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I created a Neo4j (Graph Database) course on Udemy - https://www.udemy.com/neo4j-foundations/?couponCode=HACKERNEWS https://www.udemy.com/neo4j-foundations/?co

I created a Neo4j (Graph Database) course on Udemy - https://www.udemy.com/neo4j-foundations/?couponCode=HACKERNEWS https://www.udemy.com/neo4j-foundations/?couponCode=HACKERNE... (Please enjoy the hackernews discount!) The course has an average rating of 4.62 and over 200 students. To date (since end of June), it has made $1182 for me. This was quite a learning experience - aside from putting the course content together, I found out a lot about recording audio. I tried doing this in Thailand and quickly learnt that I was in a very noisy environment. First there were the echoes of the room itself which I fixed by cramming my microphone in the cupboard in-between blankets and pillows. Then there were the scooters, neighbours, air-conditioning, airplanes! This was a very frustrating experience. If you ever make a course, make sure you have a nice, quiet recording environment! I've also learnt that you can make a bit of money from having Udemy promote you, but if you want to make any decent money, you have to promote yourself. I also believe from this experience that making one online course just isn't worth doing. If you're going to do it, you have to keep doing it. There is a learning curve at the start, and I believe the trick to being successful is to really work on promotion, and do up-sells to other relevant courses from your existing student base.

rwieruch 10y ago
Thanks for sharing your story! Maybe you can give some more insights. What would you say is the ratio on "How much Udemy helps to promote your content" and "How do you have to do yourself to promote the content"? Did or Do (maybe they came up in the same time as your course) you have competitors in that topic?
- LouisSayers 10y ago
  No worries :) There are courses on the same topic for sure. What I did was I took all the courses out there on Neo4j myself, learnt from all of them, and then created my course based on everything I learnt, and the pitfalls that I personally had come across that weren't detailed in other courses. With Udemy your revenue breaks down as follows: * Your promotions * Udemy organic * Ad program * Affiliate program * Corporate subscriptions (if your course makes it into this bucket) 90% of my sales so far have come from Udemy's marketing - I have put very little effort into doing promotion myself. With some affiliates (ones Udemy has set up), I get as little as 25% of the revenue generated - and they'll be at heavily discounted amounts anyway - so maybe $2.50 on a $10 sale, others I might get up to 50% of the sale. So basically, with me doing next to nothing (apart from the odd question - which I get hardly any of), I'm getting about $200 a month on average. This might seem pretty good, but keep in mind this course took me a seriously long time to build out (like 6 months, with prob half of that working full-time on it), and I can get the equivalent of about $400+ per day contracting.

rwieruch 10y ago

Thanks for sharing your story! Maybe you can give some more insights. What would you say is the ratio on "How much Udemy helps to promote your content" and "How do you have to do yourself to promote the content"? Did or Do (maybe they came up in the same time as your course) you have competitors in that topic?

LouisSayers 10y ago
No worries :) There are courses on the same topic for sure. What I did was I took all the courses out there on Neo4j myself, learnt from all of them, and then created my course based on everything I learnt, and the pitfalls that I personally had come across that weren't detailed in other courses. With Udemy your revenue breaks down as follows: * Your promotions * Udemy organic * Ad program * Affiliate program * Corporate subscriptions (if your course makes it into this bucket) 90% of my sales so far have come from Udemy's marketing - I have put very little effort into doing promotion myself. With some affiliates (ones Udemy has set up), I get as little as 25% of the revenue generated - and they'll be at heavily discounted amounts anyway - so maybe $2.50 on a $10 sale, others I might get up to 50% of the sale. So basically, with me doing next to nothing (apart from the odd question - which I get hardly any of), I'm getting about $200 a month on average. This might seem pretty good, but keep in mind this course took me a seriously long time to build out (like 6 months, with prob half of that working full-time on it), and I can get the equivalent of about $400+ per day contracting.