#17 Developing different income streams within your ELT business

In my most recent LinkedIn Live, I spoke to Young Learners specialist, materials writer and teacher trainer, Michelle Worgan about how she has developed different strands to her core materials writing business since taking my group programme, Designed to Flourish, last year.

Michelle talked about how she had increasingly felt that solely focusing on materials writing for publishers wasn’t quite hitting the spot in terms of really making a difference. She had been interested in approaches such as inquiry based learning for some time, and wanted to be able to both explore these further, and help other teachers who were looking to bring a bit more to their classroom practice.

She now has three main strands: materials writing, a group programme, and passive income materials packs. And, as well as the satisfaction and increased professional growth, these new strands also provide another source of income.

Income as a writer or editor is famously often a question of feast or famine. With the best will in the world, delays happen or projects fail to get approved, and you can find yourself either twiddling your thumbs (and not getting paid) or overloaded. Having the ability to create your own income on top can help to smooth out these peaks and troughs, and give you are more predictable and reliable income overall.

Let’s look a little deeper at the two new income streams Michelle has developed, and some tips for making these work for you.

Online courses and group programmes.

The barriers to running your own online courses have massively come down in the last few years, as people are more and more comfortable with attending online, and the tech has got cheaper and easier to manage. If you have expertise in a particular area, and you’re confident that there is a need and market for it, there are quite a few options available for you.

At one end of the scale you have a completely live group programme, run in real time on a platform like Zoom, and possibly recorded for participants to keep afterwards and/or to watch if they have to miss a session. At the other end of the scale, you have a completely asychnronous course, available for self-study any time, but without any feedback or interaction. There are dozens of platforms to create your course on, which charge an annual fee or take a small fee per participant.

And, something which people don’t always consider, there are so many ways to create something which is a mixture of both approaches. For example, the input is recorded, but dripped weekly, and there are live coaching sessions which take a kind of flipped classroom approach. One of the things I do on my group programme is to help people work out exactly where the sweet spot is between the expertise they have, and what is actually needed/wanted, and then how best to design a programme model which works both for them and for their participants (Incidentally, this could be a 1-2-1 model as well as a group programme).

Self-published teaching resources and books

The idea of passive income is a very attractive one, and most teachers have a plethora of materials they have created. It seems obvious that a potential income stream is to self-publish these, either on your own site, or on a site such as Teachers Pay Teachers, or as books- digital or paperback- on Amazon. If this is of interest to you, check out my previous newsletter on passive income ideas.

However, it has to be said with all these ideas for an extra income stream, the sticking point is nearly always the marketing. Passive income can be a misnomer, as it’s often very far from passive, and requires effective keyword research, a robust marketing plan and consistent promotion. A group programme can actually be an easier sell at times, despite the usually much higher price point, because you don’t need to sell anywhere near as many (and there’s a clear reason for the potential client to buy it now, rather than ‘some time’)

Michelle has written a really informative blog off the back of the live interview, which I highly recommend if you want some more tips about what to do (and what not to do) when marketing your new income streams. Here's the link to watch the live interview with Michelle which inspired this newsletter.

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The next Earn Learn Thrive LinkedIn live will be on October 12th at 2.00pm UK time. I’ll be talking to Ros Wright , a clinical communications trainer and materials writer. We'll be talking about what's involved in teaching clinical communications and OET, a specialism which has rocketed in popularity lately. Join us live and ask questions, or watch the replay.

Check out Michelle’s courses and products here https://michelleworgan.com/