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5 Steps to Making Money With Skills You Already Have

There's good news... you don't need to be an expert at English to teach English. In fact, all you need is the ability to read and write fluently in English. Remember you're not teaching English to college students... you're teaching it to first time learners and little kids.
Tony Toreto
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Freelance writer and tech guy

Freelance writer and tech guy
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English is the most popular language in the world and it's getting even more popular by the day as more people strive to learn English. The supply of English teachers isn't enough to meet demand.

There's good news... you don't need to be an expert at English to teach English. In fact, all you need is the ability to read and write fluently in English. Remember you're not teaching English to college students... you're teaching it to first time learners and little kids.

If you understand everything you've read so far then you're qualified. You can make money with this English skill that you have and I'm about to show you how.

Create Your Plan

Before you start doing anything you need to have a goal and a plan to achieve that goal.

Ask yourself, "How much money do I need and what will I do with it?"

Is it to take a gap year and travel the world while you teach English online?

Is it to save up $XXX of capital to fund your business?

Is it to save $20,000 a year by teaching English full time in China?

Whatever your goal is, write it down. Now for the sake of this example let's say your goal is to save $10,000 in a year so you can go and fund an ecommerce business.

Now let's create a plan to achieve the above goal...

First, we need to calculate living expenses: Rent, bills, food, transport etc. Let's assume that turns out to be $2,500/month. Here's a budgeting tool you can use here.

Second, we need to calculate how much we should save per month by dividing the goal amount by the time we want to achieve the goal. So that's $10,000/12 = $833.33/month. Let's just round that up to $840/month.

Third, we calculate our monthly income goal so we know how much we need to earn to be able to fully cover expenses and achieve our monthly saving goal. Use the following equation: expenses + monthly saving goal. So, that's $2,500 + $840 = $3340/month or $40,080/year. That's the minimum amount you need to make each month to achieve your goal.

Personally, I'd recommend you open two bank accounts; one for expenses and one for saving money but that's up to you.

Get Certified (TESOL)

There's no doubt having a certificate is one of the best ways to boost credibility in the market. The
TESOL certification online
can be taken by anyone who's fluent in English to become a qualified ESL/EFL teacher around the world.

It takes only hours to complete the course and is very affordable. Of course, you could go the traditional method and get a degree from a university... but this is the cheapest route to get certified. In this day and age, people expect some sort of certification so that's why you need one.

Join Online Platforms

If you're going to teach English online rather than offline then you'll need to join online platforms where you can find students to teach.
If you'd like an offline job then you can apply for jobs on popular jobsites in the area you want to work in. But, for those who plan to teach online here's a list of some online platforms you can sign up for...
And much more. You can also Google "Online English Jobs", "ESL Jobs Online" and anything to that nature.

Get Experience & Build a Reputation

You have no experience, no reputation and there are English teachers out there who have more experience than you who students prefer to go instead of you.

No worries, it's the same in all the other markets. But, it's not a problem. There's a way to fill that gap very easily.

First, you need to know how many hours of experience you need to get you started. Let's say 10 hours.

Second, go out and offer to teach people at an extremely cheap cost or even a free hour so they can test you out and get yourself a few testimonials.

Third, give it all you've got. Because in these first few hours you won't earn much, but you'll gain valuable experience.

If you did all the work then in less than a week you should have a few hours of experience under your belt. You can finally start executing on your plan to achieve your goal of saving $10,000.

Start Earning

What you need now is a consistent stream of income. The way to achieve that is to focus on getting regular students and not one offs. Just a handful of regular students is enough to get a steady income stream.

There's no straightforward way to do this, you'll just have to look for as many students as you can and hope some of them will stick with you. Of course, that means you'll need to try your best to help each student. Don't let your chase for quantity ruin the quality of your teaching.

Hopefully, in a months' time you should have found a few students who want to stick around for some time.

You'll need to establish how much you'll charge per hour and how many hours you need to work per week.

Now let's say you're going to charge $40 an hour. That means you need to work 84 hours in a month to achieve your $3,340/month goal ($3340/$40). That's 21 hours per week (84/4). That's 4-5 hours a day. Of course, the more you charge per hour, the less hours you need to work.

You can then choose a tool such as Google calendar to schedule your teaching slots and organize your life.

You're Almost There

With a bit of hard work and patience you'll achieve your goals sooner than you think. Best of all, you're achieving your goals using a skill you already have.

Most people only dream of living an easy life like this, but for you it can be a reality.

So get out a pen and paper and start writing your life plan today.

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