Udemy

It's about quality, careful topic selection, and a bit of being in the right place at the right time - not quantity of courses or how much you believe in it. I make about $30-$45K per month from Udemy from about 10 courses, so it's achievable. But the median instructor makes far less. Your goal is possible, but it requires more strategy than "number of courses x median sales price."   Use the marketplace insights tool to identify topics that you are both qualified to teach and have high demand and no existing quality offerings. Investing in a single, comprehensive course in a topic like that will get you closer to your goal than 100 courses in some oversaturated topic with entrenched top-sellers.   Even if you identify such a topic, there is no guarantee for success. There is a dose of luck involved, as well as your own skills as a presenter and as a teacher.   Further complicating matters is that it can take months for a new course to take off, especially your first few courses. As you build up more of an audience, it becomes easier to launch new courses because you have more people to market them to via Udemy promotional announcements. But at first, it's a game that requires perseverance and patience.   Instead of committing to a $50,000 goal and potentially setting yourself up for disappointment, I suggest a different approach. Do your best to identify topics with high demand and low quality offerings that you can teach. Study the existing top selling courses in those topics. Do they have an insurmountable lead on number of reviews, or is it possible to overtake them? If the latter, you have a decent shot of overtaking it and achieving something closer to the top amount per month for that topic instead of the median - if you put in the time to create a course that is substantially more comprehensive and engaging than the ones that currently exist. Bonus points if you choose a topic that is relevant to businesses, as inclusion in Udemy Business can be a big deal for further boosting your revenue and audience.   I think such a course will take more than one month to create, especially if you're not doing it full time. But budget the time to create it, and don't give up on the first one - at least launch two, so you can do some cross-promotion between them. Then, a few months after your second course has launched, assess where you are. By that point you should have a good indication as to whether $50K/ year on Udemy is attainable for you, and you can set a realistic goal. If not, that's OK - try something else. For me, Udemy was one of many different ventures I tried for self-employment, and it happened to be the one that stuck. For you, it might be something else. You don't know until you try.   ... View more

According to https://support.udemy.com/hc/en-us/articles/229232367-Audio-Standards-and-Choosing-a-Microphone "text to speech software is not allowed." ... View more

Does that 1-2% figure include UFB revenue? If you factor out UFB (where refunds don't happen) what are you seeing? For me it's more like 5% if I exclude UFB, but it's spread out pretty evenly among my courses, so I don't think it's indicative of some specific course issue(s).    That's pretty substantial and there's probably still a lot of money on the table for Udemy to curb refund abuse further. ... View more

You certainly can continue to add additional content to your course over time. That's encouraged.   I wouldn't release a course that cannot yet stand on its own, however. If students finish the content you currently have and feel like it isn't finished, that won't work to your advantage - you'll just get bad reviews and that can be hard to recover from.   But, if what you have is a competitive, complete course on some aspect of drawing, it's OK to release it in its current state and add on to it over time.   You might also consider breaking up your content into multiple courses if you are planning to add entirely new topics to it. You are competing against about 400 existing drawing courses on Udemy, so it might be a better idea to go after more specific topics that have less competition. ... View more

I think I only had a couple of courses when I started using a TA to help with Q&A, but one of them was a top-seller and was generating enough questions every day to eat up at least an hour of my time. I was probably at around 50K students at that point if I had to guess. An hour a day doesn't sound bad, but it's weekends, holidays, and vacations too - so at that level it starts to wear on you and you need to enlist some help. Plus my courses are technical, so answers usually aren't easy.   I don't think it's really a function of how many courses and students you have; it's a function of how much time you are spending every day supporting those courses and whether it is starting to cut into your productivity in creating new content, or worse still if it is starting to become frustrating. Creating courses should be enjoyable, and if it's not - it's time to outsource what's preventing that. ... View more

- Spend some time optimizing your course landing page. Are you offering a solution to your students' problems? Is your course image and promo video the best they can be? Did you choose your best lectures as "free preview?" Do you have the right keywords in place in your title and description?   - Can you drive more reviews to your course within Udemy's policies? Reviews matter (a lot)   - But the best way to drive more traffic and sales is simply to make more courses, in topics that have high demand and low competition that you are confident in presenting. Use the Marketplace Insights tool to research that. ... View more

Right.  ... View more

Well, if you play your cards right that $3 per course adds up. It's probably not worth doing a co-instructor relationship on a topic that is only projected to earn $100/month or something (consult the Marketplace Insights tool in your instructor dashboard for that data.) But for larger opportunities, it can be an effective way to build a large, comprehensive course that would be too daunting to take on yourself.   The most important advice is to only work with someone you know and trust. There are unscrupulous people out there who are out to scam you and will take all of your course earnings while doing nothing in return, and it's entirely your responsibility to prevent that. Even I have had problems with co-instructors who just fell off the face of the Earth and stopped supporting their part of the course. These days I only partner with other top instructors that I know or with corporate sponsors.   I try to aim for arrangements where the work is split 50/50 and the revenue is also split 50/50. In any case, the revenue split should be commensurate with the work each instructor puts in. Watch out for people who want to take an outsized percentage just to expose you to their audience.   Get an agreement in writing, and make sure that agreement spells out who will do what, by when, who will support Q&A, and who is liable if someone uses IP they don't own in the course materials (that's also an issue I've had to deal with.) But if you're working with someone you trust and have a solid agreement in place to produce a course with high earning potential, partnering with a co-instructor is a great way to accelerate the course creation process. For hot, emerging topics, it's an especially good way to be first to market. ... View more

Thanks! Before "quitting your day job," it's responsible to:   - Have at least 3 months worth of savings, or however long you think it would take to get a new full time job again should the need arise   - Understand any extra expenses you will have being self-employed. In the US, you will have to pay for your own health insurance, retirement plan, "self employment taxes," and more - and health insurance itself can be very expensive when you are purchasing as an individual (I pay over $1800/month for a family of 3, with a $15,000 deductible). In most other countries it is much easier to strike out on your own. Then there are business-related expenses such as accountants, lawyers, web hosting, etc. you must account for.   - Prove that the income you are receiving from Udemy is enough to pay the bills. There's no reason not to build up your Udemy income on the side (unless your employment agreement prohibits it) and only move to full time once you've seen it bringing in the income you need for at least a few months. ... View more

I have two TA's. The first one I found by looking for students who had completed most of my courses, and were already active in Q&A. I got lucky, and my #1 choice for the job was willing to do it - and is still my primary TA to this day.   The other one I found on Upwork. I managed to find someone familiar with my courses already there, and he's also worked out great. I've had more of a problem with turnover from people hired on Upwork though; I had to go through about 3 other TA's on Upwork before finding him. ... View more

The biggest challenge with your first course is driving enough reviews to it. Without a few reviews, Udemy won't surface it much to students.   If you have any sort of existing following outside of Udemy, you'll have to be a bit of a pest and try to get them to enroll in your course. You're not allowed to ask them for a positive review, but you can ask them for a review.   Once you have those first few reviews, it's more about your choice of topic and how wide the appeal is for it. If you haven't already, use the Marketplace Insights tool in your instructor dashboard to set the right expectations for the organic traffic your course might generate.   Building a second course can also be a good way to grow traffic to your first course, as you can market your first course to students of your second and vice-versa, using Udemy promotional announcements.   Best of luck with your first course! I wish you the best of success. ... View more

Absolutely! A great thing about Udemy is the freedom they give instructors to be creative in how they present their material.   About the only things you can't do is use text-to-voice software, or try to sell students stuff outside of your final "bonus lecture." The full set of rules, guidelines, and recommendations are at https://support.udemy.com/hc/en-us/sections/360001167193-Course-Material-Basics ... View more

The best thing you can do to promote your first course is to create a second course. Cross-promotion between students of multiple courses is the best way to drive sales of a new course (using Udemy's promotional announcements.)   I just launched a new course myself. We got a handful of enrollments through our mailing list, and maybe one or two through social media (mostly LinkedIn, where I have the most followers.) But a single promotional announcement sent to the students of my other courses through Udemy resulted in over 700 enrollments.   So I'd focus on building a more diverse audience through multiple courses, and cross-promoting your courses to them. It requires persistence and there's no guarantee of success, but I think that is still the most promising strategy.   For something quicker, it's worth the effort to put up a YouTube channel and put a link to your course in the descriptions of the videos there. It won't result in a flood of sales, but a steady trickle over time adds up.   Mind you I have tens of thousands of followers on every platform and tens of thousands of people on my mailing list, and even so it's hard to get people to do anything through those channels. ... View more

My marketing strategy is to let Udemy do its marketing. I do all the standard things, like having a YouTube channel, a mailing list, and a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But it's all a drop in the bucket compared to the traffic that Udemy drives on our behalf. That's why we're giving them a cut of our revenue, after all.   I take full advantage of Udemy promotional announcements as well. Of all the things I do, that's the most effective by far. ... View more

Excellent! Perseverance usually pays off; I'm glad Udemy could change your life too! ... View more

1) I have 4 mouths to feed and am very risk-averse in general. When I left Amazon, I already had a small software business of my own on the side as well as several months' worth of savings and enough cash to move with. I had to leave Amazon for family reasons, but if I didn't have that Plan B ready to go, I would have sought another full time job instead of trying self-employment. I'm glad it worked out the way it did, though.   2) The first thing to delegate is Q&A. By recruiting one or more TA's it will free up a lot of time for you to create new courses, and update the ones you have. Partnering with co-instructors also accelerates things, but of course at the cost of sharing revenue. I've also outsourced my social media management, mailing list management, and the sending of promotional announcements to an assistant. Everything else I still do myself, including editing videos. ... View more

Heck no, the island doesn't sound that bad really! ... View more

That even if you think your job is the most important thing in the world, nobody else does. There's more to life. In the context of Udemy - always try to do better. Everyone else is, and you gotta keep up. ... View more

Oh, well a TARDIS can also do time travel, so that's certainly more fun! Clearly Elon already has one. ... View more

Ask me anything folks! I'm always happy to help other instructors. ... View more

You might find that doing a couple of takes helps to reduce the filler words. A lot of it's just about feeling and sounding confident in what you're presenting, and doing a dry run or two can help with that.   And a little trick about editing - I keep a little dog training clicker in my hand while recording. If I mess up, I click it into the microphone. It makes it a lot easier to find the spots where I messed up while editing later on and speeds up the process quite a bit. So if you say something that doesn't come out right, just click, and say it again. Sometimes I'll find myself repeating a sentence 3 or 4 times before I get it right, but the student never knows because I quickly edited all that out. ... View more

Have you tried listening through headphones or earbuds? That might be a better representation of what a typical student listening on their phone might hear. More sensitive mics can pick up more mouth noise and breaths, to the point where it is distracting. If that's the case, try to avoid talking directly into the mic; angle it toward you but not such that you're breathing right into it. A little more distance to the mic can help too, as can a wind screen. ... View more

What's being discussed is a third-party website that has no affiliation with Udemy itself; it was always a paid service. Udemy's own teaching center remains free. ... View more

How do they know? Udemy doesn't publish instructor revenue data. I would believe 300K / month in gross sales, but not net to the instructor. ... View more

Personally I'd rather stick with the richer feature set of my deskdtop video editing software and just re-upload edited videos.  I think this is an important feature on YouTube because re-uploading a video causes you to lose all the views and ratings on that video, which are really important. But re-uploading a video within a course does not reset the metrics on the course, so there's no pressing reason to be able to edit an existing video within Udemy as far as I can see.   If your upload speeds are really slow, or you don't have decent video editing software, I could see how that would be useful. I guess my question for you is why would you want to edit videos online instead of offline? It would be a ton of work for Udemy to develop and maintain a feature like that; there are other things I'd rather have them focus on. ... View more

What's even more interesting is that "In Search of Excellence" isn't one of the books they made us read as managers at Amazon. Maybe Jeff didn't want us to know where he lifted that from! ... View more