How I Made Over $10k From Udemy – Zero Paid Advertising
I’ve been an instructor on Udemy since the spring of 2012. Recently I finally crossed over the hump of $10,000 in total lifetime earnings aka net profit. Surprisingly I did all of it with very little effort and with zero paid advertising. Here is how I did it…
So, I started from very humble beginnings as you will see in the screenshot below. Back in 2012 I had some experience in online marketing but I was super shy, and hadn’t make much more than a few hundred dollars online.
I threw up my first video training on Udemy, that I had basically copied the information from a webinar and organized it into my own steps and course. Within a few weeks I had made my first sale. It wasn’t much, and honestly I kind of ignored it. But as you can see just a few months later, after just having a handful of courses on Udemy’s platform I made over $100 and my earnings pretty much haven’t dipped below that since except for two months where I was extremely lazy.
Well, over the years the Udemy platform has changed quite a bit, and I did exploit a few of their open loopholes, which allowed me to have some pretty good months. You are unable to do most of these anymore, but I will list some of them below just to give you some ideas. See that’s the one thing I think is most important to learn as an online marketer, is how to look for opportunities and areas you can exploit. Because marketing doesn’t really change much once you know all the rules, but where most of the “easy” money is made is when there are new opportunities. And skilled marketers to find and exploit those opportunities before they become widely known and the platform you are exploiting finds out and eventually no longer allows that.
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, that’s a little back story and some ideas that might help you think strategically about other new platforms and marketplaces as they launch but my strategy has been very simple, and it actually took me awhile to actually discover what I was doing and break it down into a process, but here it is…
Basically go out and find content, and reassemble it in my own voice, etc. For instance, I may go out and find a course or another product, go through the product and learn a strategy…and then just go make my own course about what I just learned. And it worked 🙂
So I kept doing it.
However, the harder I worked and the more courses I churned out, due to the fact that Udemy was constantly changing, my income each month pretty much stayed the same, so I got really lazy and put it on hold for awhile.
Now, you may think you need to be an “expert” or have a lot of money invested in tools and equipment to teach on Udemy, but this is simply NOT true. These are the only tools I use and the only essential tools 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, that is essentially my complete blueprint of how I went from zero dollars to earning over $10k on Udemy. Yes, it did not happen over night. But I want to stress how extremely lazy I was in all of this. Sure, I had to take the time to learn new things and record those steps for my courses, but I had no special skills that you don’t have. And what’s weird is that when you have your own course you now become an authority essentially. And it’s FREE to create. So, what I’m saying is you can become an authority without spending a fortune on advertising, etc.
Of all the many ways I’ve seen and tried to make money online, for the complete beginner who is trying to get over that hump of their first $100 online, I consider Udemy to be one of the absolute best solutions.
So, what are you waiting for?
Create Your FREE Udemy Account Today!
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