Do you want to earn money teaching online but don’t know where to start? Worry not—we’ll guide you through the entire process—just keep reading this article until the end.
We know what you’re thinking right now— I want to teach online and earn money, but do I have it in me? Or is this option really for me? It’s completely normal to have these doubts when starting out. Almost everyone goes through the same.
To help you clear your doubts, answer the following questions:
- Do you have strong skills in a particular niche?
- Do you have a hobby that you are passionate about?
- Do you have access to a computer and the Internet?
If your answer to all the questions is Yes, then online teaching is definitely for you. You don’t have to have formal knowledge or academic qualifications to start your journey.
Beginner’s Guide to Earn Money by Teaching Online Course
The next question people have about eLearning is how big the industry is and whether they can still make it starting now.
Multiple studies over the years have concluded that the eLearning business has grown significantly over the last two decades and continues to grow today.
According to Growth Engineering, the market has grown 900% globally since 2000.
Global Industry Analysts has estimated eLearning industry to reach USD 457.8 billion by 2026.
Statista predicts total number of online learning users to reach 1 billion by 2029.
Based on these statistics, there’s definitely a market for you.
Step 1: Choose What You Want to Teach Online
All you need to do is pick a niche for your course. This is actually the most important part, so make sure you give enough time.
Trust me, you don’t want to skip or spend less time on this exploration phase. We suggest going with a niche that you feel most comfortable with.
We suggest picking a niche you are the most confident about. Newer the niche, the better, as long as there’s a market for it. Here are a few niches you can explore:
i) Technology:
Technology has taken over the world today. However, there are still people who struggle to use them. You can be the bridge between those people and the technology.
AI, Programming, Data Science, and Cyber Security all fall under this niche.
The target audience would be IT students or anyone who is interested in learning new technologies.
ii) Foreign Language:
Do you happen to know Spanish, Chinese, or Italian? Well, then, there’s a good chance you can create your own online course to teach them.
Even English is a foreign language for many. Not only that, to get a visa for some countries, you need to know their native language.
Hence, being a foreign language teacher is a great way to earn money.
iii) Arts and Music:
Teaching to paint or play musical instruments is another excellent source of income. There’s no one definitive way to paint. Thus, if you’ve knowledge of any, you’re good to go.
The same goes for musical instruments. You can teach how to play guitar, piano, drum, violin, etc.
iv) Cooking and Pottery:
Another useful course you can teach online is cooking and pottery. You can teach one or both depending on your expertise in the particular subject.
You can share unique recipes and the whole process of preparing them. You can also share various techniques for clay pottery.
Step 2: Prepare Course Materials
The above courses are some of the common courses you can teach students online. There are a plethora of courses out there with earning potential.
The next step is to craft a curriculum. If you pick a niche saturated in the previous step, you need to capitalize on the gap. Study your competition, note down the areas they are not covering, and make sure to capitalize on them.
Now, you need a medium to deliver the material you just created to your audience. You have several choices. You can pick the one you are most comfortable with or, even better, use a combination of them.
i) Online Courses
This is probably the most popular choice of the bunch. And why wouldn’t it be — it’s the most versatile one. You create a course and put it on sale. Then, you sit back and collect revenue from it.
An online course can be static or interactive, text-based, video-based, or a combination of both. It’s better to consider your users’ preferences as well.
It has grown into a popular side hustle for passive income. The course continues to generate income in the background as long as it’s online. You only have to make minor changes here and there to ensure the course is updated and relevant.
ii) Live Coaching
Coaching has become really popular among influencers, creators, and entrepreneurs for knowledge sharing. Here, users pay for live interaction with veterans and experienced professionals in an industry to seek consultation.
You need to set up an online booking platform on which your audience can check your availability, pick a session date, and pay.
You don’t require a course, but you will have to be free for each session. Thus, it’s not as popular as online courses.
iii) Digital Learning Materials
Instead of creating a full-fledged course, you can create multiple learning materials and then sell them individually or as a bundle.
The most popular digital learning materials are PDFs and ebooks. You can also create and sell roadmaps, checklists, slides, and multimedia content.
iv) eLearning Platform
Finally, you can use your knowledge to create an interactive learning platform and sell the access to your audience as subscriptions. That said, you need a big technical team and massive capital to implement it.
If you are reading this article, it means you are a beginner. Thus, we strongly recommend going this route unless you are somewhat established in the industry and can take bigger risks.
Now that you have chosen your medium of delivery, it’s time to actually work on the teaching modules. If you are going with video courses, prepare a script, set up a recording studio—it doesn’t need to be fancy—a simple phone on a tripod with decent lighting is enough, and record yourself.
Showing your face helps increase your credibility. However, if you are not comfortable, you can stick to faceless videos with screen recording of tutorials and points you want to share.
Make sure you have PDFs, slideshows, and presentations that you want to offer as part of your courses as well.
Step 2: Publish Your Course
Now it’s time to put your courses online so people can find and buy them. There’s always the option to build a website from scratch, but it is not beginner-friendly. For starters, CMS like WordPress are the best bet, and that is what we’ll be using today.
On WordPress, you need a theme and plugin that meets your need. We recommend using the eLearning + Masteriyo combination as its free to start, versatile, and supports courses, quizzes, live interaction, and download materials.
Other than that, Masteriyo comes with a course builder to help you create your course within minutes. Further, you can add as many lessons and quizzes as you want.
This plugin has many other features. We’ll unveil them gradually while creating courses using Masteriyo.
i) Create Courses Using Masteriyo LMS
Before anything, you should install and activate the Masteriyo LMS plugin. After activating the plugin, the setup wizard page will appear.
You can choose the course per page and per row. Further, select how many questions per page you want. You can also choose the currency and the currency position. With that, now you’re ready to create the course.
Then, select the Create a new course button, as shown in the image below.
This takes you to the editor page. Start the course creation process by adding a Course Name and the Course Description.
Along with that, you can also add Course Highlights, Categories, and a Featured Image. If you’re satisfied, hit the Next button at the top.
ii) Add New Lessons and Quizzes
Next, it takes you to the Course Builder page. From here, you can add lessons as well as quizzes to your course. Simply click on the Add New Section button.
Type Your Section Name and select the Add button. When you click on the Add New Content button, you can choose to Add New Lesson or Add New Quiz. You can also choose the option to add a new section.
iii) Configure Settings
After the course-creating process, it’s time to configure the Masteriyo Settings option. It’s right next to the Builder tab at the top. Below is a brief explanation of the settings.
- General: Choose the Difficulty level of your course. Along with that, you can decide the course Duration and the Maximum Students you want to enroll in.
- Display: Here, you can choose your Curriculum in a Single Page to be Always Visible or Only Visible to Enrollers.
- Pricing: From here, you can either make your course completely Free or decide to get Paid. Also, you can easily add the amount you want.
At the end of the process, hit the Publish button at the top right. You can also Preview your course before publishing.
Here’s a full guide on how to create an online course using WordPress.
Now, it’s time to monetize your site and start earning money by teaching online.
Step 3: Monetize Your Online Course (8 Ways)
The third step on how to earn money by teaching online is monetizing your course. Here are 8 ways you can do that.
i) Sell Your Courses
There are two possible ways you can put your course on the web, distribute it for free or monetize it. This article is about earning money; hence, go ahead and make some money from your online courses.
Luckily, Masteriyo allows you to add any currency and track all the payment orders easily.
ii) Take Fee for Course Certification
Let’s say you want to do a good deed and make your courses free. Nevertheless, you also want some passive income. There’s a great way to do that with course completion certificates.
A course completion certificate is like proof that students finished the course. This could be a chance to charge your students for course certification.
iii) Membership Subscriptions
Under the subscription model, students have to buy a monthly or yearly subscription plan.
Later, students need to renew these plans when the subscription is about to end. Plugins such as User Registration and even Masteriyo LMS have this feature.
iv) Implement Tier Payment System
In this system, at first, you can offer certain lessons for free. However, to continue the further course, they need to pay a certain amount.
Make sure to create a course that is valuable enough for students to pay for the rest of the course.
Plugins like Everest Forms allow you to add different payment gateways to your site easily.
v) Offer Premium Consulting
We bet everybody comes across some sort of problem while studying. This is another great chance to earn that extra cash.
You can offer premium consulting to the students who want to personally ask you queries. A live video session is a way to go here.
vi) Hosting Ads on Your Site
Another easy way to monetize your free course is through ads. You can make it compulsory for students to watch a few seconds of video before they can access course materials.
However, make sure the ads are skippable to avoid annoying users.
vii) Earn from Extra Downable Course Materials
There’s no such thing as ‘too much education’. It’s always an asset to get more information and knowledge.
So, even if you make your course free of cost, you can monetize the extra downable course materials. We’re pretty sure the students will happily pay for those materials.
viii) Affiliate Links
Lastly, you can also utilize affiliate links for passive income. You can act as the promoter and add affiliate links to your courses or blog posts.
There are different ways you can get paid via these links. For example, you get money per click, per action, per view, etc.
Wrapping Up How to Earn Money by Teaching Online
And that’s it about how you earn money from online teaching. We’ve mentioned the different ways you can earn money by teaching online. Choose a nice of your choice, outline your course, and publish it.
Further, for your convenience, there’s a list of 8 different ways to monetize your online course. Apply the one that suits your course the best.
Finally, it’s a wrap. Hope you enjoyed reading this article. You did? Then, why not share it on your social media?
