5 Free Tools you Need in your Teaching Business

Aug 11

Written By Andrew Woodbury

Grow your business to full-time income on $0 per month with these tools.

Read time: 4 minutes

Here’s our TTT for this week on how to grow your online teaching business.

What is TTT? A Tip, Takeaway, and Task. On Thursday.

Today’s read will take you about 4 minutes.

Enjoy!

Tip: Use these powerful tools to grow

There’s really no excuse not to start your business in 2022. YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn function as free universities. Powerful tools that drive revenue and engagement are available for free.

In this post, we dive into the five that you absolutely must have - plus a few bonus tools.

The tip this week is simple: if you’re not using these tools already, run (don’t walk) to set them up and start using them.

Here’s the list:

1. Stripe - process payments from all over the world

2. Canva - design beautiful art and presentations that convert

3. MailerLite (or similar) - start your powerful email marketing that nurtures prospects

4. Calendly - let your students book with you, not the other way around (and charge up front)

5. Zapier - automate processes so you work less

*Bonus 1: Carrd for landing pages

*Bonus 2: Vimeo for video storage

Takeaway: These are the foundation of your online business

You can have a thriving, profitable, and valuable online teaching business that spends $0/month.

Let’s dive into how you would use each of these.

1. Stripe - likely the world’s most used payment processor, you can send invoices, create subscriptions and installment payments, and even create your own digital products from inside the Stripe dashboard. It also integrates with essentially any course hosting platform or website. For a 2.9% processing fee, this is all you need to accept payments from anywhere in the world.

2. Canva - design beautiful and captivating content for your socials and website. The free plan is robust and is all you’ll need. We prefer Canva for presentation and webinar slides as well - their templates are gorgeous. You can create invoices, videos, reels, and much more.

3. MailerLite (or similar) - if you have a business in 2022, you need to have email marketing. MailerLite is, well, light. User friendly but with all the bells and whistles. Capture email, group your subscribers, create automation sequences, and sit back as you nurture your audience. It also integrates with most website builders.

4. Calendly - gone are the days of emailing back and forth to see when someone is available. Put the onus on your students to book their classes (with them paying ahead of time of course - thanks Stripe!) and Calendly shows them when you’re available. Be sure to block off slots in your calendar when you don’t want classes to be booked.

5. Zapier - sometimes we want different tools to talk to each other, and Zapier is perfect for that. Want to connect your newsletter form on your website to your email marketing system? Zapier can do that. Want to add people who download a specific lead magnet to a specific group in your email marketing system? Zapier can do that. Want to get an alert in Slack when someone buys your course? You get the idea…

*Bonus 1: Carrd for landing pages - building a website is largely unnecessary. Landing pages are entirely necessary. Carrd is free or $19/year for beautiful landing pages. Check it out.

*Bonus 2: Vimeo - developing a YouTube channel is a great idea, but don’t want ads to pop up on videos you embed on your landing page or course content? Vimeo is great for that. Vimeo also lets you build showcases and sell groups of videos.

Task: Create an account and get to work

Set aside a morning over the next few days and create a free account on each of these platforms, if you don’t have one already. These will help expand your prospect ecosystem, use automations and lead magnets to their full potential, accept a variety of payments, and have an impressive online presence - all for free.

If you want to see all the tech we use to run our entire business, see our post here.

We hope this helps.

See you again next week.

Leo, Andrew, and Mike