Think you Might Want to Teach Online Someday?

Think You Might Want to Teach Online Someday? (but don’t know what to do or how to start?)

If you’ve ever dreamed of owning your own online business but feel completely overwhelmed at the prospects of starting, know that there are some simple things that that you can do today to prepare for whatever your future online business becomes!

Start to regularly post to social media. Engage with your audience, see what they like and what they don’t, what they respond to, what they need, and what they have enough of. You also get to practice your voice, teach what you know, see what is interesting to you and what isn’t. Helpful hint: Don’t try to do it all! Pick one platform (instagram, facebook, youtube, pinterest) and go all in.

Learn, learn, learn. Become a student of the subjects that you are interested in. What do you want to know? What do you want to teach? What subjects have always been fascinating to you? The machine that you are reading these words on contains the MOST INCLUSIVE KNOWLEDGE LIBRARY THAT HAS EVER EXISTED (in this dimension on this planet, of course.) You can find out just about anything from inside your own home! Ask questions on google, read blogs, listen to podcasts, stumble around on youtube for so many things you didn’t even know existed! I encourage you to support your local bookstore, but you can order lots of books from the internet too. Helpful hint: Engage with anything and everything that sparks your interest and keeps you wanting to learn more.

Grow your email list by creating an easy opt-in that is valuable to your audience and quintessential client so when you’re ready to launch, whenever that may be, you have someone to launch to. It’s a very simple premise; create something that your audience would love (a supplies guide, meditation, mini course, webinar, playlist, etc) and give it to them in exchange for their email address. Email marketing is an incredibly effective marketing tool that you will surely use when you start your online business. Helpful hint: Keep it simple! People can be overloaded with information so the simpler you make your opt-in, the better.

You don’t have any way to contact your social media following if that platform goes away. Having email addresses is the only sure  (presuming that the fall of facebook does’t mean the apocalypse, which means email prob won’t exist anymore either)

Research other people who you admire or who are further along in their online teaching career than you are to see what they are doing. Not for self judgement but for inspiration and ideas about how you could run your business. Sign up for opt ins, watch webinars, see what the different options are. Helpful hint: If someone is doing something very similar to what you dream of, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do that thing. In fact it means that you CAN and you know its a prosperous idea because someone else is already doing it successfully!

Start teaching in person right now, even if you feel like you’re not ready! You can never get in trouble if you teach what you know from your own experiences and aren’t afraid to say when you don’t know the answer to something. Community centers, yoga studios, and outdoor spaces are great places to start! Even if only one or two people show up, teaching in person gives you real time feedback on how people are responding to what you’re offering. Here is where you’ll fine tune your style, words/phrases that you use, and see first hand what’s working and what’s not. Helpful hint: Ask for feedback and suggestions at the end of every class, telling your students that this is how you grow and learn to offer your students exactly what they need. Don’t forget to collect email addresses of your students!

I hope you find this information useful! Please comment with any questions that you have and let me know what methods you implement into your growing business!

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Think you might want to teach online someday? (but don’t know what to do or how to start?)

Regularly post to social media engage with your audience, learn what they like + don't like.

Become a student of the subjects that you are interested in; take classes, explore, read books.

Grow your email list by creating an opt-in that people will offer their email address for.

Research what other people who are further along in their online teaching career are doing.

Start teaching in person to anyone, anywhere. This is where you'll hone your teaching skills.