Do you have a skill that people would pay to learn? Whether you’re an expert in social media, using Excel, or building tables and chairs, you can make money by teaching a class through an online teaching platform. And this month you can learn to teach for free.
Online courses are proliferating. And, for someone with a teachable skill, such as pastry-making or appliance repair, they can be an extraordinarily good way to earn semi-passive income. After all, once a course is designed and launched, it can live on the web forever, pulling in new students and new revenue year after year.
(This post may include affiliate links. You can read about our affiliate policy here.)
Learn to teach for free
However while many people have deep knowledge about a topic, the process of designing and implementing an online course is a mystery. How do you structure, film, and edit a self-paced course? How do you define and find your target audience? And how do you market to those people to sell your program?
This month two of the best online teaching platforms — Teachable and Thinkific — are answering those questions with free workbooks and online courses. Both sites normally charge hundreds of dollars for the packages that they’re offering for free in October. So if you’ve ever considered making extra money by sharing your knowledge, now is the time to check it out.
Teachable
Teachable, for instance, has a free 23-page workbook. It’s aimed at helping you find a course topic, develop it, identify a community that needs that information, and generate sales.
The workbook also teaches you how to sell yourself. In other words, how do you convince strangers to pay for your course? It also shows how to use social media to market and sell your class.
If you decide to put your class online, Teachable gives you four ways to do it. You can post the class for free, paying a commission on each sale. Or you can enroll in a monthly subscription plan that allows you to keep more — or all — of the course sales price. (Once you secure more than a dozen sales each month, monthly subscriptions are usually more cost-effective.)
If you choose the second option, paying a $29 to $39 monthly fee, the site provides another group of freebies. These include “mini-courses” that teach you how to write for publication and sales; how to grow your Instagram following and how to set up and grow an email list.
All of Teachable’s plans are fully refundable for 30 days, so even if you pay for a plan, you have no economic risk until the 30-day period is over. Click here to sign up.
Thinkific
Thinkific also offers a group of step-by-step guides. The site suggests that people who want to get started sign up for the site’s free plan and use it to follow along. The best place to start is with the curriculum-building course. This course helps you turn your knowledge into a class and turn your class into a business.
Much like the courses it suggests you make, Thinkific’s free “learn to teach” modules are done in easily digestible snippets. Each course is just 2- to 15-minutes long. They all take on a narrow topic — like putting up your first class — and walk you through the steps.
Add surveys and quizzes to make your course more interactive, the site suggests. And it shows how you can do that with a drop-down menu included in the site’s software. Thinkific also helps you to build a website to support your course sales. This website is hosted by Thinkific, so there is no cost to offer it. Click here to sign up.
One month free
Thinkific’s free plan is truly free — indefinitely. However, the site’s free plans are branded with the Thinkific logo and lack some bells and whistles.
During October, the site is offering a one-month free trial of a far more extensive paid plan which helps you develop a community. Community marketing can be a powerful way to sell courses, as well as ancillary products ranging from t-shirts to books and webinars.
Thinkific’s bundle comes with a plethora of courses that show you how to find and connect your community, as well as the software that can manage sales and contacts. However, this bundle is structured as a one-month free-trial, so you need to cancel within 30 days of signing up or the site will begin charging you $99 for the site’s monthly starter plan.
Leave a Reply