If you are keen to become a Udemy Instructor and start making online teaching income, then the first step is to decide which topic you want to teach.
After creating more than 15 courses on Udemy, I can share with you how I came up with topics to teach for the past 7 years.
There are three key areas you can look into.
1. Life Experience
You can teach some of the skills you have gained or developed during your years of growth.
For example, if you are a parent and you have gained a considerable amount of experience raising your kids and are involved in support groups for young parents, then you may have the knowledge that a lot of other new parents need too.
Maybe you have been living overseas or alone and you have picked up some skills in quick meal preparations, then you can also share this with other people who just started to live alone.
Never underestimate the skills you picked up along the way. Sometimes, you never know that what you know will have a big benefit on others until you have been asked the same question over and over again.
John Thomas Mattison suffers from a gluten (wheat) allergy and his Fiance’ has hypoglycemia (a condition that the body that has lower blood sugar).
Thus, John is very much into fitness and nutrition but he is not a nutritionist by occupation. Even so, he created 5 courses on home recipes on Udemy and has a total of close to 1,000 students to date.
2. Occupation/Professional Knowledge
Another area you can look into is your full-time profession or career.
If you are in the same profession for more than 2 years, most likely you have possessed some skills or knowledge that can benefit others.
For example, if you are an accountant, you can share your knowledge on basic book-keeping with small business owners. Most small business owners dislike accounting (including me!) and would love to outsource or learn how they can simplify the whole process.
Of course, you can only do this without creating conflicts with your existing employer or partners. If you are a sole proprietor, then things are much more straightforward.
Irfan Sharif is a Chartered Accountant with over 12 years of experience in accounting, finance, and business intelligence. Leveraging his expertise, he created the course ‘Bookkeeping & Accounting Masterclass — Beginner to Advanced’ and to date, the course has more than 80,000 students enrolled!
3. Interests/Hobbies
The third area to look at is your own interests or hobbies. You can also turn that knowledge into courses to benefit many others who are looking to pick up these hobbies for example.
You can start by writing down how do you spend your time during your weekends or when you knock off from your work during weekdays. It is easy to overlook your interests or hobbies without writing them down. Try this method!
Praseela N is a software engineer who started as an entrepreneur and has done diploma in hand-crafted soaps and cosmetics. Based on her interests, she also created a course on Udemy teaching people ‘Learn Eggless Cakes with frosting’.
Bonus: Feedback from your students in the future
Another method of how I have ideas to keep creating new courses on Udemy is because I conduct surveys for my existing Udemy students for them to tell me what other topics they want to learn.
This is an extremely powerful method because you already have a relationship with your students and when you create a new course, most of them will want to learn from you (especially if the topic is related to what they have learned from you previously).
Next: Do research using the Udemy insight tool
Once you have shortlisted a possible topic (or a few topics), the next step is to conduct research using the Udemy insight tool to see if there’s any demand for your course.
The following tool can be accessed via Udemy Instructor dashboard (after you sign up for a free Instructor account with Udemy)>> Tools >> Market Insights.
In the following example, I entered the topic ‘Cake Baking’ and it shows me that although the demand is high on Udemy, there are also many other courses at the moment.
If you do not have a very special or unique angle to position your cake baking course then most likely I would suggest avoiding this topic at the moment.
Ideally, we need to find a topic that has high student demand and a low number of courses (which is not so easy!)
Let us look at the next topic ‘Cupcake Baking’:
Here it says the student demand is average and the number of courses is low!
This is something a new Instructor can try (of course, if you want how to bake cupcakes)!
Scrolling down the insights page will show us more details like below:
The above screenshot states that there are only 5 courses on cupcakes on Udemy at the moment!
And only 20% of those courses have a rating of more than 4.5!
Thus, if you can create a course (teaches how to bake cupcakes) that is truly practical and achievable by your students, your rating won’t be low and can attract most of these enrollments!
The final step is to check out the existing courses on Udemy that teach the topic that you want to teach too.
Note: In the rare case where there are no Udemy courses that teach what you are going to teach, then you can skip this step!
Using the same example above (baking cupcakes), we will check out the current courses on Udemy that teaches cupcakes baking:
There are a total of 4 courses (one not shown above) on Udemy that teaches how to bake cupcakes.
The 4th course (not shown in the above screenshot) focuses on salted caramel and that course has a rating of 4.9!
So it is better to avoid creating a course that teaches how to bake salted caramel cupcakes at the moment.
Do not need to be overly concerned about the current Best-Selling course!
You can further check out the current best-selling course and filter to look at those 1 or 2-star reviews and see what the other students are saying and see if you can create a course to bridge this gap.
The following are some of the reviews posted for the Best-selling cupcake baking course at the moment for your reference:
From the reviews posted above, if you can create a course that covers more in-depth on the mixing step, and include more elaboration on the steps you are taking, you can have a better chance of achieving a high rating in long term.
It is so important to check out the reviews posted by students for other courses before you create your own course as this will help you to include things that you may not have planned for your course.
Go ahead and give it a try!
Hopefully, you have gained a better understanding of the research process when I create a new course. And I sincerely hope you have learned something useful in this post to create your own course on Udemy!
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I wish you the best of luck!
