#127 Understanding How Udemy Prices Courses - What You Need To Know!


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!


* Total Students is different than Total Enrollments because many students enroll in more than one of my courses.
1/25/19 Stats
Courses Sold: 5
Money Earned: $27.10
Earnings/Course: $5.42
Reviews: 3
Month To Date: $1,859.44
Total Students: 45,979
Total Enrollments: 112,791


* Total Students is different than Total Enrollments because many students enroll in more than one of my courses.
1/26/19 Stats
Courses Sold: 13
Money Earned: $65.44
Earnings/Course: $45.03
Reviews: 3
Month To Date: $1,925.21
Total Students: 45,992
Total Enrollments: 112,804


* Total Students is different than Total Enrollments because many students enroll in more than one of my courses.
1/27/19 Stats
Courses Sold: 21
Money Earned: $73.27
Earnings/Course: $3.49
Reviews: 12
Month To Date: $1,998.48
Total Students: 46,023
Total Enrollments: 112,825

Transcript:

What's going on guys welcome to the daily udemy income report the show where I talk about making money on you to me 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 Monday January 28th 2019 in today's episode I want to talk about you to me pricing policies and how they affect how much money you're gonna make on a day to day basis but before we do that let's take a look at the stats from all the days over the weekend that we've missed since the last episode and so starting on the 25th which was Friday we had five courses sold made $27 a high per course 5 dollars and 42 cents and we'll talk about why that is in this episode refunds stayed the same reviews only three and we'll take a look at those in a bit so Friday is usually pretty sort of low but that's low even for a Friday so let's see the

let's see what was that the 25th so the 18th was the week before right here we still twelve courses still made sixty-two dollars though just quite a bit more than five courses in twenty seven but sometimes that just happens and that's how that goes so Saturday thirteen courses sold sixty-five dollars and forty four cents came to five dollars and three cents a course and we didn't have one refund for like seven bucks or so so that ratcheted that up to ninety $2.99 only three reviews that day as well and we had some pretty bad reviews over the weekend we'll take a look at these in just a minute so let's see the 26th just to sort of reference here so the 19th was a week before we sold 16 courses and made $55 this Saturday we sold thirteen courses that made more money so that's kind of an interesting thing to see Sunday the 27th we had 21 courses sold much better 73 dollars and 27

cents but much lower per course three dollars and 49 cents so you know if we look up here another day we had around twenty sold who made 100 bucks higher per course so these fluctuations in price per course that we see have a big effect from you know day to day and that's primarily we're going to talk about in this episode in a little bit so let's see refunds stayed the same 12 reviews much more reviews came in that day better reviews still a couple of bad ones we'll take a look at those in a minute month to date stats will just jump jump down to Sunday's 1998 dollars so far pretty good I'd like to see it crack that 2000 we've already done it this morning but we'll see that in tomorrow's episode 515 courses sold so far this month pretty good 208 reviews so I mean think about it we sold 500 courses almost half gave a review pretty good you know not quite half that would be

what 257 or something to deem 260 something like that at 260 something anyway but close promotional activities stayed the same one hundred forty three dollars and forty four cents pull enrollments jump to twelve one hundred twelve thousand eight hundred ninety nine and my average rating dropped down two tenths of a point from four point five to two four point five and we'll look at why in just a second here so checking out my profile page udemy.com /user forward slash John elder 3 we see that the Postgres database course is still the best seller we have these two courses still have not regained their highest rating badge it looks like we're never going to and should scroll through the rest of these real quick not seeing the steam of course still has the highest rated it always does but it doesn't so many copies even though its highest rated so I don't usually talk about it but the

thing we really want to look at is the sequel course it's still got its highest rated badge which is fantastic fantastic fantastic this one this research poster one also has this highest rated majid always does doesn't so many many courses alright so real quickly let's take a look at some of the reviews so right off the bat we got a three-star for this one it's terrible four stars not great four stars not great three and a half stars pretty bad two and a half stars pretty bad and then they start to getting a little bit better 5 stars before today I hadn't coded in rails rails app for 18 months I'm running Windows 10 and installing rails was easy with this course that's what the course is all about how to install rails but it's more than that you learn by building very simple two page site which you'll push to Heroku on the way to deploying your app you create a rails project and a

great bootstrap github and Link it to Heroku using an SSH key you also set some basic routes tweak the gemfile and use some ARB for navigation you can do this in one day use this as a foundation to John's other Rails courses that is a fantastic review detailed in-depth big five stars fantastic thank you very much Dominic four stars uh I get three stars it's just bad you know we just had a bad weekend four reviews sometimes it just happens let's see this is my favorite of all time five stars and ah that's great but it's the sequel course so we love to see that then we jump to a three stars what is going on and then back up to a five star another good review for me it is perfect pace is fast direct to the point no wandering focused on the meet however for others may not be the right one like complete beginners if you're a complete beginner you may want to check out some HTML

Javascript or another language to get the basics we're not really easel at HTML or JavaScript in this course I'm not sure what they're talking about as well as some basic database stuff again we talk about all the database stuff you could possibly need when building this or some whatever if not a complete beginner this may be the right one courses not too long lectures are kept under six minutes each and doesn't get into every Ruby syntax detail which is for me is good you can go check out the Ruby docs for yourself rather go straight to the core building with rails you know we'll take it it's it's a large review like we like to see and it's five stars but some of them I don't agree with some of the things they said but that's fine another five star review I was skeptical skeptical at first since the course duration is too short in comparison with others but I was wrong

indeed a lectures lecture contents are designed way too neat and tidy so you won't get bored and will equal to and will eager to learn more also John teaches you how to use the official Docs from Django and blue strip so you won't be passively depending on one sole instructor but will be able to find your own way to solve other problems in the future thanks for the excellent work John that's what I try to teach I try to teach you not just the thing but how to learn you need to learn how to learn how to code because with coding it always changes so if you just know a thing a person told you you're not going to be a good coder you need to learn how to learn so you can figure out things on your own in the future that's the whole point of coding so I like that they picked up on that three and a half stars very bad I like this course a lot I'm only disappointed because I want these

courses to be longer love 20 hours instead of two not saying you have to just providing examples I think you're a great instructor see if I'm a great instructor why three and a half stars that's like that's like a C or something B minus C is people crazy okay five stars we'll take it for half stars five stars very helpful course thank you sir John elder I've been knighted I hated Sir John five stars five stars great course for learning the ins and outs of authentication using Django so it's a mixed bag we had a lot of really bad like three stars and even less but then a few really good ones as well so that's just sort of how this works so anyway in this episode I want to talk about you know these pricing policies so like when we pull up our stats every day every single day I look at this price per course sort of the average right and some days it's $3.00 some days it's almost $6

other days it's you know three oh three I think that's probably about as low as it goes other times like 659 like it just jumps all over the place so what's going on here well you to me when you sign up for you to me as an instructor you have a choice to make you can either opt in or opt out of you to me marketing and promotion right so if you if you opt in you choose to allow them to set the price for your course and they will sell it for whatever they want so all of my courses are listed is one hundred ninety nine dollars each but udemy only ever sells them for eight bucks nine bucks twelve bucks fifteen bucks sometimes twenty bucks right because I've often done two udemy marketing and promotions that's what that means it means they can run sales they could say this course is $199 but today only it's on sale for $9.99 right and when they do that you get a percentage and you go

from there now if you throw into the mix a fill so somebody else lines up as an affiliate and they market your course and then it sells using a coupon code they created then they get like half and you get like a fourth or something and then you to me gets their half so of course it sells for nine dollars with an affiliate you won't mind only get a couple of dollars in revenue from that and we'll look at that in just a minute I'll pull up some of my my recent transactions so you can see so the question is why would you ever do that you're taking so little money well the answer is obviously volume you know me has millions of students I think they're over 30 million at the moment and they're funneling all those students into your course so yeah you might only get $2 per sale but you might sell 50 courses that day or something so that's a hundred dollars whereas without that you're

not gonna sell a single course right zero or you might sell one for $20 right I'll take the volume and the more because then you build a base you build students who know you you can then market to those students into the future with your other courses and it just rolls from there so it's a good deal it makes sense to do that but it's a choice everyone has to make when they sign up and a lot of people think well I'll just do it on my own and I'll take 100% well you're not gonna be successful here you're just not because you're competing against all the other courses that are being sold on sale for nine dollars so if your course is fifty dollars nobody's gonna buy it because on your course landing page udemy shows other courses that are similar so like if you like this course you might like this this and this look they're on sale for nine dollars are people gonna do buy your

fifty dollar course your hundred dollar course your one hundred and ninety nine dollar course or the nine dollar one that's the same thing basically right they're gonna go with the nine dollar one all day long so you have no choice really in a very real sense you have to sign up for you to be marketing and promotion which means that they can sell your course for whatever now normally that means this courses are almost always on sale you can almost always find a coupon code somewhere on the internet for every single course for nine or ten right and during special times of the year like Black Friday Cyber Monday the New Year's we had the New Year sale that we're just finishing up now they run special promotions where they just blast ads everywhere Facebook Google you know they saw it on the App Store the iOS App Store they sell they market everywhere and we see big spikes in

sales when that happens the rest of the time you just sort of muddle around but lately the last few months they've been experimenting with their pricing policy selling courses at slightly higher prices how do I know this well we can just look at our own data yesterday through udemy organic and a coupon code this person paid $25 for my course and I got $13 of it that was the 26th so you see on the 26th our price per course was above $5 the big part of the reason why is because right here I got $13 for one course now sometimes that works fine sometimes the people realize they've been duped right they know if they go back and hit reload they get a different coupon code or they can search for a coupon code and find the course for nine bucks they just paid 26 for that this is people off and that often leads to refunds so if we go back we can see that day there are some other ones right

here for twenty dollars and 99 cents and here is a coupon code so they use the coupon code you know mieze obviously running tests with different coupon codes at higher prices and we see there's a $20 sale I got $10 from it right other times you see you know $5 is sort of normal let's see what else do we got here here's a bunch of $1 ones right what's going on here this is the ad program so if we click on the details we can see this course got sold through the iOS the iTunes Store right the Apple iTunes Store and when that happens Apple gets $3 right so the net amount is $6.99 and then since it's from an ad I get 25% of that which is a dollar 75 right so it's pretty crappy but again there's lots of volume here we see 30 M students tens looks like maybe they just cracked 30 million students so they're running that coupon code it was nine dollars so the net amount was nine dollars

I get 25 percent of that or two dollars and fifty cents you know let's go let's find an affiliate here's an affiliate one alright I got even less so this looks like Australia so they take taxes out in Australia right then they converted to US dollars then I get 25% of that because it's an affiliate I get a dollar ninety six so it's just kind of silly it's but you know it's just the way it is and you have to sort of understand that going in that's why it also doesn't make a lot of sense for you to market your courses because you're gonna sell ads on say Facebook right you might spend hundreds of dollars on ads and then what somebody signs up for your course for nine dollars and you get half of that so you get 450 if they didn't have a cookie on their web browser already that had a previous coupon code from you to me in which case udemy gets all the money instead of you

like it's just it doesn't make a lot of sense even if you use your own coupon code you get almost 100 percent so you would get close to the nine if you ran ads but still you might spend $40 and get one sale at nine dollars you're just never gonna break even that way so I mean the strategy and we've talked about this before in this show is that you just have to sort of sign up for the udemy marketing and promotion and just sit back and ride the wave don't do the marketing yourself except for little things that we've talked about you know YouTube marketing and stuff like that some social media marketing blast it out to your Facebook group and everything blast it out on Twitter when you have a new course do those sorts of things but don't spend money on marketing because it's just not worth it so that's the udemy pricing policy I guess you would call it the plan that's what happens

that's why we get these huge fluctuations in price and every once in a while I'll get a course that sells for $199 the full price and that freaks me out because you know that person is absolutely gonna ask for a refund because they have to they have to figure it out eventually and then they go wait I just spent $200 on something I can get from nine all the time why do I put my courses up for sale for $1.99 because I know for the most part 99.9 percent of the time they're not gonna sell for that price but it looks better right on the course landing page it'll say regularly $1.99 on sale for nine now everybody knows that's BS but it doesn't matter somewhere in the back of your brain you're still going to that's $190 off even though you know all courses that essentially sell on udemy for nine bucks you can't help yourself but make that little connection even if it's

subconsciously and it helps to sell the course more which would you rather have of course that's regularly $199 and has 6000 students and you can get it today for nine dollars or another course that's regularly priced $39 and has 6000 students and you can get it today for $90 so consciously you think then $199 course is better it's more expensive it has the same amount of students they must be a good of course and it look at the prices $1.99 it just works so that's why I do that and I recommend that you do that too okay 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 tomorrow morning.



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