Teaching Online Can Make You a Celebrity

If you are a bookish person or a passionate learner chances are you are already spending a lot of time online researching and learning the subject matters you are interested in. You might have noticed it but there is hardly a subject matter these days that you cannot find online. What varies however is the depth of the studies regarding the subject matter you are trying to learn.

From Free To Paid Information

There are still a lot of free online information about almost any subject but I am starting to see the information gates closing as content publishers start to monetise their free content aggressively. For example online news content publishers have started to ask for viewers to subscribe or else they will withheld all or some of the information they publish.

Many online websites have started to push advertisements aggressively to a point that many landing pages are so filled with advertisements that it is nearly impossible to navigate a website without activating an advertisement. For all of these inconveniences many viewers understand that content publishers also need to make money and that nothing is free.

For example YouTube now offers YouTube Premium which now offers a subscription based revenue model besides their ad based revenue model. One of the advantages of getting the premium service is that viewers are no longer served with ads. This is good for people who value their time over saving a small amount of time wasted viewing ads.

If YouTube gets successful with this then I see no hindrance in website content publishers following this model. They can have for example two (2) versions of their website. One website would be filled with ads while the other one would be filled with content only and gated by a subscription firewall.

Going back to the early days of the internet the general strategy of online publishers would be to give out free online content until they have built a big viewer following. The monetisation would come in later. This is no big secret as many entertainers even before the age of the internet used to give away free samples of their work to their viewers hoping they become paying customers.

This is the ”From Free To Paid” business model that has been going around for so long and one you would definitely be doing if you wanted to succeed online selling information. However unless you have an established online reputation chances are you cannot make money right away. Developing an online reputation takes time and one thing that viewers definitely measure is your expertise on a subject you are teaching.

Customers Want People With Expertise

All of us have our own unique expertise that we have gained from a lifetime of experiences and learning. One thing good about the internet is that it has brought people together with common interests on a global basis. For example a person can pose a question in the online site Quora and they can expect to get several answers from total strangers.

If you take the time checking the answers in Quora you would notice that many of them are in-depth answers to a total stranger’s question. This is also prevalent in many online forums. You would see many online personalities dominate forum conversations with their expert information.

Why do people spend a lot of effort doing this? The answer is that people want to show their expertise on a subject and also to help other less knowledgeable people. By sharing their expertise on a subject they not only help other people but they can also promote their expertise which could gain them prominence enough that they can derive some profit from it.

It is no secret that many people do this but this is not a generalisation. But you notice it from to time. People would give out a small dose of information about their expertise on a subject and then later on peddle a course, book or their own website. There is nothing wrong with this as nothing is free online and these people do give out free information even though in small doses.

As a result many people gain recognition and have become mini to full blown celebrities by just being an expert on a subject online. Are you one of these successful people who have managed to create a career out of teaching your expertise on a subject online? Are you a bookish or passionate learner bursting with enthusiasm in sharing your knowledge in public?

The good news is that people will pay for good information and would continue to pay for good information. Though it may seem that the internet has flooded the world with free information and that there is a surplus of free information the reality is that there is simply not enough people spreading information for their own reasons.

That is why online courses are thriving and more and more are being created. Online publishers realise that many people are not learning much from traditional schools and universities and need to augment and even replace their studies with traditional learning methods. Even schools and universities realise this as they themselves are now offering online courses.

But you do not need to be aligned with a school or university to be able to teach online. What customers demand is expertise. A teacher from school may teach you mathematics but only a real world working engineer can teach you the practical real world application of mathematics. This real world engineer could be you.

You may not be an expert on all the theoretical side of mathematics but you could be an engineer who have actually constructed a bridge for example using mathematics. This is your expertise. Customers who would most probably pay for your courses are engineering students and graduates who do not have real world experience building bridges using mathematics.

The Fear of Replication

Many would be teachers especially those doing online teaching fear that what they teach would soon be replicated by their students. This is true but to a certain degree. While entire courses can be copied by their students for them to setup their own courses and to teach the professional teachers keep tabs of their works and student list.

Once they confirm that one of their students is actually counterfeiting their courses they inform the law and the public especially the students of the counterfeiters so they can decide on the misconduct of the counterfeiter. Also the true professional teacher has so much knowledge stored that what might seem a lot of information or knowledge to a naive student is but a small percentage of what the professional teacher knows.

One thing to note as well is that not many people want to teach. The reasons are varied. There would be people who only wanted to learn about the subject matter and apply what they learned to their jobs. There would be people who find it difficult to interact with people on a personal teaching basis. There would be people who always suffer the Imposter Syndrome and could not be enticed to teach even online.

Whatever the reason is the reality is that many people do not like to teach. The proof is in society. Every year millions of students graduate from schools but only a fraction of them teach for a living. There are many people who teach online informally but though their numbers are in the millions like in YouTube their numbers are still insignificant compared to the billions of people who visit YouTube everyday.

Why Many Would be Teachers Fail

This is essentially why many would be online teachers fail. Many would be online teachers and content creators wrongly assume that what little information or knowledge they know is already a lot. Therefore once they have exhausted the little information or knowledge they are giving out to the online community they essentially are found out as not experts because their tendency is to recycle the limited knowledge and information they have already given out.

This means that the wannabe expert teacher has chosen the wrong subject matter to teach online. The reason why they chose the wrong subject matter to teach could be varied. One reason could be that the wannabe teacher is really passionate about the subject matter but is relatively inexperienced about the subject matter.

In this case the answer to this problem is for the wannabe teacher to delay teaching the limited knowledge they know and study first to become a master of the subject matter. They could instead teach another subject matter in which they "Really" have a mastery of. For example there is an engineering graduate and worker whose hobby is learning psychology.

If he tries to teach psychology online there is the danger that actual psychologists would tell others on his lack of knowledge and experience about psychology which could be a position for him that is hard to defend. But if he had taught engineering he could actually teach engineering on a student and a professional level.

Continuous Learning For Continuous Success

We have determined that the strategy to monetising is to give out free information first to build up an online reputation for your expertise and then sell your more in-depth information to paying customers. We have also determined that there would always be a market for your course, knowledge, information and so on because online teachers are in the low millions while students are in the billions.

We have also determined that if you have limited information and knowledge to share and sell then you would fail as you would never be established as an expert in the subject matter. You would eventually get called out by the real experts in the subject matter who have years of actual, practical and theoretical knowledge.

The secret therefore is to continually study the subject matters that you intend to specialise in and teach professionally online. This is easier said than done. An employee or independent worker can claim several years experience and knowledge yet may be doing the same job over and over again during all those so-called ”Years of Experience”.

Expertise requires continuous learning no matter what. For example as a computer programmer I studied and applied in the real world many computer languages which are now obsolete. If I had stayed on a job that still uses an obsolete computer language I would have been obsolete also in terms of knowledge.

Younger and more newly trained computer programmers would be better experts than me in tackling the current computer programming issues. That is why passionate learners are best suited to be online teachers. The more passionate learners know the more expert knowledge they can share and sell.

The world is going online and increasingly online and computing skills are not only demanded these days but are becoming a requirement to be able to have jobs and to function socially. Jobs have become more complex and people with multiple skills are the ones thriving especially those with digital skills.

As more and more people realise the importance of these online knowledge teachers in terms of advancing their career prospects and other social interactions they become celebrities in their own way with people not only following their educational content but their thoughts and even personal lives as well.

It is no secret that online teaching has become another path to online fame and fortune as evidenced by the many celebrity actors, academics, authors, writers, cooks and others who are now conducting online classes teaching the crafts they became famous for. I am talking about such online platforms as MasterClass.

Conclusion

Once you have developed an online reputation for expertise regarding certain subject matters people especially your students will start to follow you especially if you also have a strong social media presence. Whether you like it or not this newfound fame can make a you a celebrity in a small or big way.

If your sincere attention is to become a celebrity by becoming a well known expert in certain subject matters then you must be prepared to become a passionate learner and continuously learn otherwise you stand to become obsolete in the online world where content is being generated so fast and consumed so fast as well.

You must make lifetime learning and teaching your lifelong goal in order to succeed continuously as well. Tip: Study Seth Godin as an example to have a clearer appreciation of this article.