This income stream is closely related to YouTube in the sense that it involves video, but video is not the full extent of online courses. Using sites like Udemy.com to post an online course that teaches the skillsets related to your niche is a great way to draw in additional passive income. These courses typically involve video lectures, demonstration, transcripts of video, sometimes extra text and image materials, and much more.
Putting together a full online course is not easy. It is a lot of work if you want to create a course that can demand an amount of money worthy of passive income. The best place to get started is to take the time to view a few online courses. Since you will want to see what type of competition you’ll have, you may as well look at courses in your niche to get an idea of what people are paying for and what type of quality they expect.
You will want a transcript. Write out what you are going to say in your videos. This will not only make it easier to create clear and crisp audio during the videos, but it will also make it simple for you to provide a written transcript to your online students.
Make sure videos are crisp, audio is crisp, and everything is as professional as possible. A poorly made online course is unlikely to garner great reviews.
And be prepared to answer questions. Though this isn’t quite passive, having the willingness to interact with students that post questions will encourage positive reviews and helpful feedback on what you can do to improve your course.
Be an authority. Avoid “I think” and “I believe” language. People want to learn a skill; they do not want to learn what you think about a skill.
With an online course, it is important to have an audience and have a marketing plan. For this reason, having a platform in place, such as a blog, newsletter, social media presence, is going to be a great advantage.
Using your blog, social media, newsletter, etc., start talking about your course when you begin the process of building it. This will allow you to build anticipation while simultaneously gaining feedback and insight into what the target audience would want from this type of course. Throughout the process, you can give small peaks into what they may gain from the course, collecting email addresses to notify them via an email list once it’s ready, and continue to demonstrate that you’re going to provide a valuable service with this online course. When you launch your course, you should already have an audience together. If that initial audience is pleased, future students are sure to follow.
Creating shorter videos of five or six minutes each for each lesson within your course makes your information easier to digest. Within the first thirty seconds of a video, explain what the lesson covers, and then cover the lesson concisely and with as many visual learning aids as possible. To end the videos, reiterate what you’ve taught them in a quick way. Make sure the beginning and end of the videos use some form of uniform branding with your company name, logo, etc.
One way to help increase the sale of larger courses is to create free mini-courses that introduce and provide some sense of value while also providing a preview of the more in-depth details, techniques, and skills you will provide in the full-sized courses. These are also great to use as a free gift in exchange for having people join your mailing list and build anticipation for future courses.
After your first course, it’s time to start building another course, ideally in a related field or an advanced course! Now that you have an audience started with the first course, you can build upon this audience throughout the process again. As you continue to build courses, interacting with potential pupils and past pupils along the way, the back log of courses stand a strong chance of attracting additional customers. As your reputation as an online course teacher improves, that passive income stream will as well.
Make sure to price your Udemy courses a bit on the high end. Because Udemy is always offering discounts and allows you to create coupons, you can help create the illusion of a higher value while making a reasonable amount per student. Coupons also work to promote the course, so it’s a win-win situation.
We’ve already said this, but start out by spending time familiarizing yourself with popular courses on Udemy. Taking the time to understand what other people are doing that works will give you a huge advantage before you spend a ton of time working on a course blindly.