How to Change Career From Teaching to Affiliate Marketing

Intro.

​Like many vocations in life, becoming a teacher is an extremely rewarding career. The sense of accomplishment knowing you’ve helped teach our children to excel is gratifying, but sometimes there comes a point where you’ve had enough.

For some, you may realize that working with students physically is not exactly what you thought it would be, for others, it may just not be as enjoyable as it once was. Sometimes we all need a change.

So what options are out there that you can harness, where you can use your existing skills?

Keep The Teaching Flame Alive

A great alternative is to set up an educational website online, which can be targeted towards a specific level of education. You may have a certain skill teaching woodwork, needle-craft or history.

It doesn’t matter which field you are teaching students in, you can relay your knowledge onto your own educational platform.

If your knowledge is extremely specialized, you could even think about setting up a memberships site, and even receive payments for your expertise.

Maybe offer tutoring online or locally which can help young or adult students. There’s so many paths you can go down within the teaching industry, like even creating your own courses.

The Affiliate Marketing Model

I’m an affiliate marketer myself, so I want to focus on how you can also become an affiliate marketer. To learn how this is done, you may want to read my step by step guide to affiliate marketing. If you already have some idea of how the process works, here’s how to start affiliate marketing from scratch.

So as a teacher, how would you make money in affiliate marketing? Well, let’s assume you’re an art teacher. The best way in my mind would be to write guides or tutorials on how to get started in the field of art you specialize in.

From there, you begin to gain an audience of people that are interested in what you have to say. Once they read your guides and gain some knowledge from you, they may require some more guidance. This is where the affiliate marketing comes in.

Promoting Art Equipment

Let’s assume you are proficient in photography, or photo-graphical art. The aim would be to sign up to camera stores as an affiliate, and promote their products. Photography is an ideal niche to get into, because cameras and other photographic equipment can be reasonably expensive.

So look out for companies like Canon or Olympus and check out their affiliate programs. Once you’re approved to promote their stock, add affiliate links in your articles that promote their products.

Then there’s online tools that you can promote, like Photoshop, Snappa or Adobe Creative Cloud.

But what if you’re not into photography, maybe you are a painter. So what about promoting canvas frames, paints & oils, brushes and the huge range of other art supplies.

You can even join affiliate programs that sell expensive paint art collections.

How to Begin As An Affiliate Marketer

I want to start by saying… do not leave your day job just yet! Sometimes it takes a bit of time before a website starts to take off. Especially if you’re doing this on a budget.

It’s possible to use paid advertising to obtain website traffic, but the alternative is organic search traffic through search engines. That’s how I get most of my traffic. I don’t promote this post at all, so you’ve probably landed here because you found it in Google or Yahoo.

I, like many others, started affiliate marketing with no training. However, it quickly became apparent that I needed an education to learn the skills to master this. There is a lot of competition out there, and finding that extra edge to get a higher ranking is important.

The search engines are about keywords. The term you put into the search engine is a ‘keyword’, and as an affiliate marketer, you need to learn how to get your article to appear higher than everyone else for the keyword that people are searching for. Hence the requirement for an education.

My Recommendation

I was not only taught by Wealthy Affiliate, I’m still a current member there. They are an all encompassing platform that can host your website, give you all the tools and features required, fast support and a huge community of other affiliate marketers, where you can pick their brains. You can pick my brain also should you join!

WA will guide you from beginner to advanced affiliate marketer through their extensive Online Certification Course. What’s great is the fact you can sign up and take the first 10 lessons for free. You can even create a website and keep it on the free membership, although the extra training is duly recommended.

If you want Kyle, one of the owners to give you a guided walk-through, you can access that here

Final Thoughts

I used to be an engineering draftsperson until I decided a change was needed. I’m so glad I made the change, and my income is now based on how hard I work on my website. 

This is what keeps me going, and I don’t even work as hard as I used to. 

If you want to make the change from teacher to affiliate marketer, I’d have no hesitation in advising this path. As I said though, don’t quit your job before you start earning an income, which will happen if you stick at it.