You’ve looked back over your career in education, and you realize that you’ve been through the school of hard knocks, and you’ve learned a few lessons you’re sure could help younger and more inexperienced teachers and and/or administrators succeed.  Or maybe you realize that although you may not be good at a lot of things, the “one thing” YOU ARE good at, other educators, parents, or students need to know and learn.  In either case, you want to be a coach.  The only problem is, so does every other person and their cousin.  And the truth of the matter is, they could be.  No one knows everything about everything, but most people know a little (or maybe even a lot) about “something,” and that’s what makes personal life and career coaching so popular.

So if you know in your heart you have what it takes to help teach others how to succeed, then how do you compete against the thousands of other coaches out there who more experienced, had a head start, and maybe even have more resources to build a successful coaching practice?  Well as a teacher, parent and student coach myself, I could tell you, but I think one of my personal mentors (i.e., my business coach) could tell you even better herself.  Her name is Milana Leshinsky.  And even tough she’s not a traditional classroom teacher or administrator, I can’t tell you how much she’s helped me in building a successful coaching practice.  Check out her advice to me on how to compete against “beat out” the competition when it comes to personal coaching.

…Read more »

When I graduated from college, I briefly worked for a large financial institution (who will remain nameless) selling investments and services.  And due to an embarrassing incident, I learned a valuable lesson about sales and attracting more clients. Little did I know at the time I would be able to take that same lesson and use it to build my own speaking business.  Now, for the first time ever I’m going to share that simple strategy with you.  Don’t worry, you can thank me later.   …Read more »

Let’s face it, as much as we’d like to help others by extending our coaching services to them, coaching is service people have to be first be convinced that they have a need.  And whether we like to admit it or not, we all could benefit from some type of coaching.

So how do you convince a reluctant teacher, administrator, or staff member he or she needs coaching?  Just try this… …Read more »

A dear friend of mine, who runs a very successful fitness business, sends out an email to her clients (which I’m one of her subscribers – hey, even educators need to get and stay in shape), reminding us about our food journals, weigh-ins, monitoring our progress, etc.  However, I noticed that nothing really was very compelling about her email messages.  Helpful to me, yes, but only because I know her and I’m one of her clients.

So I thought to myself, how many mails do I receive every day that don’t even make it past the screening process for me to even open, let alone read it and then forward to someone else because I think it could help helpful.  Whether you’re selling, promoting, or sharing anything or not, we as educators (due to our time constraints) usually can’t afford for our emails NOT to be read.

Therefore, I emailed her back, showing my friend a simple formula she could use that would not only increase her readership, but also encourage others to forward her message along to others (and in our case, to other parents and colleagues).  So I wanted to share that formula with you here on Rich Teachers. …Read more »

Here are three (3) additional ideas to help you generate quality content for your eNewsletter or eZine.  Again, don’t try to do all three at once; just pick one idea you like the most, develop it, and use it until you exhaust all the possibilities. …Read more »

I don’t care how good you are when it comes to professional speaking, there’s always going to be a time when the request for your speaking services will start to decrease.  Many factors can play into that – your program material may be outdated; the economy could be bad; there’s more competition in your subject area, etc.  Whatever the reason, there’s no need to panic.

Now if you’re teaching full-time (like I was at one point), it’s no big deal, because God knows you have more than enough “stuff” to do at school to keep you busy.  But  if you ever decide to go into professional speaking full-time as I did, there’s some things you need to know and do when you start to see longer gaps in your speaking calendar.  Just follow some of these time-tested tips that have worked for me (as well as other teachers-turned-speaker) and you will remain both productive and profitable during the down times.

…Read more »

Creating a great educational product is one thing; generating income from it is a whole different matter altogether. There are literally thousands of products out there that have the potential to make a difference in the lives of students, teachers, and parents that aren’t being purchased.

If you have a great information product or at least a good idea for one (like I’m sure you do), and you want others to know about it so they can potentially buy it, there are so many great ways you can do that!  Here are a few just to get you started (with lots more to be posted in the future). …Read more »

Each year, teachers spend hundreds of dollars of their own on teacher supplies. While each school does offer a fair amount of money on supplies, they do have to put their finances into school supplies. However, it is crucial that they plan their teacher supply needs in advance so that they do not over-run at the end moment.

Educator, Mark Hamery, offers some of the following time-tested tips to help Rich Teachers save money on teacher supplies: …Read more »

In order to plan your time as a teacher or administrator, we need to first understand the different types of “time” we have in our day.  And, don’t worry, it’s very simple to do.

I’m going to assume that we each have 3 types of time in our day.  Why is this an assumption? It just makes taking control of our time easier, besides, you could partition your time probably into 21 types if you want.  But being an educator, I like to keep things simple; so we’re going to start with just 3.   And knowing this is critical if you’re serious about re-gaining control of your time.  In a future lesson, I’m going to show you how to maximize each one. …Read more »

Ok, by now you should have a target niche (or topic) that is profitable and all you need to do is create a product.

There are lots of different products that you can create but for the purposes of this lesson, we will create an eBook, and I will show you how to write a brilliant one!

The reason that you should create an eBook as your first project is it’s without a doubt, in my opinion, the easiest product to get started with. They can be as long or as short as you want them to be.  Before I wrote my first eBook, I purchased several myself just to see how authors were writing theirs.  And what I discovered is that you can create an eBook pretty much any way you like, according to your personal preferences and the preferences of your target audience.  I’ve purchased eBooks as short as 16 pages and as long as 450 (no joke).  But they’re very easy to create.

And if your niche really takes off, you can always come back and create an “add-on” product like educational videos or an online course, but to start off, let’s just focus on an eBook. …Read more »