Edupreneurs
By Angela Watson
What’s Here
Education and entrepreneurship intersect for edupreneurs who sell their teaching materials online, provide professional development services, and create all kinds of side businesses that utilize their teaching skills. Sometimes called teacherpreneurs, these individuals are tired of having their teaching expertise undervalued while corporations roll in the dough from publishing curriculum resources and consulting with schools. Who knows best practices for teaching better than a teacher?
I became an edupreneur in 2003 when I created this website. Over the years, I started making money from ad and sponsorship revenue, affiliate link earnings, freelance writing and editorial work, book sales, webinars, and speaking engagements along with instructional coaching.
In 2009 when I got married and moved to New York City to be with my husband, I took the leap from full-time teaching to full-time consulting. I’m now an edupreneur who teaches teachers! I work as an instructional coach, provide staff development, and create books and articles to support educators in their daily practice. I make a living doing the creative things I love, and I want to help other educators do the same. You can hear more about my story in this interview.
Pages in This Section
Becoming an Educational Consultant
How to Transition Into Educational Consulting
Blogging Tips for Teachers
Monetizing Your Teaching Blog
Publishing a Teaching Book
Teaching Blog Traffic School
Blog Posts on Consulting
Entrepreneur on Fire: my journey from classroom teaching to educational consulting
Always a teacher: a reflection (& confession) on 5 years out of the classroom
A Day in the Life of a Literacy Coach
Instructional Coaching Resources (book recommendations)
How to Become an Educational Consultant
More posts about being an instructional coach
See all posts tagged with “Coaching and Consulting”
Angela Watson
Founder and Writer
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Hi Angela,
You’ve really inspired me. I am starting my own educational services and rely on your website for encouragement, direction, and advice. I am keeping you in mind as I move forward. Thank you.
Kimberly
Hi Angela,
What an inspiration! Thank you for sharing what you have learned along the journey. I was a special educator for 15 years in the traditional school setting and for four years in the online school environment. The goal for my business is to be resource for homeschooling parents. I want to teach them to use free web tools to meet the learning needs of their special needs children. The information that I will be providing them will be free. My plan is to because a trusted resource in the homeschooling community and be able to speak at conferences and teach workshops. I would also like to publish digital products for sale. I look forward to searching around your site for all of the great resources.
I am current a teacher with 10 years experience. I am looking start a business which help foreign student from my native country Nigeria, come to attend high school, college, and universities in Canada. Please advise.
Wow fantastic info more grease to your elbows and thanks a trillion for sharing.
I want to bring the experiential aspect of teaching into the public school domain. I am creating lessons and materials for those who want more real life stories, learning materials and activities to engage their students. I am wondering what your advice is for “getting noticed”? On TpT the advise is covers/graphics and patience. Do you have any other advice that can help those of us just getting started? Also, how do you find the time and energy to do all these different activities and make products? Do you have others working with you? I love the development and creating lessons and activities; I don’t particularly enjoy the covers, etc. Do you have an answer for my situation? I would like to find someone to do the covers and I can focus on my passion, the development and creating lessons, etc. Have any ideas? Is there any other websites available to sell teacher products? If so, can you share them? Do you think there is room in the market place for another TpT? With a different slant, with different product requirements and more ecology minded? THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR ANSWERS.
Hi, Deborah! I think the key to getting noticed is having exceptional products which are unlike others on the market. It definitely does take patience before the sales come in–for me it happened more quickly because I had already spent 10 years building a following on my blog. I don’t have anyone else working with me and really don’t have much time for TPT stuff; it comes in spurts me for me. I’ll make a bunch of stuff at once and then hit a dry spell. I don’t like creating covers, product descriptions, etc. but I do it anyway because it’s an important part of the business! Kind of like grading papers is to classroom teaching. 🙂 There are other websites where you can sell teaching products but TPT is far and away the biggest and IMO the best. I don’t canabilize my sales rankings at TPT by selling elsewhere. I suppose there is room for another TPT but many others have tried it already and not experienced much success. It would be kind of like creating another eBay or Etsy. All the best to you!