I do the same thing on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Ustream and so on. I love teaching and am trying to get it up to a sustainable level so I can do it full time.

At times I’ve been fairly depressed, wondering why I have so many issues with the typical work environment, when others seem to be okay with the situation. One of the key thoughts I had was ‘There’s got to be a better way.’ I’ve never accepted the status quo, which is good in many ways but also bad as you tend to be unhappy this way. During the last few years I started to work at home for my IT contracts and it’s worked out great for both the client and myself. I knew I was onto something!

During this time I’ve realized that I really enjoy working at home, as well as learning and sharing that knowledge with others. I like teaching and getting feedback from others. And to sell anything online these days requires teaching even if you do this via your own blog. I also wanted to work from home, be able to live anywhere (not dependent on major city for employment) and have more freedom. Freedom to take my dog for a walk during the day, take a nap and work into the evening if I want.

I can’t think of anything better than an online business, especially in the area of information and affiliate products. The online learning market is huge and growing exponentially. Distance learning even at universities is very popular – people don’t have to commute or quit their jobs to study online. Plus there’s no office space to lease, no equipment and no employees!

You can easily create your own information products such as ebooks, videos, software demostrations and podcasts and sell them online. If you’d like to learn how to do this I highly suggest checking out Teaching Sells which has just re-opened for a little while (a while back they closed their doors to new members for many, many months). I was a member of Teaching Sells until I absorbed all the content and got my own sites up and running.

You not only learn how to create content in a variety of multimedia formats, how to organize your content, how to set up your sites (or get others to do it for you), how to market your site online, how to outsource content creation or any other part of the business, and how to joint venture with others (even if you don’t have your own content – find an expert and partner with him or her).

One of the big benefits of teaching online is the scalability and potential for much larger income. If you get paid by the hour, say working downtown, or teaching music one-on-one, you will be limited by the number of hours in the typical week. By creating content once, you can resell this information again and again even when you’re sleeping!

There are many ways you can teach online, from doing one on one webcam video lessons via MSN Live Messenger, Skype to group webcam lessons via Ustream.tv. This would be for teaching or tutoring as you would do in your home or at a a business location. This is great for making real money. At some point you will want to try to get away from what is called ‘hourly-based revenue’. You only get paid when you work, when you don’t teach you don’t get paid.

You can create websites and blogs that teach and earn you revenue by putting ads on your site – whether they be Google Adsense or you try to get sponsors to buy ads on your site. So the content is free to your viewers but you make money from the businesses that advertise on your site.

You can sell information products – such as PDF files, videos, diagrams, etc as I’ve mentioned in previous posts. But a unique and lucrative alternative nowadays is to set up a virtual learning environment, also known as a membership site or continuity program. This is a protected area of your website and sets you up for recurring revenues.

One method that is often successful is to set up what’s known as a liquidating offer. When someone buys a fairly low priced product from you, you give them the option to join a training program at the time of purchase, that will give them access to lots of great content each month. They will also be billed a monthly basis – a great way to take advantage of the 80/20 rule which says 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your clients.

To learn how to create and market your own content or others, and much more, stay tuned for an exciting announcement tomorrow regarding a relaunching of an awesome online training environment or teaching online.

Instead of sending the links directly to your friends, why not create a blog first? Put the videos, links and articles in blog posts and then post the link to your blog instead. YouTube videos are easy to embed. This way you get traffic to your blog and you can add relevant affiliate links to your posts to make some extra money. You can use Wordpress.com to create a free blog, hosted by them and it’s super easy to set up with no coding or installations.

Blog posts are great for search engines too so you will be found by people searching for your topics as well. To take it a step further, you could also create your own information products for sale.

Today I want to give you some examples of how I educate my customers and what the different goals are for each. One of my main goals is to give you real examples that are working for me and others today, not a bunch of theory.

Adsense Revenue

I use YouTube videos with YouTube’s revenue sharing. Go to YouTube to see my free video guitar lessons.

I also have Adsense on my free guitar lessons website. Notice the right sidebar near the bottom has the Google ads.

You need to evaluate whether you want to get revenue from the readers or from businesses. I see it as a motivation question – Who is more motivated to pay for your content? Often times, businesses who want to be noticed by your readers are motivated to pay because they want to sell their products.

Affiliate Marketing

Sometimes in the YouTube videos I link directly to the affiliate product in the video description. Some people prefer to send leads to an opt-in page where they get their email address and market to them later. I do that in many cases too, but you need to mix things up and see what works. There’s something to be said for impulse purchases. They see your video or post, get pumped and go and buy.

In the right sidebar of the following sites I put some affiliate links in there, so they appear on every page. Here are some examples:
-Free guitar lessons
-Membership sites
-Work at home (this site)

Social Networking

I often blog on my sites to educate my readers. You can see that in this blog but also on the ones already mentioned. This is also good for the search engines as they will find your content and hopefully serve it up to searchers in your niche.

I use Twitter and Facebook to post links to these blogs as well. The goal is to educate my readers. I don’t do much of any selling directly in the social networking sites.

Email Marketing

I usually offer something of value to obtain my reader’s email address and build a relationship with them. Then over time I send them useful information that is hopefully helpful to them. You can see an email signup form at http://willkriski.com on the right sidebar. I use Get Response for email collection. It improves your chances of getting read (not filtered as spam) and allows you to send a series of automated follow-up messages and broadcasts to large groups of people all at once.

Articles and Other Sites

You need to get your educational content out there, not just on your own sites. One such site that takes articles is EzineArticles.com (my profile there). You can post your content on other sites such as Wordpress, Squidoo, HubPages, and help people in forums and other people’s blogs (via the comments area).

Information Products

A more direct method is to actually sell your own educational content. Here are some of my own examples:
-Overnight Membership Site Course – a video course on how you can set up and market your own membership site quickly
-http://onlineguitarcoaching.com/fretboard-blueprint – learn how to solo over chord changes and visualize the fretboard
-Get Rich as an IT Consultant – my e-book on how to make big money with IT subcontracting

Membership sites

If you want to create an online learning environment of your own, you might want to create a membership site. Here’s an example that I have created for learning lead guitar. This is a private members-only area where people need to sign up and pay on a monthly recurring basis. They need to login to get access to your site. I use Wordpress and the Wishlist Member plugin. I’ve created 7 video courses and continually add new content there.

So whether you sell your own or other people’s products, you will need to educate them first, which is often called ‘pre-selling’. So hopefully that will give you some real examples of how you can educate your readers, and how to monetize that readership!

Due to a variety of demographic, technological and social trends, online learning is growing rapidly and is predicted to hit $52.6 Billion by 2010. Internet usage continues to increase…With the rise of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, the Internet has evolved beyond being simply a delivery mechanism for digital files to becoming a community of interconnected individuals. This trend will likely continue migration from large homogeneous communities towards smaller niche communities. People will join those niche communities that they are interested in for business or personal reasons. As bandwidth continues to increase, we’ve seen the type of material available online go from text, to images, to audio and now video (even live streaming video). The content that can be delivered over the internet is becoming richer and more useful for learning purposes. And the technology is often free and getting easier to use. Socially, the ‘cocooning’ phenomenon has also increased leading towards more home schooling, tv watching, internet usage. With rising commodity prices such as gasoline the trend is towards less travelling by car, plane or other means.

According to Regina Lewis (2005), over 4 million students are enrolled in online schools and universities (and that number is growing 30% per year). There are many benefits to online learning:

-flexibility, including anytime, anywhere access to instructors and information
-student-centered teaching according to their individual learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) as well as at peak learning times which can be evenings for some students
-repeatability – students can watch videos or view articles and diagrams over and over
-less intimidating than classrooms for some students who are quiet or shy, can think about answer before responding
-access to experts from around the globe, not just those in a student’s city
-’chunkability’ – the ability to focus on one small topic rather than be overwhelmed by too much information
-younger students who grew up on the internet are more comfortable in this environment
-reduced travel costs, with the record prices of gasoline these days
-part-time learning, where many adults have full time jobs

Education is becoming increasingly important, resulting in the need for continuous learning just to compete in today’s economy.

Whether you sell affiliate (ie. other people’s) products, or create and sell your own products you will need to educate your customers. In other words, you need to ‘pre-sell’ your customers by providing ‘useful but incomplete’ content to them. To complete the information they will need to buy your product or service. If you create your own information products for sale these are also educational in nature.

This educational content can be in a variety of formats these days such as:
-blogs (Wordpress.com, Blogger.com or your own blog)
-social networking (Twitter, Facebook, etc)
-podcasts (mp3 audio files)
-videos (webcam or camcorder)
-screencast videos (using Camtasia studio for example)
-diagrams (PDFs, images)
-software (creating multimedia).

Notice that this variety of formats appeals to different learning styles which is important.

So if you’re planning to sell anything online or better yet, sell your own information products you will need to be able to create content in at least some of these formats, and publish it all over the web.

You rarely see anyone talking about how to make more money, especially when times are tough. I think this is a fatal mindset. You need to be taking action at all times. As I mention in my ebook, you need to find a niche market. This is probably the number one thing you can do to increase your rates. Getting higher rates is also a matter of psychology – how you feel about yourself – that comes across in discussions and interviews.

Another area you might want to consider if you have a full-time job is to start an internet business. These can be started fairly cheaply these days. It’s a good idea to test your idea first, but creating a small basic offering and test it with some Google adwords for example. I’ve seen many people invest their life savings into an idea they’re passionate about and end up broke.

My advice is to create some information products like an e-book or better yet a membership site. If you don’t have any specialized knowledge (most of us do) such as a hobby or job skill, you can find someone who does and partner with them. They provide the content and you set up and run the site for them. If you don’t have any technical knowledge drop me a line and I’ll send you some pointers. I’m looking at setting up a new site to help people like you set up their own membership site step by step. Most of it isn’t that technical, there’s no software to install for example. And you can work on this on the side. At a minimum it can help pay off some of your debt, and best case you can quit your day job and work on it full time!

At Teaching Sells (of which I’m a member), they show you how to teach online and get paid for it. From figuring out your content and how to structure it, to marketing and building the site. The idea is to set up a paid monthly subscription site, but instead of a regular website you create an ‘Interactive Learning Environment’ using all sorts of multimedia. This creates a community of learners around your topic and provides a constant revenue stream for you.

I’m setting one of these sites up for another of my passions, teaching guitar. What can you teach to others while gaining the freedom you want?