In the recently published Side Gigs for Teachers: Ways to Actually Make Money  Jackie Bolen and Jennifer Booker Smith seek to show educators how to earn extra money in their spare time. We reached out to co-author Jackie Bolen and asked her some questions about the book and side hustling in general. We hope you enjoy the interview and be sure to grab your copy of Side Gigs for Teachers today!

1) What inspired the two of you to write this book?

Jennifer and I are both “retired” teachers who met while teaching English in South Korea. Of course, we’re not really retired and are still super busy doing a million things! She’s traveling around the world, and I’ve since moved back home to Canada.

We got started with self-publishing books, developing websites, and putting materials on Teacher Pay Teachers while still teaching in Korea. But these days, we’re both making a full-time living off of our side-gigs.

We hope to inspire other teachers out there (ESL and otherwise) to get their own side hustle going on. It’s an excellent way to earn a bit of cash in your spare time, or even make it into a career like we have. If you’re not happy in the classroom, need a break, or just want to have a bit more cash in your bank account at the end of the month, there are options out there!

2) About how many side gigs for teachers does the book cover?

We divide the side-gigs up into two categories: Active, and Passive.

By “active,” we mean things like tutoring, pet sitting, or test evaluating. Basically, you have to work one hour for one hour of pay with these side-gigs. We discuss 14 of the best ones for teachers options in detail. Teachers have a lot of skills like public speaking, writing, and knowledge about certain areas so why not put that to good use to make some extra money?

The second category of side gigs are passive ones. By “passive,” we mean that you have to put a lot of work (or money with investing) in up-front, but that you can earn money for years down the road. Some of the examples are self-published books, affiliate websites, and investing in the stock market. We give you all the details for how to get started with seven of these ones.

3) Can you tell us about two or three of your favorite side gigs for teachers covered in the book?

There are a few that I’m currently using to make a full-time income. Jennifer and I have 20+ self-published books that you can find on Amazon. The first one took a lot of time, effort and frustration! But, we’ve learned so much along the way that the process has gotten much easier over time.

I also develop Amazon affiliate websites. Basically, I review products on Amazon and if people click a product link on my website, and purchase something on Amazon, I get a commission. This side-gig is good for people who have a very, very long-term vision. It can take a year or two of solid work before you ever earn you first dollar. But, there is huge potential to make this into a full-time job for yourself.

Jennifer is the guru of all things Teachers Pay Teachers. You can put your course materials on that website and people pay you to download them. If you already spend a lot of time creating some awesome stuff, why not make a bit of extra money off of it?

4) What kind of teachers do you think can be successful with side hustles?

I really think that just about anyone can start a side hustle. There are a million and one different ones so you’re sure to find a side-gig or two that will work for you. In our book, we talk about 21 of them, and I’d be very, very surprised if you read the book and couldn’t find one that would work!

However, the people that do the best with starting a side-hustle are usually motived, and are also long-term thinkers. It can a while before you start to get some traction in terms of earning serious money. The key is to believe in what you’re doing, work smart, and also be willing to put in some serious effort to get things off the ground. Of course, perseverance helps a lot. You will get some motivation though when you earn your first dollar from your side hustle.

5) For a busy teacher just getting started trying to make money on the side, what kind of general advice would you give them?

The best advice I could give you is to start with one side-gig. It can be tempting to try and get a million things up and running, but in reality, you’ll have more success if you master one thing. Give yourself at least six months before trying another one.

The other thing I would say is to just start NOW! Actually, yesterday was the best time, but it’s not too late today. You can spend months and years researching and thinking and planning, but it’s better to just make some forward progress in terms of action. You WILL make mistakes. Everybody does. Learn from them and keep putting one foot in front of the other.

6) Besides your books, do you have any recommended resources for teachers getting started with side gigs?

I am a huge fan of Pat Flynn over at Smart Passive Income. He interviews the top people in the online business world.

7) Anything else you would like to tell us or share with our readers?

You can find me online at www.jackiebolen.com. I’m happy to help you out by answering a question or two. I also offer consulting via Skype for more detailed advice about getting a side-gig up and running. Get in touch!

Side Gigs for Teachers: Ways to Actually Make Money is available now on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback versions!

So you’re a teacher and you spend tons of time pouring over lesson plans, activities, and resources for the young minds you’re teaching.

Whether you’re the super creative who does this daily or an occasional designer of a worksheet here or there, you have the potential to make some side money.

How you may be wondering? On one website, teacher-authors have made over 175 MILLION DOLLARS since their founding.

Around three million members browse their site for new materials for their own classroom. Teachers from any school can upload their materials to create their own small business.

How to Side Hustle

The best thing about this side hustle is that most of the work has already been done. All that’s left is a quick upload after registering with Teachers Pay Teachers. Membership is free for the basic seller but for even higher royalties, sellers can pay around $60 a year for the premium membership. You can put as much effort into your store, descriptions, and teacher instructions as you want depending on what kind of return you hope to see.

By uploading documents, lesson plans, and even teaching planners, teachers have the opportunity to make some sort of income out of this side hustle. It’s also important to keep a record of income and expenses incurred for tax purposes.

The simplicity of this website is what makes side hustling even more appealing. Each teacher gets a store (think Etsy) and can promote their store on their social media pages. Also, any of the current members can happen upon the store as well.

For the driven hustler, sellers can place ads that will appear on prominent places of the website to drive even more traffic and promote their materials.

It’s for The Whole School

Not only can individual teachers buy different resources, but the website offers services to the whole school.

This is attractive to different schools because they can set a budget and buy different materials fit for each grade and intelligence level to help students achieve where they need to be.

Teachers Pay Teachers does a great job of offering services that focus on the student and the teachers themselves as well. It’s an added bonus to work with a company that advocates for your line of work.

Through multiple licenses, great material has the chance to be bought for a whole grade or as a resource for all of the teachers in one school district. This creates a serious stream of income for the chosen seller.

What to Sell?

Almost every teacher is going to have something to contribute.

The website offers a wide range of products including physical goods. If you sell any of the following, it may be time to open up a store.

• Lesson Plans
• Task Cards
• Worksheets
• Classroom Décor
• Activities
• Teacher Planning Calendars
• Hard Educational Goods
• Printables

How to Build Up Your Store

If you want to take your side hustle up a level, you may want to start marketing your store. One neat way to bring more people to your store is by providing free resources and printables. Many side hustlers do this in whatever career course they are on to bring attention to what they offer.

If people like what they download, they may come back to buy more. Plus, who doesn’t like helping out a fellow teacher.
Another creative way would be by creating a business Facebook page for your store and updating it with new materials. A great way to generate likes or follows is by creating a contest.

By using gift cards that Teachers Pay Teachers offer, sellers can reward a lucky follower after hitting a goal for likes on their business page.

Not only does this have more people seeing your new material on Facebook but also gets the winner onto the Teacher Pay Teachers site. The hustle part of side hustling is promoting your products and getting your name out there.

It’s always good, as mentioned earlier, to promote your store on any of your social media channels. There are different Facebook groups as well to join where you can share links to any of your stores or product pages. Try searching for anything “teacher resources” related and be sure to check the guidelines for posting etiquette.

Some of the top sellers for TPT treat their stores as more of a business than a side hustle and have amazing marketing plans in place. If your store starts to really take off and people love what you’re creating, you may have the potential to create your own business. Top sellers tend to utilize Pinterest marketing and run their own blogs as well.

Why Side Hustle?

The best part of side hustling is that you’re self-employed. You decide how driven you want to be and the hours you want to put in. Whether you want to upload occasionally and let people find your store to adding content daily and promoting like crazy is up to you.

Even an extra $100 a month can sound appealing to several people. There are numerous teachers who are extremely successful selling their content as well who can make thousands a year.

It’s truly up to the side hustler on what they want to achieve. Usually what you put in, you get out of it.

We are excited to announce that going forward we will be featuring regular interviews with financially savvy educators and other awesome personalities.  It is our hope that these interviews will serve as motivation and inspiration for you!   To kick things off, we share our interview with Gina Horkey, freelancer extraordinaire and creator of  “30 Days or Less to Freelance Writing Success: A Course for Brand Spanking New Freelancers.”

For this interview, we asked Gina a handful of questions relating to educators and freelance writing.  Without further ado, here are our questions followed by Gina’s compelling responses!

What qualities make a good freelance writer? Do you think educators are (in general) well-suited for freelance writing?

Just get started!
I think you should probably enjoy writing at the bare minimum.

Being good at it or having decent writing chops is helpful, but can also be learned and improved over time. The best qualities are probably having a thick skin and fierce determination – success from freelance writing comes from putting yourself out there consistently and following up. I.e. marketing yourself and doing the work.

I think teachers and educators are definitely prime candidates for freelance writing.

As an educator you’re likely pretty good at teaching and imparting helpful information on students. Writing as a medium accomplishes the same thing – you’re communicating and educating an audience of readers and ideally helping them to improve their lives in some way.

How much can a part-time freelance writer expect to earn?

Of course I have to say it depends. 😉

It depends on these factors:

• Your niche. Some niches are higher paying, like personal finance or healthcare.
• Your experience. As you gain experience (and samples) as a writer, you can command higher rates.
• Your confidence. If you don’t believe you’re worth a certain rate, you won’t ask for it.

From my experience, new freelance writers tend to start out around the $30-50/article mark and work their way up. More experienced writers command hundreds of dollars per post.

Using myself as an example, freelance writing is only a portion of my diversified business, so I’d consider it “part-time.” I average $2,000-3,000 from just writing in an average month with just a few key clients.

Can you share a success story of an educator who successfully freelance writes?

There are actually a fair amount of teachers that have gone through my course, 30 Days or Less to Freelance Writing Success . Many of them have actually started a mastermind together for accountability and because they have so much in common.

Here’s Philippa’s story, for example:

Besides your own course, do you recommend any particular resources (websites, books, etc.) for educators looking to get started with freelance writing?

One of the recommended resources that I came across was The Yahoo Style Guide! It’s a great (and very comprehensive) guide to help you learn how to write for the web.

My friend Sarah also has a site called, Life After Teaching, which helps educators that are looking to transition out of teaching find their way. She also has a book with the same name that you can find on her website.

Anything else you would like to say to educators interested in supplementing their income with freelance writing?

Most people let fear (or any number of excuses that disguise themselves as something else, but really are fear – lack of time, lack of direction, needing everything to be perfect, etc.) hold them back from taking action and pursuing a new direction.

Don’t let that be you.

Instead, punch fear in the face and do it anyway. When I started, I decided I was either going to succeed or fail hard trying.

Why not you, why not now?

About Gina Horkey

Gina Horkey is a married, millennial mama to two precocious toddlers. Additionally, she’s a professional writer and online business marketing consultant with a decade of experience in the financial services industry. Gina enjoys helping other freelancers gear up to quit their day jobs and take their side hustles full-time. If you’re interested in starting a freelance career, take Gina’s FREE writing course to kickstart yours today! Click here to get the first lesson sent to your inbox.

Udemy offers a truly exceptional opportunity for instructors.  In short, you can make money on Udemy by creating on demand online courses on anything imaginable.

Put together and teach your course once; If it’s well-received and otherwise successful you can get paid for that class again and again!

Here is more about Udemy from their website:

We’re the world’s online learning marketplace, where 9 million+ students are taking courses in everything from programming to yoga to photography – and much, much more. Each of our 35,000+ courses is taught by an expert instructor, and every course is available on-demand, so students can learn at their own pace, on their own time, and on any device”

Some Drawbacks…

Before you get too excited please consider some of the drawbacks. This would not be a fair review if we didn’t go over some of the difficulties for instructors using who want to make money on udemy by selling online courses.

First, putting together courses takes a lot of time, in terms of both planning and production. You also need to have the proper equipment, and be comfortable speaking on the camera/behind the microphone.  If you are shy or not willing to put yourself in front of the camera, Udemy might not be for you.

Can I Really Make Money on Udemy? How Much?

One final point, but not really a drawback is that unfortunately the Udemy compensation model is not as lucrative for instructors as it once was. Teachers who got in early were making a lot more money (90% across the board per course!) before Udemy changed its compensation structure multiple times, currently the structure is as follows:

About the instructor revenue share
Udemy operates under a tiered revenue share for paid courses. As an instructor, the two main revenue share scenarios that you can expect most often are:
Instructor Promotion → 100% revenue share (less a 3% administrative processing fee, 4% in the territory of Japan) on sales made by instructors where the student makes the purchase using an Instructor Coupon (either at full price or at a discount), which you the instructor create and control.
Udemy Organic → 50% revenue share on organic Udemy sales where no Instructor Coupon is used.

If you’re opted in to any of our marketing programs, e.g., percentage promotions, fixed price deals, and the marketing boost program, your revenue share can range from 25% to 97% depending on the scenario.

So, basically, you will make somewhere between 25-97% of your course fees, depending on the scenario.  In general, if Udemy is promoting your course for you, it will be on the lower end.  If you promote your own course you can make 100% – the administrative fees.  If you’d like a complete breakdown of what you can make, see the chart on Udemy’s site here.

Udemy claims that the average instructor income is $8000.  Not bad, right?

Some make less and some a lot more.  Case in point: Jerry Banfield.

Jerry has earned over $300,000 with the Udemy platform, averaging over $6,000 per course he creates!

Jerry is truly an awesome instructor. As one of his students said:

“Jerry’s instruction is the perfect balance of passion, intelligence, proof of experience,
and calculated determination. He is a machine for success and helping other build the
successful lives that they have always dreamed of.”

If you are going to give Udemy a try, I highly recommend that you consider taking Jerry’s course, “The Complete Udemy Instructor Course”. This course will give you a great foundation as well as the tools and the knowledge you need to get started making money with online course creation.  It features no less than 84 lectures and over 10.5 hours of class time!

Learn more about Jerry’s course on how to make money on Udemy HERE.

With over 9 Million students utilizing Udemy, more instructors are needed!  I hope to see your course(s) there soon!