Choose your course topic

To increase your chances of being successful on Udemy, you want to spend some time really thinking through your course topic. Start with a topic that you’re knowledgeable in and passionate about. Then, think about the audience you will be teaching and what they are interested in learning. Next, use tools specific to the Udemy marketplace to help you refine your topic and explore marketplace demand and trends using our Marketplace Insights tool.

Check your topic’s demand and competition

When choosing what you’ll teach with Udemy, pick a topic you’re experienced in and genuinely excited about. For many, this could be a number of things. How do you pick the right topic? One way is to explore the topic’s demand and competition by visiting our Marketplace Insights tool which can also be found on your instructor dashboard under Tools.

When you land on the Marketplace Insights page, you’ll see a list of “Promising Topics” which are currently in high demand. If you see a topic on the list that you’re knowledgeable in, this could be a great teaching opportunity. Otherwise, continue to enter your topic into the search field and hit enter. 

Based off your topic’s supply and demand, the tool will provide the following information:

Opportunity overview

Recommended strategy for teaching this topic on Udemy:

• This topic is a great opportunity. Learner demand is high for this topic but the number of courses available is low, which makes it a great opportunity to create a course on this topic. 
• Aim for high ratings to succeed in this topic. For maximum impact, make sure your course stands out from others by delivering high ratings from your learners. Submit a Test Video to make sure your recording delivers a high-quality experience and to exceed student expectations. Strive to meet or surpass all the recommended items on our Course Quality Checklist and Student Experience Checklist. You may want to consider including practice activities as a way to differentiate your course from the others. This is a great way to create a course that engages your learners. 
• Have a marketing strategy to succeed in this topic. To compete among the top courses in this topic you’ll need to implement effective marketing strategies to drive learners to your course. This could be by building a presence on YouTube, Facebook or another social media platform to drive traffic and enrollments to your course. Learn more about marketing strategies.
• Differentiate your course to succeed in this topic. Although there might be a lot of courses in this topic area, you might be able to make your course stand out from the rest. There are many ways to approach each topic and we have learners who appreciate unique perspectives that are relevant to them. Focus on your true specialty within this broader topic area.
• Bring your “A” game to succeed in this topic. Both learner demand and course availability are high for this subject. This means you’ll really need to create an amazing course with high ratings, a smart marketing strategy, and a well-differentiated topic from the others to stand out from the courses already in our marketplace.

Other high level information includes the topic’s student demand based on the learner search volume, the topic’s supply based on the number of courses on the marketplace in this topic, and monthly revenue information to help you understand this topic’s revenue potential.

Student demand

A deeper dive into how this topic performs from a search perspective. This includes how this topic’s search volume compares against others on our marketplace, the 6 month search trend, and top search keywords. You can explore the other topics of interest to understand what what else learners who search this topic are also searching for. There’s also enrollment information by channel so you can see how learners find these courses which may be helpful to determine your marketing strategy. Finally, the conversion rate measures the rate at which learners paid for the a course in this topic after visiting the course landing page.

Topic competition

Understand the overall supply for the given topic by seeing the total number of courses in the marketplace that have it listed as the primary topic. There’s some information about the learner-perceived quality of the courses in this topic, and you can explore a list of the top earning courses to see what content is being taught, learn more about the instructor, the course’s length, price, and more.

 

Don’t be discouraged if you find that your course topic isn’t in high demand or if there’s a lot of competition. Try refining your topic to see if there’s a unique approach you can take to capture a new audience, or see if there’s a related topic you could teach that interests you. 

Please note, Udemy does have a list of restricted topics that are not allowed on our marketplace.