As you can see up to this point, there are numerous tactics to make money online, and teaching is one of those. Moreover, it is a strategy you can start as an additional job, while still keeping your full-time job. And the best of all, you do not need to have a teacher’s degree to begin teaching online.
The primary distinction we will make at the beginning of this chapter is based on these two aspects.
• Online classes - Teaching students individually (usually one-on-one, sometimes teaching a group)
• Online courses - Teaching students as a part of an online course
Since these two require a different setup, we will analyze them separately. As for you, you can choose one of these strategies, or even both, depending on your preferences, how much time you have to invest in teaching and depending on your plans for the future.
Even though teaching online does not require you to have an official teacher’s degree, there are some topics you will need to be pretty knowledgeable about, to be able to teach them. While some industries, such as conversation classes in your native language does not require any special skills apart from speaking fluently, you will not be able to teach someone to use Photoshop unless you know how to that. Therefore, your first step will be choosing what to teach.
Choosing your niche
In the long run, you might end up teaching a lot of various topics, but for starters, try to choose your niche. Find a subject you know a lot about and a topic that you can educate about. Whereas traditional education has its limitations, teaching online enables you to teach any skill, regardless if those skills are taught as a part official school or college curriculums.
This type of education is often called “informal education” implying that it happens outside the official curriculums. Another characteristic is that informal education is highly practical, relies on exploration and practical usage rather than learning theory. Students try to learn specific skills or concepts they are personally interested in or would need in their professional development.
Some of the niche ideas and concepts you can teach include:
• Business
• Marketing
• Web development
• Health improvement
• Photography
• Design
• Music
• Languages
• Personal development
Each of these topics can further be divided into minor sections enabling you to determine a more specific and narrow niche you want to focus on.
The main benefit of choosing a niche is the fact that if you specialize in a particular topic, you get experience in teaching it, and you also get a reputation. What may be seen as a negative aspect is the narrow target audience which limits your reach and your potential income. Still, it is better
to be recognizable as a teacher who teaches one topic exceptionally well, than to try to teach everything and achieve mediocre success.
Pros and cons of online classes
When choosing between the two ways to teach online, starting with online classes is definitely easier and quicker way to go. Here is why:
No full-time commitment
You can do this job as a part-time gig, and you never really have to commit to it full time. When you find students to teach, you can agree upon the number of classes per week. You only accept the number of students you are comfortable to teach. For example, if you want to have one class every day (five days a week) you will need enough students to fill in those slots. And you will not look further.
Flexible hours
With online classes, your hours will be very flexible. Even though the great thing about this is that you can arrange your work day and choose when you want to work, you will still be working with students who also have schedules of their own. Essentially, you will need to adapt to their schedule if you want to teach them. This can sometimes be difficult to organize, especially when you have students from the different part of the world who are in different time zones.
No mandatory curriculum
Teaching online classes offers more flexibility in terms of having a curriculum. Although it is recommended to have a study plan and some general ideas about how you want to structure your classes, in essence, you will not need to create entire course content.
Using other available resources
In fact, you will probably use some available resources in your classes. Rather than creating teaching resources, you could use a textbook or other resources available to you. A great benefit of this approach is that you already have materials organized and structured, and with minor adaptations, you can use them with your students. Also, this gives you more freedom in finding new materials and adapting your classes to each student.
This way of teaching also comes with some disadvantages such as:
A limited number of hours
This does not necessarily have to mean that the income is lower than when teaching courses. What it means is that the number of hours you work limits your income. Just multiply the hours you can spend teaching with your hourly price, and you will get the maximum income you can make. With online courses, you do not have such a limitation.
More time for preparation
Unlike courses, where everyone follows the same program, online classes are usually more demanding regarding the time you need to plan and organize each class. It does get easier in time, and you will get the hang of it, but in the beginning, you will need to invest more time into preparation. Try optimizing the preparation time by teaching students who are at the same level. In this case, you could use the same lesson multiple times.
Customization of the program per student
When working with students individually, there is a need to adapt each lesson to that particular student. Students who choose individual classes are usually unable to follow the group programs, due to their limited time, or difficulties they might face when learning. Therefore, if you want to have success with students and help them make progress, you will need to adapt your lessons. This might require more time and effort when preparing for the class than it does when creating a single course instead.
There are some specific websites offer you to earn money by teach online.
Teachable
This is an online teaching community with millions of students worldwide. The platform supports features such as customizable sales pages, creating coupons, promotions and even your affiliate program. You can accept international payments. There are three payment plans for using this platform for teaching, billed monthly or annually.
Udemy
It is one of the most popular hosted platforms. It is completely free to use and host courses on the platform. Udemy takes the percent of the payment once the sale is completed. Depending on the traffic source, the revenue is divided between the teacher, Udemy, and affiliates (if they are the ones that drove the sale). Udemy reports having over 12 million students.
Thinkific
The platform supports creating courses with drag and drop features, embedding multimedia content, customization features, as well as marketing and analytic tools to monitor your performance. Thinkific offers a free plan with 10% transaction fee and access to core features. Premium plans come with lower (or no) transaction fee and more advanced options to run your online teaching business.
SkillShare
The platform hosts online courses enabling you access to their creation tools. Once your content is uploaded, you get access to your channel where you start interacting with the students. You are paid based on the number of students who attend your classes.
