So I have gone on a lot of time wasting goose chases over the years trying to get this online course pot of gold. Some of them. Thankfully for your sake, you're not even going to be tempted to do when I first started this in 1998 Believe it or not, that was way too early. It was hard to even get people to take it seriously and mostly audio lessons. And I had an online media training course I gave it away for free figuring out that one out of 10 or one out of 50 people that came through the course would then want to hire me for in person training. Well, no, what I found is that 10 out of 10 and 1000 out of 1000 found something for free wanted something for free.

I got zero business out of it. Then in the early aughts, I created my own courses I hired developers from India had interactive elements where people could push a button record it. I hired producers to have slick videos spend a lot of money created courses that people love. They thought it was great. And I sold maybe two. Very, very little success.

Now, let's fast forward to just the last four or five years, I did come across Udemy enter the platform, January of 2014. But I thought, Hey, I don't want to, you know, get pinned down here. I don't want any big serious commitment. So I cast a wide net, I did extensive research on every other online platform, and I came up with hundreds and I spent a lot of time writing to them, forming relationships, partnerships. I even taught Groupon into selling my courses courses that I had hosted on my own site. I looked at a lot of different self hosting platforms and I am on a self hosted platform.

But when you add it all up, it just amounted peanuts. It just didn't add up too much of it. Yeah, do I occasionally get 100 bucks here 50 bucks bucks from my website Sure. More than 95% of them, I get absolutely nothing and it was wasted time it was time I should have spent building better Udemy courses. Now, there certainly are people who have a course on Udemy. But make the vast majority of their money selling courses on their own platform, they can sell it a lot more and I sell my courses on my own website at media training worldwide calm for more, I give a few extra bells and whistles.

So yeah, I can charge $500 for a course there. But it's not about and this took me a long time to get. It's not about how much you charge for each course. It's ultimately about how much revenue and profit Do you have at the end of the year? And how many people do you reach? And for me again, I'm just one person But I think a lot more people would likely be in my camp than the camp of someone who sells billions of dollars off of their own website, and also sells on Udemy.

For me, I found it to be incredibly difficult spinning my wheels, trying to get all my courses on these sites and these European sites and Asian sites and then building everything on my own website. Meanwhile, I'm doing partnerships with groupons a lovely company and they do occasionally sell one but again, when I add it all up, it's irrelevant to a month where I'm getting many thousands of dollars in revenue off of hundred sometimes 1000 course sales from Udemy. So what I've reluctantly come to agreement, others have said this on YouTube too, and I agree with it. Chris Brown has mentioned this in his courses. I I he was the First one I really heard say this. And I think he's a smart savvy guy.

He says, look, Udemy is Google. Every other online platform is being Where do you want to be? So you can spend a lot of time going after the AltaVista has all these other little search engines. Or you could just be on Google. And that's the reality today that things could change. Obviously, someone could buy it, and put it out to pasture like Google.

But for now, Udemy is the dominant player. It's the number one platform if you really want to reach the largest mass of students who want to learn, want to learn online and are willing to spend some money maybe not as much money as I would like and you would like but they are willing to spend money and most of the time their credit cards already in the system. So you don't have all of this major work and effort of building trust, getting someone to come to your website for the very first time and pull that credit card out. Bless you, if you're smart enough to figure that out. I wasn't my advice to you. If you don't already have a massive email list newsletter list of hundreds of thousands of people who love you and have bought your other products.

Start with easiest thing, easiest thing today is to create a course on Udemy. Sell that course, promote it, push it out there, get ratings, give it to friends, and give it to people who already know you and like you make that work rather than scattering all your energies of this partnership deal on this joint promotion and this new online service in New Zealand and this one in southeast Africa, because it's a big world, you can spend your time spinning wheels in all of these places. Meanwhile, there's something right in front of you that's willing to sell your courses to real students every day. Other time wasters I had, and this was pretty new to me. I've done 10,000 videos, how to videos on public speaking media, training my core areas of expertise on YouTube, and one day YouTube, just shut the channel down. That's a story for another day, you can send me a message if you're really interested in hearing about that sad tale.

I my revenue model was trying to get advertising revenue from people watching my training videos. Now I still have a YouTube channel. It's a different one, but it makes like $15 a month. What I have found is your people want training that's different than YouTube. It's different from others. Buying a book.

It's different from a lot of things. Udemy is the platform for training. Now Udemy is not paying me anything to say this. It's just my observation, having looked at every other player, and certainly there are some other good players in the space, there's lynda.com the amount of time I've wasted trying to get my foot in the door, if you can send them a pitch and get on, great Be my guest. But why not focus your time for now and for the immediate future? What's something you know, that works?

You know, if you create a course on Udemy, and you've done research, and it's in a good niche, and it's a good course and you get some initial students and you get some good reviews, you will in fact make money. You could be holding meetings and exchanging emails with folks@lynda.com for the next 10 years. And never get in the system. Where do you really want to spend your time? So these are some of the areas where I've spun my wheels I've wasted time I've, I've gone down, you know, black holes and wasted time, energy and money. I want to save some of that.

So my advice, really focus on Udemy. Get your course get a lot of courses, something we haven't even talked about yet, but multiple courses up, right, get that profitable before getting fancy and say, Well, I want to protect all the data and I want to have all the money for myself. Yeah. For some people that works. 99% of the people I know who say well, I'm too good for you to be I want to have all the data myself. I want to protect and preserve the relationship with the customer.

And I want to be able to charge 500 $1,000 I come back to them six months a year later. Most of them have never sold Panic again. You could be the exception. Fantastic, but why not start in the simplest way and build from that