This is Dave Espino, the InfoBoss. Today I wanted to answer a question I've been hearing a lot, “which is the best website for teaching online or creating courses, which website is paying more now?” It's kind of a loaded question too, because there are really a variety of websites out there where you can publish your online course.
Publishing on a Marketplace – The “Marketplace Model”
If you're talking about a marketplace business model. Then one of the best websites is Udemy. Udemy has 24 million students at this point, and they have this tremendous ecosphere where they bring a lot of people in, they do a lot of marketing and then people find your course through their search engine and that's a great model.
I call it the “training wheels” for the online course business.
There were other similar sites like Skillshare, Skillsuccess, CyberU, Learning.ly, and several other sites like this where you can publish your course on these websites.
None of them hold a candle to you in terms of market reach right now. That can change in the future. If you already have a captive audience of people and guess what?
Amazon, Google, Youtube, Facebook; they already have massive captive audiences. It'd be a no brainer for these companies to launch into the online course business and then watch out. It's going to be incredible when that happens.
My Favorite Method – The Self Hosted Model
There is this marketplace model with Udemy and some of these other marketplaces I mentioned, but there's another way. If you really want to make a lot more money with your online course, use the self hosted model.
That's where you decide to be your own boss, host your course on your own site using either a website called Teachable, Thinkific or even Clickfunnels, and you're able to drive your own traffic to your own course and you can charge as much as you want.
That's a big difference between a self hosted model and the marketplace model. The marketplace model typically has pricing restrictions or they determine the pricing of your courses, which is horrible, right? With a self hosted model, you determine the pricing and you can price as much or as little as you want. Self hosted courses can sell for $67, $97, 200, $297, $597, $997 and $1,497 just to give you some ideas.
That's a lot better than selling a course for $14.99, right? A lot better.
Now You Must Decide
So in answering that question, you've got to determine; do I want to go the marketplace direction or do I want to go the self hosted direction?
The marketplace direction is where you create a course and you publish it on the marketplace and they kind of take over from there. They do the marketing, they set the pricing, they have guidelines and restrictions, and there's competition as well that you have to deal with and that kind of thing. You really leave a lot to someone else.
When you go to the marketplace model. In other words, you have very little control over your earnings other than let me create another course. Let me add another course. Let me add another course. And I've been there. I've done that. I have 52 courses on these various marketplaces, and I can't complain because they give me a good base income that I can then grow.
What Works For Me?
But I make a lot more money on my self hosted courses, and only have eight self hosted courses and at least 10 to one versus the marketplace courses. And I don't have to deal with all kinds of guidelines and restrictions and competition and any of the self hosted. So it really is worthwhile to look at the self hosted business model as the way to go, and if you're just getting started than Udemy is great. I call it the training wheels. For the online course business it's great because you don't have to do as much, but very, very quickly you should get into looking at the self hosted model because that's where the real action is.
That's where the money is and that's where ultimately your full satisfaction and success is gonna come from.
If you were interested in the online course business at all, I call it the world's most perfect business. If you’re interested in the online teaching business I'm launching a brand new online course fast start kit. This is a brand new fast start kit with tips, tricks, and resources to get you off to a fast start with your online course business. I'll be releasing my fast start kit soon, so be on the lookout for the link in a future article! I hope my information helped, and I’ll see you next time.