So I launched my first course about 4 weeks ago and up until 2 days ago I managed to get around 50 students by promoting it to my network on LinkedIn. But yesterday I posted another link to the course on Linkedin with a coupon (which made it free) and in the last 24 hours I've had almost 3000 students enroll. It's strange though because I used the same coupon back when I first launched the course and only managed to get around 30 students from that particular coupon code. The most recent LinkedIn post didn't really generate much more viewership/engagement than my usual posts, which I wouldn't say is all that high. I'm not quite sure what is driving the volume now (I assume a link to the course was posted somewhere), but I had used a few hashtags when I posted on LinkedIn, which included #udemycourse, #udemycoupon and #udemyfree. Perhaps the hashtags are what are driving the volume now. I initially thought it would be great to get a surge in enrollments by making the course free to help build credibility for the course, but I'm not so sure this is a good thing now. Of the almost 3K that have enrolled in the last 24 hours almost none of them have viewed any of the content (so most are just mining courses). That and I'm worried now that having a surge of non-qualified enrollment might negatively affect my ratings (the course is a bit technical, so I'm worried that a generalist who didn't go looking for this content in this first place might be more likely to give lower ratings). So yea, can't say that getting a surge in students is necessarily a good thing. I can update this post in a week or so to let you know where I netted out, ratings wise. But my suggestion would be to take it easy with the free coupon codes, plug your course as much as you can across various channels (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn) and just grow it over time.
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