New milestone unlocked. I did a $20,000 monthly milstone post a few months ago and decided to do one for each notch from here.
My first $30,000+ month on Udemy. The January sale seemed more effective than the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales.
Other than this, there is not one thing I did that magically make my numbers steadily increase each month.
- I am still on track to release one new 10+ hour course every 6-8 weeks.
- Continuing to grow my Facebook student groups (only paid students can join, this keeps the content and post quality up) and have 10,000+ in three groups.
- Youtube and Instagram are growing, but very slowly and do NOT contribute a ton to my revenue share.
- I have totally overhauled my flagship money making course to be updated to the newest software. This and many other updates have helped this course have higher ratings and sales.
- The Udemy Promotional algorithm that chooses which course gets paid ads by udemy, selects "best sellers" tagged courses. I have noticed a big increase in ad revenue sales in that course. It took 2 years for my flagship course to get the best seller tag. Not something that came overnight.
- Building Facebook communities have been a huge help in having bigger course launches
- I have stopped doing shorter courses on Udemy and now try to have at least 8 hours or more of content for each new course
- I have not offered any free courses for over a year
- I have created several intermediate courses to compliment my flagship best selling course to naturally make more cross sells.
- I do one big promo each month and offer my students all my courses for $9.99
- I do a live stream and review students work in a live video (sometimes over 50 student projects in total), I ask for reviews right after this video so they are at peak satisfaction with the course and bonus content I provide. I can also quickly review 50 students work instead of having to get back to them one at a time.
- I have improved my course intros dramatically. I have made them longer (4-5 min instead of 2-3 min) to make sure the right students enrolls in the course.
- I have added new downloadable resources to ensure they have something other than just videos to engage with. This has been HUGE!
- I would rather come out with one 12 hour masterclass than try to do 3, 4 hour mini classes. Longer more broad topic classes just tend to make more.
My total breakdown of earnings this month JAN 2020 (last 4 days of the month are projected average daily earnings and added to the total)
Udemy: $33,500
I do everything myself, so no need to pay any contractors or employees I get to keep it all. I do not do any paid advertising myself.
Just giving people a breakdown because I know when I first started I LOVED to see some of the top earners break down and give lots of details of their earnings. It is like getting to peer behind the curtain.
Not doing this to FLEX, doing it to give you a raw breakdown of some things I do to slowly increase my earnings AND showing you do not HAVE to have your own platform, do tons of paid ads, have a great social media following.
You can to still do well as an online instructor. Just make tons of high-quality content and be consistent with putting out that content and engaging with your students in positive ways.
Content is king, if you work on anything this year, continue to up the bar on your video/audio/editing/content quality.