The Ultimate Guide to Teaching Niches E-Book

Janine Bray-Mueller

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: Marketing for Teaching Freelancers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 233

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

LIMITATION OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY AND/OR LEGAL NOTICES:

The information presented in this book represents the view of the author alone as of the date of publication and should not be taken as expert instruction or commands. It is strictly for informational and educational purposes. Because of the rate with which information changes, the author reserves the right to alter and update her opinion based on new data. This guide does not give any promises about getting results or earning any money with my ideas stated in this publication.

While the author has made her best effort to verify the information provided in this publication, the author accepts no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, or omissions. This publication is for informational purposes only, and she makes no representations or warranties concerning the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this document. Any slights of people, institutions, or organisations are unintentional. When advice concerning legal or related matters is required, the service of a fully qualified professional should be sought. You should be aware of any laws that govern business transactions or other business practices in your country. Any financial numbers or statistics referred to here or on any of my websites are estimates or projections, and should not be considered exact, actual, or a promise of potential earnings. All numbers are illustrative only. The author expressly disclaims any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, promoters, or written sales materials. The author shall not be made responsible for or liable for any loss of monies or any damages including commercial profits but not limited to personal or other incidental or consequential damages.

Because of the rate at which information changes on the Internet, individual links and website information contained in this publication may have changed. The author makes no representations about the accuracy of the web information shared.

Parts of this book have already been published on the www.ft-training.com website, in the digital EFL magazine, or in the EFTT newsletter.

THANK YOU

Writing this book has been an incredible journey—but it could never have happened without the moral support of my family:

This book is dedicated to my Hubby.

My hero and partner for life.

And to my four wonderful children.

How can I thank you all?

Richard

, my IT knight on a white steed, who never failed to help when the computer tried to get the better of me

(which it did often enough)

.

Elyssa

with her sunny disposition, always cheerful, always ready to lend a helping hand.

Herbert

with his unshakeable sense of justice and his moral support on nights I couldn’t sleep.

Jessica

with her unwavering support, her caring, and her strong sense of family and family moral commitment.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Cara Leopold of www.leo-listening.com, teacher colleague in France for beta reading and test driving this publication.

My thanks to Sean D’Souza of Psychotactics.com. His marketing insights and the many lively discussions in his membership site—the CAVE—triggered my enthusiasm to write this book for freelance teachers.

Latin: nanos gigantum humeris insidentes…

‘Discovering truth by building on previous discoveries’

This concept has been traced back to the 12th century and is attributed to Bernard of Chartres.

Contents

Preface and Introduction

A Concept to ‘Think Like A Fish’

The Preferred Student Concept

1: H

OW

T

O

F

IND

S

TUDENTS

S

UCCESSFULLY

Two Important Truths Freelancers Need to Know

The Teaching World on the Internet

Why Freelancers Don’t Find Students

Do potential students know you exist?

Why Students Choose by Price or Location

The psychology of price

Forewarned is forearmed—the WIIFM factor

What Do Students Want?

How will students know if you don’t tell them?

Rewiring a thinking habit to avoid a common advertising mistake

2: S

IGNPOSTS IN THE

I

NFORMATION

S

EQUENCE

The Information Sequence

HOW example: The Hollywood sequence

An Inefficient HOW Example

The Joshua Bell Concept for Success

The parallel between Joshua Bell and freelance teachers

Comparison between Joshua Bell and freelance teachers

Only certain kinds of information will involve students

The Specificity of WHAT (goes in your Teaching Niche)

Find out what makes your student tick

Is there a logical or scientific formula to define a price?

The importance of deriving the perceived worth of a ‘want factor’

The WHAT

‘Want Factor’

How to uncover hidden want factors

Freelance Thinking Caps and Magic Pills for Students

Why Not Solutions?

Why Problems Instead?

3: C

ONCEPT OF A

P

REFERRED

S

TUDENT

P

ROFILE

Freelancers Don’t Need One but

Two

Student Documents

Student Needs Analysis vs Preferred Student Profile Analysis

The Purpose of a Preferred Student Profile Document

How does your teaching service solve your student’s problems?

Three examples of WIIFMs and want factors

When a Miss Is As Good As… Having No Students

Do you target the right student market?

4: T

HE

T

EACHING

N

ICHE

What Is a Teaching Niche?

Will your teaching niche work?

When you cannot see your teaching niche for the wood…

Does a niche exclude teaching all other areas in a language?

The Creditability of a Teaching Niche

Can a niche increase your (passive) income?

Does a teaching niche work?

Does a teaching niche cause freelancers to lose students?

S

UMMARY

: S

ECTIONS

1 – 4

5: T

HE

P

REFERRED

S

TUDENT

I

NTERVIEW

An Interview Must Be… But What’s Your Aim?

What are you trying to reveal from the interview?

What else does the interview accomplish for you?

Tips for a Preferred Student Profile Interview

The Preferred Student Profile Interview: Strategy Checklist

Things That Most Assuredly Will Go Awry

Finding the Gems in the Recorded Interview

The Preferred Student Interview: Feedback List

Suggested Interview Questions

Adult Students

Parents of Schoolchildren and Students

Seminars and Workshops

Future Teaching Service Improvements and Products

6: W

RITING

U

P

Y

OUR

T

EACHING

N

ICHE

T

EXT

Ensuring the HOW in Writing Your Advertising Text

Adding the WHAT in Writing Your Advertising Text

The WHAT issues facing freelance teachers

What is authentic sounding text?

Putting the HOW and WHAT Together

Writing up your text and the order of priority

Example: The Written Text for English Lessons

Getting Feedback from Your Preferred Student

Why feedback is critical after the preferred student interview

7: F

REQUENT

Q

UESTIONS

The Impostor Syndrome Problem

Do you need a preferred student?

How do you decide whom to interview?

Can you choose the wrong preferred student?

Can you misinterpret the student profile information?

Should you send an e-mail with questions first?

Do you send the interview questions in advance?

How do you tease out a student’s biggest problem?

Can you interview anybody?

Cold calling problems

Competing against other freelance teachers

Setting up websites for multiple profiles

When there are two different audiences

The preferred student profile interview (sequentially)

B

OOK

S

UMMARY

L

AST

T

HOUGHT

About the Author

The Ultimate Guide to Teaching Niches

HOW TO STAND OUT IN A CROWDED TEACHING MARKET AND FIND A STEADY STREAM OF STUDENTS

Step-by-Step Practical Advice for Freelance Teachers

Janine Bray-Mueller

NOTES BEFORE YOU READ

To avoid the ‘he or she’ issue, the plural is used wherever possible.

To avoid long, drawn-out explanative descriptions, the word

student

is used to encompass a student, a company, a customer, a school, or any educational institutions, who are taught or have received courses given by the freelance teacher.

Customer

will be used in general situations and implies a student, or company, or school, not yet enrolled as students of the freelance teacher.

A

course

encompasses all forms of tuition, classes, lessons, workshops, seminars, etc.

The word

problem

is used to cover all types of student learning issues and learning aims.

Preface and Introduction

You cannot induce a career revolution if you don’t know why a revolution in your career is necessary;

If you don’t know why a revolution is necessary in your career, why should you change?

Let me tell you about a Nobel Prize Award, Eric Kandel, and a sea slug.

The 2000 Nobel Award in Physiology or Medicine was granted to Eric Kandel for his research on changes in neurons associated with memory storage when he produced visual proof (with the California sea slug; Aplysia californica) of how people were able to learn. The sea slug is the largest single-cell creature living in the world, and although its simple nervous system doesn’t allow complex social behaviour, it is still capable of a variety of associative and non-associative learning tasks. This capability gave the first breakthrough to identifying how memory worked and led to the first step to understanding the cause of Alzheimer’s disease.

However, it nearly didn’t happen. The laboratory assistant was on the verge of abandoning the task. In fact, he had already decided to give up after ‘just one more experiment’ because he’d lost hope.

The laboratory assistant remained focused on completing his task and that last experiment became the long-looked-for breakthrough in the pharmaceutical industry for Alzheimer treatment. His ability to focus on the task—and not give up—had paid out.

A sea slug analogy for freelance teaching revolutions

As freelance teachers, we are involved in how our students learn. We give them tips on how to remember and use their new learning. Now the time has come to practise our own knowledge in learning to help ourselves succeed in developing our own freelancing careers into a viable teaching service business.

Like the laboratory assistant, freelancers need patience and the ability to keep going even when the future looks grim. Perseverance starts by focusing on one small step at a time. You won’t win a Nobel Award for a lifetime effort similar to Eric Kandel, who in his early career was not even interested in science, but you can start your freelancing journey by imitating the simple nervous system of a sea slug and take one small, simple step at a time. Who knows? You may even discover that you enjoy watching how your teaching business develops—like Eric Kandel when he began neuroscience research instead of becoming a historian.

The Nobel Prize and Eric Kandel

It’s understandable to want to know what the future brings, but the enormity of giving our careers and our teaching business a direction can be overwhelming. Focusing on completing one task after another will eliminate this frightening distraction.

As teachers, we know our trade but to succeed in our freelancing business, we have to take each step one at a time and direct our teaching skills on:

Learning what we need for our teaching business to attain a successful, a fulfilling,

but also

a sustainable teaching service business

Understanding the necessity of acquiring new skills to achieve this aim for our own freelancing business

Having the stamina to avoid all kinds of distraction destined to corrupt our efforts to be successful (e.g., procrastination, fear of failure, confronting naysayers)

Panic attacks and the worries about survival is because the fear of the unknown lies in not being able to envisage the big picture—our own financial future and our teaching careers. Take heart, because successful freelancers rarely manage to see the overall picture. However, they do know where they want to go and what they want to achieve. To understand what I mean, think of yourself driving a car. You know two certainties about your trip: (1) your starting point and (2) your destination. What happens in between is no more than a list of possibilities that will influence how your journey proceeds or deteriorates. The bit ‘in between’ is what causes teachers to feel panic as they go about establishing their freelancing careers. In his book titled, The Book of Survival, Anthony Greenback writes:

To live through an impossible situation, you don’t need to have the reflexes of a Grand Prix driver, the muscles of a Hercules, the mind of an Einstein. You simply need to know what to do.

‘You simply need to know what to do’

This book is about motivating your confidence to create your teaching niche and give you the skill to write the text describing your teaching service, quickly, simply, and without fluff. The whole centres around one student, which I call the preferred student. As you read the book, it’s natural to question whether you’re going to make the right choices. For example, you might wonder whether your first idea for a teaching niche is right. Here is my answer: Don’t worry. A teaching niche is not carved in stone. Why not consider the first niche as a stepping stone—a tool to get you started?

Indeed, discussions with other freelance teachers have shown that when they dive into a freelance business without deliberately choosing a teaching niche, they get frustrated and begin to wonder whether all their hard work is worthwhile. This is when I hear the quiet click of the three-year death cycle of a teaching career closing yet another freelancer’s door. Teachers give up instead of enjoying the satisfaction of knowing they were responsible for their students’ successes.

The ideas and lists presented in this book are designed to be uncomplicated and easily repeated. Should you decide the first teaching niche doesn’t suit, choose the next issue from your preferred student’s list of problems and carry on. You will find the bulk of your work will have already been done. Remind yourself of what would not have happened if Eric Kandel’s laboratory assistant had given up one experiment earlier.

The truth is that freelancers will never get to see all the little events, all the small parts happening along the way. We cannot expect to see what the future brings. Vital for us all, however, is to keep going forward, make plans, and keep refining our teaching business’s foundation, our teaching methodologies and materials, as we pursue our freelance career paths. And remember, we are not doing this alone. The helpers at our sides are our own students. Let me explain in this book why your student is instrumental in being your stalwart helper in establishing your teaching business.

About causing a revolution in your freelancing career

I write this book as a freelance language teacher. Consequently, most examples relate to language teaching but these are easily transposed to other teaching areas. My aim is to help you achieve a revolution in your freelancing career. It's based on an angler’s philosophy and how you can use his maxim to ‘think like a trout’ to push the survival panic barrier outwards; to extend your teaching future. His philosophy of knowing how one fish thinks will help you to write ‘fish’ text that engages prospective students’ immediate attention to your teaching service. It will also help you discover the revolution in your freelance career—the teaching niche. Internalise the philosophy and watch how it stops the slow begin of the three-year death cycle of your freelancing business.

Let’s begin to find out what is meant by a concept called:

‘Think Like A Fish’

A Concept to ‘Think Like A Fish’

A hobby angler I used to know in Pinneberg not far from where I used to live in Germany, sold the most delicious self-smoked trout I have ever tasted. He was so successful the locals called him ‘the trout stealer’. When I asked about his nickname, he told me:

When the other anglers go out fishing, they think like fishermen.

Well, I think like a trout.

An easy concept to employ

He was implying that where there is ONE trout, there are others not far away.

The concept is sooo simple, but how many of us actually think ‘like a trout’?

How many of us ‘think like our students’?

We assume we know what they want and why they are looking for private teachers. But this is not thinking like a fish. This is thinking like those other fishermen.

Why ‘think like a fish’? Because when you have to present your teaching information to attract new students, you have to know what one student (one trout) is looking for.

When you can emulate what one trout has found, you know the other trouts are not far away.

It is this single trout information freelancers need to uncover when they want to catch the rest. And to catch the rest, you have to know how to bait your line, i.e., write your text for your teaching information package so that students sit up and take notice.

But who is the trout?

The trout represents a concept I call the preferred student. We’ll begin by first describing this trout—our preferred student—and then continue with the next step in understanding how to begin putting your teaching information package together in the section: the information sequence.

But before we begin with the information sequence, we need to understand the concept behind the preferred student.

The Preferred Student Concept

Our preferred student gives us everything we need to develop our teaching information package. The preferred student provides you with the ‘what’ in your information sequence that is covered in the next chapter. Consequently, it makes sense to understand the concept of a preferred student. When we can explain this idea to others, we are one step closer to better understanding the concept ourselves.

The Preferred Student Concept

No two persons are alike. It’s true that there are some people we would love to have as students—yet others we’d prefer to avoid like the plague. We don’t just need more students; we need better quality students.

A preferred student helps us to identify the better quality type of student.

Describing the concept of a preferred student to your colleagues or friends

You want to buy your best friend a jumper for her birthday. Would you buy anything that is halfway acceptable as long as it looks nice enough as a birthday present? I doubt it.

But because you know your best friend loves jumpers that don’t scratch, prettily decorated with little glass stones, and that her favourite colour is green, you’ll take pains to find a green, soft-to-touch jumper with small, decorative glass stones around the neckline.

Will she love it? Of course, she will.

Now, let’s suppose your best friend’s name is Sally…

A preferred student represents all the Sallys living in the world. The Sallys are people you care about, and all these Sallys hate scratchy jumpers. In fact, these Sallys love green, soft-to-touch pullovers with small, decorative glass stones. Indeed, our pullover appeals to every Sally worldwide. Our preferred student is our best friend Sally and she represents all the Sallys in our teaching world.

A preferred student is NOT a favourite student

The preferred student is a concept in which we isolate a single student to be the representative for all our future students.

The goal is to achieve a steady stream of better quality students; i.e., students we prefer teaching the most.

Explaining the preferred student concept to a chosen Preferred Student

You could describe the concept like this:

Have you ever seen a « teaching subject » advert and thought, ‘How do I know whether this course is the right one for me?’

Well, that is because nobody ever asked you what you wanted from a « teaching subject » course. Nobody ever asked you what issues you were facing, and why they were problematic and how you hoped to solve them.

Now, I’d like to ask you a few questions about the issues you were facing before you came to me, and the reasons why they were such problems for you.

In fact, I know you are not the only student facing these same issues. Many other students are experiencing them as well. When you can explain them to me, I can better describe my tuition (courses), so it better illustrates exactly what you were looking for when you first came to me. And then we can find out what worked so well for you when we solved those old problems.

Instead of me imagining what those problems were, wouldn’t it be better if I asked you about them instead?

This book aims to help freelancers stop a slow, three-year death cycle of your freelancing business, and we do this by causing a structural change to your freelance teaching career. The change begins by internalising my German angler’s philosophy on how to ‘think like a trout’ that works in tandem with the preferred student concept. Let’s now continue this process by resolving two frequent questions asked by many freelance teachers: How do we find a constant stream of new students? and Why is it so difficult to find students?

1: HOW TO FIND STUDENTSSUCCESSFULLY

(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:

You cannot survive without making money. A teaching business has to cover its operating expenses, your salary, social insurance and pension contributions, etc.

and

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.

The teacher is not bona fideor

The business is not seriousornot 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.