Comment by nickjj

Comment by nickjj 2 days ago

As someone who has sold video tech courses since 2015, I don't know about the future.

I don't want to openly write about the financial side of things here but let's just say I don't have enough money to comfortably retire or stop working but course sales over the last 2-3 years have gotten to not even 5% of what it was in 2015-2021.

It went from "I'm super happy, this is my job with contracting on the side as a perfect technical circle of life" to "time to get a full time job".

Nothing changed on my end. I have kept putting out free blog posts and videos for the last 10 years. It's just traffic has gone down to 20x less than it used to be. Traffic dictates sales and that's how I think I arrived in this situation.

It does suck to wake up most days knowing you have at least 5 courses worth of content in your head that you could make but can't spend the time to make them because your time is allocated elsewhere. It takes usually 2-3 full time months to create a decent sized course, from planning to done. Then ongoing maintenance. None of this is a problem if it generates income (it's a fun process), but it's a problem given the scope of time it takes.

csa 2 days ago

Were most of your sales coming via your site and/or organic search?

It sounds like you have a solid product, but you need to update your marketing channels.

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nickjj 2 days ago

Almost 100% of sales come from organic searches. Usually people would search for things like "Docker course" or "Flask course" and either find my course near the top of Google or they would search for some specific problem related to that content and come across a blog post I wrote on my main site which linked back to the course somewhere (usually).
Now the same thing happens, but there's 20x less sales per month.
I've posted almost 400 free videos on YouTube as well over the years, usually these videos go along with the blog post.
A few years back I also started a podcast and did 100 weekly episodes for 2 years. It didn't move the needle on course sales and it was on a topic that was quite related to app development and deployment which partially aligns with my courses. Most episodes barely got ~100 listens and it was 4.9 rated out of 5 on major podcast platforms, people emailed me saying it was their favorite show and it helped them so much and hope I never stop but the listener count never grew. I didn't have sponsors or ads but stopped the show because it took 1 full day a week to schedule + record + edit + publish a ~1-2 hour episode. It was super fun and I really enjoyed it but it was another "invest 100 days, make $0" thing which simply isn't sustainable.

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- csa 2 days ago
  
  > find my course near the top of Google
  > Now the same thing happens, but there's 20x less sales per month.
  You’re a victim of the AI search results. There are lots of those.
  I recommend something like social media ads where your target audience hangs out (maybe LinkedIn, possibly Google).
  
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johnnyanmac 2 days ago

This is always sad to hear. I really want more educational material out there that isn't just serving "beginner bait" and I'd love love love more technical podcasts out there. But it seems like not much of the audience is looking for small creators for that. Perhaps they only focus on conference studies.

And yeah, I agree with the other reponsder that AI + Google's own enshittification of search may have cost your site traffic.

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lisbbb 19 hours ago

It's too time consuming to create--I looked into doing some kind of "new tech" podcast with a colleague and it was just too much work for very little moolah.

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lisbbb 19 hours ago

As someone who was probably a consumer of such courses, thanks, first off. But second, what happened with me was I would be on the bench at my company and be going hard at training on various tools and technologies and then get whipsawed by them into another direction completely and never once used the thing I was learning in my actual work. So I gave up on training. I would pretend to do training, but basically just screwed around doing whatever I wanted--I learned auto painting and dent repair while on the bench, basically anything. The last few years of my career sucked anyways. So yeah, I can understand why your business has dried up--there's no point in actually learning anything ahead of actually needing to use it. There just isn't. That goes for certs, too. People are burned the hell out on tech because there is so much of it now. It used to be you could do a bunch of Java certs or whatever and have a career. Now, you have to know and be experienced with EVERYTHING and that just is not possible when every technology has 2-5 competing clones of it.

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nickjj 15 hours ago

Yep, I know what you mean.
It skews back-end stats too. For example if someone buys a course, I hope they take it in full so they feel happy and fulfilled but in reality a good portion never start. It's like Steam games. Some people just like collecting digital goods knowing they exist and that gives comfort.
Massive course platforms are still thriving it seems so the market is there but it is way more saturated than 10 years ago. My first Docker course in 2015 was like maybe 1 out of 5 courses out there, but now there's 5,000 courses and Docker's documentation has gotten a lot better over time.
I haven't figured out how to make things work, I just know I love tech, solving real world problems, documenting my journey (either through blog posts or courses) and traveling. It would be amazing to be able to travel the world and make courses. Back when I started 10 years ago I didn't realize I like traveling so much so I squandered that extra time.

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