7 Practical Steps to Starting an Online Teaching Business

Starting Your Own Online Teaching Business Isn’t As Hard As You Think

Here is a list of the most important things you need if you’re going to start your own online teaching business.

Now…

Take it step by step. Get one thing done each time you sit down and you’ll be up and running before you know it!

Here are the 7 steps you need to take in order to start your business:

Confirm Your Idea
Create a Web Site
Choose Scheduling Software
Decide on Payment Processing
Choose an Email Service Provider
Set Up Your Marketing Funnel
Get Ready to Teach Classes

Want a copy of this checklist? I’ll send you a copy. Just drop in your name and email below.

Let’s take a Closer Look at Each of the Steps to Starting Your Online Teaching Business

1. Confirm Your Idea

Before you start building anything, you will want to confirm your idea!

We need to confirm the following:

Can I find my ideal students or clients online?
Are they willing to spend money to get help in solving their particular challenges?
Does my idea help them solve one or more of their particular challenges?

Question 1: Can I find my ideal students or clients online?

Do you know where to find your ideal students or clients? Are you a part of social media groups, threads, hashtags, communities etc. where your ideal students hang out? If you teach kids, this might mean that you can find their parents online. If you wanted to share a post with your ideal students or clients, do you know where to share it so that they would see it? There are many places to find and connect with people online now. Most any of them will do as long as you can get access to your ideal students or clients.

Question 2: Are they willing to spend money to get help in solving their particular challenges?

If you’re wanting to build a business to support yourself financially either full time or part time, you will need students or clients who are capable of and willing to spend money to solve their particular challenges. Some people don’t have the financial means to pay for your services. Others might have the money, but they are not willing to spend it on the kinds of services you offer.

You can check this by seeing whether there are other services offering programs like yours where your ideal customers are already spending money. Another way to check is whether or not you see paid ads on Google search results or in social media for the kinds of services you’re going to offer.

Question 3: Does my idea help them solve one or more of their particular challenges?

Finally, you need to confirm that your idea actually aims to solve a problem your ideal customer feels that they have. This is not a challenge that YOU believe that they have, but a challenge that THEY believe they have and sincerely want to resolve. People don’t pay for programs simply because a certain topic is being taught and they’re curious to know more. People buy transformation; people buy results. They have a problem or a challenge, and they are looking for a solution.

Similar to someone buying a drill. The point of buying the drill is to get a hole. The point of the hole is to be able to put up a shelf. The point of the shelf is to beautify their home space. If you want to sell drills, sell the beautification of a customer’s home.

If you answered:

If you answered “yes” to the above three questions, you’re ready to move to the next step.
If you’re not sure about the answers to the above 3 questions, then it is worth spending some time to make sure you can say “yes” to all three.
If you answered “no” to any of the above 3 questions, then you may either need to come up with a new idea or tweak your idea to better fit the needs of your ideal students or clients.

2. Create a Web Site

You need a home online. Choose a hosted site or do-it-yourself site or get the best of both worlds. DON’T overthink this. Just get something created so that you have somewhere to send people. You can perfect it with time.

– Hosted Options include: Wix, Weebly, & Squarespace which can be easy to use but expensive. Also, Squarespace does not process payments from people outside the U.S.

– Do It Yourself: Choosing to host a WordPress site with a hosting service like Bluehost can be cheaper but requires more technical know-how, fixing problems, and dealing with the slow speeds of cheap servers.

– Need more help? The Independent Teachers Academy shows you how to get your professional website up and running.

3. Choose Your Scheduling Software

You don’t have to use scheduling software. You can simply charge for a program or a certain number of lessons and then hammer out the times afterward with your clients or students. That said, scheduling software is an easy way for people to schedule classes with you at times you have made available and that automatically takes care of timezones. This can save a lot of time and frustration.

– Scheduling Software Options include: Acuity Scheduling, SimplyBook.Me are a couple that handle both recurring classes and timezones. Calendly is awesome but does not do recurring classes. These options generally run between $15-30 a month.

– Google Forms can be forced into the service of scheduling, but even though it’s free, it’s going to require more regular maintenance, isn’t as professional, and doesn’t connect to payment processing.

– Do-it-yourself options on a WordPress site can be a little cheaper, but still requires monthly or yearly fees, more technical expertise, and doesn’t always have all the options you may need. You can find a number of options on CodeCanyon.

– Need more help? The Independent Teachers Academy walks through everything you need to know about scheduling.

4. Decide on Payment Processing

You need to have a way for people to pay you.

– Direct Payment Processing options include: PayPal, Stripe, WeChat, Square, Bitpay, Alipay, etc. Paypal and Stripe are the most common, and any of these options can work for you. You will either need to integrate one of these with your scheduling software (see above), create a button on your site, or simply send customers a link to pay. These options may not be as professional-looking to your customer.

– 3rd-party Payment Processing options include: Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, BigCommerce, ThriveCart, SamCart, OpenCart, SendOwl. These options usually allow you to embed a shopping cart on your website or you can put a link on your site to a shopping cart page for payment processing. These can also be quite expensive with monthly fees ranging from $20 – $100 a month or more. With WordPress, you can use the free Woocommerce plugin, but it is more technically demanding and many Woocommerce add-ons can be quite expensive. These options may not connect well with your scheduling.

– Need more help? The Independent Teachers Academy shows you exactly how to set up payment processing in order to take payments from your students or clients.

5. Choose an Email Service Provider

You can’t use Gmail or Outlook to send out mass emails to lots of people. You’ll need an Email Service Provider. With most Email Service Providers, you can collect email addresses and send out automated emails to people who sign up. Since email is one of your #1 marketing tools for your business (in tandem with social media), you’ll want to do this well.

– Expensive but powerful Email Service Provider options: There are many, but, unfortunately, many of them charge way too much for what you’ll likely need for your business. These include ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, InfusionSoft, GetResponse, Drip, etc.

– Free or inexpensive options include: MailChimp, SendFox, SendinBlue, G-Suite, Hubspot, etc. These can be great, but can also be more technically difficult to set up (i.e. G-Suite) or suffer on deliverability (i.e. MailChimp).

– Need more help? The Independent Teachers Academy provides you with all of the steps to setting up an Email Service Provider for email.

6. Set Up Your Marketing Funnel

Your marketing funnel is the path someone will take from never having heard of you to signing up for classes with you.

Your funnel or customer journey will likely look something like the following:

Social Media Engagement -> Visit Your Web Site -> Sign Up for Email List -> Visit Your Sales/Scheduling Page -> Pay for Classes

Set Up Your Social Media Profile: Based on step 1 when you confirmed your idea, you should have a good idea of where your ideal students or clients are. Set up a profile for yourself there so that you can start sharing content with your students or clients. Don’t try to do them all. Focus on one or two and build an audience.
Create a Freebie to give away on your site where your ideal customer has to put in their email address to download it.
Start sending helpful emails to those people who sign up for your email list.
Create a sales page and checkout for your program.
Send an offer to the people on your email list to sign up for your program.

Inside the Independent Teachers Academy, we’ll go through exactly how to set up each of these steps in your marketing funnel.

8. Get Ready to Teach!

Once customers start coming through your funnel and you have classes scheduled, you’ll need a way to teach them online.

– Live Teaching Platform options: Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Team, GoToMeeting, Skype, Facetime, Blue Jeans, Join.Me, etc. Most of these will let you share your screen so that you can show powerpoints, whiteboards, etc while others come with these features included. You’ll need a way to notify customers of where to go for class once they sign up. In the Independent Teachers Membership, Zoom links can be created and sent out automatically, but other platforms can be used as well.

– Program or Curriculum: You’ll need a good program or curriculum to follow that gets people results. If you get your students or clients results, they will be so happy that they come back for more classes and tell their friends about you.

– Need more help: The Independent Teachers Membership walks you through developing your own program when teaching online as well as popular live teaching platforms like Zoom.

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The Feeling You Get…

…when you tell your bestie you’ve begun following your dreams.

This checklist covers all of the basics you need to get your own online teaching business up and running!

Think of how you’ll feel when you take those first steps.

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Starting Your Own Online Tutoring Business Checklist

You can download this 8-page checklist which is packed with information and tips for getting up and running starting today.

Your Website
Your Scheduling
Your Payment Processing
and More…

Don’t wait to start creating the future you’d like to have for yourself. In a few years you will look back and wonder what things could have been liked if you had just started.

I’ve started multiple successful businesses and I can walk you through the exact steps you need to take to be successful too.

The hardest thing is starting.

After that, you just need to keep taking baby steps forward and, before you know it, you’ll be there.

Resources to Get Started

Independent Teachers Academy ->
Download the Business Checklist (See below)

Questions, thoughts? Leave them in the comments below.