5 Reasons To Use Udemy In Your Business

I recently discovered the online marketer’s dream replacement for Ezine Articles!

It achieves the same things, but does it in a much cooler, web 2.0 way.

In ‘the olden days’ when I started marketing and had no list of subscribers, the recommended way to get started driving a bit of traffic was to write short articles on the Ezine Articles site.

You can see that my articles date back to 2009 here.

Now though, there’s a ‘cool kid’ in town, helping new (and established) marketers to achieve the same goals but in a much better way.

I was introduced to Udemy.com by a fellow UK marketer called Gavin McCoy who’d put together an excellent product based around the site called Udemy Profit Pump.

This really caught my interest, not only because it was completely refreshing and different, but because Gavin did such a great job of framing it in his introductory webinar.

So here are my 5 Reasons To Use Udemy In Your Business

Reason 1: Expert Positioning

Just like Ezine Articles before it (and EA is still a valid way of doing this) Udemy creates instant expert positioning for you.

When you get started out online, it’s hard to get a blog established and get your message ‘out there’ even in these days of social media.

With Udemy your beatifully presented course is up there ‘in lights’ and you get immediate professional kudos.

Reason 2: Free Traffic

One of the key reasons that so many new marketers sweated it out on Ezine Articles was to get targeted traffic to their web site or blog.

That’s why I did it … in fact this article on Easy Ecommerce had me ranked on the first page of Google for that search term when it was first published (not any more I hasten to add, Shopify changed all that!).

Udemy works the same way … it brings the traffic to you, you just create the great content to attract it.

Reason 3: Ready-To-Buy Customers

The only thing better than free traffic is targeted free traffic and Udemy brings that to you in spades.

The Udemy community is made up of people who want to learn … and they’re willing to pay!

Now that doesn’t mean that you can just bang out any old rubbish and you’ll get enrolments – the usual quality thresholds apply – but there are some people generating amazing amounts of income from Udemy and they don’t need a web site of their own or to get involved in any of the usual technical hassles … perfect!

Reason 4: Free Promotion And Marketing

One of the other big problems for new marketers is the high cost of advertising and promotion when getting a new venture off the ground.

Udemy constantly – and I really do mean constantly – markets its site and courses, offering incentives, coupons and so on.

In fact, you can even offer coupons yourself, to generate some interest on social media outlets and the like.

It even showcases courses too, so you may find a lot of free traffic coming your way at times.

They advertise on Google, Facebook … everywhere!

Make sure you take advantage of their big budget advertising spending by listing a course.

Reason 5: Build Your List

The canny marketer will use Udemy to build up their list of subscribers, by ensuring that their course has ‘extras’ like bonus content or reports … any kind of lead bait to get that all important name and email  address into your auto responder.

Udemy sends targeted leads to your page, when they ‘convert’ and take your course, you must make sure that you capture their details in some way so that you can offer some form of upsell or additional service … even a high ticket 1-to-1 or group coaching perhaps.

Are You Using It Paul?

The answer to that is ‘yes and no’!

I bought Udemy Profit Pump and decided to give it a try straight away.

One of the techniques Gavin demonstrates in his training is reversioning PLR video content as Udemy courses, but I’m keen to create my own content, so I listed a previous product that I’d created some time ago.

Update: It’s a bit out of date now, so I have unpublished it from Udemy for the time being.

I do intend to create a course on Udemy as soon as I have time, I want to create content that is new and probably away from online marketing when I do so and I may even use a pseudonym when I finally get to it!

Some Fast Start Tips

Pretty well all that you need to get started on Udemy are:

1) A laptop or PC

2) A microphone

3) Screen recording software

4) A slide presentation

Camtasia is the preferred choice for screen recording, but if budget is an issue use free http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/ (just keep your videos short and sweet!).

If you don’t have access to Powerpoint, use OpenOffice which is a free alternative.

See You On Udemy?

I think that Udemy is the most exciting thing that I’ve seen in a long time and I think that if you can create quality and in-demand content, it really is a great way to establish yourself as an expert in your field.

The inspiration for writing this post – having already been inspired by Gavin’s course – was a recent email from Jennifer Bailey who follows this blog:

I have just developed my first product (at last!). It is on Udemy – an e-learning platform. I  created a course on WordPress (well start with what you know!) and in little over a month I have almost 1000 students and I have 13 reviews all 4/5 stars . 

I’d say that’s a pretty compelling result and Jennifer has done a superb job of her first course – and just look how many people are consuming her content: https://www.udemy.com/quick-start-website-how-to-build-your-own-website

So take a leaf out of Jennifer’s book, Udemy is a pretty compelling proposition for online marketers, and one that I highly recommend that you investigate.

Always be aware that you’re pacing your content on a 3rd party site, so retain backups on your hard drive and remember in future that you can re-purpose your own content to sell in different ways in the future.

And finally, if you want to check out another site like Udemy, take a look at http://www.lynda.com/ (Update: Recently bought by LinkedIn)

Update: I Just Took A Course!

All this talk about Udemy got me thinking, so I decided to take a short course because I’ve wanted to know more about mobile apps for a while now.

The course I completed was: https://www.udemy.com/app-for-local-business/

It took me a day, and as a direct result I built a couple of Google Play apps for my two main web sites, PaulTeague.com and Clixeo.com.

As you can see from those links, the training worked out very well … in fact I love the way Udemy delivers training.

I even got a nice certificate at the end of … that’s a clever touch from Udemy, a nice ‘wow!’ moment.

Th experience of learning something new on Udemy has made me resolve that I must now create a course on it