How Much Money Can You Make Off Udemy

My Udemy online course „Practical Time Management - Personal Productivity Tools" just passed 1.000 students and 200 reviews (average now is 4.6). It took roughly 3 months to reach that milestone.

Now looking through data and statistics I found some interesting insights and I would also like to share with you some key lessons that I've learned on my way - how much you can actually earn, students dropout, how much effort was put into production, how people rate it.

Fasten your seatbelts and let's go :)

Publication

The course was published on November 5th, 2019. I got a nice confirmation email from Udemy. I took roughly 48 hours from the moment that I submitted the course to have it publicly available.

It's 28 lectures in 7 modules with 5 lessons for Introduction and Summary modules. 5 main modules are Brain functioning, Effective Task List, Best Calendar Practices, Focus and Distractions, Planning Strategies. The total watch time is 1 hour and 43 minutes + there are some tasks and 5 quizzes to solve on the way.

I had to make one correction to the course to have it accepted - there was a part in the last lesson that I invited people to submit to my newsletter to get more free materials. I had been asked by Udemy's support to remove it.

After it was accepted, I shared a nice discount through my newsletter, Facebook fan page, and friends (mostly from Poland). In a week I had my first 100 participants.

Pricing and Earnings

3 months after publication, on February 5th, 2020, I had 1033 students and earned $2462.87.

My November payout was $985.72, December was $712.51 and January was $702.29. The payouts are delayed by 2 months, so I received my November payout in January.

To understand how much you can earn, let's talk about pricing. I set the price of the course at $24.99, which is called Tier 2 pricing on Udemy. There are currently 37 of them with Tier 1 is $19.99 and the last Tier 37 is $199.99.

The amount of money you earn on Udemy depends on a few factors:

1. The source of purchase - If the purchase comes from Instructor Promotion (my coupon or course referral link - I have a redirect from udemy.nabielec.com), I get 97% of the price. If it comes from Udemy organic traffic, I get 50% of the price. If it comes from a paid Udemy campaign, I get 25% in most cases. This is why my first payout is the biggest, while it didn't have so many students - most of it was my traffic and I got most of the money from these purchases.
2. The promotion - There are a few types of promotions and coupons that I create and Udemy makes their promotions as well. It usually drops the price by up to 50% in my case.
3. The revenue share - I co-created the course with Bartek Rycharski from the Course Makers studio (in Poland). We decided I will not pay for his assistance during course creation nor the recordings in the studio (over 2 days) and editing, but we will split the Udemy earnings as 35%/15%. So to this day, Bart earned just over $1.000 already and I hope he will soon be rich! ;)
4. Is it Udemy for Business - If people purchase the course by Udemy for Business, I receive no money. In these cases, my payout is dependent on how much students watch. So if they watch 50%, I get 50%. I was added to Udemy for Business on January 24th, so this is a fresh story at this point.

Marketing

Very quickly Udemy and its channels became the main source of people purchasing the course:

Also with Udemy for Business the rate of purchases is 3x the previous one, however as described above, it does not translate to revenue directly until people really take their time to watch the course.

Effort

How much work was required to create this course? My rough estimate is 100-120 hours.

First, we had to have an agreement about the idea behind the course, the target audience, the transformation we would like people to go through and then the structure to achieve that. In our work, we used Course Makers Canvas from Bartek Rycharski. He and his team gave me invaluable feedback at this point.

Then I created two presentations and hosted two free webinars with the course content to get feedback from people. Roughly 500 people signed up for these webinars and 100 showed up live.

With the feedback, I was ready to write lesson scenarios. To keep individual lessons up to 5 minutes and packed with information, a single scenario was roughly 600-800 words. The document with all the scenarios for the course is 42 pages long, with 17.700 words and almost 100.000 characters.

I do not have a precise time tracking for that, but I estimate it took 30 hours to polish the idea, 10 hours to prepare and host the webinars (I already made quite a lot of them in the past) and 40 hours to write scenarios.

At this point, we entered the studio and spent two full days there to record the whole thing. If you look for a professional studio with people knowing how to prepare good online courses, I highly recommend Course Makers (Poland). I would be happy to create another course with them.

The last piece of work was corrections, preparing materials, graphic design and putting it on Udemy.

Now, after publication, I spend roughly 1 hour weekly walking through statistics, answering questions and reviews, sometimes organizing promotions. At this point, it is almost 100% passive income.

Dropout

This is the interesting part. It turns out that 50% of people who purchased the course, did not even start it - the progress is below 10%. It is true for both regular purchases and Udemy for Business. Only 18% of people get to the last 10% of the material.

Let's look at the total and also split separately for regular purchases and Udemy for Business.

It's shocking for someone that already has an online course, in Polish, that is actively led by me, with community, daily tasks, and reports - this course is 30 days long and 91% of people graduate it. Even more interesting fact is that if you miss two tasks and reports in a row, you are kicked out of the course - so you really have to be actively engaged from the beginning to an end. For the last edition, 111 people started the course and 103 got to the last, 30th day. Completely different results from Udemy.

I would be happy to compare these results with other course authors. I am all about productivity and helping people develop, so I care about those numbers and how to help people learn :)

Reviews

There are a few interesting insights when it comes to reviews.

My initial audience rated the course very high - after 200 participants, I was oscillating around 4.8 ratings. This is normal because those were the people that already knew me and my work or got very strong course recommendations. They were my fans. With more people coming that didn't know me and my work, I stabilized around 4.66 for the next 2 months. It was still a very high rating and I got the "Best rated" label from Udemy and still have it.

Some people rate it as 3/5 stars and comment as „very good course" - I really can't understand that even if I am Polish and we are known from being a little bit depressive ;)

Interesting things started to happen after I was joined to Udemy for Business on January 24th:

Just look what happened to the average review after that day:

It dropped from 4.66 to 4.56 in just two weeks!

I have two hypotheses about what happened:

1. People working for large businesses that buy Udemy for Business have access to super high-quality content and have higher demands.
2. People who do not pay for the course themselves, rate it lower as they didn't put their own money into that.

With my other course in Polish, I have similar experiences - most people that drop from the course are the ones that didn't pay for it themselves - in most cases, it was funded by the company.

What do you think about it?

The best part

The best part of the whole story is the feedback I get, how much it helped other people. People from all over the world signed up with the top 3 countries being the USA, India, and Poland (where I come from).

Some people call it a blessing, some say it helped them to get back on track or saved a lot of time and frustration.

One person liked the course so much that he decided to make subtitles in his native language for free so that his family and friends that do not know English can access it. Wow!

While creating the course I was thinking that this is a missing piece in our education system and it seems I was right. For every teacher, the feeling that it helps other people is one of the best rewards. My Gallup CliftonStregnths has „Developer" on the very top, so it feels like a double reward for me :)

Key learnings and takeaways

Few things that I've learned on the way:

• Udemy can be almost 100% passive income. I spend just 1 hour weekly to support it. At this point it gives me about $700 monthly - couldn't live out of it, but still pretty nice! My course in Polish had 900 students with $35.000 income, but it took 2.5 years to get there and it requires a significant amount of my time.
• It's a great satisfaction to be able to help people all around the world :)
• Be in TOP3 courses in your category on Udemy or do not even start - now I know it couldn't be truer. If there is no initial traffic and really good reviews, we won't get anywhere - it's like SEO for the course.
• Think about the target audience, their problems, and transformation you want to help - and then create a structure, not the opposite.
• You can build your brand on Udemy, but you won't be able to use it as a marketing channel - they'll cut all the external traffic or will ask you to do so.
• Work with people who are the best - I learned a lot from Bartek, who helped to create over 30 courses in the past and I also learned a lot during the studio recordings - about energy management, pace of recording, how to prepare myself, about light, sound or even what to wear - I am sure this will enormously help all my future courses. Not mentioning the quality of the video and audio that we were able to achieve. It's compared to MasterClass.
• Roughly 20% of people who purchased the course on Udemy will use its value. This is good to reach a wide audience, but a little bit frustrating for someone focused on productivity - especially if I compare it to 91% that I achieved with my other course.
• I need at least 10 hours weekly to really progress with the work when creating the course or I'll get frustrated and will get nowhere. I had to cut a few activities to be happy with the pace of creation.
• The audience that I've built in Poland on my courses in Polish helped me get started with the course in English - they provided initial traffic and very, very good reviews. It was so encouraging to see it! So my advice to all people trying to start their course is to first build the first 1.000 fans (or true fans!), consult with them and then create the course.

If you have any more questions about the project or want to discuss - feel invited to comment :) - As you can see I am pretty open to talking about details and actual implementation, rather than ideas.

How Much Money Can You Make Off Udemy

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-you-can-earn-udemy-course-takeaways-after-1000-nabielec

Posted by: bischoffwassis1948.blogspot.com

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