How to become an online teacher (And a successful one)
Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2024 9:04 am
Online teachers are smiling at the bank, especially in the season.
And they’re doing it while pursuing what they love: teaching.
The numbers (of enrollments and profits) look interesting — to say the least:
For example, Resit Gulec and his team at Master of Phone number library Project Academy have enrolled 500,000 students from 180 countries around the world, teaching project management.
Online teaching case study - Master of Project Academy.
How much are 500,000 enrollments worth?
They have different pricing plans for different project management courses, but generally — they charge around $600 for a year’s access and ~$900 for lifetime access. Do the math.
And Resit is only one example. When you look around, you’ll spot more success stories from solopreneur online instructors & educational instutions.
Take these two GetResponse customers:
Alex Terrier, a jazz musician and music teacher offering online music courses to help musicians play with confidence and creative freedom.
InfoShare Academy, a company offering intensive programming courses for beginners who want to start working in IT.
Alex Terrier - online teaching success story.
Alex Terrier – lead generation results in 30 days.
Even though they teach completely different topics, they successfully attract new prospects, convert them into paying customers, and as a result grow their businesses.
Best of all? You too can become a successful online teacher – and this article will help get a head start.
Let’s go over the key steps on how to become an online teacher.
Editor’s note
Want to know exactly how you can start monetizing your knowledge online and what tools you’ll need along the way? Read our guide on how online teachers use GetResponse and start selling knowledge today!
1. Plan to teach what you know best
You don’t know everything the same way.
For example, you may know how to cook, code, write, design, and manage projects.
Sometimes it could be something you don’t consider a big deal.
For instance, your language may seem very basic to you, but it can be a goldmine. If you’re great at English, for instance, you can teach English online to Chinese students or even startup founders that are looking to raise capital outside of their home country.
But you probably won’t know each of these at the same level.
What you need to do is to select the subject you’re most confident with and teach it. Why? Well, you need to teach what you know best because:
you’re going to get questions from students, and you may end up not being able to answer tough questions.
you’ll need to convince potential students you’re an expert in a topic they’re looking to spend money to learn. And convincing them will be hard if you’re not specializing in that topic.
For example, if you’re looking to learn project management, whose course would you rather sign up for?
A. John McCammon — a project management specialist
B. Richard Caldwell — project management, web development, and marketing specialist.
(Note: these aren’t real people)
Chances are high you’ll be signing up for John McCammon because he specializes in the topic you want to learn.
And we all know what they say about the jack of all trades who is a master of none. You get the idea: Being an expert and teaching a specific topic will help you be focused enough to grow your online teaching business faster.
2. Build an engaged audience of potential students
You may be asking, “Why do I need to build an audience to sell an online teaching class?”
Well, because it’s easier to sell to your audience because they know and trust you.
But building an audience of potential students is not a walk in the park.
You’ll need to:
convince people to join your community
convince them you know your subject matter well, and ultimately
convince them your course is worth their money and time
Each of these tasks requires a certain level of work, so building an audience is one of the major hurdles of starting an online teaching business.
But it’s also not an impossible feat to accomplish.
Your potential students are everywhere. You just need to locate specific platforms they go on every day and invite them to become a part of your audience from there.
And there are free and paid strategies you can use to build your audience. The difference between the two options is simple:
Paid strategies: Run ads or pay an influencer to build your audience.
Free strategies: Join communities (online or offline) and build from there.
But we’ll be focusing on the free/affordable strategies in this post.
So let’s dive into it. You can build your audience in three simple steps:
Step I: Know where to find potential students
You can find your potential students on Facebook groups or other communities and convince them to become a part of your audience.
And these communities can be offline or online.
For example, if you’re looking to teach ‘real estate marketing,’ you can find real estate associations in your area and start engaging real estate experts in your local community, gain their trust, and offer to teach them something you know that they don’t.
And tell them you’ll offer a course on it online. (We’ll explain more about this shortly)
Or you can go online; go to a platform like Facebook, type “real estate” in the search bar, and select “Groups” on the left sidebar.
You’ll get a result that looks something like this:
And they’re doing it while pursuing what they love: teaching.
The numbers (of enrollments and profits) look interesting — to say the least:
For example, Resit Gulec and his team at Master of Phone number library Project Academy have enrolled 500,000 students from 180 countries around the world, teaching project management.
Online teaching case study - Master of Project Academy.
How much are 500,000 enrollments worth?
They have different pricing plans for different project management courses, but generally — they charge around $600 for a year’s access and ~$900 for lifetime access. Do the math.
And Resit is only one example. When you look around, you’ll spot more success stories from solopreneur online instructors & educational instutions.
Take these two GetResponse customers:
Alex Terrier, a jazz musician and music teacher offering online music courses to help musicians play with confidence and creative freedom.
InfoShare Academy, a company offering intensive programming courses for beginners who want to start working in IT.
Alex Terrier - online teaching success story.
Alex Terrier – lead generation results in 30 days.
Even though they teach completely different topics, they successfully attract new prospects, convert them into paying customers, and as a result grow their businesses.
Best of all? You too can become a successful online teacher – and this article will help get a head start.
Let’s go over the key steps on how to become an online teacher.
Editor’s note
Want to know exactly how you can start monetizing your knowledge online and what tools you’ll need along the way? Read our guide on how online teachers use GetResponse and start selling knowledge today!
1. Plan to teach what you know best
You don’t know everything the same way.
For example, you may know how to cook, code, write, design, and manage projects.
Sometimes it could be something you don’t consider a big deal.
For instance, your language may seem very basic to you, but it can be a goldmine. If you’re great at English, for instance, you can teach English online to Chinese students or even startup founders that are looking to raise capital outside of their home country.
But you probably won’t know each of these at the same level.
What you need to do is to select the subject you’re most confident with and teach it. Why? Well, you need to teach what you know best because:
you’re going to get questions from students, and you may end up not being able to answer tough questions.
you’ll need to convince potential students you’re an expert in a topic they’re looking to spend money to learn. And convincing them will be hard if you’re not specializing in that topic.
For example, if you’re looking to learn project management, whose course would you rather sign up for?
A. John McCammon — a project management specialist
B. Richard Caldwell — project management, web development, and marketing specialist.
(Note: these aren’t real people)
Chances are high you’ll be signing up for John McCammon because he specializes in the topic you want to learn.
And we all know what they say about the jack of all trades who is a master of none. You get the idea: Being an expert and teaching a specific topic will help you be focused enough to grow your online teaching business faster.
2. Build an engaged audience of potential students
You may be asking, “Why do I need to build an audience to sell an online teaching class?”
Well, because it’s easier to sell to your audience because they know and trust you.
But building an audience of potential students is not a walk in the park.
You’ll need to:
convince people to join your community
convince them you know your subject matter well, and ultimately
convince them your course is worth their money and time
Each of these tasks requires a certain level of work, so building an audience is one of the major hurdles of starting an online teaching business.
But it’s also not an impossible feat to accomplish.
Your potential students are everywhere. You just need to locate specific platforms they go on every day and invite them to become a part of your audience from there.
And there are free and paid strategies you can use to build your audience. The difference between the two options is simple:
Paid strategies: Run ads or pay an influencer to build your audience.
Free strategies: Join communities (online or offline) and build from there.
But we’ll be focusing on the free/affordable strategies in this post.
So let’s dive into it. You can build your audience in three simple steps:
Step I: Know where to find potential students
You can find your potential students on Facebook groups or other communities and convince them to become a part of your audience.
And these communities can be offline or online.
For example, if you’re looking to teach ‘real estate marketing,’ you can find real estate associations in your area and start engaging real estate experts in your local community, gain their trust, and offer to teach them something you know that they don’t.
And tell them you’ll offer a course on it online. (We’ll explain more about this shortly)
Or you can go online; go to a platform like Facebook, type “real estate” in the search bar, and select “Groups” on the left sidebar.
You’ll get a result that looks something like this: