whether they selected the right large growth fund or whatever they did really paled in comparison to did they save enough did they make semi-sane acid allocation decisions did they not completely undermine their financial plan by selling everything at the wrong moment so I'm really happy in my current role to be able to address a lot of these things to tap resources like a lot of you and external resources and write up about a whole lot of topics they write about four or five columns a week and and really busy but tremendously enjoy what I'm doing I have become more and more interested in the logistics of retirement planning so have been writing an awful lot about that another topic that's of tremendous interest to me is the decline in cognitive functioning as people age and how they must prepare their financial plans for that possibility I know that many of us have experienced that in our own families I'm undergoing that right now with my dad so it's become front and center with me and thankfully he has me to help him but a lot of other elderly folks do that so that has become a real cause of mine helping people even dedicated to it yourself or so have been very effective over their lives helping them prepare for that day that they may not be able to do so so I've been focusing a lot on that it's a sensitive topic I know that some users have gotten a little offended by things that I've written but I mean well and I think it's a really important and critically under discussed topic could I just ask that we've recognized once again all of the people who are in the infrastructure of the political heads wiki and Alex and stand up and wherever else is here who are involved in the actual what goes on I'll second that as well you know a well-running discussion board or site is is like a tropical garden that needs weeding about 170-10 minutes and if you don't weed it very quickly becomes unhabitable the people on the discussion board to do that really deserve my gratitude well Rick and Christine both talked about the wiki and I think that's probably one of the most under utilized and unrecognized resources available and it is a vast vast knowledge base so I've been using the bully pulpit for us to do a series of wiki to try to get to more recognition for it and that's one of the nice things I really don't like having a deadline and I told Christine earlier that she's my idol I don't know how she does it batting out column after column after column every time I love on the morning start there's Christine with a new column Laura and I share a column that is a bi-weekly column which means Laura writes one week and then two weeks later I have to write which means I'm writing one column a month and here's Christine betting now what seems like one a day so I've really got to do it but it's a lot of work writing a book is a lot of work writing columns are a lot of work especially when you're supposed to be retired and playing golf and things like that but I figured I felt that I you know we were we were given a column at Ports and it gives us a choice to spread the bogey it's worth to a lot of people who aren't really getting the bogey message so even though it's a chore I feel that it's it's worth the effort and that's basically you know the thing that I love to hate having a deadline because I thought I packed that in years ago yes Alex looking at how people are using the site what's interesting phenomena is the regular posters readers and not to use the wiki that much however we're getting more and more traffic from people who've never been to the site and they do a Google search on something and basically the more sort of complex the query or you know the something like non-deductive IRA tent is leading people to the wiki so you like anything I don't know if the quality is there the content is there it eventually gets failed so there is getting more and more traffic on it so it may not be seen as much on the form part of it and we've talked we're going to be doing something to figure out a way to better integrate the two or at least make people more aware of it from there the regular users but people aren't you know there is a lot of activity from people reading the well that's great now we get back to the Q&A a question from Alex what about low cost variable annuities for someone like Vanguard or TIA crap to fill out any income gaps in retirement so you're talking about a variable annuity instead of a instead of a speed right get that off I'm not sure what the variable annuity in retirement is that's a hard one I think for certain investors in the saving phase but a very low cost variable annuity can be useful and here are my criteria for using one first of all person should be young because the compelling advantages of an annuity are greater the longer you are so the perfect candidate for annuity is actually one who's 15 years old can we can we stop right there for a second we want to make sure he's talking about not qualified annuities not qualified correct correct so the second criteria is you don't have any space for sheltered assets anywhere else so you don't have enough in your in your IRAs and in your 401s okay if you've got plenty of room in there you certainly don't need a variable annuity the third thing is it has to be in an asset class which is inherently very tax inefficient okay and that's junk and that's rates all right so if you can meet those three criteria I think that owning a variable annuity is a reasonable thing to do but very few people need that criteria a low cost variable and yeah low cost one personal cost is part I would say almost always no you're converting a tax efficient long-term capital okay in retirement not oh in a retirement yes so you want tax deferral within a tax no it's people who just need an income stream that is greater than 3% or 4% and don't really care about leaving well actually it could work to leave so many towards an errors if there's a low cost variable annuity you could guarantee yourself that 5% stream in retirement and still leave something for your errors but you're gonna have costs that make generally speaking a the average mutual final cheap I know there's a lot of professors my parents are among them who are living off of these sorts of things you know with all rates that they couldn't have if they were to follow you know 3% or 3.5% or something or what are they invested in Alex no but I mean what's the traditional and you know I mean they've structured their product inside an annuity but it's not what I think of when I think of a variable annuity and I use Vanguard variable annuities all the time but as a 1035 to get into something ugly into something you know much much much less ugly but still not great the T tradition by the way until about eight months ago it was an amazing deal because if you if you if you qualify for it means that you had to have received some money at some point in your life from an educational or a public institution which probably 90% of people would qualify for it and basically what amounted to money market yield and still does yield 3% and all you had to do is put it inside of an IRA and money was perfectly liquid in and out I contacted Vanguard and my question to the Vanguard people last night was on the variable annuity side because I'm not going to talk politics or anything here but if taxes on long-term capital gains go up to an ordinary income tax rate and taxes on dividends from stock will go up to an ordinary income tax rate then all of a sudden the Vanguard variable annuity becomes very attractive on a taxable accounts and we've been talking with Vanguard for the last year and a half I mean it looks like this could occur could occur I'm saying it will but it could about how we can structure using how we can manage accounts at our company using Vanguard variable annuities because right now there's no system at Vanguard to allow money managers to actually manage portfolios of variable annuities in a very efficient way rather than calling up individually and talking with somebody on the phone and trying to manage 500 client portfolios like maybe 500 individual phone calls I mean it doesn't work so they're working on the system to allow investment advisors like us to be able to efficiently manage variable annuities just like we can manage the Vanguard funds and I think it's an important step if the tax laws change that would make very low-cost variable annuity products particularly attractive and a lot of asset classes were right now not and one other thing that hasn't been touched on but in a lot of states variable annuities or sheltered from creditors so there are some people like that are subject to lawsuits that might consider doctors and others who are subject to lawsuits this is a question about small cap and value and tilting does anyone like to share the thoughts on either yes or no oh no I'm not saying do it I'm saying is that with the core portfolio is beta I mean it stocks bonds US stocks I'm international I like to use reads I call it the core or very simple that gets you most people out there that's a that's all you need I mean you're there you're done even maybe something more simple than that you know total global total bond you're finished right to and that's better than how 99% of investors are investing just doing that but you start to break it out and you start to become more interested in how the markets work and all the different risks that are out there and breaking it apart might say well I'm gonna have a certain portion in the US certain portion in international maybe some in emerging markets maybe some of you start to break apart your portfolio a little bit because each of these components have different risks different returns and they work differently together in a portfolio when you might enhance your return comes to small cap value in the long run not all the time there have been many long-term periods of time five years ten years where small cap value stocks have underperform the rest of the market but in the long run you tend to they tend to outperform because I believe there's more risk in owning small companies there's more risk in owning value companies like Europe if you will be talking about that and there is in owning the whole board basket so because there is these extra risks out there you're entitled to an extra return and if you understand how the markets have broken down and you decide you want to take these extra risks in your portfolio then it's just fine to allocate a portion of your portfolio to say a small cap US or small cap international fund but you knowingly are doing it I mean and you're knowingly paying more money for it this doesn't come cheap you could buy beta the Vanguard total stock market for seven basis point zero seven percent if you venture off from that and you go into small cap value you're going to pay more money but the idea is the excess return that you're going to get from the risk premiums make up for and more make up for the extra cost that you're you're taking but I think you venture into this knowing what you're getting into and knowing or deciding how much you risk you want to actually allocate to that area yeah I was fascinated to hear Gus Sotter last night talk about this issue and what I thought I heard him say was yeah small value stocks do have higher returns but I'm not willing to bet the company on it and he basically came out and admitted that Rick's exactly right first of all it doesn't come cheap the DFA US small value fund excuse me has probably captured about half of the small value premium the other half that I think it's lost to transactional costs because maintaining a highly tailored small value fund is very expensive in terms of transactional in terms of transactional costs I think that a large part of it is a risk story and we sure as heck saw that you know 0809 with what small value funds did ending there had small value funds existed in 1929 to 32 it would have been even worse but I think there's also a behavioral component as well to it so you know as long as you can tolerate it and you know what you're doing your time arises long enough sure go for it knock yourself out but but you know if you want to you know use rick's core for approach I think that's wonderful too now there's one usual fun but I would recommend to if you know somebody who has access to it in 401k plan which is the DFA 6040 global portfolio which is has a fairly nice healthy tilt to it it is global it owns everything reads emerging markets all that stuff you know domestic it's very balanced the bond portion of it is very balanced and it's one fun and if you you know the person who doesn't want to think about investing who wants to use one fun to the 401k if that one's available I would not recommend that I could not recommend that one highly enough if they're willing to bear a bit of a tail I do believe in the form of French three-factor model but you know don't lose sight that small cap and value is compensation for additional risk so you may not completely agree with me on that point with that some pristine correct me if I'm wrong small cap value is about 3.3% of the total market in the vanguard style box so my own portfolio I have an extra 1% tilt people that come to me with a portfolio that 50% of their equity is in small cap value in my opinion that's many times too risky and one thing I would add is that when we look at the universe of actively managed funds to the extent that anyone uses them what we see is that almost across the board you've got a smaller cap tilt than the broad market that active managers typically do underweight the indexes largest constituents the one thing I would point out though is that if you look at the long historical data plus the live fund data that a 6040 conventional US stock bond portfolio has a higher return has a lower return and a higher risk than a 4060 small value bond portfolio you know so at least in terms of mean variance preference you are better off the small value of how to look at the market of course you have to bear this very attractive risk you have to be willing to have a negative return in here like 1998 when your neighbors were making 40% I can make an argument that having more small cap value in a portfolio is it is a good idea if your intent is to more mirror the economy rather than try to mirror the stock market what I mean by that is half of our economy is not securitized in the form of equity and that half that's not securitized in the form of equity most of it are very small companies which tend to be bought and sold at value stock type prices so if you want your portfolio look more like GDP look more like the US economy what you would do is you start out with the total stock market and that add or magnify small cap value because that gets your portfolio more away from what the stock market is which is nothing more than companies deciding how they're going to capitalize themselves towards what the US economy is it pushes it that direction I think that's a good justification for doing it I think that's a deeper than say a point we're back to the high water mark if you're a 60 40 portfolio investor whatever your high water mark was at the end of maybe you know 2007 November you know October 13th 2007 when the market if you have a 60 40 conventional portfolio you're doing just great but if you're the average American worker it really sucks and the small value tilted portfolio more closely mimics that so I think it's a great point well here's a case of where risk showed up I got a news flash in these days when we've all been temporary residents of Pennsylvania or the local news is reporting that Harrisburg the state capital has filed for bankruptcy I don't know whether the mobile heads had anything to do with that but the risk did show up and the question that is asked is this a domestic crisis or is this just noise well I come from Rhode Island of course we had central falls the first one to go under and the states will come in and take over when the cities are no longer able to pay their bills this is not a city this is the state capital the city though but it's the state capital where all the politicians reside they don't live on their guards but I think all the states will come in and they will bail out the cities restructure them take over management of them get them back on their feet it's gonna take a while but it will and in the case if a state ever going bankrupt the federal government will step in so I don't think there's any risk at all to say the vanguard intermediate term is one point which has thousands of securities in it I don't think it's gonna make a difference though for a fund over individual bonds and for a nationally diversified fund over a single state fund unless you are in a state with very high state tax and you personally tax bracket in fact vanguard does have a long-term in Spain tax free so I'm sure that I mean the classic mistake that a lot of small investors do the older ones with all of their money into individual bonds from their own home state it's just the classic case of the tax tax tail where you know in wagging the investment talk that's an incredible thing now I don't have some opinions about that municipal bond so I'll yield it for $100 we say I had a deep insightful comment I'm a big believer that if you own muni bonds you want to diversify fund I think that the muni bonds scare me and I think many bonds have a new risk that they haven't had in the past remember the question of the 8% assumption well muni bonds are municipalities and states have a large unfunded liability using fairly aggressive assumptions so the purpose of the bond portfolio in my opinion is mostly to be that is a shock absorber if stocks go down now think about it if stocks do go down significantly this is not a prediction I am not meritive winning but if stocks have a bad run for the next 10 15 years if there's some terrorist events if you know country default is going to be greater than those municipalities are going to be under bigger stresses they're going to have bigger unfunded liabilities and yes they can do things to try to cut costs but remember you know these are elected officials and politicians don't generally make the tough decisions so that in my opinion and this is not a prediction this is a consequence of a low probability situation that if our stock portfolio goes down defaults and our municipalities could go up just when we really don't want them to happen so what proportion of a fixed income portfolio should the average person in this audience have in munis of zero 20% well that's an easy answer it you can I I think you know first of all you've got to be in the taxable situation where they make sense you know the goal is not to pay the least amount of taxes the goal is to make the most amount after taxes on a risk-adjusted basis municipalities are about 8% of the total US bond market and I would be hesitant to go much above you know 12% or so okay we'll take one more question this is appropriate for this time period is for dr. Bernstein doc there are a number of threads on the forum about the current state of the bond market and how to invest are avoided previously I remember you stating that you feel that the risk versus the reward of anything longer than cash and short-term bonds is a fool's errand the other professionals here basically are championing stayed the course with intermediate bonds please clarify if you would your current thinking of well as I said the Christine yesterday I can't be right about everything you know I you know I'm going to stay the course of my particular recommendation I mean the dumbest thing that I could do now would be to eventually because you know I mean how much upside is there left in bonds really at this point so I continue to believe that and you know I think the more important than having an opinion and shifting around is simply to stay to stay your course I've always been a believer that short generally that's in general that's been a terrible strategy for the past 30 years or so but I'm reasonably certain that you know that they will come when that will look like a good strategy again and I'm going to wait for it thinking the past you've said you were an asset junkie bill that's a class junkie so this question might be appropriate it says on gold Jack recently said that this is speculation but if you must own it one two three or even five percent in gold isn't the worst thing you can do does the panel agree anyone more accommodating to owner a greater percentage or even making it part of one strategic asset allocation gold was the best investment I ever made when I graduated college in 1979 I knew everything my parents gave me some college graduation money and I bought gold and silver even with the recent surge it has not kept up to inflation it taught me that I wasn't as smart as I thought I was I still believe in gold as an asset class or I actually like the precious metals mining I wish the vanguard precious metals mining had not taken in non-precious metals I think Van Nek has a great GDX gold miners ETF I think it can make a lot of sense I think that probably 99% of people who've gotten in there and in the last two or three years you're doing it for performance chasing for just the wrong reasons so I selling as it's been going up to rebalance yeah I mean as Jack said yesterday people discovered diversifying asset classes only after they've had high returns the day will come when people will no longer be interested in gold when as in the year 2000 and 1999 all the talking heads said it wasn't part of the portfolio central banks were selling it and that'll be the time to put it back in the portfolio long-term mean variance point of view either gold or precious metals equities will work on a precious metals activities just because they're easier to handle they deal with dividend I too and almost beyond words at what Van Nek did several years ago with the precious metals fund they always do these things at the wrong time and this is not the time yeah those of you who were here last year well yeah I just got a steal 30 years ago I made an investment in gold and has been a fabulous investment that's a wonderful dividends including three wonderful children here's the investment man was 53 years ago just a quick point on the timing question I had to do a CNBC retirement roundtable a month or so ago and that was one of the topics they wanted to cover and actually the other panelists were pretty bullish on gold and I I just stepped back and said so if you told me that you had some asset that was up 25% on an annualized basis and you were going to add it to a portfolio to decrease risk in the portfolio I'd say you were crazy I wouldn't care what asset it was and that's what we were looking at with gold returns so I I believe that it can probably be part of a long term strategic portfolio but I agree that the timing is as our parents taught us you know if you're playing poker and you look around the table and you don't know who the patsy is you are you are probably buying it from someone who bought it for $300 an ounce in 1984. Who's the patsy? Jeremy Siegel has stocks for the long run. He used to have an Trinaloid version or edition he's on right now but years ago in stocks for the long run he had a chart that looked at the price of gold going all the way back to the 1800s and there were little blips along the way but it was an adjusted for inflation the price of gold adjusted for inflation and although you looked at this chart and there were little blips along the way during the war times and during the 1980s 1990s and now we have another blip but in the long run the price of gold is the inflation rate it is the inflation rate and right now in my opinion the price of gold is going way ahead of where of inflation so two things are going to happen either the gold bugs are right and we're going to have terrible inflation and they might be right I mean I don't know if they're going to be right or not or they're wrong and when everything comes down around the world and hopefully we fix some of these problems that we have with sovereign debt and such in our own depths it starts to hopefully reverse that the price of gold will come back down to the inflation rate which currently I take it somewhere around $600 an ounce where it should be trading at so one of those two things are going to happen I just don't know which I mean not only are you really an insightful but you also know what intrinsic value of gold is so I want to I don't accomplish anything. All right at this time I'd like to do some wrapping up of the event and I would be really repussed if I did not recognize the people who helped me pull this off I have a real all-star staff and I'd like to call them up and recognize them. Ed, Raver, Marlene, Linda, Paul and Linda Gloverson and Gail. Come on up. As I said in business I used to delegate and wonder whether the people some people are going to be able to carry out a task and sometimes you spend time chasing after them worrying about whether they already have something done with these people I give them an assignment and I cross it off the list because I know it's done and I know it's going to be done properly and these people have really really worked through the last year every every one of these events takes a year to plan and carry out. To recognize the other important people here and that's you the attendees it's really great to see new faces every year and young new faces that's really exciting and it's also nice to see people who return and we feel like we we know a lot of these people from two, three, four, five, six events we have one individual here at TEMI who's been to all of TEMI events so hopefully you've had a good time hopefully you enjoyed yourself and learned something and would like to see some of your faces back next year if not all. Thank you everybody but there's a guy who does an unbelievable job but he spends an immense amount of time and he's continuously working on this and we really really should thank Mel. When Taylor and I started this in Miami, this was going to be a one-time event, Jack had said he'd like to get together with us in a non-resort place and it turned out that Taylor found out that Jack was speaking at the Miami Herald Making Money seminar and he knew that I was a snowbird so he called up and said Mel, should we invite at that time that we were called the vanguard of diehards and should we invite the diehards to come to Miami and have lunch with Jack and Taylor and I were gonna pay for the event and we said well what if the whole world comes you know you're not gonna limit this thing somewhere so we said okay $50 ahead 100 people will go for $5,000 and that's how we set up the first one and we thought it was a one-time event but then so many people wanted to come it was very sure to notice a lot of people couldn't come but they said when's the next one next one so it's like what happened one of the one of the forum members who I did not know and emailed and said I'm on a forum in Pennsylvania and I'm willing to host the event and it's right close to vanguard and you know we'll be able to visit vanguard so that's how the second event came about and then Morningstar was gracious and said would you guys like to have your next event in conjunction with the Morningstar conference so all the sudden we went from a one-time event to and later on when we were writing the book we didn't have time to have an event Jack said Mel when we're gonna have the next event I mean Jack Jack really loves this and it's amazing and but we were always trying to tie our events in with another event where Jack was appearing Jack has to deal with his wife that he's gonna be home on the weekends and so kept trying to tie it in with an event that Jack was speaking at and we ended up in Denver with the CFA group and after that Jack said I'll go wherever you guys want me doing the things on our own so what started out as a lunch with Jack in Miami in 1999 has now turned into this which is our 10th event so hopefully this are going for a long time and one of our many people in the audience might someday be doing this job so I can go play golf but in the meantime I love what I do and I love with the people I'm working with but anyway thanks for coming I hope you had a good time and we'll see you all next year


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