Background Published my first course in 2015. I now have 14 courses published on Udemy. My total revenue earned to date is roughly $42,000.00. My student count is 250,000. Introduction Udemy is still my #1-course site for selling courses, but that gap gets smaller and smaller with each new year. Some brand-x course sites are good, but the vast majority are mostly useless. I have roughly a half dozen sites where, when added all together, I generate about what I make in a month with Udemy, but that gap is starting to narrow. Each month my sales go flat with Udemy; the brand-x sites show an improvement. It's not a lot, but when you take anything over $100.00 and multiply it by five or six sites, it starts to add up. A good month for Udemy is $1000.00 or more in a single payout. When you add the payouts from the brand-x sites, it comes in at just under $2000.00 a month, but there are other payouts as well. Publishing houses I have three publishing houses that pay me royalties every quarter. These publishing houses pay for the marketing and manage all hosting requirements. Every three months, I get a check that averages about what I make a month on Udemy. I have publishing contracts with three publishing houses in the UK. Do your research Every course site or publishing house has reviews posted by instructors. Do your research and ask questions! I got this email last month. _____________________________________________________________ Seeing if you'd be interested in a sales promotion w/ Huffington Post and our other publishing partners for your courses. You will benefit from: Placement in 225+ publisher stores like the CNN store. Potential inclusion in email blasts to 4,000,000+ tech & online course enthusiasts You'll get new customers and substantial press coverage. How does this sound to you? Best, Jimmy _____________________________________________________________________ Sounds great until I did my research and read what others had to say about this publisher. No thanks! The lessons I learned doing this are: Only sell courses on brand-x sites that use a marketing place similar to that used on Udemy. Use only course sites that reside in the U.S. or UK. Only use publishing houses in the UK. If you don't have at least 12 or more courses, it may not be worth the effort. I get propositions every month asking me to publish my courses on some site. I recommend staying away from any brand-x course site outside of the UK, or the U.S. Sites in India are selling courses for pennies on the dollar. When you get a payout for $.26, you're going to be very disappointed. Free course coupons. If you have issues with trolls or you need to improve your course ratings, blasting out 100,000-free course coupons using Udemy free coupon sites on Facebook will fix the issue. Slow sales for the month? Set loose 250,000 free course coupons, and don't be surprised when your sales go up. My next milestone is 500,000 student enrollments. I send out free coupons twice a year or when Udemy has a very slow month, or I'm making a single sell for the entire day. As soon as the Black Friday sales end and mid-summer, I send out free course coupons. Whenever it is slow, send out free course coupons. Do you want to buy a course from an instructor with 250 students or 250,000 students? Perception is everything. If you can't dazzle students with your brilliance, baffle them with your marketing. When to publish I publish when the course content is roughly 60-70 percent complete. Then, I send out free course coupons to a few select students, usually my top students that have been with me and supported me from the start. Once the course has been reviewed five times, it's ready for prime time. After that, I continue to work on the course content, and over the next three to six months, I finish the course. When the course is completed, I roll it out to the other course sites and publishers. Yearly revenue I'm by no means getting rich doing this, but my end-of-the-year total continues to go up. In 2020, I made $26,000 selling courses online. Roughly $12,000 of that came from Udemy. I'm hoping to break $30,000 in 2021. My milestone is to make $50,000.00 a year selling courses online. That would require at least another 10 to 15 courses. Why the $50,000.00 milestone? Because I enjoy what I do and the I know that sooner or later the money will follow. Slow and steady wins the race. Courses I stay away from Certification courses. Software courses. Any course where the content is in need of constant updating. Tax incentive The way I understand it, I only pay taxes on revenue from courses sold to students that reside in the U.S. Udemy does a pretty good job of breaking that down at the end of the year, and since my other course sites and publishers are in the UK, they deduct for the VAT taxes. What's the end game? Chaos reigns supreme. Everyone needs a backup plan. Everyone needs a cushion, someplace they can land and recover from a catastrophic loss. A little of something is better than nothing.
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