Written by You need a long-term plan to leave teaching. You need to have a replacement income before you can take the leap into uncertainty. Teaching is killing you though and you need to get out before you drop dead in the classroom and traumatise 30 sensitive children.
Replacing Your Income
Part of your replacement income can come from your pension, part from taking on more external examining and private tuition. The more income sources you have the more secure your income will be.
There are other ways to earn money from your teaching skills, too. I know one teacher who set up a private tuition centre in his local community. You could also join the lecture circuit visiting schools, colleges and other groups to talk for a fee on various subjects from body language to exam technique and ancient castles.
Online Income
Earning money online is another possibility that you should consider. You will not find links on Escape Teaching to any magic button guru-style solution. I know they don’t work, I have the tee-shirts gathering dust in my wardrobe.
What will work is to set up your own website. This will start to make you a decent income over a time-scale of years, rather than weeks because you have to learn the ropes and to build up a good-sized site.
The Principle
Give people solutions. Forget Google and focus on people. That will work better in the long-run.
The Method
Decide on one area that you would be happy to write about every single day and in which you are knowledgeable.
- Buy a domain name and hosting – Don’t use Blue Host
- Install WordPress
- Start writing
- Continue writing every day
- Find a source of images. I use Art.com for most of mine because it is free, I just link to them and do not have to worry about accreditation
- Keep writing
- After a month sign up for Google’s Adsense program for publishers
- Keep writing
- You will start to find your visitors are linking to your pages. This is the way links are supposed to happen
- Research affiliate programs that might enable you to solve more of your readers’ problems
- Continue to focus on your readers as people rather than as potential sources of money
The Time-Scale
You are talking three months before you start to see any visitors and six months before they are more than a trickle. You do not need to worry about monetization for at least six months. Just concentrate on quality and originality and the visitors and consequent income will come.
