Why Every Serious YouTuber Should Build an Online Course  🔗 **Source:** [Why Every Serious YouTuber Should Build an Online Course](https://share.snipd.com/episode/605cf684-86d1-4e96-944d-da7758834424) ## Highlights - **Views Are Lead Gen Not The Business** - YouTube views are the top of the funnel, not the business itself. - Chris Badgett notes many creators have audiences but fail to convert that attention into owned revenue like courses, leaving income 'rented' to platforms. Transcript: Chris Badgett See, most creators on YouTube, they rent their income and they don't know it. So if you think about things like ad revenue, sponsorships, Patreon, these services that YouTubers use to monetize, they're actually just renting that income. It's not coming from a platform that they own a control, and it can be very fickle. Most YouTubers don't make any money at all, but of the ones that earn money as a YouTuber, over 50% of them make under $15,000, and it's only 4% of the YouTube income earners that earn over $100,000. So the cool thing to think about here is the views are the top of the funnel, not the actual business. So I'm going with my daughter to VidCon, which is the big YouTuber conference in California. So I'm really focused on YouTube right now. I'm a grown man. I'm 47 years old and I'm still, I feel like I was kind of early here in wanting to be a YouTuber when I grow up. I'm 47. I've been on YouTube. Gosh, it seems like it's been about 20 years since I launched my first video. I fell in love with the platform ([Time 0:01:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/949eac09-14a9-401c-9333-b66d0295c2f7)) - **Own Your Platform Not Someone Else's** - Do own your platform instead of renting on other people's services to avoid algorithm swings and policy changes. - Chris recommends WordPress plus LifterLMS so you control pricing, student data, emails, and site customization. Transcript: Chris Badgett Now, where I come from in the WordPress ecosystem, we know this already. Like we, when we build our website, we build it on WordPress, on our hosting account. It's a website that we have full control and ownership over. So as an example, in the online course space, people sometimes end up on course platforms like Teachable or Kajabi or School or Thinkific, and they end up paying an exorbitant amount Of money every month to rent a small piece of some other company's website to put their online course on. That's not what we're about at Lifter LMS. We don't want our users to have cookie cutter sites where they all look the same. We want people to build an asset that they own and control. So when you're renting access on somebody else's website for your online course, you're subject to algorithm swings, platform cuts, policy changes. If your revenue is dependent on sponsors, they leave. Sometimes you end up in this feast or famine, like, let me go find money somehow for my YouTube channel. But when you own your site, you own your students, you know their email addresses, as an example. Like in YouTube, you can have a lot of subscribers, but you can't email them. You're totally dependent on the YouTube algorithm and people only being able to find your YouTube content if they happen to subscribe, if they happen to see it in their feed. So owning a platform is very different than renting space. ([Time 0:05:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/753e4692-d85f-4183-9da4-82971da59193)) - **Why Udemy Pushed Me To Own My Courses** - Chris shares his Udemy experience where platform rules capped prices and blocked links to creators' sites. - Udemy bundled courses and discounted payouts heavily, illustrating why he moved to owned platforms. Transcript: Chris Badgett One of the things that happened in the course creation space back in the day, in the early days of course creation, I'm talking about 15, 16 years ago, there was a company that got big called Udemy. You may have heard of it. My very first online course before we built Lifter LMS, I put on Udemy. You can go check it out. It's called The Poet Omelet Method, Perfect Omelets Every Time, which was just a fun course. I challenged myself when I fell in love with the online course format the early days to make a whole online course in the weekend and publish it. And I did that on Udemy. And it wasn't a very serious course. I just happened to love cooking. But what happened is over time, I watched Udemy maximize for profit for Udemy and not take good care of their customers. So what happened is one of the big things they did is they created, this was a while ago at this point, a maximum of $50 that you could charge for your course. They also made it impossible for you to ever provide a link to your own website from inside the course. So Udemy just wants to keep the people, the eyeballs, the traffic. They want to keep everything on their platform. And then what they started doing is they started doing these course bundles where your course would get included in a course bundle with other creators that you don't know. And they would discount your course price, amount you would get paid in your commission by a serious amount like 80 90 percent and they would put coupons on top of that and stuff it was Real disaster if and it made a lot of people clear about the value of owning your platform where it's your roles, it's your website, it's more customizable, it's more affordable, and It has the best support in the industry. ([Time 0:07:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9b9dee83-e2db-43fa-85ad-5f4a48b4e339)) - **Launch A Single Specific Transformation Course** - Start small: pick one specific transformation and build a course around it rather than teaching everything you know. - Example: transition runners from finishing a marathon to finishing a first 50-miler with ~8 focused lessons. Transcript: Chris Badgett And what I mean by this is that your YouTube channel probably already has a topic focus, a niche. You have a certain type of viewer or customer avatar that you make content for. But sometimes YouTubers are so prolific and creative and making all this great content that you can suffer from what we call the expert's curse, where you know a lot of things and you're Like, what should I actually teach? So the key thing to do when you're making the leap to monetizing your YouTube channel with an online course on your website is to start small. Just pick a transformation of some kind of result, a specific result, even an identity shift. Those are the best where you create a transformation related to your subject matter expertise. So for example, I like to look at the big mega niches. So the big mega niches on YouTube, and you're probably in a sub niche under these, if your content is somewhat educational and not pure entertainment, are health, wealth, and relationships. So what do I mean by that? Health are things like personal fitness. It could be dealing with a medical issue that you have. And there's many like you that have the same issue and they're looking for resources and things. It could be something to do with weight loss or getting your beach body ready for the summer. It could be all kinds of different things. But if your content is broad, when you're making your first course, I would look for a specific transformation. So if we look at the health space as an example, I'm an ultra runner, which means I run distances over the length of a marathon. This year I ran a hundred mile run across the entire state of New Hampshire. And so that's like a health niche I really understand because I've been in this ultra running space for a while. And if I was doing a lot on my YouTube channel, I know a lot of ultra runners, influencers, micro influencers and stuff that have a lot of great YouTube content, but they're not creating Online courses. So if you're like sharing your races and then you're doing like, hey, here's what's in my pack. Here's how I fuel for 100 miles. Here are the challenges you face on your first 100 mile and so on. I would pick my first transformation and I would get specific. So I would do something like how to go from finishing a marathon to finishing your first 50 miler. And then I would create a course content around that to help somebody kind of transition, just like I did before I ran long 50 milers and 100 milers. When I was younger, I ran a marathon. So I knew what it took to run a marathon, but running double that distance or even four times that distance or more is a totally different game. But anyways, notice how I said I would focus on how to run your first 50 miler having previously finished a marathon at some point in your past. So I would go into certain things to facilitate that transformation in my course, like getting into the gear, getting into the training, getting into the nutrition, getting into the Hydration, getting into the recovery, getting into how to work with a coach or decide if you want to coach or not. So I could easily come up with eight key videos or lessons. ([Time 0:11:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4becfb37-7cfc-427e-9436-e4849295e7ae)) - **Validate Course Demand With Your Audience** - Validate your course idea before building by asking your audience, checking comments, and using waitlists or early-bird signups. - Chris suggests offering a future start date or discounted pre-sales to measure real demand. Transcript: Chris Badgett So you probably already have some validation. What are the questions that your audience asks you frequently? What's the most popular question? What do you see in the comments? Which ones of your videos have the most views with the strongest education and transformation intent? You can make some videos about a course you're thinking about making and ask people to go sign up for the interest list or the wait list. You can even use Lifter LMS as an example to set a course start date in the future, like a month away or even three months away, and see how many people sign up for the interest list or pay In advance, perhaps at a discount for an early adopter discount and so on. There's all kinds of different ways to validate. And you have something as a YouTuber that a lot of course creators or would-be course creators don't have, which is you already have an audience. So your audience is free market research and you already have one. So try to validate before you really commit and do all the effort and so on. You can even make a light version of the course as a standalone video and see what the uptake or popularity of that is. ([Time 0:20:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/75a9bc17-1751-422c-8b4e-db8f4585e0af)) - **Ship Your First Course Fast** - Do launch quickly: done is better than perfect; your first course speeds up future course creation. - Chris emphasizes one course launch unlocks momentum and makes subsequent courses much faster to produce. Transcript: Chris Badgett It's easy to start thinking about, okay, I'm going to build a membership and there's going to be this whole course catalog. I've got ideas for 50 courses. That is all good. And I would encourage you to explore that creatively and stuff, but take it one step at a time. Rome was not built in a day. You've already been building. You already have a YouTube channel. It's fine if you only have 200 subscribers or if you have 200,000 or 2 million. I've seen people be very successful in small YouTube niches with a very small audience it's super niche. It's a super kind of pain point opportunity seeking niche. And you can do a lot. So don't get distracted by vanity metrics like number of subscribers, number of views and so on. If you have some traction at all on your YouTube channel, you're doing well. So not about keeping up with Mr. B. I'm getting millions of views per video. So the perfect thing to do is just to start and create one course and launch it. Done is better than perfect. And done is definitely better than failure to launch or never releasing anything at all. And it's one of those things where once you do it once, it'll be so much easier and you'll go 10 times faster the next time you do it. ([Time 0:21:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4d1a9c92-6627-4c3a-9411-ea105327f68e)) - **YouTuber Case Studies Who Left Marketplaces** - Chris cites YouTubers who succeeded after leaving marketplaces: Frank Kane made over $2M and moved to his own LMS. - He also mentions Christian Taylor using LifterLMS to monetize viral reach into course sales. Transcript: Chris Badgett You can look at our case studies. We have YouTubers like Frank Kane, who's at the time we interviewed him, this was a while ago. He had made over $2 million with his online courses. He was in the, he's in a tech niche in terms of Amazon skills and things like that. But he has over 600,000 students. He's in one of those situations where he had started building on Udemy, but he got unhappy with all the restrictions and new policies and everything. So he's been building up a mirror LMS or Loaning Management System platform on his own WordPress site with Lifter LMS. There's another YouTuber named Christian Taylor, who does a lot of software reviews, does some affiliate marketing with that. And some of his views have gone viral and whatnot. And he's stepped into the course creation space with Lifter LMS and WordPress. ([Time 0:23:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2cf8b6ae-1431-4984-b14c-f29bb1955124)) - **YouTube Influence Beats Cold Traffic** - Your existing YouTube influence is vastly more valuable than cold paid traffic for course launches. - Chris says creators can leverage their channel as free market research and direct buyers without heavy ad spend. Transcript: Chris Badgett You've already done 80% of the work by building the channel, getting comfortable on video, making video, editing video, and building that audience and getting comfortable up there. So your own influence that you already have YouTube beats cold traffic or paying for ads. You don't have to do all that kind of stuff when you're launching your first course when you already have an audience. So in summary, I want to see more YouTubers building online courses. I know a lot of young people or friends with kids and a lot of these younger folks, including my own daughter, says they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up. It's like the number one skill. When I was a kid, people wanted to be an astronaut. Now they want to be a YouTuber. So there's so many people coming online, going to YouTube with hopes and dreams, but it's important to think about monetization. Yes, you can do sponsors, monetize your channel with ads and things like that, but that's not the way the pros do it. The pros do it by building their own information products so that YouTube becomes more of lead generation for the back catalog, their online courses. ([Time 0:25:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a5f67996-7d5d-48be-ad15-7c00080e0399)) - **Human Creators Remain Irreplaceable** - Human-led video learning will remain valuable even as AI grows, because students want to learn from real people. - Chris argues your unique perspective and personality make courses distinct and defensible against AI content. Transcript: Chris Badgett There's never been a better time. And if you're worried at all about artificial intelligence taking over the world, in my view, YouTube is going to remain an outpost for humanity. So what I mean by that is a lot of people will read blog posts and articles, may have been written with AI or heavily written with AI, but nobody really wants to watch educational content Made by a non-human. And really, as a human, there's only one of you out there. So if you think that, oh, it's already been done, this famous person has already done a course on my topic. Yeah, they're not you. And you have your own take, angles, insights, and ideas as well. ([Time 0:27:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/468e6fdd-b441-48ea-96e1-28a4aaccdec9))