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How much money can I earn teaching English ?

Much much more, by not being GREEDY!

We also manage the website www.skypelearn.com where teachers pay 55 Euro per year to have their profile inserted and where students from all over the world contact them and pay them for English lessons, and we sometimes really wonder if some of these teachers know what they are doing.

The basic price today for a 1 hour English lesson via Skype is between 9 Euro and 15 Euro. It depends on if the teacher also offers exam preparations, or even technical English such as legal English, medical English, construction English.
If a teacher charges more, then he or she is going up against a huge wall called competition and will get very few students.

10 Euro an hour ? Are you kidding ?

Nope, we ain't!
There is a difference in the money you can earn teaching via Skype or directly teaching private lessons and we will go through these below, but just for the sake of doing some quick maths to start with......:
1 student 2x a week @ 10 euro per lesson = 20 Euro per week
2 students 2x a week @ 10 euro per lesson = 40 Euro per week
4 students 2x a week @ 10 euro per lesson = 80 Euro per week
8 students 2x a week @ 10 euro per lesson = 160 Euro per week
10 students 2x a week @ 10 euro per lesson = 200 Euro per week
20 students 2x a week @ 10 euro per lesson = 400 Euro per week

...but let's be realistic for starters and let's say that you have 12 students each week and each of them does 2 lessons each week..... so you are teaching 24 hours a week, and making 240 Euro each week.
So each month you earn 960 Euro for a 24 hour week.

BUT!!!!!!!!
This is for just one student in each lesson.

Imagine if you get 2 students into each lesson.
Result = just double 960 Euro and you get 1920 Euro per month.

Earn money teaching direct private English lessons

By direct we mean person to person and not via Skype:
You can teach private English lessons from your home, go to the student's home and even teach companies at their premises.
The advantage of teaching direct English lessons is that you can teach more than 3 people at once, so if you are charging 10 Euro per student per lesson, and you get 4 students in one lesson, then you are making 40 Euro an hours.
So if you have 2 lessons a day with 4 students in each, you are making 80 Euro a day for just two hours of work.

And don't forget, that whether you teach one student or 20 in one lesson, the work you do is the same, but the earnings explode.

In fact, teaching just one student is much harder than 2 or 5 because in one to one lessons, you and the student have to talk much more because it's just the two of you.
One on one lessons are also very demanding on the one student and also he has no other student with which he can compare himself with.

The disadvantage of teaching direct English lessons is that you will probably have to keep a time line compatible with the local student's time line, which most often is afternoons to early evening.

The other disadvantage, is that locally, you will have competition, and only so many students available between you and the competition.

Also, you may need to rent premises, or fix up your home to become a language school.

And don't forget, that either you or the student, or both will have to travel to get to the lesson.

Earn money teaching via Skype

The same money earning maths can be applied to teaching over the internet with different advantages.

The first advantage is that you can teach students from all over the world right from your living room.

Next advantage, you can teach at any given time, morning, afternoon, evening, in the dead of night ... because your student will be in different time zones.

Also, you won't need to rent any premises and buy desks and chairs, and mainly there is no travel or car parking involved for neither you nor the student.

Another advantage is that you can work out flexible timetables and even teach English just to supplement your other income.

The disadvantage of teaching English via Skype is just one.

You cannot cram 10 student into one lesson, it just isn't doable.
One, because of student time lines in their time zones and the difficulty in finding 5 student at the same time line with the same level of English.

The other, because of technology and if anyone tells us that Skype conferencing will work with 10 connected student plus you the teacher at one time we will think that you mean like in 5 years time and not now.

But you can certainly get 2 or 3 student into one lesson at the same time comfortably.

Don't worry about the video conferencing issue where you have to buy Skype premium to get more than 2 people video chatting live via Skype because -...... remember ... you won't be using a video cam when teaching over Skype so without video 3 or more is permitted and for free.

So even at the start, if you are teaching 5 students a week, doing one hour per student,
say one hour each evening on each workday, that makes 5 hours a week, 20 hours a month, and you are making an easy 200 Euro monthly extra money from the comfort of your living room.

Most serious English language Skype teachers manage 15+ students weekly, even being able to combine a few students into one lesson so on average that would be 10 hours per week but 150 Euro per week, which monthly comes to 600 Euro.

As they say: If you don't try it, you'll never know.