The last few weeks have been an immensely challenging time for teachers, parents, and students alike. With the world of education thrown into chaos because of the coronavirus pandemic, parents and guardians are having to balance working from home with home-schooling, while teachers face the enormous task of keeping an anxious and remote classroom engaged and productive.
Luckily, there are a range of free and publicly available resources to guide parents and help teachers (like BBC Bitesize, and Wide Open School), and alongside these stands YouTube, one of the most accessible and comprehensive libraries of educational content around the world.
Channels like Crash Course Kids, Study With Jess, Easy Languages and AsapSCIENCE (video below) are publishing structured, exciting and insanely informative videos that provide invaluable knowledge and advice to specific, as well as general, audiences and age groups.
But YouTube presents two opportunities here. It’s a learning resource for sure, but it also offers __limitless opportunities for educators to turn online and offer up their expertise to others. __
And beyond YouTube, there are also a huge number of ways for creators to turn their unique skillset into a way to generate revenue and possibly turn their profession or hobby into a way of earning a living full-time.
Turn Your Profession or Passion into an Online Resource
So how do you turn your skillset into something you can create online video content around? Whether you are starting from scratch, or have a YouTube channel but you’re not sure what your strategy should be, there are two things you should be doing right now:
Learning how to succeed at YouTube
Picking up inspiration from other creators in your space
Learning to succeed at YouTube is the only way to stand a chance of earning a decent living from the platform. Luckily, vidIQ is a creator-obsessed resource with an enormous amount of content to guide you through your journey. Check out the other articles on this blog, or watch the videos uploaded to our YouTube channel. Wherever you are on your journey, we have an answer to your question (and if we don’t, please reach out so we can find the solution for you).
__We even have a vidIQ Academy, with courses dedicated to every aspect of building and growing a YouTube channel. __
Right now our most popular Academy course ‘How to Build Your YouTube Channel in 30 Day’ is absolutely free to all users until June 14th 2020. But don’t worry, you’ll still be able to access it as a paid user beyond that date).
It’s an in-depth walkthrough of everything you need to know to hit the ground running, so sign up today to hit the ground running. Now on to the second point:
How Other Creators are Using YouTube to Teach Others
While we HIGHLY discourage copying what other channels in your vertical do for many, many reasons, it would be odd if you didn’t identify who your competitors were, the kind of content they are publishing, and how engaged their audience is with that content. You can be sure that when your channel is successful enough, you’re competitors will be watching you.
The tutorial/how-to genre on YouTube is one of the biggest, one of the broadest, and one of the most valuable. We can’t cover every creator, but we can check out some who are doing great things in the space right now.
For traditional educational topics like science, maths, languages, social studies, and history you have the heavy hitters like Crash Course, CGP Grey, and Khan Academy.
But there are millions of other creators publishing content around very specific educational and informative topics, and their channels are generating massive views and subscribers.
Take Hannah Witton for example who attracts significant views for her videos on sex education, body-positivity, relationships, and disability. Make sure to check out her video on how she makes money online, and how she uses YouTube to promote her work as an author:
Another individual creator channel, ‘How to ADHD” offers up a ton of advice around living with ADHD as an adult. It’s an incredible example of a creator with first-hand knowledge of their subject creating educational and informational content on how to thrive.
And how about this channel as an example of how to teach others some incredible life skills? Charisma on Command has generated nearly 3.8M subscribers by creating content around building confidence and laying the foundation for good relationships with everyone in your life:
Beyond YouTube: How to Make Money for Being an Expert
Do you have an aptitude for teaching a particular skill and want to explore how to build a successful career around that? Of course, as a teacher or a professional in another field, there are clear career paths that you can follow to achieve those goals.
But for millions of people around the world, this pandemic has stirred up a great many fears about those traditional career paths. Being furloughed or even worse, losing their job security entirely, has unlocked the desire to control their own careers going forward.
On the flip side, many of those who have been lucky enough to keep their jobs but have been working from home, are now dreading the return to a stressful commute and the 9-5 drudge.
As part of our TubeTalk podcast series, we’ve interviewed some incredible creators and industry experts about creating a career around a particular set of skills.
Jess Catorc from Teachable offers extensive advice about building a community on YouTube around your educational content but then utilizing other platforms to sell courses. In the last few years, there has been an explosion in sites that allow you to create your own online courses, and sell lessons around your expertise. These include:
For teachers, Gabby Wallace, a YouTuber with 1.6M subscribers offers advice on how to leverage the huge demand from users to learn new skills, plus how to monetize your educational content on the platform.
Whatever skill you have, there will be someone out there willing to learn from you. And if you're passionate enough, you could turn those tutorials and online lessons into a full-time career. Why not make a start on that dream career path today?
Want To Get More Views on YouTube?
If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level and get more views on YouTube then make sure to download vidIQ. Join over 1 million other users and use vidIQ to help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps click here to install now!
And if you’re really serious about growing your YouTube views and subscribers, sign up for exclusive access to the vidIQ Academy and learn how to launch a successful YouTube Channel in just 30 days.
Carla Marshall is the Head of Content Marketing at vidIQ. She has 10+ years of experience in video marketing, social media management, content marketing, DRM, and SEO. She was previously Editor in Chief at ReelSEO.com, and as a journalist and video marketer, she's covered news stories, creator journeys, and digital-first publishing initiatives across all the major online video platforms. She is YouTube Certified and a judge for the Shorty Awards, as well as the UK, US, Canadian, Global, and EU Search Awards.
