Vue.js Courses
Vue.js video training
Vue.js 3 came out this weekend, and I made a short crash course about it. I released it on Udemy a few hours after the initial announcement. I decided to make it FREE for the first 3 days of Vue's release, but didn't expect what happened next. The tweet got over 600 likes and over and a few hundred retweets, and over 11000 people enrolled!
Here is a screenshot of the tweet and enrollments: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lmiller1990/electic/master/screenshots/viral.png
Udemy is not at all my main platform but this felt pretty good. I am not sure what to do now - at least I got a nice boost in Twitter followers (300 -> 400) and a bunch of extra students and ratings on Udemy? Any tips on how to capitalize on this?
Since launching my first course, I sold around 60 copies! I have made about $2700 - it's a video course, so it's a one off purchase - no recurring revenue - but I'm still super excited people find my content worth paying for and really happy I made some $ doing what I love, teaching people about Vue.js.
I posted some graphs of my revenue on my personal blog: https://lmiller1990.github.io/electic/posts/20200904_retrospective_on_launching_my_first_course.html
I am not sure why my Stripe revenue is not updating - my IH account is definitely connected to Stripe.
Anyway, I'm working on another course now. I might try Udemy for the next one; see how things go!
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Nice job! I have a few questions if you don’t mind.
- How do you advertise?
- How do you convert on clicks?
- What is your click to conversion ratio?
I have a boilerplate/video-tutorial combo, on a different subject, but I’m struggling to convert page views (from my popular, related YouTube content, and google ads) into purchases. Any advice?
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Hi. What is your subject? Link to your YT? I am not super familiar with YT monetization - my feeling is it's difficult, people go on YT expecting things or free.
I have no idea about click to conversion. I have no tracking on my website what-so-ever, I don't like tracking. I believe most of my traffic is via a free book I wrote: https://lmiller1990.github.io/vue-testing-handbook/.
Another thing I have going for me is Vue.js is pretty new. There isn't a lot of completing content (yet).
PS: I am trying out YT lately: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCydNBt-h2Cox_Ub_GzspneQ. Any tips on YT?
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My YouTube channel is https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiw8awF7g3QO36srPajIHJA
I don’t have it monetized because I haven’t met the required number of hours viewed yet. You need giga views at least weekly to make any money there I think. As for advice, just produce great content. If my videos did well, it was because the competing videos offered poor explanations on the topics I chose. I was unhappy learning from them and so when I figured it out, I would upload a video explained in a way I would have liked to hear when I was learning.
My tutorial/boilerplate topic is node + express + mysql. Maybe a saturated market I guess. My app is at www.mariustemplate.com. I’m not too happy with the mobile version right now but the desktop version is good I think. The content I think is great but people don’t get to find that out until they buy unfortunately. I tried posting a sample video and a video showing what comes with the package, but no luck.
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I don’t have it monetized
I might not have explained myself well. You can still monetize YT without ads. I mean using it as a funnel to direct people to your paid content.
My tutorial/boilerplate topic is node + express + mysql
I think selling templates in general is difficult. There are so many available 100% for free. Selling code to developers in general is not a good market imo - if anything, developers are more likely to pay for knowledge.
As for advice - I think you need to identify a niche. Your content seems useful but very generic - maybe you can make more specialized content. In my case, my course is about Testing Vue.js applications (testing is very general, so is Vue.js, but basically no courses/content covers how to test Vue.js apps).
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Yeah I think you’re right
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I released my course about Vue.js on the 1st of May. It's not fully complete - I only released 4/6 modules (so around 3h of the 4.5h of total content). I did this to get early feedback and generate some income while I finish the last two modules.
I made a $10 of discount code to reward anyone who buys it early, for a sale price of $39 (down from $49). I sold around 35, for a total of ~$1400!
My main marketing strategies have been:
- email. I have a "sign up for early access" form, around 600 people registered their email
- reddit. I am active in /r/vuejs, and post about my course when it makes sense (eg, someone asking for learning resources).
- small banner on my online book, the Vue Testing Handbook.
Some students also reached out with questions, I went the extra mile and organized a pair programming session with them to answer any questions they might have.
I'm really appreciative that people are fronting up $ for my content, since I put a ton of work into it. I'm really appreciative of each student.
I got some great feedback, overall the reception has been really positive.
Next goal is finishing the course (I just finished module 5, so 1 more to go).
Seems like IH Stripe integration is busted, and hasn't updated my sales in over two months.
I have been working on a Vue.js 3 course for a few months. I finished the first 4 of 6 modules - so 2/3 of the course, or around 2.5h of content.
I decided to release the first 4 modules at a discounted rate - I made it $49 USD. I redid my landing page, and it looks a lot more slick now. You can find it here, http://vuejs-course.com/.
I also put a $10 promo code link in my free ebook, "The Vue Testing Handbook", which is where 95% of my traffic comes from. You can see that here: https://lmiller1990.github.io/vue-testing-handbook/
2 people purchased the course in the first 24h! I'm really excited. One of them actually emailed me directly saying he loved the course and asked how he can share it, which feels incredible!! He also found a bug, which I was able to fix immediately.
I feel both blessed and honored a customer when out of their way to email me praise. On releasing the content, my imposter syndrome was at an all time high, so this was really reassuring!
I plan to finish the course over the next few weeks, then do a write up on the lessons I learned in creating my course. I mostly learned how to screencast, a bit about recording, and a LOT about marketing.
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Hey man,
First of all, really nice stuff. Just watched a couple of your previews and am looking at buying. Could you tell me when you are looking at having the course completed? I'm more of a "do it all in one" type of person :-)
Also, out of curiosity, what tools do you use when making videos? I've tried to create some before but the sound quality was always awful and I couldn't find an editing tool that I liked :-\
Can I ask what you use and how you host them?Again, really cool content and thanks in advance :-)
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Hi! Just to let you know, I finished all the content :)
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Hi! Thanks for checking my course out. I am almost finished module 5 - so just one more to go. I intend to finish it in the next few weeks.
For making the videos, I invested in a Blue Yeti brand microphone. I record using Quicktime (comes installed all macOS). I do no editing what-so-ever, I just record each lecture over and over again until I am happy with the result.
I am hosting the videos on Vimeo. This was around $100 for a one year plan, which seems pretty reasonable.
The actual website is built using a node.js framework called Nest.js that I am trying out, seems great so far, which is hosted on Digital Ocean, which is around $5 a month.
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AWS S3 would let you host those videos for pennies. You get like a year free too. It’s crazy cheap. I’m 99% sure you can allow streaming to authenticated users only. Although for only 100 bucks a year for probably less work setting up, seems like a fair deal too.
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It probably would. I don't have much knowledge about S3 - I think $100 a year pays for itself in convenience - as an Indie Hacker, I do try to save wherever I can, but I think easy to fall into the trap of doing everything yourself to save a couple of bucks, which ends up taking you a lot of time and effort you could spend on your product.
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10 people decided my content was worth $20! I am still happy with a one-off payment - I now have 18 videos, each is 10-15m for approximately 3 hours of content.
I'm using the skills I learned to work on a full length course, where students build an entire front-end app from scratch, which I'll be selling for $49.
I'm learning a ton about marketing and email campaigns, I'm really excited to see how my first full length course is received.
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That's awesome. I'll be checking this out over the weekend. Looks like a great resource :)
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Thanks!
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Congrat, keep it up!
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Thanks!!!
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Kudos to you Lachlan!
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Thank a lot! 😇
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Very cool Lachlan, that's a huge milestone! If you can find 10 to pay you, you can find 1,000's more.
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Thank you! I hope so! 🎉
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Hey Lachlan! You're an expert on a niche topic. Your knowledge is certainly worth much more than 20 or 49 bucks!
I don't feel like it's an issue for you so don't take my advice too seriously, but if I were you, I would raise my prices (add a zero to the end for instance, seems reasonnable).
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Hey, thanks for the encouragement! I really appreciate it.
I may start to play around with pricing a bit more - I'm redoing my website's UI to look a bit more professional and modern, so that will probably help justify a bit higher price too (current one is a true MVP, only a couple of hours - but it helped validate the idea!)
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I'm so happy that two people found my content engaging and useful enough that they signed up!
I dropped my price to $19.99 (it's a one off payment; no ongoing costs) to see if people would open their wallets. This seemed to have worked!
I currently have 12 screencasts available and make one weekly. Some things I have done to advertise myself better:
- Twitter. I started to use twitter, posting about my OSS work.
- Reddit. I am active in the /r/vuejs subreddit. I share my latest screencast every week, but post 10-15 times per week, usually helping people with their code.
- I make the latest two screencasts free, so you can preview a new one each week.
- I released the first seven lectures of my upcoming course for FREE so people can get an idea of my style of teaching.
Imposter syndrome at it's peak right now - I've worked on Vue.js for years and am the maintainer of several core libraries but I still feel grossly under qualified to be teaching people.
Anyway, I love teaching so I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing and see how things go!
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If you find 10 people who are willing to pay for your course, 100 people are as well. If you're a maintainer of several vue.js core libraries I have no doubt that you can share some really good value! Keep going!
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That's a great way to look at it! thanks.
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Keep it up! Although online course sales dipped over the last few years, they’re setting a small resurgence. Share value constantly and pick your social platforms wisely. Focus on the networks (max of 2 I would say) that allow you to reach the right customers in a way that showcases your teaching ability.
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thanks for the advice. I agree on focusing on two platforms - quality over quantity.
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I feel ya on the imposter syndrome. Same goes for me when I think about the topics I want to create content for. But don’t take for granted the things you’ve learned over the years that somebody on day 1 would see as being so far above their current understanding.
I would...
Create for people with less experience than you.
Share your successes and mistakes with those whom you share a level of experience/knowledge with.
And document learning from those that are more experienced/knowledgeable than you.
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that's how I try to think of it - although I have a lot to learn, I definitely know more than I did several years ago. Agreed on learning as much as possible from those with more experience than you.
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I finally got the confidence to start charging for my screencasts. I now have a collection of 11, ranging from 10-15 minutes in length. The most recent two are free, so people can get a feel for my content.
I have made a new almost every week this year and have learned a ton about video recording, sound recording, and sharing my content.
It feels surreal to actually have a working checkout (albeit a simple one). Imposter syndrome is so real, but hopefully people find my content useful enough that they pay.
I decided I wanted to keep users who signup up to my mailing list for my new Vue.js course in the loop with an email. I let them know the current status of the course, and gave them links to some of my other screencasts to enjoy in the meantime. In total I sent 259 emails out. I'm using Email Octopus, which I found out about via IH - someone on this platform is building it!
The original goal for my site was to marketing and sell my upcoming Vue.js 3 course. Vue.js 3 has not been released yet (still alpha), so in the meantime I am making a weekly screencasts to get my recording skills up to scratch, and to show people the kind of content I produce.
I've published a total of 5 screencasts since I started doing them (6 weeks ago, only missed 1 week). Over 200 people have registered their email to show their interest in my course!
I'm planning to monetize my screencasts too, when I've got a few more (aiming for at least 10 for now).
I'm thinking I'll make the most recent 2-3 available at all times for free, and the rest viewable for a 1 off payment for around $50. I'm still figuring out the best way to price things, but as long as I can continue to produce content, I think $50 is a very reasonable price to access what will hopefully grow to be hours of useful content. I'd love feedback around pricing strategies.
Link to screencasts: https://vuejs-course.com/screencasts/
The landing page for my upcoming Vue.js video course allows people to register their email to show interest in the course. I plan to send them an email when the course is nearing completion to get feedback and give them a discount on the course.
Prior to releasing the course, I'm making other content to improve my video production and instructor skills. As part of this, I'm releasing a weekly screencast, wher I talk about Vue.js. I've done two screencasts so far.
I post the video on Reddit and Twitter to share it. This week I got a ton of great feedback, which drove my total registered emails to over 100! You can see the thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/vuejs/comments/equumw/video_article_separating_ui_and_business_logic_in/
I do plan to monetize my video content if it continues to be well received - I'm not too sure how to do this right now, though. I don't think a subscription service is the right way to go, though.
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This is really great insights, and well dont to reaching 100 sign-ups!
May I ask if you gained all your sign-ups/traffic from posting on reddit and twitter?
I'm in the video field myself and have found Twitter pretty useless, but I might be using it wrong. Thanks!-
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Hard to say I - I don't do a ton of tracking, try to do at little as possible to respect my users' privacy. That said I can share some information around traffic that I do have. In the last week I had 138 referrer, 92 direct, 21 social, 20 organic.
Within referrer I had 100 from another book I wrote and post a back link on, and 30 from my Medium blog.
The 21 social were all from Twitter - that said a lot of developers hang out there, so perhaps it's a better fit for my product than yours. I feel reddit might be a better fit for videos?
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Amazing, thank you so much!
We're planning to up our game on writing articles and providing more resources as well. Perhaps I should give Reddit a try! :)
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4 Comments
Congratulations! That’s a lot of students. Would you care to share the 1 best thing about Vue 3 for you?
Personally it was my first JS framework - I found it easy to learn. I could not "get" the others (React, Angular) but Vue seems to click with me.
When the 3 free days are over, wouldn't it start monetizing automatically?
You already have high rating for the course, and a large number of people who've taken it, so that should put you in a good position for the paid version, I guess.
Yep, that's the hope! I am new to Udemy, let's see how things go :D