If you’d told me a year ago I’d be selling hundreds of products and had passive income sources paying me thousands of dollars a month, I’d have bitten your hand off to take it.
Now I have it, I want more. Ain’t the male ego a wonderful thing? Anyway, here’s my take on how to make money teaching online.
YouTube
Anyone wanting to sell video courses on Udemy or SkillShare should start out on YouTube. It’s a great place to learn your craft and discover what people like.
I’ve no idea why I started doing video tutorials on my YouTube channel. I saw other people doing them and I thought it looked cool. The game changer was when I bought Screenflow which is a screencasting and video editing tool. Finally I could shoot half decent HD video.
The above video shows you how to create a Udemy lecture by talking over slides in Screenflow. If you’re not of the Mac persuasion you could try Camtasia.
I also bought a Blue Snowflake USB microphone for around $40. It provides great quality audio for the price. The quality improved still further when I put it on a large hardback book upon my desk which brought it closer to my mouth and eliminated the background noise of my computer whirring away.
More recently I have invested in a Samson Meteor or you may like to get a Blue Yeti. Either way, invest in a proper microphone.
Make money on Udemy by creating free courses
Whatever you do, don’t spend ages creating a premium course and put it on Udemy expecting something to happen straightaway. The best way to make money on Udemy is to create an audience on the platform first. And the best way to get followers on Udemy is to create free courses which will attract students.
This goes back to my previous point on YouTube. The minimum requirement for a course on Udemy is 30 minutes video so it’s easy to pick a few of your 5-minute YouTube videos and bundle them together as a free course by adding introductory and concluding videos.
Unfortunately due to a Udemy change on July 1st 2014 you can no longer offer discounts of your premium courses to the students in your free courses. However, it’s still a good idea to create free courses. You will still grow your audience on the platform that well and you can change them to paid courses at a later date and promote to them that way.
The above video shows course editing, coupon setting and announcement sending through Udemy, unfortunately the Udemy UI has changed a bit since I made the video but it’s more-or-less the same.
What else worked for me?
- YouTube – I put about 20-25% of my premium courses and promo videos on YouTube with a discounted link under the video
- Social media – I have got the odd sale from Facebook and Twitter
- Affiliates – this used to work better before Udemy imposed restrictions on putting affiliate links in announcements but many instructors with relevant courses will be interested in cross-promotion
- Kindle – put discounts to courses in Kindle books. I have sold a few this way
- Bundles – Udemy allow you to bundle paid courses together, here is a WordPress web design bundle of mine
- And, of course, my email list – I have been promoting the courses to my list by offering a finite number (last time, 50) of free courses and then others at a discount. This always goes really well however I probably won’t do this again now that I’ve decided to sell the courses at learn.robcubbon.com – my new membership site
What hasn’t worked for me?
- Offering freebies to Reddit, etc – this is encouraged by Udemy but I don’t think it benefits the instructor. You can offer free coupons on sites such as Reddit to artificially swell the numbers on your paid course. Redditors often see this as spammy and the people you bring to the course rarely value it.
- Fiverr gigs. Many people put up Fiverr gigs and upsell their Udemy course through them. I’ve made one gig but it isn’t selling. 🙁
3 things you may not know about Udemy and SkillShare
- The best length for a video is just 5 minutes
- The best length for a paid course is just 1 hour
- The course material does not have to be exclusive to the platforms
What makes a successful Udemy course?
The subject matter has to be something you’re passionate about and something that people want to learn.
The courses that do well are the courses that provide a definite outcome. Courses that teach students a saleable skill or something they can earn money with are particularly popular.
The above video is the promo video for Make Money Running A Web Design Business – my most successful course on Udemy.
What makes a successful SkillShare course?
SkillShare has been around for nearly as long as Udemy has (going live in 2011 as opposed to Udemy who went live the previous year). Like Udemy it offers unaccredited career skills learning with the attention on doing rather than learning.
The platform has so far proved to be a nice little passive income earner as, once your courses are uploaded, there is little work to be done – there doesn’t seem to be the student-instructor interaction that there is on Udemy. The site is not as reliable and doesn’t work as well as Udemy.
Going forward
In the future I’m looking forward to creating new courses, developing my own membership site at learn.robcubbon.com and experimenting with other platforms. Watch this space.
You can do it
I know that some readers of this blog have moved into Udemy and I’m delighted to see some of you making a success of it already. Woohoo!
Udemy may be the market leader at the moment but the online learning space is highly competitive and volatile. However, as long as we continue to push out high quality video tutorials, we’ll hopefully be able to sell our expertise online through a variety of channels.
Find out more about creating video courses that sell here.
Some good tips again Rob. WIll give Skillshare a good too and see what happens
Good stuff Rob! Always fun to generate income by creating products; win-win for us and folks who get real value from our offerings. Thanks dude!
Thank you, Ryan, You’re right, it’s great fun. 🙂
I was inspired by your blog and focused on passive income for last 2 months. I manage to hit $200 last month. Hope it’ll increase gradually.
Thanks for inspiring us and slowing dragging us away from those wrecked cabins at so called corporates 🙂
Awesome, Jay. I’m super excited! The thing about passive income is, if you earn $200 one month, you’ll likely earn $200 the next. You keep at it and it’ll grow. It took me ages to get to $200 a month. Well done!
Thanks Rob. 🙂
Why didn’t you use the platform UseFedora.com to offer your courses? You can set up your courses just as you did in Udemy and even export them from Udemy to your own platform via usefedora.com
You could even host your courses on your custom domain, include what ever links you want, integrate it with autoresponder, host your videos, process payments, offer affiliate payment and management etc.
Depending on the plan, they keep 10% from the sale at most. The only downside is that they don’t have upsells.
Could you give any feedback on UseFedora if you was considering it but decided against it? Thanks
Are you anything to do with Usefedora, Marina?
I am just looking to host my Udemy courses on my own domain and basically it comes to 2 options: UseFedora or the setup you used for your courses with putting all pieces together like payment processor, affiliate program, video hosting with Vimeo and course hosting WP plug-in yourself and pay for them separately. I am just genuinely wondering which one is better and why did you choose the last option for your business. You feedback will be highly appreciated.
Hi Marina, good question. I’m sorry I was suspicious that you were something to do with UseFedora – I really apologise for that. I do get a lot of spam here but I can see you’re genuine. Sorry!
So, the reason I went with Sensei/Membermouse/Vimeo/etc. as opposed to selling the courses via Fedora or Thinkific was control. I want to be able to design the look and feel of my courses on my membership site at learn.robcubbon.com myself. It’s been really difficult, time consuming and expensive. So far it hasn’t been worth it but we’ll have to wait and see on that one.
Thank you for your question, Marina. Speak soon.
Hi Rob! Thank you for your feedback. I had the same concerns that you so nicely addressed in your reply. I think I will go with a less hassle option for now which I guess may not necessarily have the higher costs either… Thanks again 🙂
Let me know how you get on, Marina. 🙂
Hey Rob, enjoyed the post.
Just to give you the heads up, you can actually completely customize almost anything you want in a Fedora site.
Happy to send or reply with some pretty cool examples, if you’re interested.
Cheers,
Conrad
I have created my own school using wordpress, a theme, an excellent plugin called wp-courseware, store and link my videos on amazon S3, I use paid-memberships-pro, and a plugin called media maestro for playing the videos i=on my WP pages, and now everything is super secure and it works, However, I have to manage all the tech problems that arise when students have problems (mine or their fault), and I have to troubleshoot when a plugin or WP has an update and suddenly something doesn’t work. It’s expensive and very time consuming- even without counting the thousands of hours building the courses. My question to you Rob, is how can I sell a 3 month long course on Udemy? I build semester long, college-level, real (as in, this is what students would take during a semester for college credits) courses that result in students being fluent speakers of the language. It’s a three to fourth month process and it would be really hard to break it into many stand-alone pieces/courses (unless I call every hour “part 1”, “part 2”, etc.). Do you know anything about Udemy and people putting really long courses on there? Any suggestions on how it could work? Thanks 🙂
Hello Eva. First of all I’m jealous of you for choosing WP Courseware because I’m regretting my decision for using Sensei. And I’m jealous of you for using Amazon S3 as it’s cheaper than my choice Vimeo.
That aside, I really would suggest you split your courses up into beginner, intermediate (and split that up into pre-, mid- and upper-) and advanced. You’ll make more money and shorter courses sell better on Udemy – I mean, courses of 2-4 hours video. Go back to all your videos and see if you can re-edit them to be snappier 5 minute long as well. (These are just suggestions).
Yes, you can put long courses on there, I just wouldn’t advise it. Talk to the people at Udemy – just email them. Ask a question on this Facebook group. There’s also loads of documentation on Udemy advising on the best course anatomy and structure. And let us know how you get on!
Hi,
I am also developing a website for selling online video tutorials. I am have question regarding hosting vedios. I have two choice vimeo and Amazon S3. How can you say that amazon S3 is cheaper than vimeo. I thought it’s other way, as vimeo Pro is $199 per year which means roughly $17 per month. Can we get amazon S3 at the same price considering 300 members and 300GB bandwidth/month.
Thanks,
Megna
Hi Megna, that was my experience when I was using Amazon S3 – with Amazon S3 you pay for what you use and as my videos weren’t watched much that was very little. It you have a very busy site with lots of videos then you will have a different experience.
Hi Eva,
One of reasons why I didn’t go with Udemy is that they dramatically changed their terms of service: you cannot link within one of your courses to another (for example, to promote a paid course within a free one), you cannot link to your website or blog within your bio or sales page and they regularly put courses on sale for up to 70-90% off. Plus they can change their terms of service to what ever they want any time.
You can get some free courses and put couple other paid courses on your Wish List on Udemi and then watch what happens for a month. They start to send you emails with course promotions and you will see how it works.
What’s wrong with any of the above, Marina? I know I sound trite but I’m not trying to be.
I know Udemy isn’t for everyone. I would suggest the people who wouldn’t benefit from it already have a huge audience and are making ‘000s from their courses already. Otherwise, Udemy can only make you money and build your brand.
Yes, Udemy can change their terms of service at anytime, just like Google, Facebook and Amazon. Only they’re big companies so it’s OK if they do it. 🙂
You definitely can link one of your courses to another – all my courses are linked. I have a special video where I offer discounts to my other courses in both my free and paid courses.
You can add links anywhere in your course to a squeeze page – it’s more effective there than on your profile page which no one looks at and has your home page and social links as well.
You can opt out of 70-90% off sales if you want to but you’d be a fool to, in my opinion.
This is all my opinion. I think people need to get their head around online pricing as different to the pricing of physical goods. I wrote about it here: Udemy’s Discounts & Commissions Work – Why Fight Them?
I get it that people thing they are “devaluing their work” so don’t sell there! Don’t sell on Audible or Amazon Kindle to because they do the same thing – heck, they give stuff away!
Hi Rob, wow $5000 on these platforms is awesome. how do you create a Udemy bundle? Good article. I’m already got courses on udemy and skillfeed. Combined they make another revenue stream. Have you found any other platforms to sell courses on other than these 2?
I’ve used quick time to use screen recordings with yeti blue usb mic. Udemy complains about the audio quality and that I don’t zoom in on the screen recordings making it mobile unfriendly. Does screen flow handle this?
Hi Greg. Thank you! You need to contact Udemy directly to do a bundle. Tell them the courses and the price and they set up a sales page.
I’m starting to see some income from Skillshare.
Yes, I think ScreenFlow will create better video.
Nice work Rob! Very inspiring.
I do think Udemy is a good start – I’m focusing on a short free course there first and will then build on it.
Hey Paul. Good to see you here! Let me know if you need any help with Udemy 🙂
Hi Rob, very interesting. I’m very interested in passive income. I have two questions. 1. Do you have any advice for determining what types of courses are actually popular enough to generate appreciable income? (I need to figure out if the things I know have enough potential to be worth the time to put into creating the content). 2. I’m confused by one thing. You said try to keep videos to 5 minutes and courses to 1 hour. Isn’t the entire 1- hour course a video? What do you mean by keeping video to 5 minutes?
Hi Philip,
1. The Subject Matter of Successful Udemy Video Courses this article may help.
2. 12 x 5 minute videos = 1 one hour course. That’s what I mean. Udemy likes courses made up of short individual videos.
I hope this helps.
Thank you for your comment.
Hi Rob.
Thanks for sharing your practical experience with Udemy/Skillfeed. I’ve been in the planning to begin online courses on Udemy. However, for one my idea regarding PHP development area, I’m not yet decided whether I should sell on Udemy or start my own membership site? (www.phpbomb.com).
Since you are much more experienced in selling courses with trials & errors. Would you please suggest or give me your opinion regarding selling on Udemy VS my own self-hosted site?
I will appreciate your response.
Cheers,
– Zeeshan
Hello Zeeshan,
In answer to your question regarding selling on Udemy vs. on your own self-hosted site – do both! I do. You’ll find Udemy easier, maybe start with that.
Hope this helps?
Rob
How much of this “5000+ a month” is from Udemy and how much is are u making from Skillfeed?
Thank you Rob for this awesome post!
Tyler
I started selling on skillfeed today thanks to your post!
Delighted to hear it! 🙂
Most of it is from Udemy to be honest, Tyler. You can see the exact details about what I earn from my income reports.
Rob, in the income reports the large part is about ‘your promotions’. If you don’t mind sharing, may I ask if your promos were mostly within Udemy students or at other places. I ask this because I had limited success within my Udemy students. Thanks.
Hi Wes, they are mostly to my existing Udemy students in the two promotional announcements that we are allowed to make. 🙂
Hi Rob great idea on creating a course bundle. Is there any information you have on how to create one? thanks
Yes, you just have to email Udemy and ask them to do it for you. Tell them the courses you want, the title of the bundle and the price and they’ll set up a page for you. I think you email instructorsupport at Udemy. Hope this helps, Greg.
Hi Rob. It was good to read your experience about online courses. I am planning to create a course on programming. But I see there are already too many courses there on programming. Should that be discouraging for me?
Why would people go for a new course rather than the already existing ones- with better rating?
Also I would like to know what was your income in first few months when you first put up your courses on udemy?
Thanks
Hello Claire, I can’t tell you categorically if you succeed or fail. Programming is such a huge category that you would expect competition. Usually this shouldn’t discourage you because it means that there is demand out there and, if you create a good course and manage to get buyers, it will be picked up by the Udemy algorithm.
You may find this article useful: How To Make Money On Udemy.
All my Udemy earnings have been detailed in the income reports in this site. I’ve been earning on Udemy for two years. The first few months brought in around $300-$900 a month as far as I remember.
I checked with Udemy support. Unfortunately they no longer support bundles. I think it’s a great idea a la Nathan Barry to offer different packages. I’ve since put together a bundle on gumroad. I really like how they support dropbox uploads. You can protect your course files, it saves storage space, and it’s a fast upload. http://chicvoyageproductions.com/bundle-create-videos-create-a-business-without-a-brick-mortar-shop/
For Claire you might want to check the reviews from the existing course you’re thinking off. Perhaps you could improve on it or even consider publishing it on another platform called Skillfeed. My earnings on skillfeed exceed Udemy last month.
Hi Greg, thanks for letting us know about bundles on Udemy. I didn’t know that.
Claire might also check SkillShare. My earnings from them have been increasing upto SkillFeed levels recently.
Thanks Rob and Greg.
I’ll be uploading my course in next 10 days. I have already been working on it for past 2 weeks. Also I would like to know that what is the best way to get first few customers? Is that the hardest bit?
Yes, Claire, that’s the hardest bit. You could read my latest post: How To Make Money On Udemy
I would be interested on a post from you on SKillshare. I know Nathan Barry uses it as well. I gave one of my courses a try and I think there is more hoops to jump over before you can even sell your course.
Claire I usually get some feedback from the facebook group and make the course free in exchange for some reviews. When I get several hundred students I’ll start charging and send out some social media posts. Most of my posts come from the organic search on the platform. I haven’t had much success on my own promotion.
Maybe Rob can provide his take
I’m very encouraged by SkillShare, Greg. Yes there are more hoops to jump through (and mainly because their site doesn’t work that well) but my monthly income is increasing steadily there – you only start getting paid after the first 100 subscribers to a course. There seems to be more engagement with students there when compared to SkillFeed which could be a good and bad thing. I’ll add SkillShare to my income reports this quarter.
Hi rob
I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. What software do you think is most suitable to record video? Cam studio did not work for me. It’s showing some errors.
My second question is that I’m on my way to publish an ebook on amazon. What is the procedure? Does it include tax ID validation? I’m resident in the uk.
Thanks
Hi Claire, I would recommend Camtasia or Screenflow. This video will help you on the Kindle Amazon non-US resident tax issue (I hope).
Ok thanks.
I want some more help from you. Can I email you?
Anyone’s free to mail my via the contact page.
Anyone’s free to mail me via the contact page.
hmmm! Great article! I make more money with skillfeed than I do Udemy. I actually might try that kindle technique. Pretty genius. Thanks for the tips!
Hello Aaron, Kindle publishing is good for your brand anyway. It can’t hurt! Udemy can be frustrating. It can be difficult to be visible on their site as there’s lots of courses on there but once you get something from them, the rewards can be great! 🙂 Thank you for your comment.
Awesome post Rob, great way for people to get into the “course world” 😉
Thank you, Mads, I’m keen to get as many people as possible making and selling courses because I think there’s a lot of people out there who’d benefit as a result.
DON’T USE THIS WEBSITE (SKILLFEED.COM). I started a free 30 day trial through StackSocial.com and now am being charged $19 after canceling my trial account far before the 30 day trial was completed. How can I be charged after my account is cancelled? These are very poor business practices that will inevitably destroy the unethical companies that act in this manner. I will not be suggesting this website/service to any of my colleagues, and in fact, warn anyone who I come in contact with to not use Skillfeed.com (until this mistake is corrected!!!!)
Pat, fair enough mate. But, honestly, if they really treated people like that they wouldn’t be so successful so I’m sure there is some reasonable explanation. I might be wrong so be sure to let us know.
Hi Rob,
Awesome post, I’m a member of your web design course and have gone through the beginning of it mostly but have yet to complete it.
I also teach on Udemy and have 5 courses there, launched a new one today in fact! I’ve earned about $2500 so far with Udemy without much of any promotion outside of sharing a bunch of free coupon codes.
I originally tried a Wishlist member course with WordPress years back and had trouble when it came to promotion. I considered grabbing ZippyCourses to build another pro WP site for a new course idea I had but I’m still up in the air on the whole promotion aspect where Udemy provides that for me.
I looked around tonight at some different platforms and ended up building out a syllabus in Fedora with my new course idea, the one thing I’m really liking so far is they use Wistia for their videos so they look awesome.
Just curious, what is your go to solution currently? I’m seeing a lot of talk in the comments about some other platforms I should potentially add my Udemy courses too.
I get approached ALL the time from companies asking me to be part of their site, namely SchoolKeep, Patientce.io and there was one other I forget. I just can’t justify the time if they won’t be promoting my existing courses for me.
I figured I’d give Fedora a shot though because they had reasonable free entry and subscription costs, professional design etc. compared to some others I looked at.
Hey John,
Thanks for the positive note on Fedora (and curious to hear Rob’s thoughts as well). I’m the Co-Founder there, so happy to go into quick wins you can do on the marketing side. What topic are you teaching on and planning to use with Fedora?
Side note: have you checked out our course marketing playbook yet?
Hi Conrad,
Thanks for the reply. I am teaching a course on how to start your own digital marketing agency that is niche focused. I believe there is a lack of courses that really teach the setup, tools and work flow processes of running an agency vs. courses that simply just teach “How To Do SEO”
I will check out the marketing playbook in the morning.
Absolutely, and that seems like a great topic.
Hi Conrad, I didn’t want to set up a school with Fedora originally because I thought it wouldn’t be customizable enough. I may have been wrong but I thought that a membership plug-in with my own video hosting would give me more control. I may be wrong and I would be lying if I said that the plugin route is easy, because it isn’t. But that was my original decision and I can’t go back now. 🙂
You can always go back! That’s a sunk cost, and we do have a free plan 🙂
But more seriously, Fedora is actually completely customizable. We have an easy editor for basic changes, but if you wanted to do more you can do that as well. Here are some examples: http://usefedora.com/examples
Cheers!
Hey John, good to hear about your successes on Udemy so far and I hope they continue there and other platforms.
Yes, you will be contacted by many other online learning platforms and most of them should be ignored. However, there are a few that are worthwhile investing time in. Skillfeed and then Skillshare are the first two to try but there are others as well – there are many other places you can try to sell your courses in here: Udemy Alternatives For Selling Video Courses Online.
For my membership site I use the DAP plug-in for WordPress and Vimeo Pro for the video hosting. It’s not perfect by a long way but I like that I can control it within the WP environment. I think going forward I will sell different products there to the products I sell on Udemy et al.
Thank you for your comment.
My Udemy and skill feed earnings been going head to head lately. Skill feeds been pulling in $50-$60 a month and Udemy is almost doing $100 a month on average. I was gonna go even harder but Skillfeed started denying my course submissions. Udemy also has strict rules when it comes to audio so i have to invest in like a snowball. Do you use a snowball mike? if not which mic do you use?
mic*
Now I use the Samson Meteor, Aaron, but I used to use the Snowball but I regret using it for so long. The Blue Yeti is another good choice.