The Best Business to Start Online from Home to Make $100,000 a Year

Let’s start with the punchline.

The best business to start online is to become a teacher.

I’m being serious here, but it’s probably not the teacher in the sense that you’re thinking about.

Now I’ll need to explain this in the rest of this post.

The premise is pretty simple. You want to make money online and the only way to make money online is by following a simple formula:

Audience x Offer = Money

Every single online business that makes money follows this formula. What’s beautiful about the formula is that you can plug in a ton of different things into it.

The Offer can be t-shirts, goods from China, books, courses, soaps, or whatever else you can think of. From there you need to find an audience that wants the offer.

Wait, want isn’t enough.

They have to feel like they NEED the Offer.

Lots of us want things, but we don’t go out and get those things. However, when we have a burning need for something we do everything in our power to make it happen.

Yes, this applies to t-shirts and soaps as well.

So what does this have to do with teaching?

Every single day we wake up with a story in our heads. This story always seems to have a villain. The thing that is preventing us from progressing further in the story.

A bad relationship. A bad job. A tough class. A lack of skill.

We all have something that is on our minds that we want to “fix”. You’re here because you want to fix your financial situation. It doesn’t mean you’re broke (you might be) and it doesn’t mean you’re in debt (you might be). It just means that you want to better your current financial life.

You’d like someone to provide you with the answer. Someone like a teacher.

The Best Business to Start Is…

And that’s why teaching is the best business to start online. Because there are always people every single day looking for an answer. All you have to do is figure out the question that they are asking.

If you can do that then you can make money.

You see, that’s a lot different than selling t-shirts. People don’t usually go out looking for T-shirts. They come across them and then they have to be convinced to buy them.

However, if I know that you’re looking for an answer and I come up and tell you that I have it, then I’m good. From there I just have to find more people that are asking the question.

I can answer in a book, a course, a webinar, or any other way and I can do so in a way that you’ll pay for.

This is where you might think that you don’t have the answers for anything, but you do. You’ve lived long enough to have answers to lots of things and you have the ability to learn even more answers.

What if you knew a way to thread a needle that didn’t require 30 minutes of frustration?

Or maybe you know how to make those cool foamy coffee designs that you see in all of the stock photos.

Remember, every single day people are looking for something to help them move forward with their story. They are frustrated because this thing is preventing them from getting to where they want to go.

You have that thing.

Is it for everyone? Most definitely not.

It’s only for the people that need it so the question then becomes how do you even get started with something like this? Lucky for you I happen to have the answer and I’m not even going to charge you for it.

Ready?

How to Start an Online Teaching Business

First and foremost I don’t want you to get caught up in all of the technical stuff like buying a domain or setting up a website. That stuff can happen down the road, but there is no point in doing it if you don’t actually have a business.

You don’t even need a business plan because you know the simple equation that a business needs.

Audience x Offer = Money

That’s your business plan.

That means you need to figure out two things:

1. The Audience
2. The Offer

Do you figure them out in the order listed? You can or you can figure out the Offer first.

The Audience you probably already understand. It’s whoever is willing to buy your Offer. However, that is too simplistic and it’s something you’ll forget down the road so let’s dive deeper into the Audience

The Audience

We’ve established that everyone has a story that they tell themselves. Some people have problems that they’re willing to pay to get solved while others go through life thinking they can work it out.

That means your audience is pretty specific. They are the person that has the problem that you’re going to help them with AND they are willing to pay for the problem.

It doesn’t make much sense to try to talk to anyone else, right?

You’re here to make money so why would you talk to someone that doesn’t have the problem OR the money?

Remember how I said you’ll forget this down the road? What I mean is that you’ll go online and see someone with 100,000 followers (wherever you like to kill time on the toilet) and believe that’s the way to make money.

While that is a way to make money, it’s much easier to just find the 1,000 people this year who are willing to buy from you because you can help them.

You can’t get to 100,000 people before you get to 1,000 first anyway.

It’s important you keep this in mind. There is a specific person with a specific story in their head that has a specific problem in need of a specific solution and they have the money to pay for that solution.

We call this person the Hero and it’s the only person you care about with your business because it’s the only person that will make you money.

Does this make sense?

You don’t make money by talking to everybody. You make money by talking to the one person who is willing to listen and has money.

When you find that person you need to make sure you have something worth buying.

And that’s the offer.

The Offer

What is it?

The Offer is the package of what you’re selling. It could contain a course or maybe a book. The Offer is everything. The branding, the support, the price, and whatever else is attached.

Think of it like this.

You meet someone awesome and you’ve been dating long enough to start to think if you want to marry (purchase) this person. It’s very easy to think that the Product (the person) is the whole offer, but that isn’t the case.

The Offer is the person, their family, their past, their living habits, and everything else that will either annoy you or make you happy in your life.

The Offer is what you’re going to provide to help this person move forward in their story.

This is where you might lock up because you’re telling yourself there is absolutely nothing in this world that you could offer someone that they would be willing to pay for it.

And that’s not usually true.

We have a tendency to undervalue the things that we know and the experiences that we have um, experienced.

You might think that it’s no big deal that you can create a cupcake with a cloud-like texture, but I, and many others, wouldn’t have a clue about where to start.

In life, you’ve done things because you wanted to and figured out a way to do them. There are many people that just don’t know how to do them. They are stuck and they are waiting for you to show them.

Setting Up Your Teaching Business

Okay, now you understand that once you have your audience in mind and your offer, you need to fill in the gap.

What’s that?

Well, if you know how you want to talk to (your Hero) and you know what you want to offer them (their Transformation), then you need a way to bring them over to you and get them to trust you.

Why?

Because rarely can you just show them the offer and suddenly they fall in love with you.

However, I don’t want you to think that there is a complicated system to all of this. In fact, all you have to do is follow the Odd Noodle Playbook.

Seriously, that’s it.

What is so wonderful about this Playbook is that it helps you to see all of the different tactics that you can use. Some people like to use YouTube to help with this while others might want to blog.

Some like to get the most out of Instagram while others love Facebook Groups.

As you can see with the Odd Noodle Playbook you have a ton of flexibility because it’s a system where you can get to fill in the tactics.

Let’s do a walkthrough of each step in the framework.

The Odd Noodle Playbook

I just want to emphasize again that your business isn’t built on tactics. It’s built on this framework.

You can’t build a successful online business without going through each of the steps of the framework. If you’re missing one of the steps then your business falls apart.

This is important to keep in mind as you have to troubleshoot your own business to ensure things are working correctly.

Now, let’s go through each step with an example.

1. Get the Hero to notice you

Before anything you need to get the Hero to notice you.

Let’s say you want to teach people how to code iPhone apps. How do you get them to notice you?

Maybe you have a YouTube Channel that talks about different aspects of coding iPhone apps.

Maybe you have a blog where you write about the topic.

To get people to notice you, you need to draw them towards you. That’s why the pro-YouTubers and pro-bloggers talk about the importance of titles.

Many times people don’t get others to notice them because they can’t write effective titles.

2. Get the Hero to pay attention to you

First, what is the difference between someone noticing you and someone paying attention to you?

Well, let’s stick with our example. You’ve written a blog post title 11 Ways to Build an iPhone App Without Coding.

That’s a great title and it makes people notice you.

However, when they get to your post and begin to read it they see that it’s not very good at all and so they leave.

You weren’t able to keep their attention.

If you can’t keep someone’s attention then your business isn’t going to go much further. To keep their attention you need to show them that you can offer them exactly what you told them you would, but you also have to do it in a way that speaks to them.

Your Hero has a particular story in their head and if whatever content you’re showing them doesn’t fit that story, then they’ll leave.

3. Get the Hero to trust you

This sounds like it might be the most complicated part but it really isn’t. Getting the Hero to trust you means that you’re able to show them consistently that you can help them with their transformations.

Not just one, but many.

These transformations can happen in every single piece of content that you create.

Another way to get them to trust you over time is to show them that you understand who they are and what they are going through. Empathy is going to be one of your most powerful tools when it comes to building trust.

With our iPhone coding example, we can continue to build trust with mini-tutorials and even have a bootcamp they can go through over email.

Building trust is simply a matter of showing up consistently for your Hero.

4. Convert that trust into money

And this is where your offer(s) comes into play. When they trust you because you’ve helped guide them this far then they are ready for even bigger transformations and that happens in your offer.

If you’ve done a great job at the previous three steps then this fourth step is nothing more than just letting them know that the offer exists.

The reason why you might come across so many people using pressure tactics or lying to make a sale is because they don’t want to put in the time to build trust.

A Teaching Business Is for Everyone

Before you think that this isn’t for you I should let you know that you’re already a teacher.

You’re an Experience Teacher.

What does that mean?

It means you have some experience in your life that you can share with others. This experience will help others overcome their own obstacles and help them move further in life.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve overcome an illness, fixed a relationship, or finally got the job you wanted.

We all live lives and therefore we have experiences.

Even if you feel you don’t have an experience that is worth sharing you have the opportunity to create those experiences for yourself.

There are no rules that state you can only start an Experience Teaching Business if you’ve climbed Everest and cured polio.

There is something there within you ready to share with the world. There is a passion that you have that you’re willing to learn more about and improve.

We all have something. You just need to find yours and dedicate yourself to it.