5 Ways to Transform Your Teaching Experience into an Online Business

Teaching English as a foreign language can be an incredible and rewarding experience. You can meet like-minded people, experience a new culture and get paid well with a low cost of living. Due to high demand, teaching English in China is a popular destination for both first-time and experienced teachers.

However, teaching doesn’t have to stop in the classroom. The valuable skills you learn can lead to many other exciting opportunities for those with an entrepreneurial mindset. Turning your experience and knowledge into a lucrative career isn’t as difficult as you might have thought.

Here are five ways that you can transform your teaching experience into an online business:

1. ESL Teacher Training

Even if you’ve only been teaching ESL for one or two years, your experience can still be valuable to people who are starting their teaching journey. Many people choose to get their teaching certifications online and you can help them through that process by teaching classes and sharing your experiences.

There are a few different ways that you can approach this. You can start by creating a website that caters to offering advice for new teachers. Alternatively, you can become certified and set up your own TEFL/TESOL school, which in terms of remuneration and opportunity to spread your knowledge, definitely would be first prize in the long run. There are plenty of options out there and websites are easy to set up using WordPress.

2. Help Language Learners Online

Websites such as Tutor and Italki are online communities that facilitate one on one tutoring process with native speakers and is also a great connective, networking platform. It’s always important to remember that language learning is a collective and continuous process, and platforms like this are very useful.

Becoming a tutor online is a fairly simple process. You need to create an account, set your prices, and create a video. It allows you to directly tutor English learners one-on-one via Skype, and it’s up to you how you teach and set your prices. It’s a fantastic opportunity for any native speaker to be their own boss and help facilitate the language learning process.

3. Publish Training Materials For ESL Teachers

There is a very big market for ESL teacher training content. Putting together modules and lesson plans with the knowledge and experience you have, creates a valuable resource. You can create your own website and market the content directly to training companies and individuals.

From creating lesson plans, classroom activities, the practical aspects of teaching abroad, and everything involved with the process, all of this information is valuable and there will be a market for it. You will also be able to sell the content to existing companies directly, and this is usually very lucrative if the content is relevant.

4. Assist ESL Recruiters Through Video Blogging

Recruiters often desire to improve their ability to recruit ESL teachers. With your first-hand experience teaching abroad, you could develop a video blog which could greatly assist recruiters to find suitable candidates.

These videos are highly marketable to recruiting companies and all you need to start up is a video camera and scripts for your blog posts. Choosing the format for the scripts is the most important, always remember that relevant content is key, and will always be the most marketable. This not only makes for an easily marketable business but one that also has relatively low start-up costs.

5. Create Your Own ESL School

If you’re really ambitious, you can create an entire ESL school online! You can create a website and market your school. This is an exciting and fun way to use all of the ESL teaching skills you’ve picked up in your career and continue to develop them.

Technology has made it easy to teach a class of students online, and there are a number of platforms you can use for teaching. Online forums are excellent for developing a sense of community among your students, and you can publish all of your teaching materials on your site.

The teaching experience that you have is incredibly valuable, so don’t let it go to waste. There are many options out there for fully utilising your unique skill sets, get out there and make it happen!