🧑‍🏫 How to Teach Online (& Why Learning to Teach is My Best Sales Hack)

Amelia HrubyHello, and welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast about sharing your work and making money online without relying on social media. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby, and we are currently in season nine of the podcast where I have shared over 25 new episodes on themes ranging from business degrowth to healing burnout and fractured attention to crafting a privacy focused tech stack to the bookkeeping rituals that keep my business finances in order. And also our whole AI series, which was five plus episodes on how to think about these new technologies in your creative small business. So we've done a lot in season nine of Off the Grid, and I'm really excited to be continuing that for two more months. This season will run through the June and I have so many more amazing conversations to come.

So in today's episode, I'm gonna talk about how to teach online and why learning to teach has been the biggest sales hack that I've ever found in my online business. Now, I don't even know if I believe in sales hacks. Like, let's be honest, there is no get rich quick scheme that I believe in. But there are things that you can do and learn and practice that improve your skills. And every time I work on becoming a better teacher, I notice that I can write better sales pages and I can sell more spots in my classes, workshops, and courses in the process.

So I'm excited to get into all of that today. And the reason I am doing this is because I am teaching a three day workshop intensive in May that's called Come to Class, how to teach and sell online with confidence and care. So if you really wanna learn how to teach and sell online from me, come to Come To Class. In this intensive, I am going to walk you through how to uncover your teaching style, how to craft containers for learning, how to write a syllabus and curriculum. We're gonna have a whole hour on how to host virtual sessions that don't suck, how to get results for your students and gather better testimonials, how to market your class workshop or course without social media, and then a whole day on why better teaching leads to better marketing, and how to translate your in class skills to the sales page.

That's three days of two and a half hour sessions. There's a follow-up co working and q and a day. There's a private podcast feed. There's notion templates. There's bonus conversations with my favorite course creators, people like Podge Thomas, Nick Antoinette, Taylor Elise Morrison.

So much good stuff is wrapped in to come to class, and I would love to see you there. Early bird registration is now open to folks on the waitlist. You can join the waitlist right now at the link in the show notes. You'll get an automatic email with more info and the invitation to join. Early bird pricing expires on Friday, May 1.

So if you're listening to this, now is the moment to get in for early bird. And if you're a little more like, I don't know. Not sure if this is for me. I wanna hear more about it. That's great too.

I truly embrace some pausing and discerning, and I've recorded this whole episode for you. So in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through kinda like four things. We're gonna start with this kinda controversial question. Are online courses over? Like, do these things even sell anymore?

In the age of AI, are we still selling online courses? We're gonna talk about that first. If you've been feeling nervous about selling classes, workshops, and courses because of the overall climate of the Internet, I'm gonna assuage your fears. From there, I'm gonna talk about why teaching is so important and what you might be able to teach. There are so many skills, areas of expertise, idiosyncratic ways of doing things that we all have, and I'm gonna talk through how and why you might teach those things.

Then I'm gonna talk about why it's so important to craft intentional containers for learning. You don't just go from knowing something to teaching something without thinking about the proverbial classroom. And the thing I think is most important there, which is really under discussed, is actually boundaries. We have to create boundaries in our learning containers so that our needs can be met and our students' needs can be met without relying on the, like, gross hierarchical professor knows all, student knows nothing, knowledge only goes from professors to student. We don't need to do that, but we still need boundaries.

I'm gonna talk about that in this episode. And then I'm gonna walk you through why I truly do believe that learning to teach is a skill that is directly transferable to sales. And I'll get more into why teaching is my greatest sales hack. So all of that is coming up in this episode. Thank you so much for being here and listening to the show.

Thank you so much for joining the clubhouse to keep supporting our work, And thank you so much if you choose to sign up for Come To Class. I would love to see you there. So let's dive in, shall we, to today's episode all about why courses are not dead, how to teach online, and why learning to teach has been my best sales hack of online business. Okay. Let's start with the age old question, which is actually just an extremely of the moment question.

Are online courses over? I've gotten this question many times, and it was sort of a zeitgeisty conversation earlier this year when Amy Porterfield announced that she was closing her Digital Course Academy, which was a long standing online course that sort of spawned this whole wave of online courses. And my answer to the question, are online courses over? Is a definitive no. Online courses are absolutely not over.

People love learning online because it's flexible, it can fit their schedule, it can fit their lifestyle, and it can be so, so transformative. However, there is a certain type of online course that is over. That is the totally self guided evergreen funnel online course. I don't think that those ever worked and people aren't willing to spend money on them anymore. And I think especially the versions of those that cost a thousand dollars, $2,000, $3,000, those do not sell well anymore.

So you can certainly create one. The infrastructure is out there. You might be able to get a couple people to sign up for it. But I think that there was a period of time, especially during the pandemic when everyone was very online, when a lot of people made a lot of money selling $1,000 plus online courses that were largely self guided, meaning that they set them up in their course software, people moved through them on their own. Maybe there were some like office hour sessions or things like that, but there wasn't a lot of hands on time.

Like that stuff sold well and people made money, But I don't think that works anymore. The market is completely fatigued with that kind of course. And a lot of people felt really burned because they didn't work for them. Frankly, I don't think I signed up for anything that expensive, but I bought so many online courses during the pandemic and I barely remember them. And I think I finished very few of them.

So I think that the era of creating some type of set it and forget it online course that makes you a ton of money without any effort, that is over. I definitely think that's over. I also think the era of selling a $2,500 signature course that you just pitch over and over and over again and you sell through affiliates and Facebook ads and things like that, I think that is mostly over as well. That's kind of the Amy Porterfield model that she has stepped away from because it isn't working. And again, I think it's not working partially because of market fatigue.

People are over it. Partially because it didn't actually get meaningful results for people or it required a huge amount of individual motivation to get yourself through courses like that. And so people stopped having that much energy and motivation, and it stopped working if it ever did. And then also I do think that this type of course has been impacted by AI because a lot of those courses really just taught you how to do a particular thing, how to move through a general process like how to launch a course or how to start a podcast or how to write a website or this, this, or that. And that's the kind of thing that people are now asking.

ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity. And it's providing them step by step answers. And then they're asking follow-up questions, getting more information. And so I think that that type of how to course has been very impacted by the rise of AI. All of that seems true to me.

And yet, I don't believe that online courses are over. I think that a certain type of online course is over, but not all of them. And not the ones that people listening to this podcast are making. Because here's the thing, we still wanna learn things, and we need to learn things, perhaps more now than ever. As so much is changing in the world, we have a lot of new skills to develop.

And that includes, you know, the technological business skills, but also life skills, practical skills. Right? I'm taking courses on gardening. I'm trying to learn how to better fix my car myself so I can stop spending so much at the mechanic on my 2008 Toyota Prius. Like, I need to learn things.

I want to learn things. And personally, I don't wanna learn them from AI. As you've probably heard me talk about on this podcast, I don't use generative AI. I'm not using chatbots. I committed to a full year of sobriety from those things.

So I wanna learn them from real people who have a clear perspective, who bring a tenderness to the process, and who I trust can help me transform as I move through their class workshop or course. And that's why I believe that teaching online will remain a viable and beautiful revenue generating line of business. Learning has been going on as long as humans have been humans. Right? And we've been doing it online since the Internet has existed, and we're gonna keep doing that.

It's just that this particular get rich quick way of doing that doesn't work anymore. So if you have been worried that you can't teach online, that your courses aren't gonna sell, that you can't host a workshop anymore because the online course boom is over, I just wanna reassure you that even though that bubble may have popped, it doesn't mean you can't do this. I do this all the time. Some of my closest friends, peers, and colleagues have created entire businesses around doing this. And we're making it work because we're doing it in our ways.

And those ways are still working. So with that pep talk said, I'm assuming that if you are listening to this, I thought there's something that you're really good at that you wanna teach. Maybe it's a skill like how to write a beautiful poem. Maybe it's an area of expertise like you know everything about hand building a mug or improving the SEO on your blog posts or using the five love languages to reshape a relationship. Whatever it might be.

I bet you have an amazing skill, a clear area of expertise, or maybe you have a really idiosyncratic way that you do things. If you remember my conversation with Anisha on bookkeeping for neurodivergent business owners, we each talked about our incredibly idiosyncratic way that we process the income and expenses in our businesses. Maybe you have something like that that people sometimes ask you about or you wanna share with more folks or you wanna teach people how to do it like you do it. If you're listening to this, I truly believe there is something like that in your life that you can teach and that hopefully you want to teach, to share that knowledge, to share that process, to share that skill. The question then becomes, do you know how to share it with others?

Do you know how to craft a class, workshop, or course that holds people through that process? And do you know how to sell it so you actually make some money doing it? I definitely believe in trading skills and teaching for free and offering our knowledge. I don't think we need to gatekeep things. And also, think that selling courses, classes, workshops around this is a way to support ourselves.

And while we're doing that, I think we should enjoy it. So maybe you're already teaching, but you're not having the best time. Or maybe you love teaching, but selling is just not really working for you. Or maybe you've never taught before, but you wanna try this out. I just wanna affirm that there is space for that and you can do it.

Teaching is a skill that you can learn. But there's no one size fits all way to teach, which also means it's not something that like ChatGPT can tell you how to do or that you can really learn from a textbook. I think that developing a teaching style is an incredibly personal process. And I think it starts with figuring out how you like to learn. It starts by exploring classes, courses, workshops, figuring out what works for you, figuring out how you can process information and take it in and then apply it and change things with it.

And from that, you can build a very cool, different, unique, specific to you teaching style. I think about this all the time when I hop on a Zoom call, and it's a class or it's a lecture or it's a webinar, and I'm like, how does this person even start the Zoom? Right? Do they have a prompt in the chat? Is everybody super quiet?

Is the host talking? Are all the students chatting? Are they inviting people to share? Where are those people sharing? How are they sharing?

Is there music playing? Are we taking deep breaths together? Are we stretching? Are people moving around? Are they all seated?

Are they on camera? Are they off camera? Like, all of that goes into the teaching style. And it's something that as a teacher, you can determine and shape for the people that are in the container you're creating. And as a student, you can feel.

It impacts you. It shapes how you take it in. I have been on Zoom calls that were so belovedly held that everyone there connected very quickly, got so much out of the conversations and teachings, and then left feeling like, oh, I gotta get to know I gotta keep knowing these people. I gotta keep going. We have to do this together.

And I've also been on Zoom calls where I hated every single second of it. And I was like, why am I here? I don't even know who you are leading this. I don't know why you're putting me in a breakout group. I don't know why we're talking about this.

I don't know why you're asking people to jump in, and then somebody talks for eight and a half minutes. How we construct a classroom space virtually is a part of developing your teaching style. And of course, this is something I'm gonna be talking about in come to class coming up, but it's also something that you can just personally reflect on as you think about beginning to teach these skills, areas of expertise, or personal processes that you would like to impart to others. I think another really important aspect of teaching online is boundary setting. And I don't think people talk about this enough.

I think there's this sort of presumption that like, well, I'm gonna teach a class, and so people are gonna pay for it. We're gonna show up. We're gonna do some stuff. We're gonna leave. I got paid.

They got something. Now it's over. But But in my experience of teaching online, the boundaries are rarely that clean-cut. Sometimes you wanna offer more than what you said you would, and you end up kind of over delivering, and then you have some feelings about that. Sometimes people are asking a lot from you, and you have to hold to the scope of what you promised really tightly because you can't just build their whole website for them when they signed up for a forty five minute how to outline a one page website workshop.

Right? There are a lot of slippery boundaries that come into place when we start to teach online. And I think that part of learning to teach online is to carefully craft the containers, interactions, and goals that you have with your students so that your needs can be met and their needs can be met. And as needs are met, transformation can happen. I love when Prentiss Hemphill says boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.

That's such a beautiful definition of boundaries And something I'm so invested in when I'm teaching come to class or holding any educational container is establishing how boundaries there can be the distance at which me and my students can teach and learn simultaneously. Especially because if we wanna break down hierarchy in the classroom, if we don't want the sort of like teacher knows everything, students know nothing, knowledge flows one direction, which I find very boring and problematic, if we wanna get rid of that, we actually need often more boundaries to have a non hierarchical learning space than we do to have a hierarchical one. Because when it is like one person has all the power, the direction flows from them to everybody else, When that type of strict hierarchy is in effect, it's actually a very, very firm boundary, and again, a problematic one. But if we are going to deconstruct that hierarchy, we have to move those boundaries into other places and other ways. We can't just get rid of all the boundaries, or people won't be able to get their needs met and learn things and transform in those spaces.

And so I'm very interested in and always carefully shaping the boundaries in any container I'm holding. I thought about this a lot when I was starting my group program, Close Biz Friends, at the start of this year. And I had a slide at the very beginning of that program where I walked people through my approach to the program, my approach to logistics, and my approach to teaching. And when I talked about my approach to teaching, I was very clear. I wrote on that slide, I am your teacher and cheerleader, not your drill sergeant or personal trainer.

And to me, that meant that I am here to hold the classroom and share information. I am here to cheer you on, but I'm not gonna be blowing a whistle in your face. I am not gonna be standing right behind you making sure you get your reps in. I'm not gonna be lifting the weight the rest of the way up for you if you can't get it to the bar, which I think is what personal trainers do. I don't know.

Is that what the spotter? Is that what that's called? I shouldn't use exercise metaphors or gym metaphors because I don't go to a gym. But me communicating that to everyone in the program was me setting those boundaries and being clear about what they could expect from me and what they couldn't. And because I did that, the program did not run-in this sort of hierarchical I know everything, you know nothing way.

Other people shared information. We learned from each other as we went, and we were able to do that because the boundaries were clear. So I think that boundaries are an incredibly important part of learning how to teach and an often under discussed one or under taught one, frankly. You know, I've taken how to teach online classes. I have been trained in pedagogy at the university level when I taught undergrads in my PhD program.

And we didn't talk about the boundary between student and teacher. We didn't talk about the boundaries between how to hold a container and decide things even as simple as can people come and go throughout the time, or is there a period where the door is open, the door is shut, and if you leave, you can't come back in? That's a quite literal boundary. Right? And it's something worth thinking about when you're setting up an educational space.

And that's why it's gonna be something we talk quite a lot about and come to class. It's really important to me. So so far, I've talked about what we can teach and how to unearth our unique skills, areas of expertise, idiosyncratic ways we do things, how to get in touch with those, how to decide to teach them, and begin to create a space where they can be taught. And I talked about why boundaries are so important in those spaces, why we really need to attend to the container itself. We need to shape the vessel in order to teach within it.

And one more thing I wanna bring in here, especially when we are teaching in the context of our business. Not just teaching because we wanna share information, but also because we want to make money from the things we teach, when we wanna sell classes, workshops, or courses. I think that often we talk about it like teaching and selling are totally different things. Right? And I hear from so many people who are like, I just want to teach.

Also who are like, I just want to coach. I don't wanna sell. Just wanna coach. I don't wanna sell. I just wanna teach.

Right? You just wanna do the thing you do, not have to sell the thing you do. But what I love about teaching is I think if you get good at teaching, that is actually a directly transferable skill to a sales page. Now, I get that that's a potentially controversial claim, but let me tell you how I think this works. In my experience and opinion, teaching is about learning to communicate something complex and involved in a way that is simple and specific and meaningful to the people that you are communicating it to.

And again, that could be a skill. It could be taking ten years of experience hand building mugs and learning to communicate that to people who have never touched clay before. Or it could be an area of expertise, taking five years of watching amazing films and turning that into a class on how to get more out of watching a movie. Right? That's a lot of expertise that you're channeling into, you know, maybe an hour with somebody.

Or it could be a very idiosyncratic process that you do personally, right? As I already mentioned, here's how I process my business finances at the end of each month. Come learn this process with me, and ideally cultivate your own process, right? Teaching is about taking what is complex and nuanced and built over experience and transmitting that information in a way that is simple and meaningful and hopefully applicable, like the person who's learning it can apply it in the process. That's what we're doing in the classroom.

And luckily for us, that's also what we're doing on the sales page. When you sit down to write a sales page, your job is to communicate the bigger picture context of what you do, the specifics of how you personally do it, and the benefit that it will bring to people who do it with you or learn it from you. Right? That's also what we do in the classroom. We have to tell our students, here's what's at stake here.

Here's the big picture. Here's what you really need to know. Here's what actually matters. I looked at the whole big picture so I could tell you what matters. And here's the benefit to you to learning this and doing this.

On the sales page, we give that in a sort of hypothetical theoretical way. In the classroom, we actually do it together. But it's the same process. We're breaking it down the same way in both spaces. We're just emphasizing slightly different things.

On a sales page, I spend more time emphasizing the problem, emphasizing why it matters to solve that problem. In the classroom, I assume people already know they want to solve that problem. So I do that a little bit, and then I spend more time on what is the actual solution. What are we actually getting at here? How am I actually watching a movie now?

You convinced me. I need to watch movies better. How am I actually doing that? Right? So I think that, again, this is all part of the same thing.

Because what's at stake in the classroom and on the sales page is knowledge, and practices and the meaning. And so the other thing I really wanna emphasize and come to class is that if we get better at teaching, we can become better at selling. And another byproduct or, like, amazing bonus impact of this is that if you get really good at teaching online, if you hone your facilitation skills in how you bring it together a classroom, the experience people have there. Your work, in my experience, will sell better with less effort because when people love their experience learning from you, not just what they learned, but how it all came together when they love the actual learning experience in addition to the content itself, they write great testimonials, they tell their friends, and they become repeat clients and customers. And so when I teach about teaching and come to class, I'm honestly kind of presuming that you got the content.

You know what it is you know. And I'm gonna help you turn that into a curriculum that can walk people through that step by step or at least give you some worksheets, processes to break that down. And then translate that into, okay, how does that look on a sales page? And then think about, okay, what is the experience in the virtual space I'm hosting that will let people not only receive this information, but feel good throughout that process. And when necessary, feel the very, like, generative discomfort of learning.

How do I hold people through that discomfort? Because transformation requires friction. There's friction in any learning process. So as teachers, we have to get good at holding that, and we can. You can learn that skill.

And then how do I take all of that, get amazing feedback from it, and then put that on a sales page that is awesome, and sells my teaching even better in the future? That's what we're going do together. This is all the stuff that goes into making teaching a part of your practice. And if you're still listening to this and you're like, why? I don't know if I want to teach.

I don't actually know if I want to teach things. Here's what I'd have to say to you. One, you don't have to teach. You don't have to do this. If you're like, I exclusively want to be a consultant, go be a consultant.

You're like, I only want to coach one on one, just coach one on one. There's so many different models. If you're like, I just want to create content and never have a workshop or class ever, great. Just be a content creator. You don't have to be a teacher.

But I do think that if you want to build a business around your know how, if you wanna build a business around knowing how to do stuff, you have to learn how to teach. And also, these skills are relevant to coaching or one on one work. Sometimes as a coach, are teaching, not always, but sometimes it may come in where someone needs to just learn a topic, and you need to kind of give them that information. Similarly, if you are a consultant, sometimes they might ask you to lead a workshop, right, as a part of a consulting practice. Like, teaching is how we take that one on one into the one too many.

And so it's an applicable skill in so many different ways. Even if you are never personally going to, you know, sell a workshop hosted on Zoom, These skills apply in so many other business models. And honestly, if you love off the grid episodes, if you're like, Amelia, I just love how you break things down, how you put it in steps, how you tell us what's coming, those are all my teaching skills. You like that I'm a teacher. You just don't know that that's what you like about it yet.

And so in this episode, what I wanted to do was talk about some of the things that I think are most important to think through about how to teach. We need to think about what we're gonna teach and why that matters. We need to think about how we are going to hold a container and what boundaries we need to set to do that well. And then we need to think about what's at stake in what we're teaching because that's what will help us sell it. So thank you so much for listening to this episode.

Whether or not you join us and come to class, I hope that you now have some new insights and ways to think about your own teaching practice to consider if you want to host a workshop or do something else online. Or maybe now you've ruled it out, and you're like, nope. Not for me. And you know what? That can be such a relief.

Right? Taking thirty minutes to be like, actually, that's just not for me. Y'all sometimes I still listen to like podcast episodes on Facebook ads or something just so I can reaffirm, not for me. Sometimes the not for me is very valuable. So if you listen to this and you're like, not for me, great.

I love that for you. But if you listen to this and you're like, yeah, that's for me, I would love to invite you into Come to Class. Again, it's happening May. It's a three day intensive. We'll meet for two and a half hours each of those days from 11AM to 01:30PM central time in The US.

And then there will be a follow-up coworking day where we're actually gonna have a presentation with an amazing course platform that I love, and then we'll have some open q and a and coworking time. There will also be a private podcast feed feed for you where you're gonna get bonus interviews with my favorite course creators, as well as the opportunity to submit follow-up questions, and I will answer them and put those answers on that private podcast feed. Also, all the classes will go there. So if you're like, I can't sit on Zoom for all that time, but I can go for a hike and listen to everything you're saying, that will be available for you in addition to the video recordings in a lifetime access online portal. And also, honestly, like with this format, I'm gonna be playing a lot with how I teach and getting really intentional with modeling the stuff that I'm teaching in how we hold this space.

So if you like a real good meta moment, especially for my folks out there who are already teaching, and you're like, yeah. I know how I teach so far, but I wanna see how Amelia does it, and then ask her every question I've ever had about how she thinks about a Zoom room. If you wanna do that, come to class, my friend. Again, early bird pricing is in effect through May 1. So head to the show notes, pop your name on that email wait list, and you'll get an automatic invite to come in with the discount.

If you're an Interweb member or you did this year's round of Close Biz Friends, there are special discounts that take even more money off for you. And we're already at the special beta price of $2.99 USD. So I hope to teach this again, and I don't know that it will ever be this inexpensive. You're getting a lot at that price point. But the first time I teach something, I always like to make it more accessible because also I'm learning in the process.

Right? I haven't taught this before. I can't offer you any testimonials except for the fact that I've taught over a thousand students and have over 200 active interweb members. So I do know how to hold an online space. I do know how to teach some stuff.

But I want you to be able to explore this and try it out for the first time with me. So come in this round when we have a lower price. Come in this week when you can get early bird pricing, and join us for this round of come to class. Alright, folks. I think I talked enough for today.

Part of coming to class is knowing when it's time to end class. So class is wrapping up. We are no longer in session today. Head to the show notes for all the links. Thank you so much for being here.