How I Got 1,000 Students to My SEO Udemy Course in 5 Days?

It was October 22nd around 8pm, I came back from work after the train was late and I had to wait 25 minutes at the train station, listening to some weird woman yelling on the phone. I opened my laptop as usual. I decided to check how many students enrolled to my new SEO course on Udemy I published 5 days before.

I was hoping to see at least a few.. 5 or 10 maybe. I didn't expect more than that because I didn't start any of the marketing tactics I was planning, even my closest friends haven't seen the course yet.

Few weeks before, I set up my first target for this course: Reaching 500 students in 1 month, after reaching this target I would feel safer to start cost for my course. Sharing my target with 3 of my colleagues it turned out as an ambitious target.

But hey! This is what targets are meant for, right?

The Shocking Point

I saw this: 1,014 students enrolled.

The first thing I did was sending the stupidest message to Udemy's support team:

The respond that the data is accurate made me think about the process I've done before publishing the course. Udemy course is just like any other product; you have to think about branding, positioning, targeted audience and more. So the process I'm discussing here is relevant for any new business, website or product you're working on, not specifically to Udemy courses.

Competitor research

The first thing I did was checking everything about my future competitors:

• What names did they choose?
• Did they target their course to a specific audience? If they did, what audience? And where did they mention it?
• Are their courses high quality? Can I create a better course than the best one in there?
• What was the value proposition they offered?
• Are they all similar? Of each one had his own differentiation?
• Did they offer any special benefit?
• Is the person behind the course is professional?

Finding the right audience

OK so after deep thinking I can say that finding the right audience and deliver it in the right way is the MOST IMPORTANT PART of any product or company.

I had to understand who are those people that may be interested in SEO course and why are they interested in it? Do they want to be professional SEOs? Do they want to do it as freelancers to get some extra money? Or maybe they are in the high-tech and they want to expand their horizons a bit?

So I bought an SEO course on Udemy in order to understand who those people are and I realized most of them had their own websites, personal websites. So I figure they probably want to promote their own personal website with SEO.

Only after understanding my audience I could start thinking about the content I'll offer on my course.

I mentioned the targeted audience in the course name, subtitle, description of the course, and on the promotional video I created.

Making an effort

Your potential customers can easily know if you made an effort or not, they can see it on the quality of your product, the design, the audio, the estimated time you spent on the project and more.

Most of them won't buy your product if they think you didn't make a big effort trying to serve the best solution for their problem.

So I recorded the course with super expansive microphone I had from the days I was recording music, I borrowed a DSLR camera from a friend, I bought a big whiteboard and spent hours editing the videos I recorded.

Providing a proof

People don't like risks we all know that, and they don't know you, so why would they buy something from you? How do they know you're telling the truth?

This is something that you must think about in every project you're planning, especially if you're about to sell something.

So I understood I had to provide some kind of a proof that the things I teach are effective. So what I did is actually providing a proof from Google resources to any tactic I teach, and I wrote it on the subtitle of the course, in the description of the course and mentioned it in the promotional video of the course so no one would miss that.

My value proposition & differentiation

If you're creating something that already has a market, you probably have few competitors.

When your potential customers are trying to choose between dozens of different options they most immediately see your value proposition, that special thing that ONLY YOU offer, that thing that will make them choose you and not the others.

So after choosing the target audience and viewing few of my best competitors I chose my value proposition – I'll help them bring customers!

No one needs traffic on their website, those website owners created a website in order to find customers, not traffic.

I mentioned my value proposition on my course name, subtitle, promotional video, and actually all over the place, they most identify the differentiation from my competitors immediately.

Creating a sense of urgency

Creating the feeling that your customers can take your service either now or in a month from now will probably lead them to not taking your service at all.

This is way I had to create some kind of urgency to users to take my course right now.

My excuse for urgency was that the course will cost $79 on November 20th at the latest.

This way, as long as the course is FREE they will click the enroll button and save the course for anytime they would like to watch it. In this case I must cost $79 for my course in order not to hurt my reliability as an instructor of course, which leads us to the next section…..

Staying reliable

Sometimes marketers tend to think that their customers are stupid and they won't notice if they're trying to fool them, but it's a mistake. Especially these days, every customer has dozens of ways to test your reliability as a service provider and as a person.

• Your customers are checking your Facebook profile
• Your customers are checking your LinkedIn profile
• Your customers are checking your website
• Your customers are reading blog posts that you wrote
• Your customers are checking your job
• Your customers are checking reviews about your product
• Your customers are asking about you on social media

The point is, if you're trying to fool them, big part of them will notice, and usually this part is the avenger part!

• They'll write bad reviews about you!
• They'll warn people on forums!
• They'll report you to administrators!

You don't want to mess with them, you really don't. Keeping your name / brand clean and reliable is super important. This is why I didn't promise any unrealistic wish, and I told only the truth about my professional experience etc.

Making emotional connection

Messages are usually being delivered in one of 2 ways: emotional and rational.

Sometimes by making an emotional connection with your customer your brand stays in his mind much longer. So it is important to deliver a rational message using real proofs but it is also important to create an emotional connection with your customers. We all remember Budweiser's super bowl commercial and the funnier and a bit disturbing GoDaddy commercial. They both are creating this emotional connection we are talking about (or at least some kind of emotion).

So my course is talking to website owners, and I was a website owner 5 years ago and I am now, so I can easily connect with their goals and emotions, I know that they are dreaming to do something on their own, some master piece that people would want to buy, they want to be proud of their product and help others.

So in my promotional video I was talking about my personal experience with websites and mentioned that this is exactly the reason I created this course, to help others in this difficult journey.

Conclusions

It doesn't matter if you're creating a course, opening a business, creating a website or developing a product, you must think about each one of these steps.

Without them, you'll find your potential customers easily being convinced by your smooth competitors that might even generate much less value then you do! But your customers still chose them because of their marketing tactics.

If you want to dive deeper to the texts I wrote, the level of effort I made or the repeating messages I used you can find the landing page of my course here.