BEFORE YOU READ: DO NOT COPY OTHER COURSES.
- Rather, look at competitor / similar courses as inspiration and always think of a differentiator you want to build in your course. Copying and Pasting will not get you anywhere on Udemy. As Michael mentioned, genuinely building trust is the ONLY way.
- MY GOAL with this post is to show you how you can automate some of the "mechanical" work with AI, further exploring tools i used to go from 4 weeks to a week.
- I have no Intention to Disparage any instructor or their methods - please take any "learning" from this if you possibly can (as instructors)
- You cannot succeed until you really know what you're teaching (i've spent years in AI and Product Management) to being able to create courses faster. There is no short cut, but if this post can help you - i'd be glad.
I started creating courses in January, 2023. I had no experience prior to this creating online courses. Over the last 9 months, this has been a stable $2k / month for me and I want talk about my story and how I did it. Firstly, Revenue screenshot: — October revenue is still unaccounted for — but it’s going to be 3k based on enrolments and previous trends.
My courses & Time taken
My first course — It was a disaster. Recorded with a laptop microphone, the 2 hour course was on a trending AI Topic, died in 2 months. Took me 3 weeks to build it.
My second course — Master Generative AI (Extension of previous course but taught everything in AI), took me 4 weeks to build, makes me the most amount of money, and has a lot of students
My Third course — Prompt Engineering — took me 2 weeks to build, a lot of students, but dying after 3 months
My Fourth course — AI & SEO (recently launched) — picking up slowly, took me 2 weeks to build
My Fifth and 6th courses are on AI Product Management & Digital Marketing and were built a week, primarily because i leveraged and learned a lot from my previous courses
Notice how i went from 3 weeks to 4 days for launching courses.
Firstly, i’m a hard believer of launching MVP and iterating over time. I don’t spend all my energy building perfect courses, I build a bare bone MVP and keep adding content.
How do you get to 1 course a week, provided you decide to do this full time?
A course has 6 stages of creation:
- Ideation — what you want to build, mostly go with your passion and the knowledge you have curve is shorter — 10%
- Research — What kind of courses exist, which ones are top rated and why — 20%
- Creation — Recording content and creating videos / assignments / notes / cover images / texts — 35%
- Editing Content — 30%
- Initial launch — 5%
(% indicates how long each step took me initially)
Break-down of each of these steps:
- Ideation — you figure out what kind of course you want to build, this one is relatively easy but super important. You need to choose a niche that is less competitive (AI SEO is one such niche) but has decent audience for making money. It could be a electric guitar, setting up a grocery shop, so on. As long as it’s not competitive, do it
- Research — Once you figure what you want to build, start looking at a couple of places for inspiration and understand whether the market exists for this type of content. This could be just looking at the course marketplace to see other courses exist, Reddit posts, blogs, Groups and so on, as long as there are people looking for it, you bet you can make money
- Creation — this is what takes a lot of my time. I’m going to show you how i significantly reduced my time in here.
- Curriculum — research other courses / starting from scratch is not ideal because other courses already have invested time to refine the curriculum so makes sense to use that as a starting point
- How to automate: Use the best rated course and use ChatGPT to generate a similar course structure, add notes on additional lectures example — i teach about “BLUE” electric guitars, it takes almost no time to get to starting point
- Script + Slides creation — Once you have curriculum, putting together script can be a nightmare, but this is essential. instead of building an entire script, put down bullet notes.
- Use ChatGPT to take each chapter and then create bullet notes to talk about — copy these notes in a doc to refer later
- Leverage these bullets to create slides on Canva — takes 1 min per slide — so 40 minutes overall for a 40 Page PPT
- Cover Image / Description — All of this optimized content can created using ChatGPT — invest very little time here, but ensure you have keywords optimised in the course
- Course recording — This it the major heavy-lifting but you will have to do this. I use OBS to record content, it’s free and open source and gets the job done, initial learning curve is 15 minutes
THIS is by far my most time taking part, initially, it was the editing but i automated it, let me show you how.
- Editing — I’m proud to have automated this bit. But let me talk about the initial struggle first:
- Basic Edits: Initially I used Primere Pro to edit my videos. This step took a lot of time, even more than creating that video, because in order to make course video optimised, I would trim silent parts, which would be a night mare.
- Now I’m leveraging AI tools like Snapy to auto edit using their video silence remover feature. It’s a boon.
- It may come as a surprise but I spend no time editing my video. It’s all ready within a few minutes. The only effort is uploading it.
- Initial Launch — Takes me literally an 30 mins to launch my course. I publish it on Marketplaces like Udemy, they take care of all the marketing, while I keep creating courses. Most of the revenue is market place based, you get 100% of the revenue coming from your own marketing links. They take a cut for their marketing based revenue.
I don’t know who will benefit from this. But I hope I can help someone who is looking to productise their knowledge. All the best!
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