Should You Teach On Udemy For Passive Income?

In this article, I’d like to answer the question, “What do you think about online teaching on Udemy as a passive income?”

Well, I’ve been teaching on Udemy for about five years.

I started off in August of 2013 and now it’s August of 2018 and I have had a great experience teaching on Udemy.

On one of my visits to the Udemy headquarters in San Francisco

I think of it as a great platform where, if you don’t have a whole lot of marketing resources, it’s a great place to publish your course because then they do some of the marketing for you.

Now, understand that Udemy is a high volume / low ticket marketplace.

So right now, a lot of the courses that are being sold are being sold at a discount.

I don’t expect that to last for a long time though. I already see that Udemy is starting to increase their prices and starting to see if they can get a little bit more for their courses.

When you go into Udemy as an instructor, you basically want to opt in to Udemy’s promotions and you want to opt into Udemy’s affiliate program.

In other words, by promotions, I mean that Udemy is going to promote your course for you and by affiliate program, I mean that affiliates are going to promote your course for you.

That’s just the way the Udemy system is set up for you to succeed.

Now, at the same time, you have to understand that when you do opt in to those things, you do give away some control and you do give away some revenue share.

So it’s important to just know what you’re getting into right up front.

 

Udemy Is A Great Place To Start

 

But having said that, Udemy is a great place to start.

I think of Udemy as “the training wheels for the online course business”.

If you don’t know much about marketing or if you don’t really want to get into marketing your own courses, it’s a great place to start.

Some of the most successful courses on Udemy include programming courses, courses that have to do with work skills and really high-demand courses that are very broad appeal, such as photography, videography, web development, and those kinds of things.

Those are the highest demand type of courses, but I’ve seen people do really well with even a sourdough bread baking course, like my friend Teresa Greenway has.

She did $3,000 her first month with her very first course about baking sourdough bread.

So there’s a lot of potential on Udemy, but it’s also important to understand that there’s another world of online teaching that exists as well, and that’s in the self-hosted online course business model.

So Udemy is what we call a marketplace platform and that’s where you publish your course in a marketplace along with all these other courses that kind of compete and vie for the students’ attention, but you also have the ability to self-host your course.

That means you go at it alone, you do your own marketing, but you get some incredible benefits from that as well.

You get to get 100% of your revenue and you don’t revenue share with anybody else, and you have a lot more control over your content; the way it’s laid out, everything allows for more control when you use a self-hosted platform.

If you’d like to know a little bit more about the self hosted world, (which can out-earn the marketplace model by ten to one, at least in my experience) then be sure to follow me on YouTube where I create daily videos about the online course business!

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/DaveEspino1?sub_confirmation=1

Scroll to Top