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From 0 to 8,000 students in 2 weeks on UDEMY
In 2 weeks I’ve got over 8,000 students and plenty of good reviews. The catch? I never did…
iulianivg.medium.com
Congrats on the success, but I feel the section about promoting your course is a little light. How did you end up promoting your course? Where did you find success, and which of the places did poorly? Wat kind of promotion did you do? Was it blatantly obvious that you were there to sell a course, or you spent weeks building credibility before doing it. All this information would have made it more valuable to the reader because promotion is where most IHers struggle.
Thank you!
I spent no weeks building credibility. I did not do paid promotions, just free advertising. The biggest success is on LinkedIn groups, seems like people are very serious there and also open-minded enough to try new things. But they will also be very challenging if you can't communicate properly.
E.g don't tell a random audience about your start-up if your start-up doesn't create value for them. You'll get criticised 😬
Places that did poorly? Can't relate, I communicate my value proposition well. I think there was one company that runs a telegram group for discounted Udemy courses. I've got over 800 students from them but I have no clue how they found out about my course.
Maybe they are trying to grow before they can charge for promotion and I was lucky.
What is more amazing is my conversion rate. I'm still waiting for it to be calculated but it's estimated at 68.52% lol
Maybe that's wrong, we will see in January when I get my stats.
I think not only IHers struggle with promotion but every entrepreneur in general. My problem with IHers is that everyone thinks they can only sell to an existing audience but people don't generally put enough effort into promotions. If you spent 3 months building you SaaS, spend 3 other months promoting it.
I have two active courses on Udemy. They unpublished the third one, Google Analytics practice tests, as they no longer allow only practice tests. Across the course, there are 10,500 students and average rating is 4+.
One thing that gives me a lot of kick is that I've customers (aka students) on every continent and in 142 countries!
I tried paid ads on Google, Bing and YouTube. But the RoI wasn't great, especially with Google Ads. Udemy keeps discounting the courses and the CPC for my keywords is too high. Bing has better RoI due to lower CPC but the volume is missing.
One of the things I did initially was to distribute free coupons on many coupon sites. That drove couple of thousand enrollments and 50+ reviews. I also answered questions on Reddit and Quora to drive some traffic. Gave away the course for free to some users on Reddit in exchange for the person to review the course on Reddit. Worked out well.
Have stopped promoting it for the last 12-15 months as changed my focus to building my sales and lead gen consulting business. The category is also saturated on Udemy and that affects the conversion rates.
My other course on MS Project 2010 is pretty old. It's pretty basic and I think the quality of recordings is not great. But it's doing ok without any promotion. Probably because the rating is good and there aren't too many competitors.
Thanks for sharing this meaningful information. You are the real PRO here and Oh My God, 142 countries? That's amazing in my opinion.
I don't know how to ask coupon sites to distribute my course, but you have enlighten me a little bit. In my opinion, you shouldn't offer free coupons if your course is great. But again, it depends on your market strategy, release strategy and everything else.
I plan to make next courses in something like web development or blockchain, mainly programming. If you ever want to collaborate on anything or just talk, feel free to reach me https://twitter.com/iuliannnnnnnnn
Thanks for your encouragement! Free coupons are good to get initial traction and reviews in competitive categories. Odds are stacked against a new course with zero enrollment and no feedback when others are having thousands of students and solid reviews. Free coupon solves this empty house problem.
But if you are in a less competitive category, free coupons may not be needed.
Iulian, This is awesome, I would be glad if you could tell me more. I've been working hard on LinkedIn and organic promotion for a couple of weeks - posting in thematic communities. The product is the Mind Tracker, an emotion tracker.
Congratulations! Being a long-timer udemy learner myself, I spend more time one udemy than Facebook/Twitter/YouTube.
I am also thinking to launch something but still, I hesitate. I admire what my favorite teacher on udemy is doing awesome job and that makes me hesitate to create an yet another course.
It’s a weird feeling, most of what I know is from udemy, and so I do t how to create new content to create new value or help more students.
Any ideas on how to deal with this issue?
You have a beautiful list of life achievements:
https://amazingandyyy.com/
For the first time ever I find someone who is so transparent.
I probably have so many curiosities about how well your projects are doing and if they are successful: DecoHash, BSOS, BNS, Leptin, Revieweer, Shepherd and all others!
I think you should add a Udemy course to all those beautiful achievements. Feel free to get back to me with any questions, I'll offer my help.
Will it be a course about development, perhaps anything to do with blockchain?
I tried reaching you on Twitter but you don't allow anyone to message you :)
My account: https://twitter.com/iuliannnnnnnnn
Thank you so much for your kinds words! Just change my Twitter setting!
Most of my projects doesn’t acquire enough user then died.
For udemy courses, I am thinking about MERN stack or ethereum DApp or kubernetes, but since I learn most of these on udemy, and each topic already have the best teacher in my opinion, I am afraid I cannot be more valuable to others.
Great read. Do you push other products/services in your app that you actually own?
Thinking about using udemy as a growth hack for my SaaS.
I love the fact that the engagement of your students is sky high, which is indicative that they may be receptive to tools/content you create that compliment the course.
I own no app, just the course.
But pushing products/services of a SaaS of yours sounds good as long as those satisfy the need!
Just quickly wanted to ask anyone here who is selling Udemy courses, have you used paid advertising and was that successful? Was thinking into looking at a Digital Marketing team to take care of it.