The truth about passive income as a freelance teacher

Passive income sounds like the dream, but is it all it’s cracked up to be and how can you earn it in ELT? 

I’ve been running a business teaching people in ELT about turning your savings into financial security for the future since 2022. On the surface of it, that might sound like I am doing the classic “earn money in your sleep”. And I’ve certainly had the experience of waking up and seeing I made a sale during the night. But I’m not sure I’d call it passive! I’ve worked hard to build an audience and marketing has become one of the main things I spend time on. 

But are these “passive” income models preferable to selling my time to an employer? Yes! Here are some of the “passive” income models you could adopt as an ELT freelancer in order to earn more in ELT. And the tech set up you need to achieve them.

This post contains affiliate links from which I may make a small commission if you purchase. It doesn’t cost you anything extra!

Online courses

Particularly since Covid, students all over the world are more prepared to learn online. That can mean via live online classes on Zoom. This is where platforms like Preply offer exploitative rates to teachers while enabling you to be found by a high number of students. 

But learners are also more likely now to consume digital learning content that is asynchronous i.e. videos or audios and online workbooks studied at their own pace. This is where teachers can earn decent money on an ongoing basis.

The market for English is huge and it’s no longer only accessible for language schools. The good news for you is that offering online courses is a way to sell to many people at the same time, working from your laptop at home. That might be low-cost courses or higher-ticket offers, depending on the target client and the niche you’re aiming for. General conversation or business English classes have more competition and have to be priced lower. In comparison, something like English for Botox clinics can charge more as it’s a more specific offer and, therefore, result. 

Tech you need to earn passive income from selling online courses

Firstly, don’t create the course until you know people want to buy it. Write the outline so you know the topics. By topics, I really mean results. You want to write from the point of view of what the customer will achieve by doing this course. Once you’ve sold places, you create the lessons. And you can crowdsource people after they buy to see what they want to learn so that you create a course in line with their expectations. The best thing is to run that course live before offering it as a video-based course. That way, you get to test the content, see where people need more help, and refine the material after feedback. I did this with my No-Stress Money Plan course 3 times before turning it into self-study.

At the very most basic level you just need a way to accept bookings and take payment. That can be as simple as a Google doc sales page and a Paypal link. Or a basic webpage which you could create for free in WordPress. The more professional you get, the more you’ll probably look at sales carts and a website, but you can start with much less than that. 

To deliver the course, if there’s a live element you can use platforms like Zoom or Google Meet for free, within certain limitations. If it’s not live, you can email participants videos you’re hosting unlisted on YouTube (free). I ran my investing course for several cohorts using Google slides with embedded YouTube videos and I linked to Google doc worksheets. It doesn’t have to be fancy or technical at first. Now I use Thrivecart for sales pages, to take payments, and to host the course. But I was fine without any of that for the first 18 months. 

Books

Many more people say they want to write a book than actually write a book. So, in that sense, actually writing one puts you ahead of the game. This is an area where some authors really do make a good living. They usually have multiple books so people become repeat customers and/or they have one viral book that becomes a bestseller. 

Getting a book published traditionally is much harder than self-publishing and you make a lower royalty than if you’re self-publishing. But the distribution and promotion of a traditionally published book is potentially much wider. I have both kinds of books and none of them have made me rich! But they do both bring in a trickle of income and help establish credibility. I fully intend to publish more and, in fact, have a children’s picture book coming out in 2025 via a publisher. At this point, the thrill of being published doesn’t have much to do with expecting to make much money! But you never know …

If you are hoping to earn an income from selling books, choose your topic, title and cover carefully if self-publishing. Research the market to make sure yours will stand out. If you’re looking for a publishing deal in ELT, few publishers accept book proposals. But you can compile a list of publishers who sell the kind of book you want to write and send an inquiry. 

Tech you need to earn passive income from books

Again, at the least fancy level, you can sell a pdf of a book by sending people to a webpage or even a Google doc with a Paypal link. When they buy, you manually send it to them via email. I have also done this for years and you’d be surprised how high people’s tolerance is for a book in pdf format even though it doesn’t adjust to fit mobile very easily. 

If you have so many sales it’s hard to keep up manual delivery, that’s a nice problem to have! Time to look for a platform that handles sales and delivery automatically. I don’t host pdf books on Thrivecart but it could do that.

Alternatively, self-publishing on Amazon, or similar platforms, is also very easy. You upload a Word doc and it creates an ebook. You then have an Amazon listing to send people to buy from. Amazon will pay you each month, in exchange for a chunk of the book’s price. This option also allows you to create physical books on demand so Amazon handles all that for you. Potentially people can find your book in a search, but don’t bank on that. You’ll most likely need to be marketing it yourself or running Facebook ads to it.

I did once have Amazon pick up one of my books for a promotion. I sold hundreds of books over a couple of days because they promoted it. So, even at the heavy discount they were offering it for, I made way more than the handful of sales I’d have made at full price without the weight of their promotional activities. I have no idea why they picked me and it’s never happened again!

Resources

Most teachers already make their own materials for their classes, either as a supplement to the course books or instead of. So, it’s a logical next step to think other teachers might buy your resources and lesson plans. You just need to find willing buyers who are looking for what you’re selling. The disadvantage of this is that, compared with the global market of millions of English learners, the number of teachers is much smaller. But people do supplement their income selling teaching resources.

Tech you need to earn passive income from selling resources

At their very most basic, teacher resources and lesson plans will probably be pdfs or editable docs in Word or Google docs. You can do something more designed up using Canva and you’ll probably be able to do everything you need with the free version of that.

Then you need to sell them on a third party platform like Etsy, Teachers Pay Teachers or the Times Education Supplement as it’s the easiest way to reach people who are looking for what you’re selling. The keywords you use to help people find your products need to be very carefully chosen to be highly sought after but without much competition. 

You could sell teaching resources on your own site or a Shopify store instead of a traditional website as well. But you’ll need to be driving a lot of traffic to it. So you’ll want to learn SEO, at the least, so that people come across it in Google searches. Posting in relevant Facebook groups is another way to drive traffic to your resource site as is running Facebook ads. 

Memberships

A membership is not only recurring income, it’s regular and reasonably predictable (assuming you retain the members). Members could join to get ongoing access to resources, or live training, or monthly drops of things like templates or lesson plans. Another membership feature might be support, critique or feedback from you on whatever the main task of the membership is. For example there are memberships for building websites or writing essays. People often join just as much for the community aspect and to learn from and be supported by their peers. Free groups can provide this as well so you definitely need to clearly show the value paid-up members will get. 

But, of all the options so far, a membership is possibly the most labour intensive on your side. I personally wouldn’t call this passive income at all. You need to keep coming up with new content or training or providing feedback. You’ll need to be active in the group community too, though some people do outsource some of this to a VA. And then there is the work of recruiting new members via marketing.

Tech you need to earn passive income from memberships

For a membership to work, people need to be able to pay either upfront or on a monthly basis. It’s probably more typical to pay monthly because you get to charge a manageable amount that helps potential customers make an easy decision to buy. Also they know they can stop at any time. So, while you could take payment without a platform, it’s a lot harder to manage if you have to remind people to make a payment each month by sending an invoice. 

Again, Thrivecart has the facility to rebill customers on a subscription basis. If part of your membership involves access to content, this can be dripped out month by month when people join. If you want a place where people can interact and you can host live calls, you can set up Facebook groups for free. That would be enough to start off, but there are other all-in-one membership platforms that are popular that also allow you to host a community forum, such as Circle or Mighty Networks. There will be an ongoing cost to you for these platforms but they have more features and control than Facebook groups.

Affiliate marketing

In truth, all of these things are better called “recurring income” than passive income because you do have to do some work to create the thing you’re selling. And then to promote it. However, there is a way of getting other people to do the promotion for you. 

And that is through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is when someone else promotes your thing for a commission. This could be through “refer-a-friend” bonus offers, usually where they say something like “Use my code PIXIE to get 10% off”. Or you can use a platform, like Thrivecart, that assigns special affiliate links. This tracks where your customers come from and assigns a commission to the affiliate marketer.

If you want to read more about how affiliate marketing works, here’s a post on it. If you’d like to learn how to use affiliates to sell your stuff, including without using any fancy tech, here’s a short course on it by Lizzy Goddard (affiliate link). Her emphasis is on making extra sales with little effort on your end which is the whole point of passive income, right?

What you need to earn passive income from affiliate marketing

If you want to actually BE an affiliate marketer and promote other people’s products and offers, here’s a really comprehensive, easy to follow course on how to do affiliate marketing. A whole world of recurring income awaits you. This is an affiliate link to Leanne Scott’s course Affiliate Marketing Superstars, from which I make a small commission at no cost to you. I’ve done the course myself and highly recommend it. There are lots of testimonials from other people here too.

As a teacher, you could look for products to market related to TEFL like TEFL courses, or promote courses and resources to students of English that would help them learn. Or choose an area of interest like travel, cooking, diving, gardening – anything you could happily create content about.

The ONLY truly passive income 

Affiliate marketing is great and, trust me, when those notifications come through that you earned a commission, it feels like money fell out of the sky. But you do have to create the content, like this blog post, and you have to promote it or it doesn’t really work. It’s not as simple as “build it and they will come” – though blog posts and YouTube videos that appear high up in Google searches will keep selling for you years later. 

But there IS a way of making money completely passively and that is by putting your money to work. If you’re regularly putting away a portion of your income (even if it’s small!) into pensions and regular, low-risk investments your money grows by itself. Even just having savings in high-interest accounts is better than having it sit idle. So many people in ELT have inheritances or savings that have sat doing nothing for years. It’s a huge missed opportunity for truly passive income. You don’t work for it, you don’t have to promote it or manage it. You just open the right kinds of accounts and leave it alone. 

This is what I teach on the No-Stress Money Plan and I aim it at people in ELT because no-one gives us any guidance on money and many of us are a bit lost. I’ve got all my money working for me, and a greater sense of financial security as a result. It’s a lot less complicated than any of the other ideas for passive income once you understand how investing works. If you can open a bank account, you have the tech knowledge necessary too!