Welcome to the morning Udemy Income report! See how I make money on udemy. Follow along and see my stats, learn about my marketing techniques, and see what's working and what isn't working!
| 1/10/19 Stats | |
|---|---|
| Courses Sold: | 43 |
| Money Earned: | $147.58 |
| Earnings/Course: | $3.43 |
| Reviews: | 2 |
| Month To Date: | $914.58 |
| Total Students: | 45,830 |
| Total Enrollments: | 112,642 |
Transcript:
What's going on guys welcome to the daily udemy income report the show where I talk about making money on udemy walk you through what's working for me and teach you how to do the same thing my name is John Elder from courserapy.com and today is Friday Friday January 11th 2019 and in today's episode I want to talk about marketing your course somewhere else besides you to me specifically on YouTube so before we get into that let's look at yesterday's numbers so yesterday was the tenth Thursday and we had a really good day let's go back here there we go 43 courses sold now yesterday I was wondering if the udemy New Year's sale had sort of ended if it would sort of you know tailed off a little bit and throughout the beginning of the day that's the way it looked we're a couple orders trickling in it wasn't very good and then around the middle of the day and sort of into the
afternoon and especially into the night sales started flooding in again so we ended up with 43 courses sold just three less than the day before which is which was a monster day itself a hundred and forty seven dollars and fifty eight cents now this is quite a bit down from the day before and we only had three less sales so looking through the numbers individually I saw a lot of courses where my royalties split was only like two dollars and fifty cents or even one dollar and 97 cents so a lot of that happened the reason why it's even this close is because somebody ordered through the sale promo code but they had clicked on one of my links in an email that I send out previously a promo email so the cookie was still on their browser so it counted it as if it was my promotion and you'll see that on the month to date stats here and promo activity it popped up ten dollars
because of that so if it wouldn't have been for that we would have been you know eight dollars less than this even so you know it comes to three dollars and 43 cents of course still I'll take it when it's 43 new students signing up and 100 and almost $150 you know falls out of the sky in one day we're not going to complain about that a refunds to date jumped up to twenty eight dollars and forty eight cents this is because of three new refunds they're from the same exact person who knows what's going on they're probably shady but that's fine because it's the 11th now so we're over a third through the month and you usually get 100 to 120 dollars worth of refunds so we're well below the average going forward we have two reviews yesterday but I'm not even going to talk about these because as I said a couple days ago or maybe yesterday you know we sent out a notice
the other day saying that the review system was down and it will be for the duration of the sale so it looks like it's sort of jerking along I got a couple of reviews that popped up but they look like old reviews that have been recycled so I'm not even getting sure that there are real reviews so we're not even gonna bother talking about it in this episode so month to date 914 dollars so far we're still this is only 10 days in so very very good that's let's call this $1,000 if there's this is the 10th so the 20th and the 30th we can do this three more times that would be almost a $3,000 a month which is pretty good I don't think that will continue as soon as this new to me sale the new year sale stops sales will drop so but still 914 dollars 10 days into the month is fantastic 258 courses sold so far reviews again it's a little wishy-washy we already talked about
the promo activity open enrollments or total enrollments hundred twelve thousand six hundred forty two students and average rating again we're not quite sure what this is because the reviews a system is down finally looking at my you know my profile page udemy.com /user or /john elder 3 we can see that the Postgres course is still no longer the best seller we've lost that badge it looks like very sad this year this Ruby on Rails course is still the highest rated I should note even though this is the highest rated it doesn't make that much money it really doesn't bring that much money in even though it's the highest rated so it's kind of kind of a weird situation but we'll talk about that some other day and finally this user authentication app is still continue to lose this high highest rated badge so that's very sad so anyway all in all very happy so far with this
month and how this sale is going and we'll keep an eye on it over the weekend so in today's episode I want to talk about marketing and promoting your courses off of you to me you to me itself you to me themselves do a lot of marketing on your behalf if you opt into the udemy marketing program which you absolutely must and you know things like right now they've got a sale going on a promo code of the new year's promo code and so we're making hundreds of dollars just from them doing that they run ads on Facebook they run ads all over the place I've gone to like news websites and there's an ad on that website like the Wall Street Journal and it's an ad for one of my courses now that's only because it's something called remarketing where there's a cookie on your browser and there's a cookie on the Wall Street Journal website and they're serving up ads and it you know it
does some voodoo and it shows only that ad just to you because it knows you're connected somehow so it's not like everybody is saying my courses being sold on the Wall Street Journal website but still you know me is very active in their marketing but in this video I want to talk about stuff you should be doing yourself now people go to you to me as professors as teachers instructors to make money but not through marketing themselves you go to you to me so that you to me does all the marketing that's the that's the reason because otherwise you could host your course on your own website and keep 100% of the of the proceeds you know when I sell a course on udemy I sometimes get a dollar ninety seven two dollars three dollars five dollars right that sucks that's bad the only reason we put up with that nonsense is because of the volume of udemy because there are millions
of students and they just funnel right into your course right so it's sort of counterintuitive to say you should also be marketing your course that's on udemy because the whole purpose is you don't have to market but there are some things you should be doing that will help and they're not that hard and they don't take a lot of time so you should do it and one thing is by using YouTube so if you're an instructor you should have your own YouTube channel here is my codeme channel only has 652 subscribers but I'm not I haven't done any role marketing with this channel these are just sort of organic people that have found this channel so what you want to do is every time you create a course on udemy you want to create a playlist for that course so if you click here on my playlist you see all of these playlists are essentially a course I have a yuna me and you can see each one
has like five videos four videos for videos four videos one video for videos four videos for videos so what i'm doing here is at unum II whenever you upload your course they want you to have at least ten minutes of free content its preview content so when somebody goes to one of your pages you know one of these landing pages there's two or three videos that they can watch preview videos right and those equal about ten minutes so you should take those preview videos and upload them to YouTube in a playlist for that course you know three videos four videos and that's it I also usually upload my intro video that we talked about yesterday or a couple days ago whenever that was so I'll upload that one as well and you can see these don't get a lot of traffic but they get enough and so let's look at the few the full so this one has had 95 views there's four videos and
about a hundred people have watched them that's not a huge amount but it's organic I didn't market this I didn't promote this I didn't run ads to get those people I just uploaded these videos and then forgot about it and a hundred people came and saw them now did anybody actually order the course at you to me after watching this yes absolutely we can track that so let's just let's just open up one of these real quick and this one alone is that 46 views right and so look what I did down here right here I say take this course on usually for just $9.99 regularly 109 $9.99 using this URL coupon code and then right here I have a coupon code for this course that I've specifically generated right so we can track and see exactly how many people are clicking on these links and ordering and it is real people will do this they will click on this they will buy it and
then down here I have the same link again I've just shortened it into a we'll shorten URL but it's the same link right I also put a link to my website code me comm my twitter and my facebook page for code me and you know how long will it take you to do this ten minutes twenty minutes all you have to do is upload the videos write a quick description and this description is almost always the same I use the same template template I just copy and paste you just you change the URLs and I might change this well I will change this little description but every one of these videos in this playlist get this same description because I'm I'm pretty lazy I don't even bother changing those descriptions and just from organic traffic to youtube you will you will get sales right at you to me because of this not only that but you're also building something off of udemy which is so
important because tomorrow udemy could change their policies and hurt you they could decide you're breaking their rules and kick you off you know a thousand things another company could buy you to me and shut it down like all of these things could happen and then you just be out of luck but if over the years you've been building this YouTube channel you're not you're not completely out of luck you still have a fanbase you still have a group of potential students that you can market to right you can see online here I've only got 650 subscribers but I've only been doing this six months or so and I put no effort into it this year I've sort of resolved to make more of an effort on YouTube and grow my YouTube channel here so yesterday I released a video right here it's less than 24 hours ago and it's already got 40 views and it's gotten some comments and stuff some
interaction so I'm gonna keep doing this and add content to YouTube that I don't have on udemy just to grow my channel and it's a new it's another asset you then own that is independent from udemy which is very important too so so many good benefits to doing this and people ask is it against the rules to do this can you upload your promo videos from you to me to YouTube yes you can and in fact they recommend that you do that if you go on udemy in the instructor section there's a bunch of tutorials and for marketing they suggest you do this exact thing this is how I got the idea they sent me an email saying hey do you have a youtube channel you should upload your content and blah blah blah and I always thought well that's kind of stupid why would I do that but two things one it works I've proven to myself it works because I can track who clicks on these promo code links and
to something that happens that you probably aren't aware of as soon as you upload your course to udemy and it has three or four free preview videos hackers not hackers bots will steal those videos immediately almost immediately and they will post them on YouTube themselves so I found literally dozens and dozens of my free videos promo videos listed on YouTube under other people's accounts why are they doing this because they want that free content to build their own channels off of right so you can have that stuff taken down YouTube is really good if you file a copyright claim it's real easy in fact you to me will do it for you if you ask them to there's a form you can fill out I've actually had to do that for some some people have stolen my entire course they bought it and they downloaded all the videos and then uploaded all the videos to YouTube I had that taken
down immediately and it was really easy and you to me in fact did it for me I just let them know and then they did it I filled out the form and and they did it but other times when people steal the free promo videos I leave those up why because my courses are all branded if you watch a video it says coding recom I'm wearing the t-shirt that says Cody be calm right they can watch those they want it it will lead back to me it will only benefit me and you know I'm fine with that they're actually marketing my stuff for me by doing that so as long as it's just a few free promo videos at the beginning I'm perfectly fine with that so that's really all I wanted to talk about in this video it's Friday knock off early here and if you had if you don't have a youtube channel yet you absolutely have to start one it's free it's easy it takes minutes it takes five minutes to
upload your three or four promo videos each time you create a course be sure and make a playlist for each course and you can upload them all at once you can drip them out one every week or so for the next three or four weeks I tend to just throw them all out at once you can experiment with both ways to see which one is you know more beneficial for you which one that results in more traffic more organic traffic there is all kinds of marketing things you can do like optimizing these pages you know I'm not writing a whole lot of stuff in the description you can write like 5,000 characters so you could write you know a page and a half of stuff that's good for SEO I just don't because I'm lazy I should but I don't you can put keywords in here hashtags in here all kinds of things you can do so that's something you can learn about if you're interested so that's it for
today's report if you liked this episode be sure to smash the like button below subscribe to the channel and check out courserapy.com for more tips tricks and online course awesomeness my name is John Elder from courserapy.com and we'll see you again Monday morning.