I recently surpassed 300,000+ students on Udemy (12 courses) and 92,000+ readers on Amazon (18 books).
All on the side while working a full-time job.
What I do is not special and can be replicated, but does require some effort & patience.
Here are 5 strategies I follow:
1) Leverage marketplaces
I don’t have a lot of time (or a huge following) to rely on self-marketing. Instead, I rely on established marketplaces like Amazon for books and Udemy for courses because they have built-in audiences.
They take a higher cut of sales, but I’m okay with that.
2) Repurpose into other formats
An ebook can be repurposed into other formats with minimal effort & rework, including:
- Paperback
- Audiobook
- Course
- Webinar
Take the hard work you do once, and repurpose it multiple times.
3) Repurpose into other products
Any successful product can be repurposed into another product by slightly modifying the audience or outcome.
For example, you can take a subset of a book and turn that into another book by expanding on it a little bit.
“Influencing Virtual Teams” had three chapters about meetings which got repurposed into another short book called “Better Online Meetings.”
4) Create small products
I focus on creating short books and short courses.
Most of my books are around 10,000 to 12,000 words and my courses are around 1.5 hours long.
Small products help me as a creator (less time to research, create, edit and ship), and help your customers (less time to consume, higher chance of completion, and faster time to value).
Small products also means I don’t have to worry about validation (whatever that means), or about failure.
I just focus on creating more.
Volume is the key.
5) Create useful products
This should have been first on the list, but most people dismiss it as common advice.
Your North Star should always be your consumer.
Your reader or course attendee should walk away from your product feeling like they got more use value than they paid for it in cash value (how much money they spent on buying it) and time value (how much time they spent on consuming it)
Read that last statement again.
It’s the key to understanding that people pay you with their time and not just their wallets.