If you have a skill that would benefit others, you should start thinking about starting a website and start teaching others online. You would be surprised but there are many people who might want to learn the skills that you already have.

There are people who would want to learn how to write, how to design graphics, how to become a better gardener and even how to breed fishes. Yes, there are many people out there who wants to learn all these things and they are even willing to pay you for teaching them the skill.

8 Reasons Why You Should Teach Online

Let’s look at some of the reasons why you should be teaching others online.

1 . Make Money Online

There are many people out there who teach online through their online courses, video course and books. The topic that they teach vary from hobbies such as how to train your dog and all to the way to more serious stuff like personal finance.

In fact we can say that the number of topics that can be taught is infinite.

Imagine someone who teaches a topic on keeping your budgies happy. Another person can actually teach a course on breeding budgies and go in depth on the genetics of budgies and how to create your own pedigree line of budgies. Another person could be going deep into the topic of treating budgies and getting a budgie cured from the various diseases that are out there.

In other words, there is always something for you to teach. So think of a topic to teach and go deep into a specific area from a bigger topic.

Never for once think that just because there is someone else teaching a particular topic, it leaves little space for you to go into it. There is always room for you to go into a particular topic and people would appreciate variety when it comes to choosing something they would want to learn.

So don’t worry, there is always a topic that you can teach. You just need to be more specialised and go vertically deep.

Reference

• “81 Blog Topic Ideas” to get you started with teaching others through a blog.
•  “How to Choose the Right Blog Topic” by Yaro Starak

2 . Establish Authority

When you offer online materials such as ebooks, online courses and you blog often about a particular topic, people would begin to see you as an expert in that particularly field.

You might not know everything about a particular topic or area of interest but that’s ok because you could easily carry out more research and get to the answers as time goes by.

You can also establish authority over a certain area by providing case studies and creating a video where you explain about a particular topic.

Neil Patel is an example of someone who establishes himself as an authority by speaking at every conference that he can lay his hands on.

Then we have people like Brian Clark who is the founder of Copyblogger, a blog about using copywriting and social media for online marketing.  Brian have established himself as an authority in his niche and he has built a 60,000 strong subscriber fan base. The more people he teach and the more value he provides to that huge group of people, the more of an authority he gets.

Reference

• 25 Ways to Build Online Authority 

3 . Build a Hungry Following

The people who you teach through your website and articles will always be hungry for more content. This is especially so if you can create suspense and anticipation among your followers.

If you do up your content well, your visitors can become your loyal followers and even your brand advocate.

What you need to do is to publish great content which would make your followers want to share and which in turn get you more visitors and more following.

Try to engage your followers with your content and make use of social media to get people to share your content. With more people seeing your content and later becoming your loyal subscribers you will have more people to teach and gain satisfaction from teaching others you are passionate about.

4 . Build Trust with Potential Clients

If you run a business selling services, your ability to teach your prospects or visitors to your website would create a situation where people would feel like as if they know you even though they haven’t met you.

This is because when people read what you write or when they see you on a video that teaches them something, you build trust and affinity with them. They will begin to trust you more, especially when what you have taught them proves to be something very useful to them, made money for them or benefited them in one way or another.

People love short cuts and stuff that allows them to save time.

Building trust can sometimes be both critical and difficult but it’s not impossible and one of the best ways to build trust is by teaching people what they are interested to learn.

Take for example a Chef who shares his recipe online and even puts up a video detailing how to cook a certain dish. Some might think that the Chef is doing something stupid by revealing his “secrets” but tell me which Chef comes to mind when I ask you to name a famous Chef. Most probably it will be the Chef that has published several recipe books and have his own cook show to teach people how to cook.

Hence why teaching is so important when it comes to building trust. It gives us a good chance to build a relationship with out visitors and to be more present in their minds so that when it comes to buying something related to what you are selling they will choose you.

5 . Find Out What Solutions People Are Looking For

When you teach people online, you now have a position that would allow you to ask questions to your students.

You can ask them questions that can help you become a better teacher, create better content and point you the way for your next information product. This way you will not be wasting your time working on something that people don’t need.

With the insights gleaned from your students you will the know their grievances and the problems that they are facing. There is a high chance that if your group of students are facing a certain difficulty and need a solution for it, there will also be thousands of people out there who are facing the same problem and need the solution to.

With this type of insight, you can then go on to produce a killer product that will benefit you and your students too.

6 . Teaching is Therapeutic

Teaching is one of the most important activity in any society. There is a whole generation that needs to be educated. However, teaching does not only benefit the students, it also benefits the teacher. It has been found that teaching can be therapeutic to the teacher and it helps a teacher to destress.

At the same time, the whole teaching process can give a sense of satisfaction that other endeavours can’t provide.

Imagine your students coming back to you 5 years down the road and thanking you for teaching him when he was a student. Gestures of that sort from past students will give you a warm feeling that is hard to describe. You can also get that type of satisfaction when you teach others online. The thank you emails that you get will come flooding in no time if you have worked hard teaching others online.

7 . Demand for Digital Products Are Growing

Lets look at ebooks as a form of digital product. It has been found that the most popular download is an ebook. It is not softwares and videos but ebooks.

In fact ebooks have been so popular that the sales of traditional paper books have taken a turn south. The bulk of the sales have moved to the sale of ebooks and it is not a million dollar industry but a billion dollar one in this very moment.

If we look at the year 2002, US consumers spent $1.5 million dollars on ebooks and Gen years later, in 2012, the amount have ballooned to an enormous figure of $2 billion.

You wouldn’t want to miss out on this opportunity of a lifetime and get for yourself a chunk of the pie, no matter how small it is. By teaching online. And building your brand and authority, you. can create digital products like ebooks and sell them in order to make a good income online for yourself and your family.

8 . 247 Accessibility

If you are just teaching offline, you only have a few hours in a day for you to teach. By going online and creating educational materials and online courses, you can leverage on technology that allows you to teach your students 24 hours, round the clock.

Your students can just go online and have access to your educational materials.

They no longer need to be in the same classroom with and they can learn at their own pace and leisure.

This also means that you can create online resources once yet students can benefit from your material over and over again even when you are longer around.

Just imagine that.

Conclusion

I hope that this blog post have inspired you to teach online. I used to be a teacher myself and I gain a lot from teaching high school students when I was still a teacher. I now teach people who are interested to start a business online or start a blog. It has now become my passion to help others out in internet marketing. And best of all I do all that without the hype that borders along the lines of being a scam.

I hope that you have enjoyed reading this article and are inspired to now teach something online. If you have created something online and are teaching others, do send me an email and tell me about your story. I would love to hear it and maybe feature your story in my blog.

– Ardy