Tips on How to Earn a Living as an Online Teacher

I am delighted to introduce you to yet another EFL trainer. I met Jack Askew a few months ago through his successful blog and have been following him ever since. Not only does he teach EFL learners, he spends a lot of his time showing teachers around the world how to venture into the world of online teaching and, more importantly, how to make a living out of it. In this post, he gives us some valuable tips. So without further ado, here’s Jack.

Online learning and teaching is booming.

And this trend is continuing, with more learners looking for online teachers, courses, and other products to help them with their language learning goals. This is great news for anyone who has dreams of starting their own thing online and taking control of their teaching and income.

Before I go into the different ways that you can earn money as an online teacher, I want to talk about the advantages of moving online.

Do You Want Control?

When discussing this, the word I like to use is “control." When you do your own thing and move online, you gain control over:

1. What you teach and to whom

You can decide exactly what you want to teach when you move online (as long as there is a market for it). In addition, you decide exactly who you want to teach. All the geographical barriers are broken down, and you can target learners by their level, outlook, goals, country of origin etc.

2. How you teach

Would you like to have full control over your teaching methods? I know I did when I made the change. It was so liberating to plan my lessons without having to follow guidelines and use methods imposed by others. Gaining control over your teaching allows you to follow your own path, explore and experiment with different methods, and ultimately teach the way that is best for your learners.

3. Where you teach

After speaking with hundreds, if not thousands, of teachers who talked about moving online, one of the biggest reasons for doing this is gaining the ability to live anywhere in the world. For some, this means being able to move back home after some time away. For others, it means being able to work while traveling or living abroad.

The flexibility here is important too: there is nothing tying you down to one place. So, if you see yourself moving around over the next few years, then this will definitely appeal to you.

Let’s move on now and get to the meat and bones of this post: the different ways to earn as an online teacher.

Different Ways You Can Earn As an Online Teacher

I am going to start this list with the recommend way to approach things if you are new to online teaching. And the first way to earn online is through one-to-one lessons/consulting.

One-to-One Lessons

Most language teachers will choose this option when first starting their teaching business. There are a couple of advantages to this:

• It’s the easiest way to earn decent money when first starting out
• It’s the best way to learn more about your niche, allowing you to be successful as you expand in the future

This is the way I and many other English teachers started. It’s much easier to earn from one-to-one lessons when you’re first starting out as there is very limited prep work (especially compared to designing a course or creating a product), and you can find paying students with very low start-up costs.

Additionally, once you work with learners within your teaching niche, you are going to learn about the problems they have and gain experience solving them, which will greatly aid your teaching business as you look to expand.

Group Lessons

To leverage your time you can also offer group lessons.

To reach this stage, you will need to have a large student base, or know how to market and advertise for learners. I find group online lessons are more fun, and the higher hourly rate certainly helps (four students paying $15 compared to one student paying $30, for example).

Hire Other Teachers

Once you have more learners requesting lessons than you can handle, you have two choices: up your rates or hire other teachers (or both!).

Although there is a little work involved to set things up, hiring other teachers can bring in extra income based on the work that you have put into your business. There are things to think about here:

• What type of teacher do you want to hire?
• What is the payment arrangement?
• How is payment handled?

Once you have ironed out these details and set things up, you then have the system to hire as many teachers as you desire.

Services

I have offered various services in the past to online learners. In my IELTS niche, for example, I provided writing feedback and also speaking feedback. I set these services up so that I worked asynchronously with my learners.

Think about your niche and what services you could start offering. And once you have a system down, you can start outsourcing the work to other teachers, especially if your service becomes a success.

Affiliate Income

Language learners like to buy things. So, why not give your learners advice on this while at the same time earning money on affiliate sales?

It works like this:

• You find products/courses/books etc. that are going to benefit learners in your niche that offer an affiliate program
• You send links through your email newsletter or on your website
• If the learners buy, then you receive a commission on this purchase

My best advice here is to only offer things to your audience that you know are going to benefit them. It’s tempting to offer products based on commission, but if you offer things that don’t benefit your audience, then you’ll end up losing trust.

Courses, Books, and Products

Over the past year, I have started offering different products and courses for both English learners and teachers. The beauty of venturing into this world is that the income is much more passive; once you have written your course or created your product, then there is less time needed on your part for the actual teaching side.

Here are some examples of this:

• Offering a $10 guide for your learners – this can be bought directly from your website
• Creating a video course on your site or on a different platform
• Starting a membership site for your learners

These are just three examples. To be able to make this successful you will need a following and have some knowledge of internet marketing. The good news is that if you start with one-to-one lessons and become successful, then you are going to learn so much in this area.

What to Do Now?

If you are a language teacher who wants to move online, then I recommend that you:

• Download my free guide on the tools you will need to teach online.
• Check out The Teach English Online Course – this will show you exactly what you need to do to create your own successful online teaching business.

Please get in touch with any questions you have as I love to help teachers succeed in their online teaching journey.

About Jack Askew

Jack Askew helps English learners reach a high level, and helps teachers build successful online teaching businesses.

He currently resides in the mountains of Asheville, NC, is originally from Preston, England, and spent two years living and working in Spain.

Thank you very much, Jack for these valuable and practical tips. These could very much form part of some teachers’ New Year Resolutions for 2015.

That’s it from the Gallery Languages Team for 2014. We’ll be back in the new year with lots of goodies and tips for teaching and learning.

In the meantime on behalf of the Gallery Teachers Team, I’d like to wish you all a most wonderful end to 2014 and happiness, serenity and good health for 2015. 

Ciao for now

Shanthi