Are you a natural-born educator? Maybe you have a wealth of knowledge to share, and you’re wondering if you can make money teaching others what you already know.
With the rise of technology, many people are asking themselves, “Is it possible to make a living teaching online?” In this article, we’ll dive deep into the topic and determine whether you can actually earn a livable wage by sharing your knowledge via the Internet.
Table of Contents
The Rise of the Gig Economy
To properly answer the question, “Is it possible to make a living teaching from home?” we need to take a step back and first look at when people really started searching for alternative ways to earn income. In other words, we need to analyze the rise of the gig economy.
If you’re not familiar with the term, the gig economy, according to Google, is:
A labor market characterized by the prevalence of short-term contracts or freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs.
The gig economy encompasses a wide swath of different jobs and professions. For example, Uber drivers, independent marketing consultants, freelance programmers, and many other people fall into this category.
While professions like the ones listed above have been around for many years, they’ve become more popular in recent years. In fact, the gig economy boom can be traced back to 2008 and 2009 when the financial crisis forced many people to find alternative income streams.
Since that time, the gig economy has flourished, as proven by the following stats:
3 million people classify as “freelancers” in the United States. That number is expected to balloon to 86.5 million by 2027.
In 2018, Americans spent a combined 07 billion hours freelancing every single week. That number is only expected to rise in the future.
90% of freelancers believe that the gig economy’s future is even brighter than its impressive past.
These stats show us that the gig economy is thriving, which is good news for those looking to make a living teaching from home. After all, once you decide to pounce on this exciting opportunity, you’ll automatically join the ranks of gig economy professionals everywhere!
The E-Learning Revolution
The rise of the gig economy isn’t the only “revolution” that’s affected teachers and others with valuable knowledge to share. The explosion of online courses and e-learning opportunities has also dramatically affected the teaching environment.
E-learning refers to any education delivered digitally via the Internet. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade or so, you’re undoubtedly aware of the many online courses and curriculums available in just about every industry under the sun.
If you want to learn about anything — science, marketing, entrepreneurship, habit-building, scriptwriting, etc. — you can find an online course dedicated to the subject. In fact:
The global e-learning market is expected to be worth $325 billion by the year 2025.
E-learning allows students to learn 5x more material without increased training time.
60% of learners say that online courses fit their lifestyles better.
What do these stats mean? In a nutshell, e-learning is a growing industry, an incredibly effective way to learn and preferred by modern students.
This is great news for teachers and others with valuable knowledge to share! It means that you can take your expertise, distill it into various lessons, make it available for purchase on the Internet, and create revenue selling courses to those who crave the information you have.
How to Begin Teaching Online
As we’ve just seen, it’s entirely possible to make a living teaching from home or anywhere you want. Now the question is, “How?” How can you earn a liveable wage from the valuable knowledge you possess? That’s what we’ll cover in this section.
There are five basic steps you need to go through before you can start making a living teaching from home. They are:
1. Choose Your Niche
The first step is to choose your niche. What will you teach online students about?
Perhaps you have a unique skill that you’d love to impart to others. Maybe you’ve just finished a long career in a certain industry and want to use your knowledge to earn additional profit. You may also have a strong interest in a specific field and hope to share the information you learn with other like-minded enthusiasts.
Whatever your situation, if you hope to make a living teaching from home, you need to decide what subject you’ll be educating folks on before moving on to step two.
If you love the idea of teaching but haven’t yet chosen a topic to create educational classes on, we’re here to help! Ask yourself the following questions to find your niche:
- What interests me?
- What am I an expert at?
- What do other people want to learn?
This last question, in particular, is important. You, for example, may find the gopher frog incredibly interesting — so much so that you might even consider creating a course that educates people on the noble amphibian.
But here’s the thing: most people probably don’t care to learn about the gopher frog. If you created an online course on this topic, your potential customer base would be very small.
The trick to making a living teaching from home is finding the intersection between your interests, expertise, and market demand. So, make a list of all the things you enjoy and are skilled at. Then jump online and narrow down your niche list based upon market potential.
2. Select a Proven Teaching Platform
Once you’ve decided on your niche and vetted it for sustainability (i.e. made sure that there’s a strong enough interest online in the topic) you can look for a proven teaching platform.
If you hope to make a living teaching from home, you need to invest in technology that will allow you to record and store lessons, interact with students, and accept payments. Fortunately, there are plenty of options available to you in this regard.
Our personal favorite is, of course, ClickMeeting.
ClickMeeting is a powerful webinar software that will allow you to easily record your lessons, store them securely in the cloud, deliver them to your students on time, and accept payment for the valuable knowledge that you share.
Other handy ClickMeeting capabilities include:
Custom Branding. With ClickMeeting, it’s easy to add your logo, adjust colors, upload specific images, and more to your courses. Use our software to create the perfect environment for you and your students!
Live Streaming. ClickMeeting gives users the option to teach live classes. If you choose to use this feature, you’ll also be able to stream your lessons on Facebook or YouTube, allowing you to reach more people with your knowledge.
Educational Perks. To create top-of-the-line educational courses, you need a few perks. ClickMeeting users get access to many of them such as screen sharing, polls and surveys, digital whiteboard, private chats, and Calls-To-Action.
Detailed Analytics. What do you do once your class is over? Take a look at the analytics, of course! That way you can make improvements for future lessons. ClickMeeting will tell you where your students are from and if they enjoyed your course.
Automated Webinars. Finally, ClickMeeting makes it easy to record a lesson and then automate it so that it continually educates students on autopilot. Imagine being able to teach a class once and then getting paid for it over and over again!
There are plenty of platforms that will help you make a living teaching from home. A quick Google search will show them to you. But for those looking for a powerful option that’s easy to use and won’t break the bank, give ClickMeeting a try.
3. Create Your Lessons
At this point, your niche is chosen, and you’ve selected a proven teaching platform to help you deliver your knowledge to eager students. Now it’s time to actually create your lessons!
Today, most classes are delivered via video, though it is entirely possible to create a text-based curriculum and simply ask students to read the material rather than watch it. But this approach is often viewed as less valuable and won’t be as popular amongst online learners.
However, if you decide to deliver information, keep these two things in mind:
Use what you already have. If you’ve been teaching for a while, then you might already have a collection of materials that you can repurpose into lessons for your new teaching business. Blog posts, YouTube videos, and other kinds of content make for great starting points when it comes to building your very first course.
Make each lesson actionable. One of the best ways to ensure your students enjoy the courses you create is to make each lesson actionable. We suggest that you end each lesson with an action item, i.e., a set of steps that students can complete to begin achieving results almost immediately.
Choosing the right niche and selecting a quality teaching platform is important. But neither of them will matter much if your lessons aren’t up to par. So, do your best to create in-depth and valuable content for your students to consume.
4. Market Your Courses
It doesn’t matter how incredible and/or detailed your lessons are. If you don’t market them effectively and drive traffic to your courses, you won’t ever be able to make a living teaching from home. But don’t worry, marketing your knowledge doesn’t have to be difficult.
Here’s an example of how to market any course you create:
Create an on-demand lesson. First, create a recorded lesson that interested students can access and consume for free. This will draw potential customers in, showcase your knowledge, and give you the chance to collect their contact information.
Collect email addresses. Speaking of contact information, the entire point of releasing free, on-demand lessons is to collect it. So when students sign up for your free lessons, require them to give you their email address.
Organize a live webinar. Once you’ve built up an email list of students, you can invite them to a live webinar where you share some of yourbestmaterial. Now is not the time to skimp out. Do your best to impress your webinar attendees.
Make your paid course available. At the very end of your live webinar, give your attendees the chance to purchase your paid course. If you’ve done a good job and shared quality information, a solid percentage of your attendees will probably want to become paying customers. And thus, your teaching business begins!
There’s no one way to market your courses. But the process outlined above has been proven to work and will help you start to make a living teaching from home.
5. Award Certificates to Students
The final step is to award certificates of completion to your students. Once a learner has paid for your course, made their way through the training materials, and passed all exams, they should be recognized for their hard work.
Put together a certificate or diploma of sorts that you can email to your students and that they can print and display if they so desire.
Earn a Living from Your Knowledge
As we’ve just learned, it’s entirely possible to make a living teaching from home! The rise of the gig economy and the e-learning revolution have enabled anyone to share their knowledge online and get paid for it.
The best part is, doing so isn’t all that difficult. Just follow the five-step plan that we outlined in this article, and you’ll be well on your way:
- Choose Your Niche;
- Select a Proven Teaching Platform;
- Create Your Lessons;
- Market Your Course;
- Award Certificates to Students.
And don’t forget about ClickMeeting. Our platform gives users the ability to teach their students in both live and on-demand settings and get paid for their efforts. Give ClickMeeting a try for free today and see for yourself how powerful our software is.
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