How to Make Money With Skillshare – Teach What You Know Best

Skills are a vital part of our daily lives. They empower knowledge and makes us resourceful as human beings. For some of us, it also means that we can impart that unique knowledge to others and get paid along the way. Sounds like you? Then read on to discover how to make money with Skillshare and potentially build a teaching business online.

Skillshare at a Glance

Skillshare is a subscription site that offers online classes for students to pick up new skills in the area of business, technology, creative and lifestyle. For $12/month or $96/year, subscribers will get access to more than 1000 classes that are mostly project-based which encourages them to implement the skills they learned on to some kind of tasks or activity ideas.

Lessons are delivered in small chunk size videos that are easy to digest and watch on mobile or offline mode. Meanwhile, members can also become creators and contribute their skills to the community. Since its inception in 2010, Skillshare has been used by notable figures such as Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, and Gary Vaynerchuk to deliver their expertise.

Skillshare Support for Teachers

As a teaching platform, Skillshare certainly makes it simple for beginners to create classes.

• Firstly, there is no need for application form or registration fee to become a creator besides what you’ve paid for your membership.
• Videos can be captured in several formats such as a screencast, a talking head and a product demonstration and detailed guidelines are provided to walk you through the process.
• The 30-Day Teaching Challenge lets you connect with successful creators in the community as you learn the rope of creating, filming and publishing your first few videos. The workshop also comes with some motivational perks like prize giveaways, blog features and discounted membership to help you reach your teaching goals.
• In their mobile app, students can download classes and watch them offline. These views will also be taken into account when calculating the teacher’s earnings.
• Through the community board that comes with each class, you can discuss/share project ideas with the students to help them improved on their newly learned skill.

How to Generate Income from Skillshare

Teachers at Skillshare are compensated in two ways. Firstly, you will get a referral link that is unique to your identification when you sign up as a teacher. When you promote this link and get others to subscribe, you make $10 for each new paying member. This is called a Premium referral.

The second is called the Royalty and you need to achieve a minimum of 30 Premium students to be qualified. In this model, you are paid according to the share of minutes watched by Premiums (online and offline) across all your classes each month. This means video content that is engaging will likely earn you more revenue from the royalty pool.

Tools You Need to Get Started

As mentioned before, Skillshare has a Teacher Handbook that explains in detail how to set up for video recording so I am just going to run through very quickly what are the things that you’ll need.

• A computer/laptop – as your workstation
• A USB microphone – for professional audio recording
• A recording software (i.e Camtasia) –  you’ll need one regardless of which video formats you choose
• Camera/tripod/lighting – for taking ‘talking head’ video
• A product and a quiet room space – for taking ‘physical demonstration’ video

Collaborating with these tools can be quite intimidating for the first time, but like anything else, as long as you keep practicing, the quality of your presentation will improve over time.

What Topics are You Interested in Teaching

Chances are, your unique skills can be used in a variety of ways, but to provide a good learning outcome, the class must be something that interests the audience without overwhelming information. Hence, narrowing down to a specific topic will make your video content much more relevant and easy to understand. So, how do you go about finding for the right topic?

The answers can actually be found on Google. Nowadays, the search engines are the most go-to platforms to learn new things and the good news is, these queries, specifically known as keywords, are captured and presented to other users as well. Have you noticed how Google rolls out other phrases while you type in your search term?

Over here, Google is suggesting relevant keywords to ‘how to make paper flowers’ that are trending in among the users. This more or less reflects what people actually want to know and learn. Besides that, Google trend is also a good place to visualize what’s popular online.

In this example, we can see that the keywords ‘video blog’ has an upward trend so if you are someone who has the experience, you can use this information to share and demonstrate that much demanding skill.

Ways to Promote Your Classes

Even though Skillshare provides a wide range of support system, it’s still crucial to learn a few marketing skills to ensure that your classes get the attention they deserve.

1) After creating a class, the first crowd you can promote to are your friends, families and social media followers. Since these people know you personally, they are more likely to support your passion by watching your videos. You may also offer the course for free and see how the crowd respond.

When more students enrolled, the audience size will grow and your classes will eventually get more exposure within the Skillshare community. Students who like your classes are likely to leave positive reviews and this will encourage more people to sign up, so it sort-of creates a snowball effect that helps to boost your teaching reputation.  

Once you reached the milestone like having more than 1000 student followers and achieving good ratings, that one class and subsequent classes will basically sell on their own in the future, without much promotion.  

2) Now, this might seems a little redundant, but since you already have some videos, why not take it a step further and post in on YouTube? It’s free and you can create your own channel, offer teaser videos and cross-promote with your classes on Skillshare. There are about 1 billion viewers using the platform each month, so why not have some of them check out your classes instead.

3) Going back to all the trends and keywords that we discovered on Google earlier, there’s something else that you can do which will attract more visitors to your classes on Skillshare. Promoting through your own blog is probably one of the best ways to build a teaching reputation and be discovered by a new audience every day.

That’s because blog posts contain words and the more you write, the more keywords the site will be ranked on Google. This opens up more opportunities for other people to discover your skills and allows you to reach out to other bloggers within the same niche.

No two marketing strategies are ever alike. Some work well with social media, some with blogging and some with the combination of both. So, experiment with the different ways of promotion and see what works best for you.

Turn Your Skills into Profit

I like how easy one can become a creator on Skillshare and use it in different ways to build a teaching business online. If you’ve been tinkering with the idea for a while, I sure hope that this article will finally push you to take the first step. Don’t let your skills sit in the garage. Use all the resources that are available, immerse with a like-minded community and your skills will take you to a new level of success.

Do you want to learn other ways that can turn your skills into profit? Find out more from my recommended training platform here.

Question; Have you used Skillshare or other similar teaching platforms before? How did it work out for you? Please share your experience in the comment area below.