How to know when to turn your knowledge into a course as an Edupreneur

 Welcome to the Empowered Edupreneurs Podcast. My name is Michelle Smit and I am an ex-teacher turned online business coach for Edupreneurs the owner of Digiteach and a six figure entrepreneur. I am in love with empowering educators just like you to create freedom filled online businesses and lives they love.

If you are looking to up level your skills, your finances, your mindset, and change the trajectory of your life as an educator in business, then you are in the right place. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of business and mindset development to help unlock the infinite potential within you. To play bigger with your life and go after your dreams. We are going to have so much fun together. So thank you so much for pushing play today. Now let's dive in.

Hello, lovely one. I hope you are doing so well today. I am excited to talk to you today and bring you this new podcast episode. If you don't know me and you've just stumbled upon my podcast and you haven't seen me before, many of you already know me and you know this information, but if you don't, I help educators.

Classroom educators, online, freelance tutors, trainers. All sorts of educators. Educators who are already in business, tutoring, business owners, all sorts of educators. I help them launch courses and group programs online, so I help them shift from trading their time for money. And I help them start trading their value for money through digital products and group programs.

And I help them take their knowledge, their expertise, processes and information and experience and all that jazz in their brain. And I help them package it into offers online that they can sell for years to come. So the course and group teaching model is my absolute favourite. Anyone who knows me knows that that's my model, and that's what I love.

I am super passionate about helping other educators who are ambitious as hell to take matters into their own hands and build their own business, make their own money, and also, Sort of go beyond just the traditional teaching systems and ways of teaching and online business, online courses and group programs is really a new way that we can teach and share our gifts and serve others in this world.

And I'm so freaking grateful for it because, I love it. And ever since I found it, I simply couldn't turn back to what I used to do. That was just a little intro into, what I do and who I help and how I help them. Courses are my jam launching is my jam group programs are my jam.

This podcast episode is all about how to know when you should actually create a digital course or group program. Like what are the signs? What are the silent nudges from the universe telling you to dive into this venture and build new skills that could radically transform your life? Now, I was thinking about it when I was an online teacher, because I was an online teacher.

Many years, about four or five years eventually I got this niggle inside of me. And I remember this niggle and I remember these feelings and I really wanted to put myself back in that place and remember what the actual niggles were, what the signs were for me. To actually go the course creation route because there was like no correlation between what I was doing and online business and course creation.

Like it was such a 360 change. But it was so fricking amazing when it happened. And I know there are lots of teachers out there who would have a similar experience to me where they are just not content in their situation. And they are looking for something else, they may not be sure what that thing is yet.

In my journey, I didn't actually know what I was looking for. I just knew I wanted more money, more time, more flexibility. I wanted to travel and work online. Those were the things I knew I wanted. I just didn't know, you know, the details. This podcast will be about what are those signs? What are the things that you can look.

Right now and see them as potential signs for the fact that maybe you should go and add a digital product into your office suite if you already have a business or if you're an educator and you're just not happy in your situation and maybe online business and course creation is a fricking badass, amazing route to go.

So what are the tell-tale signs? I've got four signs for you today, and the first one is. You are repeating yourself or a process over and over again with students, this is a big one. If you are an online teacher, a freelance teacher, a tutor, and you find yourself repeating the same thing over and over and over again.

That is a huge sign. Now, I know most jobs require repeating information. But the benefit of being an educator is that you typically take a student or someone through some sort of process from A to B, some sort of transformation where the student starts off here at A, and then by the end of working with you, they are now here at B.

They have experienced some sort of. Change transformation in that process. That's kind of what educators do. The cool thing about online business and course creation is that is what they do essentially. Well, selling courses, that's what you're doing is you're facilitating that transformation.

And when you have already got a process that you're taking students through over and over again and it's like repetition, that's a good sign. Because you can start to. Document that process and figure it out, systemize it a bit. If you can do that, then you can create a program or a course that takes students through that exact process instead of just repeating the information over and over again.

And if you find yourself repeating yourself, but you haven't yet identified the process and the steps of, you know what you're taking students. Then maybe this is a great time to look at the stuff you're teaching and think about how can I systemize this? How can I make this into a method or a process?

That is a really good thing to do because once you can do that, you can definitely lay out a group program or a digital course in that process, and that is going to allow you to, help students all over the world. Without you having to actively be there teaching the same thing over and over again.

Now, you may be asking yourself, okay, what if I don't want to create a course in the topic and niche that I'm currently teaching in? And that is totally okay. Many educators don't, and it's a good starting point. I just think it's a good starting point, to go into something that you have experience in, right?

Especially if there's a demand for it. So say you are already, you have a tutoring business, you're teaching one on one lots of students and things like that. That's a sign that there's a demand for what you're teaching and you would have success probably with selling a course in that same topic, showing that same method, right?

I think it does help in that sense. But if you are like super over what you're teaching and you're more passionate about something else and you know that you can help someone else in that, then go ahead and create a course in business in that. Like, I always want you to follow your energy and your passion first and foremost.

I think that's wildly important. Like listen to your gut instinct with that. If you are a maths teacher and you're kind of over teaching maths and you actually have this other passion that you've got experience in that you know you can help people in, then go with that option, right? You don't want to build a course.

In anything that you're not like or build a business in, anything that you're not like passionate in or at least energized by. That's really important. Now, the other question you may ask is, could I create a course for kids? Because obviously this is a question I get all the time. It's a bit unrelated to this podcast topic, but I just thought, let me just answer it.

Often people ask me this, right? And the short answer is, yes, you can, of course. But it does add complexities. So even though you are serving the kids in your, your course or your program, your online program, you need to market to the parents. You need to appeal to the parents to purchase the program for their kids.

You need to be able to articulate the value of your offer effectively to the parents. In your ideal avatar, your student that you are sort of appealing to in your marketing should be geared towards the parents, especially if the kids are young, because kids don't have any buying power, they're not going to go buy your stuff.

The parents are going to go buy your stuff for the kids. And so your job is then in your marketing and your messaging is to appeal to the parents and. Articulate the value to the parents so they can see the value and are willing to pay that pay for that product for their child. So that's one thing I want you to think about.

If you are planning on creating a course program business for helping children in some capacity, is that your marketing actually should appeal to the parents. Unless the children are of age and maybe they're actually. Teenagers, maybe they're like 17, 18, then I have seen it work where you can actually appeal to them on TikTok and stuff and they then maybe contact their parents if they want to buy the thing.

That is that situation. Also, I just want to mention that it needs to be a big enough problem that the parents are willing to solve, right? I have seen some situations where educator will create a program the parents to buy for their child, but it doesn't always land. For example, I've seen someone or some people try attempt creating a maths course for parents to learn how to support their child with maths.

The course is for the parent to learn how to support their child with maths. And in reality, it sounds like a great idea because obviously a lot of parents don't know how to support their child with maths. But the, the problem comes in is that most parents don't actually want to do a maths course and support their child in maths to that extent.

So a lot of parents would just want to pay someone else to teach their child math. So you run up to a demand issue. So your product idea sounds great in an ideal world, and how ideal would it be that parents actually knew how to help their child with maths? But in reality, parents are like crazy busy.

Most of them hardly have any time to do. Most things, and most of them seem to not want to invest time and money into learning maths to teach their child. They would rather invest money and save time by just getting a math teacher to teach their maths, like an extra maths teacher. That is just the, the solution to their problem because they are limited in time and they would rather just pay for someone else to teach their child maths.

And then also the objection comes up in the sense that. They say, oh, my child goes to school to be taught maths. And so why would I invest in a program to learn how to teach my child math? Now that's something that I've seen. But if you were to target home-schooling parents that looks different, they have actively stated that they want to be part of the education of their child.

And in this case, you weren't run into that objection as much. This is just something I want you to keep in mind is that whatever, if you are creating a course for the child, that's great, but the marketing must be geared towards parents. And also you need to think about solving a big enough problem that parents are willing to pay to solve.

Something that there's actual demand for that. You are seeing that parents are paying to have this thing solved. For example, creating a maths course where you just teach the child maths and the parent can just put their child in front of the computer and, and you can. Teach the, the thing that might be solving the problem better.

It's really important to keep in mind your audience, your ideal avatar, who you're targeting, who you're trying to serve, and make sure that that is a real-life problem that they are willing to solve, okay? So I've gone on a bit of a tangent, but these are just common questions that I get asked and I thought, you know what?

Let me just answer it in this podcast, I'm talking about digital courses and group programs. Anyway, and whenever I talk about this topic, these are kinds of questions that I get asked. So essentially one of the signs is that you are repeating yourself over and over, and that is a potential good sign that you should look into adding a digital product or group program to your office suite, or going into course creation and setting up your own business.

All right, next. Number two is that you are maxed out with students and you cannot teach anymore hours, so you have hit your income ceiling. This is another big sign if you find yourself maxed out in your teaching schedule where you actually don't have any more hours to teach. Or bring in income, that is a sign that you should add a digital course to your office suite in your business.

If you are trading your time for money, but you have no more time to trade, then you've hit your income ceiling and that is not a vibe and it does not have to be that way. The good news is that if you are super busy teaching one on one and you have no shortage of students in your teaching business, that is a great sign.

It means you are a very good teacher and students can't get enough of you. That is the perfect opportunity for you to take your knowledge, your expertise, your experience, and package it into a digital program that you can sell for years to come, and more so that you can impact more and more students.

Because you're in business or you're in education because there is a big part of you that wants to serve and help people. Let's be honest, that is at the crux of most educators and often online business owners, is this desire to serve. And I can't tell you how much more impact and reach you can have by adding a digital course or group program to your business or in your life as an educator.

Like just going and learning how to launch a course and group program and. Doing that effectively. That is like absolutely life changing for you, and you're going to start creating massive impact because you can then monetize your teaching gifts in a way that serves more students and makes you more money without draining more of your time.

The key here is to stop trading time for money and start trading value for money instead. And that is exactly what I hope you do in my Educators Income Booster Bootcamp and Digiteachers Biz Academy. The Educators Income Booster Bootcamp is my 10-day live training helping you map out your offer and package your knowledge into a digital course.

It's really just looking at your idea and mapping out a really strong offer that you can then go action on launch and sell. And then DBA is where I actually help you launch your offer into the world. Create your offer, and build your audience. And build your business. Right? This is a really big sign if you are maxed out and you are like, oh, I just can't teach anymore and I have no more hours.

Like, that is huge. Perhaps you should look into creating a digital offer that can allow you to scale, scale without being attached to your time, right? Okay, the third sign is you are feeling boredom or resentment around teaching all day every day. It used to be fun. You used to be energized by it, but it's just not there.

Now this is something I can relate to big time. This was one of my biggest signs of them all. Boredom and resentment. So I was an online ESL teacher and I taught back-to-back one-on-one classes with Chinese kids for hours and hours and hours. I did it for four years and I worked weekends, and I would repeat myself incessantly to the point where I became an actual robot.

I wasn't present in my classes. I was literally just regurgitating information. I was mainly teaching six-year-olds, so the actual information I was teaching was basic. And so they came to a point in my teaching job where I was no longer being stimulated, and it just, it was too monotonous, it was too predictable, it was too repetitive.

It was so un-stimulating. It was basically just boring and I got bored and I started to resent teaching and I became a Shitier teacher. As a result. I used to be way better at teaching back in the days when I was fresh, and I loved my work. I really liked online teaching for like two years because of the flexibility, and I was like, this is so easy.

This is great. But there comes a point in your life where you plateau. Where you are no longer being stretched, grown and expanded, where your comfort zone gets so comfortable, it starts to become. Unpleasant, like your comfort zone starts to actually become unpleasant. And that's the point where I got to my job, and I know many, many, many educators out there can resonate with this on some level, especially online teachers, because honestly, how many one-on-one classes can you do before you lose your mind?

It's so repetitive. And I think some people love it so much and it perfectly suits them and they can do it for the rest of their lives. And that is amazing because you're needed. Those people are needed. We need people to do that work for sure. But for me, that was not the case. I yearned for the challenge.

I yearned for the growth. I wanted to be stimulated. Like a lot of my work I wanted. To feel the challenge. I didn't want to work in autopilot as a robot, and my soul suffered big time. I lost meaning in my work. I lost interest in my work. I lost purpose in my work. I lost the growth and expansion, and not to mention. I had hit my income ceiling of $20 an hour, so like there was no increase in salary at any point that was happening for me. I was literally just repeating myself till the end of time, and that was it. I was like, cool. I'm 26 years old, I've hit my income ceiling. And I'm miserable in this job. I can't do this until I'm like 65.

Like I won't make it. And I started resenting everything about it and it became a matter of urgency that I changed. I didn't know what I was going to do. I didn't know how things were going to unfold, but I knew that I was destined for more. And I knew I couldn't stay in a job that wasn't lighting up anymore.

I couldn't stay in a job that was sucking my soul dry. It just, it was so, out of alignment, it hurt. So if you have that feeling creeping in the boredom, the resentment that I can't do this for the rest of my life feeling, just know that it's there for a reason. Your time may have come up in this chapter of your life that you're currently in.

Maybe that time is up. Maybe this is the chapter and the chapter needs to be closed and you got to start a new chapter and that's okay. And that's normal. I think in life we're going to have many chapters that are very different and just like my mom, she was like a physiotherapist for 20 years.

Then she became a research analyst for another 15 years, then she went into becoming a business coach, a strategy coach. Like she's had three literal careers in one lifetime and like that is the thing, we don't have to just stay in the same thing forever if we don't feel like energized by it or in alignment with it.

And that's okay for you to close the chapter and open a new chapter. And the key is to listen to the internal nudges, okay? The signs, the guts. Listen to your heart, listen to your intuition. Acknowledge that this isn't what you want to be doing for the rest of your life, and be open to changing it.

You don't need to know the entire path ahead of you. You just need to be open to. Change and let that path unfold. Like that's what I did. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I was like, shit, it's definitely not this. Let me go do this. Let me invest with this mentor. Let me try online business and course creation.

Let me just see. And for me, it was my answer. It was my favourite thing ever. I loved it and I didn't ever look back, but I know it's not everyone's answer. It may not be yours, but at least be open to change. At least don't settle for something you're not happy in. There are lots of other things that you can do and if you are resonating hard with this and you are actually craving more income, more impact, more time, more career development, more personal development, and the challenge that comes with running an online business.

Launching courses, then course creation and online business actually could be for you if you are willing to work at it and you are willing to work for a life that most people aren't willing to work for. That is what I can say about that. And I've got my fourth sign for you. It is a little bit similar to the third, but essentially the fourth sign is you are no longer being challenged.

Okay, so this connects to number three. Number three is about boredom and resentment. They are internal warning signs that you need to change something, there needs to be a shift there's misalignment. The next big one is if you're just no longer being challenged, you're just not growing.

So humans actually, I feel like as humans, we are put on this earth to grow.

We are like put on this earth to sustain hardships and obstacles and to overcome and to learn lessons and to expand in our body, mind, and spirit. Like I feel like that is the work that we have to do on this earth. I mean, I think, yeah. What, there's so much suffering on Earth. If you think about it. Like surely there's, there's, there's reason for it.

There's purpose for it. There's lessons that we have to learn and things we have to go through, our spirit needs to go through essentially. And there is a saying that if we aren't growing, we are dying. And I do resonate with it because I do have a tendency to freaking love growth. And I really don't like stagnating so much.

I can stagnate for a while and I can stabilize. I enjoy it, but then I need to grow, so I sort of move between the two. But I love growth, like even the shitty, tough, ugly challenge growth, I even enjoy that. Not like I don't enjoy it. But I have the wisdom to know that there, that is where real shifts and magic happens.

Like that is where I learn the lessons. I was put on this earth to learn. And I hate it at the time. It's really shit. But I know that our biggest growth comes from our challenges. And that we are integrating so much more than we even realize in these times. And we're learning the lessons we need to learn in order to get to our next level in our business and things like, and in our life and with our relationships.

Like there are lessons that we are learning and when we can no longer grow in our work because work is like a lot of our time. Like think about Monday to Friday, eight hours a day. That's like 40 hours a week. That is a lot of your life that you are dedicating to something, right? That's so much of your life.

There's like sleep and work. Those are the main things. You're either sleeping half of your life or you're working half of your life, and if you aren't being challenged in your work, that can be soul crushing. Like I actually don't want easy all the time. I don't want to repeatedly work on the same shit over and over again.

I don't want to work on stuff that doesn't mean anything to. And I don't want to work my ass off for someone else's bank account to grow, like it doesn't make sense to my brain. And teachers are breaking their backs, working their asses off all over the world with little recognition and acknowledgement, and they are feeling underappreciated and many of them aren't being challenged anymore.

They are just being forced into a system that tells them what to do and overruns them with admin and all sorts of crap. So it's not a great system. You can tell I'm not the most positive about it. I think our education system is a bit backward and I think it needs a massive revamp, to be honest. And I also think our educators just aren't being stimulated in the way that they want to, they're not doing the work that's bringing them purpose meaning, and this isn't for everyone. I'm not speaking for everyone. I'm just speaking for my experience. And I know that a lot of educators have shared this with me.

Many, many, many, I'd say hundreds of them have shared this with me. So I'm not the only one who's thinking this. I believe that there's a, dissatisfaction that's happening for many reasons, and so there's this mass exodus of educators wanting to quit and start their own business and do this and that, and do all sorts of other things because they're like scarred from being teachers and the way that they've had to be like slaves to the system and how soul destroying and how burnt out they are and things like that.

I think burnout is like one of the main things that I see. In educators, it's just like mass burnout and with all that burnout and not having meaning and purpose in their work, they are sort of looking for other options and course creation and online business was my solution. It was the best thing that I could have done.

And what, like, it really, really revolutionized my entire life. It changed my life. And the thing is online businesses are built off information-based products and services. So if you're a teacher, a coach, and you have information to share, you have knowledge to share, you have experience to share that will impact others.

That will solve problems for others, that will change other people's lives for the better. Online business and course creation and group programs are literally the most magical way to do that. Like if you just learn the skills to do it, it can be. The most transforming, formative way that you can educate and serve others on this planet.

That is genuinely how I feel. I have never felt more purpose and meaning then since starting my business and running courses and helping people on my terms, like even though it's super challenging. I'm not going to tell you it's easy. It's not for everyone and it's challenging, but if you are up for that challenge and you are down to just, build your own legacy and create your own impact and make your own money and become your own boss, and you're just up for that challenge then, oh my gosh, it's fricking amazing.

These were the four tell-tale signs and signals that you should really start looking into or looking at. And if you have these signs. Then perhaps it is time for you to add a digital course or group program to your product suite, or for you to pivot out of teaching all day, every day and trading your time for money and look into course creation and selling your own course and building your own business.

Right now. As I said, I don't believe all educators have what it takes to do this successfully, to have a business, to launch an offer online. But I believe many, many, many do. And the other thing is that many don't even realize they have what it takes. Like me, I hardly knew my potential before I started in this journey.

Like I did not think I had any of this. Like I was not entrepreneurial at all. I was just a straight up teacher. I had no marketing knowledge, I had nothing. I was just like teaching and I was just traveling and living my best. I had no real desire for a business at that point. It's so crazy how much you can change when you just allow yourself to follow your energy and say yes to opportunities.

You would be amazed at how much you can grow, expand, and develop skill set wise, like just within one year. You can totally change the trajectory of your life. So many of my DBA students within one year are on a complete different trajectory like, they are confident, they are building audiences online.

They're building email lists. They're selling awesome offers. They're launching courses. They're making their own money. Some of them are making crazy amounts of money. Some of them are no longer teaching one on one and they are just doing the things that they want to do. Moving to Spain, doing all sorts of cool.

You have no freaking clue how much your life can change in one year, just one year. That is wild. So if you are feeling any of these signs or you're resonating with this whilst you listen to this podcast, This is my sign to you to actually do something about it and start uncovering new things and, look at how you can change careers or change the work that you're doing, or look how you can shift away from teaching one on one.

Look how maybe course creation is the thing for you. Maybe starting an online business is actually the thing for you. This could very much be just like how, how it was for me. And if you're super keen to learn how to actually map out a profitable course or a profitable offer, with the knowledge and experience you currently have, like how to take that out of your brain, how to conceptualize that idea, map out a really great offer, that you can solve for years to come.

Then you want to join my wait list for my Educators Income Booster Bootcamp. This is my $37 10 day life training experience, and it's going to be opening for enrollment in January again. And it really is the best place to start with regards to course creation, like creating a badass offer that can actually sell and just all the key ingredients that your offer actually needs to sell as well.

So I'm going to be doing that with you. So by the end of that experience, you're going to have an idea and offer that you can actually sell. That you can action on that you can then launch. And this is one of my favourite trainings ever. It's high vibe. There's going to be hundreds of educators and inspiring cool people in it.

You're going to meet lots of cool humans. You're going to make lots of friends with ambitious educators who are on the same journey as you, who also desire more. Desire more income and abundance and purpose and meaning and all that good stuff. So yeah, you can get on that wait list. The link is in the show notes.

Otherwise, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope it was helpful for you that maybe it sparked something in you. And you can look at those signs and you can sort of say, okay, maybe I should be changing what I'm doing. Maybe I am not happy. Maybe I am miserable and all that jazz. Maybe I just want more, right?

It's totally okay if you want more and you deserve more. So I love chatting to you today. I hope you have a brilliant day, and I will catch you next time. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you haven't yet joined the wait list for the Educators Income Booster Bootcamp, then head to my website at digiteach.biz to sign up. This is going to be the best live training experience, helping you take your knowledge and map it out into a desirable course that can sell for years to come so that you can scale your income and impact like crazy.

I appreciate you so much, and I can't wait to connect with you in the next episode. In the meantime, go create a business and life you love.