Revenue in the global online education market is projected to reach $146.9 billion by the end of 2022.
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Why it matters
This large and lucrative online education market provides the opportunity to transform your knowledge into a digital product and sell it online. This opportunity is available for everyone today (not just the big boys like the universities and colleges!).
So packaging your knowledge and making money from it is democratized! And the best part? You can start with minimal risk by launching an online side hustle. There are so many free platforms that make it easy to get started.
Selling your expertise on the web is one of the easiest ways to earn $10,000+ a month online. You can start it from home as a digital side hustle while still holding down your 9-5 day job.
Earning an extra $10,000 a month could change your life.
What’s also great about an online course is that it is scalable. What that means is that you don’t have to show up once you have created it. This means you are no longer trading time for money.
The hard part is that you may need to spend some time after work creating the course. But if you’re a passionate expert who has built up expertise and love what you do then packaging your know-how into a course and creating a product is a much more efficient way of educating rather than showing up in the classroom or lecture hall everyday.
In the news
Lynda (now re-branded as LinkedIn Learning) was an online course platform that was sold to LinkedIn in 2015 for $1.5 billion and Microsoft bought LinkedIn a year later for $26.2 billion.
Back in 1995, Lynda Weinman taught digital media and motion graphics at the Art Center College of Design in California. She started an online side hustle (yes they existed back then!) to help her students with free web resources.
She realized that having to show up everyday and presenting the same lecture on the same topic as not the best use of her time.
She realised that if you record a lecture and then share it online it can live forever and only required her to deliver the content once.
Go deeper
Creating a course from scratch can be difficult unless you use an education or an online course platform to help you start, design and host the course.
Here are three of the top platforms where you can create your course, host it and even create optimized marketing funnels to promote it using best practices and templates.
Kajabi is one of the best online platforms. It allows you to do much more than just hosting and delivering online courses or memberships.
Kajabi have helped 1 in 3 of their customers (who are both experienced entrepreneurs and side hustle amateurs) earn over $100,000 a year using the platform.
It is much more than a course builder and the pricing reflects that. With Kajabi you can:
- Build well designed course websites
- Create a blog
- Build sales funnels
- Set up and start your email marketing
Pricing starts at $119 a month when paid annually and with a 14 day free trial and includes the following features:
- 3 products
- 3 funnels
- Unlimited landing pages
- Unlimited marketing emails
- 10,000 contacts
- 1,000 customers
- 1 website
- 1 admin user
Teachable is a freemium platform, this makes it a good choice for beginners who have never created a course.
As standard, all plans include:
- Creating your course or coaching service quickly with their intuitive drag-and-drop builder
- Unlimited hosting
- Enroll an unlimited amount of students in your online school
- Integrate with MailChimp, Zapier, ConvertKit, Google Analytics, Segment, and more
You can sign up with the freemium product and then the paid version starts from $29 paid annually.
The free version doesn’t include a custom domain. But it provides the following features (which are limited but a good place to start).
- 10% transaction fees on sales
- Admin users
- Courses
- Coaching
- Digital downloads
- Unlimited students
- Integrated website and builder
Thinkific is a market leader, with 32,000+ bloggers, programmers and marketers who use their platform to create and host their courses.
Its presence in the market is significant with 50,000+ course creators, 100m+ courses taken and $650m in sales generated by its users.
The platform allows you to add multiple media content types including:
- Videos
- Quizzes
- Text
- Surveys
Thinkific offers a free plan but again it doesn’t provide a custom domain.
The features include:
- 1 course
- 1 community
- 2 spaces per community
- 1 administrator
- Unlimited Students
- 0% transaction fee
4 more ways to make $10,000+ a month online
The options for starting an online side hustle in a digital world are infinite and that leads to confusion and inaction.
The big questions?
- What should I do?
- How do I start?
The best way to discover what works is to simply start. It has never been easier to do that with low cost tools and access to your market via the internet, social media and your smartphone.
Here are 4 more ways to make $10,000+ a month online.
1. Amazon FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon)
Amazon makes it easy to find products and sell them via the platform. What’s great about this online side hustle is that Amazon does all the heavy lifting. An app to find a product and all the fulfillment to get it to the customers. It even provides customer support for you.
On a recent podcast with Ann Sieg we discussed how to source products, sell them and deliver them to customers on Amazon.
Many of her students at E-commerce Business School go onto create multi-million dollar businesses.
Victoria who was a full-time nurse and mother of three was able to hit $41.29 k in sales in just 90 days and all while working 12-hour night shifts! Now that is a great online side hustle.
2. Freelancing
According to Canva research, design is one of the best categories to start a freelancing side hustle. The second top spot was app developers but the next best category was for digital design skills and expertise.
The top 4 revenue results
Monthly sales for top earning freelancers are the following:
- Illustration – $406,000+ (Design) or $33,833 per mth
- Proofreading and editing – $341,000+ (Writing) or $28,416 per mth
- Animation – $309,000+ (Design) or $25,750 per mth
- Video editor – $280,000+ (Design) or $23,333 per mth
3. Online Coaching
According to Growth Market Reports, the global online coaching market size was valued at around USD 1938.41 million in 2021 and is projected to reach around USD 4567.44 million by 2030, expanding at a CAGR of 13.4% during the forecast period, 2022–2030.
The growth of the market is attributed to increasing demand for virtual training services and online coaching platforms
When done well, online coaching is a very lucrative side hustle. If you can work out how to scale it then it can become a multi-million dollar business.
One of the best online coaching entrepreneurs is Amy Porterfield. Her area of coaching is in “Online Marketing” and she has built a multiple 7-figure online business.
The secret to scaling online coaching? Turn your expertise into a product.
4. E-Books
I was traveling through Italy and as I love to read I had brought a hardcover book with me. It was an autobiography of Steve Jobs. It weighed nearly 2 pounds.
The weight and size proved to be cumbersome. I vowed never to do that again. Now I carry around my entire library of books in my iPad and despite adding more books the weight never increases.
Amazon changed the book market forever with the launch of the Kindle.
Recently I interviewed Allan Dib on the Jeff Bullas Show Podcast and we discussed the extraordinary success of “The One Page Marketing Plan”, a book he published in 2016 that has over 6,763 ratings.
Allan has made $10,000+ a month from his book and in a later podcast episode we will take a closer look at how he did that.
How a science blogger wrote and self published an e-book that became a Hollywood movie blockbuster
Andy Weir was a science trained programmer who started a blog and then decided to self publish the chapters and sell it on Amazon for just $0.99.
He wanted his novel, The Martian, to be as scientifically accurate as possible, doing extensive research into orbital mechanics, conditions on the planet Mars and the history of human spaceflight.
The Martian ended up on the New York Times bestseller list, and by 2013 the printing and film rights were sold for roughly $100,000 but the movie went on to earn $670 million in box office sales.
He said he has earned more from the audible version of his book over the physical book and movie rights.
The data
The rise of Kindle has made it possible to self publish and to earn $10,000+ a month but you do need to be one of the top authors on Amazon.
Here is some data to get you inspired:
- 30-34% of all ebooks sold are self-published
- 300 million self-published books are sold each year
- $1.25 billion worth of self-published books are sold each year
- Amazon pays $250 million in royalties to self-published authors each year
Wrapping it up
There are almost infinite ways to make $10,000+ a month online and I have just listed five.
If you’re struggling to choose an online side hustle, start with an idea that is at the intersection of what you are good at, what you love doing and what the world will pay you for.
Nothing happens until you create and then share it to find out if it works. There are no guarantees.
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