Maggie’s story: From employee to entrepreneur

Maggie, a computer scientist and marketer from Egypt, left her job in advertising to be her own boss. Her search to earn money online and share her expertise led her to Udemy where she joined the instructor community. She read other people’s success stories and thought she’d give it a try.

Her lack of teaching experience and skepticism from friends and family made it difficult for her to get started, but she took it as a challenge. She read a lot of articles on Udemy and reached out to a best-selling instructor for tips and advice.

With the support of the instructor community, she published her first course. While it wasn’t her best, that didn’t deter her. She published her second course two months later and earned her first $200 that month. For Maggie, this promised success.

Over the next few months, her income fluctuated. She was scared but hopeful. Looking back, she says, “I had so much anxiety, stress, and self-doubt, but that just kept pushing me forward to work like crazy.”

With her course creation knowledge after publishing two courses, Maggie turned her attention to a new topic, Adobe After Effects. Her After Effects courses got her the boost that she needed. Currently, she has more than a dozen courses on Udemy and has nearly 39,000+ learners.

What worked

Maggie started with self-doubt and anxiety but succeeded due to her determination and hard work. Here’s a summary of the things that helped her achieve her goal.

Reach out for advice. Whether you’re new to online teaching or have experience, reach out to our instructor community, read other people’s stories and share yours. Maggie learned some great tips from our existing instructors. She even reached out to a best-selling instructor, Robert Marzullo, who encouraged her to continue.

Research success on Udemy. Keep learning. Maggie read a lot of Udemy articles and took Udemy courses herself, learning about how to optimize her course using SEO (search engine optimization). We have many useful resources to help guide you throughout the course creation process on the Teaching Center including the importance of creating a thorough Course Landing Page (CLP) for your course ensuring they are optimized for search (SEO) using search keywords.  

Plan your course marketing strategy. Creating your course is just the first step of the process. It’s also very important to market your course to your intended learners and let them know how they’ll benefit from taking it. Maggie used tips from other instructors to improve her marketing activities and promotional emails. She cross-promoted her courses to existing learners and started a YouTube channel with free tutorials, where she offered coupons to subscribers.

Engage with your learners. Interact with your learners to enrich their learning experiences. Be responsive to their feedback, questions, and reviews. While Maggie loves to receive positive reviews, she also appreciates bad reviews and uses them as constructive feedback. She asks her learners for more information to help her improve her courses. When learners have requested tutorials or additional information, Maggie made updates to her courses providing learners the information they requested which created valuable content for future learners. She used this as an opportunity to send an educational announcement to her learners telling them about the course update. 

Keep going. Lastly, one of the most important lessons that we learned from Maggie’s story is to keep going! Don’t let setbacks deter you, instead, use them as motivation. We all have doubts and fears when taking on something big, new, or challenging. Her story demonstrates how you can channel that energy and use it to push forward.