How can I sell more of my Udemy course?

 I came across two valueable posts by Vasco Cavalheiro (Course Creator) who shared his personal journey making $1,764,000 Selling Online Courses

 and how he made $701,775 on Udemy, worth reading.

Here are my notes from his both articles for the benefit of my readers:

from someone that has been "selling" courses there for several years.

yes it's possible to make a living teaching online and specifically on Udemy

Udemy is by far the biggest online course marketplace on the internet

Some of the numbers that the company has announced are mind-blowing:

• 40 million students
• 56k instructors
• 155k courses
• 480 million enrollments
• 115 million minutes watched
• More than 65 languages
• Over 7000 enterprise customers

you are in the online education space

It’s a very large platform with a huge built-in audience and a lot of revenue potential for online course creators.

Udemy is an online course marketplace, it’s just like Amazon but for online courses.

You don’t have to build your own audience, right?

Udemy wishes to -> "target businesses"

this could impact you. most businesses only need a select type of training: sales, marketing, operations, etc...

Udemy is a marketplace for premium video courses

buy for a one-time fee of typically $10 to $12, depending on your local currency
pay once and get lifetime access to the course, and can watch it as many times as you want

courses are organized into categories like for example:

• Development
• Business
• Finance & Accounting
• IT and Software
• Office Productivity
• Personal Development
• Design
• Marketing
• etc.

become an online teacher

You should not try to actively send your students to other products or services outside of Udemy, that is the surest way of getting your account striked and banned from the platform

you mention links to your other products or services, this is enough for your account to receive a strike

You receive 97% of the revenue if they come directly from your Instructor Referral Link or coupon codes you create
You receive 37% of the revenue if your student comes organically from inside Udemy, or via the Udemy Affiliate

HIGH EARNING POTENTIAL, especially if your course caters to the business community, or to some of the most popular course categories

It's a search-based marketplace

I recommend every course creator to do the same, and go for a mix of multiple marketplaces plus a self-hosting approach.

spread your wings as far as you can. 😉

Don’t put all your eggs in Udemy or Skillshare’s baskets. Publish your course(s) on other platforms.

If you sell your courses on your website, you have your own brand, and a direct relationship with your students.

You can do value-based pricing and charge based on the transformation and the value that your courses will bring to their lives, and you don't have to worry about constantly being compared to another $10 course right next to yours, just one click away: subscriptions, course bundles, Lifetime plans

revenue potential and the customer lifetime value is much higher in your own website than in any platform

MY TEAM AND I:

"So my team and I built" the easiest to use, most affordable online course platform in the market, that gives both you and your students a Udemy-level user experience right there on your website.

marketplace got some huge success with discounted course sales, where most courses show up at the price of $10.

online courses and self-education

I managed to train myself in a lot of software development topics and other skills that I could apply directly to my job, in a very practical and fun way.

aside from creating high-quality courses, you need the right strategy to become successful on Udemy

TRAFFIC -> UDEMY PAGE (course):

I started by sending some of the traffic that I had to my course landing page, and to my huge surprise, I did get some meaningful sales.

After a year or so on Udemy, I had made a total of around $30.793 - I made this revenue mostly with organic sales

My course category is in the software development space. I teach a technology called Angular if you are curious.

ONE vs MULTIPLE COURSES:

it was impossible to create one mega course to try to compete with the top courses, I decided to niche down and make instead a lot of smaller but more in-depth courses covering specific subtopics of my niche, and sell them separately.

By really drilling down into a topic in detail and creating practical courses that teach a developer to create an application from A to Z, I created these smaller courses of 4 to 10 hours long but not more that are super in-depth.

I film myself building a program and I explain everything that I’m doing, leaving no stone unturned and really getting into the details and the decisions that I’m constantly taking as I code: why did I do this, why did I not do that instead, etc.

STRATEGY of NICHING DOWN:

this strategy of niching down worked for me over time, and allowed me to make a living teaching the topics that I love. To date, it's still one of the most essential steps for online course creators desirous of becoming successful on Udemy.

By providing a whole series of in-depth courses in a subtopic of a broader niche, I’ve created an offer that is unique in my space, no one else has (as far as I know) such in-depth coverage of the topic.

niching-down strategy (that is uncommon on Udemy) has worked for several different reasons and has helped a lot of course creators like me become successful on the platform.

BEGINNERS ONLY + PRACTICAL

many beginner students might prefer a more in-depth explanation, to get into the topic, and get a beginner-only course. They also might prefer to build something practical, like a small application, rather than going through technological features one by one. Students want to see how it all fits together.

some people if they like my teaching style, will just end up buying all of my courses!

I currently have 17 courses active on Udemy, and a lot of my students buy 10 courses or more!

because many of my students buy several of my courses, I end up showing up on organic search a lot on the “Frequently Bought Together” results, displayed prominently on the search results by the Udemy algorithm:

LESS COMPETITION:

instead of having one large course of 20h or more on one given topic, having many smaller more specific courses focusing on one given subtopic also works well on Udemy, and fewer instructors are doing that at the moment.

This approach to selling online courses on Udemy also aligned with my interests and goals, I just wanted to niche down as much as possible in this technology that I’m to this day super interested in.

ROLL BACK the MAIN TOPIC:

I continued to record more courses of 5 to 10 hours on the same topic, instead of diversifying to other areas. I did a couple of mini-courses on closely related areas to see how they did but went back to my main area of interest as the results weren’t as good, and also, the topics just weren't as interesting to me.

If you are going to record a bunch of courses on one topic for years in a row, you better really enjoy it! 😊

PROMOTING:

as I’m building my next course, every week I use an educational announcement to keep in touch with my students and I send them a free sample lesson from the course.

I publish the video lesson as an unlisted video on YouTube, with no advertising at all, and no links to external resources. It’s just a way of sending a free video to my students in an exclusive way.

I keep sending these educational emails while I’m recording my course, and I include the logo of the upcoming course on each email so that the students get familiar with the branding of the course.

After a few months of recording, I then send a promotional email with a launch coupon, valid for 3 days only.

I then usually do between $600 to $1200 overnight on the day that I launch the course, which gives me a nice little revenue boost for the month.

Besides sending promotional emails at the launch of a single course, I also send promotional emails at certain moments during the year, like Black Friday and New Year. specific times, I send coupons for all of my courses in a single promotional email, and I put all my courses on sale temporarily for that specific holiday period. those coupons, together with the course launches tend to do quite well.

BONUS LECTURE TECHNIQUES:

I launch my courses via one single promotional email, with a coupon to the course valid for 3 days, at the lowest available platform price, which tends to be $9.99

I typically do about 80% of the launch revenue on my first email, and 20% on the second

Here is what has worked for me:

Building an audience via a blog was crucial to be able to launch my Udemy courses, and get some traffic on my first-course landing page from day one

If your topic is already full of Masterclass-level content, consider creating a full series of more in-depth smaller courses instead, focusing on smaller subtopics

Promote your course as you are recording it using educational announcements

choose a topic that you like a lot, as you are going to spend the next few years producing content on that subject, so you need to enjoy it

Always be on the lookout for brand new topics, and record a Masterclass on the topic as soon as you can, timing is crucial!

And here is what did not work as well for me:

I quit my job a bit too late before starting to teach online, I should have done so 6 months earlier. Timing is crucial, so if you see an opportunity on a new topic, go for it immediately, and don’t make the same mistake as I did!

Recurring promotional emails don’t work well on Udemy. So I stopped sending promotions every month, and instead, I started sending them only on special occasions

I highly recommend Udemy to all course creators, it’s a great way to get started teaching online.

I created an online course business in 2016

BLOGGING:

blog gave me the professional purpose that I lacked in my day job, and I just loved writing and seeing that my work was actually making a visible difference to other people.

FREELANCING:

I decided that I’m going to give it a try at something different. I had managed to build up some savings via years of freelancing, and I had maybe around the equivalent of 120k USD on my freelance account. Initially, I thought of freelancing remotely and working from home, that would be an improvement. By then I was already thinking about Udemy as an option, to see if it would be a good fit for me.

NEW CAREER: Online Course Instructor

I was a corporate developer, I had the constant feeling that I was always running late and that I would end each day with the frustrating feeling that I didn’t manage to do anything that I set out to do, due to all the constant interruptions.

I had basically been unemployed for 4 months with no revenue, without even telling my family back home about it.

ALL OVER THE PLACE:

I promoted my course website on my blog via a top menu link and some blog posts and linked to my Udemy course on my website and some other blog posts.

So I was all over the place, sending my audience randomly to two different places, Udemy, and my website. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

SUBSCRIPTION vs PURCHASE:

On my website, I was running a subscription-based model with access to all my available material, but you could also purchase each course separately for $50 to $80 or so.

You get a no-brainer monthly subscription price of $9.99, a yearly subscription of $99 which means a 17% discount compared to the monthly price, and a $399 lifetime anchor price, plus the option for a team plan.

My goal was to bring as many people as possible to the monthly subscription, using the Lifetime price and the prices for individual courses as a comparison price, to make the monthly subscription look like even more of a no-brainer next to those higher prices.

UPCOMING...

I didn’t have a lot of courses available, only 4 mini-courses or so. But I had created the thumbnails and titles for a list of over 10 upcoming courses on the topic, so that helped to sell the subscription because people knew what they were getting in the future.

FOCUS on SALES:

I kept making courses while keeping a close eye on my sales, to try to understand what I should do next.

Promoting Online Courses On YouTube:

Besides the blog, I had also created a YouTube channel that did generate a small amount of traffic, but I simply took my videos from parts of my course and repurposed them there.

The channel never took off like the blog did (it has 30k subs today), mostly because the videos aren’t done in the typical YouTube format.

The viewer gets to see a sample video which is in the middle of a full course, while I’m building an application, so it’s kind of like tuning into a TV show midway through it, a lot of context is missing.

I still publish videos this way though, because I do get a small number of views, and feedback, and also the videos will rank in Google search results often if there aren’t any blog posts available for Google to rank.

So this strategy requires minimum work and it helps with SEO. Mostly my assistant takes care of my channel for me, including thumbnails, end screens, etc. so I think this strategy was worth it.

It helped me rank in popular search terms for years, with minimum work involved just by repurposing my course videos.

NEW COURSE VERSIONS:

I kept working on my online courses through the years, re-recording new versions when the technology evolved and made previous courses obsolete, and I recorded some new courses on related topics.

STARTED NEW Parallel BUSINESS:

I also started developing a new parallel business, which is my online course hosting platform White-Label Online Course Platform.

I am in no way associated with Vasco so these were my notes and important statements taken from his articles for the purpose of knowing what’s important and make it a key points for my Udemy journey.