How to Make a Great Living Teaching Online
By John Purcell
5/5
()
About this ebook
This book teaches you how to make money online, even a very good living, by making tutorial videos. Whatever your hobby or area of expertise, from cookery to computer programming or even teaching your own language, there's a good chance you could make more money from tutorial videos than from a "normal" job. In the past two years I've made more than $170,000 (£104,000) from tutorial videos. I used to have a job - in fact a whole career - that I hated, but now I live where I want to and work when I want to. In this book I'll teach you how to turn your hobby into a business. I'll also tell you about some of the other ways you can make a living online; you'll discover that many of the same principles apply regardless of the nature of your online business.
The Internet gives you the opportunity to set up a business with little or no upfront costs, making almost 100% pure profit at no risk. Whether you want to make some extra income or you want to leave your job and take control of your destiny, this book will help you.
John Purcell
After studying a degree in science, I worked as a software developer for around fourteen years before starting my own online business. I now make a living mostly from selling video courses on computer programming. I was born in England but I've lived in various European countries; at the moment I'm in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, but plan to move to Berlin, Germany soon.
Related to How to Make a Great Living Teaching Online
Related ebooks
7 Steps to Creating, Promoting & Profiting from Online Courses Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Freedom Online Business: How To Create An Online Business Around Your Lifestyle Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow To Start an Online Coaching Business: Turn Your Personal Knowledge Into Cash Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow to Blog for Fun & Profit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Create Income through Self-Publishing: An Author's Approach on Generating Wealth by Self-Publishing Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How To Make Money Blogging: How I Replaced My Day-Job With My Blog and How You Can Start A Blog Today Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Easy Kindle Publishing: Get Paid to Write What You Already Know Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Make Money Online Step-by-Step Directions How I Make $2500 a Month Selling on eBay, Fiverr, Amazon & More Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Passive Income Ideas: Discover the Smart, Proven Strategies to Stop Trading Time for Money and Build Real Wealth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMake Money From Home Teaching Online Video Courses Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Start Your Own Blogging Business: Generate Income from Advertisers, Subscribers, Merchandising, and More Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Teaching Online: How to Start and How to Succeed as an Online Instructor Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Write an Online Course: From Concept to Completion One Step at a Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Create an Online Course for Passive Income: MFI Series1, #60 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTen Simple Steps to Start Teaching Online Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Make Your Own Amazing YouTube Videos: Learn How to Film, Edit, and Upload Quality Videos to YouTube Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How to Make Money Online as a Language Tutor Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Course Design Formula: How to Teach Anything to Anyone Online Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Udemy: The Essential Step-By-Step Guide on How to Make Money Online with Udemy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTransform Online Teaching: Expert Strategies and Essential Resources Every Educator Needs Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tutoring Complete Home Business Guide: Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Social In 17: Successfully Market Yourself on Social Media in Just 17 Minutes a Day Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsYouTube Masterclass: Your Complete Guide to Easily Launch, Grow & Monetize Your YouTube Channel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Youtube Authority: How To Start And Grow A Successful YouTube Channel For Your Business Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How To Start A Profitable Blog: Turn Your Blogging Passion Into Profit (Blog Mastermind Booklets) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
E-Commerce For You
Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Psychology of Selling: Increase Your Sales Faster and Easier Than You Ever Thought Possible Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The YouTube Formula: How Anyone Can Unlock the Algorithm to Drive Views, Build an Audience, and Grow Revenue Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/580/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5DotCom Secrets (Review and Analysis of Brunson's Book) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Passive Income Cheat Sheet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How I Made My First $1000 on Etsy (With No Social Media Following and No Money to Spend on Advertising Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Write Copy That Sells: The Step-By-Step System For More Sales, to More Customers, More Often Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Influencer: Building Your Personal Brand in the Age of Social Media Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence—and How You Can, Too Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Beginner's Guide To Day Trading Online 2nd Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Beginner's Affiliate Marketing Blueprint Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/52022 Best Ways To Make Money Online Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Digital Product Blueprint - Step By Step Guide To Create And Sell Profitable Digital Products Online Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chat-GPT Income Ideas: Pioneering Monetization Concepts Utilizing Conversational AI for Profitable Ventures Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tube Ritual: Jumpstart Your Journey to 5000 YouTube Subscribers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Ultimate Marketing Plan: Target Your Audience! Get Out Your Message! Build Your Brand! Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for How to Make a Great Living Teaching Online
4 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very informative and entertaining. I really enjoyed John’s writing style and wit.
This book gave me the confidence and motivation to start my tutoring project. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I like the honesty of John Purcell for discussing the roadblocks of teaching online, making it very clear that making substantial income from teaching online takes awhile, but his sincerity can be felt that he really meant to help people to get off the hook from the current job that they have hated for so long. He discusses the steps very clearly how to do just that. A great read! John Purcell greatly inspires me to move me out of my shell and try it online!
Book preview
How to Make a Great Living Teaching Online - John Purcell
How To Make a Great Living Teaching Online
John Purcell
Copyright © John Purcell 2013-4
Distributed by Smashwords
www.caveofprogramming.com/
Not to mention my less-frequented websites, such as
www.quantumlifetime.com/ and
www.fascinatingexperiments.com/
Table of Contents
What's In This Book
Introduction
How This Book is Structured
Planning Your Subject Area
Recording Your Videos
Lights, Camera, Action
Building Traffic
Location is Everything
Creating a Website
Create Your Course
Getting Website Traffic
Creating Watchable Videos
Developing an Engaging Speaking Style
Technical Considerations
Keep it Simple
Video Pricing
Interacting with Your Students
Other Ways of Making Money Online
My Story
Living in a Tent and Gold Prospecting
Computers? Waste of Money!
The Importance of Being Idle
A Year In Paradise
Drugs, Gambling and Mosquitos
Escape
Success
The Psychology of Working Online
Modern Slavery
Do Schools Foster Enthusiasm, or Crush It?
Psychological Hurdles
Quitting Your Job
The Recipe
Conclusion
What's In This Book
Introduction
This book will teach you how to make a living by teaching online; we'll focus on making money by creating tutorial videos but we'll also touch on teaching directly, one-to-one (using free software such as Skype), and various other ways to make money online too. Whether you want to escape from your job as soon as possible, whether you want the freedom to travel the world, or just some extra income, you've come to the right place.
One way in which this book differs from many other similar books is that I won't assume that you have huge amounts of time and energy to spare. Other books might tell you to start getting up at five every morning and going for a power walk
; they might tell you that no-one starts a successful business without working fourteen hour days or that you need total focus and dedication to make any kind of business work. Often when you read a book about entrepreneurship, you get the feeling the person who wrote it was pretty much bound to start something sooner or later, such was his or her level of drive and enthusiasm. This book's not like that.
To tell you the truth, I've never been the most energetic or highly motivated person. I prefer to work smart, not hard. Since I've never had bags of energy to spare, I had to figure out how to set up a business with minimal input in terms of time and money and with no fixed commitment (since I was never sure when my energy was going to simply run out). I'm prone to sleeping a lot and getting out of bed at twelve. If you're a bit lazy like me and you need a book that'll tell you how to get the most of out of your limited time and energy, read on.
I've always admired P.G. Wodehouse's character Rocky
, of whom Wodehouse says, About once a month he would take three days writing a few poems; the other three hundred and twenty-nine days of the year he rested
(The Aunt and the Sluggard, P.G. Wodehouse). Here's one of Rocky's poems:
Be!
Be!
The past is dead.
To-morrow is not born.
Be to-day!
To-day!
Be with every nerve,
With every muscle,
With every drop of your red blood!
Be!
If you need this sort of thing, there are other books that provide it in large doses. This book, on the other hand, teaches you how to be Rocky. That's not to say that we're going to talk about how to deceive people into giving you money; quite the opposite. For most of my life I've hated terms like marketing
and entrepreneur
. I believe in making money by giving people what they want and making sure they know about it.
It was a great surprise to me to realise, with a start, that I had become an entrepreneur of sorts, and an expert on online marketing. I got to my present fortunate position not by writing great advertising spiel or by exhorting people to buy, buy, buy now before it's too late, but by providing an honest service. In this book, I'll explain how you too can make a lucrative honest living by giving people what they want.
Three years ago I had a job, in fact a whole career, that I hated through and through. Every day I sat at a desk writing computer code to create software that interested me about as much as watching paint dry. I desperately wanted to escape from having a normal job, from having a boss and having my work decided by others, but I didn't know how. I suspected that I would grow to hate any job just as much. I wasn't business-minded and couldn't see myself as an entrepreneur of any kind.
Not only that, my overall energy levels were so low that often just getting through the day was challenge enough. Most afternoons I was consumed with the desire to sleep, no matter how much sleep I'd had the previous night. Every day I came home from work feeling exhausted. At the weekends I usually didn't have the energy to do much other than have a coffee with a friend, read a bit and watch stuff on TV.
Time and time again I tried to find a way to escape from my job, but nothing worked; I didn't have the energy, the persistence or the vision to see anything through. I realised that if I was going to escape from my job, I was going to have to find a way of building up a business that required only an hour or two of work per day. I didn't seem to have the energy for anything else.
And you know what? After more than fourteen years of trying, I finally managed it. I figured out how to set up an online business that largely runs itself and requires only perhaps an average of an hour of time per day, and that only at irregular intervals. Not that I think doing hardly any work is necessarily something to aspire to, but if you have only a little free time or you just don't want to devote a lot of your time to making money, it's definitely possible to build up an online business with surprisingly little time and effort. I was lucky enough to be able to draw on fourteen years of experience in a lucrative technical field; if you don't have the skills to teach a highly in-demand subject then you may find yourself having to work more than I do in order to make a good living, but nevertheless, the techniques you'll find outlined here will help you to make the most of your time and to make the most money for the least amount of time and effort.
Since I began selling tutorial videos about two years ago, I've made more than $160,000 (US); more money than many people make from working grueling hours at hard jobs every day. Sounds too good to be true? There are many, many others like me, making money online in all kinds of ways, from tutorial videos to e-books to software to teaching one-to-one, not to mention poker players, affiliate marketers and all kinds of other people selling all kinds of things. If you can use a computer fluently and you're at least averagely intelligent, you could be one of us if you want to be, believe me.
In this book, I'm going to explain how I created my online business and how you can too. If you enjoy learning things and teaching them to others, or if you've got an existing skill that others are interested in and that you'd like to teach, there's a good chance you could make great money online. I'll assume that you are already familiar with stuff like using the Internet and watching videos on your computer; I'll also assume that you aren't reading this book for detailed information on how to do stuff like set up a website, since you can get that kind of information quite easily by doing a few Google searches. Instead, I'll concentrate on what I believe are the elements that have contributed to my own success. If there's anything you want detailed instructions on how to do, Google will help you out. The information that I present here is a little harder to come by.
We'll also cover some other ways you can make money online, besides creating instructional videos. While I haven't got into other ways of making money online a whole lot myself (except for teaching some lessons via Skype, selling this book, getting revenue from YouTube and, I might mention, selling a grand total of one t-shirt that I designed personally), many of the same principles apply whatever you're doing online. I've met people who made a living online through methods quite different to my own, and they all loved their work. The Internet gives you the chance to be your own boss, to run your own online company, set your own hours, make your own decisions, work from wherever you like and set up your company with little or no money. Neither do you have to immediately launch into it full-time, or work like a dog (although of course there are many who do work very hard to make a living online). What could be better?
One key question you're likely to have when you start is, how long will it be before I can make a living online? This question is a bit like asking how long is a piece of string?
. The answer will vary widely from person to person. Before I started making tutorial videos or teaching one-to-one, I had the idea to write a technical blog and make money from putting Google ads on the blog - something we'll talk about more later on. I read that many people find it takes two years to get to the point where you can make a living wage at this, but making money from Google ads is hard and you need great website traffic before you can make a living like that. Teaching online tends to make more money faster; my online colleagues report that it took them anywhere from a month to a year after creating their first course before they hit one thousand dollars a month. There are ways that you can hit the ground running and potentially make a living wage really quickly after creating your first online course if you're determined and you pick a lucrative topic to make a course on; we'll discuss these methods later on too.
How This Book is Structured
This book can be divided into roughly four sections. In the first part we'll get straight to the point with a recipe for getting up and running with an online course. If you're anxious to get started (and I hope you are) then read this part first. In the second part, Getting Website Traffic, I'll talk about how to maximise your success; how to make more sales and how to keep your students (also known as customers
!) coming back for more. We'll also get into details about how to create videos, online courses and websites. In the third part, My Story, I'll tell you my own story. If you want to be entertained before getting into creating a course, skip to this section; hopefully my epic tale of endless mistakes and half-baked ideas will do the trick. Finally, in Modern Slavery, we'll look at the factors that keep people trapped in their jobs and at the psychology of working for yourself, examining the major mental hurdles to setting up an online business and how you're likely to feel when you've done it.
Planning Your Subject Area
Let's assume, to start with, that you want to make a living teaching people how to do something or other. The first thing you need to do is pick a clearly-defined topic. Photography, computer programming, algebra, cookery or even your own language are all possible topics, along with many, many others. Lots of people make a living online teaching English, even - without being able to speak any other language themselves, and without necessarily knowing anything much about grammar. Your area of specialisation is known in online marketing lingo as your niche
. One of the key things you need to do to create an online business is to pick a niche and evaluate how likely it is that you'll actually be able to make money from that niche. There are several different ways of doing this. You don't necessarily need to spend weeks researching your chosen niche; it's better (in my view anyway) to just get going with making a few test videos for YouTube and seeing if people watch them or not, but you should spend at least a little time thinking about the pros and cons of various niches that appeal to you. If you're already a university lecturer or teacher, your choice of niche may be easy; all you have to do is check there's a market there. If you're not, you'll want to think carefully about what really interests you and what you could teach to others. You don't need to be an expert on your chosen subject; what you do need is a little passion for your subject and an ability to explain the basics of it to an online audience.
A lot of the value in tutorial videos consists in having someone explain and demonstrate information that you'd otherwise have to consult a book for. For this reason, you can even teach things that you don't know a whole lot about yourself. All you need is to be able to learn how to do something, then create a video on it explaining and possibly demonstrating it in a user-friendly way. Although I generally stick myself to the field I know best, software development, often I'll learn the particular thing that I'm teaching only moments before I make a video on it. My customers appreciate having stuff demonstrated and explained to them and pay me for this service; they know I'm not a world-class expert in my field and that I'm often working at the moving edge of my own knowledge.
You can even get someone who is an expert to explain stuff to you and record your lessons. There are people around making a living doing exactly this. One thing I experimented with was getting someone to explain the Hungarian language to me, recording the results. We created a course (www.udemy.com/learn-hungarian-fast/) from these videos and currently have more than one thousand subscribers (although many got it early on for free) plus lots of YouTube views. If we had worked at it a little, we could probably have made good money from our course - even though we're teaching Hungarian, a relatively obscure language. My tutor isn't a professional language teacher, but we had fun recording the videos, and people who are interested in learning Hungarian generally enjoy the videos precisely because they are fun.
One of the most useful tools you can use to help you evaluate the level of market interest in your niche (and hence whether or not you're likely to be able to make a good living from it) is the Google Keyword Planner. Type Google Keyword Planner
into Google (www.google.com) and you'll find it. The Keyword Planner lets you enter phrases and find an estimated monthly search volume for those phrases; in other words, it lets you determine how many people are searching Google for your chosen search terms every month. (A reminder: if you need detailed instructions on how to use the Keyword Planner or any other tool mentioned in this book, don't hesitate to search Google for information yourself. It's all out there and usually easy to find.)
Let's say you're thinking of creating videos about oil painting. What would people type into Google if they were looking for oil painting tutorials? Try entering things like oil painting tutorial
, art tutorial
, how to paint
, learn oil painting
and so on into the Keyword Planner. This will give you an idea of how many searches are made per month for your chosen phrase. This figure is known as the monthly search volume. If the answer is that there are only a few dozen searches a month for tutorials in your niche, you are going to really struggle to make a living from your chosen subject. If there are a couple of thousand searches a month for your tutorials, it's potentially a lucrative niche. Ten thousand plus and you may well be able to make really a lot of money.
Of course you also have to keep in mind the question of whether people will be prepared to pay for a course on your chosen subject, or if not a course, then at least some sort of product that you could try to sell to them. You can sell both your own products online, digital or otherwise, and other people's products, taking a cut on every sale. You can also make money from, in effect, selling advertising space on your videos or articles, via services like Google ads and YouTube ads - although this is, as mentioned,