What exactly is the meaning of Edupreneur? And more importantly, how is it different from a teacher? Let’s find out:

An Edupreneur is a person who combines Education with Entrepreneurship (Education + Entrepreneur = Edupreneur) and strives to create an education or training based company (as a solopreneur or with employees) that functions just like any other company, i.e, it strives to generate more income than losses so it can survive, sustain and hopefully grow and scale.

In order to clearly understand what an edupreneur is, you first of all have to understand what it is NOT.

And this is best done by comparing the meaning of Edupreneur with respect to a traditional teacher. Let’s look at some of the differences between an Edupreneur and a traditional teacher:

A traditional teacher doesn’t care about profit, an Edupreneur does

This for me is the biggest difference. Which is the mindset about money. For a long time, there has been a kind of hesitancy about teaching to make money. This comes from the fact that teaching is considered a noble profession. And it very well is.

But what is the point in being noble if you are not able to feed yourself. Will you be able to serve and educate students if you are not making money?

It’s a well known fact that the average traditional teacher earns a very less amount of income. Are we to simply accept that the profession we have chosen will never see us earning a lucrative sum of money?

This is where the real meaning of Edupreneur comes in. With a modern mindset about teaching and training, an edupreneur knows that in order to serve maximum possible number of students, he or she needs to be motivated towards making money. Without money, the whole mission can fail.

An Edupreneur is not ashamed of making money by educating others. In fact an edupreneur is not ashamed of becoming rich and enjoying the luxuries of life by creating a training business which has been built by his or her hard work and dedication. Because there is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s time to move beyond such orthodox thinking.

An Edupreneur realizes that the best way is to create a win-win situation both for himself and his students. By working hard and creating a quality education business, the students get the best quality of education and the Edupreneur is further able to grow the business from the income he generates.

An Edupreneur wants to have his cake and eat it too and knows there is nothing wrong with this notion.

A Traditional teacher focuses only on teaching whereas an Edupreneur focuses on setting up a Business System

A traditional teacher’s scope is very limited – to teaching their students. Whether that’s via working under an institution/employer or setting up their own self employed practice, a traditional teacher will often find themselves very limited when it comes to growth.

That’s because in order to scale and maximize your impact as a teacher, you need to develop a system that is built to increase your reach as well operate even when you are not actively working.

An Edupreneur realises that there are two important points to pay attention to when it comes to setting up their education system:

• Developing the ability to teach online via webinars and online courses so that the teaching is not geographically restricted and one has a global reach
• Using tools that enable automation (like E-mail marketing, online ads, automated sales and delivery of courses via a Learning Management System, etc) so that the system works and serves more people even when the Edupreneur is not actively working.

This means that the Edupreneur must think of teaching as one aspect of the online education system and not the only thing.

A traditional teacher has to be good at teaching but it’s not a necessity for an Edupreneur

Remember, a traditional teacher has only one avenue of earning an income, which is via teaching. This means that in order to grow, a teacher has to be able to demonstrate a very high ability of teaching.

Though most of the times, Edupreneurs will be involved in teaching themselves since that is their passion but they don’t necessarily have to be good at it. In fact an Edupreneur doesn’t have to teach at all.

Remember the Edupreneur is focusing on creating an Online Education System.

An Edupreneur can always outsource the training part or hire an employee to carry out anything related to the actual teaching or training.

In fact as you are about to find out below, being an Edupreneur can also mean starting an education based company that has nothing to do directly with teaching at all.

Now the question is –

How can you become an Edupreneur?

The first thing you have to realize is that being an entrepreneur in the online education industry doesn’t only mean that you have set up a business that is directly related to teaching or training.

There are a host of other opportunities like:

• Creating a Learning Management platform like Teachable, Thinkific, Spayee, etc.
• Creating a Webinar software like Zoom
• Creating a Marketing Agency that focuses on marketing only for education based companies
• Creating an Online Course Marketplace like Udemy.
• Creating a blog (content focused site) that deals with everything related to the Education industry

But for the sake of this article, let’s assume that you want to be Edupreneur who wants to create an education based company which is directly related to teaching or training in a particular niche. So what would be the things you would need to focus on to create such a system?

The first thing you have to realize is that in the current scenario, going online is what you have to focus on because that is what will enable you to scale your company. I’m not saying you don’t have to set up a physical institute. You can do that too but going online is something that you should definitely be focusing on if you don’t want to your impact to be geographically limited.

In order to create on online education venture, you have to focus on the following five points:

Develop Niche Clarity

You can’t be everything to everyone. You have to be clear on what exactly you are planning to teach, especially when you are starting out.

For instance, let’s say you want to become a digital marketing trainer. Instead of trying to teach all aspects of digital marketing, develop your expertise in one particular subject like Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Pay per click ads, etc. Choose one topic which has enough scope to go deeper. You have to take a “one inch wide and a mile deep” approach.

When your prospective students come on your website, they should immediately understand what your niche is. There should be no room for confusion. Always remember that people want to learn from an expert and not a Jack of all trades.

This will not only result in more sales of your courses/workshops but also make the whole thing less overwhelming for you since you will have a clear focus on what to work on and get better at.

As you grow bigger and have more resources, you can always broaden your niche or even diversify into different niches.

Develop a professional website

Unless you have abundant resources, I always suggest learning how to create and maintain a professional website is a skill that is an absolute must.

Remember, your website will represent your business. It is where your prospective students will come and buy your courses from. It is what forms a lasting impression in your student’s mind.

You will have to learn how to create a website by buying a domain name and a hosting service and integrating it with a content management software like WordPress.

Yes it will take work but the last thing you want to do is to outsource all this to a freelancer because a website is something that requires constant maintenance. You don’t want to have a the headache (and expenses) of having to rely on someone else again and again.

Developing your own website is really not such a tough skill nowadays, thanks to a plethora of amazing software. For instance, check out this video in which I show you how easily I create professional looking pages on my website.

Creating, Shooting and Editing Videos

There is no doubt that this is the era of videos. Videos do the best job at replicating the experience of a physical classroom.

Creating, shooting and editing videos is again a skill that should be learned, though there is no harm in outsourcing it to a professional videographer if all your content is ready and you are comfortable paying for it.

Creating videos doesn’t always have to mean you have to create the most professional looking videos. As an online educator, students are focused more on the quality of your content rather than how cinematic your video looks.

There are also very beginner friendly methods to create videos like Screencasting, which refers to using a screen recording software to record your computer screen and your voice-over. Check out this page to see which screencasting software I use for my own videos.

Later on as you become more comfortable, you can start creating videos using a DSLR or a Mirrorless camera or even your phone.

One thing where you won’t be able to compromise will be audio. You will HAVE to invest in a good microphone because while video quality can be slightly forgiven, your students won’t tolerate poor quality audio.

Creating a Marketing Funnel and Selling System

Creating courses is one thing but being able to sell them is another.

This is where as an Edupreneur, you will have to learn the skill of developing a marketing system for your business.

The biggest area where you will have to focus is on automating your system.

This means using tools and resources that do the work for you even when you are not actively working. This involves tools like an E-mail marketing software which sends emails on its own, using online ads like Facebook ads, maintaining a blog which brings organic traffic, etc.

The second aspect of such a system is developing a marketing funnel, i.e, a system which is designed to turn a cold prospect who doesn’t know you into an eventual buyer of your course. For example, you can have a short course which you can give away for free that gives the student a preview into the main course. In exchange you can ask for the student’s email. Once you have their email, you can follow up with them through the email marketing software and become more familiar with them. Similarly, you can conduct live webinars to warm up a cold audience.

A prospect that is more familiar with your brand will have more trust in it and more trust means a higher probability of them buying from you and turning into life long customers.

Learning the skill of generating traffic

Being able to generate traffic is the lifeline for any online business. You can set up an amazing marketing system and the most professional looking website, but if no one is coming to it, then there is not much use. It’s like opening up a great looking restaurant in the middle of nowhere.

The ability to create and run cost effective online ads is a skill that takes some time (and burning of money) to learn. But it’s one of the most invaluable skill.

In Online Course Blueprint, I mainly focus on teaching you how to use Facebook ads to generate traffic because in my opinion Facebook ads is the most cost effective and beginner friendly traffic generating mechanism out there.

While paid ads will give you traffic on demand, you should also focus on long term traffic generating techniques like Search Engine Optimization, Blogging, collaborating with other people to leverage their audience, social media usage, etc.

So now you know what an Edupreneur is and you are also aware that being an Edupreneur involves so much more than just teaching.

If you have any questions, do leave them in comments box below and I’ll help you out.