Do You Have Any Questions You're Afraid to Ask?

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ScottDuffy
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

Do You Have Any Questions You're Afraid to Ask?

Sometimes it's a bit intimidating to start a whole new Post just to ask a question. 

 

So go ahead and ask your question as a comment in this thread, and I'll do my best to answer. No stress, no worries. No dumb questions. Ask away.

 

Who am I? I'm a fellow instructor, and I've been on Udemy for about 7 years. Udemy's my full-time income these days and they've been very good to me over the years. I've seen a lot. And I'm here to help. So how can I help you? What do you need to succeed? LMK below.

 

72 Replies

Hi Scott, 

I see that many instructors provide professional captions/subtitles. 

For those who have long courses, I feel it is very tedious or difficult to do it. Is there any easy way of doing this? Is there anything you would recommend? 

 

And I see that some instructors provide subtitles in other languages. What is the easiest way of doing this? 

 

EshantGarg_1-1631769018505.png

 

 

 

 

EshantGarg_0-1631768612881.png

 

 
 
 
 
 
ScottDuffy
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

I use a service called HappyScribe to create English captions. They are better than the Udemy captions because I can upload a list of words that are unique to my courses.

 

It costs me next to nothing. I think I paid $49 one time for the service on AppSumo.

ScottDuffy
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

The Auto captions are provided by Udemy.

Hi Scott, 
thank you for reaching out to help us starters. 

I have two courses online now but it seems like there is only one student a month buying the one course and the other course gets almost no purchase for the first two months... Actually I wonder if I should create more courses, try to find out what I can improve on the old ones or start a youtube channel for 2 years to be able to promote the courses properly............

ScottDuffy
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

One of your courses is in English and the other is in German.

 

It's likely that the German market is just a fraction of the English market on Udemy. Maybe only 5%. This is one factor that leads to low sales in German. The other factor is perhaps the topic of the course, which I interpret to be how to use video as a coach or therapist. It's an important topic, and I'm sure there are thousands of therapists that can use the training. But are those people searching on Udemy for courses? I don't know.

 

I think the image is great. It conveys what you are teaching. A+

 

I don't see anything wrong with this course given that I can't speak or read German.

 

What you need is more students. Is there a way to present your course in online groups and forums where therapists and coaches hang out? Is there a reddit forum or a German twitter hashtag for this? Find some enclave where these people hang out and say, "excuse me, but I have this thing that might be helpful to you. <link>"

- - - -

Your English course seems important as well. Discipline and bad habits. 

 

There is a fairly obvious typo on the landing page that my eye was drawn to immediately.

 

"You need a lot of discipline in order to get what you really want in live". This sentence is totally wrong.

 

There is irony there because the sentence is wrong. 🙂 The word probably should be "life" not "live".

 

"Habits" is a tough category on Udemy. There are courses with 10,000s of students already in the marketplace. Some of the teachers are "famous" on the Internet. So what sets your course apart from those other courses?

 

So the problem you have here is differentiation. 

 

You might have more success with "How to Break a Porn Addiction" or "How to Stop Snacking Throughout the Day" or "How to Reduce Your Online Shopping Habit" or "How to Go to the Gym Every Morning" than "how to abandon bad habits" in my view.

 

The riches are in the niches, they say. So how can the concepts of this course be targeted for a specific, popular bad habit? Find a topic that is underserved on Udemy. 

 

OR find a way to make this course stand out. Since your partner is a respected therapist, this might not be easy. But TV infomercial Queen Susan Powter used to scream "STOP THE INSANITY!" which became her catch-phrase and made her stand out in the late-night infomercial wars. 

 

I think it's a tough category. You need more students, more reviews, and a better message to say why your course is better than all the other habits courses. That's not going to happen if you do nothing.

 

Good luck!

Hi Scott, 

 

thank you for your review and insights! 

the riches are in the niches, makes sense, I will do that then. Going deeper more into the corners of the internet. 

 

I wished I could do an internship at how to make great online courses..

Hi Max,

I had a look in your course and I see a couple of things.

 

The courses are very well produced and I guess this was a lot of effort.

 

promo video of the habbits course: There are too many effects. this has two downsides: you need a lot of time and effort to produce and it draws attention away from your toppic.

 

I guess you are a really cool guy and someone to have a lot of fun with. Even though your description on your instructors page sounds very self-focused and arrogant. and the same in the promo video of the habbits course. 

 

habbits course, video: create the action for your new habbit:

cuts are too fast. draws attention away from the topic.

 

also from the course and your profile you dont seem to me like an expert. I'm very honest on that, because I have the same problem too. I did a lot of things in my life and sometimes I do not know how to position myself. Anyway you need to give the student the feeling that you are an expert and that they can trust you.

 

promo video of the other course. It starts quite strong but then gets a bit boring. Have a look here on how to create awesome promo:

The Perfect Promo: Guide (udemy.com)

 

To your sales: have a look in your analytics. are the conversion rates bad or did you not have traffic at all? (for organic traffic you need a good udemy ranking in the udemy search. and therefore a good thumbnail, title, number of reviews,.

I would work on all of these. it's too much for now to go in every detail. if you dont know how feel free to aks again.

 

for conversion rate you need a good promo video. proof, that students can trust you. good preview videos and maybe landingpage.

 

once you fixed the causes for the conversion rate you need to get higher in the search ranking. therefore you need traffic. later organic traffic but to get started you might try free coupon codes. (but just if your course is good and this leads to good reviews). also a lot of people here say this is not a good strategy and I guess they are right! But maybe if you dont have other ideas how to promote your course its an easy way to start and later you probably get organic traffic from udemy. at least for the german course! for the english course: competition is very high. i guess the free coupons just work if you have an outstanding good course to get it going. otherwise this will just be a short peak in visibility. In german course quality can be a little bit less and you will still make sales.

 

Don't get me wrong. My aim is not to critisize or blaim and I hope my feedback is not to harsh. I just say that because in my opinion this kind of things can be very easy to see or very hard to see at the same time. For others it's always easy to tell what is good and what not. But for oneself it's always difficult because everybody has his or her own blind spots. And i feel a bit related to you. Watch my content. I know that i used to have a lot of this kind of things. I changed a lot. But still I'm pretty sure you will find parts where you say it's obvious to change this and that. Try the experiment and watch a lot of stuff from the great instructors like scott duffy or phil ebiner. Then watch mine and see what is the difference. Then watch yours and ask yourself what you can change.

hope that helps. Felix

 

 

Hi, 

Many thanks for this post. I have a pretty dumb question. Whenever there is a following lady picture on the udemy landing page then my sales incredibly gets down. It's just a co-incidence or happens with other fellows as well. 

MuhammadDuj869_0-1632054842884.png

I am sorry if i hurt anyone. 

GuilhermeMP
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

When this lady appears (along with this message) it means that Udemy is not running a sale and therefore courses are being sold at table price. However, students usually wait for sales. When there are sales running, they usually put images of different people (of various ethnicities, genders, cultures etc) along with a different message highlighting a discount

ScottDuffy
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

The poor innocent stock model is being blamed for poor sales. 🙂 

 

I don't see a correlation between the image on the home page and my personal revenue. Maybe someone can track it.

My guess is that particular image gets posted when there is no sale on Udemy. This image will definitely get us more sales.

 

2021-10-21_8-39-30.png.

Hi Scott, 

 

I'm a big fan of your courses, thanks so much for all the helpful info I've got from them 🙂

 

I just published my first course yesterday, and am finding marketing it a really steep learning curve.

 

Would you possibly have 5 minutes to take a look and tell me some initial thoughts? Any feedback from such a Udemy Pro like yourself would be MASSIVELY appreciated.

 

I have three more courses nearly finished so any tips really would be great.

 

Thanks again for giving back to new instructors, really kind of you.

Paul

 

 

ScottDuffy
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

Hi Paul,

 

On the whole, you've put together a nice short course. The course image is eye-catching, the title contains a clear value proposition, and the subtitle draws interest. I've watched the promo video, intro video, and one of the lessons. You're good at this. 

 

There's no reason why someone who is looking for a career change would say no to watching even a bit of your course to get some tips from it.

 

If I can make two suggestions. One, you appear to have just chosen the first five lessons of the course as your free preview ones. Maybe there is another video or two within the course that you can expose for the free preview that gives potential students a feeling for your teaching style. I'd recommend choosing a different video (or two) for a free preview.

 

And two, am I correct to assume that the downloadable PDFs contain most of the lessons of the course? If so, you're leaving yourself open to students buying the course, downloading the PDF, and refunding the course. I'd ensure that there are enough videos in the course that teach things not covered by any downloadable PDF to make the videos a valuable companion to the workbook.

 

You clearly know a lot about creating a video course despite this being your first one.

 

In terms of marketing, what you need to do is get your course in front of people who can use it. I see you've probably given away 2500 free coupons, and that's OK I guess. But what you really need are people who are looking for a career change.

 

Where do you find people looking for a career change?

 

LinkedIn, likely. Twitter too. Perhaps Reddit. Job search boards. Maybe there are job search FB groups that allow these kinds of posts. I don't know the exact answer, but what you need is exposure to the right audience. Not just free coupons to random people who may not even need your advice, but actual interested students. Not free coupons, but place your product in front of the right people. The price is already right.

 

Is there someone who already has an audience, that might be willing to show this course to their audience? 

 

You need reviews. Preferably good ones, but the course needs student activity. Watching videos, doing assignments, completing the course... Out of those 2500 free coupons, you need some of those people to watch the course and give feedback. Use educational announcements to encourage action.

 

Finally, if you can get some reviews, this might be the kind of thing Udemy Business is interested in. So once you meet the minimum qualifications for that, see if you can get their attention. 

 

Good luck!

 

Hi Scott, 

 

I really can't thank you enough for the tips and the time it took you to watch those vids and type out all of that hugely helpful advice. You are a very kind person! :-)))

 

I have actioned all of your fantastic suggestions.

 

A MASSIVE THANK YOU AGAIN, you have a fan for life in me! To get such great tips from such a pro like yourself is amazing!

 

Have a lovely rest of the week! 🙂

Paul

Hi @ScottDuffy how do you spot a spam or a fake review? What are the different signs to look for to ascertain that the review is not genuine? 

ScottDuffy
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

It's sort of like asking, how can you tell a photo is real and has not been Photoshopped? How can you tell if something is a Deep Fake?

 

I would say, humans (and now AI) can recognize certain patterns. When you compare the reviews of a course where you KNOW the reviews are real, next to a course where you suspect they are not real, you can see the difference.

 

1 hours ago - 5 STARS - Best instructer on Udemy. Amazing. Great.
2 hours ago - 5 STARS - Wonderfuil. Best.
2 hours ago - 5 STARS - Greate course. Realy GReat. Wonderfuil.
2 hours ago - 5 STARS - John Doe best teacher. Much best. 

3 days ago - 1 STAR - This course is awful. Avoid it. I want my money back. This instructor really knows nothing about the topic, and shouldn't be teaching at all. 

I mean, you can just see a pattern. 

ardit
Storyteller Storyteller
Storyteller

Hey @ScottDuffy I really like your course images. What do you think of mine? Or should I just copy you 😁?

ScottDuffy
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

Ardit, glad to see you're still around, man. It's been a long time.

 

Wow, you've completely changed your Python Mega Course image. That's a big change.

 

Did you hire a professional designer for that? Or run a contest on 99designs?

 

I like the bold background colors. Makes it stand out. I love that your photo is there. (I assume that's you and not Twitter's Jack Dorsey or a professional model.) I might suggest that you make the photo of you bigger. Humans trust faces. 😉 50% more Ardit, please.

 

I like your course image better than Tim's or Jose's. Yours is SO much better. In fact, you definitely have the "top 1 or 2" course image on the entire page 1 of "python" search.  I also like Angela's course image.

ardit
Storyteller Storyteller
Storyteller

@ScottDuffy, thanks for the feedback! Yeah, long time no see! I have been lurking here in the community, though.

 

My old image had a number (10) in it, which was against the Udemy no-text-in-image rule. 

 

You are right. I look too sexy in this new image 😁. I should replace it with something closer to reality.  Otherwise, I will get a lot of refunds when students see me on video inside the course. 

 

@ScottDuffy  My questions were asked by others and answered here!  Many thanks for taking time to do this for instructors.  It is MOST appreciated.

ScottDuffy
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

Wish you much success! 

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