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Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
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speakeasy Offline
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Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
Udemy is an online school based on video lessons. Pretty much anyone can create a course about something they have in-depth knowledge about that people would be willing to pay to learn.There are courses there on just about anything imaginable, business, programming, math, social sciences, language, health, whatever. They have certain guidelines to make a course and it has to be quality of course or everyone will demand a refund(no questions asked refunds within 30 days if you don't like the course).

I read an article that the top teachers on there are making serious bank, some of them in the six figures. These are the ones with thousands of students. They are more likely to be teaching things like IT or business skills. It might not be entirely passive as you have to answer questions that students email you.

But if there's any valuable knowledge you want to teach for profit and be totally location independent, this is something you may want to look into.
(This post was last modified: 02-26-2013 04:54 PM by speakeasy.)
02-26-2013 04:52 PM
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pitt Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
Interesting. Thanks for letting us know.
(This post was last modified: 02-26-2013 05:06 PM by pitt.)
02-26-2013 05:06 PM
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Ruxman Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
Thank you, are u thinking of supplying a course?
02-26-2013 06:29 PM
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speakeasy Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
(02-26-2013 06:29 PM)Ruxman Wrote:  Thank you, are u thinking of supplying a course?

I'm giving heavy thought about what I could offer that people would pay for.
02-26-2013 07:35 PM
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WestIndianArchie Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
Running Game on These Hoes 101
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02-27-2013 01:25 AM
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Ruxman Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
If there's anything I want to learn right now, it's clear lucid writing with laser point focus.
02-27-2013 05:48 AM
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Virtus Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
Cant imagine this Udemy lasting for much general edu stuff. Something specialized like real estate law innebraska.. maybe

other than that

here is
classes from top universities. Free

https://www.coursera.org/
https://www.khanacademy.org/
https://www.edx.org/

learn languages. Free

http://duolingo.com/
http://memrise.com

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02-27-2013 06:43 AM
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Teedub Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
This is AWESOME, cheers bro. Definitely going to take a look.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. - H L Mencken
02-27-2013 01:01 PM
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WestIndianArchie Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
(02-27-2013 06:43 AM)calihunter Wrote:  Cant imagine this Udemy lasting for much general edu stuff. Something specialized like real estate law innebraska.. maybe

other than that

here is
classes from top universities. Free

https://www.coursera.org/
https://www.khanacademy.org/
https://www.edx.org/

learn languages. Free

http://duolingo.com/
http://memrise.com

He's talking about TEACHING a class, not taking one.

WIA
02-27-2013 02:19 PM
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Virtus Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
Well for fucks sake how can you teach a paid class if a comparable offering from Harvard is free eh? The opportunity cost is too high

"Virtus"
(This post was last modified: 02-27-2013 03:50 PM by Virtus.)
02-27-2013 03:49 PM
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speakeasy Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
Here is an article talking about what the top teacher make: http://gigaom.com/2012/05/17/a-new-way-t...-teaching/

(02-27-2013 03:49 PM)calihunter Wrote:  Well for fucks sake how can you teach a paid class if a comparable offering from Harvard is free eh? The opportunity cost is too high

Someone in the comments of the article above answered your questions: "Free courses from Stanford, Harvard are awesome, but the problem is they are generally too academic. Videos are long, contains a lot of information that you don’t need. Plus, Stanford and Harvard are not the best information resource out there. There are so many other awesome people that can share their knowledge and experience that no other Harvard prof. can. So you are basically paying for high-quality, specialized content, which I believe %100 worths."


I would also add that Udemy is great for finding very specific information on how to do something. Like say you need to set up an ecommerce site and have no fucking idea how to do it, you can't just go to the Harvard website and find that. But there's a video on Udemy you can probably get for $50 that will walk you through the entire process from start to finish. That's just an example.
02-27-2013 04:06 PM
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
I've produced a course for Udemy over a year ago when it wasn't flooded and guess what... if you don't already have a fanbase or followers Good Luck selling.

This is what i did: I consulted with a entrepreneur marketer for a few weeks to learn marketing paying him a few thousand $. He had plenty of credibility and proof. Then I re-organized the content and information into my own course. I made quality graphics and video recordings with examples and posted on Udemy. A few weeks go by and no sales... considering it is on a marketplace where people can search and browse. I even tried contacting other instructors to trade courses to provide reviews for each other.
A year later I only got a handful of sales.

Now Udemy is flooded with instructors with courses such as "How to watch and understand Football" (which is selling). Now they implemented a strict approval process for new and existing courses so if you're not selling, your course can only get accessed directly by link. Udemy is definitely NOT for newbies trying to make a buck.
(This post was last modified: 02-28-2013 10:52 AM by Freedom.)
02-28-2013 10:49 AM
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michael Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
I used Udemy to take a guitar class. It was worth it -- I would use it again.
02-28-2013 09:35 PM
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Veloce Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
holy shit. i've been meaning to do my own blog for cooking lessons, but that might be more immediately profitable

"...so I gave her an STD, and she STILL wanted to bang me."

TEAM NO APPS

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02-28-2013 09:39 PM
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Veloce Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
There's some mofo teaching omelettes and he's not even a chef! Fuck that I'm getting into this asap.

I'm watching his first video for free. This is awful, truly awful. Who are they hiring to assure quality info being dropped? $27 for his course on making shitty omelettes? This is literally the worst way I've ever seen to make an omelette. I'd hate to think of anyone actually paying money to see this.

This will not stand man.

"...so I gave her an STD, and she STILL wanted to bang me."

TEAM NO APPS

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(This post was last modified: 02-28-2013 09:54 PM by Veloce.)
02-28-2013 09:41 PM
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speakeasy Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
(02-28-2013 09:41 PM)thedude3737 Wrote:  There's some mofo teaching omelettes and he's not even a chef! Fuck that I'm getting into this asap.

I'm watching his first video for free. This is awful, truly awful. Who are they hiring to assure quality info being dropped? $27 for his course on making shitty omelettes? This is literally the worst way I've ever seen to make an omelette. I'd hate to think of anyone actually paying money to see this.

This will not stand man.


I'll be the first to subscribe to your course when it's up.
03-01-2013 12:35 AM
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theArbiter Offline
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RE: Being a teacher on Udemy for passive income
I want to bump this to see if anyone has followed up on creating a course.

A little bit of my observations on Udemy (of course, read what the other forum members have to say as well):

- You receive 70% of the revenues of the courses you sell (85% from traffic you generate yourself)
- I'm on the Udemy mailing list and they have massive discount promotions all the time. The latest is many courses discounted to $10 (original price from $27 to $499, though of course value might not be reflected by these prices). I don't know what the procedure is for participating in these promotions as course creators, though perhaps you can boost sales this way.
- The courses that get the most sales are by far subjects on programming (https://www.udemy.com/courses/Technology/). You're hard-pressed to find any courses with less than 100 sales.
- Marketing and general business courses probably come and second, but it's a hit or miss there, whereas from my observations, virtually all the programming courses I've seen have a decent number of sales.
- There are some personal development courses with moderate sales and a (very) few in health (yoga). Everything else, you have your work cut out for you.

Udemy is dominated by techies (or wannabe techies), so that's the general audience. If you can market yourself well and can create an in-demand course on some programming nuance, then you can probably make quite a bit of coin. Look at this dude with a $499 course and over 4500 sales. This guy just hit the right sensibilities. Programming without programming? Gee. If you buy that course, I will kill you since I didn't embed any affiliate link and such a price is ridiculous (it's also a course you can get at $10 through the promotion right now).

I was pondering creating some courses in the language learning niche, but the present demand just isn't strong. I probably will still give it a shot, though only as a supplement to a product in a primary distribution channel once I can get that running.
08-08-2013 11:30 PM
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