How I Made Over $10k From Udemy – Zero Paid Advertising
I have been a trainer on Udemy since the spring of 2002. Recently I have deducted 10k dollars in net lifetime earnings or net profit. Surprisingly I did all this with minimal effort and zero paid advertising. How did I …
So, as I will see in the screenshot below, I started from very humble beginnings. In 2002 I had some experience in online marketing, but I was timid and could not do more than a few hundred dollars online.
I threw on my first video training on Udemy that I copied the information from a webinar and arranged it in my steps and course. I made my first sale in a few weeks. It wasn’t too much, and frankly, I ignored it. But as you can see a few months later, after doing several courses on the Udemy platform, I made more than $100, and my earnings did not go down, except for about two months where I was sluggish.
Well, the entrepreneurial platform has changed quite a bit over the years. And I’ve used some of their open gaps, which has led me to spend several good months. You are unable to do most of these anymore, but I will list some of them below to give you some ideas. One of the things I think about learning as an online marketer is how to look for opportunities and areas that you can exploit. Because marketing doesn’t change much when you know all the rules, but where you most “easy” money is made when there are new opportunities. And skilled marketers before those opportunities are well-known, and you have to find and exploit the platform you are utilizing, and eventually, it no longer allows.
These are a few things that worked in the past with Udemy which made it easier to earn money on their platform…
- You got paid more – yep, when they first launch instructors were paid 70-80% of the price of the course
- You could email your members links to affiliate products (the first time I did this I “accidentally” made over $400 in one day, more than I had ever made in a month on Udemy)
- Their affiliate platform was integrated into their website and you could promote other instructors courses in your promotional messages (now you can only promote your own courses to your students)
- Coupons weren’t overused – in the early days of Udemy coupons weren’t abundant, so most people were paying full price for the courses AND the instructors were keeping more
- Very little guidelines on length and quality of uploaded content
So, it’s a little back story and some ideas that can help you think strategically with the introduction of brand new platforms and marketplaces, but my strategy has been straightforward, and it turned me a while to discover what I was doing and break it down in a process. In, but here …
Go out and find the content and reproduce it in your voice, etc. For example, I can go out and find a course or another product, go through the product and learn a technique … and then take my class. I can do what I learned. And it worked. So, I kept doing it.
However, because of the more hard work I did and the more courses I churn, Udemy is continuously changing, my income is almost the same every month, so I got sluggish and stuck with it for a while.
Now, you might think that you need to be an “expert” or invest a lot of money in tools and equipment to teach on Udemy, but that’s not true. These are just the tools I use, and the only means you need to get started.
- A computer – this is the one I use
- A microphone – this is the one I use and RECOMMEND
- A screen recording solution – if you have a Mac use this one, if you are a PC use this one
- A HD webcam (optional)
And then as far as finding content, there are SO so many options…you can look at the table of contents of books for ideas, you can watch YouTube videos, you can find PLR products, you can outsource videos, etc. Now, since my niche is the make money online niche, I chose to go to a site called WSODownloads.info. They have tons of WSOs listed that you can download for FREE to get ideas. I would go through and find ones that I liked, go over the steps, make a bulletpointed outline for a Udemy course, then start to record the videos.
Now, if you’re thinking yeah that sounds easy, but I don’t think I could create enough content to last for an hour or more. Trust me, it’s extremely easy, just break it down. Most of my videos are still less than 10 minutes. Even if your videos were a mere 3 minutes each, that means you would only need about 20 short 3 minute videos…trust me, that’s not hard.
So, to continue where we left off I mentioned that I had gotten lazy because Udemy was paying much less in commissions by 2014, and I wasn’t really thrilled to continue cranking out courses because you now had to work harder for the same results or to continue to increase your revenue.
But I started to test and try some different things, because I saw that some new instructors with not near as much online marketing experience as me were making way more money than me somehow, so these are a few things I tried that seemed to work…
I began sending regular promotional messages each month. You are allowed up to 2 promotional messages per course, so I maximized these. Now, I only had a limited number of courses and students, so I thought this wouldn’t do much, but surprisingly each month I mailed my messages I made more money, and whenever I didn’t I made less. So, this is something that I continue to do each month.
Also, I began promoting my courses a few places. Still not spending any money, but I posted them to a few free websites where I could post free and discounted coupons. There are literally hundreds of these websites online, but so far these are the ones that have produced results for me…
BestBlackHatForum – the Udemy section
OneBuckCourses
Coupon Lair
Edudealer
And here are a few good Facebook groups to post your course coupons to to start getting members flooding into your new courses…
Udemy Facebook Group 1
Udemy Facebook Group 2
Udemy Facebook Group 3
Udemy Facebook Group 4
Udemy Facebook Group 5
Udemy Facebook Group 6
Udemy Facebook Group 7
Udemy Facebook Group 8
So, this is my complete blueprint for how I went from zero dollars to $100 in Udemy. Yes, it did not happen overnight. However, I would like to emphasize how lazy I was in all of this. Of course, I had to take the time to learn new courses and record these steps for my classes, but I did not have the specialized skills you do not have. And the most fantastic thing is that when you do your course, you are now basically a bystander. And making it is free. So, what I’m saying is that you can be an authority without spending any money on advertising, etc.
Of all the money I’ve made online, and I’ve tried to make money online, as a whole beginner trying to get their first $100 jump online, I consider Udemy an ideal solution.
So what are you waiting for?
