How to Monetize Your Tech Skills With an Online Course

Teaching others what you know is an excellent way to start a side gig. And with the internet and social media, finding people willing to pay to learn your expertise has never been easier.

So, if you’re looking for a decent semi-passive income, here’s how to monetize your tech skills by teaching an online course.

1. Determine Your Expertise

If you want to teach your skills and make money, you must first determine what you will sell. You can’t just offer a course that you only have surface-level familiarity with, especially with the number of people teaching the same knowledge.

So, before you build an online course, you must first determine what topic you can consider yourself as a subject matter expert (what is a subject matter expert?). For example, if you want to teach people how to get started as a freelancer, you must have real-world experience working as a freelancer.

That way, you can prove to your students that your methods work, and they can emulate them to achieve the same success. Once you know what to offer, you can move on to the next step and start building yourself up so people will know you as a valuable resource.

2. Build a Reputation

While you, your colleagues, friends, and family might know what you do, the rest of the world probably doesn’t even know you exist. That’s why you should market yourself as an expert so people will trust you.

But how can you do that? In the past, you needed to spend a lot of money to buy ads, sponsor free physical seminars, and even write books. Thankfully, you don’t need to do that nowadays, especially with the advent of social media, especially TikTok.

You must create engaging content for your social media profiles and slowly build a following. You can also use TikTok (how to use TikTok for beginners), YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels to create short but meaningful content.

Aside from your daily social media posts, you can host a weekly live show about your expertise and feature guests with similar experiences. While you would probably have less than 10 viewers on your first show, it’s a good start to introduce your face and build a following.

Furthermore, you can record these live sessions using Android apps for recording podcasts for sharing later.

3. Find or Create Your Market

Now that you have social media profiles focusing on your expertise, it’s time to find or build your market. The easiest thing to do is to find social media groups like Facebook Groups or X (Formerly Twitter) Spaces where people ask about the things you already know.

When you’re inside the group, you can answer their questions or even create posts that will bring insight to the members. However, you have to be careful, as some of these groups are already there to promote someone else’s course—you wouldn’t want to poach students from another coach and stir up drama as it would likely lead to negative feedback on you. They might even expel you from the group.

The safest bet is to create your own Facebook Group, where you’ll have free reign on what’s happening inside. That way, you don’t have to worry about offending the group’s owner, and you can even use it to promote your course in the future.

Once you’ve made your own social media community, you can promote it on your posts to help grow it even further. We would even suggest starting a weekly newsletter to send to your followers’ emails—that way, you can deliver value while slowly building the market who buy your course once you launch it.

4. Come From a Place of Help

Whenever you’re creating a post, replying to a question in a Facebook group, or simply posting a video story, you should avoid focusing on selling your course. That’s because many students don’t like hard-selling. If you do that, you might lose followers, as they’ll think you’re only doing this for the money.

While you’re doing this to earn, it shouldn’t be the foremost thing on your mind. Instead, you should focus on helping the community learn from you—this is the one thing you should remember when engaging with people in your social media groups.

We also have tips for engaging with your Facebook Group members to build a high-quality group that people will recommend to their friends and family. When you have an excellent community, you can easily find people who are more than willing to pay for your course.

5. Build Your Offer

Now that you’re known for your skill and have a community following you, it’s time to create your course. While you might have heard about high-ticket, low-ticket, and other kinds of offers, it’s best to focus first on your core course—the one topic you know inside and out.

Building your offer means creating an outline that will teach the subject from start to finish. Once you have the outline, you should figure out how you will teach it—will it be a live video lesson? Or will it be a recorded video your students can follow on their own time?

You should also create quizzes and exercises that will make it easier for your students to understand and practice what you’ve thought. Once you have that, you should show your lessons to some of your peers so they can give you feedback on improving it.

When you’re happy and confident with your creation, it’s time to market and sell your course.

6. Sell Your Course

Since the 2020 pandemic, many online learning platforms have been launched where students can find teachers and coaches. So, if you want to do it the easy way, you can pick any of the top platforms to create and sell courses.

However, some creators find these platforms limiting. So, instead of relying on these third-party websites, they build their own learning portals using WordPress (what is WordPress?) or Figma (what is Figma?) instead.

You must also figure out your online payment platform if you’re going through this route. The most popular option is PayPal, but Payoneer is also viable. So, you should check out our PayPal vs. Payoneer comparison to help you choose.

Be a Legitimate Online Coach

Building an online course doesn’t sound easy—you have to risk time and effort to make it—but it does have its rewards. Once you get the course up and running and people start enrolling in your classes, you have a semi-passive income to supplement your primary source of living.

Of course, you shouldn’t forget about customer service, keeping your students happy, and, most importantly, delivering results. After all, if you do well in these areas, you just might be set for life as a legitimate online coach.