How Rais made $3k from his first online course — teaching over 145 countries

• Course Instructor: Rais Rochdi
• Website: http://www.usaherald.com/
• Course Topic: How to work from home (on Fiverr)
• Interesting Stats:
  • Countries taught: 145 countries
  • 1486 students enrolled this month, 11,432 students enrolled to date.
  • The conversion rate is: 20%
  • Total Earnings: $3000

1. Who are you?

I’m Rais Rochdi, 25 years old from Algeria — I work as a journalist for USA herald, and also work as a part-time content marketer on Upwork. I studied English language and literature in university and started working as a freelancer at age 16.

2. What’s your course all about?

My online course is making money from home, in a pajama. In other words, I teach people who are interested in freelancing on the process of searching for online jobs, positioning themselves, and finally converting potential clients into sales. My online course only tackles Fiverr — an online platform for freelancers. However, I’m planning to launch a broader course in the upcoming weeks.

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3. What makes you an expert in this field?

I’ve worked as a freelancer for over 7 years now, I took tens of online courses about freelancing and read dozens of books about the field. Furthermore, the experience I gained from working on different freelancing platforms is what made me able to make this course.

4. What is the transformation your course offers to the students?

Usually, when new freelancers try to land a job, they feel bombarded with all these blog articles and forums — spamming them and trying to sell them a one week get rich formula. I can’t stress this enough, but most of these formulas are scams. Consequently, I had to give a course about a reputable website, to teach these students the right process of providing a service, and how to do the entire marketing etc. In other words, I don’t sell them dreams, this is a daunting process and work that eventually leads to results.

5. Which market does your online course serve and how did you get into it?

My market is broad, many people are interested in working from home. I think it’s a trend, and especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, many people turned to this interesting field. However, there is a specific segment that is interested in the course — programmers, web designers, and content writers are among the top students enrolled in my course.

6. Why is it important to you to serve this market?

Most of programmers, web designers, and content writers love to work on different projects, and from home. These jobs require calm, and working from home gives them the ability to do so. Additionally, it gives them a chance to make double what they earn in a start-up or company, and that’s very important I believe.

7. Describe the moment when you decided to create your own course. Where were you, what happened and why did you decide to do it?

In 2017, I found out about Udemy, the online courses platform. I saw many people making 6 figures and I felt motivated. I thought maybe I should give this a try — It’s a win-win deal, I’ll teach students what they need, and I’ll make some money at the same time. I searched for courses about Fiverr, and I didn’t find many, so I saw it as an opportunity to position myself. Furthermore, I was intrigued by the idea that I can teach hundreds of thousands of people, and that alone made me take the computer and start typing.

8. How did you overcome doubtful moments during your course creation journey?

In every business, idea, or even online-course, you’ll have doubts. It’s totally normal, and I’ve read hundreds of comments from online teachers where they talked about this. My solutions for dealing with doubt included enrolling in forums with other teachers and speak about the experience. Knowing that you’re not the only one going through a certain situation will comfort you, as it worked fine for me.

9. What are some of your tricks to deal with imposter syndrome?

Oh that. I think everyone has it, and I did. For some reason, I thought that by publishing this course, I’m going to be another scammer like other “get rich 1-week formulas” because the imposter syndrome was playing with my head. However, I didn’t try to compare myself to other teachers or people.

The trick is to always think this way — you’re only looking at people’s highlights, so don’t compare your background with other people’s highlights. These teachers or whoever you think are better than, or you’re not competitive enough to overcome them — they do have their own backgrounds too, and it’s nothing pleasant.

10. How long did it take you to create your course?

2 months, it took me 1 month to write and organize the course, and 20 days to record everything and modify it, and what made it harder is that I made some lectures in whiteboard animation.

11. How did your first launch go?

It went pretty slow, when you don’t have any students, people will not trust your course. However, I followed a free coupon strategy to solve that. I made my course for free with a certain coupon code and sent it to many blogs. Eventually, I had 1000 students enrolled and that worked well as a “social proof”.

12. How do you structure your launches in general now?

I’m currently making an online course about home business in general, and I’m making the structure like a story. What I mean is, humans are good storytellers, and it’s easy for us to make the course as a story than to present it in the old fashioned stereotype.

13. Where does your traffic come from?

My traffic comes mainly from the website. However, I try to answer some Quora questions regarding online business and provide them with the link to my course.

14. Which content do you like producing the most?

Content about business and marketing in general.

15. What online course platform are you using?

Udemy

16. What is amazing about this platform?

 You get free traffic without having to pay for ads. They do that themselves.

17. Which features do you wish this platform would have?

I wish the platform would allow us to link to our websites. The bad thing about this is that you won’t be able to convert your students into sales in any way because you can’t post links in your lectures or anywhere.

18. Why did you choose this platform over other platforms?

Udemy is the most successful among all others, and it’s trusted by students, so you won’t have to wait a lot before landing your first sale.

19. Which other tools do you use to keep your online business running?

None.

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20. How many students have you served so far?

11,423 students.

21. How much revenue have you created during your first launch, and ongoing?

During my first launch, I didn’t make a dime. However, I made $3000 to date.

22. What are you running costs to keep the online course business going?

 It’s totally free.

23. What are some of the biggest mistakes you made along the way?

The biggest mistake is that I didn’t make another online course. Also, in the first days of publishing the course, I made lots of price changes, and I had a negative review because of that. I think that one should choose a price, test a few times only and then never change it again.

24. How has your business changed since implementing an online course into the business model?

When you’re an online teacher, you position yourself as an expert in the particular field, this consequently opens many business opportunities. Whether you want to start a consulting business or land a job in a specific niche — an online course that you can show-off will definitely help you.

25. How has your personal life changed?

 I had tens of opportunities thanks to the online course. Consequently, that gave me one boost of confidence that I needed. The positive comments from students made me feel so good about myself.

26. What’s the greatest transformational story you can tell about one (or more) of your students?

The best story was from a university teacher in Italy. He enrolled in the course and gave me the best comment out there. He added me on Linkedin later and told me that the course helped him start a side-job and that he couldn’t find the information anywhere else. And that made me really happy.

 His review: “Really all you need to know to get started, including the ugly truth. I have to say, I was really impressed. The lessons are never boring, always reactive, and well implemented. The quality of both audio and video is perfect. Rochdi really opens up to the user without playing around. You really feel it talks to you and not to himself like in other classes, it brings his own experience and tells you all you need. And it’ more than just a Fiverr introduction course, it covers marketing and psychology. It’s absolutely worth it. It gives you even more than it promises. It’s real, not an edulcorated virtual classroom. Thank you Rochdi.”

27. If you could use a time machine and send yourself back to the time before you started out, what advice would you give yourself, knowing what you know now?

Don’t make one course, make as many as you can.

28. What is your million dollar piece of advice to those who are just getting started in their online course journey OR for those who are looking to scale?

Go for it. Don’t let all the negative comments out there stop you from starting your own course. It’s an experience that will change your life for sure. And even if you don’t make money from it, you’ll learn a lot about this field and I’m sure the second course will be profitable.