This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Greetings and welcome. This is Side Hustle School. I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. Question for you today. What can you invest in now to create a resource that will earn money for you over time?
And also, would you rather have $1,000 that you had to work for or $500 that just showed up? Like you didn't have to do anything. It was just there in your bank account the next day. We'll talk more about that question in this week's recap. For now, today's story is about a language teacher who wanted to maintain her work-life balance just where she liked it.
What's work-life balance, by the way? Somebody else can figure that out and let me know. Anyway, this teacher found a way to make passive income without having to take on more students. Today's featured story also references several different tools and platforms. Just a reminder that everything I mention in each episode is always linked up on the website, sidehustleschool.com.
That story of a language teacher who becomes fluent in passive income is coming right up. [Music]
For language teacher Janina Klimas, time was starting to become a real problem. The immersive lessons, games, and projects she'd created had turned her into a highly sought-off teacher by both students and other teachers alike. But although she wanted to increase her income and loved working with students, she didn't want to spend all day locked in the classroom. She decided she needed to increase her income without having to work more hours and keep the work-life balance she'd worked hard to create.
So she set about building a WordPress website called Real Life Language, where she could share all of her resources with fellow teachers and have a central hub for her students. Not being a tech guru, Janina paid someone to install the site for her, bringing the total startup cost to just a few hundred dollars. Although the initial investment of time was significant, took quite a while to upload years of language lessons and games, once everything was in place, she could save countless hours per week, just pointing people to one link every time they ask her for help or advice. It wasn't long before she had the idea to create her own personal publishing house, allowing her to create content and resources to share with the world. It was then she began to see the real potential of the site as a profitable side hustle.
Toying around with ways to monetize, Janina was thrilled when she made her first income, one whole penny, from Google AdSense. Though she quickly realized this wasn't gonna be a reliable strategy. So she chose to stick to mediums she completely owned like courses and books. Janina found her first real success when she began to pair her site with the platform Teachers Pay Teachers, and began to sell teaching resources, lesson plans, and handouts to other teachers around the world, using her site to direct them there or sending teachers directly to her profile. And at the time I'm recording this, she has 305 products, ranging in cost from 99 cents to $99 and 99 cents.
So a lot of products and a big price range. However, just selling products to teachers wasn't the only goal 'cause she also wanted to connect with students. And that's where podcasting came in. She taught herself how to upload and submit a feed to Apple Podcasts and began publishing short lessons on basic phrases that her students could use. And it turned out this was also an excellent way to test new courses and products that she could sell.
By finding which lessons were well-received and which fell on deaf ears, she could mold future products and group her podcast together to sell on the platform Udemy or also through her own site. As time went by, she began to put more time into her podcast and learned how to create a more professional system with cover art, lesson notes, and relevant links. She also invests $12 a month into a podcasting service to host her lessons and provide her with relevant analytics. Her final revenue source right now comes through Amazon. After being considered by an educational publishing house to write a book on language learning, but nothing coming of it, Janina took it upon herself to self-publish a book that she also sells through the homepage of her site.
She probably noticed a theme at this point. She sells through her site and she also sells through other platforms. And this may also sound like she's invested a lot of time into this, which is true, but Janina is now at the point where she makes $500 a month completely passively. Each course she's created has been based on what she's already teaching her students and it requires about 20 hours to compile and upload. But once it's there, it continues to sell without any extra work.
Another tool that Janina recommends is Haro or Help a Reporter Out, which has allowed her to get mentioned on much larger sites by helping reporters write relevant articles about language learning. Looking to the future, Janina wants to improve the usability and add more courses to her site while trying to get her self-published book accepted by a publishing house. [Music]
Awesome, I always love stories of teachers making extra money. I know most teachers don't have a ton of spare time during the school year, but there tend to be summers or other extended breaks. And also teachers are just good at managing their time in the first place.
And of course, I also have this focus on passive income where these courses and other resources can sell without her having to do anything once they're made and uploaded. Now I do have some advice, which I'm always careful in offering because you should do what works for you. And if Janina is happy, she shouldn't change anything. But I did wonder about having 305 products up on that teachers pay teachers platform. I would imagine that there is a huge 80/20 rule where only a few products make the majority of the sales and the rest of them just kind of sit there.
And so in situations like that, it's usually best if you've had something up for a couple months and it's not selling, but you have something else that is, I would recommend that you just remove those products that aren't selling. And maybe if you have time, you can make a change to them. Maybe you could call them something else, or you could just focus on what's actually working because obviously some stuff is working for Janina and that's fantastic. Anyway, would you rather have $1,000 that you had to work for or $500 that just showed up? That's where we started.
And we're gonna come back to it in this week's weekly recap. For now, as always, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/243. Thank you for listening today. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
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