Earlier this year, I embarked on a very long journey getting into course creation.
I’ve been teaching for years on YouTube but never had the discipline to create a full-on course. Maybe I went too hard, but it took an incredible amount of time to organize, layout, and actually produce the course. Not to mention the attempt at marketing, web design, and everything else we have to do as content creators in this day and metaverse.
My Podia Course
I decided on using Podia as the platform to host my course initially. It is reasonably priced at $49 a month, and it is extremely powerful. They are very creator-focused and the ability to do coaching, have a community & sell additional digital products was exciting to me.
I did all the things to prepare for this course launch. Graphics, pre-launch promo, commercial….the works. So I must have gotten tons of sales at launch, right? Wrong. Sure you saw that one coming.
I had a lot of interest, but the bottom line was my course in Podia included digital products, community and access to me for questions. So the sale price ended up being a whopping $199.
If you’re in the course world, you know that this isn’t that expensive depending on who you are, what you do etc. For me, it felt right.
The problem was and is that my audience just wasn’t as interested as I thought in actually taking the steps the course teaches. So to be short, I’ve sold two courses. Which is not a lot. But it’s $400. Which is awesome.
So naturally (instead of focusing on the content strategy I had planned) I threw $200 big ones into the ever-daunting Facebook Ads. I had tons of clicks, tons of interest, but ultimately no sales before I took a pause to reassess. (I’m pretty experienced with FB ads so audience etc. was not the issue.)
My Skillshare Course
Not going to lie, my backup plan was Skillshare. I had it in mind, but I wasn’t sure how their payment worked. I assumed it wouldn’t be much, and well, I was right.
Yes, so looking at the numbers, it’s incredibly sad when you think about the hours put into creating the course. I have 17 students. Which is amazing!! But I was paid about 29 cents per student. For one month and 317 minutes watched. Sheesh. But I have hope!
These 17 students are people that I do not know and probably never would have been able to find me through ads or content. I am completely considering this Skillshare as a separate avenue for passive income and organic unpaid results.
The Skillshare course does NOT have the bells and whistles of the course on Podia. Does not come with updates. No community. You get the point.
In fact, in the future, I will be splitting up courses and treating Skillshare as a place for mini-courses. I could have probably split my current course into two or three courses which would increase my organic reach in search results etc.
As a side note, Skillshare doesn’t allow you to have promotional graphics etc. throughout your course. Only in the intro and outro. I learned this the hard way by having to re-export every section of my course without promotional graphics.
My Udemy Course
I have had 0 sales from Udemy course at $19.99 per course. I’ve had less than 50 people check out the course. I am absolutely no Udemy expert so it’s very possible my course content just isn’t organically searched on Udemy or that I’ve made some errors that don’t have it as optimized as it should be.
I’m going to keep my courses / mini-courses here because why not. But so far, nothing.
IN CONCLUSION
With any course that you release, it’s so important to create and execute a content strategy around that course whether that’s a masterclass, graphics, YouTube videos, the list goes on and on.
You’ve put a lot of time into your course, and if you’re anything like me, you are also really proud of what it can do to help people.
Just because you don’t have sales immediately doesn’t mean you won’t sometime soon! Based off of these results, I’ll keep the course up on all three and just see what the coming months bring while I execute my plan.
Making money online as a creator is a journey, and I’m here for it. We got this.
Where else should the course be? If you want to check out the course, you can check it out here.
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