How to Make a Great Living Teaching Online

By John Purcell

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Purcell
• Release date: Sep 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310773082

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.

Book preview

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,

Reviews for How to Make a Great Living Teaching Online

[Zoran Simunovic · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very 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.

[Kareen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I 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!