Are you ready for a helpful 5-step Udemy course marketing
plan based on what's worked for me to make over a half-million dollars on Udemy?
I'll give it to you right here in a simple and straightforward format.
If you find anything helpful, will you please subscribe us on YouTube and help us reach 500k subscribers & leave a comment? Help others find it by giving a like. Your contribution means a lot.
Step-1 In your Udemy instructor dashboard, go to ‘Tools’ and then you go to ‘Marketplace Insights’. Before you even think about doing your Udemy course, you need to laser in on the exact topic. You might have a list of topics you could do or course you want to do, make sure you've looked at this data first.
For example, if you want to create a course on ‘YouTube’, it's not even an existing topic but you can look at ‘YouTube Marketing’ and you can get an idea of the income potential. Notice that the top course in YouTube marketing only, I say only because often people that have worked to get in that top position have worked really hard to get it in that top position, makes $2408 a month. The median revenue, in other words, a normal course what most instructors can expect to make is only $13 a month. There's a lot of demand but there's also a lot of courses and top courses already are making almost all of the earnings.
Therefore, what topic you pick is the number one step for marketing your course successfully. You can make a terrible course on an in-demand topic and make more money than making a great course on a very competitive topic sometimes just because of the demand versus the supply. Therefore, put the research in before you begin.
I recommend research the ‘Udemy Marketplace Insights Tool’ and also go research on YouTube using something like Tube Buddy. For example, if you're thinking about what topic to make, let's say, you do video editing and you do Final Cut Pro X. Let's see what that's like on YouTube and you'll get an indication on Tube Buddy of how many searches there are for this on YouTube and how much competition there is.
You want to think about this upfront because one of the best ways to market your course on Udemy, this is what worked for me, is to put long format free previews up on YouTube based on keyword research like this and then send people over to buy the course on Udemy.
Ideally, you can find a topic that is both good on YouTube and Udemy. That way you can use YouTube to effectively promote your Udemy course. Then you can get those reviews, get those students, get the organic marketplace traffic, get the organic Google search traffic, and all of those that you need over to your course.
That said, the number one mistake I made was promoting my Udemy courses instead of using my self-hosted platform. Thus, I highly encourage you to consider using your hosting for your promotion on YouTube because if anything happens on Udemy, the price changes or anything happens to your instructor account, you’ll lose all of the hard work you put into making your business successful.
Udemy banned my instructor account for no valid reason. They did it just because they decided to and it's their platform. I didn't violate any policies. I've got a video explaining more about that with the title “The Jerry Banfield Udemy Ban Story”. For this reason, I highly recommend to always promote on your platform. However, you can promote if you don't have your platform directly to Udemy. You can also have a good shot to rank your course up really high when you do that.
Thus, the key step once you've completed this is, get a topic locked down that is a good opportunity. Don't settle for something like ‘Youtube Marketing’ and making a Udemy course on YouTube when there's already a ton of course on YouTube is no good. Instead, keep checking on additional topics, see which one is that you can get to work and keep looking around until you can find the ideal.
You can search for specific software, for example, if you type in ‘OBS’ and then you get over to open broadcaster. This might be a better opportunity than making a course about Final Cut Pro X as an example. Even though the top course only earns $172 a month, you might have a much better shot at becoming the top course than you would on say the YouTube. And this averages over double the income for a median course which means that your Udemy course might have double the income potential versus the other one.
Lock your topic down good for Step-1. I've talked so much about Step-1 because everything else that happens is a function of step-1. The biggest time and energy I wasted on Udemy was picking low-value topics. Topics where there was no interest in them or there was a lot of competition and I wasn't prepared to succeed. Thus, set this up first, then you're ready to knock Step-2 out.
Step-2 Go into your courses and pick out a title. A title that gives you the very best search engine optimization. Ideally, you want to phrase every single thing you're doing in the title in an actionable way and sometimes include a course in it.
The format that I like to use before was something like ‘The Complete Facebook Ads and Marketing Course for 2019’. I loved using that format for my course title because that worked really good for Google organic search and Google organic search is one of the best features of having your course on Udemy.
Udemy has a very high page ranking and you want to give your course a chance to rank high in Google organic search. When someone Google's ‘Facebook Ads course 2019’, you hit several of those words in there and then you get a direct sale from Google organic search totally for free. You get 50% of the income. That can be a very good title strategy.
You can also do a Udemy search-optimized title, for example, one of my partners in my Partner Group was just talking about how he does something like ‘Write Like a Pro: Get Better at Writing and Becoming Writer’. What you notice, this is a Udemy search and potentially Google search optimized approach. This way it has ‘Write’, ‘Writing’, and ‘Writer’ all in the title. That way, the course has direct matches on any of these terms whether someone wants to search for
- Write like a professional
- Become a writer
- Writing help
- Writing course
You can optimize it like this and it has a clear call to action. The goal is to write like a pro, get better at writing and become a writer. This way, you've got a title that has the most potential to get found in both Google and Udemy search that fully considers who your potential audience might be and what they might be searching for.
The title is so important on your course because everything else goes from there. Udemy did a test before on my top-performing courses and the professional copyright team they hired could not beat my titling and my description. Thus, I take a proud, ego, and accomplishment of that and present it to you here. These kinds of titles work well. You can also just look around on Udemy and see what kind of titles are working on some of the best selling courses on Udemy and you can literally take that format and convert your idea and course into that format.
Step-3 Once you've got the title down, go in and do an exceptional job with the description. Really go over the top with the description. Udemy gives you a lot of characters you can use on the description. The description again is going for Google organic search traffic. You want a laundry list of everything covered in the course.
If you talk about writing, put every place that someone could want to write in the description. I used to write very involved 1000+ word descriptions that would give my page, especially when combined with all the course lectures, the very highest chance to ranking google search. And when you search for any of my 3 best-selling courses on google organic search, they were all at the very number one result over the top of people who had entire businesses focused on that specific topic. This system works so well when you put it all together.
Thus, do an outstanding job on your description. Write every possible thing someone could want to know in the description and also consider a human reader. If you actually get someone to read the whole description, by the end of it, you should have certainty that they will buy the course and this helps you increase your conversion rate.
A lot of instructors neglect the description or feel it's one more thing after you've already made your title, subtitle, and all the videos. Why do you need to write a course description? This is another generic course on another generic topic by another generic instructor. Please take this class today. That’s not how things work.
Write a good description and it'll help you stand out a lot and get found in the Google organic search. All of these take a good bit of time and energy and I've spent the whole first 10 minutes reading time just setting the foundation of your course up for success. Because once you've got it set up like that, your other marketing efforts will multiply with how well you've set this up.
If you choose a poor course title, don't put much effort in the description and you didn't research your topic very well, there's no point in doing any more marketing on your course. Just forget about it. That takes us to step 4.
Step-4 Once you've got your course created then what you want to do, you want to go over, set your price and then create those coupons. Create free coupons and give them out to people who you think are most likely to love and enjoy your course. I don't know if it'll be your friends, your family or your co-workers but give it to people who are likely to actually watch all of your course and leave a great review.
According to Udemy's review terms and conditions, however, make sure you don't do anything manipulative like give it to every one of your co-workers at your office and then tell them they have to watch the whole course and leave you a five-star review. Things like that could get your account banned. Thus, don't have a system in place where you're guaranteed 5-star reviews.
What you do want to do is create free coupons and give those coupons out consistently. This is one of the magic strategies that I did when combined with the other tips I'm showing you just blew my courses up into how much money I was making. At one point I was making $3000 a day on Udemy. When they suspended me, I was making $1000 a day even as the whole community was hurting from the price changes they have made at the time.
Thus, all this stuff works really good. Once you've gotten all the people you can think of to take the course and you want to give more free coupons, I've got a page for you on my website at jerrybanfield.com/freecourses. I have a freelancer who goes and checks every one of these coupons every day or two to make sure the coupons are not expired.
What I intend to have is the top Udemy free coupon page online because it's so annoying if you're hunting for free coupons to go through all the other websites.
If you'd like to submit your coupon, join my email list and reply to the welcome email with your coupon. This will allow your coupon to get up on the website if you need additional free coupon redemptions. If you will want even more free coupon redemptions than that, I recommend put free coupons out if you've got a Youtube channel. Put some free coupons out on YouTube, give those free coupons to people who are most likely to be excited about watching your course and leave a good review. That takes us to the very last key marketing step here.
Step-5 is to put free preview videos up on YouTube that then send people preferably to your self hosting like Thinkific. I use Thinkific to host my course platform at Uthena. If you want to join Thinkific and help me earn, you can click here.
If you don't have your self-hosting platform and you don't want to put one up, Udemy does convert really well. That means the number of people you send to Udemy versus the number of people that buy the course, the ratio is generally pretty high even if you earn a lower percentage of the sale. Thus, the final step to do really good marketing is to upload long format free preview videos.
Don't put more than half but put the first up to 50% of your course on YouTube. This is allowed last I checked on the Udemy policy and this is what has worked really well for those that are working with me in my Partner Group to get their courses up into the bestseller spots. It is to make long format video tutorials, put those up on YouTube and then tell people right in the very beginning.
If you look at some of my newest videos, I do this same approach with my platform Uthena. For example, on this Forex video, this is a 2 hour and something video from Dorrow Green who is on Uthan. I put in a little intro saying what the course is about then it's a free preview where you can take the full course and this is how I'm able to sell courses anywhere. Anywhere I put the course on any platform, I'm able to make sales this way.
I made hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of sales directly from YouTube organic search traffic this way. The reason this strategy is so powerful is that longer videos on YouTube tend to do really well especially long format course previews.
If you've done your work well up to this point. here's what you can do. You can search, get the exact right keywords, the exact right title from the video and then as long as you get a few hundred views on the video, that's enough for YouTube to test it and potentially put it up there higher. If you have no followers or hardly any action on your YouTube channel, what you can do is, run ads in Google ads. Google owns YouTube.
You can put ads in Google ads for your YouTube video, get some watch time on it and that will pump it up in the search rankings. That's what I've done very successfully to build myself such a big YouTube channel. When I had a small Channel, I ran ads, pumped my videos up to the top of the organic rankings and then the Udemy sales just came in like crazy from there. That's how you do it if you want to really boost it up. Once you've got critical mass on your channel like I'm grateful that every video I put out now reaches thousands of people. That's enough in a lot of less competitive topics to have a chance to go to the top of search results with a great video.
I think I've covered this completely now. I appreciate you reading this post to the end. I value your comments and feedback. If you found this helpful, I trust you will love watching my videos as well. Smash the subscribe button, turn the notifications on and look in your subscriber feed to make sure you see new videos from me. You can also follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin.
I'm a full-time YouTuber now because the ideal to me of the highest level business system is to give everything you create away for free and then just do things like have a partner group or coaching program where you can earn good money helping people directly and offer things like sponsored videos where you can help other people build their branded business. If you want me to do a sponsored video or join the partner program, you can take a look at either of those.
You can also watch videos on Facebook if you want to. Hit follow and put see first on your newsfeed. I love you. You are awesome. Thanks for getting to the end of this post and I hope it's helpful for you.
Love,
Jerry Banfield
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://jerrybanfield.com/how-to-sell-udemy-courses-in-2019/