I honestly regret making my first course

I genuinely regret making a course on udemy, If I had known It's going to be this way I would no where near approach this platform to sell courses. I wouldn't even think about making a good course.

I spent countless hours recording, editing and transcribing hours and hours of content. I am heavily promoting my course with little to no convergence.

Competition is fierce, If one course is labelled best seller good luck competing against that.

Students buy your course with dirt cheap prices and leave bad ratings, you contact them they don't provide written feedback.

I feel lost like how the f do I know what areas should improve in the course if you just leave bad ratings without giving proper feedback.

At this point, I'm trying to undo things, trying to get the money I put on software and audio equipment.

This is so frustrating.

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LawrenceMMiller

@HilalHakla522
I am sorry you are so frustrated. It is tough when you have put in so much effort and it isn't appreciated. Your course has a 4.5 rating which is good, so I wouldn't worry about a few negative reviews, we all get them. The question is "how can you improve?"

It is just a fact that Udemy marketplace is now very competitive. Your topic, Azure, has a lot of very good competition. The trick is always to ask yourself, "So, why would someone buy my course rather than the competition?"

The best selling instructors all have multiple courses. I see Scott Duffy, probably the best selling instructor in this space, has 45 courses so he has built up his own brand and a "fan base." That is a huge advantage. I think what this says is that to succeed you have to be strategic and plan to build a portfolio of excellent courses. Yes, that is a big challenge, but the payoff is also big.

Good luck.

HilalHakla522

I noticed that as well, you need to create a lot of courses and this takes a loooooot of time, we're talking years.

Competition is also painful cause It leaves no room for new course publishers to thrive. When a course is labelled best seller It's over, probably 90% of the sales goes to best selllers. It's like rich get richer type of thing.

But anyways thanks Lawrence

radaslanek

Welcome to reality 🤯

LawrenceMMiller

@HilalHakla522
I think you are right about the "years" thing. I have been at this for seven years and other instructors who sell well have also worked at it for years. So, that is a decision that people make. The rewards are great, but are you willing to keep working at it for years? There's no right answer.

On the best seller thing. I track my competition on a spread sheet and I can see the percent of enrollments going to my course, which is a best seller, and newer courses with a very similar title. I wish it was true that I got 90% of enrollments because my course is a best seller. Not the case. A good share, yes. But much less than 90%.

MichaelPog

On one hand I totally feel you and understand your pain and frustration. I know how much work it takes to produce a course and it sucks when it goes nowhere.

On the other hand I'm really confused about what you expected exactly.

I checked the Market place Insights tool, and for the topic you chose the top monthly revenue is $800. You are the 3rd top earner with a good looking course and promo. Your rating is also very good. What exactly did you expect that didn't happen?

Gove

Hi @HilalHakla522
,

I was tried to write message to lawrence and frank kane for alot of times in past, with this kind of negativity, i wrote 4 of them and delete 4 of em... Because i aware in google search engine, it show's my community profile,as well as my shame to wrote those... so i delete them.

Actually I understand your feeling, because i work this udemy for one year but total earning are still in 3 figure... I'm not quiting, yet doubting,hesitation,confusing, and a lot of negativity is come to attack me... i am still continue, because, it is my dream, the one whose can continue the longest, always whose have the faith in them. But due to reality wether or not, it's come to how you look into it.

My course are all bunch theoritically explain science, but not the motivation, someone wrote here say your course become top 3, that prove there is no shortcut,all i could say is,

The glory is come from every step you take.

RajGupta

@HilalHakla522
Reading your post in between the lines, I get the sense you are frustrated that you are not getting TRACTION.

Traction will come if you have 8-10 quality courses if you are in a very competitive field. Some of you will ask how I got the number 8. Angela Yu has 8 courses and excellent traction and a Best Selling instructor.

If you are not in a competitive field you may get traction with just one course.

I have 5 and I have better traction than when I had 1 course but to get full traction you will 8-10 courses.

If you are familiar with the Mathematical concept of Permutations and Combinations, you know the difference between 20 C 3 versus 20 C 1.

Ramesh Retnasamy

Hi @HilalHakla522
,

I totally understand your frustration. I had a look around your course and you seem to have done everything right and the course seems high quality. I genuinely think you are on to a winner if you can hang in there and do your best for the next couple of months. It will be a shame to have done all the hard work and walk away from it at the last minute.

I don’t have the many years of experience some of others here have, but let me explain why I think you have a good chance of making it and what you could be doing to achieve that. I am also an instructor making courses on Azure, but I focus on the data engineering space. I have been on the platform for just over a year and I have 27k students at the moment with 2 courses. My journey started pretty similar to yours!

I did the same as you and created a quality course to my ability. Course duration is also similar to yours at 9.5 hours. When I launched, enrolments didn’t come immediately. I quite heavily promoted the course on my social circles (LinkedIn, Facebook and some messaging apps). First month and half was hard and at least half of the sales were from my promotions. I worked my hardest to keep the course rating high (around 4.6/ 4.7). I answered every question in Q&A and also engaged with students who approached me to solve all their problems. It not only helped keeping the rating high, but also helped improving the course. Needless to say, I was also learning!

PS – I also had the odd 1 star ratings!

There were 2 key moments that followed. Firstly, because the course was selling (even though I was promoting), the Udemy algorithm picked up the momentum and started promoting. So, I started seeing sales from Udemy advertisements and affiliate marketing.

Second key moment was when the course got added to the UFB bundle which was around 6 weeks from launch, I think. Once that happened, enrolments increased significantly. To be honest I didn’t know that UFB would make such a significant impact. I think around 60 – 70% of my enrolments come from UFB. Little did I know that higher rating, number of reviews and demand from business customers are the key criteria for addition to UFB, but somehow all my hard work in the previous weeks got me there. I think the criteria for UFB is that courses need at least 25 reviews, 4.4 rating and demand from business customers. I can’t remember where I saw this, but it was from one of the google searches. So, it might not be 100% right!

Let me address some of the points raised here

Competition - There are a high number of courses on Udemy for Azure, but that shouldn’t matter for you. Your course is specialised on AZ-204 certification. There are only 2 other video courses for AZ-204 and one of them is the best seller and the other one has lower rating than yours. Rest are all practice tests and they are not your competition. So, you basically have only one competition and that’s the best seller.

Best Seller - They probably take lots of enrolments, but as Lawrence says I don’t think it’s as much as 90%. Also, I think UFB will be very different and they will be more likely to try new courses. Most importantly, your course is the most recent and people are always on the lookout for new courses as the technology in this space is evolving rapidly.

Number of courses – I am sure having many courses can help cross selling and increase enrolments exponentially, but I think there is opportunity to see small success like some people are seeing!

So, I would encourage you to do the following

Promote the course as much as you can to increase enrolments
Answer every question and update the course as required to keep the rating high

These are the only things in your hand and doing them will ensure that Udemy promotes your course (as it’s selling) and also the reviews and rating will help get into UFB.

As I said you have done a brilliant job, but here are 2 things you may want to consider

Your course is the most recent course on the platform for AZ-204. As Azure is evolving too quickly, people are always looking for the latest course. So, just say that in the title. New course 2022 or something similar
You have listed 1-2 years of C# experience as required, but none of your competitors have. I am not suggesting we should oversell, but do students need work experience or C# knowledge sufficient? You may want to consider rewording.

Sorry, it’s a long message, but hope this helps and good luck

MarkusZed457

Dear Hilal,

sorry to hear that. WOW - you started by providing a 9 hour during course for a technical topic that provides knowledge to a specific - but sure upcoming niche. It is a great effort to do so and requires - of course - a lot of knowledge, so please take my honest respect for that. Haye you ever thought about lecturing smaller courses on related topics? So if you teach 9 hours, why not providing 9 1 hour during courses (5-8 Videos) on specific topics from the greater course? So you could easily get in touch with your community on udemy, and are able to produce your content pretty faster (which scales income sooner). ^^

Edit: One of my key learnings on udemy was, that it seems to be a great strategy to think not only in courses and your own offer in the plattform, but in building topic related funnels. It is almost the same structure one would build up in traditional online marketing: freebie course -> cheap specific course -> main offer (8h+ course) - and the idea is to lead people through this funnel by using the "bonus lecture" you can provide at the end of every course. You can also interact with your peer by using on plattform messages, just to inform them if there is something new in one of your courses or something.

Wish you the best,
Markus

LawrenceMMiller

@MarkusZed457
Has this strategy worked for you?

MarkusZed457

Well yes, but my target was not so much to found a main business out of my udemy courses, but rather to get (more) people book my courses. I won around 2.000 Participants in 2 years, which might be not as much to run a real business from it, but more than I once expected. Actually I try to set up not only a few courses, but a greater course offer on the base of the same principle (first time) on larger scale. Let's give it a try, I'd love keep you informed how things are going and am looking forward to achieve greater benefit from the application of the described strategy

HilalHakla522

interesting i never looked at this market place tool. I excpected to get minimum 3-4 course sales with promotions every day. That was my expectations since Scott Duffy's course gets about 50- 200 course sales daily.

HilalHakla522

thank you so much the eye opener Raj ! I get it now

HilalHakla522

Thank you Ramesh, I really needed that motivation. Cause the last couple of weeks I've slacking from Udemy cause I was so demotivated. I kept telling myself that I'm not going anywhere with this. I'll try changing my approach with this and just do it for my personal knowledge on the subject of cloud.

HilalHakla522

I never thought of funnels like that, but considering that for each funnel step a small percentage will actually reach your end goal. It seems It's kinda inefficient. I'd rather push sales to my main courses than having them bounce betweeen funnels.

ThomasMitchell

If your competition consists of 10-hour courses, the strategy of breaking it up into several smaller courses isn't gonna work. Why, as a student, would I pay for ten 1-hour courses when I can pay for one 10-hour course that covers everything I need to know?

HilalHakla522

yeah exactly

RajGupta

Getting to a minimum number of sales every day is certainly the goal. Even with 5 courses my sales do freeze often.

I would encourage you to keep at it.

BenterAdede

This is an eye opener. I am yet to publish a course. Thanks for this tip

TrevoirWill

I understand your frustrations. I didn't start making $100 a month until I published my 5th course on the platform and I was where you are in terms of wanting to cash out.

I took a look at your course and the value proposition is great, this is a good topic. One thing that might be affecting your ranking though...is that you have it listed under the category IT Certifications > Azure Functions as opposed to IT Certifications > Microsoft Certification.

I have experienced where getting this classification wrong can affect the enrollments and how easily persons might see your course. You might also think about doing AZ-204 as the main topic, so that more general searches along those lines will find your course in the results.

Another "ironic' part about increasing sales, is giving away free stuff....Yes...I know...but if you make a smaller course, maybe focused on a specific module (2 hours long) and then promote it on social platforms as free and increase those enrolments, that is a great way to build your student base and have students who know your quality, opt to buy this and other new courses from you. It improves your credibility and the course that is "free" will also rank higher and still sell.

Curtis.Norman

Hi Michael, I am curious... I am familiar with the market place insight tool, but I don't know how you were able to tell that this course was the 3rd top earner... Can you please help me understand how you were able to do this? Thank you.

MichaelPog

Simple. I see that he placed his course under "Azure Functions " category, so I typed that in the Market place tool, and his course is 3rd in the list.

ChrisBankes120

The list is not necessarily in the order of earnings.

SivakamiS2017

@HilalHakla522 … coming in late to the discussion, and many others have already given some excellent feedback and advice.
Don't lose heart. It takes a while to start doing well on Udemy.
It took me nearly 2 years to make a reasonable amount of money, and 3-4 years to make a decent income.
I am still not anywhere among the big earners, far from it … but I enjoy creating Courses, and the income is not bad (don't get me started on the Rev Share cuts 😉 )
Without intending to sound patronizing, I can say that if you love what you teach, and are good at it, you are very likely to do well. Just hold on for a while, before thinking about giving up.

Also, it does indeed take a lot of effort, there is nothing "passive" about Udemy income. You need to constantly create and update Courses. And if you are doing this alone, like me, it will keep you very busy.