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Laura Candler's Teacherpreneur Resources

Teacher + Entrepreneur = Teacherpreneur!

Teachers are overworked and underpaid, yet they're some of the most devoted and caring individuals you'll ever meet. It’s a shame that so many have to leave a profession they love in order to find higher-paying jobs. Unfortunately, the reality is that unless you have another source of income besides your teaching salary, it’s difficult to pay for decent housing, let alone enjoy a few luxuries or pay your child's college tuition.

Make Money Doing What You Love
However, with the web 2.0 tools now available for free, teachers can stay in the classroom, doing what they love to do, and supplement their income by sharing their expertise with others! If you enjoy creating effective teaching materials for your own classroom, there's a huge market for them among teachers, parents, and home school educators. It's never been easier to become a "teacherpreneur!"

I've been sharing my materials for free online for over 10 years. Then 4 years ago I became a teacherpreneur and started earning money from those resources. After just a few years, I was earning more online than I was from my teaching salary. But the biggest perk was being able to share and collaborate with terrific teachers all over the globe.

Teacherpreneur Resources
I want others to be able to be able to experience this kind of success as well, so I’ve decided to devote this page on Teaching Resources to gathering resources for teacherpreneurs. Right now there’s just one recommendation, but I’ll be adding more links and recommendations in the future. Whether you ultimately decide to stay in the classroom, or leave to become a teacherpreneur full-time, the choice will be based on your passions and not on your financial circumstances. You won’t be forced to take a job you hate because you’ll be making money doing something you love!

Sharing or Selling – or Both?
I realize that some people believe that teachers shouldn’t be selling their materials; instead, they should be offering them for free in the spirit of sharing. I don’t mean to offend anyone, but I would venture to guess that folks who feel this way are not classroom teachers themselves, or they have a second source of income supplementing their teaching salaries. Maybe they don’t have big medical bills or college tuitions to pay, or maybe they don’t mind going into debt to pay those bills. I shared all of my materials for free for almost 10 years, but when my older daughter was ready for college, I promised myself that my family wouldn’t be going into debt to pay her tuition! I continue to share many, many resources for free, but I do sell ebooks and other products from my site. Thanks to the support of the wonderful teachers who purchase my materials and tell others about them, I’ve been able to keep my promise to stay debt-free!

Sell Your Materials on TeachersPayTeachers.com

Thinking of selling your teaching materials online?
The easiest way to get started is to use a website like www.teacherspayteachers.com.

Here's how to get started:

  1. Sign up for a free standard account on TeachersPayTeachers.com which will allow you to download their free products and look around. Even if you aren't ready to sell anything right now, you'll want to sign up so you can check out the site and receive their weekly "10 Free Downloads" newsletter by email.
  2. Take a look around and get a feel for the site and what's available.
  3. Download some free samples that appear similar to the types of things you might create for your classroom.
  4. Next, upgrade your account to a free seller account and get started by creating one free product to upload to the site. It's really easy to do, and you can find lots of help from other sellers in the Discussion Forum. Everyone has to start out with one free item, but you can put a dollar value on any other items you upload after that point. You will only get to keep 60% of the sales price if you have a free account, but it's still a good place to start to see if you are interested in trying to earn money online.
  5. TpT HandbookBefore you create too many more products, download the TeachersPayTeachers Seller's Handbook and read it cover to cover! It contains a wealth of tips and tricks that will help anyone become successful on the site.
  6. If your items start selling, you can upgrade to a premium account where you can keep 85% of your earnings. This costs $59.95 a year, but if your items are selling well, you'll quickly get paid back on your investment and earn substantially more after that.
  7. Start a teacher blog where you can share free materials and let teachers know about what you have to offer in your teacher store. Not sure how to start a blog? Take a look at Charity Preston's Teaching Blog Traffic School below!

Click to get started on TeachersPayTeachers.com now!

Blogging for Fun and Profit

Blogs began as "web logs," or online journals where people could share their views with others via the Internet. Now blogs often look more like complete websites where people not only share their personal views, they post pictures and videos, sell their materials, and earn money from advertising. If you are interested in selling materials online, you'll probably want to create a blog at some point. The best way to get started is to begin blogging for fun now and worry about the profit part later. You can use your blog to share ideas and post messages about what's going on in your classroom. If you plan to upload photos to your blog, be sure to check your school's policy first and obtain written permission from parents.

Luckily, it's really easy to get started with blogging because of free blog sites like Blogger and Word Press. Lately there have been a number of collaborative teacher blogs that have popped up such as Simply Learning Centers and The Lesson Cloud. You don't even have to have your own blog to post messages on some of these group blogs, although you do have to submit a request and become approved as a blog author first. I'm most familiar with Blogger and I'm a member of several collaborative blogs there, so I created the tutorial below that explains how to write a blog post on Blogger and include images and links in your message.

 


Charity Preston's Teaching Blog Traffic School

Teaching Blog Traffic SchoolIf you're a teacher blogger or just thinking about creating a blog, you need to check out a course that I enrolled in a few weeks ago called Teaching Blog Traffic School. Whether you want to blog for fun or for profit, this course has exactly what you need to get started quickly.

Before I tell you about it, let me give you a little background about selling online. I painted a rather rosy picture of the life of a teacherpreneur, but as with most things in life, there's good news and bad news about starting up an online business.

How Will They Find You?
First let me break the bad news. Teachers have been selling their materials online for a number of years now, and the competition has become fierce! Even if you have really great materials, the teachers who would love to buy them might never find you! You might spend thousands of dollars having someone create a beautiful website, but if no one finds it in cyberspace, your investment goes down the drain!

Many of you know that you can create a blog for free on the internet, so there's no reason to pay for a custom-designed website, at least not at first. You can even sell your materials quite easily directly from your blog. However, you still have to figure out how to get people to your blog to see all of your great stuff!

Charity PrestonCrash Course for Teacher Bloggers
Luckily, there's good news to offset the bad. Charity Preston, creator of the Organized Classroom Blog, has developed a course for aspiring or established teacher bloggers. I've known Charity for a few months, but it was just last week that I discovered her Teaching Blog Traffic School, which is a crash course for teachers who want to create a blog and being networking with colleagues or selling materials online but who don't know where to begin. It's also great for people who've already have a blog and need some inspiration and fresh ideas. As soon as I heard about it, I signed up.

You might be wondering why I signed up when I'm obviously doing so well on my own, but when I saw the list of topics covered by Charity's course, I knew that I had to sign up. Sure, I have over 40,000 followers on Facebook. But I've never been that great with blogging, and I need serious help with Twitter! I wanted to learn how to network with other educators, not just sell my material online.

Teaching Blog Traffic School Course
With a title like Teaching Blog Traffic School, you might think that this course does nothing but teach a bag of tricks for getting people to come to your blog or website. Nothing could be farther from the truth! It consists of 30 lessons that show you how to create a teaching blog and attract visitors to your page. Even if you don't want to sell anything online, you still need people to find your blog and interact with you. That's exactly what Charity shows you how to do. The lessons are in QuickTime video format which means I can watch them on my iPad or from my computer. The first lesson is a video introduction, and the core lessons are slidecasts in which Charity shows you exactly how to set up your blog and promote it in a step-by-step manner. It's as if your best friend were sitting next to you at the computer, showing you exactly what to do. I watch one video each morning, and I'm inspired to take all sorts of action during the day!

If you'd like to see two sample lessons and a list of all lesson topics, check out Lesson 1, the Introduction, and Lesson 8, on how to use Twitter. You really need to watch a sample to judge for yourself that what I'm saying is true. You'll be amazed all the great tips you pick up from that one slidecast, and there are 28 more that are just as good! If you scroll to the area below the video, you'll see a complete listing of all the topics in Teaching Blog Traffic School. You can also download a chart showing all of the TBTS lessons in PDF form.

Collaboration and Cross Promotion

One thing I love about the course is that Charity understands the value of collaboration. She set up a special Facebook group where those who sign up for the course can post questions and ask for help as they create their blogs and begin promoting them. I'm a member of this group, and I'm learning so much from the other members. One big topic of discussion is how to create a quality teacher blog that does not engage in meaningless promotions just to push products. We want to offer great content to our visitors, and we want them to feel free to share their terrific teaching ideas with us as well. As we learn and grow together, we have also decided to help each other out by sharing the word when group members post fresh new content to their blogs. I'm already seeing the benefits of that kind of collaboration!

Blogging for Fun

What if you aren't interested in blogging for profit and only want to blog for fun? Several members in our group are doing just that! I asked Charity if she could send me a list of all the lessons someone would want to watch if they only wanted to blog for fun. I expected her to send me 4 or 5 lessons, but I got back a list with 13 titles! Here's a list of all the course titles that shows which ones would be most suitable for teachers blogging for fun. You actually wouldn't need to watch all 13 right away - 4 or 5 of them would give you a good start and you could watch the others later.

Why I'm Promoting the Course

Charity does offer an affiliate marketing program where teachers who refer new members get a certain percent of the enrollment fee. However, I have decided that I am not going to accept any part of that fee for myself because if I do, you might think that I'm just promoting this course for my own gain. Instead, I've told Charity that I'm donating my affiliate fee to teachers, and I'll do that through DonorsChoose or other programs. The only reason that I'm promoting this course is that it's an amazing value that will empower teachers everywhere.

How to Sign Up
Click the link to Teaching Blog Traffic School to begin the sign-up process. The program costs only $37 if you purchase the course all at once - if you buy the videos individually they will cost $3 each for a total of $84 and are easily worth several times that! You'll be glad to know that Charity offers a 100% money-back guarantee. If you are not satisfied for any reason, she will refund your money in full. Take my word, though - you will not be asking for a refund because you are going to love this course!

Purchasing Options

Good news! You now have two purchasing options. Your best deal is to purchase the entire course, but if you aren't ready to invest in all the videos, you can buy them individually

Click here to order the Teaching Blog Traffic School Course Now!

I'll meet you in our secret Facebook room! :-)

Still Not Sure?

Right now you might be thinking that you don't have $37 to spend on a course like this, but think of it as an investment in your future. The old saying that you have to spend a little money to make money is really true. I have probably spent hundreds of dollars on books about social networking and none of them came close to giving me the information that's in the course. It's an absolute gold mine of knowledge about how to get started! Also, after you begin selling your materials online, you can write off the cost of the course as a legitimate business expense! (Hint: Save your PayPal receipt!)

Why sign up now? If you are still on summer vacation, this is the perfect time to get started. You'll be able to watch Charity's lessons and get your blog and a Facebook fan page set up in no time. You'll have time to think about your goals for the future of your blog and consider the types of products you might want to create. Then when you get back to school and are creating materials for your students, you can quickly add directions, upload them to a teacher sales site like TeachersPayTeachers.com and begin selling them or just sharing them for free online. Charity covers all that and more!

What if you have already started back to school and don't feel you have time to begin this course? Personally, I think that if you love creating materials for your classroom, and you've thought of selling them online, you should enroll in the course now and just save the course information so you can get started when you do have time. You get immediate access to all the lessons right away, and you can do them at your own pace. You might even want to watch just one lesson each weekend and try to implement the ideas slowly.

Teaching Blog Traffic School is also a terrific course for teachers who are nearing retirement. I don't know about your state, but the retirement income where I live is significantly less than a full-time teacher's salary. Around your 25th year, you begin to look at what you'll be paid in those golden years of retirement and it dawns on you that you just can't live off your retirement income alone. Now would be the time to get a blog set up and start creating products from your teaching materials. Start by setting up a blog and blogging for fun, and then you'll be ready to go if you decide to sell your teaching materials online later. Signing up for this course is an investment in your future!

Click here to order the Teaching Blog Traffic School Course Now!

Look for more teacherpreneur resources to be added to this page soon!

Note: Some recommendations on this page may contain affiliate links. However, I would never recommend something if I didn't think it had great value! ~ Laura Candler

 

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