|

Three Ways Teachers Can Earn a Side Income Online

I regularly receive questions from teachers who want to know how they can earn money through blogging or similar social media activities. The first thing to know is that becoming a blogger or social media “influencer” is not a get-rich-quick system. But you can certainly earn a nice side income online after your teaching responsibilities are done for the day. Here are a few things that you can do to earn a side income online.

The Basics

Before we begin, all of these ideas are predicated on you knowing how to create a blog, YouTube channel, and or social media profiles. Everything that I’m about to suggest is based on using one or more of those platforms.

Affiliate Marketing

This is not to be confused with multi-level marketing schemes like Essential Oils, Rodan+Fields, or the classic Amway. In its simplest form affiliate marketing refers to sharing a specific tracking link to a specific product that you recommend to others.

Amazon Affiliates is the largest program in the world for affiliate marketing. Once you sign up for the program you can begin sharing links on your blog, social media accounts, and email. If people click those links then make a purchase, you will earn a small commission (typically 3-6% of purchase price).

There are other affiliate marketing programs that you can join. Commission Junction is a popular one that I have used in the past. Commission Junction acts as a clearing house for hundreds of companies’ affiliate programs.

It is important to understand that affiliate marketing relies on people trusting your opinion of a product. That’s why I only write endorsements for products that I have actually purchased myself. If you start sharing links to every product under the sun in the hopes of boosting your affiliate income, you won’t.

Online Tutoring/ Teaching Services

There are companies like VIPKID that are always looking for teachers to tutor students online. The nice thing about companies like VIPKID is that you don’t have to do any of the work to get customers. You just do the teaching and the company pays you for your time.

If you have a large enough following you might consider hosting your own webinars or online tutoring sessions. I have hosted hundreds of webinars over the last six years. I use GoToTraining and GoToWebinar to host my webinars. GoToTraining has an integrated payment system that you can use to collect payments. GoToWebinar does not have an integrated payment system so you have to add a third-party tool to collect payments. I use GoToWP for that purpose.

Sell Your Lesson Plans/ Lesson Materials

Teachers Pay Teachers is the best known platform for selling your lesson plans and other teaching materials online. The downside to TPT is that they take a huge cut of your sales for themselves. TPT’s cut is 20-45% of each sale.

There are other, cheaper platforms for selling your lesson plans and materials online. I’ve used e-Junkie, Gumroad, and WooCommerce for those purposes.

Need Help Getting Started? Want to Learn More?

I offer two on-demand courses designed to help you learn how to make money online.

Ditch TPT & Sell Your Digital Products is an on-demand webinar recording with handouts that walk you through using e-Junkie and Gumroad to sell your lesson plans and lesson materials online. This webinar includes a guest appearance from Tom Richie who has utilized YouTube to build a huge audience for his history lesson materials. You can access this recorded webinar right now for $25.

From Blog to Job – A TeacherPreneur Jumpstart is an in-depth nine part course in which I explain everything that I have done to turn my simple blog into a full-time income. You’ll learn how to develop a content marketing plan, monetization strategies, tools of the trade, how I nearly made a $500,000 mistake, and much more. This is an on-demand course that you can start anytime. Start by December 31st and you’ll save $50! Go here to start today.