How are you feeling about the size of your online course audience? Maybe you just uploaded a course in the run up to Black Friday your audience is zero right now. Maybe your audience is just not big enough and not growing to your satisfaction. Maybe you are selling a few courses but wish sales were more consistent or would propel you to the next level of “edupreneurship”.
An “eduprenuer” is exactly what the word conveys – it’s what you get when you cross an entrepreneur with the education industry. This concept has been around for at least a couple of decades. It used to refer mainly to trained professional teachers and educators who “branched out” in their work by creating side businesses such as speaking engagements, publishing, training, consulting and so forth.
For over 2 years we work daily to make Teachinguide even better for you. But now we have reached an important milestone – our new website with many more features is ready to support our mission: Helping you to succeed on Udemy!
Udemy sale season is on the horizon. Towards the end of October, typically Udemy course sales start to pick up a little. Udemy sometimes runs a “course creation” contest or incentives around this time of year.
Why? Because this is the time of year that potential students anticipate buying Udemy courses (or for that matter, anything) on sale. For over 5 years they have been “trained” to anticipate this time of year. So Udemy wants to be sure that the selection of courses is fresh and enticing.
That means you should be sure that your own online courses are fresh and enticing. We’ll go through what exactly this means in this article.
Mini course do not necessarily jump to mind for most would be course instructors because on platforms such as Udemy, Skillshare and others the length of your course matters in terms of rankings, pay and credibility. But ask yourself,
Do you have 100 hours to spare? How about $1000? Have you ever taught a class? How ‘bout an email list and sales funnel – is your database of contact 1000 friends strong?
If you answered “no” to any of these questions, but you want to launch an online course, you should consider creating a “mini course”.
Online course design should look to traditional course design principles for inspiration as these are rooted in years of research on instructional design practices. So when you sit down to design your next online course, keep in mind a few key course design principles that will help guide your content creation and organization. How you incorporate these may differ slightly depending on which online course platform you are using and what the end purpose and audience for your online course are.
An eLearning business has become a very legitimate career option for just about anybody who is willing to put in the time and effort. It does take a lot of time and effort to build an eLearning business, just like any other brick and mortar business. The beauty though is that you never have to leave your desk chair (not that we advocate laziness)!
Yet we read about and hear from those who have tried to launch their own eLearning business, but are still barely bumping along revenue-wise. So we decided to put together a few common issues that research shows prevent some online instructors from building up their eLearning business.
Teaching online courses brings with it a set of challenges not found in a traditional classroom setting. Online instructors often fail to make the connection between what happens in a physical learning environment – whether that be a classroom, training facility or conference room – and what they do when teaching or creating online courses. Whether you’re using Udemy, Teachable or an LMS to teach your online courses, you can benefit from knowing a few general teaching best practices.
Here’s a list of best practices that will help you think about what you need to do in your online courses that help to replicate what most instructors would do when teaching in person.
It’s pretty clear to most online course creators that email marketing is critical to course sales and success. You just have to search Quora and other forums to find disgruntled Udemy instructors who thought that simply putting their course on Udemy would bring in the income. And it’s clear from our recent instructor survey that marketing and promoting a course is a real challenge for online instructors.
Successful online course creators seem to be multiplying exponentially in recent years. Back in the early days of Udemy, earning 6 figures as an online course creator was a novel idea. Now stories abound of online course creators making big-time careers out of creating all manner of courses, and then after being so successful, helping others to propel themselves into the world of online course creation.
