- Are you building educational content on the web? (courses, 1:1 lessons, e-books, anything)
- How do you publish/sell your product? (YouTube, Fiverr, Udemy, Gumroad?)
- General advice for people looking to start?
1. Yes, I am selling ebooks related to iOS development 2. I sell on Gumroad 3. You might have heard this before, but I will repeat it again, build trust with your audience first before selling them stuff, so they know you are actually skilled in your trade and your product is actually worth the money. eg: if your product is for python dev, then your audience is python dev.
To build trust, help people in public, like answering question in reddit (eg: r/python), stackoverflow, write technical blog post that answers common questions etc, I have been doing this for 2.5 years. Then put a newsletter sign up box below each blog post, this way you can reach your audience who is interested on your content directly, very useful when you want to launch product to them, make sure you use it to regularly send useful information to them too, not just use it to launch product.
My iOS blog : https://fluffy.es , I have stopped writing on the blog as I no longer work as iOS dev now, but I still get a few sales each month.
- There are lot of online course sellers these days. A lot of the content is mediocre and not worth paying for especially when you can find tons of free stuff on youtube, google etc these days. So you need to create real quality content of tremendous value.
- Don't do broad courses. Pick a niche. Specific niche. Don't teach programming languages. Teach Python (for example).
- Marketing. marketing. marketing. If you canot market your courses, you won't do much. You need to think about this.
- Plenty of good platforms to start with. Look at teachable, thinkific, learnworld, podia and a few others. The problem with these platforms is that you have to figure out marketing yourself even though they give you a more branded platform (your own logo, website etc). You may be better off starting with a marketplace platform like udemy.com where you are just a number like others but you may be able to get a few eyeballs on your courses (even though udemy courses are too cheap mostly for my liking and I feel like authors are forced to heavily discount).
- Did I say figure out your marketing strategy/tactics ? If you have no idea, you need to think about it. If you build it, they won't come but you already know that.
- Don't create long content (e.g. a 45 min single video). Better to create smaller consumable content (split that 45 min video into 3-4 10-15 min videos). Student attention span for online content/courses is too short.
- Create a feedback system and ask your students if your courses helped them. Offer tons of free resources.
- Do tons of content marketing. Best way to gain audience especially for online courses.
- Setup Upsell by offering FREE courses and then provide premium content. This will work if your content is good quality.
Good luck!!
After that, I built a "real" but very minimal site and created a subscription business. I've put very little effort into marketing other than the fact that most my videos are free.
I probably picked too small of a niche but it's what I was into. It may be hitting its growth limits, but it's in the 4 figures / month MRR range.
My main advice is to focus on being helpful over UI, business models, growth hacks, etc. The first step is to provide value. After you can do that, then start worrying about how to capture it.
My take-aways:
- Pick a niche you know really well. A lot of sales come through reputation, since there is always going to be other competing products out there. My niche is Vue.js (not that niche).
- It is a lot of work. I'd estimate my profits around 5 USD / hour after it's all said and done?
- You need to build a brand! Start using Twitter and Reddit, interacting with your community. I am NOT a twitter or reddit guy normally, I do it for my professional image and content primarily.
- Build an audience first. I collected emails starting in Jan (day I decided to make a course). Around 500 ppl left their email before my launch, which was in June. Majority of my traffic from from my free ebook [0].
- Practice screencasting before you make a course. I did by posting free screencasts on my course website to get my skills up and show my content was worth $. [1]
- I rolled my own platform, hard to say if it was worth it. I posted my content on both my own platform and Udemy. I made around 5k from my platform, 2k from Udemy, but sold way more courses on Udemy (since they take a cut and they reduce the price based on country.
- Rolling your own platform has costs. Dev time, hosting videos (vimeo) hosting content (digital ocean), domain (namecheap) and the overhead of maintaining your stack.
- Udemy, while they take a cut, do a lot of marketing for you. Since I have put less time into marketing, sales on my personal site dropped, but Udemy is consistent (around $500 a month - I only spend around 3h answering questions a month).
I am now writing a book and will sell on Gumroad. Easy to set up, and they handle payments etc.
I will write a more detailed blog post soon on this topic.
I've had decent success with Gumroad selling directly (https://walkingriver.gumroad.com).
I also sell book versions of the same content on Gumroad and Amazon (https://amazon.com/author/mcallaghan).
I think you should shoot for an hour or two of valuable content onto Gumroad, set a fair price for it, maybe even give away all or part of your first course. Build an audience to give you some fans to sell the second course to. See how it goes.
Good luck!
You can send a couple of "marketing emails" per month for each course. Inside those emails you may only have links that go back to Udemy, so they are used primarily to market your other courses on Udemy. If you try to include a non-Udemy URL, the system detects it and won't let you send.
Plus, someone on Twitter just pointed out that every one of my Udemy courses is available on multiple pirate sites. So, at this point, I think I'm just going to shut those courses down. I certainly won't be expanding them anymore.
Next year as my current contract gets downgraded (no more exclusivity - less salary), I'm thinking about providing 1:1 lessons and make other courses.
Although I do have some things to show, I do not have any actionable advice to share, I am as "lost" as you! :)
[1] https://www.educative.io/courses/full-speed-python
[2] https://github.com/joaoventura/fullspeedpython
[3] https://joaoventura.net/I chose the first one..
I use leanpub/gumroad to sell them. I'm not good at marketing and find it difficult to adapt advice from articles I've read on that topic. Whenever I publish a new book, I put them up for free for a few days and I still get paid as both leanpub/gumroad allows paying more than the price set.
I post about my books on reddit/hn/twitter and other social sites. Getting attention is hit/miss, for example my recent book had good response on https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/jognf5/i_wrote_a_cook... but not much here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006829
I'm active on stackoverflow and reddit subs related to programming. I've had readers thanking me for the help and some have mentioned that they found out my books from my profile. And I learn a lot too from trying to answer questions.
Based on my experience, the biggest lesson I'd say is not giving up.
Update: He uses his Youtube channel to promote his SkillShare courses. Using a combination of educational offerings for cross-promotion is often a good idea.