Online Course Launch Checklist
As a preliminary to this, I strongly recommend you review my Topic Selection Checklist. If you have created a course which does not:
- Solve a problem
- Relieve a pain
- Provide a new skill: or
- Provide the student with a result that they wanted but did not know how to get
Your course may NOT sell well.
Hitting the Review button in Udemy or publishing your course on a platform or a market place is to complete the easy bit. You now have to have a Launch promotion and marketing strategy. This falls into three parts
- Pre-Launch
- Launch
- Immediate Post Launch
This does not include the longer term promotion strategies that you need to consider.
You will only be able to move forward with a course link once Udemy come back to you with their comments on your course. If they come back with issues, you will still have a draft link you can share.
Ensure you have done everything to make your course listing as good as possible.
Pre-Launch Marketing
- Building expectation in your educational announcements of your other courses
- Choosing the right course URL
- Make sure you have your keywords in your URL before you hit publish.
- Blogging
- Create a blog post about your up coming course and if possible create a landing page which you can collect email addresses in advance of publishing your course
- Ensure that you have Google Analytics set up on your Udemy course so that you can see where your traffic is coming from
- Sharing in your Facebook Groups – let people know that your new course is coming
- Find relevant Facebook groups, join them. Don’t spam them with an announcement but drop hints when commenting, that you have a course on this coming up.
- Asking advice in Studio about your course – Test Video, Promo Video. This increases awareness of your course in the studio before it comes out.
- Preparing and warming up your reviewers – cultivate your inner circle
- Build up good will by reviewing their courses and getting some good will in the bank
- How to ask for a review – you should ask for “an appropriate review”
- How not to ask for a review – you should not ask for a “Five Star Review” or even a “positive review”. Udemy is tightening its guidelines on this and you do not want to fall foul of their new rules.
- Engage with instructors you don’t know and sign up for their free courses. Leave them a positive review. Contact them, tell them how great their course was and tell them you have left them a Five Star Review. When you publish your course, you can go back to them, offer them your course and ask them to consider leaving a rating and review.
- Creating an off Udemy landing page – collecting emails, Lead magnets and free offers, first to know, plus off udemy bonuses, add to your mailing list, create scarcity, learning from Jeff Walker Launch
- Be clear in your launch pricing strategy
- Where to offer free: Udemy Studio Review Document, Facebook Groups, Best Black Hat Forum
- Pricing through launch – Launch at min $97 so that any Udemy promotions make your course look like an attractive deal
- Incentives to buy soon (Outside of Udemy) – offer an extra bonus (checklist, extra content, ebook, recorded webinar) for a limited time to get them to sign up
- When not to offer for free – think hard about this. Certainly not after the initial launch period, other than on a strictly limited basis.
Launch Marketing
- Setting up launch offers
- Using Free for social proof, early on
- This makes your course look appealing to new students
- Helps you in the Udemy market place
- A paying student, even $1, gets you more credit from Udemy than a free student
- Offering bonuses
- In Udemy you cannot do this
- You can include a lecture offering an off Udemy bonus on your website and remove the lecture after the launch period providing you make it clear this is what you are doing
- Updates
- Frequent updates keep your course moving forward
- Consider launching with a section or two up your sleeve and publish these a month or two after launch
- Using reviews in your marketing and course summary
- Include these in your off Udemy marketing and quote a couple in your course description
- Previews and Audio content to spread buzz
- Post your promo video on Youtube, share it on other video sites too: Vimeo
- Take the MP3 sound track from one or two courses, mix into an audio promo and publish on Youtube, Soundcloud and other Audio sites
- If you know any podcasters, try to get on their show to talk about your courses
Post Launch Marketing
- The importance of organic ranking in Udemy
- Drafting your personal Biography
- Keyword Rich
- Talk about the sort of courses you are creating
- Quote some five star reviews
- How should you price your course?
- Min $97 or $197. Really long and complex courses $297.
- The Udemy pricing structure
- Keeping above $19
- 97% from your own coupons
- 50% Udemy organic or promo sales
- 25% from Affiliate sales
- How to choose the right category for your course
- Choose the right category
- Look at the sub categories. Normally you should be able to select one of several. Where are your competitors? Choose a category with fewer courses overall in it – less competition. More chance of ranking on the first page organically
- If you want to move category, you need to email [email protected] and ask them to do it for you. Better to get it right first time.
- Crack the Udemy category algorithm
- See comment above
- Optimise course ranking
- <1,000 students, quickly
- At least 10 5 Star Ratings and Reviews, then aim to get 30
- High student engagement
- Choose the right category
- Getting your first 1,000 students
- Free coupon distribution to Facebook Groups, Udemy Studio Review Document and Best Black Hat Forum
- Getting your first 10 5 Star Reviews
- Approach a personal list of friends and Udemy instructors
- “I have just launched my new course on Udemy entitiled “*********”. Explain a benefit of the course. I would really appreciate it if you could enroll in the course and leave an appropriate rating and review for the course. Here is the link which includes a free coupon. I appreciate you may not have time to go through the whole thing, but if you could complete at least 50% of the course, it would make all the difference .
- Please let me know if I can be of any help next time you publish a course on Udemy. Best regards....
- The importance of ratings and reviews
- Critical to potential new students for whom this represents real social proof
- Critical in the Udemy algorithm
- Very helpful with off Udemy marketing
- Can quote in your course descriptions and personal descriptions
- How to Stand Out in Udemy and get more Clicks