Newbie
I just submitted my 1st course. I offered it for free in hopes to attract new people. I plan to have several courses out ASAP. Any helpful tips for me being the "Udemy Newbie" that I am? :-)
Comments
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Welcome to the group.
Now, when you convert that free course to paid, keep track of that fact because if you go back and forth again you lose your right to send promotional announcements to your course. For this reason, instructors quite often release their courses as paid while offering free coupons to their courses and don't ever go free. Since you're course is already free, it will be listed by Udemy in search results separate from paid courses so you won't show up amongst the paid courses. Instead, you could have advertised afree coupon on a site named BestBlackHatForum and gotten hundreds to thousands of free students within days.
Lesson learned: Don't make your courses free; instead, offer free coupons. Get lots of free students from BBHF.
Next, to use promotional announcements to promote courses back and forth you need at least two courses. You only have a single course, so you need your second, third... courses as soon as you can produce them.
Realizing this response is kind of a downer, I wanted to congratulate you on your first course. I hope it does well and that you push forward to find your way through the jungle that is Udemy course marketing ;-).
---Brian
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Well, that doesn't make me too happy. lol. I was reading many comments from others, and I read in a few places that they said to offer my first class for free to gain more students. Too bad. But yes, lesson learned.
I'm hoping to have my next course up and ready to go in the next week and a half. Thanks so much for your feed back.
I do have a question, how do I know how much to offer a course for?
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Yeah, I'm sorry to be the harbinger of bad news, but instructors were probably discussing releasing their courses for free via coupons. If not, we need to find the source of the information you found a expunge it! All the discussions I'm involved in espouse skipping free courses and using free coupons instead.
This is my $0.02 on course pricing:
Price your courses at $199.99. You will never sell your course at $199.99. Instead, most of the time you'll sell your course on Udemy sell for $10.99-$12.99. When pricing coupons, make them $9.99, the least you can price a coupon code. You will still get approximately $9.70 per sale (97% of the sale for instructor coupon sales).
If you price your course at $199.99 you will be the greatest marked down course when it ultimately sells for $9.99-$12.99. I make about $5.00 per sale on average across Udemy sales and my promotions.
In summary:
Organic Sale: Udemy 50%, You 50%
Udemy Ad Sale: Udemy 75%, You 25%
Instructor Pomotional Sale: Udemy 3%, You 97%
Affiliate Sale: Udemy 50%, You 25%, Affiliate 25%
The primary way to advertise your promotional coupons is via Udemy promotional announcements, that's why you don't want to risk losing them.
Hope this helps. Keep asking questions if you still have questions.
---Brian
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Wow, lots of great info. More than I've read anywhere else so far. So thank you. Much of this is a little confusing since I'm just getting started. I'm not new to teaching, just new to teaching on udemy. It has ALOT that I need to get organized with.
So when I get my next course out and ready to go (hopefully within 2 weeks), I think I'll offer it for the $199.99? Which will ultimately sell for $9.99-$12.99?! And of course I will plan to do the Instructional promotional sale too. I'm assuming this is where I can sell my course via coupons to my own following?
Since I offered my last course for free, I didn't have to go through the whole pricing page. I'm hoping when I do, that it will be more clear. I've read how other instructors accidentally let Udemy promote their courses, and they didn't opt in for the coupons so they missed out on that extra money when their own following purchased the course. I certainly don't want to do that.
Again, thank you for your responses! Much appreciated!
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Carrie,
Let me add just one or two thoughts. Don't rush! Take your time and develop high quality comprehensive courses. If your first few courses are not of the highest quality you will earn poor ratings that will be difficult to overcome. No one is getting rich quickly on Udemy. We are building a solid income over time, by developing courses that are as good or better than the competition.
I hope you have viewed your competitor's courses and figured out how to develop a course that provides more value and that is of higher quality. That takes time, but it is the only way to succeed. It takes time to develop high quality content, it takes time to develop high quality videos, and it takes time to develop your own on camera presence. Don't even think about just putting up slides with a voice over. Not in your topic area!
Brian is right about free coupons versus free courses. In either case, you get a lot of enrollments who will never go through your course. Use free coupons sparingly. Those of us who have been around for a while know that the number of students your course has means little or nothing. The number of reviews is much more meaningful X the ratings with comments. The normal ratio of reviews to actual sales is somewhere between 4X to 8X. If someone has 10k enrollments and they only have 50 reviews, we know that they can't have more than 500 actual sales. Udemy's algorythms for product placement recognize this. You can't fool the algorythms.
One thing I do not agree with Brian on, is the pricing. The maximum pricing makes sense if your course is more than ten hours long. Keep in mind that there are best selling courses that are forty hours of high quality content. If you course is only one hour, it looks ridiculous to put a high price on it.
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Thank you for all the feed back. It's very helpful!
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I guess @LawrenceMMiller
and I are destined to disaggree. But then that's healthy if you can interpret each argument and turn it into your personal promotion strategy.I recorded my first 10 Udemy courses in 10 weeks. I didn't take my time. They weren't the best courses that I was destined to produce, but they certainly started to make me money fast. And the more I produced the more I learned. Fast! I would counter that taking your time is one of the worst things you could do. Produce as many courses as you can as fast as you can to dominate each nitch you're after.
@LawrenceMMiller
and I agree that you need to plan your course creation based on your niche competitors. Course length and quantity will be driven by what you need to do to compete in your niche.As far as free courses, student enrollment numbers matter a lot! Students are much more likely to enroll in a course that has 1,000 students than one that has 2 or 3. Additionally, contrary to what other instructors might say, I've gotten good reviews from appreciative students that have enrolled in my course for free. If I were you, I would advertise a free coupon on BestBlackHatForum to get 1,000 students in a few days and hope that those enrollments turn into positive reviews. If not, review your student completion records for students who have completed your course but not left a review and send them a Udemy message asking for an honest review. I think you'll find that your course does much better with 1,000 students and some reviews.
I thought that pricing would be the simplest issue: be the greatest marketed down course in your niche by initially being the most expensive. Length of your course is another issue that shouldn't be confused with this one. Again, be the greatest marketed down course in your niche: the simplest way to do this is price your course at $199.99.
Though it adds to the confusion, having such a debate does show you multiple options to choose from in building your own course marketing strategy.
Hope this helps,
---Brian
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Well, thank you so much! I really have a lot to figure out. Thank you so much for your time.
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I tend to agree with @LawrenceMMiller
's points. High quality courses vs rushed, and it will take time to get reviews. Tons of free students who do nothing doesn't help the algorithm, which looks at how much content was "digested" by your students. It's better to have fewer active students, than lots of free ones who do nothing. AND it's better to have students who are actually interested in the topic so they will buy your new courses.Here's another tip that has helped me launch new courses. It is more time consuming than just creating a few coupons but I think the results are much better... I usually only create a handful of free coupons, and they are all personalized. I usually go on Facebook pages and let people know I have a new course and that I'm looking for people to provide me feedback. I then private message them a personalized coupon and ask them to give me feedback in return. I do this with 20-30 people in total. Then I follow up each week to see how their training is going. This does several things: it keeps them involved in the course, it shows them I care about their progress, and it provides me feedback from people who actually want to take the course. In the long run, these people became my most vocal supporters and helped me spread the word about my course. In some cases, they also left positive reviews.
Best of luck to you!
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And I guess I disagree with @GregReverdiau
as well.First, I'm impressed that @GregReverdiau
seems to know the Udemy search result algorithm. Please publish it as soon as possible.In my own experience the Udemy search result algorithm changes often and your search results can vary (unless Udemy's experimenting) based on something as slight as how often you update your course.
Alright, so I get a thousand students via BBHF, after I've had some promotional sales for the next course, instead of a handful via FB -- thanks for supporting the point that FB advertising is useless?
Finally, I agree with monitoring your student completion records and sending encouraging messages to you students motivate them to keep going or to leave a review in the end. In fact, I originally posted the concept on the old FB group and have repeated it here many time. I'd just rather try to get my first few reviews from a pool of 1,000 rather than a handful.
---Brian
Finally, have you ever tried giving away thousands of free coupons? Then how can you be so certain it's not the way to go?
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@
, I usually don't state things unless I have something to back it up, my area of expertise is based on that exact principle... With that said, it has been mentioned numerous times by Udemy staff that the algorithm favorises courses that have more student involvement. Are there more factors? You bet!Regarding handing out thousands of coupons for free, I have not, for several reasons. The main one is because I listen to people smarter and more successful than myself who have done it and do not recommend it. As far as results? My courses have an almost 1:3 ratio of reviews/student, a 4.76 instructor rating, and about .1% of my students are free students.
As far as FB advertising, I ran some numbers and didn't think it was a good ROI so I would agree that it is not efficient.1 -
We might just need to agree to disagree... after I've had the last word ;-)
1) So you're saying that course enrollment numbers are not considered in the Udemy algorithm that determines search result order. Again, if you indeed have this knowledge, please share the Udemy algoritm with the rest of us ASAP!
2) Please provide details on the Udemy experts that suggested you would be better able to get reviews from a handful of FB free students than you would from 1,000 BBHF free students. I'd like to have a word with them.
---Brian
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You're twisting my words and you are obviously on an agenda, as it often seems you are on this forum. I will end this conversation, have a great day.
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Hello Greg,
I read this article now. I launched a free course and made it paid today.
It is still showing free in udemy search. How much time should it take to go live?
How to make a personalized coupon? Is it that you already have the audience on your FB pages? I don't have an audience right now... what I should do now, after making it a paid course. please share ur ideas.
Regards,
Ekta
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@GregReverdiau
the course has gone live. Please answer only this part...How to make a personalized coupon? Is it that you already have the audience on your FB pages? I don't have an audience right now... what I should do now, after making it a paid course. please share ur ideas.
Thanks,
Ekta
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@Ekta
, I too started with no audience. I posted a message on various Facebook pages that related to my topic and then contact each person individually to give them a personalized coupon. You can do that by going to the course dashboard and then click on coupons on the left menu. I use their first and last name all together to make the coupon, and have a quantity of 1. I hope this helps.2 -
@CarrieFernandez
Congratulations on your course! What I notice in your messages is that you have been reading information from somewhere which has led you to make decisions about your course and in this thread you are getting conflicting comments. My tip for you are first be very careful who's advice you are taking. I have been on the platform a number of years and Udemy has evolved considerably. Back in the day having lots of free students would work and with some topics it may still work. However in your topic area I don't think this is the right way for you to go. Your courses will take a while to establish on the Udemy platform so my first tip is to follow all the official advice that Udemy offer see this link https://teach.udemy.com/ . There really isn't a short cut to success for the vast majority of instructors. And now you have found this official forum you will be able to access the support from Udemy employees, the Udemy Community Champions and of course other instructors. I hope that helps. Good Luck2 -
Post it here https://www.adviky.com/submit-coupon/
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Hey @Pradeep469
, we're very careful to keep the community free of any type of promotions. Please avoid sharing your coupons page as we'll need to remove the messages.1
