How to make a million dollar Udemy course from someone who just did it

How to make a million dollar Udemy course from someone who just did it

New Udemy milestone to report on. This will be my first individual class that has crossed the one million dollar revenue mark. I wanted to take some time to write a post to break down what it took to get that course to that mark.

1.) It took 221,268 students which makes it $4.5 dollar earnings per student on average

2.) 4.66 Rating with a peak rating of 4.7

3.) 641,040 landing page visitors in the last 12 months

4.) Only has a 5.54% conversion rate. Which tells me high landing page visitors and low conversion rate is still profitable.

5.) 53 million minutes taught since October 2020

6.) The course is 5 years old

Things I did:

1.) The original course was only 9 hours long. The course now rests at 30 hours, a 3x increase in course size over the last few years. All original content was updated over the course of 4 years as well. UPDATING your course yearly will help you maintain higher sales for much longer and perhaps half a decade and longer. Think about the longevity of your courses not just creating new ones. It took 5 years for this course to cross the one million mark. I plan on this course making at least a half million more before it is retired.

2.) The topic is an entry level course and a broad popular topic that is in demand. Niche courses and advanced courses are some of my lower selling (but still important) course offerings.

3.) Conversion rate always seemed to average around 5% which seems really low. That did not seem to matter when the landing page visitors were so high from organic and Paid marketing on the Udemy side. The course rated and sold well at the start of its life in which Udemy started to run more paid ads toward my course and kept a virtuous cycle of marketing going. This goes to the next thing…

4.) I had a really compelling intro video that can work well in paid/organic marketing. I felt like my intro (which I need to update yet again btw) did well at captivating the audience as other intros I watched for similar courses did not.

5.) My review numbers on average have always remained high. I have some one star reviews but the 5 star reviews won over time. Keeping my courses updated was one of the reasons I believe my reviews stayed high. The longer I would go between course updates is when I would notice a small drop in my course rating and a drift higher when I added new updates.

6.) I offer a community for my students. I have an active Facebook group which allows community and engagement with student projects and encourages students to leave reviews. Those reviews will most likely be higher because of their involvement in higher level community activities like student challenges. 62,000 students currently participate in the private student only Facebook group.

7.) Everything is custom made by me. I wrote all scripts and recorded and edited all videos to make sure the course experience was smooth and tailored to my average student. Downloadable resources are plenty, all created to support my video content and to allow the student to enjoy the course instead of having to take notes. Creating a “digital pdf book” to go along with your course is ideal. I have never hired anyone to assist in the creation or marketing of my courses.

Glad to share some tips and happy to share this milestone. I wanted to be as transparent as possible to share some stats and can share additional information.