In this video I’m going to show you how to make passive income with ChatGPT.
INTERESTED IN AI? – Check out our list of the best AI newsletters here
And I don’t mean in theory, I will actually show you what I started a week ago that’s getting close to $100 per day in revenue right now.
I was actually fairly surprised at the potential of this, I think that I could scale this up to $10,000 per month within 6 months.
I will show you exactly what YOU could do to get that figure and how I would approach thinking about it.
And also why some of you watching this, should DEFINITELY not attempt this.
Ok, let’s start.
When I first heard the idea, I didn’t immediately see the potential, it didn’t click right away.
But I actually spoke with two people that are making serious money with this as we speak.
So let me start with you what this idea is, then we dive into specifics on how to approach this.
There are tons of places online that sell courses and online classes.
Udemy, Skillshare, Coursera, there are many.
These aren’t tiny operations.
Udemy is on the stock exchange and doing really well.
It did $518 million 2021 and probably somewhere around $640 million for 2022.
It is growing insanely fast, driven by the fact that many more companies are going online.
They are paying to have their employees trained up to do well in this new digital world.
Tons of people use Udemy to learn skills for work and personal life.
It looks great on a resume. It’s cheaper than college.
So, this online learning thing is a rapidly growing movement right now and will probably stay this way for a decade or more.
And anyone can make courses on Udemy, they have a whole community of instructions that share their tips and milestones.
Some people share making their first $1000, some celebrate making their first $1,000,000.
Someone named Rob Persival just celebrated pulling in 2.8 million dollars teaching web design.
So the money potential here is big.
But how do we know what courses are the money makers and which ones are not worth pursuing?
Well, Udemy actually tells you.
Let’s say you want to teach Facebook Ads
The demand is high and top courses pull in $4,831 per month
Affiliate Marketing demand is high and top monthly revenue is $2,768
Fitness, the top monthly revenue is $1,859
Stress Management the top monthly revenue is $809
But those are small in comparison to business skills that every employee needs.
For example
Photoshop $10 thousand
Excel almost $50 thousand monthly income.
And this is reported directly through Udemy.
I’ll give you one pro tip, because this information is not available publicly.
If you sign up for being a udemy instructor, they do give you unlimited access to this to see which courses are doing well.
They even suggest some areas where they are lacking good content and where they need good courses.
Now, there are two ways to approach this.
One is to try to target some of these established categories with a lot of sales and a lot of competition.
A lot of people who start trying to make money automatically assume that a lot of competition is bad.
That’s not necessarily the case. A lot of competition means there is money to be made.
But, for the purposes of this video, let’s look at low competition areas.
One of the profound ideas I heard early in my make money online career was the idea of “Velocity to $1”.
The concept is basically that when you have a business idea, you should draw up a plan to see how fast you can earn your first dollar from that idea.
Oftentimes people get great ideas, but get too overwhelmed or too scared to execute and just not take any action on it.
Thinking about how you can get to your first dollar AS FAST AS POSSIBLE, has helped me break through some business ideas that I’ve had, test them quickly and start making money.
So, if I wanted to test this idea, how would I go about it?
How would I start making money with Udemy in the shortest amount possible.
First I would find up and coming categories where people need help.
Some tools I can use for that are Google Trends, I use this A LOT, this shows you the search history for any topic you can think of.
You can see how it’s increasing or decreasing over the years, starting in 2004 when they started keeping track of this.
There are online newsletters that do a good job of tracking new topics and business ideas that are trending.
For example The Hustle is good for business ideas.
Exploding Topics specifically focuses on trending searches,
I just checked a recent email from them and they pointed out that FastAPI is trending.
That sounds like something that might work for a Udemy course.
But I actually have a better idea for a course…
See I happen to know that there is a new trending idea and it’s HUGE.
It’s called ChatGPT.
And it’s trending big.
People are interested in how to use ChatGPT.
How to use AI in general.
How to generate content, automate your online business.
All these are exploding topics and the competition is very small.
Here is a course launched within the last month or so.
It has 2,205 students at $10 each.
That’s $22,000 dollars. In one month.
Can I ask you a serious question?
Can you survive and feed yourself and your family on $22,000?
By the way, I think that it could be a lot higher than that.
Udemy is known for showing different prices to different people, so this might show as $85 to people who are logged in.
So some percent of those courses were sold at $85 a pop.
So let’s see how much that would be if let’s say a third of his students paid full price.
Let’s ask ChatGPT
If an online course has 2,200 students and one third paid $85 and the rest paid $10. How much money did the course make?
So 733 students paid full price. The rest paid $10.
So the total is $76,875
By the way, I just want to jump in here and say that I actually created a course on Udemy for ChatGPT.
It took maybe 5 to 7 hours of total work.
And I spread that over 3 days I think, so this is something you can easily knock out in a weekend.
Within a week of launching I had my first $100 day of sales.
I will post a follow up very soon, so you can actually see the stats and I will also explain what I did.
But here was my BIG takeaway:
Udemy will promote your course.
A lot.
Most of my sales came from Udemy’s customers.
So just by having a course up there, you will generate sales.
I was kind of surprised by that, usually just listing something on a marketplace doesn’t mean that you will immediately get sales, but here that actually works
And I think that is due to the fact that Udemy is such a large and well liked platform that people just search for stuff and buy.
Also they probably get emails from Udemy that pushes them to new and exciting courses.
I’ll post a screenshot of yesterday’s sales, and notice that ONE customer came from me. Probably someone saw a course linked in the description.
And then FIVE came from Udemy promoting the course on my behalf.
So, that’s Passive Income…
I took a weekend to create a course and now that course is making me money every day.
Let’s get back to the video, I will do a follow up, but…
Yeah… I can see how people are making a full time living by creating Udemy courses, I think that’s realistic if you go all in and create real value for people.
SO, how do you create the courses?
How do you use ChatGPT to help you here?
Well, let me go on a bit of a rant.
I think most people right now are thinking of these AI tools as just replacing their own work.
Like I ask ChatGPT to make me a course, it spits out a course and then I just upload it online and I’m done!
For the past few years, even before ChatGPT, people were using software like JArvis AI to create AI written articles and then post them on websites to try to rank on Google and make money.
That might work in the short term, but don’t just rely on whatever the AI spits out, I don’t think that’s how you get the best work out of it.
For everything that I’m talking about here and for AI use in general, think of the AI as an assistant that empowers you to do more.
For example, you can ask it for an outline for a course and it will give you let’s say 10 course lessons.
Take those ideas, add your own, then ask the AI for a list of bullet points that you need to cover in each course lesson etc.
In other words, just use it as a research assistant, use it to add content when you get stuck.
When you find long articles on the subject, paste them into ChatGPT and ask for a summary etc.
So basically use the AI to gather, sort and filter data.
Use it to organize your thoughts and help you output all the ideas faster.
Use it as an extension of your brain, don’t use it as a replacement for your brain.
Once you create all the courses and outlines, you have to create the videos.
I’m not going to go over that here.
Udemy actually will walk you through the process, they have a really good tutorial on video creation for instructors and you can actually send in a sample of your video and they will walk you through how to improve audio and video.
I use AI tools, like Descript to edit my videos, it takes something that took me hours and it does it in seconds.
By the way if you want training on how to use these AI tools, checkout my free newsletter in the description.
But, once you are done with your course outline and your first few videos, you upload everything to Udemy.
That might take a while, just because you have to upload video files.
But let’s say 1 to 2 hours for that if you have a fast connection.
Keep in mind that you can start with the few “core” classes and then add on more over time.
You don’t have to start with the entire course on day 1.
So I think realistically you can do this in under 24 hours.
Keep in mind we can improve this course over time, so the goal is just to get to that first sale and start the money train going.
Udemy does a great job of walking you through everything, if you just follow their step by step plan, you should not have any problems.
Then you set your course live, they have to approve it, but that probably will take one business day.
After setting my course live, I got my first sale within 2 days and then I got close to $100 in sales per day in under 2 weeks.
I did not do a lot of promotions for this, maybe I got 2 or 3 sales from this channel, but most of the sales are from Udemy.
So, in the beginning I said:
I think that I could scale this up to $10,000 per month within 6 months.
I’ve been doing online marketing for over 10 years. I think someone brand new to this can get to $10,000 per month in 6 to 12 months.
I think the way Udemy works is that IF you can create good courses, they will do a lot of the marketing for you.
That’s the big advantage of launching there.
They take a commission for promoting your course and also you don’t get your students emails, so you can’t email them directly.
So a lot of marketers choose to not use Udemy, because they don’t want to pay commissions and also they want to be able to promote more stuff to their students.
But if you just want to create courses and make money, I gotta say, Udemy seems like a really good platform for that.
Here is how I think about businesses online and what amounts of money can be made.
The reality is that most people don’t make any significant amounts of money online.
GASP, right?
Why would he say that?
Now, I’ve met with many, many people who run online businesses of various kinds, some of who have build up great wealth.
They are not necessarily very smart, nor do they necessarily have some special skills that the rest of us don’t have.
A big difference between the people who quote unquote “made it” is mindset.
I know that sounds corny. So here’s exactly what I mean and it’s going to get a bit graphic.
Let’s say you set a goal that in 8 months you will sell $10,000 of online courses on Udemy.
You’d think about it, maybe test the waters out, see if you can do it.
But maybe the chance of you being able to accomplish that maybe would be 1%
Just like all the people who set their goal to lose weight in January, the actual number of people that achieve it is pretty low.
Now, imagine if I kidnap your family, everything and everyone you love.
And I promise that I will do the worst things imaginable to them.
Really let your mind go there, to that dark place.
We often try not to think about certain stuff, but just feel that emotion, for just one second.
And I told you that the only way you will see them again and keep them safe is if you get to $10,000 in online sales on Udemy in 8 months.
So the goal is the same, the person is the same.
What changed?
Well, your “mindset”.
Which is a very weak word to describe what just happened.
Because when everything you love is at stake and there is nothing to lose and a very clear objective in mind, then we are able to put our true 100% percent effort into the task.
We don’t spend time worrying about what if it doesn’t work or what if people make fun of me and leave nasty comments, wah.
We become obsessed and focused and energetic.
We live and breathe our goal.
And then we can estimate what our true chances of reaching our goal becomes.
So if you had that mindset and the goal was to reach $10k in sales on Udemy in 8 months, I think you would hit that goal 100% of the time.
I’m not talking $10k in profit,by the way, I just mean $10k in sales.
That will be fairly easy as long the course is good, Udemy will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
You would need to sell over $41 per day, I’m already above that in less than 2 weeks.
So my point is that, the POTENTIAL for people to do it is near 100%.
How many people would actually hit that goal with the normal day to day motivations levels?
Maybe 5% I would guess. Maybe 10%.
So I would say this is a GOOD opportunity.
It’s very solid. And the whole online course space is growing, Udemy is dominating a certain section of it.
If you just commit to doing Udemy courses and pour your heart and soul into it, you will do well.
Just provide value to your students and you will do very well.
With that said, there is this thing that Warren Buffett says that I think applies very well here.
He says that a lot of people would do a lot better financially in life if they got a little punch card with 20 spots on it at the beginning of their life.
And each time they took a shot at a business or an investment or any money making venture, they got one of spots punched.
And they only got 20 of them for their whole life.
Once they are out, that’s it, they can’t invest anymore and they can’t try new business ideas anymore.
That would force people to choose very carefully which ventures they would pursue.
And when they chose to pursue them, they would hit it very very hard.
He compares it to baseball, where you have 3 chances to hit the ball or you’re out.
People try to hit the ball even when it’s not perfect.
He suggests letting all those pitches just come at you and go past you.
You don’t have to swing at every one.
But when you see that really good one coming at you, then you go all in and swing as hard as you can.
Pretend your family is kidnapped and work like you’re possessed.
There will be a few people watching for whom this is the perfect opportunity.
They likely will be able to generate thousands of dollars monthly within a few months, while providing great value to their students and to Udemy as a platform.
For those people, you SHOULD go for it.
Keep in mind that the biggest obstacles will be in your mind.
For the rest of us, for whom maybe this isn’t the perfect business to get into, then don’t swing at it.
The AI is out of the bag and there will be more opportunities down the road, just keep your eyes open and be ready to go all in.
Whatever you do, just “no half measures”.
For me, I’m not going to pursue this one further, even though it’s tempting because the money is coming in.
I’m going to let the sales come in for as long as the course is making money, but I won’t invest more of my time into it right now.
I’ll post an update once that is done with all the sales and money that I’ve made.
Keep in mind, I did everything over a weekend, so if this ends up making thousands of dollars on autopilot, that would be a really good hourly wage for my work.
I started a newsletter that will provide free training as well as other business opportunities.
It’s going to cover AI applications as well as business and making money online.
I think this new AI era will make a lot of people, a lot of money and I plan to be one of them.
I will document my process and share my results, so stay tuned.
Sign up for my newsletter in the description.
My name is Wes Roth, thank you for watching.