Let's talk strategy. There are other strategic blunders I made over the years. Thankfully, some of them you won't be tempted to make, because times have just passed and changed. And it's not really an option anymore. As I mentioned to you earlier in the course, I just started too soon. I started in 1998, it was just too early.

Thankfully, the marketplace is really booming for online education. Udemy is a great partner for you. I'm excited and happy to be with you to me. So you don't have to worry about being too early. If anything, you had to worry about being too late. So my advice is, if you haven't already started a course, don't just throw up garbage in one day, but get going today.

Get working, at least get your outline going and start thinking about what you want to do. Certainly if you're serious about this, watch the other 15 or 20 courses on how to create courses and spend a week or two on But then give yourself a deadline. I really don't think you need more than about two weeks to create a course from beginning to end. It just shouldn't take that long. I want to share with you a few other strategic blunders I made. One was this whole idea of going after the long tail IE Chris Anderson's book, the long tail, this idea, why don't have to be a superstar or have a big hit.

Let me get a tiny little slice here. And I did create a bunch of long term, long tail courses, things like crisis communications, for executives in the oil and gas industry. Well, that is a long tail niche subject. And the problem is, it's just too long tail. It's too niche. So my advice is don't try to be all things to all people.

But figure out something where there is a large audience where people can really find you searching one or two or three words. That's really what it comes down to. If it takes 810 12 words, to describe what your course is about, you've probably narrowed things down too much where you're unlikely to get more than one sale a month. times may change. If Udemy gets to the point where it has hundreds of millions or billions of students, well, then there may really be gold in those little niches but right now, we're not quite there yet. So that's a blunder I made of being too narrow.

I should have gone deeper into broader categories of public speaking, presentation skills, media training, I have courses in all those subjects, but there are a lot of niche courses. Another blunder I made is just two part. blunder number one, I went out of my core area of expertise, which I'm not saying that's always a bad thing. But I try to do something counterintuitive. I did a an online course on wine tasting. Or you could say, well, TJ, you know, you know about wine and people care about what, why not.

What was counterintuitive about it is, I talked about how frankly, most people in the world 99% of the people in the world can't pass any blind taste test, and it's basically all a bunch of bunk. And if you really want to enjoy wine, make sure you've got something that isn't spoil that isn't too hot, that isn't too cold, because red wine serve too warm and white wine and serve too cold. Make sure it hasn't been open for more than 24 hours. And 99% of the world really can't tell the difference beyond anything else. So it had a lot of counterintuitive themes. And it was basically very critical of the wine industry.

And a lot of the people who are wine connoisseurs it was, frankly a lot of pointing fingers of the Emperor is wearing no clothes, and it might have made a great point. magazine article. It might be great for a YouTube video, but it's simply too counter intuitive for what people are expecting if they sign up for an online wine course, or wine tasting course, or wine appreciation course. So that was Elisabet. I just deleted the course. Because it got some negative reviews, the comments were not that great.

And it just wasn't selling so why bother tarnishing things? So I had to make a little shift there. So I would advise you, it's okay to try something that isn't what you do full time for a living if you have a passion for it. But if you go so far away from what people are expecting, if you're too contrarian, that might be interesting as a panelist or a talk show guest but it doesn't really meet people's expectations. So be very, very wary of that. You need a strategy that really helps you think out who you are, what you're about what your passions are, what your expertise is, and then creating courses on a regular basis.

Now what we haven't talked about, which is a common strategic blunder many people make that I didn't make. Most people just don't make enough courses. They do one course, don't do any promotion. Don't do the keywords, right? Don't get initial reviews. Three months later, they've made one sale, they've got $3.

And they give up and they say, Oh, this whole Udemy thing. This whole online training thing is a bunch about the biggest blunder most people make is not systematically doing another course learning from that making it better doing another course, systematically improving it, making it better and doing more and more courses. The people who make the real money from this platform are doing lots of courses. They're, they're doing courses on a regular basis. They're constantly improving. They're courses.

And that's really the way to succeed in this modern era and not end up doing a whole course on blenders and screw ups the way I have