Making It As A Udemy Instructor : My 5-figure Income Recipe (Part 2)
This article of the multipart series will touch on which are the high demand topics on Udemy and the earnings potential of the cream of the crop.
If you have not read Part 1, here is the link to Part 1:
Without further ado, let’s get started!
The Marketplace Insights is only accessible after being accepted as a Udemy instructor. It is a tool for instructors to get to know the supply and demand for different topics so that they can make informed decisions on what courses to create. An instructor could well decide to go for niche courses rather than popular courses or vice versa.
These are the insights info for photography courses:
These are the insights info for accounting courses:
These are the insights info for python programming courses:
These are the insights info for web development courses:
These insights tell us that students who enrolled in Udemy are more interested in technology courses, especially courses on software development. On the other side of the equation, Udemy’s counterpart Skillshare, which also provides online courses, has its focus and forte on design and arts courses.
Python programming courses are one of the most in-demand courses on Udemy. As can be seen, the highest earner who is teaching Python makes an amazing $125,000 per month from his course.
This is not to say that everyone should go for high demand topics like Python. High demand courses are usually also very competitive with thousands of courses and plenty of instructors teaching these topics so much so that the mean or median course makes a mediocre amount of money because the top rung on the ladder dominates the competition.
It is more important for any aspiring instructor to teach what he is good at and passionate about. Udemy’s courses cover all sorts of categories that we can think of and Udemy itself doesn’t put any restriction on the kind of topics that an instructor will want to teach.
Creating a niche course may be more befitting for some potential instructors. At the same time, do be aware of those categories with extremely low demand because the effort we put in may not have enough student interest in it even if we are not worried about not making any money from it.
Another useful insight tool is where Udemy gives the number of learners for each topic. This piece of information is available to students through selecting “Categories” and going down to the last subtopic.
As we can see, Psychology courses have very low demand of about 160 thousand students. On the other extreme, Python courses have a staggering 34 million learners.
Udemy also give its instructors helpful information in relation to:
- Which country his student comes from
- What other courses his student enroll in
- How much of the course his student has completed
- At which chapter of his course a student last dropped out from
- How much each of his course enrollment is sold for and what is the tax amount and Udemy’s revenue share
- Daily total minutes that his students watch his videos
- Total daily visitors that land on the instructor’s course landing page
- All visitors that land on the instructor’s course landing page — how many are from Udemy organic search, or from instructor’s own promotion, or from Udemy ads and affiliates, or from outside sources like Google search, Facebook, Twitter, etc
- Conversion rate of visitors who land on the instructor’s course landing page
- An instructor community platform where instructors post questions and answers as a form of helping each other — Udemy’s moderators also answer queries when these are directed to them
- Bestselling and highest-rated courses are also singled out with badges that other instructors can refer to as model courses
Courses are ranked by various factors including total number of reviews and ratings, highest rated and relevance. Relevance relates to keyword search so if a course title and subtitle matches the topic’s keywords, it’s relevance is high.
Be prepared for a long-haul game if you want to be a successful Udemy instructor. Unlike curation of articles on Medium where an article can be curated just hours after it is posted, it takes months if not years before Udemy decides to give it that status.
As I have mentioned before in my previous article, ratings and reviews are the core of getting students to enroll for a course and Udemy has in place a strong Trust And Safety policy with regard to genuine ratings and reviews.
Some instructors have garnered hundreds of thousands of reviews and ratings. Because Udemy officially started business in 2010, most of these top instructors have probably joined Udemy way back in those pioneer days.
Trying to circumvent and put in fake reviews will entail the course being removed from the platform. Udemy’s robust system is able to detect and ensure that every review or rating for a course comes from both a unique device as well as a unique IP.
Just like Medium is a platform for readers and writers to converge and meet, Udemy is one built for students and instructors. These 2 platforms provide the critical mass with both clocking more than 100 million monthly visitors. Putting content in front of an audience is one thing — while being visible in front of such a huge audience is the challenge that every content creator will continue to face.
That’s it for now!
In the next article, I will cover Making It As A Udemy Instructor : My 5-figure Income Recipe (Part 3) where I will give further insights on free coupons, discounts, and pricing.
See you in the next article!
In the meantime, here is the link to my online course “Python Programming Made Easy”:
