How To Make Extra Money While Homeschooling Your Kids

For many parents, homeschooling offers a powerful way to have greater control over their child’s education and learning. The appeal of doing so is easy to understand, as parents tend to know their children better than a teacher ever could and have the chance to provide better education.

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Yet, homeschooling is also a very intense approach that can involve a lot of time and financial costs. In most cases, a parent who actively homeschools won’t have the option of working or, at best, may be able to hold down a part-time job.

With that in mind, the ability to make extra money while homeschooling your kids is certainly appealing. Doing so could help to offset some of your costs and may also end up being something that you enjoy. So, how do you go about it?

Ways To Make Extra Money While Homeschooling Your Kids

There are multiple ways to earn while homeschooling. We’re highlighting the key approaches in this post, along with how they work. 

Using Homeschooling To Your Advantage

There are many different ways that you could go about earning money while you are homeschooling. For example, you could use any spare time to create crafts and then sell them locally, such as at fairs or schools. Likewise, you could offer services to local families, such as babysitting or something similar.

But, that’s not what I want to focus on today. Instead, this post will take a look at ways to take advantage of what you’re already doing in homeschooling.

Making money this way can be a much more efficient use of your energy and means that you don’t have to try and balance your homeschooling with a full-time business.

Creating And Selling Products

One way of doing this is to create products that are specifically related to homeschooling. This could include making a book about what you do and how you do it. However, you may also be able to create products simply based on things that you are already making for your own purposes.

For example, many homeschoolers end up creating collections of resources as they go along, as well as lesson plans, activities, and the like. It may be feasible to package some of these in an appealing way and sell them. Creating an ebook lesson plan is a perfect example, and you can sell this online via Amazon.

This may be particularly true if you have a specific focus on your homeschooling, such as Christian activities or ones targeted towards special needs. You’ll often find that there are relatively few resources out there and people in your local area may find related products extremely valuable.

Realistically, this area is likely to work well for some people and be a waste of time for others. In particular, if you are well organized and tend to create a lot of resources yourself, then you probably have some things that could be turned into products relatively easily.

It’s also a great opportunity to help people like yourself, and any business that can help people is bound to make money.

Relying On Blogging Through A Website To Make Money

An alternative option is to make money blogging. Blogs on homeschooling are extremely popular and they serve a few different functions.

For one thing, this type of site gives homeschool parents the chance to talk about what they are doing and how it is working. Often, writing like this can be a great way to be creative and to get an outside view of your own approaches.

You may also find yourself engaging with other homeschooling parents through comments on the site.

At the same time, this type of blog can be a powerful resource for other parents who homeschool. For example, they may visit a blog to find out lesson ideas, resources, and ways to get past specific challenges.

An advantage is that the information you put out is free to read, so you can get a lot more traffic to your website than you would to a sales page with an ebook advertised. You can make money via advertising banners or links on your site. These types of ads either pay per view, pay per click, or pay per sale, depending on which companies you work with.

Blogs are surprisingly easy to set up and you can make them functional and visually appealing even if you don’t have any previous experience. Overall, website creation has become much easier than it ever was before, so actually building the site really isn’t an area to stress about.

You can also continue to develop and expand a blog over time. This could include adding new content on a regular basis, along with expanding the topics that you talk about and any resources you provide.

What you do here is really up to you. I’ve seen some sites intentionally keep things basic and just have a general blogroll where they add content regularly. In contrast, other blogs are much more complex and many have multiple submenus and different areas.

The image below is one example of the more complex approach and I’m just showing a fraction of the different menus and options.

Don’t be intimidated! You can start out simple, then redo your site later or add on as you gain experience. My site you are reading now has been through several iterations over the past 4 years!

Making Money From A Blog Explained In More Detail

Having a blog is a good option for anyone who is homeschooling. However, this is only part of the equation. The other aspect is actually making money from the blog. After all, even if you enjoy running this type of site, making money from it is the ideal outcome.

There are a few ways of doing this and you can also mix and match somewhat.

Creating Digital Products

Earlier on, I mentioned the idea of creating physical products and selling them. Well, you can take the same general approaches digitally too. For example, some sites host printables on various topics, as well as ideas for activities.

In theory, you can sell these on your site and make a bit of money, especially if you’re pricing is reasonable. However, doing so isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems.

For one thing, you really need a good reputation to successfully sell things off your own website. As a general rule, visitors are wary about giving over their credit card information, especially to obscure sites. This means that it can take time until your site is recognized enough that people will start to buy from you.

Typically, you would get that reputation simply by continuing to build your site and creating quality content. Nevertheless, the issue is one to be aware of, as it means that you probably can’t successfully sell things early on.

At the same time, there are a lot of different homeschooling blogs out there right now and many of them offer most or all of their products for free. So, you would face stiff competition and may struggle to actually make sales.

Despite these challenges, the idea isn’t impossible. In fact, if you can build a high-quality blog and a good reputation, selling products may become pretty easy. Personally, I recommend considering this at a later point after you have a steady flow of traffic and a loyal fanbase.

Launching a product after a year or two of delivering freebies is quite common! You can make money this way but it isn’t ideal as a starting point for newbies.

Using Advertising Networks

Advertising is an extremely common technique with blogs, mostly because it is so easy to achieve. Typically, you would do this by going through a program like Google AdSense, which lets you earn a little bit of money based on how many views your ads get.

In some cases, you can also earn money based on getting people to click on your ads. This second approach means that you typically get more per action but that doesn’t always work out to more income, simply because people aren’t that willing to click on ads.

Ads make a lot of sense because you just need to set them up. As a result, you don’t have to make your content relate to the ads in any way and you don’t need to create any sales pages. This is inherently simpler than most other methods and ads can be very ‘hands-off’ once you get them set up.

However, ads aren’t all that profitable. In particular, how much you earn with ads is directly tied to the traffic you get. More traffic means more income.

Now, the specific amount you get per view or click does vary depending on a range of factors, including the specific field that you’re in. But, you typically need a decent amount of traffic to earn much at all.

For example, one estimate suggests that you need around 100,000 visitors per day to make $100,000 per year. To put it another way, you’d need 100 visitors per day to make just $100 a year.

That’s just a very rough estimate of course but you can start to see the difficulty. Just getting 100 visitors per day isn’t that easy and even if you did, you’re not earning much for your efforts.

Now, I have seen ads used successfully and even tried them out myself a time or two. They can certainly work as a way to make money but many blogs simply won’t have the traffic to make them worthwhile. One of my current sites has about 1,000 visits per day and makes about $200 per month from ads.

Once again, this means that ads work better on a site that is already established and has a decent amount of traffic, rather than one you’re just getting off the ground.

Affiliate Marketing For Targeted Advertising On Your Blog

One final option is affiliate marketing. This approach will be the best choice for most blogs out there regardless of the topic because it doesn’t rely on traffic nearly as much as the previous two approaches.

With affiliate marketing, you’re promoting products but not ones that you have created yourself. Instead, these are items from other companies and you can pick items from any company with an affiliate program (and there are a lot of those).

Because of this, you get to take advantage of the reputation the company and products already have, while also using their sales processes rather than your own.

From my personal experience, I saw that the 1000-daily-visit site was making $200 per month versus a 50-daily-visit site that was making $3,000 per month was a great example of how affiliate marketing can leverage targeted advertising to make sales.

I was advertising digital downloads, which is easy to sell because they are instantly downloaded as opposed to being shipped.

Affiliate marketing naturally fits in with homeschooling because you do end up using a range of different products as a homeschooler. There are also some affiliate programs that are specifically designed around homeschooling. This includes some companies that are well-known and others that are obscure.

Another option is to promote products from Amazon, as Amazon has a comprehensive selection of products and a relatively decent affiliate program. Indeed, there are many affiliate programs that you could pick from and you could look at products that are directly related to homeschooling or ones that are indirectly related.

Being A Success At Affiliate Marketing

For the most part, affiliate marketing is straightforward:

• build a website/blog
• write articles for the website to generate traffic
• link to affiliate products

The idea is simple, but there can be some daunting steps when you get started. How do I build a website? How many words should my article be? How do I make links? Why is my site not getting any traffic?

All those questions can be answered here. This is an affiliate training center that specializes in teaching affiliate marketing to newbies just like yourself. You can build your site on any topic you want, but they show you the core concepts of how to start a profitable affiliate site.

Nathaniell

What's up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. My name is Nathaniell and I'm the owner of One More Cup of Coffee. I started my first online business in 2010 promoting computer software and now I help newbies start their own businesses. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!