In the last episode, towards the end, I was talking about the reasons why you should NOT make a 3rd party platform like Udemy your main course delivery platform. I talked about the first 3 reasons. Now here's reason #4 why you should NOT make a 3rd party marketplace your main course delivery platform.


They have restrictions on what kind of emails you can send to your buyers. From what I've read, most of these marketplace platforms will not allow you to send your buyers links via email that lead back to your site. You cannot send out other offers of your own or affiliate links. Your access to your buyer's list is very restricted, and your email list that you build on such a platform cannot be downloaded, imported into another system, it cannot be sold as part of your company if you end up selling your company. So this rented list is not a true asset for your business.


Reason #5: Instead of building your own business, you are essentially building THEIR business. They are the ones really getting a paying customer. They're just paying you a small commission, for all practical purposes. They are the ones who can continue to market other courses to your buyer. For LIFE. They are building an asset off of YOUR back. It's their lifetime customer value that keeps going up, not yours.


#6 why you should NOT make a 3rd party platform like Udemy your main course delivery platform: A lot of the stuff on Udemy is coupon-driven. Udemy frequently offers up 100 or 200 or even 300 dollar courses, for just 10 dollars. And it feels like this "buy any course for 10 bucks" promo happens like almost once every couple of weeks. Of course, as a seller, you would need to opt in for this promotion. So you basically have to tell Udemy that it's ok for them to promote your 300 dollar course for 10 dollars. And then they practically spam the heck out of all their buyers - which, remember, includes your buyers as well. I won't lie to you - I myself have purchased a couple of courses on Udemy after they dropped from a few hundred bucks to just 10 bucks. And as a seller, it's tempting to opt in to this promo, because you know Udemy is marketing the heck out of these 10 dollar courses, and you certainly don't want to be left out. But guess what? If the course sells for 10 bucks, then you're probably going to get paid 1/2 of that, because remember, it's not your promotional effort - the 10 dollar promo is their promotion. And you can't maximize the transaction by upselling them or add them to your list and market them other stuff. Guess who gets to do all of that? Udemy, of course!


Finally, reason #7 to not use a marketplace platform to build your long-term business: They don't allow you to sell recurring subscription products. Not as far as I can tell. Just 1-time products.


So this whole miniseries is not really about picking on Udemy. In fact, if were to ever use a third-party marketplace, I would pick udemy over all other solutions out there.


What I'm talking about is strictly about not focusing on a third-party marketplace to build your entire membership business. Basically, I'm telling you to stop renting and buy a house. That's all. So you could technically replace everything I said about Udemy and replace it with any of the other 50 course-creation web sites that are out there. I just use Udemy in my examples beacause it is the most popular one.


There are so many out there, that I found an article online that lists all of them. And I will link to it in my show notes.


Some of the names are: Ruzuku, Teachable, Skillshare, Digital Chalk, Mindbites, Mindflash, WizIq and on and on and on.


Now, let's flip the coin and see what's on the other side...


You can use Udemy and other such online course creation platforms as a marketing tool - maybe repurpose some old content, old videos, and see if you can leverage that massive organic traffic that you can get from them. And you can try to fly under the radar and using bonus lessons and other tricks, see if you can get them over to your web site.


If you have to tiptoe around too much, then I don't know if it's worth it. Because for all that time and effort, you would be better off creating maybe a podcast, or creating any number of courses within your own content library, where even if you sell it for 5 bucks, you get to keep the entire 5 bucks. And if you used a membership plugin like DAP, then you can make each buyer into your own affiliate, and you can offer THEM commissions to help you promote your product. Every member becomes an affiliate, they promote it, bring in more buyers, then each one of THOSE people becomes an affiliate and brings in more members, and so on. A massively viral marketing opportunity using an affiliate program. And you can use all of that to build YOUR own business, and not the business of somebody else.


So before I conclude, let me talk about WHEN and WHY it is a great thing to use Udemy.com


#1) Marketplaces like Udemy are great if you're just getting started, don't have an established name or brand. And you're trying to build a name for yourself. And you want maximum exposure for your brand. In that case, create a free course. And then create a more expensive course, make it worth a lot - like 100 or 300 bucks. And then participate in all of their promotions, because at this point, making money or building a successful business should not be your goal. Your goal is to get your name and your brand out there in front of as many people as you can.


#2) Getting that kind of exposure will help you get noticed, help you build authority, if your course gets thousands of students, you can leverage that exposure into becoming a mini celebrity. Use that as a testimonial - 5,000 students on Udemy with high ratings - and you can go as a guest on other podcasts, write a book about how you created it, create an online course about how you did all of this, then use that in order to help others with their marketing, and so on. So if you don't have your own web site, then marketplaces like Udemy can be a great starting point to go where there's already traffic, and create your presence. Just like renting a store at the mall, where there are already so many buyers. Like selling on Amazon. Like putting you podcast on iTunes. Like writing a blog post on Medium.com, rather than on your own blog. So to leverage a large, built-in audience, that's where Udemy and other marketplaces are priceless. But you have to know where to draw the line when it comes to renting versus owning. And unless you bring it all back to your web site, you don't have a successful, long-term business. And you sure as heck cannot sell recurring subscriptions on most of these marketplaces.


So remember, out of the 3 ways to host your membership site...

1) A Self-Hosted WordPress Site


2) A fully-hosted membership site, and


3) A third-party marketplace like Skillshare and Udemy


The absolute best option, in my humble yet spectacularly wise and intelligent opinion, is to have your own WordPress-based site running on your own hosting account, running a membership plugin like DAP, where you OWN and have full control over your content, your members, your affiliates, your emails, the payments... basically everything. And THAT is how you build a successful, long-term profitable online business.

Hosting your membership site on a third-party marketplace - like Udemy.com and SkillShare.com

On Udemy, it is free to create a course. And whatever price you end up charging for it, if you do the marketing and send buyers to your own course page on Udemy.com, and the visitor buys your course using a coupon that YOU have provided them with, then you keep 100% of the revenue from the sales. Of course, they deduct about 3% for processing fees, but still, that's 100% of the actual revenue.

If Udemy sends you customers via their own marketing efforts, then they get 50% of the sale. They have other service add-ons to help you with marketing, and opting in to those would net you less on each sale, but you can reach a wider audience because of the increased exposure your course would get from Udemy’s marketing efforts.

There are a number of other course-creation platforms, and each one has its own place in the industry. But probably the most popular one, that I myself have purchased a course from in the past, is Udemy.

Digital Sharecropping

Sharecropping, by definition, is "a system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on their portion of land."

And building your business on a third-party platform, where they own the platform, they control the sales, and then they pay you a portion of the profits, is generally referred to as Digital Sharecropping.

It can work for many businesses – like my book SubscribeMeBook.com is being sold on Amazon Kindle and will probably make the most sales on that platform. However, that doesn’t stop me from selling this book on my own web site, or through other eBook platforms. And that is why my book sales will not get entirely shut down if Amazon decides to not allow my book to be sold there. It is not the end of the world. However, if you are building your membership business on a third-party platform, and something goes wrong with your account or your product, or the platform itself shuts down or gets bought out by another company that maybe absorbs the talent and shuts the business down, then all of your content, your members, their recurring billing profiles – everything disappears overnight.

That thought makes most membership site owners nervous, which is why a building your own self-hosted membership platform using WordPress and a membership plugin like DigitalAccessPass.com (DAP), is a great idea for most people.

All this and more in today's episode #16. Show notes available at http://SubscribeMe.fm/16/

At DigitalAccessPass.com, we recently got an email from a prospective customer, who said this, in part (paraphrasing):


Finally, I have built a course that I will use for content, should I host it on my site, or put it on Udemy and then give free coupons to my members to take it on udemy?


And I'm going to break up my answer into multiple episodes.


So in today's part 1, before I can answer that question about Udemy, we first need to talk about the 3 options you have for running a membership site.


1) Self-Hosted WordPress Site


2) A fully-hosted membership site, and


3) A third-party marketplace like Udemy.com


Let's get into each of these in more detail...


1) Self-hosted WordPress site: If you listen to Episode 3 of this podcast - this is episode 14, by the way. So the title of episode 3 was "$1.5 Billion for a Membership Site? Membership Site Dream Team" - you can listen to it at subscribeme.fm/3/ , I have talked about having your own domain, the kind of hosting you should use, and how you should have your own WordPress site, what to use for video, and so on.


So having your own domain registered via Godaddy, your own hosting with liquid web - to support this show, please use my affiliate link , http://subscribeme.fm/liquidweb/ . Your own version of WordPress downloaded from WordPress.org and installed on your hosting account, and then using a membership plugin like DigitalAccessPass.com, now THIS... is a self-hosted WordPress membership site.


So be sure to check out episode 3 at http://subscribeme.fm/3/


2) A fully-hosted membership platform: The difference between self-hosted and fully hosted, means that on a fully-hosted platform, everything is stored on their servers. You can use your own domain, but the hosting, the content, the videos, the forums - all of these are hosted by someone else. Just like gmail hosts all of your own email. So these third-party platforms manage your site, the content, the security, the server updates, making backups of your content. They basically take care of all the "tech", and you just log in and create content and set up your funnels. Easier said than done. Sounds very simple, but in reality, it's not.


Anyway, there are 3 commonly known, fully-hosted membership solutions: They are Kajabi.com, Nanacast.com and Rainmaker Platform.


Kajabi is considered more newbie-friendly and easy to use when it comes to usability and look & feel of the web site. It is a proprietary platform where everything is hosted on their servers. Proprietary platform means, it's not running on WordPress. Which means you cannot easily extend the functionality of whatever they are offering simply by uploading a new plugin or a theme. That can be good or bad, depending on what you're looking to do with your web site.


Nanacast is also a proprietary but more full-featured platform that comes with a lot of features, but it is generally considered complex to set up. Nanacast does offer a WordPress plugin to let you integrate your existing WordPress site with the main account on their server, but you will probably need to hire a Nanacast consultant to help you set it all up.


Finally, Rainmaker Platform is from the team behind Copyblogger and Studiopress themes. It is all built on WordPress, but it is hosted on their servers.


If you use Infusionsoft.com as your CRM, then you can use either Memberium.com or Infusionsoft-owned CustomerHub to integrate your membership site with Infusionsoft. DAP integrates with Infusionsoft too.


So Kajabi, Nanacast and Rainmaker are all fully-hosted solutions, and these are a completely different animal compared to self-hosted solutions (like your own hosting account with  WordPress & DAP). And usually, such fully-hosted solutions start at about 100 dollars a month, and go up from there, depending on the number of users, and add-ons you purchase. So it could become pretty expensive over time - like 300 to 500 dollars a month. And even when you pay all that, you won't really have the full flexibility you can have with your own WordPress site.


Here's a couple of key disadvantages of a fully-hosted membership solution:
(check out the full episode to hear the rest...)