What is the best platform to make money teaching online with a flexible schedule?
In my opinion, the easiest entry point to teaching online and by far, the easiest way to get started (what I call the training wheels) is to start on Udemy.com.
Access 24 million students
When you start on Udemy, they have 24 million students around the world and they're pretty good at marketing.
So what they do is they market their platform, they drive people to their platform, and then your course lives on their platform so people will type into the search engine a topic and if that is your topic than your course will show up with all the other courses on that particular topic and so it's a great way to go because you to me, does some really good marketing and they drive traffic to their platform which then filters to your course.
Now that's a great way to go. I call it “the training wheels for online courses” because the best way to go, in my opinion, is to self-host your course yourself and do the marketing yourself.
Now before we go into that, let me just talk real briefly about Udemy now. Udemy is a great platform.
If you have a high demand topic, if you have a topic that's going to help people in their work skills, whether that's actual tactics and strategies for work or soft skills like people skills, management and things like that. Because a lot of people are going to Udemy to further advance their work skills and to do better at work and to improve their job situation. So those are the good courses for Udemy. The other good courses for Udemy are courses that have a broad appeal.
Like one of my friends Phil Ebiner has the photography masterclass and he's done incredibly well with this huge course all about photography because hey, everybody wants to take better photos, right?
So, if you have a mass-appeal course like that, or if you have a high-demand course or if you have a course around work skills and things like that, then you're going to do pretty well on Udemy.
Now, not every course does incredibly well on Udemy, because there's competition from other instructors on the same topic.
There's people who have ratings and reviews higher or better than you. There's all kinds of things going on, but you can still make some decent money with publishing courses on Udemy. Udemy is a high-volume / low-ticket marketplace, so the way you maximize your income on Udemy is you create multiple courses on Udemy.
I have 52 courses on Udemy and I have about another 8 courses off of Udemy on a self-hosted platform and the self-hosted courses out earned. Remember there's only about eight on the self-hosted platform.
The 8 self-hosted courses out earn my 52 courses on Udemy. So, that should tell you a little bit about the difference between the marketplace platform and the self-hosted platform.
Now let's talk a little bit about the self-hosted platform. If you're going to self-host your course, not only do you get 100% of the revenue, but you also have far greater control over your business AND you can price your courses at higher tickets.
On Udemy, you're typically getting 10 to 15 to 20 bucks for a course.
But on a self-hosted platform, you can charge whatever you want – the sky's the limit.
I have courses ranging from $47 all the way to $1,497 and it takes a whole lot of $10 courses to get to $1,500, right?
So to wrap it up, if you're just getting started, I recommend the training wheels. I recommend that you start on Udemy and as you get more and more involved in the information product business in the online course business, then move quickly to the self-hosted platform.
The only difference with the self-hosted platform is you're going to want to learn a little bit about marketing and a little bit about how to create a sales funnel, to drive people into your course, to buy your course.
That's not that hard to learn and the rewards are so great when you do that. In fact, I'm going to have some resources below this article that will help you to create the sales funnel for your online courses.
You can get a free copy of my book called "The World's Most Perfect Business" – it's a free download – right here: http:DaveEspino.com/FreeBook
Watch the video here: