Everything You Need To Know About Making A Course On Udemy
How I came to know about Udemy?
Who doesn't know about Udemy :) but my story is a little different, I came to join here as a learner and student, done various free courses and never bought one. I used to think about those people who buy courses on Udemy as foolish, I mean what is the point to buy a course when you can get a lot of data available on the internet online.
But I was wrong! I got a job as a trainer and now learning and giving training was part of my full-time job, I have to learn those topics which I am going to deliver and get 100 % competency on them because you never know what the audience will ask during the training session, so you have to be prepared.
Once I got a very amazing training opportunity, the firm who appointed me asked me to get prepared for a training topic because I have to deliver that training in front of an audience after a month. So, I went to the internet searched .. and found nothing. Whatever on the internet was insufficient, scattered, and not up to the mark.
I was exhausted, I called another trainer who was not in my city, and asked him to help me, teach me that topic and I offered him to pay him the heavy amount in return because I want to get that contract at any cost. That friend was generous enough to charge nothing from me and provided me with the training material, presentations, trainer guidelines and described me on the phone call about the topic.
That day, I found out, knowledge is not free! There is a price for everything out there. If you are getting something for free then that might not be a quality product. You have to pay the price for the quality.
That was the day, I found out the objective of Udemy — which is quality! provision of quality, carefully designed, and outlines the content that will add value to someone's career profile and knowledge bank. Paying a hefty amount is really not a big deal when you can use that knowledge to earn more bucks in your job and career.
Why I developed my first Udemy course?
I was delivering training on various topics for a while (umm … for about now for more than 9 years now). It is my everyday job to attend courses, make some new courses, deliver training sessions, make training quotes for prospective clients and companies, training content outline making, line out the target students, and reaching them.
Over a period of time, I know that there is a topic on which I am an expert, so I started making a complete detailed course on that topic. I started to deliver that topic and that particular topic somehow became my identity.
That was the moment I decided that this is the time, I want to reach towards the masses, to share the knowledge to those people who are far away and who can not reach me physically and in normal circumstances. So I searched for an online platform and reached Udemy.
Why I selected the topic for Udemy which I was 100% competent on?
As I told that this topic was becoming my identity, whenever people in my city want training on this topic, there is only one name which is my name in their mind. Though there are many other trainers, I have good marketing skills, so they definitely call me for training on that particular subject.
This is the reason I developed my first course on the subject for which I was 100% sure that I can develop the sort of training which can be a competent one. And this is what Udemy is all about, giving your best shot and wait for dollars ticking in your account :)
If you have the very best topic then you don't have to worry about competition, because in that case the Udemy team themself do marketing of your course and it will be displayed on the list on the top. The most important point is, never compromise on the quality of the content, this is not Facebook, Youtube or Instagram, this is Udemy which is a learning platform, no one want to learn from an incompetent teacher.
The best selling instructor on Udemy summarizes this in these words:
The best instructors sometimes spend months researching and developing their courses. The results you get are very often in direct proportion to the time and effort you put into course development.
Lawrence M. Miller
Learning course creation
Learning course creating was moderately difficult, so if 1 is very easy and 10 is the hardest, the Udemy course creation difficulty level will be 4 :) This is how it is that much easy.
Udemy has developed lots of tutorials, which contain videos from defining your audience and objectives, outlining your course, setting up your filming studio, audio setting, creation of your first lecture, create your course landing page, price your course, closed captions development and editing.
By reading the above titles you can see that Udemy has covered each and everything which can create a question in the mind of the instructor, so they have already developed guidelines, videos or tutorial and uploaded on their platform, this is how it makes all the things very easy.
My suggestion is active on the instructor's community, see how the other trainers are doing, read basic course creation guidelines, resolve your confusion, and start the creation of your course.
The tip is first to learn from Udemy and then go for the creation of your course. The link to learning course creation is https://teach.udemy.com/
Learn about course creation and video editing?
Do you know what costed me to record my entire first course? $ 10 ONLY.
And this 10$ is for buying a new BOYA BY M1 Microphone because of no compromise on audio quality! Never! Well to some extent you can compromise on video quality, but the audio is perhaps the most critical part, audio counts 70% of all the recording.
Students who are learning from you can tolerate the video, but they can not tolerate a bad audio quality, training is all about listening and if they are unable to listen to your voice, or bad voice, then how will they be going to learn from you.
Recording equipment selection is flexible, you can get DSLR+Blue Yeti or Snoball microphone which can total for about couple of hundred dollars, or you can just ignore everything and just get a good microphone and record the course by your mobile camera, or if you don't want to show your face then you can only record the screen and then voice over that screen recording.
There are also three modes of recording, let me clarify to you about that too:
- Talking face — in which you will be appearing on the computer screen and explaining about the topic. This is better for many types of courses, most in which you don't have to show slides, like personality development courses, soft skills, courses which don't require any software working — seeing your face on the screen will build more trust in the audience.
- Screencast — in which you are elaborating on the PowerPoint presentation or any other software presentation like Prezi etc. Screen recording is good when you want to record working on any software or any coding exercise, etc. It is also good when you want to deliver from the presentation and don't want to show your face on the camera due to many reasons (like you are either camera shy or not confident enough) in that case you have to double your effort on the audio quality and attractive presentation.
- 1 and 2 combined — sometimes you have to show your face and also time to time show your slides to keep the audience engaging and bring creativity.
The above-mentioned modes have different benefits and disadvantages, they require different expertise and equipment as well, you can decide what suits you.
Curriculum Selection, why I picked a popular course?
Despite having thousands of courses on MS Excel, every new day instructors are making more courses related to MS Excel and they all are doing great business. Though some are learning 100$ while some are earning 10,000 $ all depend on the content, outline, duration, and course quality. One of a famous instructor in Udemy once said:
Before developing your course take the three highest rated courses in your category. Why are they the best? Why are they selling while others are not? How can you do better than them? That should be your standard.
Lawrence M. Miller
Udemy is offering a great tool, its called marketplace inside, can be accessed from this link https://www.udemy.com/instructor/marketplace-insights/, the trick is, write a topic name and it will give you its demand and availability in the below-mentioned form, take a look:
Keep on typing various topics and find out on what topic you can make your next course. Imagine you find a topic which has high student demand and a low number of courses, that will be Jackpot!
Even if some topics have a high number of courses, still the market and demand is so big that almost every instructor is earning, just like gave the example of MS Excel, there are examples when people joined Udemy as instructor four years back and developed an MS Excel course while there are several thousand MS Excel courses already present and they still captured the market because of the quality of the course :)
Like the below-mentioned course Python Hacking, have higher demand and low courses, this can be a moneymaker! Now I have given you the hint, go and make some bucks :)
Let’s Talk About Perfection!
And with this, let's talk about perfection, if you launch a course which you didn't make by your heart, or is such that if it is been attended by yourself, you will give yourself a 2 star. That kind, of course, will not get viral, or get a very small and slow response.
However, this doesn't mean that you wait for perfection, nothing is perfect better launch a course if you still think it is not perfect, but try to add value and quality in it, over time you will get perfect in your work and your courses will start to speak about your quality of teaching and credibility but don't postpone launching a course just because you think that it isn't perfect!
Promoting my first course, free coupons and other strategies
If you have developed a course then you can wait so that the prospective customers available in the marketplace which is about more than 5o million now … WOW! That’s Huge! If some of them are interested they will reach your course through searching inside the marketplace. If your course has potential then it can catch the audience.
Or else you have to show some activity, as per my experience an instructor profile becomes stronger by increasing the number of following things:
- Number of courses
- Number of students
- Numbers of reviews
You can wait and watch for these to automatically grow or you can take some steps
How can one increase the number of courses?
It simple. Develop more courses. If you have made one don’t wait for some magic to happen, start making another one, the best selling instructors on Udemy all having at least more than 10 courses or at some have as many as more than 70 courses. There is also a phenomenon in which many instructors have evidence that they are getting more sales in the month in which they launch a course (and the sales are not specific to that particularly launched new course) but launching a new course has an overall positive effect on your sales, a spike in dollars in your account!
Remember, if you are serious about Udemy, Udemy will be serious about you :)
How to increase the number of students?
In general, if you have a very good course, your A-game, then you will get new student enrollment every new day and the number of students will be increasing gradually, now if you want to accelerate the procedure then you have to take benefit of the coupons.
What are the coupons?
Udemy allows instructors to distribute their courses for free or on discounted prices to the students. What you have to do is make coupons, the coupon making process is as below:
1. Go to your specific course (for which you want to make coupons)
2. Goto promotions and then click on make a new coupons
3. The system will ask you to what types of coupon you want to make, 100% free or of some specific price and for how many days, right now coupons are available for 30 days or 10 days limit
4. Upon clicking make coupon the screen will show you the coupon code, the time limit, and the number of coupons available for that specific coupon code.
Upon generation of the coupon, it will also generate a specific link upon clicking that link a prospective student will directly avail that discount.
Where you can market that coupon?
Well, I have used LinkedIn, I have more than 9000 followers on LinkedIn and more than 11000 on Facebook, already had a following of students and professionals who like my work and know me for my job and profession. A post regarding a free course on Udemy got more than a hundred people instantly interested in it, they wrote their emails in the comments and I extracted all those email addresses and shared the coupon code link. People started to share that code in their circles also and despite having 100 people interested I got more than 500 students registered in two to three days, this way you can accomplish your goal of more students and this will make your profile a little heavy in the platform.
How to increase more number of reviews on your courses?
Positive reviews is a must for your profile stand out from others who are in the competition. The reviews are like testimonials, which showcase your work. Normally a student who signs up for your paid course also leave reviews (either positive or negative) however this ratio is very low in free students (students who signed up for the course using the coupon code), so this is one of the drawbacks of the coupon system of promotion. Tips to increase the number of reviews include asking your audience about giving a review in a decent manner, beware, don’t ask them for giving a specific type of review like if you ask someone “please give a five-star rating” this will be a Udemy policy violation. However, if you want to ask then ask decently like, “please give an honest review, your feedback will help us in improving this course”
My first sale — 17 $ from a Saudi Arabian Udemy Student
Now, this is somewhat the sad part, for about one year of development of my first course I didn't have any sale, not a single dollar in my account, this was the most demotivating factor and after first-course development, I left Udemy to never to return back.
In the mid of April 2020, I got my mobile ring and when I looked at it, I saw my first sale 17 $ in my account, and that is when it opened my eyes, I went to Udemy again and heading towards the instructor community to see what is happening, there I communicate with many instructors, this was the first time I was into the community and talking to other instructors and it was an amazing experience. People are sharing how many courses they made, they were sharing how many million dollars they had made so far, and my eyes were wide from amazement, I told myself if they can do it why can't I and then I started to know more about and to ethically hack the algorithm :) and I came to know that in order to boost your income you have to:
Develop more courses
Invite a lot of free students to your courses
Promote your courses on the internet
So that was the day I started developing courses on Udemy and since then making at least one course every month, and the graph is going upwards by the grace The Almighty. This was an amazing experience that moved me towards thinking seriously about Udemy and this is why I am able to write this.
The more courses the more sales
Phil Ebiner who is the Top-Rated Instructor, and have more than 1 Million+ Students, do you know how many courses he had published to date on Udemy? 119 courses! See what he says about more courses:
At the end of the day, what ends up making more money is making more great courses. So while I truly believe building your brand (website, YouTube, social media) is super important for the long run, I also think if just starting out, you might want to just focus on creating as many good high quality courses as you can. Phil Ebiner
What you just need to do it to stop procrastination and stop wasting your time once you have developed your course, new instructors have the following bad habits:
- Checking the details of the newly enrolled students,
- Checking how many dollars they have earned from time to time.
- Shocked on every negative review, ponder on it, overthink and waste their precious time
- Go and read all the comments on Udemy instructor community, this becomes their new entertainment
Don't involve in all the above-mentioned stuff and better utilize your time and efforts in creation of new courses. You must make a target to launch a new course every new month, set your goal, my goal is to make 50 courses by the mid of 2021. Let see if I achieve this target or not, though I have not even planned it how will I do it, still a plan is better than nothing in hand.
Lockdowns all over the world and boost in Udemy sales
With the lockdown imposed all over the world, many people were sitting at their homes, most of them are wasting their time and procrastination, while there were people who are wasting their time in entertainment, some took the matter in their own hands and try to learn new skills when they come out of the lockdown so that if they have lost their jobs they have some additional qualification with them to display, decorate and strengthen their resume.
And with this in mind, many people started to do online courses, so it happened with me when I opened LinkedIn one day and found in my posts a trending posts in which an Indian girl has posted how she did 120 online courses, whoaaa… like seriously. So this was just a touch of how people were and are still motivated about online courses, some are there for free but those who want quality content and actual learning are there to pay amounts in order to do that.
The new normal
Online courses and classes are here to stay. This is the new normal individual and companies will be adopting in the coming years, about two years back I heard from CEO of School of Learning:
Withint 5 years classroom session will be abolished and people will be only doing online courses.
Waqar Ali
Fortunately, or unfortunately, this happened in two year and now classroom sessions ended, people are more into online courses for many reasons:
- Due to the pandemic and lockdown, people these days don't want to go out and interact with masses
- Online courses and learning is more flexible, you can attend a class in the mid of the night as well
Start making a course now
So now that you have learned and understood whatever I have defined, what are you waiting for, start making a course now, give valuable content to the audience and start making some bucks! You just need a few things:
- Motivation to make an online course
- Expertise in some subject or topic, or even if you don't have enough, go online out there and learn sometime and then make a course on it
- Equipment, minimum, a mobile phone, laptop, and a microphone.
I hope you liked what you have just read, if and hundreds of other instructors can make money through Udemy then you can make some too. Besides, think about you can get students learning the skills you are teaching all over the world, the comments in the review and praising in the personal messages, the impact you are creating in the life of the people is satisfying! Thank you for reading this article and if you are an instructor on Udemy, comment with your course name or link I will surely visit and give you some tips.
