I’m excited to welcome Scott Britton from Life-LongLearner.com and The Competitive Edge podcast to The Side Hustle Show.
In this chat, we talk about how he built up a passive income stream from online courses on Udemy, which gave him the freedom to travel and live in South America for several months.
Scott’s a business development pro, an excellent marketer, and bestselling author of Lifehacks. In fact, I followed many of the tactics from Scott’s Kindle book launch for the Work Smarter launch last month.
Update: The book was a hit! Here’s the breakdown of my launch strategies.
He’s a super smart guy and really delivers a ton of excellent tips in this episode. I think you’ll like it!
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Learn:
- How to create and sell premium content, even if you’re not an expert.
- 3 tactics to seed your course with initial student enrollment and reviews.
- How Udemy’s “velocity-based popularity” algorithm works, and how to work it your advantage.
- How you can use Udemy to funnel students to your blog, email list, and other products or services.
- How to use Google Analytics to test the effectiveness or your course titles.
- Why most other online education platforms are a waste of time.
- The downsides of building a popular course.
- Scott’s #1 tip for Side Hustle Nation (and why he’s spent $10,000+ on it already this year)
Links:
- Life-Long Learner
- The Competitive Edge podcast
- The 8 Income Streams I’m Working on Right Now
- Skillshare
- Udemy
- Skillfeed (out of business)
- Scott’s Sleep Hacking Course on Udemy
- Scott’s Gmail Productivity Course on Udemy
- OptimizePress
Download the Free PDF "Highlight Reel" from this Episode
With all of my guest's top tips and resources included.
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Success! You just unlocked the highlight reel from this episode ... AND over 200 other subscriber-only bonuses. Check your email for details :)
(If it doesn't show up in 5-10 minutes, check spam/promotions.)
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What do you think? What could you teach?
Man, 35:06 and on hit right home for me… deep. The take-aways for Udemy were spot-on, but this part of the podcast is what got me good.
Getting tons of awesome email from people all over the world asking on how I can help pick their paths, guide them to the future they desire, regain confidence, etc. etc. I absolutely love helping people but, just like Scott said… it really starts to cut into available time and internal resources.
Definitely not complaining, but there’s also a ton of head-space that gets committed. It gets tough. It gets real tough. I have a renewed respect for those solely dedicated to the social services and humanitarian career paths.
This episode came at an interesting time as I’ve been getting the same “moving away from the information-only-business” feelings creeping in and it’s good to hear Scott talk about this. I’m also beginning to wonder if this is just something that entrepreneurs / small business folks experience along the way?
Got my gears spinning good – great episode here Nick!
Thanks Richard! I actually almost cut that part out, but thought better of it. Gotta show that it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. I don’t get anywhere near the volume he gets and it still feels like a hamster wheel sometimes.
Another great episode. I make a bit on Udemy and there were loads of great takeaways.
But I agree with Richard, it was the bit about 80 emails a day that really got me. Scott, mate, if you’re reading this, I think you should get a VA to do your email. I know it’s easy for me to say but I’m definitely getting one soon and I don’t get 10% the email you get.
Don’t answer questions from people who are “ask-holes” and inquire about things that aren’t even in your courses. They’ve only paid you a few dollars – not the consulting rate you would charge for the time it takes to properly reply to the email.
So your VA should start every email reply: “Scott receives 80 emails like yours so I’m sure you will understand that your query is unlikely to be answered. In the meantime I think you’ll be interested in the following article’s from Scott’s blog. Bla bla.”
I know Pat Flynn recently did a podcast about inbox zero which included his VA. I didn’t listen because I didn’t think it applied to be yet. But, I will now. This has been a wake up call for me because I can only see it getting worse.
I know this seems a little bit mean but it’s not fair spending the day answering people’s questions.
Hey Rob, thanks for stopping by — I’ve definitely been following your Udemy journey as well!
The email thing is an ongoing challenge, and I don’t get anywhere near the volume Scott does. Since I’m pretty early in my journey, I try and make a point to personally respond to people because I think that will help build an engaged audience. I try and do batch processing as much as I can, but if and when it gets to the point of answering 80 emails a day, with no direct correlation to clients or revenue, I agree it’s time to do something about it.
For larger volume instructors, I think the only way around it is to jump into the Udemy inbox each day or few days and copy/paste a reply that asks people to email your support@ address.
I’d then set up my email inbox using a tool like Help Scout where you can use Saved Replies and quick linking to knowledge base articles to hammer through the email (or, as Rob, suggests, have a VA do it).
To add some value to it, you could ask people, after they’ve emailed support@ if they want to join your email list, your Facebook group, your community, your Patreon etc
Nick, thank you. This interview with Scott was chock full of info I’ve been dying to know about…and things I didn’t know I needed to know about! Amazing.
And, I also have to chime in, I’m a recent recipient of one of your personal email messages. Honestly? It blew me away. So if you’re able to keep it as personal as possible, even with some help of a VA, you will continue to stand out as the inspiring down-to-earth guy that you seem to be. With all the hype and self promotion out there there’s a true shortage of people like you! In the words of Hammer: You’re too legit to quit. :-)
Aww that makes my day. Thanks Steph for listening in and for the comment! Let me know if there’s anything I can help with!
Hey Nick! My pleasure. And thanks for the Udemy worksheet, it’s a huge value. I love that you collect all the nuggets from your guests and give us an actual PDF to download. Sweet!!
Great podcast as always Nick. Working on my side hustle and learning from people like Scott and you really makes the lonely journey much more bearable. Keep up the great work.
Thanks Chi — I’ll keep ’em coming! Let me know if there’s anything I can help with.
Thank you Nick for another great podcast. This was full of great, actionable stuff!
I’m glad that you kept the last bit in there when Scott got real because it’s important to think about scaling and what to do when you hit that point. Like he said though, it’s nice to have that freedom (or financial safety net of passive income) to then work on the next project.
I like the point he made about it being a lonely gig sometimes. That’s a cold hard truth of working online though right? It also makes a difference if you have a family or not. I know for me, being able to take off and go swimming on a Tuesday morning with the kids is a BIG deal and one I’ll always fight to keep.
Thanks again for the great episode!
Thanks Sean. I’ve had to get very proactive about networking online and in person to break through the entrepreneurial loneliness. Masterminds ftw! And the opportunity for “off-peak living” like swimming on a Tuesday morning is a huge bonus.
Thanks for this interview. It’s great to hear about people doing well on Udemy. I just started and without much effort have made some income. As I learn and improve, I’ll post about my online course passive income journey! I wrote about it here: https://gabbywallace.com/how-to-make-a-passive-income-teaching-online-on-udemy/
Thanks Gabby — yeah I haven’t had much success on Udemy yet, but definitely see the potential!
I agree there is potential with the right course and strategy. By the way it was nice to meet you at Podcast Movement!
Likewise!
Loved this episode!
Gave me a good kick in the ass to get some more Udemy courses grinded out!
Cheers,
Nicklas
Thanks Nicklas — great to see you back over here. Yeah I’m percolating on an idea for a new course as well! Let me know.
I really love the content really want to start my side hustle . I will be looking into the platform on Udemy not sure what course to offer …
Thanks Shay! As far as figuring out what to offer, look into your inventory of skills and experiences. Is there a topic that other people come to you for advice on? Is there a problem or hurdle you’ve overcome? Maybe that could be turned into a course.
I’ve been thinking about trying Udemy. Maybe now I will.
Hi Nick (and the rest of the side hustle show nation)
I wanted to put out a question regarding creating content online.
I am an engineering and an expert in 3D design. I make my money but doing designs for hire. Pluralsight, a website similar to Udemy, contacted me about creating content online about 3D modeling. I accepted their offer, made my audition video, got approved as an author, and will soon be starting my first project.
In the statement of work that they sent, we will be negotiating terms. Payment works as a one-time upfront free (upon completion of a course) and royalty payments once a quarter. These royalties are based on a percentage of sales.
My question is, what type of royalty should I expect? They have not made an offer yet as to the percent.
As far as the one time upfront payment, I got a comment in an early phone conversation that it is about $1000. Should I try to negotiate that as well?
Love the podcast man! It is in my top 3 and maybe my favorite. I did the side hustle so long before making the jump to full time entrepreneur and am so glad I did it!
Hi Scott, I had a chat with Pluralsight but I didn’t like their model that you have to be exclusive to them as I do quite well on Udemy and they don’t insist on exclusivity. I would love to hear about your experiences with Pluralsight as I’m have an updated resource on online learning platforms (as so many of them are not worth bothering with but there are some diamond in the rough!) https://robcubbon.com/udemy-alternatives-selling-video-courses-online/
Hello,
As a passionate online business owner myself, I believe that creating as many passive income streams as possible is by far the most powerful way to be successful entrepreneur. However, It takes so much efforts and time to get great results.
Thanks so much
Omar Saady