Udemy

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You can, but it's likely to lose money for you. The cost of a conversion from a paid ad is typically more than the revenue you will receive from the sale on Udemy.   I'd advise focusing on things you can do for free: YouTube videos that link to your course, blogs, focusing on SEO on your Udemy course landing page, making your course image stand out,  stuff like that. See https://teach.udemy.com/marketing/use-external-marketing-tools/ and https://teach.udemy.com/marketing/course-landing-page-keyword-exercise/ for more ideas. ... View more

Unless it's some sort of emergency, I limit my working days to 5 days a week, and each of those days I set a goal for myself. Once that goal is complete, and all of the messages I've received for the day have been dealt with, I sign off, go outside, and enjoy nature for a bit. As an introvert I don't need much else to recharge.   My working day starts as soon as I get up, usually around 7 or 8 AM - so usually I'm done by 2 or 3 PM, which leaves plenty of time for the other stuff life has to offer and all the stuff that needs doing around the house. I find it far more rewarding to wrap things up after producing something I aimed to produce today, than to wrap things up at some arbitrary time on the clock.   I am religious about maintaining "inbox zero" so I'm not left with outstanding things to worry about all the time.   One little hack I do is to take my "weekends" on Mondays and Tuesdays whenever possible, when the local attractions are much less crowded. We also try to schedule actual vacations during off-seasons to make them more enjoyable. Our kids are grown and on their own, so we're no longer tied to school schedules! ... View more

Hm, you're right - that doesn't sound right. The only explanation that would make sense would be if a bunch of 5-star reviews have recently expired from your review average calculation, due to them aging out (3 months I think it is.) But it sounds like your reviews are consistent enough for that to be unlikely. ... View more

Udemy (as far as we know) still weights more recent reviews higher, as well as reviews that have written comments in them. How far in the course the student was when the review was written may also be a factor. So if those one-star reviews fit any of those categories, they may be weighted disproportionately.   All any of us can do in this situation is try to drive more reviews to average out the effect of the occasional bad ones. Your courses appear to be quite popular, so the good news is it shouldn't take too long for some more rational reviews to bring things back up. ... View more

I think there's some confusion over what a "sub-group" is. I think we're just talking about expanding the taxonomy for new posts, right? So if you want to post something that doesn't fit into "Published Instructor Club / Course Creation" etc., like a discussion specific to growing sales for instructors at a certain point in their journey (that's my vote, by the way) there's a place to put it. Or maybe there's an "off-topic lounge" where people can just post stuff about... whatever. Good places to be a digital nomad, what people are doing for other side businesses, etc.   But, these wouldn't be closed communities, right? I assume they would still make into the "latest" and "trending" buckets that people check on a daily basis, if so warranted. ... View more

Raise prices on course topics with high Q&A demands; the cost of supporting them has risen with inflation, while the revenue we get per enrollment has fallen. Margins are getting thin for instructors. (I know pricing experiments are already underway)   Build systems to help learners support each other and build their own communities.   Allow instructors to schedule recurring promotional announcements, so we can spend more of our time and money making content instead of promoting it.   Or if you're looking specifically for community ideas:   Bring in actual filmmakers and cinematographers to do webinars on how to create compelling and visually interesting videos. What can course creators learn from Hollywood? ... View more

Perhaps it's a language or cultural barrier thing, but in the US dismissing someone as an "old man" is considered insulting. ... View more

Reviews are a very touchy subject. As instructors we put months of effort into a course, and seeing someone criticize it with a few strokes of their keyboard, perhaps unfairly, can be very very discouraging.   Just to explain why it works that way - if you have 20 5-star reviews and get another 5-star review, it won't change your average at all. A 4-star would only change it to 4.95. ((5*20+4)/21) But a 1-star would change it to 4.8. ((5*20+1)/21)    What makes it worse is that recency is also a factor, so a brand new one star review counts more than a 3-month-old 5 star review. We don't know the details of how that works, but it explains how a new 1-star review can drag your score down so dramatically.   Everything cuts both ways, though. A new 5-star review also carries more weight than an older 1-star. It's just that if the 5-star is closer to your existing average, it won't move it as much. It's all quite fair on paper, but yes it does open up the possibility of people really torpedo-ing a course with a one-star written review.   Udemy has said below they have no plans of changing this any time soon, so we have to learn to deal with it. If you're in this situation, all you can do is see if you're lucky enough for the review to violate some Udemy policy in which case you might get it removed - and if not, try to drive more reviews to dilute the effect of it. Or simply wait it out - after a few months, it won't affect your score.   Most of your courses have exceptionally high review scores. We tend to fixate on the negative feedback at the expense of the positive! ... View more

Oh, by "paid review" you mean by a paid student... I misunderstood!   That makes sense mathematically though, right? A one star review is much further from your existing average than a 5 star would be. I'm not saying that makes it right; if a review is an outlier perhaps the algorithm should treat it as such. ... View more

@AhmedMagdyMohamed wrote:   Another thing which I discovered recently a negative paid review is highly weighted than a paid positive review! How do you know that? ... View more

Wow @AhmedMagdyMohamed way to go with throwing out accusations of racism, and then following it up with ageist remarks. That sort of behavior isn't acceptable here, or anywhere else. Perhaps you could offer some more constructive feedback, such as how you earned ratings of 4.9 - 5.0 on some of your courses. We must have a lot to learn from you about how to create some of the best content on the platform, and how to motivate students to write positive reviews. Please share your tips with us!   Look, EVERY review system is fatally flawed. They are ALL subject to gaming and the biases of the reviewers. But like it or not, students - which are Udemy's customers, and our customers - expect them as a tool in making a buying decision. If I were in charge, I'd eliminate reviews entirely in favor of some objective engagement-based metric from the behavior of paid students. But I'm not, and reviews are here to stay.   Bad reviews hurt my feelings too. That's why I don't look at reviews at all, or respond to them. Only if I notice a course is doing noticeably worse than my others will I dig into reviews looking for actionable feedback on what's wrong with it. And if there is some, I act on it. Otherwise, I accept that reviews are for students more than they are for me, and that the system is about as good as it can reasonably get.   It's been awhile since Udemy talked about how the review system works, but there are quite a few nuances that help us out you might not know about. The last we heard, written reviews carry more weight in your review average than reviews with no text - so those one-star reviews with no text may not have useful information for you, but they also don't count much. And reviews don't count at all after a few months, so even if you are hammered with unfair one-stars, they will eventually go away and let you start with a clean slate again. I think Udemy thought this all through a lot better than some of the huge tech companies, like Amazon.   Suggesting mandatory written comments on one and two star reviews is not an unreasonable idea. But it would bias reviews toward the positive, as it would introduce friction to negative reviews, and make the reviews less helpful to students as a result. "OK then, require comments on all reviews" you may say - but there are just too many courses on the marketplace, and reviews are spread too thinly as a result. Udemy needs to drive all the reviews they can get, in order to get a meaningful measure of every course's quality from learners. I appreciate Udemy's stance on this, and it's really an impossible situation.   Anyhow, my advice as always is to focus on what you can control. If your course is getting hammered by bad reviews, there's probably a reason why. Make your course better. Stop offering it for free and making it easy for trolls to access. And if you really think there is a concerted attack against your course from competitors - find evidence of it, and present it to the policy team. Never in the history of this community have I seen anyone actually have evidence of an attack from competing instructors, though. More often it goes back to Larry's point of how we want to blame someone else for bad things. Larry's a very wise man by the way. Y'all should listen. ... View more

Thank you for setting a friendly tone at Udemy and always being an advocate for instructors, Gregg! ... View more

According to https://support.udemy.com/hc/en-us/articles/229232367-Audio-Standards-and-Choosing-a-Microphone " it is still the case that "Text to speech software is not allowed; students want to hear directly from you as an instructor to build trust."   While I agree AI-generated voices are getting better, changing that policy would also make it too easy for bad actors to quickly generate courses based on stolen content and stuff.    Most Americans think French accents are kind of cool 🙂 It could actually be to your advantage.   ... View more

I don't actually see VND in that price tier matrix - do we know what the price floor is there?   Yay more learners 🙂 ... View more

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. What you publish should at least cover what you say it will in the course description and title. Publishing an incomplete course will leave students feeling like they didn't get what they paid for, and will only lead to poor reviews, refunds, and poor sales. Also keep in mind what competing courses are covering in the same topic. If you don't have content that is competitive with established courses, students will have no reason to choose your course instead. ... View more

Every day you postpone releasing a course is a day of lost sales, and missed opportunities to help people learn important skills. The best month to release is the month when you're done. ... View more

The only reason to send links through there is to hide where the link came from. Probably originating from some pirate site if I had to guess - whoever is using it doesn't want you or Udemy to know about them. But if it's only 3 visitors, it's probably not worth worrying about. It's possible it's nothing nefarious and just someone running a website who is overzealous about privacy. ... View more

The ability to sound energetic, while still speaking clearly and not too fast for foreign audiences. Still working on that one myself...   ... View more

Why isn't there a way to unsubscribe from just these notifications? The unsubscribe link takes you to a page where you can unsubscribe from all "helpful resources and important updates," but I just want to unsubscribe from these particular ones.   I never opted into them; they just started appearing a few weeks ago. ... View more

Will existing auto-transcribed subtitles be re-processed with the new "improved auto-generation model"? (I hope so!)   ... View more

A great reminder that we instructors are part of something much bigger with Udemy, and something that touches more lives than we can imagine in a positive way.   Just this week, I've heard from students who landed jobs at Google and Amazon who credited one of my courses for it, and substantially improved their lives as a result. Udemy lets us earn a living by helping people around the world, and that's a rare thing.   ... View more

Don't give up too easily. It can be very hard to predict what videos will gain traction on YouTube and which ones will not. Every upload is a roll of the dice, and you  have to roll the dice enough to have a chance of a video taking off there. ... View more

For me it's more about the constant sense of accomplishment. Whether it's recording a section of a new course, getting an older course 100% up to date, or implementing some new marketing idea - every day there's an achievable goal you can set for yourself, and it feels good when it's achieved. ... View more

Do you know about how many of those followers have become students? ... View more

Maintenance is generally on an as-needed basis with me; I teach technologies that are changing all the time, and every week there are one or two things I have to change in my courses as a result. Sometimes the software I teach undergoes a major revision and I have to re-record an entire course; I just finished a 2 month effort redoing my Elasticsearch course for example. Something like that happens once or twice a year. It's not something I can schedule or plan for; when changes like that drop, I have to get right on it or my ratings will plummet.   What I can schedule and plan for is the long list of ideas I've accrued over time for marketing and promotion. Whenever I get an idea (or more often, learn new ideas from other instructors here,) I write it down in my to-do list. And that's what I plan to spend most of Q3 and Q4 on. That includes things like polishing my own website, writing better and more frequent educational announcements, tweaking my promotional announcements, trying to find a way to make social media work, SEO optimization, and creating more promotional content on YouTube.  ... View more

Right! I find it's a full-time effort just to keep my revenue from falling over time, and doing more than that is inviting burnout. (Not complaining; for me it's a good problem to have.) For those of us who are doing this for lifestyle reasons and not looking to grow some huge e-learning content company and sell it later, we need to balance life with course creation and maintenance.   My own goal is to finish up two more new courses this year, and then focus on marketing activities and keeping my existing courses up to date for the rest of the year. I've been working more than full time cranking out courses this first half of the year, and it's time to slow down a little. ... View more

Hey @Bella thanks for the response above. One point I was trying to make, and didn't make clearly, is there is a fine line between quizzes and practice exams for many courses. Both provide interactivity, but it's always been in my head that practice exams are intended for simulating certification exams, while quizzes are more lightweight and appropriate for other types of courses. It just seems odd to offer a "select" badge to courses with practice exams but not quizzes, given how similar they are. Unless the intent is specifically to highlight certification prep courses that have practice exams included (instead of offered as an additional purchase.) My concern is that we'd see instructors gaming the system by converting their existing quizzes into practice exams just to gain this new label. But as you said, the experiment isn't at the point of worrying about implementation details like this yet. ... View more