Create your exam landing page
The course landing page (CLP) is crucial to your success on our marketplace. This is your opportunity to entice learners to enroll in your course. If it’s done right, it can also help you gain visibility in search engines. As you complete this section, think about why someone would want to enroll in your course.
This is one of the first things your potential learners will see when they’re browsing courses.It’s similar to when shopping for a product online. You want to read the product details, look at pictures, and read reviews before you decide whether or not to purchase. Learners will do the same thing and decide whether to enroll in your course after they review the information on the course landing page.
Factors that drive student decision-making
Students decide whether to enroll in a course based on 3 factors:
- Content on the CLP
- Course price and discount
- Social proof (number of enrollments and reviews)
We’ll focus on the first point and help you write for the intended learners of your course.
Your goal is to ensure your learners feel that your course will provide value, address their needs, and deliver a satisfying online learning experience.
Best practices
- Be honest — misrepresenting your course will likely lead to refunds and negative reviews
- Think about how your students would search for your course on the web and use those search keywords in your copy
- Address your learners directly by referring to them as ‘you’, not ‘learners’ or ‘students’
- Be conversational and approachable. Write in a natural, informative, and action-oriented style
- Avoid jargon or copy that could be confusing and deter new learners
- Check for spelling or grammatical errors
Ensure your course is unique
The best practice is to apply originality and creativity. Create content that’s fresh for every course you publish. While there are reasons to leverage quotes or statistics to support key points, repeating content can hurt your search visibility. For example, if you have ten similar course landing pages, search engines will only choose one and deprioritize the rest. This deprioritization may also occur if you duplicate copy from your own website or marketing efforts onto your course landing page.
Differentiate your copy and avoid copying and pasting copy across different pages.Repetition across multiple course landing pages can also be confusing to prospective learners who find it difficult to understand how your courses are different from each other.
Creating your course landing page
Most of the components of the course landing page are inputs during the course creation process during the publishing phase.
Course title
Your course title is one of the strongest factors for learners to find and enroll in your course. Think of keywords to improve the searchability of your course. Be concise, specific, and keep it within 60 characters or less.
Course subtitle
A clear course subtitle provides a brief overview of what course is about and sets the right expectations for what your students will learn. Keep it to 120 characters and mention 3-4 of the most important areas that you’ve covered during your course. Include relevant keywords in your subtitle. Visit our course title and subtitle quality standards to ensure you meet our requirements
Description
At a minimum, your course description must be at least 200 words long, however, we recommend that describe your course with at least 1,000 words, between 1,200-1,700 words is even better.Your description should be unique and showcase what differentiates your course from others in the marketplace. Don’t reuse language from other courses nor repeat information from other parts of your course landing page.
As you write your description, think about your intended learners and the questions they might have before they enroll:
- How will this course help them in their lives, personally or professionally?
Does your course address a problem, need, or desire?Learn more about our course description quality standards.
Basic info
These fields are important as they categorize your course within our marketplace to help learners better discover your course.
- Select the language the course is taught in and your course’s level of expertise.
- To choose your category and subcategory, choose the narrowest, best-fitting subcategory available. For example, “The Complete SEO Course” should go under “Search Engine Optimization”, not “Digital Marketing”. Review all options as subcategories vary under each category. The subcategory you select helps Udemy surface your course to interested students via browse, search, recommendations, emails, promotions, etc. To help keep categorization consistent, research how similar courses have been categorized so that your course is easier for students to find when they are looking at similar courses.
- In the “what is primarily taught in your course?” field tag your course with the most comprehensive and specific topic available that summarizes what your course is about. Typically, the primary topic is mentioned in the course title. For example, “The Complete Tennis Course” should have “Tennis” selected as a topic – not “Sports”, which is comprehensive but not specific enough, and not “Tennis Serve”, which is too specific and not comprehensive. Learn more about adding topics to your course.
- It’s important that your course is categorized and its topic is tagged correctly in order to help learners better discover it. Udemy reserves the right to change categorization at any time. This can affect an individual course that is found to be misclassified, or impact a larger set of courses based on changes or updates to topics or categories themselves (for example, creating a new topic or category).
Course image
The course image should be something that stands out, that’s relevant and represents your course and/or brand. Your course image will be used across the site, in ads, and emails, so ensure it’s appealing and sets your course apart from the others.
Please review our quality guidelines for course images to ensure your course image complies with our policy, as it may differ from other streaming services and online learning platforms. Be aware that the use of images or logos from a third party without permission might violate copyrights and you are responsible for any infringements.
Create a promotional video
Create a short (under 2 minutes is ideal) course promotional video that learners can watch before they decide whether or not to enroll in your course.
You can also use your promotional video as a marketing tool and post it on other sites (like YouTube or LinkedIn) to drive traffic to your course on Udemy. Make sure to set your course preview video to be previewed by default. Check out our guide for creating a promo video.
Instructor profile
The instructor bio is important when learners are comparing your course with another. They want to learn more about you and determine whether you’re a credible instructor to teach the subject. Your instructor bio should reflect your:
- Credibility Learners want to know they can trust you. Highlight what makes you an expert in the materials you teach.
- Empathy Ability to connect with learners by sharing examples demonstrating how you learned the concepts you’re teaching to show them they’ll be able to relate to your course content.
- Passion Learners don’t want to learn from a boring instructor. Show your excitement about the subject.
- Personality
- Include links to your social media accounts so that students can learn more about you and to help grow your audience.
- An instructor image is required.
- Learn more about the requirements and quality standards for your instructor bio.
More sections of your course landing page to update
There are a few other areas on your course landing page that you’ve already covered earlier in the course planning process. Revisit these sections in the course creator under theintended learnersection to ensure they’re accurate and reflect your completed course.
- What you’ll learn The copy you input after the question “What will students learn in your course?” is one of the first things prospective learners will see on your Course Learning Plan (CLP) in the box labeled “What you’ll learn”. Revisit the learning objectives you’ve written for your course to ensure these still represent your course. Update them if necessary to accurately reflect your completed course and ensure they’re measurable and will help learners determine whether or not your course is right for them.
- Requirements These are listed under the course requirements or prerequisites and should include anything learners need to know or have access to in order to be successful in your course.
- Who this course is for Reference the work you did earlier in defining your audience. Based on your answers to those questions, are there particular types of people, roles, or personas that describe who your ideal learners are.
Choose 10 minutes worth of preview videos
Give prospective learners a sneak peek of what to expect from you and your course. You must choose at least 10 minutes worth of lectures that can be watched for free by learners. Pick your favorite lectures or the ones that you think best represent your course and will spark someone’s interest and drive them to enroll in your course.
To do this, in the course creator, visit the Curriculum section and turn on “free preview” for any of your video lectures.
Next: Learn how to optimize your course landing page to improve your course’s search results.