Lesson Plan Seller

You may already have a ton of educational materials you’ve created over the years as a teacher. Or maybe you’re going to make teacher resources from scratch. Either way, there are five things you need to do to start selling your lesson plans online.

1. Figure out what you’re going to sell

If you’re an experienced teacher, you likely already have teaching materials you created somewhere along the line. In this case, you’ll be at an advantage. Even better if you have entire curricula and supporting materials to sell as packages.

That doesn’t mean you can’t piece together packages if you’re starting from scratch. However, you should start with a small number of products to sell so you can start making money while you grow your product collection.

While lesson plans might be the most obvious thing to sell to teachers and schools, there are many other resources that educators would find valuable.

Here are examples of teaching resources you can sell:

• Syllabi
• Lecture presentations
• Worksheets and other handouts
• Study guides
• Homework assignments
• Exam materials
• Games
• Flashcards
• Posters
• Ebooks

Do some research on what’s selling well on websites like Teachers Pay Teachers. In addition to helping you decide which types of products to invest your time in creating, it’ll help you find gaps in the market.

There are countless niches and specialties you can choose from. You can create educational resources for certain grade levels, subjects, or resource types. You could also create lesson plans outside of the usual K-12 subjects.

2. Use online tools to create your own teaching materials

In addition to writing high-quality lessons and content, you want your teaching materials to look professional and be easy for educators to use. For products that students will see (such as quizzes or games), you’ll want to ensure they’re visually attractive so they hold students’ attention.

You don’t need to pay a graphic designer to create these resources for you. Thankfully, there are plenty of intuitive online design tools you can use to create teaching materials on your own.

For example, Canva is a user-friendly graphic design platform that comes with thousands of premade templates for lesson plans, worksheets, flashcards, and more. You’ll also get access to thousands of stock photos, videos, and other design elements to customize the look of your educational resources.

Another option when creating your own teaching materials is to use Adobe products like InDesign or Express for Education. If you’ve never used professional design software before, you’ll need to overcome a slight learning curve. However, the layouts and designs you can create will look incredible.

3. Decide where to sell your educational products

There are three places where you can post your lesson plans for sale:

• Online educational marketplaces
• E-commerce marketplaces for selling digital downloads
• Your own website

There are some benefits of using peer-to-peer marketplaces to sell your teaching resources. For starters, they already have a huge number of existing customers looking to buy custom-made products. Secondly, you won’t have to worry about managing the technical aspects of an online shop.

With that said, selling on your own website offers a lot more freedom and higher earning potential. Which option is best for you depends on how much time, effort, and money you’re willing to put into this side hustle.

When deciding where to sell your teaching resources, make sure the platform makes it easy to upload your digital products, set your prices, and securely process payments. We’ll discuss the pros and cons of each option further down in this post.

4. Set your prices

Even if you decide to sell lessons and other resources through your own website, take a look on online marketplaces to find out what the going rate is for different teaching products. While you want your rates to be competitive, you also have to consider the value of what you’re selling.

You can do this by determining what makes your products unique. For example:

• Have you been teaching in this subject area for a decade or more?
• Are your resources in modern formats and with more relevant examples than what teachers usually find in old textbooks and curricula?
• Have you come up with a novel approach to creating your resources?
• Are you providing multiple file formats, print-ready files, or anything else that would make it easier for teachers to use your resources?
• Have you created a bundle of resources so that teachers don’t have to buy each item piecemeal from you or other educators?

If you can deliver extra value, then you should set your prices higher than what the competition is charging.

You also have to consider the costs involved in this side hustle. In addition to the time cost involved in making your teaching materials, you may have to pay for graphic design software, payment processing, and other business costs. Make sure your rates are high enough that it doesn’t take forever to turn a profit.

5. Promote your educational materials

Even if you’re selling lesson plans on a marketplace that already has millions of customers, that doesn’t mean your products will be actively marketed to them. To ensure people can find the products you’ve created, you’ll need to do your own marketing.

Here are some of the main ways to draw attention to your products:

• Create an educational blog and occasionally promote your lesson plans there
• Use Pinterest to promote your products visually
• Use social media channels like Instagram and YouTube to create helpful educational content that occasionally mentions your products
• Partner with other educators or influencers in the education space on social media
• Interact with teachers on Reddit and in education-specific forums

When you’re first starting out, it’s also a good idea to offer some freebies. They should be useful resources but not as valuable as entire lesson plans. The goal is to get teachers to try out your products risk-free, realize how much they love them, and then give you a good rating or rave review.

You can also use these freebies as a way to build an email marketing list. You can then email your subscribers to share helpful tips or video content and announce new resources for sale.

There are three places where you can sell worksheets, lesson plans, and other teaching materials online.

Teachers Pay Teachers

Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) is a peer-to-peer e-commerce marketplace. It’s similar to Amazon, only their inventory consists of teaching materials.

You can sell school resources in a variety of categories on TPT, from traditional classroom subjects like math and science to art, special education, and even speech therapy. You can also sell specialized content, like seasonal classroom activities or resources for child care, physical education, life skills, and more.

To make money selling on Teachers Pay Teachers, you need to sign up for a Basic or Premium membership. These membership plans cost money and have different fee structures. The tradeoff is that your content will instantly be available to a huge user base.

Teachers Pay Teachers Fees

Etsy

Etsy is also a peer-to-peer marketplace, though it’s traditionally viewed as a place to sell handmade goods. Nevertheless, in addition to physical products, you can also sell printables on Etsy. This is how you would use the platform to sell your premade lesson plans and other digital teaching resources.

There are educational resources on this site that have tens of thousands of reviews, so it’s clear that Etsy is a good resource for teachers. However, there’s no dedicated “education” category. This means you may find it harder to get your products discovered on Etsy than you would on TPT.

The good thing about selling teacher-made resources through Etsy is that the fees are much lower than on TPT. So, with enough marketing, you could potentially make a bigger profit on Etsy.

Etsy Seller Fees

Your own website

Despite the perks of using a platform like TPT, there are some features you won’t get with one of these marketplaces that you would be able to achieve with your own website:

• Keep the competition away and put the spotlight on your products
• Control the pricing of your products
• Reduce the fees you owe and maximize your profits
• Build a fully-branded and customized shop for your educational resources
• Integrate a blog, social media, and other marketing content to increase the value of your offerings

Building your own website does mean more work for you, along with some technical maintenance. However, you’ll have more control over your teacher resource side hustle, which could mean much bigger profits for you down the road.

There are lots of platforms you can use to build your online store. A few examples are Kajabi, Teachable, Sellfy, Gumroad, and Shopify. In addition to designing an attractive shop made for educators, you’ll also offer your buyers a fast and secure way to purchase everything they need.

Something to consider before jumping head-first into building your own online shop is the cost. In most cases, you’ll end up spending a minimum of $250 a year to host your own website. That’s not including transaction fees.

So this option is likely best for established teachers with at least a dozen high-quality resources ready to sell and a solid marketing strategy in place.

Website Builder Fees

Selling lesson plans is one of the easiest side hustles you can have as a teacher, especially with the help of platforms like TPT. If you already have teaching materials on hand, selling them is a great way to earn passive income with minimal work.

With that said, selling lesson plans isn’t a particularly profitable side hustle for most who try it. While some teachers earn a lot of money selling lesson plans, most don’t earn enough to quit their teaching job. Nevertheless, this side hustle could help you cover the cost of school supplies or that vacation you’ve been dying to take on your summer break.

To start a highly profitable side hustle selling lesson plans or other educational materials, you’ll need the knowledge and skills to create truly high-quality products that will be genuinely useful to teachers. If you can’t deliver great products, you may still be able to earn a bit of money at the start, but you likely won’t achieve long-term profitability.

How much can you earn selling lesson plans?

According to a 2019 USA Today article, educators like April Smith make six figures a year selling lesson plans online, along with other teaching resources.

Heather Cianci, the teacher behind It’s Lit Teaching, has written about making more than $1,000 a month from TPT sales. However, these stories about teachers raking in massive profits and/or replacing their full-time teaching income aren’t the reality for most.

In a more recent post on EdSurge, Joe Holland, the CEO of TPT, revealed that the average seller makes somewhere in the low single-digit thousands range each year. You’re more likely to make a couple thousand dollars to cover the cost of your teaching supplies than you are to generate enough money to replace your day job.

Risks and warnings for selling lesson plans

While selling teacher resources can be a great side hustle, there are a few pitfalls you’ll need to watch out for. For starters, it’s important to make sure you fully own the rights to any content you try to sell.

To legally sell lesson plans and other teaching resources, you must own their copyright. This means you are the sole creator of the content. If you get caught trying to sell content from a publication or another teacher, you could be sued for copyright infringement.

It’s also important to check whether your school or school district has any regulations or restrictions for selling teaching materials. Some strictly prohibit teachers from selling or purchasing these types of products. But as long as you’re playing by the rules, you should be good to go.