I Have A Plan For Choosing A Topic : Want To Know If Its Reasonable

KhojBadami

Hi! My first post here. I have been lurking around for some time now. I want to use this post to summarise what I have understood. Please tell me if I am right.

So, my goal with Udemy is to create the best course on the topic and hopefully let Udemy do the marketing.

Now in order to do this, if I select a topic that already has 100 courses on it, I will get little or no sales. This is because Udemy will order the courses in the search results based on which courses have the best ratio of Views To Sales. And that makes perfect sense from the perspective of Udemy. They don't want to put non-converting courses at the top of the search.

So, this means that I need to choose a course topic that people would care about. And also, can show up somewhere in the search results soon after publishing. In other words, I need to find a "niche".

Let's assume I do find a "niche". I expect the following will happen (if the content is good)
- Publish the course.
- Starts showing up in the search results for the target keyword (hopefully in the top 10)

- Hopefully, people are searching using that keyword.

- Some people choose to see it and buy it.
- It gets some reviews & grows from there.
- Eventually, if it's good (and the ratio of views to sales is good), it will come to the top spots and then will dominate that small little niche.

- Do this cycle all over again and hopefully, with enough courses I would make some money.

My Question:

Is the above realistic? Or am I missing big pieces of the puzzle?

Abbie

Hi @KhojBadami
, you’ve got the right idea, overall! Publishing a course requires thinking like an entrepreneur. You want to pick an area that has enough demand (lots of students trying to learn), and where you can deliver competitive supply (a course that meets the need better than the other available options).

We encourage you to use both the Marketplace Insights tool as well as other offline demand indicators like Google Trends and StackOverflow trends to understand what the supply and demand for your topic look like on and off the Udemy platform.

Realistically, you will need to do some marketing of your own to get your course to look appealing to students who have no familiarity with you. As a consumer, you would probably hesitant to buy an item from an unknown seller without seeing reviews, or at least knowing someone else had tried it. If your course is truly the only one that meets a specific need, then it could get sales even with no social proof (ratings/review/enrollments). But the tradeoff is that the more specific the need, the smaller the audience probably is -- so you might more easily get a few sales, but your total potential sales will be much lower.

At the end of the day, Udemy is a marketplace trying to serve each student what they're most likely to need. So your job is to convince the marketplace that you're the thing some number of students need most. You want to target an audience that's big enough to have the sales potential you want, but specific enough that your course can be the best option in that space (and be seen as the best option with social proof.

Hope this helps!