Passive Income in Cybersecurity 3 : Making an awesome Udemy course
Time to earn some $$$ from your cybersecurity skills
Welcome to the third part of this series
Turns out Passive Income in Cybersecurity is quite a popular topic and people keep reaching out to me for more tips. If you have not read my earlier articles then check them out below
In today’s article I want to give some solid actionable advice for one of the easiest and most frictionless ways of getting some passive income and that is via Udemy
Udemy is one of the best marketplaces to sell your digital courses and does all the promotion for you.
They do take a share of the course price but remember you are getting a complete platform to host your course in without any worry about running ads, maintaining a website etc.
Creating a simple 30 minute Cybersecurity will put you on the path of getting some of that sweet sweet passive income
Despite all this, people usually are hesitant to start on Udemy because of the following myths
Myth 1 — “ I am not an instructor / teacher “
Yeah and the only thing that will make you an instructor or teacher is to start teaching.
There is absolutely no reason you cannot take some of your cybersecurity knowledge and start spreading it so do not let the negativity bring you down
Myth 2 — “There is too much competition”
I have been hearing this for the past 3 years or so that Udemy is saturated and yet still people are making thousands of dollars every month.
It is true that there are literally millions of courses on cybersecurity and your course might get lost in the sea but you can avoid that by being smart on what topic you choose.
I will show you how to choose cybersecurity topics that are high in demand with low competition
As a bonus I will give actual 2 to 3 topics that are in demand RIGHT NOW and you can capitalize on that demand to earn some money
Myth 3 — “ I don’t have equipment”
I have launched over 5 courses using nothing but my laptop and the free version of Canva and I have reached over 10K students on Udemy and I have one of the highest rate courses so… no excuses !
Do not get me wrong as I am not saying making money via Udemy is EASY but it is very much POSSIBLE provided you put in the hard work.
So let us start step by step from the beginning and get you on the path to earning !
1 — Create an instructor account
Go to https://www.udemy.com/teaching/ and create your instructor account.
It is completely free . Just answer a few basic questions and have your account ready
2 — Know the tools Udemy gives you
Udemy gives you some great tools to get started. Go to the tools section
We are interested in the Marketplace insights that will let us know which cybersecurity topic are in demand right now
3 — Find an awesome cybersecurity topic
This is the most important step to focus on and where most people make mistakes.
You have to choose a topic that is HIGH in demand and LOW in competition ( this will be familiar to anyone that knows SEO )
Lets take a look at a few topics
If you choose a generic topic like Cyber security then not much chance for us to get our course to succeed
Ok .. how about “Cloud Security” .. same result
Same with a security certification topic .. CISSP gives me the below
Read to give up ??
Lets narrow it down and choose a more specialized topic
Instead of Cloud security .. Let me pick “AWS security”
BOOM ! we have our first topic. Students want this course and the number of courses are low also make it a great topic to teach on
lets look at a bit more .. I love the topic of DevSecOps and the topic is quite hot right now also
YES ! one more topic we can target
What about NIST cybersecurity which is something a lot of companies are interested in ??
So just from this article you have found three cybersecurity topics that you can start teaching TODAY and get success
Try to find more topics that might interest you and let me know in the comments section what you find !
if there are good I might steal them :)
4 — Mindmap your course
Another important step which sometimes get skipped out .
Before you start creating content.. mindmap your course with regards to the topics and sections
How much depth are you going to go ? How many lessons ?
Without a structure in place you will find it difficult to focus and either create too much or too little content
Remember that as per Udemy
“In order to be approved for the Udemy marketplace, courses must have a minimum of five lectures and at least thirty minutes of video content”
That means you just need to step 6 minutes per lesson which is quite easy
If I was teaching AWS security services I could just create a simple mindmap like the below to focus my efforts
5 — Start creating your content
This is the easiest part honestly as you just have to start creating your content based on the mindmap you did earlier
No fancy stuff needed .. PowerPoint or Canva will be good enough for the content and your laptop for audio recording
In Canva you create a presentation and use the “Present and Record” feature which will allow you to show your face as you teach
Students prefer to see the face of their teacher when presenting so I would recommend that if you are comfortable
You can record and then download the recording from Canva
Once you have recorded your first lesson; be sure to see one of the other tools which Udemy gives you which is the “Test Video”
You can upload your first lesson and Udemy team will give you free feedback on how good the audio and video quality is which is pretty awesome !
7 — Edit
Make sure to edit your raw videos as you download them. There will be lots of empty space and gaps and “ums” and “ahs” in your videos which you do not want in the final course
There are free video editors available for both Windows and Macbook which you use.
Basic video editing barely requires any skill .. if you can edit a TikTok video .. you can edit a 6 minute lesson !
8 —Upload and Launch
Time to upload your lessons onto Udemy
Once you click on Create a Course .. you can start translating your mind map into lessons and sections and upload your videos
Udemy makes it incredibly intuitive and easy to do
One important thing to remember is to create a good thumbnail which immediately grabs the attention of a potential customer.
Udemy needs to be 750x422 pixels with no text on the image. You can put your face or a compelling image with icons .
This is easily done via Canva along with the dimensions.
Choose “Create a design” in Canva along with Custom Size and you can create a nice thumbnail for your course
If you are feeling very ambitions you can create a promotion video of around a minute or two telling customers how awesome your course is.
It is not mandatory but increases enrollments by over 5 times as per Udemy
Once it is done you can submit your course to Udemy for review
They usually approve within a day for two and congrats as you have your first digital course live on Udemy !
9 — Time to get those reviews
Your work is not done yet ..
In order for your course to stand out you need to get those reviews and ratings on your course
This is quite important as the more reviews you get the higher you will rank in Udemy search and the algorithm will start noticing you
Get in those initial reviews and the Udemy algorithm will do the rest
There are easy ways to do this even if you do not have a email list or a large social media following
First step is to generate some free coupons on Udemy for your course .. You can access this from the Promotions section on your Course page
Spread this to your colleagues and network and ask them for ratings and reviews.
There are Facebook pages also dedicated to free Udemy courses but I usually have seen that people snatch up those coupons and never bother to take the course OR give a review
Reaching out directly to your contacts is much better and gives you more organic reviews and ratings
Time to get started !
I hope this was useful for you
As you can see .. there is no secret “hack” to succeed on Udemy with your cybersecurity course
Follow these steps which I outlined and you will have a course ready in no time
Tag me on LinkedIn and send me a coupon and I am happy to spread your course to my network plus give you a review !
Good luck in your passive income journey