After six month from publishing my first course on Udemy, I only made 1000$.
While this is certainly a good milestone per se, and I know I won't be making millions from publishing courses like other senior Udemy instructors that already got the benefits of being first movers and already publishing course after course and built a personal brand.
I just wanted to share my humble experience on this platform and maybe shed some light to future aspiring course publishers:
- You need to publish A LOT of courses to gain traction, don't expect that to happen tho, proceed at your own time risk.
- Udemy kills your income with discounts that are tuned geographically, for example buyers from India will purchase your course at 0.5$ to 2$ while buyers from european countries might buy it at 4-5$
- Udemy courses are a maintenance headache, you need to keep promoting your courses, updating them, answering questions etc...
- Udemy's "buy once, own it for life" business model is flawed - imo. This is a huge down side for me, courses on udemy are not "subscription" based, current students don't pay for updates and don't support your ongoing maintenance plan. App developers charge subscriptions to update their apps why can't course be like that ? There's too much value provided to students at extremly low prices, apparently this profits Udemy but not much instructors-unless they bulk upload courses and content ?
- Don't publish course to make money 🙂 Publish courses maybe to help students, build a brand or any other goal, just don't think about money and don't expect it either. You won't be motivated making content if you think much about revenue.
- Competition: There's so much competition on high traffic courses (courses that users search for). Competition is fierce AF ! So If you search for some key words and you found that one or more courses are ranking top with tags like "best seller" "highest rated", I don't think It's a good idea to waste time making that course, unless you have your own audience for that and 100% sure about your plan.
- Most important lesson in my opinion is : Udemy is a long term game. Udemy is one of those things similar to blogs, you spend years building blog pages, eveeeeeeeeennnnntttttuaaallyyyyyyyy those pages will rack up traffic and provide decent ad revenue.
Just my 0.2$
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