ESYB2 149 - How to Make Money by Selling Courses Out of Your YouTube Videos
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[00:00:00] In this video, let's begin discussing creating online courses. It's a very accessible and very hot and growing space online. Just about any expert on anything can make an online course today. I started in 2014. I first played around with YouTube before that and I improved in video, in creating videos, and I made all kinds of mistakes, and I was still very bad, and I'm still not expert level, but I'm improving all the time, so it's actually a long journey to become better at video, and your, your course takers, you know, they pay, so they do expect a certain level of quality, and even though I started in 2014 and I thought I was crowded then, I didn't know what was going to happen later, because now it's much more crowded, and every day it's more crowded, more competitive, and so you If you have a great, unique niche in which you are an expert, that's really great.

Because what you don't want to do is go into a space, a very general space, like cooking or how to start a business. Because there's like literally thousands of instructors teaching that [00:01:00] all over the web and it's a really competitive space. So finding a great niche is really important here. And of course you want to focus on improving yourself at good audio, creating good videos, presenting better.

And making sure that you have authoritative subject matter expertise, because even in niche courses, there's probably going to be somebody competing with you, and a lot of students are going to be buying the courses from more credible, more experienced instructors, unless you're the one who's the more credible, more experienced.

So subject matter expertise is really important. You can't just wake up one day and say, I'm an expert, even though you're kind of beginner to intermediate. You really have to bring expertise and insight into courses today. In 2014 or earlier, you could get away with something. lesser quality. But today, your students will just be very critical of you.

And the main platforms where you can sell online today, if you're not a professor, if you're a regular expert, are Udemy is by far the market [00:02:00] leader and Skillshare. com is a very second behind. Most people don't make a lot of money there and I don't recommend it actually because from the instructor viewpoint, Udemy treats instructors much much better than Skillshare does.

So if you just do one platform, I would recommend Udemy. And you can also teach the courses on your own website and the main hosting service providers. If you want to sell on your site, our sites like teachable. com and thinkific, I believe on teachable, the basic account is free. So if you want to sell on your site.

The Teachable and Thinkific are your options to help you with that. They take care of the video player, the payment processing, the video hosting, a lot of things that go into putting together a course that you don't have to take care of technically. And the great thing about courses is, comparatively, it's not a lot of work.

It's approximately like maintaining a regular blog. It's approximately like writing a book. If you're fast at video, it's faster for you. If you're slow at video, it's slower for you. If you're a better writer, [00:03:00] obviously writing would be easier. But for me, I find creating videos is much easier than writing a book.

And I'm able to update the courses much more frequently as well. Courses are one of the lesser work intensive businesses I've been in. I see it as a positive. Now there's some common questions people ask. So let's address them. So how do you make money on Udemy? The courses are priced so low. How do people make money?

Well, it's volume. You make not much money per sale, but Udemy It's like a Walmart model where you basically just have to sell a lot of copies of your course to a lot of students and on your own site, you command the prices so you can generally charge higher rates on your site, especially if you have some kind of niche expertise that can be readily found on Udemy made in high quality and people ask, okay, if I make a course on Udemy, how much should I charge?

Well, Udemy pricing is mostly discounted all the time anyway, [00:04:00] so you can label your course as 100, 200, but actually they'll decide the price ultimately for you because Most of the courses are sold at steep discounts. So that's actually a moot question on Udemy. Then people ask, how long should my course be?

Usually, your first course should be one to three hours, which is on the short side. If it's your first course, you don't want to make it complicated. You want to finish and publish the course. Your later courses can be longer. And you can get fancy equipment. You don't have to have it. It does help your video and audio.

It does help. But you can record from your phone. From your laptops, webcam, and the microphone can be under 100 or under 200. As long as you have a nice, quiet place in your home that has a nice background and nice lighting so it's not dim looking. Then you kinda have a okay home studio. You're okay starting to film.

And a lot of people have DSLR cameras at home. [00:05:00] Those make fantastic videos. So you don't have to spend a lot to get started. And Even though, earlier I said, yeah, they're comparatively, Udemy is not a lot of work compared to other businesses. For most instructors, they put out their first course, they're very excited.

And the first course doesn't make a lot of money. Maybe 50 a month, 100 a month. And that's not even a bad case. Sometimes it makes way less. So So, usually the way things work out is, you make your first course, your second course, your third course, you become better, even though you thought you were great at first, you realize, oh, you had room to improve, you improve, and then your courses start to improve as well, and they start to make more money.

So at first it's like, A lot of work, low pay, low pay, low pay, low pay, and then more pay, more pay. If you stick with it, you'll get to high pay. But that's like that in almost all businesses on YouTube, writing books, blogging. It's like a lot of pre work, and then later you get paid. So, if you're used to getting paid per hour, it's a very different mindset.

You [00:06:00] have to invest a lot of effort, and then Maybe in six months, maybe in a year, maybe in a year and a half, you'll see that get rewarded many fold, but not at first and with persistence and patience. So let's say you choose some online niche to do business and you succeed. Let's say the niche is like basically how to.

You can become a hiking guide and then make money taking people on hikes and turning that into a tourist business and making six figures. Let's say something like that worked out for you. Just as an example. Well, then guess what? A lot of other hikers and outdoor enthusiasts, they would love to do what you did.

They would love to replicate what you did. So you can start to train people. In that niche and because it's a niche there's going to be almost nobody competing with you and so you can create your own course, your own book, your own coaching, create your own YouTube videos and masterminds groups and even membership sites Because you're [00:07:00] the expert you succeeded and people want to achieve what you achieved.

So they'll take your coaching and training and courses. So, it's gotta be a niche like that, like kind of a narrow niche for that to be a possibility. And it has to be based on real success that people want. Because if you teach something where you didn't succeed, people just won't take you seriously, they're not gonna buy your products.

And one example of this is John Lee Dumas, he had a podcast, Entrepreneur on Fire. I believe he started in 2012, 13, or 14, where podcasting was just becoming a thing, like people were just getting into it. And he created a fantastic podcast about business. And he became one of the top business podcast. He started telling his coaching on how to become a podcaster.

And that coaching started making like thousands and tens of thousands of dollars a month. I believe he's over a million dollar a year in revenue now, if you think of it from a free product, right? Because [00:08:00] podcasting was free, but he was one of the first ones to get on it. He was one of the first ones to be great.

So he was able to So you have that credibility where other people wanted to learn from him and he was able to sell high end coaching, high end training, all those sorts of things. So that's your introduction to teaching online. Of course, there's a lot more on this topic. It's a complex topic, ever evolving topic.

But this should be a good overview so you can consider if you want to get into this and how to do it.

