The Ultimate Guide to Teaching Niches

Step-by-Step Practical Advice for Freelance Teachers; How to Stand Out in a Crowded Teaching Market and Find A Steady Stream of Students

Janine Bray-Mueller

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783752888997
• eBook ISBN:
  9783752847895
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique du droit

Freelance pedagogical businesses face these challenges daily: * How can I gain visibility on the global teaching market to attract a steady stream of new students? * How do I secure an adequate income from my work as a freelance teacher? * How do I avoid capitulating to the three-year death cycle and lose my freelance teaching career? What you don't need are theoretical discussions about niches and specialising. These require you to locate your 'ideal client profile' or requires you to find 'the sweet spot' between what you love (your passion) and the price people are prepared to pay. These approaches are too vague for busy freelancers. What you need instead, is a practical hands-on system that works. The Ultimate Guide to Teaching Niches lays out a precise system showing what all freelance teachers, trainers, and coaches need to do to define a teaching niche that helps them to confidently stand out in a crowded teaching marketplace. * It clarifies what information is essential, how it attracts new students, and how it enables freelancers to monetise their teaching experience. * It provides you with the skill to write up the text for your teaching niche that will catch the interest of new students searching for private instructors. All lists, tables and questions are available in both Adobe PDF and MS Word formats. Contact links to Janine are in the back of the book.

1:
HOW TO FIND STUDENTS
SUCCESSFULLY

(AND WHY YOU DON’T)

CHAPTER 1 .1

Two Important Truths
Freelancers Need to Know

Zig Ziglar (American author and speaker) once said, ‘Money isn’t everything… but it ranks right up there with oxygen.’

That is… Nothing kills a business faster than lack of ‘oxygen’ (i.e., money).

To make a living as a freelance teacher, you must embrace two truths:

1. You cannot survive without making money. A teaching business has to cover its operating expenses, your salary, social insurance and pension contributions, etc.
   and
2. Selling VALUE is the essential ingredient to financial survival. Value is delivered when you meet a student’s envisaged gain in his or her life after they have enrolled in your courses.

When potential students enquire about your courses, they imagine an outcome; a certain result upon attaining the outcome. Their aims may be short- or long-term or a mixture of both, but their intentions lead towards an improvement in their lives. As a teacher, you are helping all these students to gain a new and improved level of their life achievements—using your educational programmes. Your students receive this value when they attend your courses, and it’s the value they want to instantly recognise when they enquire about them.

However, the first step must start with you, with your own confidence in your individual skill sets—and that begins with knowing why people pay you.

Know why students are paying you

There are many reasons why a student wants to enrol with you, but it is a mistake to assume that you know why. Find out what is so relevant to your students that they sign up with you. Here are a few well-known examples:

Students will pay for courses because:

• They can’t do what you are teaching
• You help them get rid of a current problem or avoid a potential problem
• They’re afraid of something (at work or in their lives)
• To achieve a particular goal they want to reach
• You’re the best teacher they’ve found (so far)

If you know exactly what potential students need from your teaching service, you are one step closer to delivering that value. They have to understand why you do what you do, and that you provide the kind of tuition they seek.

And of course, they must know you exist.

Do you find marketing difficult?

That’s okay because marketing can be confusing. But it doesn’t have to be difficult. With this book, all that is needed is to choose one step to follow, and when that becomes second nature, you select another step to follow. Because without marketing, you become just one of many other freelance teachers on the global market—like one of the stones at the bottom of a pyramid.

There are many examples of freelance teachers managing to survive without understanding how to make their business visible on the market. Their hope is to find the next student just around the imagined corner. However, remind yourself of the pyramid base in the illustration—and let me show you how to do more than just survive.

In this book, we’ll take the first steps to attain the visibility of the capstone (the pyramidion) and solve the pressing problem all freelance teachers experience—how to gain market visibility by creating a teaching niche that draws the eye of searching students similar to the pyramidion.

And then…

Second, your students need to be informed precisely what kind of gain (value) they can expect from your teaching service.

This book also shows you how you can solve the problem of writing the appropriate text on your website, social media page, or in your brochure that will attract a steady stream of new students.

The capstone (the pyramidion) is the unforgettable part of a pyramid that keeps drawing the eye of an observer after the immense weight of the pyramid base below has faded into subconsciousness.

These rows of look-alike stone blocks are like rows of look-alike teaching businesses.

You can choose to become a stone in the pyramid base of weighted sameness, or you can choose to gain visibility and put your teaching service right at its top—the capstone—of teaching services.

CHAPTER 1. 2

The Teaching World on the
Internet

Do you know Robert Southey’s fairy tale Goldilocks and The Three Bears? The story recounts how Goldilocks stumbles upon a house in the forest and knocks on the door. Nobody answers. However, the door is open, and she goes in. Inside she finds and tries out three chairs before she finds the chair that is ‘just right’. Likewise, Goldilocks tries out three bowls of porridge until she finds the one that tastes ‘just right’. And so the fairy tale goes on.

But…

Suppose the three bears never had a house in those woods?

Goldilocks wants a private teacher that best fits her
educational aims and her pocket

Then the story would not have even started. The story would have abruptly ended leaving Goldilocks stranded, or at best, wandering about the forest in vain. Because the three bears, the three chairs, three porridge bowls, and the three beds represent the minimum number of times, Goldilocks carries out an internet search for a teaching service or a teaching product. She wants a choice, and she’s comparing what is available before buying because she wants to be sure she’s going to make the right decision.

No website or internet presence =

The teacher is not bona fide or

The business is not serious or not good enough

If you don’t have your teaching service website or an active social media page (i.e., a house in the forest) with a description of what kind of courses you offer and how you help students attain their learning aims, Goldilocks won’t be able to knock on your front door. She is looking for a teacher (or lesson product) that best fits her immediate requirements and her pocket. The Internet is renown for its worldwide reach. Consequently, it’s the first visible shop window for entrepreneurial freelancers to proclaim their trade to the outside world, one in which students can contact you 365 days a year.

And yet it is unfair. During my many discussions in Germany and France, I’ve had students stating they will not consider freelancers, who are not present on the Internet. ‘If they aren’t on the Internet’, they have told me, ‘they aren’t good enough.’

Yes, I know it’s unjustifiable but…

When you don’t have a mobile-friendly website (or have created a social media page on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) describing your teaching service—when people can’t find you on the Internet—nobody will ever find you. Nobody. No one will walk in and ask you what do you teach, and how much it will cost to participate in your courses.

You’re out in the cold without a business.

Is having a website or social media page so important?

As an entrepreneurial freelancer, yes it is. It’s essential ...

Table of contents

• About the book
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• The Ultimate Guide to Teaching Niches
• Notes before you read
• Preface and Introduction
• A Concept to ‘Think Like A Fish’
• The Preferred Student Concept
• 1. How To Find Students Successfully
• 2. Signposts in the Information Sequence
• 3. Concept of a Preferred Student Profile
• 4. The Teaching Niche
• Summary: Sections 1 – 4
• 5. The Preferred Student Interview
• 6. Writing Up Your Teaching Niche Text
• 7. Frequent Questions
• Book Summary
• Last Thought
• About the Author
• Review Request
• Further information
• Copyright