Dennis J. Smith

#AskDennis: Question from Instructor Ermin Dedic

February 1, 2017

#AskDennis: Question from Online Instructor Ermin Dedic regarding YouTube. Here are Ermin’s questions: Ermin wanted to know how he could grow his followers on YouTube. Here’s some of the suggestions I offered. Create special URL from your website. My YouTube channel is https://www.youtube.com/user/djsmithidaho but not everyone can get a special YouTube URL for their channel. I use the WordPress plugin Pretty Link that redirects to my YouTube channel. I created something that was easy for someone to remember. https://dennisjsmith.com/YouTubeChannel If you are a Udemy instructor make sure to add a link to your channel in the “Bonus Lecture“. You can search Udemy Support for more information on what can be included in your bonus lecture. Add a Subscribe button to your videos. Search YouTube for videos on how you add the button to your own videos. Be Consistent and always be creating new content for your YouTube channel. Free YouTube Marketing Course on Udemy. I put together a list of 5 YouTube marketing courses you can enroll in for free on Udemy. Watch them and learn more about growing your channel. http://www.freecoursedaily.com/freeyoutubecourses/ Find Ermic at: https://www.facebook.com/ermin.dedic.5 https://www.udemy.com/user/ermin-dedic/ Find Dennis at: https://dennisjsmith.com http://onlinecourseinsider.com/

Interview with 6-Figure Online Instructor Joe Parys

December 27, 2016

My latest interview with 6-Figure online instructor Joe Parys. Joe has over 63 courses he teaches by himself and with others on Udemy and Skillshare. Those courses are being learned by over 180,000 students around the world. Watch information on how you can become a 6-Figure earner with online course. Browse and enroll in one of his courses today. BROWSE JOE PARYS COURSES WATCH MY “UDEMY LIFE” BOOK INTERVIEW WITH JOE PARYS

Udemy Life Book: Udemy Instructor Dennis Smith Interviews Udemy Instructor Joe Parys

December 27, 2016

My Udemy Life Book interview with online instructor Joe Parys. Joe now has over 63 courses he teaches by himself and with others on Udemy and Skillshare. Those courses are being learned by over 180,000 students around the world. Browse and enroll in one of his courses today. BROWSE JOE PARYS COURSES WATCH MY LATEST INTERVIEW WITH JOE PARYS

Online Learning Courses WordPress Plugin

Free Udemy Course Marketing WordPress Plugin For Udemy Instructors

October 14, 2016

I’m always looking for new ways to promote my own online courses in places other than Facebook Groups or other social media networks. It’s something that I always stress with other online instructors because a Facebook Group might not always be your ideal target audience. I run a group on Facebook “The Online Course Promotion Group: Featuring Udemy, Skillshare and more!” with over 4,000 members but it is hard to tell how many are instructors and how many are there looking for deals on online courses. This plugin is a must have tool if you are an online instructor with a WordPress website. You can download the free version of the plugin or upgrade to the Pro version which gives you more features including connection to your Udemy affiliate program account. Scroll down for more details. Online Learning Courses WordPress Plugin The Online Learning Courses plugin for WordPress allows you to display your Udemy courses on your WordPress website in several different formats including the format displayed above. It can be used to display courses in a post, a page or used in a widget. I use it on my personal site DennisJSmith.com and on OnlineCourseCoupons.com to display the courses of other instructors with the Udemy affiliate program (Available with Pro version). [convertkit form=4900669] You can download the free version of the plugin or upgrade to the Pro version which gives you more features including connection to your Udemy affiliate program account. Features This plugin allows you to display Udemy™ courses and lead your visitors directly to the course pages Display single courses by ID Search for courses by keyword (API keys required) Select between the following layouts: Standard Boxes, Grids & Lists Select between the following styles: Standard, Clean, Light & Dark Two separate widgets for single courses and searches Configuration page for more options Try out the online demo Regular updates and improvements: Go though the changelog Quickstart Examples Single courses: Keyword search: More features with the PRO version The PRO version extends this plugins exclusively with our affiliate link feature and many more: Affiliate Links Masked Links Click Tracking Custom Templates Details and upgrade can be found here. Credits This plugin is not official made or maintained by Udemy™. All data provided through the official Udemy™ API. Live Demo – DennisJSmith.com Live Dem0 – OnlineCourseCoupons.com

September 2016: The 10 Top Post and Pages

October 2, 2016

September 2016: The 10 Top Post and Pages https://dennisjsmith.com – Homepage On The Road T0 30K in Udemy Revenue How I hit my first $100 month of Udemy Free Udemy Entrepreneurship Courses Social Media Made Easy Workshop Facebook Tip – Add Your Business Page As Your Place Of Work 10 Free Udemy App Development Courses 3 Reason Why I Switched To ConvertKit From MailChimp Where Did Facebook Notes Go? Free Udemy Personal Development Courses

On The Road To 30K In Udemy Revenue

September 25, 2016

The Revenue Road Starts It took me awhile to finish writing this post as July of 2016 marked my 2nd year on Udemy as an instructor now with 9 courses. The post I wrote back in September of 2014 on hitting my first $100 on Udemy continues to be popular. I thought that I would take the time to talk about my journey along the way and what I have been doing since then. I’ll break down my Udemy related revenue streams at the end of this post. I like many others starting on Udemy wondered what my next step was after publishing my first course which was about WordPress marketing. I started digging around and came across websites that allowed you to promote your course by submitting a coupon to the site. That gave me an idea and in October of 2014 I started the website Online Course Coupons which is a site to help instructors promote their courses. It was a place that instructors could get their courses promoted and I would take a small cut of the revenue as an affiliate of Udemy. I also compiled a list “Course Marketing Checklist” that remains popular to this day and is a list of other sites like mine and started the Facebook Group “The Online Course Promotion Group: Featuring Udemy, Skillshare and more!” where instructors can market their courses and learn about other marketing advice. The checklist became so popular with other instructor that I decided to turn it into 2 courses “Udemy Course Marketing: Increase Your Success” which is a starter course and “Udemy Marketing: Where to Promote Course Coupons”. Both courses offer instructors information on where to share their course coupons and how and have great reviews. “Udemy Live” Road Trip To San Francisco I took a road trip in late June to San Francisco from Idaho to attend Udemy Live and came back full of lifetime memories. I arrived into San Francisco on a Thursday evening a little earlier and picked up Dragoş Ștefănescu who came in from Romania. It was the first time meeting him in person but felt like we knew each other for years. We had a fun adventure getting lost on the streets of San Francisco on the way to pick up Jack Wilson at San Francisco International Airport and not knowing the GPS was set in biking mode. I had a great time sharing a room with friend and Udemy Fitness instructor Jack Wilson. Both Jack and I hung out the first night and stayed up late enjoying Idaho beer with popular TOGAF Udemy instructor Scott Duffy. If you are new to Udemy make sure you check out his Udemy SEO course and his course on protecting your own courses from piracy. Meeting new instructors like Ravinder Deol the “Bitcoin Expert” I think has helped me build relationships that go way beyond online course creation and Udemy. Plus I got to meet instructors I knew through Facebook and Skype for the first time in person. That included Brandon Hakin, Dave Espino, Diego Davila, Jeremy Deighan, Jasper Ribbers, Joe Parys, Laurel Papworth, Phil Ebiner “Video School Online” and several others. These are people that have a common goal in life and that is enjoying teaching others their passions so we can change the world and at the same time change our own lives. Keeping Focused On The Road Like a lot of Udemy instructors my revenue has dropped since Udemy’s price change back in April of this year. However I have been trying to remain positive by being creative by generating new revenue sources, creating new content while interviewing instructors and sharing their stories, answers instructor questions with “Ask Dennis“, grown my YouTube Channel to 660 subscribers, marketing my current courses and building my mailing list with ConvertKit. I had to completely shut down my website One Buck Courses which generated a lot of traffic and revenue as you would expect. I got the idea for the site after seeing several website that promoted Kindle books for a buck. I thought why not do the same with courses since we as instructors could discount down to one dollar. I already knew several instructors because I had also started a popular Facebook Group “The Online Course Promotion Group: Featuring Udemy, Skillshare and more!” with almost 4,000 members that allows instructors to promote their courses. That meant it was easy to build site that offered hundreds of courses for just a dollar. But I lost that revenue since after April the lowest price an instructor could discount their courses was $10. But still that’s not a bad price when you consider the value one gets from learning a new skill online. However it seemed like the bottom fell out and Udemy revenue came to what seemed like a halt. I have to fight off procrastination and even had to start a job which I quit because I couldn’t deal with people on the phone. But I have found a seasonal job to help cover the bills as I continue working on finding my path. I might not be rich at this point but I’m rich from the experiences I have experienced and the people I’ve met along the way. That is what I am most grateful for because we all work together to make our lives more rich. [convertkit form=4900669] The Revenue Streams I will admit that there are other instructors that have earned more revenue on Udemy than I have by far. But I’m in it for the long haul while others have already left looking for the next shiny object. Here is a little background of where my revenue related to Udemy comes from. There are a few places my revenue comes from and one of those is affiliate marketing through several websites, social media and email marketing. The biggest stream of revenue is the affiliate marketing through Online Course Coupons and Free Course Daily which I started after shutting down One Buck Courses due to Udemy’s price change.…
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Interview With Best Selling Online Instructor and Video School Online Phil Ebiner

September 14, 2016

Interview Questions for Phil Ebiner: These are the questions I asked Phil during our interview and his answer are in the video above. Let’s talk about Video School Online. Would you share with me and those who will be watching what it is? How do you keep coming up with course ideas? Do you think it’s worth it to refresh older courses or create a new course with updated information? How are you preparing for Udemy’s Black Friday Promo? How did the Udemy April price change affect you? Have you seen changes since they rolled back some of the changes recently? We did a course together on ConvertKit which is for email marketing and I know you have done courses with other instructors. What do you like the most about doing courses like this and what advice would you give those considering co-instructed courses? Let’s talk about email marketing. How important do you think it is for an instructor? What one piece of advice would you offer instructors who are in it for the long term? Phil’s Courses DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE UDEMY INSTRUCTOR RESOURCE GUIDE

#AskDennis: Online Instructor Patricia Martin

August 20, 2016

#AskDennis: Online Instructor Patricia Martin Transcript for my reply to Instructor Patricia Martin: Welcome back for another edition of Ask Dennis and you can find previous episodes at https://dennisjsmith.com/askdennis using the hashtag Ask Dennis and today’s question comes from Tricia who is a Udemy instructor and she says thank you for offering this service for answering our course marketing questions and her question is “What’s the most effective marketing method to get exposure for her course”, she’s tried coupons she’s tried handing out fliers with a course link on those added some lessons on YouTube etc. But she’s still not making a lot of sells what should her next step be thank you and she goes on to give her website and her course link which i will add in the notes on YouTube because they’re just so long that it’s some difficult sometimes for people to understand when you’re giving them out a URL so Thank You Tricia for the question. I’ll make sure that I give you a shout out excuse me. So on one of the first things that I would say and I say this probably a lot is a blog definitely want to have a blog where everything that you do comes together including promoting your courses and then also connecting your social media networks such as Facebook or Instagram of course says that it is the “Street basic power guide to SEO”, so it sounds like they should already have some SEO knowledge I use WordPress for websites and use Yoast SEO as a plug-in to help out with the SEO because SEO is not my forte I know enough about it you know to make sure that I have the right keywords and what not but you definitely want to have a blog and promote your courses on your website and start writing about SEO and give out tips and things like that and become the expert in SEO so that those people who are coming to your website for SEO tips see that you have a course on SEO and hopefully more courses, I haven’t looked to see if you have more unique courses but I would imagine that you’re going to release more courses and you just you know you want to become an expert in that area so that your followers see that I’m just like myself with the stuff that I’ve done on you to me I constantly get questions from people through Facebook who have questions such as yours and that’s because I’ve been doing this kind of stuff for a while now I do WordPress and I do SEO and all of that but my interest is in helping others out with marketing so you said that you tried flyers and things like that that’s interesting because I’ve never done something like that but what about maybe teaching a course at a local community college I’ve done that here i’m in the Boise Idaho area. I’ve gone to community colleges before who have allowed me to use their facilities and I have people come and join me. I haven’t done this in a while and I’ve been wanting to do this again because you kind of want to do this to you know connect with students in real time or or real life or whatever so find some of those community colleges and maybe or find someplace where you can teach a course on SEO and go out to your businesses that are in your local community and let them know that you’re teaching that course and then you can upsell your online course to them so that they can go there for more information and maybe you can you know if SEO is what you do maybe that’s a way that you can find some clients. So I would definitely suggest something like that. Have you thought about writing an e-book a kindle book? It is really easy to write you could write a Kindle book and in front of the book you can put links to your courses i wrote my book Udemy Life and I put links in front of the book because I Amazon will show the first ten percent of the book so that people can decide if they want to buy the book but they can still see those links and possibly click on those and then I have links throughout the book because I interviewed other instructors so maybe you could do something like that to and use that as a way to get people to go to your course. So those are a few tips there that you might want to try out let me know how those work out and others use any of those tips certainly let me know if you’re looking at this video on YouTube comment below if you have a question contact me through DennisJSmith.com if you have a question yourself or if you see this on Facebook or YouTube please leave a comment and let me know if you have any questions or if you enjoyed the information that i gave you. So that’s it for this edition of Ask Dennis thank you very much and thanks again Tricia for your question.

How to create a video course, market with YouTube, and travel with Gabby Wallace

Catch These Top 5 Viewed Blab Online Marketing Shows

July 11, 2016

Right now I’m taking a pause from my Blab Online Marketing shows but hope to be at it again soon. In the meantime I thought I’d recap 5 of the top shows watched by viewers like you. I’ve ranked them in order of top views and each one is a personal favorite. But the show with Gabby Wallace is one of my favorites because I admire the business she’s built around her YouTube Channel, Udemy courses and her love for her passion which is teaching others english so they too can enjoy success. Let me know which one is your favorites in the comments below. Thanks for watching! How to create a video course, market with YouTube, and travel with Gabby Wallace Matt Bernstein and I chat with Gabby Wallace about her success on YouTube. Gabby has over 197,000 followers on her YouTube Channel. She shares her secerts to success so you too can build your following on YouTube. Gabby Wallace YouTube Channel My YouTube Channel Matt Bernstein, Dennis J. Smith, Simone GTeX, Gabby Wallace 832 viewers • 203 replays #Udemy Course Creation with Dennis Smith, Matt Bernstein and Phil Ebiner Learn tips on Udemy course creation from the experts. Phil Ebiner is one of Udemy’s top instructors with 66 courses and 151,870 plus students that have reviewed his courses over 7,593 times. Both Matt Bernstein and I chime in with our tips on course creation too. Matt’s Udemy Courses Phil’s Udemy Courses Dennis’s Udemy Courses Dennis J. Smith, Phil Ebiner, Matt Bernstein, Glenn M Trujillo 581 viewers • 143 replays Rolling in the dough teaching your passion on Udemy! A chat with Teresa Greenway We call here the sourdough lady and there’s a reason why. Teresa Greenway has built herself a solid following on Udemy through her love of baking sourdough bread. Teresa has a story to share that you don’t want to miss and tons of information on how she’s earning 1,000’s a month from her Udemy courses, books and online following of thousands. Teresa’s Udemy Courses Dennis J. Smith, Teresa Greenway , Matt Bernstein 506 viewers • 141 replays Unlock Online Revenue and Audience Growth With Instagram – Guest Evan Humber Want to learn more about Instagram and growing your followers? I recommend you watch this Blab with our guest Evan Humber. Evan talks about eye catching images and how to get others to follow you to quickly gain Instagram success. Evan’s Udemy Courses Dennis J. Smith, Matt Bernstein, MillionaireDj 478 viewers • 46 replays List Building, Sales Funnels, Lead Magnets, Email Marketing For Entrepreneurs Phil Ebiner and I co-teach a ConvertKit course on Udemy that continues to do well. I had started using ConvertKit back in November of 2015 and convinced Phil to use it earlier this year. He liked it so much I was able to talk him into doing a course with me and this Blab to let others know why they should make the switch to ConvertKit too. Get ConvertKit Enroll In ConvertKit Course Dennis J. Smith, Phil Ebiner 411 viewers • 80 replays