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Udemy for instructors is fantastic, but not for making money

If you spend any time online looking at Udemy reviews, it becomes obvious that many instructors bash the platform for its practices:

  1. they take 50% of your sales revenue
  2. or 75% if they used a promotion to generate the sale
  3. you compete with all the other instructions on the site, and there is no way for you to stand out
  4.  you don’t control your course’s sale price – and most sales happen at around $10, out of which you get $5 – even if your listing price is the maximum allowed of $199.

If you are an instructor, then all the above are terrible news for you! 

So why do I think Udemy is fantastic?

Let’s start with who is Udemy for? 

Udemy is for students looking for quality courses at affordable prices. That means that Udemy is focused on the students, and not you, the instructor. They don’t care how much money you make; they care about how many students they serve as their customers.

And if you want to build your business around selling your knowledge, you too need to start caring about the students and putting them first. 

When you shift your viewpoint like that, you begin to see how Udemy is fantastic for you to grow as an instructor, especially if you are just starting out. 

Udemy offers you free training on how to create a course. 

They have data from 35m students using their platform: they know what works and what doesn’t. Don’t ignore this. 

They offer articles on how to choose a microphone and camera to record your material. 

They offer a free expert review of sample material when you signup as an instructor. You may think your video and audio is excellent, but having an expert giving you direct feedback is a massive learning opportunity. 

Your course needs to be reviewed to assure some quality standards before being approved on the platform. I read many people take issue with this, and they are frustrated, but I believe they are missing the point. This review is again a free expert critique that you would do well to listen to. 

They offer your marketing insights like what students are searching for, what the competition looks like around a specific topic and some estimated sales numbers. 

How to make Udemy work for you?

The short answer is to embrace for what it is, and not fight against it. The really bad way to use Udemy is to have “a great idea for a course,” do some quick recordings with your phone, upload it to the site and wait for the money to flow. Frustration and disappointment are at the end of that road. 

Do not even think of what you could teach before you do your marketing research. And here, Udemy can help a lot. 

If there is zero interest in your topic, it does not matter how high quality your course is, what a charismatic instructor you are; you will have just wasted your time. 

Use the marketing data on Udemy (that you get for free), and learn about your potential students first! (Remember when I said above that you need to focus on the students?). Once you have found some interests that you can teach about that also have students waiting, you can begin planning your course. 

Next, do not record your entire course and send it to Udemy for review. What if you made a mistake that will prevent you from going through the approval process? You again just wasted your time, and you will have to re-record everything. Instead, do a sample, ask for feedback from experts and listen to what they have to say. Look at the preview of popular courses from your competitors and understand what they are doing right. You don’t have to copy them exactly, but there is a lot to learn from someone who is obviously way ahead of you. 

The following step is to publish the course, set the maximum price for it, but allow Udemy to discount it. This strategy will likely drop the price to $10. Don’t despair. You are here for the learning experience, not for the money. Once you get some sales, ask for feedback from your students to improve your course. Learn from them and improve. I would also ask them for their email and permission to add them to my newsletter :). 

Here is a summary of what happened so far:

  1.  you have some research around students that may want to learn something from you 
  2.  you have much more confidence in your ability to create video content – because your creations have been reviewed and approved by the experts at Udemy
  3.  you have a rough idea of how your course competes against others in the same topic – if it generates no sales, then maybe you need to create something else
  4.  if you do generate sales – you have some students you can communicate with and get feedback from on Udemy – they can become your future audience for various products

Try to do this on your own, and see how far or fast you will go. 

In conclusion

If you are new, if you don’t have your own audience, if you need to train your video creation skills, if you don’t have a budget to spend on setting up a website, and you need to find a niche of students that you can teach, you can do all of that on Udemy for free. 

Once you get that training, have a product that works, an audience larger than zero, and you know how to do marketing, it may be time to create your website on Teachable. 

Exploring Teachable as a platform for Spiritual Teachers

Are you looking to create an online course or a coaching service? Let’s explore if Teachable is the right platform for you.

The Short Story

Pros

  • You don’t need to worry about technology.
  • You can create landing pages to promote your course. 
  • You can integrate it with other platforms (using Zapier). 
  • It has dedicated features for selling coaching sessions.
  • It is effortless to scale your business.
  • There is a basic blog tool that can help to create awareness around your business.

Cons

  • There is a monthly fee that you need to pay, regardless if you make any sales. (Starts at $39/mo)
  • You can remove the Teachable brand starting only with the Professional plan.
  • It has a 1.8/5 score on Trustpilot reviews because of bad/slow support. (It does much better on Capterra with 4.5/5)

Caution

  •  Their free “Get Started” plan is very limited. It is just a quick test drive.
  • Don’t expect to publish a course on Teachable and then wait for the money to roll in. You still need to bring an audience.
  • Before creating your course, look for other classes like that on the platform. No competition may signify that there is no audience, or the course is not a good fit for Teachable.

The Long Story

Spiritual Teachers can use both courses and coaching services to share their insights with an audience and elevate the Consciousness on our planet. 

Working with a platform like Teachable can help you get started because they do all of the heavy liftings when it comes to technology. You don’t have to worry about hosting, disk space, performance, video embeds, bandwidth limitations… none of that technical jargon will matter to you. 

There is some learning involved because you will need to use their Admin user interface to build your course and the sales page, but it is clear enough, there are video tutorials, and you don’t have to be a developer to understand it. There is also available support, but there are some concerns here with how fast they will respond. 

Take a moment and let this sink in, just how much Teachable takes off your hands. If you are not a tech person, building a website and maintaining it, and connecting with all the various tools you will need, can quickly grow to be your highest cost—both in time and money. 

Let’s talk money

The price for the basic Teachable plan is $39/mo. That can seem like a lot, but you don’t have any of the upfront costs you would have with building a website from scratch. And if you opt for yearly billing, you get a better price of $29/mo. That adds up to $348/year. But will not pay for hosting, or a template or a developer to help you build a custom site. (As an aside, even paying $99/mo for their professional plan is still a bargain compared to the costs of maintaining your own website).

If you plan to use this platform, you need to be serious about it. You cannot just start an account and forget about it. The monthly fee will continue to fly out of your pocket regardless if you make any sales or not. 

With a course or coaching session priced at $40, you would need to sell at least one copy per month to pay for Teachable. With a conversion rate of %1, this means that you need to bring 100 visitors a month to your course sales page, to get that sale. 

However, you will not buy the tools and spend the time to create a fantastic course to just pay for itself. You will have a monthly revenue goal much higher than $40. 

Let’s assume you are aiming for $1,000/mo. That means 25 sales, at a 1% conversion rate, it works out that you need to bring 2,500 visitors to the course sales page each month. 

This model is simplified because you will also have some refunds. And you will also have referrals that will have a much higher conversion rate. 

But you now have an idea of the size of the audience you need to generate this kind of revenue. 

And this brings me to an important point: whether you choose to develop a website or choose a platform like Teachable, you are responsible for building this audience and sending it to your sales page. 

The Marketing is on You

If you are starting from scratch, with no audience, I would suggest using Social Media to connect with people you could teach and build that audience. 

And you do that by sharing your expertise for free and being generous with helping other people solve their problems. At the same time, you build up a library of questions and answers, and you are continually asking for feedback from your audience. 

Eventually, you will get to a place where you can say: “Hey, it looks like many of you are looking to make quick progress in this [area]. Would it help if I create a course for it? Would that be valuable for you? And does a price point of $xxx make sense?” and see what kind of a response you get. Alternatively, you could ask if you set up a coaching program may be a better fit.

With this approach, you know immediately if you will have customers or not. And if you do, you will have a bunch of fans cheering you on, motivating you to get it done already! They will also be the ones to send referrals. 

When NOT to use Teachable

If you not yet sure what you want, I would suggest testing your idea with some free options, like building a Wix website or a free WordPress one. The problem here is that these options make it easy for you to set and forget about them since they don’t cost you any money. But this will not work. Testing means interacting with your audience, getting feedback, making changes, not just waiting to see what happens. If your plan is to wait, I can tell you what will happen: NOTHING. So don’t even start; you’re better of using that time elsewhere.

If you are good with web technology or have someone like that on your team, you can get much better flexibility and lower costs if you build a WordPress site. 

If branding, flexibility, optimization, and customization are critical to you, having Teachable as your “main site” will note work.

Finally, if your vision is to build a custom service, then Teachable is not for you. 

Alternatives to Consider

In case you don’t like Teachable, other platforms may work for your style: Udemy, Thinkific, Kajabi, Skillshare.