Make money selling your skills
How to create a lucrative online video course
To make legitimate money online, you have three main options: to sell what you have, what you can do, or what you know. Assuming you know something that others will pay to learn, the last of these can look particularly compelling, and a number of video-based platforms have sprung up to service the demand from both experts and learners.
Udemy is the world’s largest such service, recently welcoming its 10-millionth registered student, but competition is fierce: with more than 20,000 instructors and 40,000 courses, I was curious to find out if it was still a viable platform for selling the expertise I had to offer.
If you build it, will they come?
First things first: your idea must be commercial. As with all products, your course should help overcome a problem, open up new possibilities or be enjoyable for its own sake. You also need to work out whether your audience is likely to be big enough to justify the time and expense of producing it.
One option is to head to Amazon to carry out a general search on your topic, then see how many Kindle books cater to it. If ebooks abound, and they’re in the top 50,000 paid-for titles, this suggests a crowded market. If few titles exist, and they’re outside the top 100,000, the market is either small or poorly catered for.
You should also look on Udemy itself, to see if your topic is covered. If it is, how many courses exist and how many reviews do those on the first page have? (Top tip: click on a course with more than ten reviews and, by scrolling to the earliest ratings, you’ll discover when the course was first published.) The number of students enrolled in the course is less informative, since you don’t know how many were given free access. As a rule of thumb, you can multiply the number of reviews by five to get an idea of the number of students who paid, and then multiply that by half the current price of the course (students rarely pay full price) to estimate total revenue.
Since you know how old the course is, you can divide the total revenue by the number of months it’s been online to get an idea of monthly income. This is approximate, but it’s enough to give you an idea of whether your subject has commercial potential.
The power of marketing
Take a look at pcpro.link/263udemy to see the 800+ courses about entrepreneurship ranked by recent sales. Of these, around 150 have no reviews and, at best, a tiny number of enrolled students. Only around a third of all these courses have ten reviews or more – and remember: this is the entrepreneur category, where you’d expect instructors to have a credible marketing plan.
Relying on Udemy’s marketing efforts to turn your course into a cash cow, then, is akin to believing you’ll become a best-selling author simply by uploading your ebook to Amazon. At its heart, marketing is nothing more than bringing your product and its ideal customers together, and this is something you need to do – not Udemy, Amazon or Apple – if you want to have a chance of success.
I know this because I fell for the implication in Udemy’s pitch to potential instructors that it really was just a case of creating a great course and leaving it to Udemy to promote it. When I launched my course on candle-making in March, I expected sales derived from its marketing efforts to make up the majority of my revenue. As I write, three months later, Udemy and its affiliate scheme accounts for 17% of my total income, with the majority coming from my own promotional efforts.
While I don’t expect a course on candle-making to set the world alight, as such, I wouldn’t have spent the time and money putting it together if there wasn’t a reasonable prospect of it making a profit relatively quickly. I chose that topic because it should appeal to audiences I can already reach, and I hoped it would make a modest long-term return. So far, the bulk of regular sales have come from the main site of my online retailer, along with the occasional email sent to our list.
How to build a course
“I wouldn’t have spent the time and effort putting the course together if there wasn’t a prospect of making a profit”
Udemy has an approval process similar to that for the Apple App Store. Video, which must make up