This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What's up, what's up, welcome back. This is Chris Guillebeau, kicking off an all new week. I am excited about all that is in store. Now yesterday I mentioned that we have a plan to involve listeners even more with the show. If you're new, Side Hustle School is created almost in real time in response to a growing community of listeners who are all working on their side hustles.
Creating that first or second or fifth income generating project without quitting their day jobs. Now, here's the next step. I would love to get your answer to this question. Do you have a Side Hustle idea now or one that you've been actively working on? If so, what is it?
Give me a quick call and leave your short response at 844-9-HUSTLE. Or if you want, you can use your phone to make a voice memo and email that to podcast@sidehustleschool.com. We're gonna feature a bunch of responses starting next week. Today's story features a high school teacher. I often mention that we have a lot of teachers out there listening.
I think teachers make great side hustlers. It's because you guys are resourceful and hardworking. You know how it goes, if you wanna get something done, ask a busy teacher to do it. So today I'll tell you about another resource to check out, a website that teachers use to connect with customers and make money, even if you don't have an email list or a website of your own. And I'll tell it to you in the form of a story from a high school French teacher who's used this resource to make $8,000 and even pay for her exotic honeymoon.
That story right after this. [Music]
Today's story comes from Erin Austin in Colorado. By day, she's a high school French and AP art history teacher. Her side gig is writing curriculum and selling it to other teachers on the platform teacherspayteachers.com. Erin stumbled upon this site and before she started using it herself, she mentioned it to a few of her colleagues.
One of them signed up and started making money right away. So Erin looked at it more carefully. The site allows you to have a free account or pay for a premium account. And with these accounts, you can upload curriculum or other teacher resources and sell it to teachers worldwide. Now a free account charges you 30 cents per transaction and you keep 60% of the sale, but a premium account costs $59 a year, but allows you to keep 85% of your sales and you don't have to pay transaction fees.
Erin began with a free account and posted her first free item, which is a requirement for everyone who sells on the site. You have to have at least one item for free and then started uploading curriculum she created. She only paid to upgrade to a premium account to get that higher percentage of sales once she was seeing consistent sales each month. And along with upgrading to a premium account, Erin also put a lot of curriculum on the site. In fact, she has 605 products in her store.
And that's the advice she gives to other sellers. She says it's a numbers game. Now listen, 605 products sounds astounding, but understand that these are very simple products. Erin's a French teacher, so some of these products are just short documents explaining rules for different vocabulary, grammar, and verbs for a cost as low as 75 cents each. She charges $20 or more for entire units, like a novel, for example.
She also offers some of these products for free to create repeat customers and keep buyers happy. Erin has the highest possible rating on the site, 4.0, it's like a GPA, and anyone searching for French materials will see her profile near the top. In terms of marketing, Erin tells other teachers about the site when it comes up naturally in conversation, and she posts her uploads on Pinterest, but otherwise her sales arrive without a lot of ongoing work on her part. Teachers pay teachers, throws site-wide sales a few times a year, and individual sellers can also throw sales. Last, the site allows sellers to email followers once a month to let them know about new products or sales.
Erin took it slow at first, but after she'd been doing it a while and uploaded a lot of curriculum, she was earning at least $500 a month. Because her market is fellow teachers, the income varies according to the school calendar. She makes more in months like September, April, and May, and less in June and July. In the first few months of 2017, she made close to $3,000, so she's definitely seeing an increase and on track to earn more than last year. She knows some other sellers on this platform who make $1,000 a month or more, so she feels like she hasn't hit her limit yet.
Erin puts an average of three to five hours a week into writing curriculum during the school year, and she plans to bump that up to 20 hours a week over the summer in hopes of generating more passive income through the following school year. She wants to write curriculum for films and novels commonly used in high school French classes. She's noticed that these are some of her top sellers, and they also help her keep her language skills up. In addition to selling curriculum on this platform, Erin is now working with a colleague who's a Spanish teacher on writing what's known as a reader, and a reader in this definition is a novel in the target language meant for language learners because it focuses on repetition and uses high-frequency vocabulary. So together they are creating this resource for French students, Spanish students, and ESL students.
Between all of that and teaching yoga, and of course the actual job as a high school teacher, she stays busy. Now here's a fun fact. Erin recently got married and used the money from the side hustle to pay for the majority of her honeymoon to New Zealand and Tahiti. I thought this was a great example of how extra income from a side hustle can go towards something fun or different from just paying your regular bills. [Music]
I hope you enjoyed Erin's story.
That resource I talked about was teacherspayteachers.com. Some similar platforms we've talked about before include wiseant.com and clarity.fm. If you're not able to write that down and you're not sure about the spelling, just come to sidehustleschool.com/142. Every day we have detailed show notes and I'll include links to all those things as well as an episode from when we started way back on day 13 about a Waldorf teacher who's doing something similar. Oh, and if you know a teacher, why not pass this on to them?
'Cause like I said, they're probably busy, but they're also usually resourceful, hardworking, and creative. So a side hustle might be great for them. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. Thank you for listening. I hope you have an awesome day.
I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
