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I write ebooks, which is currently my sole source of income (which is not for everybody as my living style in this part of the world needs about $150 a month).
I use leanpub/gumroad to sell them. I'm not good at marketing and find it difficult to adapt advice from articles I've read on that topic. Whenever I publish a new book, I put them up for free for a few days and I still get paid as both leanpub/gumroad allows paying more than the price set.
I post about my books on reddit/hn/twitter and other social sites. Getting attention is hit/miss, for example my recent book had good response on
https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/jognf5/i_wrote_a_cook...
but not much here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006829
I'm active on stackoverflow and reddit subs related to programming. I've had readers thanking me for the help and some have mentioned that they found out my books from my profile. And I learn a lot too from trying to answer questions.
Based on my experience, the biggest lesson I'd say is not giving up.
Yes but not much, I earned $5k+ over the course of two and half years.
1. Yes, I am selling ebooks related to iOS development
2. I sell on Gumroad
3. You might have heard this before, but I will repeat it again, build trust with your audience first before selling them stuff, so they know you are actually skilled in your trade and your product is actually worth the money.
eg: if your product is for python dev, then your audience is python dev.
To build trust, help people in public, like answering question in reddit (eg: r/python), stackoverflow, write technical blog post that answers common questions etc, I have been doing this for 2.5 years. Then put a newsletter sign up box below each blog post, this way you can reach your audience who is interested on your content directly, very useful when you want to launch product to them, make sure you use it to regularly send useful information to them too, not just use it to launch product.
My iOS blog :
, I have stopped writing on the blog as I no longer work as iOS dev now, but I still get a few sales each month.
#3 is actually a great advice, I was thinking of jumping immediately into publishing content to a platform like Udemy but your advice made me rethink that a bit!
Your books and copy look great! Why don't you prices a bit?
I don't sell courses myself but our clients do (SAAS LMS business). I can give you some tips:
- There are lot of online course sellers these days. A lot of the content is mediocre and not worth paying for especially when you can find tons of free stuff on youtube, google etc these days. So you need to create real quality content of tremendous value.
- Don't do broad courses. Pick a niche. Specific niche. Don't teach programming languages. Teach Python (for example).
- Marketing. marketing. marketing. If you canot market your courses, you won't do much. You need to think about this.
- Plenty of good platforms to start with. Look at teachable, thinkific, learnworld, podia and a few others. The problem with these platforms is that you have to figure out marketing yourself even though they give you a more branded platform (your own logo, website etc). You may be better off starting with a marketplace platform like udemy.com where you are just a number like others but you may be able to get a few eyeballs on your courses (even though udemy courses are too cheap mostly for my liking and I feel like authors are forced to heavily discount).
- Did I say figure out your marketing strategy/tactics ? If you have no idea, you need to think about it. If you build it, they won't come but you already know that.
- Don't create long content (e.g. a 45 min single video). Better to create smaller consumable content (split that 45 min video into 3-4 10-15 min videos). Student attention span for online content/courses is too short.
- Create a feedback system and ask your students if your courses helped them. Offer tons of free resources.
- Do tons of content marketing. Best way to gain audience especially for online courses.
- Setup Upsell by offering FREE courses and then provide premium content. This will work if your content is good quality.
Good luck!!
I started with just YouTube screencasts. After I had a couple hundred subs, I made a video asking if people were interested in additional premium content and shared a link to a survey. About 70 people saw the video, 22 filled out the survey with their emails and seven paid when I offered an earlybird discount.
After that, I built a "real" but very minimal site and created a subscription business. I've put very little effort into marketing other than the fact that most my videos are free.
I probably picked too small of a niche but it's what I was into. It may be hitting its growth limits, but it's in the 4 figures / month MRR range.
My main advice is to focus on being helpful over UI, business models, growth hacks, etc. The first step is to provide value. After you can do that, then start worrying about how to capture it.
My "How to make money with online courses" course is all sold out.
And all it contains is the old joke: ‘just start your own course on making money on courses’
Lorman[1] is a local company in my city. I've visited and talked with their technical team. I brought up working in education, and they looked at me completely dumbfounded. I soon realized it's pretty much completely a marketing company that exists solely to satisfy bureaucratic regulations. Any educating that occurs is a side effect.
1.
This is a sample size of one, but one of the Youtubers I follow is Ali Abdaal. In addition to his Youtube channel he has courses on SkillShare. The combination of Youtube and SkillShare seems to provide him with a very good income.
Update: He uses his Youtube channel to promote his SkillShare courses. Using a combination of educational offerings for cross-promotion is often a good idea.
We build free online courses for human rights defenders, journalists and activists. The thing I would say first is that building for online courses is tricky and you have to approach it very differently to offline classroom teaching. Trying to shift directly from offline to online usually results in things not working well - as many are finding during Covid. In many ways building an online course, especially if you are using video, is more like being a producer than a pure teacher/trainer. Especially were you use video, people expect a high standard so that takes a lot of work and one thing you have to keep in mind is that it's very hard to change video once it's up there in many cases - so it can be harder to keep things updated.
Not exactly paygated, but you can do patreon and give people that pay $ the option to vote on the next content you produce?
It's good for building a loyal audience but I'm not sure about the revenue model. I think a "build once, sell twice" approach would be more sustainable on the long run.