Have you ever created or launched courses on platform like Udemy or Teachable?
I want to learn about the experience of launching and growing the audience for selling online courses on platform like Udemy, skillshare or using platform like Teachable, Thinkfic etc.
I have a course on Udemy. It gets students via a couple free videos on YouTube and Udemy sends me the rest of the students. It's an evergreen course and still earns me some revenue to this day, but I'm not sure I'd recommend doing it my way. It seems to me that there are a few ways of creating and selling online courses.
I didn't do it this way. The very serious method requires you to invest $1k-$2k with a reputable coach to learn their system, but I can't vouch for any coach. You'll have to do some deep market research, talk to customers, pin down pain points, validate your ideas, figure out which skills of yours are the solution, build a basic blog and email list, do some guest blogging for traffic, etc. For those who do it right, even one course could potentially be very profitable.
I read about this in a cheap Kindle book and this is similar to what I did for my project. Basically, produce video tutorials on Youtube in whatever subject you have expertise in, build up some free YouTube traffic, and in the meantime, build more videos for a "premium" course on Udemy. (This would be a course for people who love your free YouTube content but want more.) At this point you'll have two variable streams of traffic - students coming from YouTube and students coming from Udemy. Unless you build out a channel that gets lots and lots of viewers, your income is probably going to be capped relatively low with this method, but it's quite simple. It also takes time for videos to gain traffic, assuming your videos are consumed and liked by people on YouTube.
If your expertise lends itself to several courses, build several on Udemy and cross sell them to your students. (You'll have to check what Udemy's rules are on promotion since they may have changed.) From what I recall, course owners are able to offer their first course for free as a lead generator if they want too. This can be combined with the YouTube lead generator tactic.
Conclusion:
In retrospect, if I was where you were today, and didn't know if I wanted to put the effort into building up a big YouTube channel as a lead generator, and I was super serious about making this my main side income earner, and I had at least one marketable skill to teach, I would invest in a $1k-$2k system (with the right teacher!) to get it right the first time.
By the way, you could use your own platform for Methods #2 and #3, but you'd lose out on the students that Udemy gets you for free. That said, if you plan to position your course at a premium price, you'll probably want to go the self-hosted path and learn from a proven system.
Thank you so much for this in depth details.
Based on your analysis, YouTube is the biggest traffic generator for your course.
What are the other sources to generate the traffic for your course?
Have you tried to provide free coupon codes for your course on various website? If yes, How was your experience?
Can you share link of your course?
As mentioned earlier, if you have a ton of useful content to offer in the form of YouTube videos and lots of courses on Udemy, the traffic problem might be partially or fully solved by the platforms themselves. That said, even being prolific still means hoping for traffic via 3rd-party platform cooperation (and waiting at least many months for traffic to start growing) rather than being in control of a traffic source like pay-per-click advertising.
Yes, to build momentum and get initial reviews, I provided free coupons to my target audience. I found them via Facebook pages and groups. Ironically, it was not always easy to "sell" free coupons; some people were very receptive while others didn't jump on the offer.
Sorry, but not at this time.
That reminds me, ads are typically recommended to those who want to sell premium priced online courses, especially in order to scale. These course makers won't use Udemy - they will go the self-hosted membership site or Teachable route for reasons including the ability to use tracking pixels and measure ROI.