Jasmine Birtles
Your money-making expert. Financial journalist, TV and radio personality.
Teach Online Classes to Make Money from Home
Sam Smith
3rd Apr 2020
Do you have a special skill and are of a patient, kind demeanour? You could make some good money if you decide to take advantage of this skillset and teach online classes.
Find out how below!
- The New Normal
- Teach Online Classes
- Creating Online Courses
- What Tools Can Help Me?
- Things Self-Employed People Have To Consider
The New Normal
Working from home has become a necessity for many people during the coronavirus pandemic. To some it’s an annoyance, hindering their ability to get that much work done without the practical comforts of the office. But for others it’s been an opportunity to see if working from home is something they could get used to.
We imagine lots of people will be going self-employed during or after this crisis. Deciding that working from home suits their lifestyle and wanting to keep doing it full time. Or maybe they’ll just want to set up a second source of income and see how it goes.
The trick is finding a skill you can monetise.
Teach Online Classes
Setting yourself up as an online teacher is a great way to make some extra money. If you become successful you could then decide to make it your full time job. Lots of people do this for a living, so why can’t you?
You may already be a trained and qualified teacher, if you are then that’s great, but it’s not mandatory. All you need to get started is a subject or skill you thoroughly understand and could teach online classes about. It could be nearly anything!
Are you a creative writer or an expert in digital marketing? This is something you could teach others to do. There’s always a huge demand for skilled writers and marketers.
Are you a whizz with maths or science? Most people aren’t so consider helping others by teaching online classes.
If you’re great at communicating with skills you could also teach children in other countries how to speak English by using platforms like iTutor group and many others. Again you don’t need any formal qualifications to do this, you just need to be the right sort of person. But having TEFL or a TESOL qualification helps.
These can be completed online and having them means sites like iTutor group will pay you more money per hour.
Or are you passionate about history? Many people love history and have their own specialist areas that they hold an encyclopaedic amount of knowledge on. If that’s you then teach online classes showing off your knowledge.
Practical Skills
You don’t even need to take the academic route if that’s not your style. You could teach online art classes such as drawing or painting. You’d be surprised how many people are keen to learn from an expert such as yourself and would gladly pay you to learn more about developing their own skills.
You could even teach people practical skills like DIY, gardening, cooking and anything else that requires skills and knowledge. Many online teachers are people who’ve done a certain job or hold a certain skill and are now using that skill to make money helping others. From acting classes, life coaching, fitness all the way to fishing, it’s about using the things you’re good at and the things you’ve done in your career to create a successful online teaching class.
Teach your hobbies
Believe it or not, people tend to be good at what they enjoy. Or hold a large amount of knowledge. It may be something that you do for a hobby but have never considered as a career or side project. Are you a keen sports fan? Or a movie buff? Perhaps it’s music or something even more niche.
We recently read about a chap who was a lifelong wrestling fan and ran a successful podcast on the subject. Not only did he become an internet personality (in that niche) over time, but he also managed to teach other people online how to become successful podcasters. Something he mostly taught himself from scratch.
What is it you love? You may have more to offer than you realise.
Creating Online Courses
If teaching online classes directly isn’t your style you can create courses about your subject and sell them online. The same rules as above also apply here. It’s also a fantastic was to earn a passive income from your knowledge while you focus on other things.
Read more about creating online courses in our article here.
What Tools can help me?
There is a range of tools at your disposal for creating online classes, courses and instructional/educational videos.
Skype, Whatsapp Video and Zoom are the best three online video chat services. But Apple’s FaceTime is also a great option, providing both parties have it. These offer a bunch of free services that allow you to chat with students or entire classes at once if need be.
Courses and books can be created and published on Amazon through their self-publishing service. Learn more about that here.
If you’d prefer to create videos instead of teaching direct lessons over video chat, then consider setting up your own website. You can do this on WordPress or from many other places. It can be done for free but once you become successful, do consider spending some money on proper professional website. It’s cheaper than you think!
Here you can offer a paid-for series of videos (rather than live sessions) or a monthly membership to unique content. Set payment to a realistic level though. We want to attract customers not deter them.
Things self-employed people have to consider
Being your own boss is great and despite the hard work and obstacles of getting set up, once you do it’s worth it.
But there are things you now need to consider that you may not have before. For example declaring your own earnings for tax. This can be a difficult to get your head around at first, but in time it becomes fairly easy. And as you get more successful you can eventually hire an accountant to do most of the heavy lifting! Although as a sole-trader, it’s fairly straightforward.
Remember if you have a full time job but start earning good money from your teaching online classes, you’ll still need to declare the earnings and pay tax.
It’s also okay to register as self-employed even if you’re currently receiving furlough pay due to COVID-19. If you want to use this time to set up your own business while in isolation then go for it!
It may be a great way to turn this crisis into something positive.
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