How I promoted my Udemy Online course and got 1500 plus students in a few weeks
- I joined several topic related Linkedin groups, posted in discussion section and got some hits from there.
- Looked up Google AdWords for hot keywords, and added those strategically to my course landing page.
- 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.
- 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!".
- I searched Youtube for topic related videos, posted feedback on those videos along with link to my video.
- Searched Yahoo for topic related questions, and posted answers along with the link.
- Searched "Stack Overflow" for topic related questions and posted answers with link to my course.
- While the course was unpublished, I shared it on facebook and sent custom messages to my friends specifically requesting them to share the course with their friends.
- 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.
- 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
