Hello fellow Instructors. For inspiration, I thought it might be fun to share student numbers. Plus any tips you might have on growing your student base?
Personally, I have been working very hard since christmas to hit my goal of 15,000 by end of april 2019. I have been active in many facebook groups, not advertising, but helping, offering advice and positioning myself as knowledgable in my niche. I have seen a lot of growth since I started this push (approx 300!). Many have come from organic growth, but quite a few have followed my social profiles back to udemy and ended up buying one or more courses.
What have you been doing to promote yourself and your courses? Share below.
I agree with Jason in that your best marketing is a good product. I get a lot of word of mouth enrollments. Some things I've noticed that help:
1. Building courses that are adjacent to each other in topic. It's much easier to build user affinity if you have several courses that all meet their needs (if they like your first course, then they would also like x.y,z courses you offer)
2. Making sure whenever you pick a topic, you know you can win the category. There's no point really in making the second best course on x topic
It's also worth thinking about what is unique about your teaching style. Is there something you do differently than other instructors? Thinking outside of the box can make the experience more memorable and share-worthy
On my way to 20,000! Working on creating more shareable content to speed things up. I have a step by step eye illustration that went crazy on Pinterest. It got over 80,000 repins and hundreds of students created their own version of the ART! I noticed that I get a lot of traffic from students sharing their completed art and saying that my course content helped them as well. Got to love free advertising! 🙂
Mostly see new students from my Facebook group, but it really is the product that has to sell you.
This week I saw a few reddit posts about how amaziballs my courses were and they helped the person pass their certification, that advertising is worth so much, that is how you grow fast.
I'm really killing it. LOL
It's a start and getting better every day. Most of these are freebies. My course has been up for about 2 months.
I started in 2013 and left Udemy to self-host shortly after as I was teaching "live" and the feature was never made to fruition (still hope of mine to see it working!) Left for 4 years due to life, work, moves, and 2 kids and now back so the numbers are mostly from the last year.
I do a lot of social media interaction, podcasts, word of mouth and referrals from Psychiatrists. I (almost) never turn down another respected person in my field wanting to chat, podcast, write an article, etc. for both selfish and selfless reasons.
Overall I think especially for my field, mental health being genuine and authentic is my best sales tool.
Everything has a beginning and I'm still crawling around you rs...
Success to all!
-Rayan Maia
Today - I spotted 32,000 student friends! - I have two FB groups, a YT chanel and I am a very lazy blogger. Occasionally I tweet - my YT vids were automated to Twitter but they dont allow that anymore. Plus I send our regualr educational annoucements and one promo per month. I try not to be too active in the FB groups as I dont want to spread myself too thin! Luckily I have a great admin and she loves it. I dont think there is one measure to increase - I think it all works together in a relationship that looks after and feeds from each other. I have an ambitious desire to double my student numbers this year.
My best marketing is the amazing reveiws that students give me!
