➤ 👨‍💻Earning with Udemy: complete guide and case study 🎮

Earning with Udemy it looked like bullshit to me. The platform offers courses for less than €10. What does it mean???

Then in October 2020 I tried to buy one. A course in English on Web Development. And I had the first 2 surprises:

despite the low cost, the lessons were excellent,
the platform had a quality study interface.

But I didn't know that

from 2019 onwards he has published several courses right on Udemy,
in 2020, he earned over $10.000 from the platform.

👨‍💻Earning with Udemy: complete guide and case study

Index

What is Udemy?
What topics work on Udemy?
How to make money with Udemy?
How Much Can You Make With Udemy?
Case Study: €10.000 in one year
The next step

What is Udemy?

Udemy was born in 2007. According to Wikipedia as of April 2021 the platform matters

40 million students,
155.000 courses
and 70.000 teachers
in more than 65 different languages.

It works like a marketplace. The company makes its platform available to students and teachers. Vendors can upload their courses. End customers can purchase the products of different teachers.

E thanks to its numbers it is the leader of the sector. This makes it a reliable environment for students:

they already know what the user experience will be like after the purchase,
the platform protects them from rip-offs. For example, refunds follow precise rules. No seller can play jokes on this front.

But the service is also interesting from the teacher's side.

You don't need to create a course area.
You can put your course online at no cost. Platforms like Teachable on the other hand require you to subscribe.
You have access to a profiled audience. Udemy attracts over 100 million visitors each month. They only go to the site for 2 reasons:
1. attend a course they have already bought,
2. buy one again.

Customers will not join your email list. This limits your marketing efforts (e.g. upsells will be more complicated).
You can put the course at any price. But in fact, the dynamics of the platform force you to pay less than €20. Udemy has trained its customers to buy below that threshold.

What topics work on Udemy

There are no limits on this front. Udemy highlights these “top categories”:

Design
Web development
Marketing
IT e software
Personal development
Business
Photography
Music

But there are also courses on fitness or cooking. You still need to request approval of your content from Udemy. In this way they check compliance with their guidelines. These are the rules that more or less apply to any online sales platform, nothing strange about them.

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How to make money with Udemy

You need a video course.

Here's how to create one on Udemy.

Register as a teacher

From the top menu click on “Teach on Udemy”.

On the new screen, click on the "Get Started" button. Enter your details and click on "Register".

They will send you a confirmation email. Verify your account and you're up and running.

Upload a first course

At this point you will have access to the courses area for teachers.

Click on “New course”. The creation process is guided.

I advise you to proceed in order through the various steps. In the image below I highlight the fundamental ones.

Here you enter the first useful information for customers to evaluate the purchase.

What will they learn in the course?
What are the requirements to attend it?
Who are the ideal clients for the course?

Curriculum Vitae

Here you upload the lessons of the course and put them in the right order.

You can upload:

Video,
video slideshow,
and text content.

Course landing page

This is where you set up your sales copy. Enter the title, subtitle and presentation of the course. You can add a sales video or content trailer.

Finally, here you need to enter your presentation as a teacher.

Pricing

Nothing fancy here you choose the currency and sale value of your course.

As I said, proceed in order. The platform is intuitive. It will not create obstacles for you. Then use your maximum energy to create a course with interesting content for customers.

Promote the course

When the lessons are ready, we move on to the sale.

Basically all marketing activities apply. Particularly if you have an email list, promote the course to your subscribers.

In addition to this you need to improve your ranking on Udemy to the maximum. The platform uses an algorithm to present “the right course” to visitors.

Udemy primarily values:

positive customer reviews,
and past purchases.

The more people accessing your course, the higher you'll rank in search results.

For this you can create special promotions. Put the course for free or at a discounted price. The more customers access it, the higher it will rise in the rankings.

It's not precise math. Udemy tries to give new courses a chance to stand out as well. But the logic is what I just described to you.

These are the possible promotions:

current best price,
custom price,
free for 3 days (up to 40.000 students),
free for 30 days (up to 10 students).

How much do you earn with Udemy

First let's analyze the timing and methods of payment. Then we talk about profit percentages.

Timing and methods of payment

The payment flow is this.

You create your course and list it for sale on Udemy.
If customers buy the course, the platform collects their payment.
Udemy holds earnings for 2 months to handle any refund requests.
After 3 months from the initial payment, it sends you the credit you have accumulated. You will receive a single monthly payment. So you only need to issue one invoice per month.

As with any business activity from Italy, you need a VAT number to collect earnings. Roughly the same is true in all countries of the European Union.

Let's move on to the profit percentages

How much will you earn for each sale

After the customer pays, Udemy deducts any fees or fixed costs from the total. For example the VAT on the course price.

At that point, the net profit remains.

One part is yours as an instructor, the rest goes to Udemy.

How much is yours? Depends.

If customers buy through your sales link, you get 97%.

If the sale takes place without your sales link, Udemy awards you 37% of the net income. This is the case when a customer searches for a course on the platform on his own. He finds it and buys it, without any marketing intervention on your part.

Case Study: €10.000 in one year on Udemy

Luca Panzarella had been working as a UX design consultant for years. He created the design of apps and websites to improve the user experience.

The first Udemy course

In 2018 without great expectations and with the minimum possible effort he created a couple of hours course on UX design for Udemy.

There was nothing in Italian on that subject. He uploaded it to the platform and then “abandoned” it.

No marketing, no updates. She responded to students' comments only when he had time.

Even so the course was selling for around €80 a month. And Luca forgot he had it.

1 course on Udemy = €80… What if I create 10 or maybe 20?

Fast forward to December 2019. Luca had finished a demanding consultancy and needed a break. In addition, he wanted to be less dependent on the direct relationship with customers.

So he returned to thinking about Udemy.

A course brought him €80 a month, without any marketing effort.

He asked himself: ”What happens if instead of 1 course, I load 10 or maybe 20? By how much will the earnings multiply?”

So he started working on it.

First he re-recorded the old course. He has improved both the graphics and the texts of the lessons.

Then he started creating new courses on topics within his expertise.

The first results during the spring 2020 lockdown

After a couple of months Italy went into lockdown.

This sent sales of his first new courses skyrocketing. As of April 2020, it has grossed over $2.800.

For a couple of months Luca was ready for a super-early retirement.

Sales with 10 active courses

At the end of the lockdown there was a downsizing, but each new course brought a few more customers.

As of July 2020, sales have reached a stable level around $1.000 per month. The trend is slightly but continuously growing as Luca gradually optimizes all the elements of the process: new courses, better copy, effective choice of topics, etc.

How Luca chooses the topics for his courses

The most important factor on Udemy is your choice of topic.

With the first course Luca went at random. He already had the material ready and put it online.

After this he used a more methodical approach to find valid arguments.

Udemy lets you know what topics your customers are searching for. From there he took the cue for new courses, connected to the first one.

This is useful in two senses:

works on topics within its competence,
improves his chances of upselling old customers.

The other approach to finding arguments is to think about tools. A lot of users on Udemy are looking for quality tutorials on using software like Figma, WordPress, Trello, etc.

If you're familiar with any of these tools, you've already found a possible starting point for your Udemy adventure.

Translate courses into English

In English the dynamic goes the other way around.

You will have phenomenal competitors, but at the same time the audience is "infinite".

Luca tried to test the market in English, with the help of an interpreter.

He translated the contents first. Then the interpreter dubbed the audio onto his recording.

The effect is that of TV interviews with a foreign guest. There is some lag between voice and video, but the content is 100% understandable for English speaking customers

In addition, each new sale makes Luca a little less known on the international market.