How to teach online courses and earn money from home

My earnings for the past three months, based on one course

A few days ago a curious friend approached me with some questions about how I teach online and make [some] money? How do I prepare courses? Where do I get the materials? And many other things.
I wrote an e-mail in response and long before the end of the e-mail I knew I was writing a blog post in hind site. 

The e-mail turned blog post is given below for you to enjoy.

Dear Friend,
How do I sell my courses?
Udemy.com is an online course market. It allows you to create video courses on various topics and sell to millions of people.

There is a 30 days money back guarantee, but none of the 100 students who have paid for my course ever claimed it. If your stuff is good enough, most of the people will not try to be clever.
I am selling one course through Udemy at the present moment. I created it in November 2014.

How can you create your own course?

Udemy.com itself offers free courses about how you can create your own video courses and those give newbies a good head start.

A link to one of such courses is given below:
https://www.udemy.com/official-udemy-instructor-course/

It is not necessary to show our face on the screen. I haven't done so for my first course, won't do it in the second one either.

Recording the screen:

I just record my screen using Camtasia Studio and edit it using the same tool. You can get one month free trial of Camtasia to learn and put together your first course as well.


The microphone:
For my first course I used the microphone mounted on my USB headphone. For second one I've spent a 400 rupees to buy a USB mic since the old one is broken.

The mic mounted on laptop does not work well since its 'omni-directional' and captures all sorts of unwanted sounds.

The slides:

Fancy slides take a lot of time to create and they distract the students as well. Its highly recommended to create simple slides instead.
I'm using the same template for my second course.

Do take a look at the slides I've used in my first course.
https://www.udemy.com/tcpip-socket-programming-for-coders-using-csharp-net

Redeem the coupon code PAKISTAN to get 100% discount on my first course and check things out. Notice that the audio quality is just average but still the topic is evergreen and people are paying.

Money matters:

Udemy keeps 50% of the cash generated by the sales of your course. I believe they rightfully deserve it since they've built such a market and they do a lot of publicity as well.

In Jun 2015 I made a $98.88 which is almost 10000 rupees. In July I've made $77.5 and the figure for August is $57.58. I hope it will cross the $60 mark in couple days.

The money is transferred using Paypal. You'll be able to use your husband's account.

​

My Personal Strategy:
I have three course ideas in my head right now. I am working on one of those. The plan is to put at least two out on the market by first week of November 2015. Combined, three evergreen courses will yield a healthy $150/month on average for at least 3 years(I hope). Noticeable thing is, I won't have to move a finger to make the money, all effort will be done upfront. It will be possible to pump things up through marketing efforts, but that's an option not an obligation.

If you've made it so far, perhaps you've recognized that in lieu of an e-mail for you, I'm actually writing a blog post which I will publish on my blog(without your name). That's just the way a content creator's mind works.

Please feel free to ask more questions and discuss ideas.

Sincerely,

Naeem.




PS: Link to my course about TCP/IP socket programming: 
https://www.udemy.com/tcpip-socket-programming-for-coders-using-csharp-net/?couponCode=FOUR

Udemy Mobile App: Searching for an instructor's course is impossible

Search results, first page

Little while ago I asked my respected friend, top Udemy instructor Len Smith to share a coupon code of his course (How To Make Talking Head Videos with Ease). He being a generous gentleman created a coupon specially for me and sent me the link.
My laptop was turned off so I thought maybe I could join the course through my iPhone.

Searching for instructor

I opened Udemy smart phone app and searched for "Len Smith".

Search results, going deep

First few items of the list that showed up were Len Smith's courses, but the one I was looking for was not included. I kept swiping down, but I couldn't just find the course I needed. Instead, courses by other instructors kept showing up as I went deeper.

Before I proceed further, I must say this post won't be all about bad things, I will put some actionable items by the end of this post.

 

How would I perform the same action Udemy website?

When searching on Udemy website, I would click any Len Smith course and then click his photo, another small pop-up would show up. I would click it and reach Len's profile page. From that page I will be able to click any of his courses. The pop-up in the middle is kinda extra, but still the overall process is simple.

What happened when I clicked "Instructor" tab on Udemy mobile app?

Blank instructor page

Nothing happened, the page remained blank. I would expect to see instructor bio text and perhaps a list of courses. Maybe its just a bug in Udemy app.

Searching by course name

Good courses

Guess what, it didn't work either. A lot of courses including some interesting ones by other top instructors like Alun Hill were shown, but I was not looking for those.

Enough problems, I better put forward a few solutions I believe.

...

...

Search by exact instructor name

• A user comes to Udemy.com
• In the search text box, she provides some text and hits search
• The Udemy system checks if this is an exact instructor name
• If that's the case, it will return a full list of searched instructor's courses.
• A link to similar courses or similar instructors can be tucked on screen as well.

Search by URL

A user comes to Udemy.com

• In the search text box, she provides some text and hits search
• The Udemy system checks if it starts with http://
• If that's the case, it will run a search on course URLs
• The system will strip any coupon codes or tracking information before searching the database
• Exact course will be shown on screen
• A link to similar courses or similar instructors can be tucked on screen as well.

Hire Me!

Remember the $65 Million headline, the cash Udemy raised recently? I am an expensive professional but with that kind of money they can hire me for a couple hundred years!

Udemy can dive into the professionals acting as instructors and ask them for (paid) help. These people got excellent knowledge of Udemy product, I'm sure these people can contribute a lot to make Udemy a better course market.

oDesk Top Rated Freelancer Program

Just yesterday I got an e-mail with the image shown above. The e-mail also broke the happy news that I was also included in the club. Reason being above 90% project success ratio.
A screenshot of exact e-mail is shown below

Learn Game Programming in Cocos2D-X C++ Series

What was the most important part of my success?

I have turned down a lot of project offers on oDesk, eLance, and in real life as well. Declining projects carefully and selecting projects intelligently plays a key role in a freelancer's success.
You MUST say NO, otherwise you will get stuck in hordes of sub-par projects and a death by suffocation is imminent.

What are important factors to bring you in Top Rated Freelancer Club?

First of all, I made a 4 digit dollar number in a year. The amount was not grand, I hardly paid the bills. The most important thing is that all of my clients provided feedback, and 60% of my clients came back to me with repeat work.

Respond to invitations immediately

I decline most of the invitations that come my way, but even declining is a response and it shows you keep an eye on your freelance account.
It is also helpful for the clients since they are able to forego and move on to other freelancers.

You will also see that when I got interviewed, I almost always got hired.
Why did this happen? I am very selective about applying to jobs, and when a client gets in touch with me they mostly pick me for the job.

Final words

1. Don't post bids for any and every open project you come across. 
2. Respond to job invitations quickly.
3. Be decisive, and learn to say NO
4. Make sure 90% of the projects you undertake end up in success

Promote Udemy Online Course on Social Media and get 1500 plus students, no e-mail list

How I promoted my Udemy Online course and got 1500 plus students in a few weeks

1. I joined several topic related Linkedin groups, posted in discussion section and got some hits from there.
2. Looked up Google AdWords for hot keywords, and added those strategically to my course landing page.
3. Also added description for every lecture. Students might not pay attention to descriptions but search engines do see and scan those to rank your content higher among other topic related items. This is hard work so don't write description before recording lectures, I would listen to my lectures again and quickly jot down points. These points would become lecture description afterwards.
4. I added two quizzes to my course. I then took quiz questions, put those in a blog post as "interview questions for TOPIC" and posted at my programming blog on Blogger. Of course there was a link to my course saying "get the answers here!".
5. I searched Youtube for topic related videos, posted feedback on those videos along with link to my video.
   
6. Searched Yahoo for topic related questions, and posted answers along with the link.
7. Searched "Stack Overflow" for topic related questions and posted answers with link to my course.
8. While the course was unpublished, I shared it on facebook and sent custom messages to my friends specifically requesting them to share the course with their friends.
9. I also took one of my coding demo course vidoes and edited it specifically with promotional material. I posted the video on YouTube and Vimeo.
10. Last but not least, Twitter can also get you some traffic. There are bots out there that automatically re-tweet if they every find a certain keyword in a tweet. A few examples are #udemy #discount #free #course. You can also directly include various coupon vendors in you tweets. A few examples are  +Coupons.com and +CouponCabin and +CouponIgniter .

Demo TCP/IP Sockets Read and Write in C#, Free Udemy Course from Naeem Akram on Vimeo.
Apart from these "tactical moves" you also need to do some due diligence about what you can teach well and whether someone wants to study it or not.
In case of my first course a lot of people told me that nobody wants to study this topic but I knew there's a market out there since I've seen a lot of people struggling with the "TCP/IP Socket Programming using C# .Net".

In the end it's going to take time, patience, and hard work. I wanted to say "blood, sweat, and tears" but that sounds romantic although these ingredients are also essential to create any masterpiece be it an online course or a sound track.

List of visitor sources along with visitor count

• Google Traffic    274 (36.8 %)
• Linkedin Traffic 105 (14.1%)
• Facebook Traffic 51 (6.9%)
• Others Traffic     283 (38%)
• Youtube      3 (0.5%)
• Yahoo      5 (0.7%)
• bestblackhatform      11 (1.5%)
• live      4 (0.5%)
• Bing      4 (0.5%)
• tekacademy      4 (0.5%)

Oh by the way, here's a link to my first online course which I plan to keep free until it reaches 3000 students.

https://www.udemy.com/tcpip-socket-programming-for-coders-using-csharp-net