A former teacher started a YouTube side hustle teaching English here's how it works
- Jennifer Thompson started a side hustle teaching English as a second language on YouTube.
- She had spent five years teaching children English in school in Spain, but wanted more flexibility.
- Thompson said she's started using ChatGPT to help her generate example sentences for her videos.
When Jennifer Thompson found success as a freelance voiceover actor and video editor on Upwork, she decided to set up a YouTube channel detailing what she'd learned about the experience.
She started posting videos about how to apply for jobs and land clients. After some success, she had the idea to set up another channel drawing on her experience in her old job, teaching English to an online audience.
Thompson had spent five years teaching English in Madrid after college, but quit when she started on Upwork.
"I've always loved teaching English —that's what I've always been about," she said. But she wanted the flexibility of living between her native Canada and Spain.
She decided to become a freelancer
To do voice-overs, Thompson bought a microphone and taught herself audio editing.
After recording a demo reel, she started applying for voice-over jobs on Upwork in 2017. She also applied to edit video for clients, transcribe audio, and proofread. She made $24,300 on the platform in 2019.
Her YouTube channel aimed to help her subscribers get started with freelance work
She decided to upload video tutorials about her freelance work in October 2019.
She'd create YouTube videos about how to land freelance jobs and shared how she created cover letters, filled out her portfolio and applied to jobs. She made $3,500 in one month in 2021 from this channel.
She decided she'd publish videos about how to get started with freelancing as a transcriber, based on her own experience.
Thompson said that she saw many creators promising their audience they could make thousands of dollars from transcription, but she knew from her experience on Upwork that it could be hard to make even $5 an hour doing it.
"I know it's tough to make money online, so I'm not going to sell it as being something easy," she said.
She created another YouTube channel for teaching English
Thompson's videos about how to be a freelance transcriber were gaining popularity, ultimately being viewed 340,000 times. Their success sparked a new idea to set up another channel teaching English, she said, because many who wanted transcription jobs did not speak it as a first language.
She started the Sparkle English channel in February 2020.
Thompson said she started with shorter videos, explaining quick tips and grammar. In her videos, she'd use Camtasia, a free recording software, to record herself going through a Powerpoint presentation she created.
She then would layer over her voice recording, using Audacity to remove background noise.
After her first 50 videos, she started to experiment with different formats. When a series on using phrasal verbs didn't land many views, she used YouTube's analytics to study what her audience liked and published videos on those topics. She found videos about basic sentence structure landed much better with her audience.
She promoted her side channel on her main channel
Thompson started promoting Sparkle English at the end of her videos on her first channel.
"If I could go back and do it again, I'd probably post longer videos," she said, because content creators need to have achieved 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the past year to start making money from ads on YouTube.
By December 2021, Thompson started making money from ads on her side channel. She made $144 in her first month. In November 2022, her highest month, she made $2,400. In October this year, she reached 100,000 subscribers on Sparkle English.
She uses AI to generate example sentences
Thompson has been using ChatGPT to help her generate examples to demonstrate particular grammar rules for quizzes at the end of her videos since it came out in November 2022.
She has used it to generate examples of sentences in a particular tense on a particular topic.
Or she asks it to, for example, "come up with 10 different sentences. I'm doing a quiz on the first conditional, I want two of the sentences to be incorrect, the others correct."
But she finds she does have to check and correct sentences generated by ChatGPT as they can include "some serious grammar errors." Because of this, she doesn't use it to generate content for her YouTube tutorials.
She said, "I want to make sure everything's perfect."
She plans to make her side hustle her main channel
Today, Thompson does far less freelancing and her Upwork YouTube channel is her main income. But she hopes Sparkle English will soon replace it.
She said each video takes her around five hours to make and edit. She currently tries to post at least one video a week on each channel, but prefers to post two a week on "Sparkle English" if she can.
"Posting every single day can be overwhelming to your subscribers. They don't have a chance to watch every video," she said. "One to three a week I think is an ideal number."
Her YouTube channels mean she can work remotely. She said she doesn't see herself as a creator. "I'm a teacher first," she said. "On both of my channels, I teach. That's what I do."
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