Ep 35 Why You Should Teach a Course on Udemy.com

How do you teach a course on Udemy.com should you teach a course on Udemy.com.

Speaking, the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

Folks, I'm often asked by clients, people I train on how they can find more opportunities to speak out, how they can enter the realm of professional speaking, how they can build their reputation as trainers, experts, authors, how they can find additional ways of sharing their message. And I'm also asked about online training as the two are going together now. Online training has been around a long, long time. I personally have done online training since the late 90s and believe me, my first course was an unmitigated failure. I have started and stopped and failed and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in online training. So the advice I'm giving you is, I think quite valuable because I can teach you how not to waste a lot these days. It's never been easier to enter the realm of online training because platforms have been created. There are probably a dozen or so online platforms around the world that have received major venture capital and have money to build engineers to build their platforms and promote it. And I'm not an investor of any of those. And I also have a system I use for for courses for my own site and I use a platform called thinkific.com and folks, I'm not doing any referral fees or anything like that. I'm just mentioning these to you because I think it's helpful. Of all the online training companies out there, there is one I do have to recommend to you because it's simply the easiest way for you to get in front of a lot of students and for you to spend no money on the technology part. It's called udemy.com it's the letter u d e m y.com and they are in my mind, kind of like where ebay was a dozen years ago or so whenever ebay started or the first year or two of YouTube. But yeah, there were competitors out there, but they just did such a better job of marketing that they started to dominate the market. And we are seeing not complete domination by Udemy, but they are definitely the most talked about and seemingly the most popular online training platform that is getting paid students. There are places out there where it's completely free and that's a different model. But for those of you who are experts, author, you may already be wildly successful in making a lot of money, but why not make more money and share people your expertise? Some of you may be aspiring speakers Trainers, authors and experts, or you have a foot in one of those markets, why not leverage that into another field such as online training? So this show today is going to go through some of the ins and outs, things for you to think about. And really I frankly want to be a motivational speaker today. I want to motivate you to start your own course in the next month or so. You can't. Again, I make no money from this. I'm not getting any affiliate fees from you to me or anyone else. But that's really what I want to go to in more detail. First, let's start where everyone starts with this issue.

Technology Insights.

Now, when it comes to Udemy and most online training platforms, they are video based. What they have found is students would much prefer watching a professor, a teacher, a lecturer, an expert, speak and lecture, kind of like a classroom, than just to read text. Because if it's just reading by the book, that's not really a course. And Udemy specifically requires that the vast majority of your content be in a video format. So what that means is a tremendous number of people waste about 18 months investigating cameras and researching video cameras and going to the high tech B and H equivalent stores in their community researching cameras. And let me tell you, it's not 100% waste of time, but it's 99% waste of time. I have more than 100 courses on Udemy and two of the most popular ones I did when I had a $60 webcam and an old microphone I don't even use anymore, doing it in a closet without professional lighting. And those courses sell a lot. Every month, sometimes every day they sell. And the video production isn't great. What's more important is that you speak with passion and you deliver real insights. People need to see you. There needs to be good lighting and you do need good audio, but you can get a great microphone for 50 bucks or so. It's not that expensive. And there are some people who do their entire courses using an iPhone. I don't recommend that. But you could do that. Certainly. There are plenty of webcams. Now. I've upgraded my studio because of all the stuff I do here. I've got a several thousand dollar camera and I'm not here recommending cameras to you today. Don't write to me or call me about that. The cameras can change every day. I'm not a technologist. What I can tell you is do not waste time doing more and more research on cameras. It's like saying I want to be a world class Novelist. Let me spend six months figuring out and researching what the best word processing software is. You could and you could say, oh, do I want to use Scrivener? Do I want to use WordPress? Yeah, you could. But bottom line, you're much better off just starting to write. If you've got any word processor and you have a great novel inside you, it's a lot better to get that out than to waste another six months finding the perfect laptop or the perfect software program for writing. It's exactly the same thing with online training. Create your course. Make sure that people can see you clearly and hear you clearly and that you have great content. That is what's most important. Now. Udemy changes its rules, typically, as far as how long. Right now, I believe the rules are videos can't be more than 20 minutes. They need to be at least two minutes. They've changed that from time to time. You need at least a half an hour of content. Folks, that's not much. I do 20 minutes a day here with you on this audio and video podcast. By the way, for those of you listening on audio and through itunes, this is a TV show as well. You can watch this program on YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, places like that. And for those of you who are sick of looking at my face, you can just listen by going to itunes and typing and speaking with TJ Walker, and you can subscribe that way. But what holds people back, I believe, is part of this, the technology, worrying about the best camera. And part of it is nervousness, being uncomfortable about how to come across on camera. People say, well, T.J. you know, I've given speeches in the classroom. I do trainings for the federal government or at IBM, and I'm used to speaking to 10, 20 people, but I don't really know how to speak comfortably in front of a video. How do you do that? Well, I'm going to show you exactly how to do that.

Speaking is brought to you by Media Training Worldwide. For all of your media training and public speaking training needs, go to mediatrainingworldwide.com.

Before you start an online course and hire a production crew. I don't even think you need to just practice. Just hold up your cell phone, talk to it, give your insights, give your information there and look at it and ask yourself, is this person giving good value? Is this person easy to understand? Does this person sound like they're just talking to me? And practice it out that way. Build a comfort level. If, for example, you're shooting the video in someone else's studio, or house. Yet you don't need to invest a lot of money the production side. In fact, I would advise you not to because if you spend $5,000 producing a professional quality videos and they look slick and nice and then the first year you only sell $900 worth of your courses, you're going to have a bad taste in your mouth from this. It's going to be a bad experience. You're not going to enjoy it. So I would recommend let's really keep production cost down to less than a couple hundred bucks as you get started. You do well. You can always make things fancier. You can always build. So first thing I would do if I were you, go to udemy.com and just buy a dozen or so courses on how to do a course on Udemy. Do the free stuff. Udemy has free courses on how to do this. But listen to other people too. And here's a little secret, Udemy. Type in the name of the course and then type in discount on Google and you will most likely find a severely discounted course or a coupon for that course. What that means is you could sign up for 10 courses and probably pay only a hundred bucks. Now I have a course on how to do a Udemy course as well and how to do an online course, but I'm not pitching that today. You don't even have to take mine because I'm going to give you most of those secrets here. I would recommend that you go to Udemy and listen to the other experts. And you know, if you can do 10 courses, you can get a real variety. You can get the ones that are most popular, the ones that are highest rated, and you're only investing 100 bucks. That's much more important than spending say $5,000 on a great video camera or a $500 microphone. As long as people can see you clearly and hear you really well, that's what's most important on the technology. Beyond that, come up with an interesting subject where you are a real expert. Don't pick something just because you think it's the hot topic. Pick something where you have expertise. Pick something where you've already read every book on the subject. Pick something where you have genuine insights that people can't find in other books. Before I ever did my first online public speaking course or media training course in 1999, I read every single book I could get my hands on. Now these days it's really easy because again, I'm not an affiliate of Amazon. I'm not getting anything from them. But for 10 bucks a month or so with Amazon, you can join their Amazon Unlimited program and you can quickly read hundreds of books on your subject matter. I don't care if it's stamp collecting or how corporations should deal with diversity. You can find hundreds of books in your niche, most likely where it's in the unlimited program. And you can read 10 at a time and you can go through 300 books in a month and you spent 10 bucks. So it's never been easier to dive in deeply and gain some real expertise. You're not going to steal from these books, but you're going to synthesize, put your own spin on it and come up with a course structure. Now what's different about a course versus just a YouTube video is you need to take people along a path. There needs to be a set out structure. You need to give people homework assignments from time to time. There needs to be an interactive element. So for example, all of my public speaking online courses and media training courses a little different from this podcast experience because after every three or four minutes of a lecture for me, I'm going to give you a homework saying I want you to do a video of yourself giving a speech, upload the speech, put the URL in the discussion forum and I'll actually critique it. Now you don't have to do it that way, but the more you can make this seem like an experience that people would have in a real classroom, the more it will be seen as a valuable experience. Now why else would you want to do an online course? Well, let's say you're already have a busy full time business. You're a public relations practitioner. Your clients are expecting you at the office nine to six each day. You don't want to travel across the country to do a one day training gig and be away from the office for three days. Well, let's say that you have real expertise on how authors can promote their books more effectively. Why don't you do an online course? You can do it in an evening, on a weekend, put it on Udemy. And now authors from around the world can be accessing your course 24 hours a day. Your time, extra time isn't needed. There's no travel time. You don't have to talk to the prospect. All of that is going on and you don't have to be involved with the technology. That's the beauty of a platform like Udemy. They're hosting the videos. You have no hosting charges. You all on their website. Someone has a tech problem and they're not hearing it properly. They're not contacting you. They can contact the people at Udemy. So all those tech problems are gone, the coding problems. You don't have to worry about that. If you can create a video of yourself and you can type and you can click a mouse, you have all the technology skills you need to create your own online courses. That was not true 10 years ago. I can tell you. I hired a lot of expensive programmers and developers, different parts of the world, and I spent a lot of money on it. And it didn't turn out pretty. If I had waited, I wish I had been smart and waited like you or many of you. Because now is the perfect time to hop in. Now, a little more full disclosure. I entered Udemy a little more than two years ago. Probably two years and one month ago. So this would have been, I guess it was January of 2014. Maybe it was December of 2013. And the first six months I had a few courses up there that made $10. A course. You say, well, TJ, why are you wasting my time with something that insignificant? Well, several things happened. Number one, Udemy has done a massively effective job of promoting and getting more and more students in. So the universe of students is much larger, number one. Number two, it took a while for people to find me and get used to me. Number three, I added more courses. I have a lot of niche courses. So for example, I have a course just on how to give a more effective retirement speech, a particular type of speech, how to give a wedding speech. Now, have I made millions of dollars on my course on how to give a retirement speech? No. In fact, I'd be shocked if I made over $20 on that course. But I did that course in a couple of hours. And there are other courses I did in a very similar amount of time that have done well. Now there are people who are making millions of dollars a year on Udemy. I'm not one of them. The people who do best are doing courses that are unique to specific high tech programming skills. That's not what I'm an expert on. But your area of expertise may be on scrapbooking. There are people with courses there on that. Some of them are making real sells and making money. So again, don't go for a hot area. Go for what it is you care about. Go for your expertise. Go for where you're already a professional. If someone is hiring you as a consultant, as a speaker, to write a book on a subject, then you should, in my view, also be doing an online course. There are a lot of other advantages to having an online course. If someone asks you could you speak on a certain topic and let's say you haven't given a speech on that topic, but you already have a course on that topic and it's you speaking on video. Well, now you've got the perfect demo reel if you're trying to get hired to speak on that topic because you've shown mastery of it in this course. So you can then give the entire course, give that person a pass into your course and they can get a sense of your expertise. So for example, people hire me for media training and public speaking training. So if you are the head of training with a major corporation, you call me and you say, well tj, we're talking to media trainers around the world and we want a proposal from you. I say to them, well sure, I'm happy to send you a proposal, but I'll actually send you at no charge my online course on media training. And it's got more than 100 videos. So you don't have to go hire me on the basis of a recommendation or a testimonial or a reference. You can actually see exactly what my methods are. You can see how I answer every question that deals with media training. So it's, for me, it's a powerful sales tool to augment my traditional in person media training. So there are many, many values to having an online course. Now I have more than a hundred course all courses on Udemy, all within the niche of speaking, speaking to the media, speaking during a crisis, giving speeches, how to give speeches. If you have massive fear of public speaking, you don't have to have that many focus on one, start one, get it up, get it out, get feedback. And it's just another area, another way for you to share your expertise. It is frankly a way to make money. But I wouldn't quit your day job yet because it can be slow go. By the way, I started off telling you I made $10 a month the first six months. I now generate four to five thousand dollars per month just from that platform of Udemy. It takes relatively little time. I wouldn't call it passive income. Be careful if anyone ever talks to you about passive income. But it's not particularly time intensive. I now put it in the category of at least a profitable use of my time investment of my upfront time. So that's why I would like to urge you, in fact beg you do a course on Udemy in the next 30 days. If you give yourself that goal, you will in fact do it if you put it in a maybe kind of sorta, it'll never happen. And here's the thing you may be thinking, well, I want to do my book first. In my professional view, an online course is a thousand times easier to do than a book. With a book, you get so many edits, proofreading, there's so many formatting issues, there's so much paperwork involved with publishing a book, even if it's a simple, short Kindle electronic book. An online course is much easier, simpler, faster, less expensive. And you really can. I mean, you could do that in the next week if you wanted to. So that is my hope for you, my request for you. Please think of doing and just do an online course on Udemy, on whatever area of expertise you have. Or it could be a hobby. Just do something to get yourself out there and plant a flag in the whole online training space. TJ I'm TJ Walker. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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