Ask HN: Anyone making money with online courses?

Your books and copy look great! Why don't you prices a bit?

I write ebooks, which is currently my sole source of income (which is not for everybody as my living style in this part of the world needs about $150 a month).

I use leanpub/gumroad to sell them. I'm not good at marketing and find it difficult to adapt advice from articles I've read on that topic. Whenever I publish a new book, I put them up for free for a few days and I still get paid as both leanpub/gumroad allows paying more than the price set.

I post about my books on reddit/hn/twitter and other social sites. Getting attention is hit/miss, for example my recent book had good response on https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/jognf5/i_wrote_a_cook... but not much here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006829

I'm active on stackoverflow and reddit subs related to programming. I've had readers thanking me for the help and some have mentioned that they found out my books from my profile. And I learn a lot too from trying to answer questions.

Based on my experience, the biggest lesson I'd say is not giving up.

I started making paid content this year. I have made around 7k USD so far.

My take-aways:

- Pick a niche you know really well. A lot of sales come through reputation, since there is always going to be other competing products out there. My niche is Vue.js (not that niche).

- It is a lot of work. I'd estimate my profits around 5 USD / hour after it's all said and done?

- You need to build a brand! Start using Twitter and Reddit, interacting with your community. I am NOT a twitter or reddit guy normally, I do it for my professional image and content primarily.

- Build an audience first. I collected emails starting in Jan (day I decided to make a course). Around 500 ppl left their email before my launch, which was in June. Majority of my traffic from from my free ebook [0].

- Practice screencasting before you make a course. I did by posting free screencasts on my course website to get my skills up and show my content was worth $. [1]

- I rolled my own platform, hard to say if it was worth it. I posted my content on both my own platform and Udemy. I made around 5k from my platform, 2k from Udemy, but sold way more courses on Udemy (since they take a cut and they reduce the price based on country.

- Rolling your own platform has costs. Dev time, hosting videos (vimeo) hosting content (digital ocean), domain (namecheap) and the overhead of maintaining your stack.

- Udemy, while they take a cut, do a lot of marketing for you. Since I have put less time into marketing, sales on my personal site dropped, but Udemy is consistent (around $500 a month - I only spend around 3h answering questions a month).

I am now writing a book and will sell on Gumroad. Easy to set up, and they handle payments etc.

I will write a more detailed blog post soon on this topic.

[0] https://lmiller1990.github.io/vue-testing-handbook/

[1] https://vuejs-course.com/screencasts

I do have a Python course at educative.io [1] which nets me around 100€/month. I was approached by one of the founders because of an ebook I did and shown here on HN [2]. I do have a personal blog [3] where I have some articles on Python and related things but I think I don't have an "audience". I'm also working as a teacher btw.

Next year as my current contract gets downgraded (no more exclusivity - less salary), I'm thinking about providing 1:1 lessons and make other courses.

Although I do have some things to show, I do not have any actionable advice to share, I am as "lost" as you! :)

  [1] https://www.educative.io/courses/full-speed-python
  [2] https://github.com/joaoventura/fullspeedpython
  [3] https://joaoventura.net/

Thanks for the input anyway João! I didn't know about educative.io, how hard was it to publish a text-based course there?