If you have landed on this article, then you’re probably wondering ‘how do I teach English online?’. Well, I have good news for you. You have hit the jackpot here! With this ultimate guide, I am going to unfold everything that you need to know about beginning your online teaching career.
Before we proceed, I want to make two things super clear for you.
“You can make a full-time income from teaching online.”
“Educators are making millions in passive income, selling online courses.”
The chances are you have known it already. Just in case you didn’t, pat yourself on the back for being inquisitive about something which has got high potential.
Online Entrepreneurs are working in the now. If data are to believe, it’s going to rise up. If you have a thing for teaching English, you might leverage this opportunity as well.
This guide will give you an overview of online teaching while answering the questions that any potential educator ask a lot.
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Table of Contents
Qualifications You Need To Teach English Online
One of the perks of teaching online is that you don’t need a degree. It surely helps in building your credibility but is definitely not a necessity. As long as you have the knowledge of the subject & and you are good at teaching others, it doesn’t really matter. Your qualifications or your previous experience don’t determine how successful you will be in the online teaching domain. Especially when you are operating independently.
You just require to come up with a topic and reach out to people who want to learn it online. We are going to cover this bit with a little more depth, keep reading!
Your Teaching Niche
Now that you have decided you will teach English online. You have to decide on the kind of lessons you would be teaching. Getting clarity over your teaching niche would help you thrive and bring in new students.
Rather than saying that you teach English online, steer clear of the following things:
- Who would you teach i.e., your target audience.
- How would you teach i.e. your medium of teaching & form of communication.
- What area of English you teach. Example: Whether you would focus on training people to speak fluently, or to write better or would just give basic grammar lessons.
Getting clarity on the above questions would help you put the best foot forward. You will be able to communicate with your potential learners what exactly are you going to teach. You would attract the right set of audience.
This step is important. However, don’t let all of this intimidate you from getting started.
Your niche will eventually evolve over time. With experience, you will be able to figure out what works best for you & your audience.
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Selection of teaching platform
If you want to take up teaching seriously, having a course website is a must.
Owning a course website would help you monitor your marketing efforts as well as get the best results out of it.
When it comes to hosting your website, there are a lot of options available.
You could use the help of someone who can build your comprehensive course website. However, this process requires a handsome amount of investment in terms of time & money. On top of that, in order to keep your website up & running, you need its regular maintenance.
If you want a hassle-free, economical way to own a course website, you can sign up with a course platform, like Graphy. You can go to a domain registrar like Godaddy and reserve the name for your course website.
Best Platform to Sell Online Courses
Curating Your Course Content
Once you have planned out on the kind of content you would create, it’s time to do it. Curate the information from all the available sources and then filter out. If you have thought about creating video lectures, start preparing its modules.
Follow the following step to curate a well-drafted course module:
- Research about the teachers who are already teaching in your domain.
- Create a pool of information from all the available source.
- Finalize on the right combination of teaching methodologies.
- Audio-visual contents are on a high these days, so make sure your teaching module includes videos or live classes.
- Filter out the irrelevant content.
- Create crisp, effective lessons in an effective & logical manner.
- Keep refining until you are satisfied. Don’t overdo it.
- Recheck your content again before publishing it.
Pricing Your English Teaching Lessons
Determining the pricing of your course is an essential step towards success. You need to answer two different questions to come up with a perfect pricing strategy for your course.
- Your earning Goal (Like How much target to make money online)
- The market rate for your niche.
Your earning goal depends on various circumstances including your professional competence. On the other hand, to answer the second question you need to do a little bit of market research and figure out how much online educators are charging for the English lessons that you are offering. The answer would vary as per the brand and the target audience.
Any established brand might charge higher than a novice who is new in the market.
An ideal way to go about it is to give free demo lessons or free access to a particular chapter. It will gauge the attention of your audience. Once they see the value you are offering, they will be more certain to buy your courses.
The Right Way To Go About Promoting Your Courses
Whenever a teacher wants to foray into the E-learning industry, there are lots of questions. The highly demanded one is “How do I get students?”
If you own an offline coaching institute, launching an online platform doesn’t intimidate that much. After all, you already have an audience. You don’t have to start from scratch.
However, for someone who doesn’t have an offline audience, the online audience helps that much as well. If you give English lessons on youtube or even your Instagram, that’s a great start.
If you have none, well, it’s never too late to begin.
In your marketing strategies, the first thing is to define your audience and find them where they spend time. You can’t overlook its significance. Targeting your marketing strategies at the right places will bring in potential students. These are the prospects who are interested to learn what you are offering.
With attractive landing pages, you will be able to capture your target audience and convert them into paying customers.
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Short Term Vs Long-term marketing strategies
Short-term marketing strategies help you to draw attention when you are just starting out. These might cost you a little money, but it’s the best way to quickly fill up your schedule. One such way is Online Advertising or placing Ads.
Long-term strategies take time to build & fetch results. Creating killer course content & developing a relationship with your learners is one way to go about it. In the months & years to come, you will have students speaking for you & bringing you more students through referrals.
Connections and Community
Have you ever tried working out and lost motivation midway? Wouldn’t you agree with me if I tell you having someone to work out together would have stopped you from giving up too soon?
It’s because being a lone wolf doesn’t help when you want to foray into a totally new kingdom. You would be having multiple questions about your content, about your marketing strategies, basically about every decision that you make. To simplify the whole online teaching process, I would recommend two ways to go about it:
Connect with other online educators.
Network with people who are already operating in your domain. This would open up a whole new world of opportunities for you. You would be able to bounce off ideas, take their advice when you need it & rise together.
Take the help of social media, put yourself out there & build relationships.
Launch a course platform with multiple instructors
This might sound like a lot of work. But, hear me out. There are offline coaching institutes where two or more teachers come together and teach their specific subjects. Imagine launching something similar, but online.
If you are someone who wants to teach basic grammar online, you can partner up with someone who wants to teach English speaking online. Both of you can come up with a name like LearnEng.com and sign up as two instructors. All of it will be a cakewalk if you create a course platform through Graphy.
Tools You’ll Need to Teach Online
Google calendar to keep your lessons organized. This helps the most especially if you teach via Live Classes.
Canva: Design simple creatives for your brand.
Trello or Buffer to plan & schedule your posts.
A quick note on getting started:
This is often the hardest part.
My best advice is this: don’t wait to be perfect because that will never happen.
Teach to get experience. Create videos to learn how to make better videos. Start marketing your lessons now.
Feel free to drop by if you need any help. Our team would be happy to help.support@graphy.com +91 8882603465
