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All My Udemy Classes Are Still Making Money Today and One Is Over Four Years Old

“In 2015, the top 10 instructors made more than $17 million in total revenue.” (Wikipedia on Udemy.com)

I’ve been making online classes for a couple of years now. It’s been a fun and challenging adventure that I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys teaching and creating audio-visual material. Oh, and there’s the money thing too. Nothing remotely compared to the top 10 instructors of 2015 but I’ve had a few ‘4’ digit months.

A long-term, recurring income stream is a beautiful thing. When you think about it, most of us are stuck in the one-to-one income generating paradigm — one unit of work for one unit of currency. This is a horrible system that’s hard to scale and unsustainable in the long run.

A semi-passive income, is where you invest work upfront, and income trickles out of it thereafter, just like rent or royalty checks (mind you, nothing is really passive, just filing taxes on income is work, but as my dad would say, nice work to have).

You Are Wrong If You Think That You Have Nothing to Teach

“It takes an amateur to make a good class for other amateurs.”

My videos are on data science, programming and personal branding as those are the topics I am passionate about. I have filmed my share of YouTube videos based only on the sheer excitement of having just learned something new. That’s a far cry from mastering a subject! So, what are you excited about?

You are alive, therefore you have learned plenty of things and each one of those can be turned into a class. The easiest source for class ideas is through professional experience, but that’s really only the tip of the iceberg. A class topic can be about anything under the sun.

All You Need Is a Laptop…

If you are new at this, a laptop or a computer with a camera and mic, along with screen recording software are all the gear you will need. There’s a learning curve so I’d recommend focusing on the essentials at first. Spend your energy on making good quality content and don’t geek out on the audio-visual stuff.

So Go Ahead

Create an account on Udemy.com and browse through their 50,000 classes available. There are other platforms out there and they all have their pros and cons. Udemy is the perfect place to get your feet wet. You will benefit from their huge community of students — 24 million of them. Even though you’ll split 50% of your profits with them, this is a hard deal to turn down. They will ensure that your content fits their platform. This is a good thing as they run basic checks on your video and audio quality, your images, your content, etc. As a newbie, it is good to have those with experience go over a checklist to make sure your class is ready.

For more on this topic, check out my new ebook on Amazon: Create Income Streams with Online Classes

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Manuel Amunategui

amunategui@gmail.com

Twitter: @amunategui

Author of Monetizing Machine Learning, Create Income Streams with Online Classes and Grow Your Web Brand, Visibility & Traffic Organically. Curator of amunategui.github.io and ViralML