This is a question all Udemy instructors will ask themselves sooner or later: how to sell courses on your own site and NOT on Udemy!
Udemy is one of the world’s leading online learning platforms and was set up in 2010. It now has over 20 million users. I have been selling courses on Udemy since 2013. I have made 6 figures profit, got 1,406 reviews (4.5 stars) from 90,567 students in 194 countries with Udemy!
But … and it’s a big ‘but’ … It’s Udemy’s platform, they make up all the rules, they keep the customers’ email addresses, and they sell most of your courses at $10.
The money is addictive. But, like most addictions, it gives you bad habits. And selling courses for $10 is a bad, bad habit.
I’ve tried to sell my courses at high prices and opt-out of the Udemy’s 25% and $10 promotions. But Udemy customers tend to consume the high-priced courses within 30 days so that they can get a refund. Udemy customers expect cheap courses. This is yet another reason why selling on Udemy isn’t a long-term business strategy.
You need to sell courses on your own site so you can charge proper prices, and keep the customers’ email addresses so you can market to them in the future to get repeat sales.
Get customers off Udemy and on to your site and social channels
But, how do you get customers off Udemy and on to your site? It’s not easy… but here are some ideas …
Make sure you have consistent branding. Make sure it’s the same name on your Udemy profile, your website, your YouTube channel, and your social media accounts.
And, brand everything: video intros, lower thirds, video outros, downloadable materials, Udemy announcements, etc., with your website domain.
So, for example, my profile name on Udemy is “Rob Cubbon”, my website is RobCubbon.com, my YouTube channel is called “Rob Cubbon”, my Twitter, my Facebook page and so on. So my Udemy students can easily find me elsewhere.
Also, remember, Udemy lets us send students to our website or squeeze page where we collect email addresses in the last video of our courses. But many students, alas, don’t make it to the last video.
In many of my course videos, I use my own site and offers as “examples” to explain something I’m teaching. This way Udemy customers see my site and offers within the course.
A great idea is to start Facebook Groups in the subjects of your courses. You can send them to your Facebook Group in the first or second video of your course. This is really effective.
Selling courses from your site – Thinkific, Teachable, LearnDash and Kajabi
Personally, I use Teachable but I would recommend Thinkific. Both platforms allow you to set up a Learning Management System (LMS) on your own domain, meaning you get some of the SEO-juice from your site for your school .
If you have a WordPress blog already, then you could consider LearnDash, which is a WordPress plugin. LearnDash will work with most WordPress themes and is the cheapest option.
I would recommend Thinkific over the rest. Teachable has bad support and is a difficult company to work with. Thinkific are nice people! My links for Thinkific and LearnDash are affiliate links.
With the above options (Teachable, Thinkific and LearnDash), you would need to purchase hosting (if you want to use your own domain) and email marketing system to work properly. I would recommend Aweber and MailChimp for email marketing, as they are the cheapest options.
Kajabi is another option but is much more expensive. True, it combines the hosting, course selling, blog, and email marketing in one platform. But it is more expensive than buying these elements separately. If you already have a site and email lists, getting Kajabi would be a big mistake in my opinion.
There are other options. New Zenler, Podia and LifterLMS. Sorry, I don’t know anything about these. A job for another day.
So, how do you beat the Udemy addiction?
In the video below, I explain how you kick the Udemy habit and start selling courses on your own site:
This is what works for me: make two versions of a course. A good version, and a lite version.
The good version of your course should be maybe 4+ hours of video, more access to Q&A with you personally.
The good version is a more immersive course. It really gives the customer the benefit of all your experience in the subject of that course.
The lite version of your course should have 50% less video, less material, and no access to Q&A with you personally. It only teaches the student a basic outline of the subject of the course but doesn’t give that immersive experience.
Of course, you put the cheap lite version on Udemy. You don’t promote this course. But you do the announcements on Udemy to promote the Udemy courses to your Udemy followers.
And you put the expensive good version on your own sites, and you charge $99, $197, $297, or $499, or whatever. The sky’s the limit.
Funnel all your promotion to the course on your own site. How do you get to the level where you can do that?
For me, it’s all about the email list
You need a few thousand email addresses in order to start making a decent amount of money selling courses from your own site.
Your email list of a few thousand addresses needs to be “hot”. That means have just got the email addresses and you need to be giving them good content through emails as well so they trust you.
How do you get email subscribers?
Well, I’ve found one of the best ways to get email addresses is through offering free courses.
I find it best to offer a FREE, half hour long, “taster” course so a student can experience your teaching style and see if they like you.
By signing up for the free course, they are automatically signed up to one of my email lists. And, hopefully, they won’t mind getting emails from me as long as these emails provide value.
The most important thing is to grow the email list, and that takes time.
It’s not going to happen overnight. You can’t flip a switch and go from making money on Udemy to making money on your own site.
It’s going to take a while. The transition is going to be gradual. You will make money on Udemy as well as your site at the same time. So there’s no great hurry, take it slow.
You’ll have to work quite hard on blog posts that get traffic, YouTube videos that get traffic, and Facebook Groups that get traffic. And, what do you do with that traffic? You point that traffic towards your free course to get the email sign-ups.
I can’t go into it all in this blog post, but I have free courses and one of them tells you exactly how to do this: How To Make Passive Income With E-books And Video Courses.
Feel good about providing value!
You’ll feel good about charging different prices for the same course because it’s not the same course! The better version of the course is charged at a higher price. The lite version of the course on Udemy is charged at a cheaper price.
For me, the secret to a successful business is to enjoy providing value to your customers.
What do you think? What is the best way to maximize income from your courses? What is the best way to help the most people? Please add your comments below …
great, great advice Rob. It’s all there. The simple business plan. Now let’s see if I can wash, rinse and repeat 🙂
I’m sure you can. And i’m here to help if you need anything!
Thanks Rob – this is really interesting as I am (just) getting to the stage of thinking about creating a course. Good timing. But my list is only just starting so I need to work on that bit first I think.
Yes, Jayne, and as I say in the article, you can do everything at the same time: Udemy, your site and your list. It’s daunting once you get started but it’s all doable! However, if you don’t have much of a list or an audience, then Udemy is an excellent short term option.
Nice…very detailed article, Rob. I have always disliked selling on Udemy for peanuts. I can’t risk taking years to earn a decent income from $10 courses. I will surely go with your suggestions and choose thinkfic soon when I’m ready.
Thanks for your suggestion.
PS: BTW, I’d appreciate your personal email address. I need to discuss something mutually beneficial with you if you’re interested, sir. I look forward to your response.
Hello Adeniyi, Udemy is right for some people at certain times but, like you, I think selling courses for $10 all the time is counter-productive after a while. Best of luck selling your courses when the time comes. My email is rob at robcubbon dot com.
Thanks for sharing your contact, Rob. I appreciate. I already sent you an email 2 days ago and still waiting for your response. I will appreciate your response ASAP, sir.
I’m sorry, Adeniyi, I get a lot of email. Can you send it again? rob at robcubbon dot com – you can see my contact on the contact page of this site.
Thanks Rob,
I’m glad that I read your post this is something I been planning to do for my site.
So Rob thanks again for sharing.
My pleasure, Antonio
Good advise, Rob, thanks
As a teacher You can start at any platform, selling your courses for 10 bucks, got your auditory and switch to personal website later.
But the most important thing is to grow the email list.
thanks for sharing, Rob
Thank you, Valeri
Thank you Rob. I have a course on Udemy that sells well but want to transfer it off from Udemy for the reasons you said. Have you found it easy to drive traffic to your own site without the use of Udemy?
Have you had much success driving traffic from Facebook ads to your Thinkific Courses?
What do most of your courses sell for off of Udemy?
As I say in the article, Doug, it’s a long term game. You have to create content and get people to sign up to your email list to get this to work. I’ve tried Facebook ads, they certainly don’t work for me. My courses on my site have sold from $9 to $499! New courses and course bundles tend to be the highest ticket items. And I do a lot of special offers, Black Friday, etc.
Thanks Rob
I never “gotaroundtuit” making my course & so it never made it to Udemy or anywhere else!
I always thought selling your course on your own site made good sense and this article of yours will give me the incentive to complete my course (main & lite versions) and get selling it on my website & the lite version elsewhere!
I look forward to discussing my success with you with this soon, meanwhile, best wishes, take care & stay safe!
Hello Richard, I’m glad this has inspired you. Getaroundtoit! I wish you the best. It’s great to make money from your courses from Udemy, for your site and from other platforms. Everything is possible!
This comment is for the purpose of testing
This is a test comment as well.
nice writeup again Rob and solid advice. I think during the lockdown Udemy was addicting as it was performing well. I think things are slowing down and after reading Russell Brunson’s Traffic Secrets it is essential to own the traffic and direct them to your own school. Good Lessons on consistent branding.
Well I have created a lite version, I’ve created bundles on my teachable to differentiate from udemy.
I used to do the free courses but I had I didn’t have a good conversion rate upselling them to the paid course.
I would like to create that super high ticket high quality masterclass that I could charge proper prices and ween myself off of udemy one day
Hey, Greg, Udemy was quite addicting before the pandemic, but I know what you mean, things were quite crazy online during March and April! Yes, in order to ween yourself off Udemy you will have to experiment with lots of different price points and product types. Thank you for your comment.
Thanks Rob .. I’d already made a decision to create courses and offer them via Thinkific – so good to see they get your thumbs up. This will be my first course, so don’t have to get off Udemy – but I love your suggestion of creating two courses … a lite for Udemy and a more comprehensive one for Thinkific. Diversification seems like the best of both worlds.
Question … do you give the courses the same name, or do you differentiate them in some way?
Hey Jay, thanks for your comment. Good question. Actually, usually, I use the same title (keywords in the title being all important, as always). But, come to think of it, using different titles would be a better idea!
Hi Rob!
As a fledgling course creator I can’t tell you how helpful this article is.
I have been torn about selling on Udemy and other online course ‘marketplaces’ for the very reasons you have mentioned. I think it’s also important that we don’t allow ourselves to be undervalued: we wouldn’t be creating courses if we didn’t have expertise in the area, and I think that our prices need to also reflect the hours of our lives that we have dedicated to our fields. As a PhD student, I have a serious case of impostor syndrome and no doubt that selling my expertise for peanuts would only amplify those feelings of inadequacy!
I do have a quick question though – are we allowed to promote our other courses on Udemy platforms/courses? I’ve done some pretty thorough googling and have yet to find a straight answer. Your article has some great advice on getting around this (so to speak), but I guess what I’m specifically asking is whether if I created a course named ‘[Subject] Lite’ or ‘Foundations of [Subject] on Udemy for example, would I be allowed to mention in the description of the course, or at the end of the course, that the full version is available on another platform such as Thinkific?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated and thanks again for the great read!
Best wishes,
Sarah
Hello Sarah, thank you for your comment. I’m so glad this article has helped you. Udemy have very strict rules about what you can and can’t say on their platform as far as promoting yourself is concerned. You certainly can’t add a link to your site in the course description, for example. You can, however, say what you want in the last video. But, the best ways to do it are more “sneaky”: encourage your students to join a Facebook group, for example. Also, I branded every course I did with “robcubbon.com” which is where they can get all my courses and showed my own website in the course, etc. There are a lot of ways you can subtly direct your course students to your site.
Hi Robb,
What a great share! I have some courses lined up that I want to share via my website, and this article will definitely help me in the process. Several friends of mine are selling courses on Udemy, and I was thinking about doing the same first. But now I have decided to share them via my own website, and I will be following the process you shared. Thanks a lot for sharing this amazing resource, it will help me a lot.
Thank you for your comment, John. But, remember, you can put courses on Udemy as well as courses on your own site.
Thank you, Rob, for this insightful article.
I’m in the process of switching my first online course from PODIA to THINKIFIC.
Frankly, I was not at all impressed with Podia’s support. Also students complained about some of the features. I also did not find the course pages on the site very visually appealing.
Your article has given me some good direction to think about.
Keep up the good works!
Thank you, Carolyn, I’m very impressed with Thinkific as a company. I hope you’re successful selling your courses with them.
The best article I have ever read. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much.