Becoming financially independent as a student is one of the biggest achievements you can accomplish at this stage of your life.
While generic tips like saving money, being wise with your credit card, getting a part time job work to an extent, if you are serious about making some real money, you will need a dependable source of income.
With this article, we aim to help you do exactly that.
Now, many of you must be thinking, “that’s why I am studying!”. However, what most of you don’t realise is that after being a student of various subjects for several years of your lives, you may have developed certain skills that others will pay good money to learn.
From tutoring subjects that you excel at, to teaching skills that have helped you earn a side income in the past, you can share your skills in the online landscape to make an extra buck.
With that said, turning anything into a dependable source of income will require hard work.
In this article, we will discover the process through which you can share your skills with others to generate a dependable source of income (and perhaps learn a few new skills in the process!).
Let’s begin:
What Will The Student Teach?
This is perhaps the most important step of this process. Deciding which subject or skill you will teach will help you decide other important things like who you will be teaching, and which platforms you will be using to deliver and promote your training initiative.
A great way to begin understanding this is to look at the current skills you have. Have you made any money freelancing as a copywriter before? Perhaps you are skilled at coding. Are you a website design mastermind?
These are all practical skills that people can use to find jobs or make money as a freelancer. If you have one such skill, you can move on to the next step.
If, however, you are unable to identify one such skill, don’t be disheartened. Your skill may just be that you are a diligent student.
Look back on your school/college days and identify the one subject you have always been good at. Most of us can identify this one subject or topic that we have always loved, and have seemed to understand and grasp better than our peers.
From grade-school level mathematics to english, there are a number of subjects that you can teach to other struggling students online.
The best part about this is, you don’t have to go through the rest of the steps in this article. Simply sign up to an online tutoring website like Preply or TutorMe, get through their evaluations, and start teaching.
However, the downside of doing this is that while it will pay you well, it will be like a part time job where you will have to dedicate certain hours of your day to the task, every day.
If that isn’t something that you want to deal with, it is better to identify another money-making skill that you can teach others, and move on to the next steps in this article.
Create Training Content You Wish You Were Taught With
This is where the hard work begins. Developing course content can be a time consuming and sometimes frustrating task. However, once you get this right, you can be sure of providing a useful and positive learning experience to your future students.
To begin, try to determine what is the best way to deliver your knowledge. Can it be efficiently delivered in a text-only format? Or do you need videos to be able to explain concepts to your students?
With the answers in mind, start developing your course content. A few things you should keep in mind to make sure your course material is impactful are:
- Create Short Lessons: Known as microlearning, the practice of creating short lessons that can be consumed easily is a proven way to improve the impact of any training material.
- Include Assessments: Assessments are a way for you to track the progress of your learners. At the same time, they will act as a way for your future students to verify their newfound skills.
- Use Multimedia: The use of multimedia is another proven way to create more engaging training material. Since we are all used to consuming videos and infographics on the web, training material presented in the same way becomes easier to consume.
The task of developing course material can seem daunting. Thankfully, there are a number of free online tools available that will help you get the job done quicker and in a relatively hassle free manner.
One of the most commonly used methods to develop online courses is to create a presentation style course coupled with a voice over. With this method, you will be creating a PPT that will contain all the information in text format. Then, you can use a screen recording software to create a voice over video for different lessons.
Publishing And Managing Training Material
Once you are done developing your training material, it is time to publish it for the world to see. At this stage you have two options.
One, publish your course on platforms like Udemy or Teachable. However, keep in mind that these platforms have their own limitations and conditions.
For instance, on Udemy, you can only upload video training material. Similarly, the payout process for Teachable is painstakingly long and your course fee may be held up by them for several weeks. However, if you still want to use Udemy, the platform has an extremely detailed guide on the subject.
The other alternative is to build your own website and offer your course through an elearning LMS (learning management system). LMS are cloud based platforms that allow you to upload and manage your training content on the web.
These tools also allow you to enroll students that can consume your training content on the same platforms. They come loaded with features that allow you to manage learner profiles, assign different courses to different students, and track their progress.
There are a number of free LMS available in the market as well. While these are great for getting started, they offer a limited number of features.
Building your own website and signing up for an LMS may require a bit of an initial investment, but it gives you complete control over your course and its management.
However, it is important to keep in mind that you will need to have at least beginner level understanding of web development, and should be ready to spend a considerable amount of time in managing your online learning website.
And Learn Another New Skill… Marketing!
This is the final step of this process. Marketing your course can be a bit tricky. On one hand, you have paid marketing methods which work really well with the right targeting information. However, chances are, most of the readers don’t have the kind of money required to test out a paid marketing strategy.
For this reason, it is better to invest your time instead of your money to generate interest in your course. Organic marketing techniques like search engine optimisation and content marketing involve a bit of a learning curve and require a few weeks/months to show effect, they work beautifully with the right kind of effort.
These topics require a complete blog post of their own so we won’t be expanding on these here. However, a simple Google search will reveal a wealth of actionable articles that you can use to learn these skills and put them to use.
Conclusion
Before wrapping up, I’d like to acknowledge the fact that the whole process described in this article may seem straightforward right now but requires a lot of time and effort to get right.
Hence, you should use this article as a starting point and do more research into the matter if you want to create a course that people will actually be interested in buying.
If you have questions or queries, we would be happy to address them in the comment section!
