Udemy

For me, I did not expect much when I created my first course. I created my first course mainly as a side hustle job to earn a few extra bucks to pay the bills. When I made my first 10 dollars during the first month, I could not be more excited. I expected to make a few bucks but kind of felt more real after that first sale.   Over the next few months that one sale per month increased to 10 a month, then 15 sales per month for that first course and that gave me a thought. If I can do this with one course, what would the sales be like if I had two courses, three, four? The income could add up to make a livable wage that could seriously supplement my freelancing income. It would take me a while, but I have my evenings free after work, I needed a side hustle.  I came up with a course creation schedule by creating one course every two months with a goal of creating 6 courses that first year. I would have to work in the evenings as I still had a full freelance business I was maintaining.   6 months ago I let all my freelance clients go to focus full-time on teaching. I have been able to more than replace my income. There has been some stressful days, and this recent thread about insturctor burnout is a good read and very raw and real - Instructor creativity burn out?   At first, it was about the income, but then it started to become about helping others, not only students but other instructors. I found a wonderful community at Udemy that was warm welcoming and helpful.   Now with 14+ courses it is safe to say I am in this for the long run and look forward to increasing student reach, enrollments and have a positive influence in the educational space. I thought I would share this to encourage others who may feel like they have to have one amazing successful first course. You can still make a lot of money by just by making one course, some instructors on Udemy have done just that.   For those building a fresh new audience, it can take several courses and a growing student base to get the ball rolling in the right direction. For me it was not until course 5 (8 months after my first course was published) that I started to have a fairly popular course.   My first course is actually no longer available as it has already been replaced by another course. It made a few hundred bucks over it's entire lifetime (18 months), but has since faded away, but it did its job of solidifying (and started) a student base for me, even if that student base was fairly small at first.   ... View more

Editing takes the biggest bulk of most instructor’s time. Some instructors are lucky to have video editors who can work with them/for them, but not all of us are so lucky! I do one hundred percent of my own editing and finding ways to streamline that process can save me the most time. First of all, I create a theme or template video for my course I am working on. This theme will have a standard look for a lower third, banners or an intro screen. These graphics look consistent or have a branded theme. I start each lesson with this template, so I already have the first few seconds set up in my editing software, same for the outro, music and fonts. This saves me a ton of time as I do not have to set it up each time, I start a new lesson as there can sometimes be 60+ lectures. I also film in one day. I can film up to four hours of screen recording content in one afternoon. This way I can record it all and save the editing for one session. This also helps to cut down on editing time and streamline my process, so I am not going from filming to editing too often and shifting gears too frequently. I also plan ahead. I open up a google doc with my course outline and I write out the title of each lesson. If I need to write a script ahead of time, I will do all this at once. There is a theme here of sitting down to do one task before moving onto another. As instructors we can get excited about teaching that sometimes we rush to film before we really planned out the outline to our course, and “play it by ear”. I found that to be more time consuming in the end as I had to go back and refilm things I have said because I decided to change up the course after filming the first few lessons. What are some things that you've done to create a course in less time? ... View more

Hi everyone! I thought I post post a few places I like to find both FREE and PAID stock photo resources. As a graphic designer for over 14 years and now a graphic design instructor here on Udemy, I get asked this question a lot. There are several places to find fantastic stock photos and even stock footage (video). One of the few free open license options I like to use is pexels.com. All of these images have the Creative Commons 0 license (CC0). What that means is you are free to use this photo in your videos as often as you like, and no credit is required. There is even a pexels.com that contains video footage. Although the video footage, there is not as much available as a paid site, so be aware of that.   Pixabay.com is another free creative commons stock photo website.   A few paid stock website I have come to know and trust over the years is istockphoto.com and Shutterstock. They contain a wide variety of low-priced photo options as well as stock video footage.    Another great addition to my paid stock library is Adobe stock. The photos here tend to be a little more expensive, but the quality is excellent and top notch. I use them often for professional-level projects. They also have stock video footage as well for your video lessons. The rules for photo licensing use can be complex. I have a short video posted below that explains this in detail about creative commons and what to look for when using both free and paid photos. I thought this might be useful even though it was originally intended for graphic designers, the same rules apply. (Sorry for the audio quality, I created this video a while ago before I upgraded my microphone!)  ... View more