Udemy.com is one of most popular online learning platforms with easy to use interface and powerful tools for both instructors and students. Udemy was founded in 2009 by a Turkish guy Eren Bali. Udemy is a San Francisco based Silicon Valley startup, which got attention when it acquired $12 million USD investment in 2012 just three years after the launch. Anyone from anywhere can teach on Udemy in any language.

Udemy provides opportunity to experts and students at the same time to learn and earn. If you are thinking to publish your course on Udemy then here are some tips for you.

Who is Udemy for?

Udemy is for instructors who know their topic very well. If you are a beginner then try to first create video tutorials for YouTube users and get some feedback from there. After you get familiar with online teaching and remove your hesitation then it’ll be easier for you to create a world class course for Udemy.

Udemy doesn’t have any specific criteria for teachers, but from my personal experience, you should first get familiar with online teaching and how it works. Udemy has a free course for starters, which you must watch and try to learn the steps mentioned there in order to create a superb course. Udemy Course Quality Checklist.

If you are going to create your course in English then work on your English accent to make it better. English courses work the best, as it get exposed to a large market.

Udemy Official Course for Instructors: Find the Official Udemy Course

What Should You Teach?

After the basic teaching skills, the next and very important step is your topic. You must be an expert or at least have intermediate knowledge in a topic that you are going to cover in your course. If you don’t have sufficient knowledge on that topic then first try to make your skills stronger.

I’m telling you this because students will be asking you questions in the course discussion forum. So you must be ready to answer basic to very advanced questions asked by your students.

The very first mistake new instructors make is, they create a course on the same topic which is already successful on Udemy. I know new instructors want quick results, but now a days the competition is bit high. So you have to be careful and be a planner instead of diver.

There is no problem in creating a course on the same topic, but what I want to point here is that you need to make your course a unique one in the marketplace so that it can standout alone and get attention of the students.

You might be thinking how one can do that? let me explain a little bit. When I joined Udemy back in 2014, I wanted to create courses on PHP because web development and particularly PHP courses were very popular on Udemy.

I started thinking to create a course on the same topic but to make sure it’s different than the ones already existing. I did some keyword research and found out that project based courses in PHP are either not available or very few in numbers.

So I created a course naming “eCommerce Website in PHP from Scratch“ back in 2014. That course went successful in very short time and then I created another course “Social Network in PHP from Scratch” which was again project based, and so this also got success.

The point here is that you can make a course on a specific thing, which targets a small audience but targeted audience. This way, you’ll face very low competition and will get great results in short time.

Another example is the Adsense course I created in 2015, there was not a single course on Adsense in the Marketplace at that time so I took the opportunity and created a course on Google Adsense which was also a success.

Even today, there are many topics which are not yet covered by any instructor, and people are searching for those topics. You can find all those topics here, and if any topic matches your skills then create a course on that ASAP.

How to Create a Course?

When your topic is finally decided and the basic keyword research is done. Make sure you create the course first and then the introduction video at the end. This way, you’ll tell the students in the introduction that what you are going to teach them in the course.

And you know what, most of the new instructors struggle with creating the first course despite they want to publish it as quickly as possible. My suggestion to overcome this problem will be to start recording the lectures without giving any importance to the introduction lecture. And when you are done with the course, you can then review your course to make necessary changes. And you may also create the introduction lecture at the end to cover all the overview of the course.

You’ll Love to Watch: Camtasia Studio Urdu Tutorials

If you are creating a course in which you want to appear yourself like talking head or face to face then use a Webcam or any other DSLR camera, you can create talking videos with a smartphone as well. But if your course is only screen cast then try to appear in the first video so that students can see you, and then use Camtasia Studio or Screen Flow for recording screencast videos. (Talking head video is not mandatory, but recommended).

Finally, if you want to create a great course then use a combination of screencast videos, articles and presentations along with one or two talking head videos. And try to add Quizzes to your course which will boost the students interaction with the course. You should also present actionable tasks for the students so the can learn a real life skill from your course. And that’s what Udemy wants from you as an instructor.

25 Tips to Make Great Online Courses for Udemy 

How to Market Your Course?

This is the hardest part of online teaching, if you know nothing about online marketing then probably you’ll hate the whole teaching thing. Teaching is a very respectable profession, but to make sure you make money out of your profession, you’ll need marketing skills.

I’ll share my tips with you regarding marketing my courses. Before joining Udemy, I was already teaching free tutorials on YouTube and on my websites. I had a different channel for English users and a website as well. So I started offering my existing subscribers a discounted coupon for every course I was publishing on Udemy. And as a result, 50% of my revenue was always coming from my own promotions.

I have a landing page on my website where I convince visitors and free students to buy my courses, and this works slightly better. But the main source of driving new students is YouTube. I also used Facebook Ads and Google Ads but that worked little to none.

I’ll advise to have an active YouTube channel and a website on the same or similar topic for which you are creating courses on Udemy. You can feed your free users with new tutorials, and ultimately they’ll buy your paid courses. Offer them some nice discounts, especially on seasons like Black Friday, New Year and Halloween.

When you start driving students to your courses, Udemy also starts promoting your courses through their super marketing channels such as Email marketing, Paid advertising and business partners. And finally, you can send discounted coupons to your existing students on Udemy using a feature called “Promotional Announcement“, this option has worked great for me. You can find it in the course dashboard on Udemy.

For planning, producing and marketing your course, please visit this page and then click the links on the left side one by one so you can learn the whole thing.

And here is the Udemy official marketing course, you can watch it to learn real time case studies and tips that Udemy has suggested you from top instructors and their own marketing Ninjas.

Useful Tips:

You can search your course keyword on Udemy.com to get ideas and competition level so you can prepare yourself to make it a unique one.

Udemy search algorithm works similarly like Google, so make sure to include your main course keywords in the title, description and summary of the course. By doing so, your course will be indexed and ranked in Google as well as on Udemy itself.

Udemy works great for those who give value, and who create outstanding courses.

Udemy will rank your course in inner searches when you answer to questions within 24 hours and if students leave positive 5 star reviews on your courses (These are ranking factors).

You can find the Udemy business model and revenue sharing system here.

If you have any further questions then do let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading…..