Should you use Udemy?

UPDATE:
Since this blog post was written, Udemy also made big changes to their pricing structure and the way they operate.
While they can be a great platform to use, please make sure you understand the terms and conditions, and what it means for your course before hand.

Should you, shouldn’t you…?

Complete disclaimer here: I’m not affiliated with Udemy in anyway and they don’t know that I’m writing this, this is purely my opinion.

Udemy is a great platform, and is the platform of choice for 1000’s of courses. But before you jump in, let’s look at some Pros and Cons.

Pros

Udemy is an established platform which hosts courses.

That means that they’ve worked out a lot of the bugs for you.
If you were wondering how to store your videos, they’ve worked that out for you.
If you were wondering about what format to put things in, they’ve worked that out for you.
If you were wondering about how to take payments and send emails, they sort that out for you.
It’s big, it’s been around for a long time, and they know what they are doing.
So if the tech side of things is freaking you out, using something like Udemy can be really useful, because then you don’t have to worry about it. Someone else is doing that for you.

Udemy is a BIG platform.

They’ve been around for a while now, and they are big.
{Stats from their website. They were founded in 2009. They now have over 7 million students enrolled across 30,000 courses… big!}
As a platform, it’s list is huge. By putting your course on there, your course has exposure to lots of people.
If you have a really small list, or you are just starting out and you are not really sure what you are doing in terms of list building, this can be really good for you because they are sorting it out for you, you don’t have to worry about that.

Cons

It’s not your list.

Yes, they have a huge list, and yes you can your course there, but when people sign up for your course via Udemy, they are not signing up to your list. They are signing up to the course, on Udemy, which is Udemys platform, which belongs to them, not you.
It’s not your list.
Your list, the number of people who have subscribed to you via email, or have signed up for something you have, is not getting any bigger. Theirs is.

That is itself is kinda a pro and a con… does it really matter? Well, it depends.
Are you getting great exposure? Yes.
Can you possibly drive those people back to your list? Yes.

There are possibilities, but you need to know very clearly, that it’s not your list.
Students who enroll through Udemy, are enrolling TO Udemy, not to you.
And there is a big difference there.

You loose control of price.

When you put your course on Udemy, you can define some of the pricing, but they control when it goes on sale and they control the sale price.
What that means is that you could find a very high end course you’ve created, being sold for a very low end fee.

Now, I believe that you have some control over this, but consider, even if you can control how high or low it goes, they control when it goes on sale.

So you, as the owner of the course, still have no control over the final end price, because they put it on sale.

This isn’t completely a bad thing, they are getting some of the people coming through the door and doing lots of the stuff for you, so does it really matter? Well, that’s up to you.
It depends on the product you are building, and how solid you are on the price and how high end your course is, but remember… you are not in control of it.

There are very strict guidelines as to how you must build your course for Udemy

That includes how you record your videos and how long they should be, how you structure your PDFs, what format you put your files in, what structure you build your course in – it is all very clearly defined by them. And if you want to build a course to go on Udemy, you must build it to their standards.

As a course designer, I don’t think this is such a bad thing. They have some really good standards, but you need to be aware of them.

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Let’s wrap up.

When you build a course for Udemy, you build it for them. It’s not necessarily
the way you would have built it. You don’t have the same freedom and flexibility to move things around, change formats and put things in different places.
Because it’s not yours… it’s theirs.

Now the content and IP belongs to you still, but the list, the price, all those sorts of things belong to them. They control those things.

So there are pros and cons.

Should you use it? That’s entirely up to you.

At the moment, I’ve chosen not to put any courses on Udemy because I like to have more control over the things I do. I like to define how much they cost, I like to decide what goes first, I like to decide what format it goes in…

I like to be in control, it’s just the way it is.

But, should you put your course there? Well, it depends.
Yes it can be great getting exposure in front of a huge list. Yes, it can be great for starting out, especially if you don’t have the list, because you can leverage some of the excitement on Udemy.

There are 1,000s of courses on there, so you will be one course among many, but it could be a good way to start.

I’m going to finish this like always, by saying that I am neither right nor wrong.

I’d love to hear from you, how do you feel about Udemy? Have you used it?