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Who buys courses?

Andy Black

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Part of it depends on the context for the potential buyer. On Udemy there's an expectation of low price, low value. People go into it for tidbits of insight or to get enough to get moving.

When I buy from Udemy it's because I want an introduction without reading a 300 page book or sifting through blogs. The info is out there, but I want it summarized. If there are useful insights, even better.

I get a lot of students on Udemy, but the trade-off is that I don't make a lot of money. Right now I'm breaking into the $2k/mo range with 11 courses after two years. If I had the same amount of students in my high-ticket courses, I'd be at $10 million.

If you've got something that's niched down and high-value, then high-ticket courses is the way to go. It would only take 10 students enrolling in my old $2,500 courses to generate the entirety of my Udemy earnings (from 4,000 students) to date.

But...high-ticket courses aren't as passive. So there is that to consider.
Curious if you’ve got higher ticket courses for any of your 4,000 Udemy students @Lex DeVille.

With the “10% would pay 10x” rule of thumb then you might have 400 willing to pay $100, 40 willing to pay $1k, and 4 willing to pay $10k. Maybe not from Udemy based on the context you mention above.
 
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Lex DeVille

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Curious if you’ve got higher ticket courses for any of your 4,000 Udemy students @Lex DeVille.

With the “10% would pay 10x” rule of thumb then you might have 400 willing to pay $100, 40 willing to pay $1k, and 4 willing to pay $10k. Maybe not from Udemy based on the context you mention above.

I don't have any right now. Over the past year they've up-sold into my $100 offers like Upwork bio or proposal reviews, or into my $300 paid email list. I ran a 1:1 coaching a while back too, but that's not available now, and I don't have any high-ticket courses open at the moment.

But yes, once they get value from the low-end courses (and because a lot of them actually make money freelancing afterward) then it's an easy choice because they've already earned back their initial investment. So it's pretty easy to rationalize that they'll make back their investment in something higher too.
 

mikemiller

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There are 1000s oc courses online out there.
About everything.
But do really a relevant amount of people buy them?

As I m at FB sometimes, I m allways annoyed about the courses selling advertisement, I thought about doing that myself.
And offering affiliate courses and apply them only at facebook.

so I ask myself: does really anyone buy these courses? About getting rich, getting girls, getting light...
Ofcourse, there are so many people who buy courses. Some of them are students while some are professionals.
 

Sean P

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According to this FAQ statement on their site, Udemy "features an extensive, multi-language library, which includes over 130,000 courses taught by expert instructors." That's a pretty big number for one website. I don't think all courses sell though. The ones that sell have to be of decent quality and need a certain amount of promotion especially just after launch.

There are quite a few sites like Udemy though not as big. A few examples are Lynda and Skillshare. Anyone who creates a course that meet the platform's guidelines can sell a course on Udemy. Skillshare has a subscription model and pays per minutes.

People sell courses on their websites too using course selling platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi etc. It's supposed to be one of the best ways to monetize a blog - to make a course in the niche the blog is in.

Digital products like ebooks and courses are selling like hot cakes, especially as millions of people hop on to the internet for all kinds of information and are willing to pay for it. It's a misconception that all information is available through a Google search and hence no one will be willing to purchase what can be found online for free.

On the contrary, people are willing to pay good money if they can find what they want in one place either in an ebook or a set of videos. To give an example, there are excellent videos that teach coding on YouTube but the hottest selling courses online are the ones that teach the same thing.
 
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Ing

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when I want to do a course about dropshipping, how it works. What way do you recommend?
 

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MichaelCash

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I think some niche courses can be very popular. I personally bought a bunch of courses related to software engineering, cloud and project management in the past. You can research what is currently trending
 
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MattR82

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There are lots of great courses out there that helped me a fricking tonne. Many from people that moderate these very forums.

I looked into the course creation thing a while back. It's not as easy as it's made out to be but you can for sure make good money from it. But a look through the thinkific and kajabi facebook groups show thousands of people struggling to make it work. It ain't just about popping a course up and that's it. It's a shitload of work and yeah you probably need a good facebook group to go with it nowadays.
 

Andy Black

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There are lots of great courses out there that helped me a fricking tonne. Many from people that moderate these very forums.

I looked into the course creation thing a while back. It's not as easy as it's made out to be but you can for sure make good money from it. But a look through the thinkific and kajabi facebook groups show thousands of people struggling to make it work. It ain't just about popping a course up and that's it. It's a shitload of work and yeah you probably need a good facebook group to go with it nowadays.
Meh to free Facebook groups. They look like way to much hard work. I think they’d be good to find out what people are struggling with, so we can help them in situ, get better at it, and create a course knowing it will help them.

Funnily enough, that’s what happened for me in the forum. Prior to joining the forum I had my own paid forum to teach people about my subject. It killed me to *have* to answer questions for $49/mth, so I killed it and turned my back on courses.

Dropping free content in TFLF ended up bringing clients - because forum members referred me to people outside the forum who struggled with XYZ. (I was surprised with this.)

Then I keep answering questions in the forum for free. Then jumping on calls for free. Then figuring out what people were stuck on, and why.

Then people kept asking for a course, which I then created, and which has then sold without me doing any promoting other than announcing it’s available.


Like anything, build it and they will come isn’t the answer.

Create a beautiful course people don’t want? Good luck with that.

Create a course people want but don’t know about it? Good luck again.

Create a course people want, that they know about, but you can’t sell it to them? Cue moths fluttering out of your wallet...

That’s the same with any product or service imo. Go help or entertain people, where they hang out, figure out how to get paid, stay in the game long enough to figure out how to divorce your earnings from your time, figure out how to scale.
 

TommyG

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I think there always has been and always will be a huge market for information products, of which online courses and membership programs are the currently the best imo.

There are SO MANY scammers and complete bullshit artists out there particularly in the 'make money online' space who just repackage common, freely available knowledge and outdated crap together into a well marketed product. But there are a lot of good ones out there too.

Right now off the top of my head, this year I've signed up for an on page SEO course ($500), a course on content marketing ($500) and a copywriting course ($400). They were all paid by my company which gives me a generous education budget.

Personally, I've paid for online educational products this year in drumming ($200), grappling ($297), yoga for bjj ($200) and a language learning paid app (around $100).

So alone that's a $2000+ investment into online education and I bet I'm not an outlier here although I'm not sure.

I think e-learning is an amazing business to be in and will grow hugely over the next decade. When I consider myself enough of an expert in my field and can think of some unique angles I'm definitely going to be creating my own courses down the road.
 
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softwareRules

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And I also think many courses are under-priced and that is a big mistake on several levels. Mostly because people, rightly or wrongly, judge the quality of a product by it's price. Especially on the Web as its non-tactile, you can't get your hands on it. 'A low price? Meh, got to be rubbish, move on and find a better one'.

I was writing a whole spiel on this, but basically, it's turning into a market of lemons. This has been the case for programming as well. A flood of low-quality but low-price goods and services are entering the market and the high-quality goods/services feel like they must compete by becoming lower priced. This low price signal is sent to future course creators and they also under-price their courses.

The only way to win is to charge more and offer more value and make it clear what the value is. It's a smaller market but higher pricing should offset losses from having to compete with the low-quality courses out there. That's my theory anyway.
 

Andy Black

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I was writing a whole spiel on this, but basically, it's turning into a market of lemons. This has been the case for programming as well. A flood of low-quality but low-price goods and services are entering the market and the high-quality goods/services feel like they must compete by becoming lower priced. This low price signal is sent to future course creators and they also under-price their courses.

The only way to win is to charge more and offer more value and make it clear what the value is. It's a smaller market but higher pricing should offset losses from having to compete with the low-quality courses out there. That's my theory anyway.
Low priced courses are bringing more people into the market for courses. If they find the courses are low quality then they may eventually start looking at higher priced courses.

I personally don’t mind there being $10 courses on Udemy when I have a $400 course. My market probably took that $10 course already, or balls at the 40 hours it would take to complete it. (Just to be clear, I’m not saying it’s a low quality course, just that the market for both courses is different.)
 

100ToOne

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Nobody got rich from a course.

I honestly feel like courses are the knew action-faking/mental masturbation model.

You think you’re going to get rich being spoon fed information? Pfft...

Get out there and produce.

I think he meant from selling point of view. The actual creator and seller.

@OP I bought many courses on udemy and many are way too cheap for the amount of value they give.

Outside of udemy, Fox's course is the only course I've bought and it's definitely worth it.
 
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lobo

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Gimmicky "Get Rich Quick" courses? Don't waste your time.

However, Udemy Courses/Learning programs designed and structured like college courses can definitely be worth the money.

I guess you could probably learn everything you could from courses through books, but some people do better having an instructor and learn better visually.
 

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