Hello fellow instructors. I've never posted here before. I am new to Udemy and have only been published since late Feburary. I am creating this post to share some of my more frustrating experinces starting out, and perhaps get some feedback from those who are more experinced than I. It is really not my intention to sound overly negative in this post. I hope it will not come across that way. I just need to get some issues I'm having off my chest. In the last two months, I have enjoyed what I perceive to be a fairly good start. My class has been growing steadily since publication and has just recently passed 125 enrollments. With one exception, all of my reviews have been positive, and my engagement numbers have been pretty consistently good as far as I can tell. It felt like I was off to a really good start, but then things took a turn. On April 18th, my landing page views plumetted from around 80-100 per day to around 0-5. Looking at the graphs, I am not able to determine why. When friends of mine search for my class by name, it seems to display far down on the second page of the search results. This has been my first frustration in that I do not understand this sudden and radical drop in traffic and visibility. Did I do something wrong? Did I fail to do something? By far the biggest issue I've had has been student questions. I have done my very best to politely answer every student who has asked me a question or sent me a message, and I almost feel like this is working against me. There has been a small number of students who have positively carpet bombed my class with questions and the more that I answer, the more they seem to ask. These students never give me a review or star my class, and some have even asked me for personal communication/instruction outside of the Udemy platform (which I have politely refused). There does not seem to be a limit to the number of questions that a student is allowed to ask per day, and this doesn't feel exactly fair to the instructor. I want very much for my class to be a success, earn good reviews, and please those who purchase it. It looks bad to leave any question unanswered, and is more likely to cause a student to leave a bad review, but I'm not sure what to do about these particular students. Then today, I got my first "bad" review. A student I have never interacted with gave my class a 3 star rating. 3 out of 5 doesn't sound bad, but because all of my good reviews are at least a month old, they seem to count for less than this most recent review, which is dragging my overall class rating down. So while the student may have intended that to be a fair "middle of the road" rating, it is having a fairly catastrophic effect on the overall rating that most people see when they look at my class. That overall rating is all that most people see, which means that any single student rating below a 4 is really more damaging than it probably should be. Certainly more damaging than the student is probably aware of when they star the class. He didn't write anything, either. So in summary, I've been bending over backwards to please my students, and this does not seem to count in terms of class success. An intermediate review from a random student that never even asked a question can be effectively devastating, and I don't know what else I can really do. I am not able to promote the class myself in any meaningful way, and I can't really make answering questions my full time job. I'm not allowed to ask students for reviews, nor would I wish to take that path. I was working on a second class, but at the moment my spirits are flagging. Advise would be welcome. Sorry if this ran a bit long.
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