Learnings From Launching My First Course on Udemy
I like getting my hands dirty with some hands-on experiments. Creating a course on Udemy was one of them.
It was a great experience and I’m happy to share my learnings to help you create your first course, too.
Udemy course: Practice advanced SQL queries with MySQL 5.7+ (2016)
Highlights
- It only took me 40 hours to create the course with rating 4.9/5.
- My total earnings so far is 2,220 USD — detailed info at the end.
- The best month was November 2016 which generated 880 USD earnings for me.
TL;DR Learnings
- A great course (rating 4.9) can be created quickly — within 40 hours of work.
- It’s desirable to offer the course for free for the first 2,000 students. The course gets ratings and the number of students is visible — which gives lots of credibility.
- Only 0.5% of all my students have finished 100% of the course lectures.
- Only 1.6% of students have finished at least 50% of the lectures. That’s sad!
- The usual conversion from website visit to purchase is 5%. During the special November promotion (70% off) the conversion increased to 10%.
- Nobody from my email list (1k+) purchased the course, quite surprising. It seems to be better to offer the course to friends for free and ask them for good rating.
- Make sure to clap at the beginning of each recording.
- Search Engine Optimisation matters on Udemy, too. My course started on 4th page and now is on 1st position on 1st page for the target keyword.
- Nobody has shared the course on Twitter. 0% out of 2,500 students.
- The lecturer’s revenue is only a very small fraction of the course price.
- Here in Bangkok, it’s quite difficult to get a room silent enough for recordings. An office rent for one day was my solution.
- A course will never be perfect. It’s better to set a time limit and then release whatever you have created. Cut lectures. Cut corners. Release.
📚 If you’d like to know details, keep reading.
Creating A New Course
When I was preparing the course outline, I defined quite a lot of interesting topics which I wanted to include. As I was preparing the lectures, I saw it all takes more time than expected, so I cut those lectures. The course gets great rating even without them, nobody noticed something’s “missing” :-)
Content
For a technical course you’ll need to create the following content to attach to the lectures:
- Video & Audio (screencast + headshot with voiceover)
- Slides (used Google Presentation)
- Example code (saved to Markdown files and exported them to PDFs)
- Additional reading resources for the students (hand-outs from documentation)
Take-aways & recommendations
- The course will never be perfect, better to release what you have and get first feedback from users.
- Time management & planning is important. I was waking up at 4am to get the lectures done before my kids wake up at 7am.
- Set a goal to spend less than 40 hours and then release.
- I’ve learnt about the microphone types (dynamic vs. condenser), eventually bought Blue Yeti.
- I’ve tried a few screencasting tools, purchased Camtasia 2. There’s a 50% discount for Udemy instructors — google it.
- Add lecture prefixes, i.e. S01-L01 (=Session 01, Lecture 01), it will help you organize the lectures.
- Enable previews of several lectures so that visitors get more confidence (make sure the content is great for these!).
Screencasting
If you record a screencast, I highly recommend to include your headshot, too. It makes the learning experience much more personal.
It takes some additional effort to record both videos and synchronize them, but it’s worth.
💥 Pro-tip: Split each lecture to a separate recording and say: “[CLAP CLAP] S02 L01 3:45pm [wait 5 seconds] Hi everyone and welcome to session 2, lesson 1.”
- The [CLAP CLAP] will generate 2 spikes in your audio preview which you’ll visually see and you’ll be able to sync the 2 videos (screencast & headshot) — make sure the clapping will be visible on the headshot.
- Don’t forget to say the time, not only the S02-L01. You may need to record the same lecture multiple times and the sync will be easier.
Take-aways & recommendations
- Book a room in co-working space for 1 day to record everything.
- Make sure to clap at the beginning of each recording.
- Try to record everything in one day to have the same recording conditions & setup.
Video Recording Setup
I booked a silent room for one day in a co-working space and set up my recording studio:
- Two HD cameras — one is enough, the other is a backup.
- Microphone Blue Yeti.
- Headset Jabra with orange cable — yes, orange is my fav color!
- Pop filter — the cheapest I could find.
- Laptop — Mac seems to be a standard for video recording… #sexy
- Screencasting software Camtasia 2.
- Pen & paper for lecture notes (laptop screen is recorded, so you need additional notes).
- Coffee, tea & water — yes, it will be a long day!
- 2–3 flowers 🌼 to cheer you up 🙂
Course Promotion
I offered the course for free for the first 10 days. About 2,000 students signed up and boosted the good rating.
After it reached 2,000 students, I sent an email with 33% discount coupon to a segment of my email list. Unfortunately, nobody has purchased using this coupon :-/
Take-aways & recommendations
- Offer the course for free at the beginning.
- Find 10 Facebook groups which promote free courses and post there during your launch day (just google it).
- Ask your friends to submit good rating.
Search Optimization
There’s more than 200 courses with the “sql” keyword. I chose 2 keywords to focus on:
- sql advanced (1st position as of writing)
- mysql sql (2nd position as of writing)
Take-aways & recommendations
- Pick a few target keywords and experiment every 3–4 days with course description & lecture titles.
Revenue
You can set the course either to be free or set price from $20 to $200.
Keep in mind that you as a lecturer will only get a fraction of this target selling price.
How Udemy Pricing Works?
- Instructor’s own promotion — the instructor gets 97% of the sales.
- Udemy organic sale — 50% revenue share.
- Affiliates traffic — only 25% of the revenue goes to the instructor.
Read more about the Udemy Instructor Revenue Share.
UPDATE: Jan 11, 2017
- December was a good month thanks to the Christmas promo — $521
- On January, Udemy introduced NY’s promo 😃 and yields to $343 so far. Feels like this will be a good month, too!
Coupons
If you have an audience to promote your course to, you can create a discount coupon and send it to your email list, or share to FB/TW/LN fans.
68% off? Really?!
Udemy can anytime decide to offer your course with a discount. In November 2016, they even offered the course with 68% discount.
Even though you as the instructor don’t like your course to be offered with such a huge discount, there’s nothing you can do about.
Featured Courses
There’s one thing I haven’t figured out yet: how to get to be featured? I believe it would boost the sales significantly.
If anyone knows, please let me know! :)
Communication To Students
Udemy allows to set these automatic messages to students:
- Welcome message to the new students
- Congratulations message to those who finish the course
- Promotional announcement to all students or segments (2 per month)
- Educational announcement to all students or segments (4 per month)
The promotional announcements are great if you have more courses, i.e. one free and one paid. I only have one course, there’s nothing to cross-promote, so I haven’t used this feature yet.
Take-aways & recommendations
- Make it clear that it’s an automated welcome message. People are not stupid.
- No need to ask students to share on Twitter — nobody did it so far.
- Make sure to ask students for good reviews.
- Consider creating one free course to get leads and another paid. Send promotional announcements to the students in the free course.
Course website conversion
I have installed Google Analytics on the Udemy course landing page. The traffic is pretty much stable, around 200 visitors per day.
Usually about 5% of the visitors purchase the course. During the special promotion in November, the conversion was 9–10%.
Sadly, 10 sales don’t mean $500 revenue for the instructor. With the huge discounts (up to 70%), affiliate revenue share (instructor gets only 25%) and refunds, we’re talking about $10 net revenue per day. Not much though.
A Wonderful Learning Experience
Creating my first course has been a massive learning experience & fun. And the little passive income is fine, too! 😃
I hope this post inspired you to step out of your comfort zone and experiment with new courses. Let me know in comments, OK? 👀
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