Hey this is Dave Espino, the InfoBoss, and today I wanted to answer a question I heard recently “which online instructor earns the most money, and on which platform; Udemy, Teachable, Skillshare, etc.” Let me answer that question by saying the richest instructors are not going to be on a platform.
Where are the Richest Instructors at?
They're not going to be on Udemy They're not going to be on Teachable. They're not going to be on Skillshare. The instructors who earn the most money have a sales funnel that they've created that drives traffic to their course or a sales process. A sales funnel that drives traffic to a webinar where they can sell a high ticket course. That's where the action is. If you want it to be one of the most successful instructors, you can do that by creating your own self hosted plan with a sales funnel, and a sales process to filter out people that may not buy from you at the higher ticket levels.
Now I do this with a high ticket offer. A lot of people do it with high ticket offers and these sales funnel models far out earned. Anything you can make on a marketplace model like Udemy, Skillshare, etc can’t compare. Their worlds and worlds apart. They're in completely different galaxies.
The danger is that you get excited about Udemy, you become a Udemy instructor, you start creating courses there and you kind of get stuck in the Udemy vortex. You get stuck thinking this is the only way that I can make money with online courses. The reality is there's a much bigger and better way out there that you can make money with online courses, and it does not involve a marketplace because the marketplace is going to require revenue sharing. So they're going to keep 50% and even 75% of your money.
How is this Different from the Marketplaces?
The marketplace owns the students, not you, so they're going to have restrictions as to how you can communicate with your students. The marketplace has price restrictions so they can limit the pricing of your courses down to $10, $9.99 in some cases.
But when you're on your own, you could sell those courses for $97, $197, $297, $497, $997 even $1,500! There is a whole nother world out there and I want to be sure that you know about it because it's in your best interest to investigate it, to check it out, and to be aware you can make a lot more money with your content then you can on a marketplace.
Now the problem is sometimes people are selling 10 and 20 and 30 hour courses on a marketplace for $10. Right? That's horrible. I mean all that time you put into creating a course and yet it's selling for so little; that same 10, 20 or 30 hour course. A technical course could easily sell for 100, 200, 300, $500 if you're selling it outside of the marketplace.
Everybody Can Fall into the “Udemy Vortex”
But the reason people stick with the marketplace is partly it's kind of laziness. I think they figure “well I've got it here. I can make money here and I don't have to deal with learning a little bit about marketing.” And I can tell you I've been the same way, even though I knew there was this other way that I could do it.
I got kind of lured into the Udemy vortex and I've been selling my courses there for five years. Don't get me wrong, it's done well. Its given me a passive income, but that same energy that I used could have been used in the sales funnel model to make a lot more money.
So getting back to the question of which online instructor makes the most money. I mean, there's no comparison. The top instructor on Udemy makes about $3,000,000 a year. The top instructor in the sales funnel process makes 8 figures a year.
We're talking $10,000,000 or more per year. So there's just no comparison between the two models. Look to where else online courses are sold, and online courses are primarily best sold through your own self hosted plan in a sales funnel model. I hope you enjoyed this article, and I'll see you next time.