lowtek
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Udemy would probably bring more traffic to my site...I'm wondering though whether I need to focus more on making sure I have something that is target well and converts well, or whether my sample size of 300 or so people just wasn't enough? I have the whole course up and running on my website, so I don't really need udemy per say as a platform, it would just be for promotion. What do you think? And how the hell did you get to 10,000 subs? haha I have 300...most of my time has been eaten up with 1-on-1 clients but I'm now carving out more time to work on an online business. THE PROBLEM IS there are million different things I can do, and I'm constantly facing decision overload on what to do, when, how much, and in what sequence. I'm still taking consistent action though, and I guess that's all I can really do sometimes...this morning though I've dedicated to getting advice.
IMHO 300 subs isn't enough to sustain a platform. My personal benchmark is 50,000 subs or more before I start focusing on my own platform.
Udemy has millions of students, but you're not going to get them off Udemy. The downside is ownership of the audience. You don't really own the emails of your students, but you can make educational announcements to divert them to YouTube, which you can then use to funnel them to your website.
The point of using Udemy is to capitalize on their massive organic base. It's not my end game, but it's part of a larger overall strategy.
What you'll find on YouTube is that 95% of your videos will range from duds to moderately popular. Only a small portion will achieve any real traction. That's just the name of the game. Well, unless you're a natural (which I'm definitely not). What moved the needle the most for me was getting on top of a controversy by the big dog in the space and taking a strong stance. That easily doubled my channel (from ~3500 to 7000 subs) and gave me enough momentum to get to 10,000.
Some other things I've noticed (for context I create programming tutorials and career advice):
- the more content you create the better you get at creating content, as well as feeling when a video is going to do well. If you're not having fun making the video, chances are good people won't be having fun watching it.
- Creating content that doesn't do well trumps not creating content at all, 100% of the time
- Titles and thumbnails matter a lot
- Audio matters the most
- Talking off the cuff to the camera does the best
- Average view duration (in absolute minutes + seconds, not percentage) + click through rate is what you want to optimize
- 1 video a week can maintain the momentum of a channel, 2 videos helps build momentum and 3 videos (assuming 2 of them are quality) is going to move the needle
- Sharing videos on various platforms (reddit, Facebook, Twitter) can give you more eyes but not necessarily more fans