MBA2069 Should You Sell Your Online Course on Udemy?

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Hey. Oh. Welcome to the Hunter. Helping you navigate the world of business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons. For the real world, I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's lesson you will learn should you sell an online course on Udemy? Udemy is by far the largest online course marketplace with over 50 million students. Yep, they have a huge audience. So naturally I get asked a lot. Should I sell my course on my own website or using a course platform privately? Or should I join a marketplace like Udemy and leverage that audience and get exposure to 50 million students? Well, because this is such a popular question I get asked, we're going to take a deep dive into selling on Udemy. What does this mean? How much does it cost? What are the advantages? What are the disadvantages? Is this a good idea for all kinds of courses at all price points? Well, we get into all of that in today's lesson so that you know you're informed, you have all the information to make the right decision for your online course. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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This is why courses on Udemy are pretty inexpensive. They run sales all the time, discounting their courses. So if your online course is really in depth, is really high value, maybe you typically sell it for a few hundred dollars or even more thousands. Then I'm going to tell you straight off the bat, Udemy is not for you. Udemy doesn't want that kind of course because they can't sell it. It's not in their business model. Most of their courses are less than $100 and the ones that are successful are less than $50. Having said that, Udemy has total control over the price of your course, meaning that they can discount it at any time. This is not up to you. You can start with a suggested price for your course, but how they slice and d how they discount it or how they offer it will change without your consent. So that's one thing I want to say up front. Now, the advantage of Udemy is, yes, you get a huge audience. Yes, you also get the platform to host your course, meaning you upload your videos and your content and your information and your downloadables, you can answer questions and all that kind of stuff. They give you all that tech for you. So you just show up with your knowledge, you show up with your videos, you show up with your content, and they take care of the rest. They also take care Of a lot of the marketing. They get your course in front of their audience in their marketplace. But remember, it's crowded on udemy. So if you don't do your own marketing to drive traffic to your course on udemy or get reviews, it's really gonna be hard for you to stand out amongst the sea of courses. We're talking literally hundreds of thousands of courses. Last I checked, 250,000 courses on Udemy. Now, udemy has different ways for you to sell your course on their platform or how you get paid. I'm gonna break down each one for you, and each one of these has a different rev share, meaning that you're gonna get a different percentage of the sale. Now, I'm not gonna mention the actual percentage because they sometimes change. I told you, it's a little bit complicated. But let me break down the four ways you can make money on udemy. The first one is called udemy organic. And that means somebody signs up for your course organically by just being on udemy. That means udemy is the one who should get most of the sale here. So I think it's about 75% that they get of the sale price. Don't quote me on this, because it keeps changing. But basically, udemy is saying, hey, we got you the sale by merely being on our platform. So therefore, you don't get much of the money. The next way that you make money on udemy is what's called your promotion. This is where udemy gives you a unique link to your course, and you share it with your own audience. And this is you driving traffic to udemy, and therefore, you get most of the money here, something like 95% of the revenue. So this is like saying, hey, udemy, I got the traffic, not you, and therefore, I should get the lion's share of the profit. And that's fair enough. Udemy does that. And it's basically, you could see it as udemy being a free course platform and so to speak, and they just take a percentage of the sale because you brought in the traffic. The next one is ad program. This is where udemy will run ads for you, will promote your course, and you will get, again, a small portion of the revenue. And the last one is affiliate, where you can gather affiliates. You can ask people in your network to promote your course with an affiliate link that you can give them. Then your affiliate gets a cut. Udemy gets a cut, you get a cut. And those are the four ways you earn revenue on udemy. Here's the bottom line. Udemy is a volume game. You need to be making a lot of sales for you to make some decent revenue because the pie gets cut a lot of ways. But one of the big advantages of Udemy is that they kind of take care of everything for you and they just send you your revenue. You don't have to worry about payment processing or refunds or any of that kind of stuff. When a customer buys a course, they're buying it from. They're not buying it from actually you. Your job is just to be a great instructor, answer questions, and make sure you give the best content and courses possible. So people that don't want to really manage the business side of courses kind of go to Udemy and say, you know what, I'll take the hit. And you could take, you know, those big portions of revenue when I make a sale. Now, one strategy I've seen a lot of course creators do is that they don't really launch their flagship course on Udemy, the one that they would sell for 500, 600, maybe $1,000 on their own website, with their own brand. They kind of sell a entry level course. An entry level course that is sort of like their topic, but a Crash Course 101 version. They sell it for a low price on Udemy and they see it as sort of like a customer acquisition channel where they can learn about their customers who can learn about you, they can Google you, they can learn about how they get to know you, they can follow you on Twitter and they can learn about your courses and your programs there. So it's kind of like growing your email list. You're doing this so that you can grow an audience. And I know many people that do this strategy where they use Udemy's, you know, platform and they're not really interested in making a ton of money. They're just interested in growing their audience and giving great value and great content with sort of a mini course that gives great value. Now, this strategy is not foolproof. Why? Because customers that go to Udemy, most customers are very price sensitive. They're going there because they're looking for the best content for the lowest price. They're used to paying, you know, $14, $11, you know, $20 for a course. So that kind of lead may not be a great fit for someone to buy your flagship product. That's hundreds of dollars. So just keep that in mind.

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So I know you're probably thinking in your head, Omar, is this a good idea? Should I sell my course on Udemy? What's your recommendation? Well, here it is. I got into entrepreneurship because I like to be in control of my success. I like to be able to build things and do things the way I think are right. That work for me, that work for the way I want to build my business. And in a lot of ways, Udemy and platforms like it take away that you can't control your pricing, therefore you can't control your packaging. It limits you in terms of marketing and sales. In my opinion, it takes away about 80% of the business side of your business, of your online course business. And the worst of it, in my opinion, is you're not in control of the actual content. You're building your business on somebody else's platform. If you need me decides to ban your course or not show your course to people as often as you like, that's not in your control. You're on their land. Yes, it's more work and maybe more maintenance for you to build your own online course on your own brand and site, or even using a course builder or platform. But then you control all the aspects of the business. How much you charge, how you promote when you have a sale, what you include with the course in terms of packaging, if you decide to open and close the course and do seasonal launches. We talked about this in a previous episode. You don't have control of any of this on Udemy. They're offering a good service for those who just want to teach and put up their videos. But in my opinion, there's just a little bit too much money being left on the table here for me to say this is a good idea. Unime looks really appealing. Like there's 50 million students out there and they even publish statistics like our top 10 creators have made $10 million on our platform. But I did a little digging, a little research, and found out that the average instructor earns a total of $10,000 on Udemy. Not bad. But think about it. What if you created your own course on your own ground and took home all the revenue and you charge $200, which is very reasonable for an online course these days. It'll only take 50 students for you to hit that 10,000 mark. That's less than one student a week. In one year, if you did a good time and energy to your business, to your online course, you can make a few sales a week. Let's say you made four core sales every single week. That's over $41,000 a year by only selling four courses a week. Four times as much of the average lifetime revenue a Udemy instructor would make. And this is why I just can't recommend somebody using Udemy to sell their online course. I've used Udemy as a stud. I've taken some pretty good courses there. Very cool platform. But it's my job to make sure I have the backs of creators and coaches like you. And this is a raw deal. And that's why I thought it was so important to do today's episode. I hope that helps and hope you found today's episode informative and insightful. If it did, leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review. Or you could rate us on Spotify. Just click that follow button on Spotify and you'll be able to give us a star rating. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. There is no silver bullet, okay? Udemy looks like sort of a way for you to get all these students and this huge marketplace and all this traffic. At the end of the day, you are still going to be responsible for marketing your course and getting eyeballs on it and getting reviews and getting people to give you testimonials. You're going to do that anyway, so you might as well do it on your own turf and take home 100% of the revenue. Thanks so much for listening. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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