How successful actually are courses?
I'm working through the compilation of a few courses within the e-commerce niche. It's taking significant work and this got me thinking....am I going to earn on this and do others actually earn from a couple of courses? Ecom us is demand now and I've 15 years experience so the courses are very thorough and in depth.
I was going to pre launch but don't want to get my hopes up as starting from a cold position.
I was going to avoid udemy as they take such a large cut but this may be the only choice to get the ball rolling?
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I think it depends. I’ve heard of people like Lee Robinson make $7-$10k to other famous people like Kent C. Dodds make enough to be able to pay off their mortgage. Others like Scott Tolinski and Wes Bos make a lot! I think it comes down to:
And probably a bunch of other factors. I feel like we can all reach a high level of success if we build high quality content and do it consistently :)
Lee wrote up some thoughts here: https://leerob.io/blog/teach-online
My gut feeling is that websites that command subscription revenue for access to a significant backlog of short videos are better businesses. For example:
Courses take a ton of effort and time. I spent years building an audience on YouTube even before thinking about making a course (hellorails.io) . If you want to see the most success you'll need to provide value for a long time prior to breaking ground. You could use Udemy but I'd try your best to have your own space on the web.
I blogged and created screencasts on niched topic (how to code Ruby on rails apps in my case). After a while it got some traction so I built a landing page to capture emails. I got about 700 emails in the end and launched with about 10k of earnings in the first week. It has sense grown past about 25k in a year. Not amazing but not bad for my first major course.
Assuming there's hype behind it, a course can be very successful. The problem with courses from a monetary stand point is that you make all your earnings at once and it fades from there. Suddenly you find start asking yourself if you should make another course like I am right now 😆.
I just quietly launched a platform similar to Udemy that only takes 30%. Email me for details.
As with many of these things, sales is often the hardest part. It really helps if you can build up your own audience / community before launching something.
How many email subs and how many Twitter followers do you have? Do you have anything else that could help, like a related blog with traffic?
I don't have any courses myself, but I think you'll find this video about Udemy helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyUkcjFBy_E
In particular, if you're just starting out, with no audience or proven credibility, Udemy might not be a bad choice after all.