Ever since she was a little girl, Anita wanted to be a physics teacher at the best school in her city. Years of hard work and two degrees later, she is where she wanted to be. She teaches around 150 students and earns a pretty decent paycheque.
On the other hand, Priya, Anita’s colleague at the school, wanted to start her own online academy to teach English. She initially started teaching as a side gig (along with her full-time job), to a handful of students through Learnyst.
Three months later, she resigned her full-time job at the school, started her own academy with over 200 students from all over the county, and is earing in multiples of what her full-time job at the school was paying her.
This post talks about the A-Z of starting your own training academy and how to succeed in your venture like Priya. We will look into the other side of things as well – getting a teaching job and its pros and cons.
As with any other job, there are certain steps you must take to become a teacher. And they are not easy, and the whole process will take years to complete. Here is the standard route adopted by anyone who wishes to be a teacher –
Once you’ve completed the above process, the next step is to find yourself a job; which anyone with experience will tell you is no easy task. You can use platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, Naukri, Monster, etc. or even the traditional newspaper medium to search for vacancies.
But here’s the big question – Is it worth it? Assume that you do manage to find a job, the salary perks are not very impressive. As per PayScale, the average entry-level high school teacher makes just around INR 2.45 LPA, and for experienced teachers, it is just around the INR 4.7 LPA. Someone running an online academy on the flip side can easily earn much more than that.
The following steps should be taken to set up and sell your first online course –
First and foremost, you need to narrow down on your target audience. The ideal thing to do would be to hire a market researcher, but you can also do this yourself by talking to people or running polls on social media. The ultimate goal is to land a specific target audience for your academy. Then you need to find out how scalable this target audience is to estimate profitability. You’ll also need to know where these people might be from – will they purely be from your local market or will you have international students as well?
You will also need the right Learning Malmanagement System and supporting tools to deliver your courses – the eLearning business is 50% content and 50% delivery. Delivery is entirely dependent on speed, user experience, intuitiveness, and other features. The tools you choose should be robust and able to scale up with the growth of your business. The platform you choose should be secure enough that your content doesn’t get stolen under any circumstances.
The most important piece of the game is the content, and it has to make your course stand out from what your competitors are offering. If possible, go for professional-looking content with decent production value. Avoid content with sloppy writings and boring PowerPoints. Either take as much time as required to do it yourself or hire professional writers and designers to do it for you.
It is exhausting and not viable for you to try to do everything on your own. You should stay true to your strengths and weaknesses and only focus on tasks where your strengths lie at and outsource the rest to carefully chosen partners.
After you’re done building your course, the next part is to start marketing it so that enough people enroll. Your marketing strategy is totally dependent on your target audience. For example, if your target audience is people looking for copywriting courses, you can run Google Ads for related keywords.
Because that is what it is. Firstly, you need to learn the economics of the business and learn about revenue, taxes, and pricing. Far too many entrepreneurs have suffered because they didn’t take the time out to understand terms like sunk cost, opportunity cost, and price curves.
As a pioneer in enabling online educators to set up their courses online, Learnyst can help you with the following –
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At Learnyst, we help you with the entire process of course creation to marketing, creating your own branded online academy.
If you already have course content ready, signup with us and get your online academy free for 14 days.
You can create your own branded online academy, upload, sell, and get 100% course sales credited to your bank account during this 14 day trial period.
So, go ahead. Create and Sell Courses online and make 10X revenue within months.