Is Udemy Worth the Effort?

Why not place on multiple platforms?
I think the best way to see if Udemy will work is look at the buyer stats for paid courses in your niche.

Could try Skillfeed and Coggno

I have a couple of courses on Udemy. I don't promote them at all. They bring in a few dollars each month. I think with some promotion they would probably do better but I'm busy with other aspects of my business.

The top 10 instructors earned $5 million according to this article.

Udemy: Our top 10 instructors together made $5M | VentureBeat | Business | by J. O'Dell

I have around 10 courses there since Udemy started out.
All have been earning.
However some of my content is not one hours in length so it won't show in the search results.
They are very picky as to what they will accept. It must have good sound, picture, decriptions and be one hour or over.
Not all can be paid courses - I have a video marketing course there teaching about YouTube marketing, but I may give that one away free.

As with a lot of these things it has been over hyped. Udemy is a good way to earn some passive income to pay a few bills, but don't rely on it as a means to quit the day job.

Udemy is the biggest platform - education establishments and corporates are starting to see the benefits. It will only get bigger.

Udemy’s most popular courses revolve around business applications and software programming languages, that mean if you are selling IM stuff just forget about it .

I'm going to launch my training course as a standalone product first and then convert it for Udemy.

I think its better to build a membership site and start selling your courses instead Udemy. But there is no doubt that udemy is a reputable website with good instructors they claim that 90% of their instructors make sales but the 50% cut from each sale is quite expensive.

I don't have any product there myself, yet.

But, I do know someone who put up a course on Udemy and it is generating some nice, consistent income, on a fairly high-ticket item ($100 range).


As to the question of whether it is worth it... Well, that depends on the quality of the course you create, and the desire of their customers to purchase your product. If you are a good marketer, there is some solid potential for you there.

Be aware that the income stats are BEFORE the major change to income. A few months ago they changed the whole income structure so they (Udemy) "own" your clients and as a result you only get paid when they take your course, not when they take other courses. They often mark down courses 75% and squeeze out the instructor. I have personally had people sign up for my course and received $0, even though I still have to service them. If you're just looking for warm bodies to fill seats, then Udemy will do that. If you're looking to make any income past a dollar here or there then find a different platform.

When I started Udemy the compensation model was 85% for my courses and a percent when one of my clients took another course, a standard affiliate fee. So my clients stayed my clients. The other instructor got paid, Udemy made its cut and I had the opportunity for recurring income. Then they changed it to 100% when I send clients to my course and that's it. As stated before, my clients become theirs so the only option is to continue to drive people to Udemy.

Once they sign up Udemy starts a barrage of solicitations and despite CANSPAM it is nearly impossible to get them to stop emailing. So no, I refuse to subject my clients to this kind of abuse. Trust is hard enough to build. I offer the course through other sites including my own membership site.

Hi,

Don't be afraid to put your course in multiple places. My advice would be to do some research on courses in your niche on Udemy. Maybe the sellers of courses similar to yours, would talk to you.

It's worth a try! :-) Good luck with what you decide.

Geri Richmond

How's about Lynda dot com ?

G.

Chris launch it off Udemy, then after that just post it on there.. if it doesn't take off and make you thousands you'll get a couple of sales a week and it's really nice having that passive (real passive) income that can pay the bills, gym memberships, what not. The only other thing with the same level of passivity IMO is Kindle publishing. Love it!

Training online has been around for a while and there have been a lot of different companies, Udemy seems to be a good platform, I picked up a few courses as part of a larger bundle its possible the courses were under-performing on the network however so far the courses that I have viewed were not that impressive.

(I'm sure there are probably higher quality courses that they offer for more money)

I suspect a lot of the issues is likely inexperience, covering topics that are not really suited to the course, like explaining how FTP works in a WordPress Security course.

(no need to do that but there it was taking up time in a video where it did not belong)

Another course covered the Linux Command Line, roughly the same concept as DOS (roughly)

The thing is when an instructor starts explaining things that should be apparent and evident I loose interest because my time is valuable, just as anyone else's time is just as valuable.

I suspect quality is an issue at Udemy, finding the good from the bad and the ugly that is probably the challenge.

I would say that if you generate quality and unique content that is also of value to the viewers you would find a lot higher revenue in your account at the end of the month.

(The Wordpress Security course I reviewed?)

It was obvious from the beginning that the instructor had only a surface knowledge of how to secure a wordpress website, no hardening skills, each recommendation was a word-press plugin with some vague suggestions that it could be done without a plugin too.

What was really interesting was this guy presented himself as an expert in security and the funny thing was that his course would not keep out an inexperienced attacker much less a determined attacker.

When you have poor quality out there in the marketplace it kind of creates an issue for the good sellers that are putting out good stuff but because of a marketing error on the part of the selling platform you might not see the kind of sales you really would like to see.

I've recently taken a couple of courses on Udemy. They were excellent. Udemy is unique in that it's become the dominant site in providing online tutorials. It's shaping up like eBay and Amazon, a unique little ecosystem all on its own. It will make sense for anyone with good info products to have them there.

With that said, I'm not sure how financially rewarding it might be. I just got a $499 course for $20 using a promo code. Right now they have a sale offering 65% off of any of their courses. It's good till midnight on the 10th. I've also seen a lot of instructors complaining that their income has dropped due to some changes Udemy made. I can't comment on that because I don't know enough about what changed other than revenue to the providers.

I shudder to think what will happen when the Warrior Forum converges on that platform. I remember what happened when word got out about the Kindle goldmine. People flooded Amazon with cheap public domain and PLR ebooks. Amazon was forced to revise several of their policies to put a stop to it. It seems Udemy might already have certain safeguards in place.

I have several products I could easily adapt to the Udemy platform but I'm not in any rush. Right now I'm really enjoying the high quality courses I've signed up for and looking forward to getting a few more good ones while this 65% off sale is running. Here's the code if anyone is interested: SPARK65

I'm sorry but I don't get it.

Why not post it on Udemy and then repurpose it to sell on your own website?

For one, It will make your course or whatever it is better because Udemy has strict rules when it comes to video and audio quality. And they also require your course to be at least 60% video.

If you can get it approved there, then it's definitely ready to be sold on your own site.

Probably what I'm saying is, why limit yourself to just your own website when you can leverage another platform?

It's either that or I'm just not gettin it.

It all fepends on their traffic volume as well as their refund rate. Anyone have any info on these?

powhow vs udemy... and also, best membership site? DAP?

Hello just one question about, I'll be making some kind of video tutorials, but I don't know does Udemy allow you to sale in other sites too? For example I will sale my video courses in Udemy and also in my landing page. Thanks for help

The one thing I don't like about uDemy is you can't sell for monthly payments.

Please take a look at skill feed as last month they went belly up. Hard to compete with you tube which is free, but here we are. Best solution is to create some courses. Also, create a web site and advertise it in a niche that is narrow. Find an area that has little competition or none. OK so use your niche authority to create even more courses. Try to sell them on your own pages.