Trying to find my niche!

If it's your first time here, let me give you some background. At the end of summer 2022, I finished my events planning job and started working fully online doing a variety of different jobs. I was planning to relocate to Barbados in the following months on their remote work visa, and this is still the plan, it is just taking a bit longer than I had hoped. The delays are all on the UK end of things. My Barbados visa was sorted easily months ago, and is ready and waiting to be activated.

I started exploring different roles, and the area I enjoyed the most was teaching English online. It has also turned out to be the most consistent of all the things I have been doing, both in terms of available work and ease of getting paid. I found a few platforms that allowed people with little to no experience to work for them and started building my experience. In the beginning, it was nerve-wracking, but very quickly I found I had some useful skills from my previous roles in training and took an official qualification in how to teach English to those learning it as a foreign language. Just 6 months later and I have a 4.9 rating (out of a maximum of 5) from my students, and have many people that I speak to each week and feel like I am part of their life.

So what is the problem you might ask? Well, it's not the best-paid job in the world, not that it is all about the money. I do it because I enjoy the work and talking to people around the world. The host platforms have to take their cut from what the student pays, which is fine, so it works out that I have been earning approximately £8 per hour with exchange rates and fees to get the money actually into my account. It would be nice to get a little bit more to live on. I could work in a supermarket in England and be better paid, but that wouldn't help me work towards my dream of moving. The work I do I can take with me anywhere in the world and can carry on with it from day one of arrival, giving me complete flexibility to travel anywhere, which is what I was after. So whilst a bit more money would be nice, I am not complaining as having a job I can travel with is more important to me. I have tried other platforms, but there are still fees to pay and there is a lot of competition out there, so nothing has given me the eureka moment.

This week I have started to investigate a new way of working, whilst staying in teaching English to people who don't have it as their first language. I had heard of Patreon before and I have seen people online talking about this platform, but never really given it much thought. This week though I decided to give it a go, as a way to reach more people. The concept of Patreon is that people pay a small membership fee and in return, they get access to the content you make for them. In my case I am going to produce recorded English lessons, stories and games (see some sneak peeks at the kind of things in last week's post Learning English: Lets make it fun! (onepawinthesand.com)). I will be starting with beginner English (A1) and if this seems fruitful then I will add in other levels and specialities. I have also added a higher-level membership that includes a small group lesson with me online so they can practice their speaking and listening skills with a native speaker. I hope this adds another income stream, even if it's just a small one, as I really enjoy this line of work. The site isn't live yet as I want to make sure I have content to start with, so I don't have the pressure of doing new videos and content if the move does suddenly happen. But in the next few weeks, I hope to have the first month's content available to anyone who wants to join as a patron.

I have developed new skills with Canva to make the lessons fun and educational, so even if this doesn't lead anywhere I will still have some good lessons I can use with my beginner students. I'm enjoying the challenges it brings and finding new ways that I can share my knowledge with the world. Fingers crossed it works, as ever I will put in the work and hopefully people will find it useful.

Here is my Patreon header page, which I designed and put together myself, even though I don't have a background in graphic design. Hopefully it catches some people's attention and I get a few more students from it: