In March 2018, I started what has now become a promising content creation business. 2.5 years later, I'm approaching $50,000 in lifetime earnings and $4,000 MRR.
I've created and shared content on YouTube and Udemy, as well as on my website and other social media platforms.
This article is a breakdown of all the platforms and channels I've used (and I'm planning to use) to continue growing my audience and business.
I'm currently juggling a lot of activities. Writing this has helped me get a high-level overview of my business, and a clear direction going forward. I hope that other content creators can benefit from this.
Udemy paid courses: > 95% of earnings
- Ongoing: Publish high-quality, comprehensive courses about Dart, Flutter & Firebase (and keep them updated) - this takes the highest chunk of my time.
- Ongoing: students Q/A - 15 to 30 min/day.
- Ongoing: regularly cross promote courses with promotional announcements.
- Planned: add free courses to acquire new students.
- Planned: livestreams for enrolled students (value add).
Teachable paid courses: additional income
- Host same courses with same pricing as on Udemy (1 course done, others TODO).
- Ongoing: offer student discounts.
- Planned: webinars to drive more of Teachable's audience to my school.
- Planned: offer subscriptions once I have 5+ courses.
Other paid course platforms
- Ongoing: evaluate other platforms (LinkedIn Learning, EggHead, etc.).
- Long-term: build my own platform. This will be an extension of CodeWithAndrea.com, and will keep my audience where I want it to be.
YouTube
- Ongoing: regularly post high-quality Flutter tutorials to increase my audience (really hard to do this consistently).
- Planned: All video descriptions should have links to my website and courses.
- Ongoing: occasional promotional videos when I launch new courses.
- Planned: free crash-courses.
- Ongoing: earn small revenue via YouTube ads.
- Ongoing: I started experimenting with livestreams on separate YouTube and Twitch channels.
CodeWithAndrea.com
- Ongoing: post articles, tips & YouTube video transcripts.
- All posts should be SEO optimized.
- Done: include cards showing my courses at the end of each page.
- Planned: include newsletter sign up inside all pages (middle or end).
- Planned: other website improvements.
Mailing List
- This includes all the people that signed up from my website or Teachable school.
- Ongoing: send out monthly updates + course promos.
GitHub
- Planned: more open-source reference Flutter apps following best practices.
- Ongoing: open-source demos for my tutorials.
- Done: official repos for all my courses.
- Ongoing: share links to all my new content.
- Ongoing: share other relevant content about Flutter.
- Ongoing: engage with community.
Slack
- Ongoing: discussion + Q/A for my followers.
- Ongoing: share links to all my new content.
- Ongoing: engage with community.
- Ongoing: Answer questions and other queries.
Live Talks / Presentations
- Guest talks at conferences (I rarely ever have/make time for this).
Behind the Scenes
- Ongoing: keep learning and skill up (coding).
- Planned: keep learning and skill up (video production).
- Ongoing: admin.
Wrap-up
All of the above amounts to a TON of work. Creating courses and video tutorials alone takes a lot of time. With my schedule (30h/week), I can (and probably should) only focus on one or two things at a time.
As a result, I can only meet my growth targets on one platform at a time, while others grow slower or remain flat. Every year, I try to allocate time in proportion to the (perceived) value of each platform.
I'll post a full retrospective of my content creation business at the end of the year, just like I have done last year.
I hope this was helpful. If you have any tips / questions, or want to share some feedback, feel free to reach out on Twitter or email me.
