071: How to Sell 100+ Online Courses a Day as an Instructor on Udemy (w/ Mike Wheeler)
Summary: Mike Wheeler is the founder of Mike Wheeler Media which provides Salesforce training, consulting and development services worldwide. Mike creates the course curriculum and provides training for users and those seeking to become certified on the Salesforce platform.<br> <br> He is also a world-class online trainer and instructor with over 27,000 students, over 9 courses and over 7,600 reviews on the Udemy online training platform.<br> <br> Period in full-time business<br> <br> He has been doing his own business since 2001 before which he used to do technical writing, training and curriculum development. He also supplements what he does with the business with some consulting work.<br> <br> Core revenue streams<br> <br> One of his primary revenue streams are his online courses on the Udemy platform. He says he has had sales on the platform every single day since he started offering his courses there. He also makes money from Salesforce consulting and development engagements.<br> <br> Starting out in the business<br> <br> Mike had a long career in the corporate world doing technical writing for different software companies. That work led him more towards contract work, but he says he had a few stints as an employee. He would always go in at the end of a project to write manuals. That was back when the internet was still new. The contracts would typically be 6 to 9 month engagements with different companies. He would basically go where the work was.<br> <br> Getting into Salesforce<br> <br> Mike encountered Salesforce in 2008 when he was doing technical writing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to better rank his technical writing services on Google. He then started getting into Wordpress for websites and building his own websites. While building a website for a client, he was asked for a web delete form on Salesforce and he did it but as he was offering the website development services, he realised that Salesforce was becoming more and more popular in the market, so he decided to train more on it.<br> <br> One day, in 2011, while in a Barnes and Nobles book store, he came across a book on Salesforce development, read it and felt like he had what it took to go into the Salesforce platform professionally.<br> <br> Salesforce<br> <br> Mike says it’s a web-based or cloud-based platform that one can use and customize to fit any business or process. It can be used for marketing, sales and customer service. It can be used by any business, in any industry, and is customized through clicks instead of code, though a person can also use code if they want to.<br> <br> Salesforce is best known for the fact that it can be customized to meet the marketing, sales and service needs of any business. For example, a business owner can use Salesforce to replace Legacy systems, spreadsheets and many other processes/systems. Mike says Salesforce was one of the pioneers of cloud computing and SaaS business.<br> <br> Knowing the Salesforce business would work<br> <br> After learning Salesforce, he needed to use it in practice, so while still working as a technical writer he got more involved with Salesforce related work which enabled him to build on his expertise.<br> <br> Going into Salesforce training services<br> <br> As he was learning Saleforce, getting certified and seeking his first job as a Salesforce developer, he started to develop an interest in sharing the value of Salesforce with anyone who was seeking it as an attainable path to a cloud-based career. For several years, he thought he would blog about Salesforce or develop his own online help system, but he realised that it would be a big time commitment and hard to monetize. He ended up developing Salesforce-based online courses and teaching on Udemy. He came across Udemy when a friend referred him to a sale Udemy was holding for their courses.<br> <br>
