Course Creation (Expanded)

Online course creation was ranked #5. This expanded entry covers the platform-based approach: selling courses on marketplaces like Udemy, Skillshare, and Coursera rather than self-hosting. The trade-off is clear — marketplaces provide traffic (Udemy has 70 million students) but take a larger revenue share and give you less control over pricing.

Udemy courses are priced at $10-20 during frequent sales (regardless of your listed price), and you earn 37% of marketplace sales. A course with 5,000 students at $12 average sale price earns $22,200 in total — but spread over 2-3 years of organic marketplace sales. Skillshare pays $0.05-0.10 per minute watched, rewarding engagement over enrollment. Neither platform makes you rich quickly, but both generate passive income from evergreen content.

The smart play is using marketplace courses as a funnel. Publish a solid free or low-cost course on Udemy, include a call-to-action for your premium self-hosted course ($200-2,000), and let Udemy's traffic do the prospecting. Many successful course creators earn $500-2,000/month from Udemy while earning $5,000-20,000/month from their own platform (Teachable, Kajabi, Podia) where they capture 95%+ of revenue.