Creating a profitable screencast business

I'm doing this at Alchemist Camp and one of the key ways I've been able to build the audience I have is that I've made a higher portion of my content free than my competitors have.

On one hand this does put a downward price pressure on the market for Elixir screencasts. On the other hand it's slowly creating a market for Elixir screencasts taught by me. There is a small but growing number of people who specifically want my lessons even when there's a free alternative. It's kind of like how free to play mobile games can create their own economy within the game that people will spend real money on, even when they never would have paid $1 to buy the game to begin with.

I've had a very successful online course that is definitely priced high (wrote about it here), but there are very few free or low cost alternatives so people happily pay for the content.

One thing I did make sure to do with the paid videos are make them short and sweet. I did everything I could to ensure the videos were almost all under 10 minutes.

That means writing out the script before hand so there's no stuttering or "uhms" and such. That also helped keep the pace of the content very high, because I know exactly what I'll talk about in the video and I can edit in the screen recording to match the audio.

That's something you don't see with a lot of free youtube tutorials; those often run 45+ minutes due to typing speed and train-of-thought speech.

That's not to say that YouTube can't fit in your plan. I run a YouTube channel as well (at 1200 subscribers right now) and it definitely feeds in to my paid course.

It's a really good symbiosis of offering free content to draw in interested folks, while also building an audience for any course launches. Plus I've heard many times that people bought my course because of my YouTube videos.

@stuter12 -
Railscasts hasn't been updated since 2013 :D

I definitely think potential is there- the hardest part is building an audience.

People pay for things like JavaScript/React/etc all the time! Wes Bos' latest "Advanced React" course has sold 11,000+ times. And I have no reason to believe that Wes is lying about his number of sales.

Personally, I took the last year off (new baby, life in general), but before was putting out tutorials on Youtube pretty consistently. Currently at ~1500 subscribers with 200+ videos, but it takes a lot of work! I use Youtube to build out my email list.

Posting your content to various subreddits is discouraged, engaging in Twitter conversations takes a lot of time- a lot of the audience building is hard work.

After you have an audience, actually taking the time to build out a course and sell it is hard in its own right.

I personally believe this is one of the main reasons why platforms like Udemy exist- they have a pretty much built-in marketing for you.

Note that I recently started screencasting for Packt Publishing, so I'm trying to build my audience via a traditional publisher too.

Yeah, that could be a problem. I think they succeeded because they provided some very, very valuable content. And it depends on your subject. I don't think there are any chances these days to attract paying users willing to learn JavaScript. But 3D modeling or machine learning - may be.

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