Teach Online: Bundling, Marketing and Uploading Your Udemy Courses | Your Questions Answered

Tim Cooper

Jun 26 2015

Can I bundle my Udemy courses and sell them at a discount?

I've given out free coupons to my course now how do I start making money?

I uploaded my course materials to Udemy but now I can't change and move things!

In todays episode we're going to be discussing some of the questions I've received over the last couple of weeks.

We start the discussion with a question from Suraya Warden.

Suraya asks if it is possible to bundle similar courses together on Udemy and sell them for a discounted price.

This is a great question, particularly as I've been recommending in previous episodes the idea of one problem and one solution when it comes to designing and developing your course material.

Instead of developing the definitive 20 hour course on something, breaking the information into smaller self-contained modules is definitely the way to go. This is the way I am approaching all my future courses.

If you have similar information or 'core' modules that you can mix and match in order to produce unique courses this makes your content extremely versatile and really cuts your overall work load down.

We must also take Udemy's recent pricing announcement into consideration where they advised that as from July 7 2015 no course can be priced less than US$9 or more than US$300.

With an upper limit in place, plus Udemy's frequent discount offers, you will stand to make a lot more money by breaking up your course into modules.

Okay, so back to the question. The answer from Udemy is that they no longer allow or support bundling. The reasoning behind it was that apparently it didn't result in a good student experience.

Udemy said that instructors can create compilation courses as long as they make it clear in the course description what courses the compilation course is composed of.

So, the short answer is, yes, you can bundle your courses, but you have to include all the desired course material in the compiled course.

The next question, which is one I see quite often is -

How do I move from giving out free coupon to getting people to pay for my online course?

This just comes down to marketing, marketing and more marketing.

I would encourage anyone wanting to know more about effective ways to market courses to go back and listen to these episodes -

Episode 4 - John Colley - Cross promotion strategies

Episode 10 - Mark Timberlake - Google+ and YouTube

Episode 11 - Dennis J Smith - Coupon marketing

You may also like to check out Dennis's free Udemy marketing course. You'll find the link to his Udemy instructor page in the show notes for episode 11.

It is very important that you do your own promotion. While Udemy has over 7 million students that doesn't guarantee that any of those students will see your courses.

My understanding from talking with other instructors is that Udemy wants to see that your course is popular and has engagement before they will actively promote it.

Obviously Udemy wants to make money too, and with so many new courses being added to the platform on a daily basis, Udemy isn't just going to throw advertising dollars at very course that hits the platform.

So your course has to prove to Udemy that it contains information that students are looking for and are engaging with. You not only have to get student numbers to your course, you also have to find ways to engage with them and ultimately get them to leave you positive reviews.

One thing that I'm experimenting with at the moment is setting up a pre-launch page for my next course.

The page outlines what the course is going to contain and encourages the reader to join up to the pre-launch team in order to access special and exclusive deals.

This is a technique I picked up from the Million Dollar Instructor course that the people at Fedora very kindly gave me access to. It is a brilliant course and provides unique information and strategies I haven't come across in the many other teach online courses I've taken.

If you want to learn more about Fedora and the Million Dollar Instructor course check out the link to their webinar in the show notes for Episode 12

If you're interested in the pre-launch concept check out my Ideas That Sell page

The last question that we cover in this call is uploading your course material to Udemy.

There is restricted functionality within the Udemy curriculum page which limits your ability to edit content or reassign it to another area.

It must be noted that the first item you upload to a lecture will become the main piece of content for that lecture. The content that is displayed automatically when the lecture is opened.

You cannot move an item from the supplemental resources area into top spot.

A friend of mine was uploading material into the curriculum as he completed it with the understanding that he could move it around and edit it later. Unfortunately he found that the functionality in that area falls short and is in need of improvement. Luckily he worked out a work around which saved him the trouble of starting from scratch.

To avoid these issues I highly recommend that you layout your course structure in a spreadsheet or something similar even before you create your Udemy curriculum.

Get a clear view of what you want your course to look like, what your main lecture content should be and what you want your supplemental material to be and how it should be displayed - you can't edit the name of a resource once it's uploaded so have all that worked out first.

Other sites mentioned in this episode

PresenterMedia - Presentation Templates, Graphics & Video Backgrounds

If you have a question about any aspect of online course delivery, from concept to market, please feel free to send me an email at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you and your question would very well feature in a future podcast.

I want to deliver relevant material so keep those emails rolling in.

If you enjoyed this episode please leave me a rating and review over at iTunes, and please.. like, share and comment below.