December - Ask a Champion Thread!

Hi @Ranjithvasudev
,

First of all, hearty congratulations to put out your second course. This is exciting and inspiring! It also shows your grit and attitude towards making it big in this industry. It is also nice to learn the efforts you are putting to market your courses. That's great.

I see that you are looking to achieve bigger milestones on sales and enrollments. Hence, I will answer your question in two parts:

1. What should a new Udemy instructor focus on?
2. What are the marketing opportunities to promote your existing courses?

Let's begin with the first point: What should a new Udemy Instructor focus on?

I am sharing this first because as you cater to your existing audience --> they will be highly satisfied --> you will get better reviews --> great reviews will help you with better page ranking --> this will also highlight your course to a larger audience. Although you have not mentioned anything other than marketing, I presume you may be following the below practices to manage your existing audience. If you are following these, you are right on track. If you are not following these, you can start with them:

1. Course Reviews: Your course reviews are the most critical component of your course. You may focus a lot on marketing, however, if your reviews drop beyond a threshold, your course won't sell. Hence, you must do everything right to ensure you get reviews that are legitimate and represent your course really well.
2. Respond to Student Queries on the Discussion Board: Students have several queries that they post on the Q&A Discussion board. Please take a few minutes and respond to those queries as promptly as you can. The more you are visible as an involved instructor, the more students love your approach.
3. Student Feedback: You will get all sorts of feedback - positive, critical, neutral. You must take the necessary and appropriate feedback and have it incorporated in your course as early as possible. This is another indication to students that you are open and listening. They love their voices being heard.

As you take care of your existing customers, you can now focus on external channels to bring more students. You are on the right track by being social, however, I would recommend a few approaches that I have tried and worked. See below:

• Posting on FB Groups: Yes, you will get lashed out or banned if your post appears salesy. Analogy: When you like a girl, you do not ask for a date immediately. You first become friends, develop a rapport, and then may be ask for a date, right? What if you ask her out instantly without investing the time in developing a suitable rapport? She would most likely deny, right? Posting on FB Groups is a similar affair. People don't know you. And suddenly you start posting about your courses, nopes, they won't take it. You will first need to start adding your comments to their existing posts. You can add value by sharing your knowledge for free. By regularly posting, people will start knowing you. As they see regular inflow of valuable information from you, some of them will start to follow you. Even the admins will take note. And may be then you ask the admin if it is ok to post something about your course. Again, it needs to be subtle. Also, if you get banned from several groups, facebook algorithm may take a note of it and may ban your personal account. So, please go slow, build momentum, and then share more about your course.
• Create Your Own Facebook Group: Although you just have two courses, it is fine to have your own facebook group with a few students in it. Please have this group strictly for educational purpose only as students don't like being bombarded by course coupons or sales messges (unless someone explicitly asks).
• Business Page on LinkedIn: Create your business page on LinkedIn. It's free and you can start posting content via the business page. You can then repost the content using your personal LinkedIn account. Your connections will get a notification as you repost the messages. Initially, people may NOT notice you or the business page. But again, any social media following needs to be grown organically. This involves building the momentum one step at a time. Review other business pages and replicate the best practices. This works really well.
• Try Quora: Quora is the most underestimated marketing channel. Over the years, Quora has gained extreme popularity. Quora comments also appear on several google searches. Create an account on Quora --> Participate in discussions as a value enabler (do not bombard your courses in your discussions) --> gain some popularity --> then discuss your offerings
• YouTube Channel: This would technically be my recommendation # 1. Because we are in the video creation business, YouTube is our biggest ally and the number # 1 marketing channel. Plus, its free. Create a YouTube channel. Post some of your course videos. Post some great value-enabler videos. Add your course links in the description. People will take notice as you grow your channel.
• Medium/Blogs: Creating a blog is one of the oldest marketing method on the internet. You must try and spend some time creating one blog at a time. The platform, "Medium" has grown exceptionally in the past few years. It has a diverse set of population and is great for written content. My advice will be - either put your blogs on your own website, as a guest on other blogging sites, or on sites such as Medium/Quora. This generally works well as you gain momentum.
• Your Website/Landing Page: Until a few years ago, a seller was required to have a physical shop. Today, a seller requires a website. Although the requirement is NOT immediate, a website will help your customers view who you are, what content you produce, you can add lead magnets to your site to collect email addresses. If you do not want to invest your energy in building a website, you can have your own landing page. A single page using Google forms or other apps is way better at representing who you are. It is NOT urgent, but essential.
• Coupon Code Websites: If you wish to share your course coupon codes with others, one of the best ways is to share your codes on coupon code websites. Search for Udemy coupon codes on Google. Find which websites offer them. Reach out to them using your course coupon codes. They will most likely add it to their website and it works.

This is not an all inclusive list. I have personally worked on these over the years and they have great results.

At the end, my humble recommendation will be to NOT work on practicing each point immediately. The ideal way to approach is to pick up a marketing channel, invest your planned efforts, grow in it organically, gain momentum, start yielding results, then move on to the next channel.

I hope this is helpful. Feel free to share any additional questions