Despolite

July 28, 2017

HOW TO OPEN AND START A BLOG

Ever thought about launching your own blog?

Ever wondered what it takes, not only to start up that blog, but also to successfully build it over time to make money online or generate a passive income? Clearly, you're not alone. Millions of people try their hand at blogging, but so few actually ever generate a substantial income from their efforts.
However, if you're starting a blog for the purposes of making money, and you're not actually passionate about writing in the first place, then you're largely wasting your time. The art of blogging isn't simply scientific or formulaic. Without a deep-seated passion for your craft, you'll face a tide of frustration and upset.
Why? While it's relatively straightforward to begin a blog, it's a monumental undertaking to generate any semblance of traffic and profit from your arduous efforts. You need laser-focus and persistence to build an audience or reach mass saturation with your prose. It takes time and it takes long and drawn out evenings burning the proverbial midnight oil.

Take it from me. As a blogger who's built a substantial platform with hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, I can bask in the warm glow of success. However, I can't sit around for too long enjoying the freedom and passive income that my blog has created. Without constantly adding insatiable content, any blog can die off.
So, what does it take to start a successful blog and actually make money online? I suppose that depends on what you consider successful and what you consider making money. If, like millions of other potential bloggers out there, you're looking to rake it in, you'll have a long road ahead.

But if you're willing to put in the time and the effort, and you can stay persistent over the years (and yes, I said years), then you can most certainly generate a substantial income online. In fact, your blog is quite possibly one of the best hubs of passive income generation, and if done the right way, it can attract the right clients and customers no matter what industry or niche you might be in.
Related: 4 Ways to Stock Your Content War Chest

How to Start a Blog: Step-by-Step

Okay, if I haven't dissuaded you just yet, and you're serious about launching the next Mashable or TechCrunch or whatever other blog you might think is wildly successful in your eyes, then here's what you need to do in a step-by-step fashion. The more you prepare and plan, the more likely you'll be to succeed in the long term.

1. Pick a Topic

Get clear on what you'll write about. Define a topic or niche, and design all your content around those things. This will help you to not only laser-focus your writing, but also to build digital products and services that compliment your content.
This allows you to attract customers in, enticing them with your highly-informative posts, then tempting them with a lead magnet before dropping them into your sales funnel (more on that shortly).

2. Select a Platform

While Wordpress is the most popular platform for blogging by far, there are others out there that can be leveraged such as a micro-blogging platform like Tumblr, Blogger.com and even Medium. However, if you're serious about your blogging efforts, you'll likely want to go with a self-hosted Wordpress installation on a custom domain.
While you could setup a blog at Wordpress.com with a subdomain such as myblog.wordpress.com, you'll get more traction with a self-hosted solution, and then be able to use subdomains on popular platforms for your content-marketing efforts.
Related: Medium Is the Solution If You Want to Blog Without Any Overhead

3. Pick a Domain Name

Custom domain names are important if you're serious about making money from the blog you start. Rather than relying on a third-party-hosted subdomain, find a short but relevant keyword-rich (if possible) domain name that's descriptive of your intended topic, industry or niche. Use BlueHost, HostGator, 1&1 Hosting or any other number of domain name providers to source your domain.
If you're at all concerned about things like SEO, when selecting your domain name, you should adhere to the following suggestions:

Use a known top-level domain (TLD) such as .com or .net
Keep the domain short, no more than 15 characters or so
Try not to purchase a domain name with hyphens, since they're more often associated with spammers
Avoid using self-hosted subdomains to rank or categorize posts

Related: 21 Ways to Market Your Business Online

4. Find a Good Web Hosting Company

There are loads of good hosting companies out there. If you're starting a Wordpress, self-hosted blog, there are a near-endless amount of options. The important thing is to do your due diligence and pick the right one that's suitable to your budget and to ensure that the service-level and up-time guarantee is there.
At the beginning, you'll likely want to start out with either a Managed Wordpress solution or a Virtual Private Server (VPS), and scale from there. Eventually, you'll probably need a dedicated-hosting solution with a CDN (below) once you break through a few thousand visitors per day.

5. Caching and Content-Delivery Networks (CDNs)

Use a system like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache and turn on browser caching to ensure that you speed up the delivery of your webpages. In the beginning, this might not seem as important. But as you grow and your traffic increases to thousands of visitors per day, this will be critical. Use Google's Page Speed Insights to test things before and after the installation.
It's also important that you setup a CDN, which will speed up the global delivery of your content. For example, your page might load relatively quickly in the United States, but what happens when someone in Australia tries to load your content? CDNs replicate data across multiple repositories around the world, and make content delivery ultra-fast.
This is important for the user's experience because most people who are foced to wait even a few seconds for a page to load, often abandon the website and go to the next one in the search results. W3 Total Cache integrates with Amazon's AWS and MaxCDN, two very good options when it comes to CDNs.

6. Enable Permalinks

In Wordpress, you should enable permalinks before getting things off the ground, which will give you nice canonical URLs that are SEO-friendly. Permalinks are located within the settings > permalinks section of your Wordpress admin and select the post name option.
Related: 10 Smart Ways to Earn or Build Backlinks to Your Website

7. Install the AMP plugin

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an initiative by Google to speed up mobile accessibility to a large degree of their content. The AMP specification, which you can read more about here, helps to thin down a webpage to its basic structural components with scaled-back JS and minified CSS code, makes for lightning-fast page speeds.

8. Install Google Analytics

Install Google Analytics so that you can keep track of your efforts while building out your blog. This is a great way to keep track of your results while using the URL campaign builder when dropping links in social media and other places so that you can effectively determine where your traffic is coming from.

9. Setup Google's Webmaster Tools

Anyone who's serious about building a blog and making money, needs to leverage Google's webmaster tools to see what keywords they're ranking for and any messages that would impact their ability to rank. This will also allow you to submit an XML sitemap and track keyword impressions along with click-through rates. This is one of the most useful tools for growing your site or blog through constant analysis of your efforts.
Related: Why Your Startup Content-Marketing Strategy Isn't Working

10. Learn SEO the Right Way

Although you shouldn't start a blog with the intention of optimizing it to oblivion, you most certainly should understand the fundamental principles of search engine optimization so that you pay attention to the key aspects that will impact your ability to rank on search engines like Google. Begin with Google's Webmaster Guidelines, and digest and implement that information. Learning SEO is a long and drawn out journey. You should always be increasing your knowledge and expanding your skill set.

11. Regulary Build Useful Content

If you're serious about succeeding with your blog, you need to build useful anchor content. It needs to be engaging, keyword centric, insightful, unique and well written. Don't write your content for search engines. Rather, write your content for humans while also paying homage to search engines and what they want. Simply put, it's a skill that develops over time with practice. It's also important to regularly publish your content on a weekly basis.

12. Sign Up to an Email Marketing Platform

The best avenue for making money from your blog is through email marketing, plain and simple. Hands down, this offers one of the quickest and surest strategies for earning an income through your blog. But before you get there, you need to sign up to an email marketing platform like Aweber, ConvertKit, MailChimp, Constant Contact, InfusionSoft or any other number of platforms that exist out there.
Related: 4 Golden Rules to Boost Blog-Post Engagement

13. Build a Lead Magnet

If you're serious about marketing anything online, rather than opting for running ads on your blog (which won't make you real money unless you have at least hundreds of thousands of visitors per day) or engaging in affiliate marketing, you should build a topical lead magnet that will sell a digital product or offer that you create in the back-end. The lead magnet will entice people to sign up to your list and provide you with their email address.

14. Build a Digital Product and Position Your Offers

Email marketing and lead magnets are all designed to help you build out an automated sales machine. However, you need a digital product, service or other kind of offer in the back-end to do that. You can create multiple offers or products, that can lead people up a value chain towards your high-ticket sales.

15. Create a Sales Funnel

Take the time to build your automated sales funnel. There is so much involved with sales funnels, but the basic premise is that your visitors will show up to your site by discovering your content, drop into your sales funnel through an offer via your lead magnet or some other tripwire, and they'll then be led through a journey with drip-fed messages at some periodic schedule that will allow you to sell your products and services on autopilot.
Related: How This Entrepreneur Created a Premier Women's Lifestyle Website

16. Get Social

Building a blog isn't easy by any measure. To help you along the road towards success, you have to get social. Not only by linking up with other like-minded bloggers interested in online marketing, but also by sharing and engaging with others on social networks like Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms.

17. Market Your Content

The single most important strategy you'll find for building up a blog and boosting your visibility on search engines like Google, and my all-time go-to strategy for rocketing up the search rankings on Google's SERPs, is content marketing. Marketing your content is an intricate process that involves long, seemingly-never-ending hours of building more useful off-site content that links to your primary anchor content, but it's well worth it.
You can use this single strategy to rank number one on Google's searches for nearly any keyword if it's done the right way. There's most certainly an art to this as well as a technical outline and to doing it the right way. Don't try to spam or overstuff keywords in an effort to market your content by any means.
Content marketing can be done with articles on sites like Medium.com or Scribd.com, it can be done by answering questions on Reddit or Quora, and it can be done with videos on YouTube or Vimeo, along with a variety of other means. The point is that all of the content has to be useful, period. Don't try to do the least amount of work for the greatest return. You need to do the exact opposite if you want to succeed.

July 27, 2017

How to Make Money on Fiverr (How I Make $4000 a Month)

by kingsolo4real, in ONLINE-JOBS

Fiverr pays if you for hobbies you play with
Drawing, Designing, Graphics, Art, SEO, Article, music and audio, digital marketing, fun and live-style,

How i make up to 4000 dollar (1261000 naira )

I joined Fiverr https://michaeltrendz.blogspot.com.ng/ on September 2015 and have generated over 6 million naira from it.

Prior to joining, I used to get angry with my friend who was a freelancer on Fiverr.

We were running an offline joint-venture business back then. Every minute he could steal from time, he will quickly log in to Fiverr to do what I didn’t know.

Back then, I always saw Fiverr as a $5 marketplace and I couldn’t imagine how he would always dedicate more time to his Fiverr account instead of our offline business which was making us good money…..(so I thought).

I didn’t miss any opportunity to make joke of him for slaving away on Fiverr and he wasn’t deterred at all by it……possibly he’d be laughing at me in his mind.

It was not until my fiancé finished school and was looking for what could keep her busy that the veil covering my eyes was removed.

I told my friend to teach her Fiverr so she could keep herself busy with it.

Her first month on Fiverr, she made $450.
That was huge compared to the time she spent on it.

It was then that I knew that there was something big happening in Fiverr and that was possibly why my friend gave good attention to it.

This was in 2014.

Fast-forward to 2015, our joint venture business started going down and I needed another supplementary income lest I go hungry.
My friend told me to come over to Fiverr and I lazily agreed.

My first month on Fiverr, I made $950……double of my income in the offline business I was running.

What really drew me in wasn’t really the money, but the fact that I wasn’t bothered about overhead, paying staff, going on marketing, etc. I just stayed back in the office, worked few hours per day and that was all.

I became really obsessed with Fiverr that I had to close down my offline business to focus on Fiverr…..that was very silly to many people, but it wasn’t to me.

Fast forward to 2017, I have earned as high as $3,000 in some months, with my lowest month being $850.

I want to share five important lessons I learnt from Fiverr. I believe if you learn it from me and apply it, you can earn a full time income, bigger than what many WORKING CLASS people earn.

Here are the five lessons:

1.     More money is made in the upsell:

If you are in the internet marketing space, you will understand the importance of upsell.

Let me use a practical example to explain what an upsell is.

When you order a product from Amazon or Ebay, you would see something like: “those who bought this product also bought this”.

The try to show you other products you might possibly need based on your current purchase. They know you are still in the mood of buying and so may possibly buy more.

With this, they make more money from you while they can.

The same thing applies to Fiverr.

Each service you render on Fiverr will invariably have lots of interrelated service.
For example, I’m copywriter on Fiverr and I know that anyone who hires me to write the content of their sales page, will invariably need email copies and squeeze page copies.

So when you place the order for a sales page copy, I will quickly respond to you, thanking you for placing the order and recommending those other services to you. I won’t just recommend, I will tell you reasons why you need them if you want to maximize your sales and conversion.
Most times, the client agrees because they just bought and so I’ll make more money than I would have normally gotten from the client.
This has enabled me earn up to $700 from a single client in one order.

You can also apply this and see how your revenue will increase, even when your client base is not increasing.

Another method of using this is through gig extras.
Add all those upsells in your gig extra so the buyer can easily see it and make a choice.
If they don’t, then you communicate and convince the buyer yourself as I described above.

2.     Don’t rely on Fiverr traffic

Fiverr sure has a lot of traffic that can help you get sales. But if you are serious about growing your sales and revenue, you don’t need to rely on Fiverr traffic.

The millions of traffic that Fiverr gets monthly is not for you alone. It is meant to be shared among the thousands of freelancers they have on their platform.

What is the probability that you will get a good chunk of that traffic to your gigs?

Of course, you can use some Fiverr SEO tactics to receive more visits to your gigs, but you should bear in mind that Fiverr algorithm for gig ranking keeps changing too and what you did today to get yourself ranked, might make you enter the second page by tomorrow.

Many top sellers on Fiverr have been hit by these algorithm changes, so you are not immune to it.

The best thing for you is to optimize your gig for Fiverr searches and in addition, get more traffic direct to your gig from outside Fiverr.

Use social media, forums and even paid ads to get more targeted traffic to your gigs.

Trust me that many business owners don’t even know about Fiverr. When you reach out to them through these platforms and let them know they can get a high quality service at a cheaper price on Fiverr, they will quickly move to it.

37% of my Fiverr revenue comes from clients who saw my gig from outside the Fiverr platform.

You can also use this tactics to make more sales and revenue even if Fiverr changes their algorithm every day.

3.     Bidding early matters a lot…being 10th or down isn’t cool

On Fiverr, I’m not just a seller (freelancer), I also buy services there too. So I have had the opportunity of seeing things from both the buyer and the seller end.

When you visit the buyer request section, you will see over 20 sellers bidding on a single project.

For the buyer, they are usually overwhelmed with requests and so they end up interacting with the first 5-10 bidders. The buyer might even make a buying decision from the first or second bidder.

What this means is that if you want to increase your chances of getting the job, make sure you frequent the buyer request section and always bid on request as soon as possible so that you will be among the first five persons to bid.

That way, the buyer may see you and consider you among his options when making a buying decision.

Additionally, make sure your bidding proposal stands out with its content, else the buyer will just ignore your post and go for other bidders.

4.     Your gig package is meant to hoodwink the seller to pay more

Fiverr introduced the gig packages last year and that to me is one of the best updates they have done since I joined them in 2015.

The three gig packages enable you to charge your clients higher amount for more services. It’s meant to make your buyer prefer to pay higher hoping to get more quality at lesser amount.

For example, if you offer article writing services, your basic package could be 100 word SEO article for $5. The next package would be 500 words for $15, while the third package would be 1000 words for $25.

This way, your client would think that 1000 words is the best since he will get more value (1000 words) for less ($25 instead of $50). So they will probably ignore the $5 and go for the $25.

This is how I package my gigs to make the buyer happily pay more.

Repurpose your gig packages so that your buyers see more value in paying you more.

5.     You must see Fiverr as a real business

One of my most favorite business quotes is this: “if you want your business to give you full time income, then you must give it full time attention”.

If you want to make a sizeable income from Fiverr, then be ready to see and treat it like a real business.

By this, I mean that you should spend good enough time getting new customers both within and outside Fiverr platform. You should also endeavor to over-satisfy your clients by delivering quality service on time all the time.

Quality and on-time delivery will lead to your clients referring you to their friends offline….it has happened to me multiple times.

Even though, I now work less on Fiverr (I don’t drive external traffic to my gigs and I don’t even visit the buyer request section again) due to other internet businesses I’m trying to learn, I still get a considerable amount of sales and revenue from Fiverr.

Fiverr is not just a place for $5 jobs; you can make a full-time living from it if you will take time to learn more about it in addition to the lessons I just shared with you here.

If you want to do it

Good luck to you.

sign-up now for free

July 27, 2017

5 Online Businesses You Can Start With No Money

by kingsolo4real, in ONLINE-JOBS

Start a money-making online business

The internet is the great equalizer. In business specifically, it has leveled the playing field. Anyone can start a money-making online business — anyone with a computer that is. But here’s the thing, no technical experience is needed. You don’t have to know how to build websites — no programming required at all. There’s no business or marketing experience needed either. It’s a truly democratic medium for entrepreneurship.

You can also live anywhere you want, set your own schedule, and work as little or as much as you want, depending on how fast or big you want your business to grow.
Best of all, unlike a bricks and mortar business, you don’t need a lot of startup capital to get started. In fact, you can get many internet businesses up and running with no money at all because there are so many free services to facilitate it. For example, you can set up a website/blog for free using WordPress. Or you can leverage a third party site like Amazon or eBay to sell goods — you use their selling platform in exchange for giving them a cut of your sales.
And this just the start of the many no money e-commerce startup solutions available.
With all of that said, let's take a look at what many consider to be the top five ways to make money online with little or not cost at all.

1. Drop Shipping

The basic idea behind an online drop shipping business is that as a small business owner you don’t have to maintain a large inventory of products or handle any delivery to your customers.

That eliminates the financial cost and risk of having a warehouse full of stuff you might not sell, and the hassle of arranging to send orders all over the country or the world.

Instead, you work with a company that specializes in drop shipping. Here’s how it works:

You list products for sale on your website or a platform like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy.

When one of your customers makes a purchase, you purchase the product from a third party company (the drop shipper, usually a manufacturer or wholesaler) for a lower price. This process is as simple as forwarding the order from your customer (this can actually be completely automated).
Your drop shipper then sends the product to the customer.

Easy enough, right? With drop shipping, you can offer a wide range of products, so the operating expenses for your business are super low.
There are some downsides to the drop shipping business model. You will have to find a reputable drop shipper you can count on to delivery to your customers. If an order is late or doesn’t go out… or a product is poor quality — you get blamed.
Also, because this market is so competitive, the margins (the difference between the wholesale price and how much you can sell a product for) are lower. But still, it is a worthwhile low or no-cost startup option.
One way to stand out from the competition with a drop shipping business is to private label your products. That way you're not selling the same product brand and just competing on price; rather you can use your own brand and face less competition.

Anyone considering a drop shipping business should seriously consider leveraging Amazon.com to grow their business.

You can learn more about becoming a profitable Amazon seller here.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is somewhat similar to drop shipping but with some key differences. Let’s take a closer look.
With this e-commerce model, you again don’t maintain an inventory of your own products, and you don’t have to worry about shipping products to customers.
Basically, you pick a profitable niche for your online business, and then you find an affiliate partner who has products available in that niche. Some of the most popular affiliate sites are Clickbank.com, Amazon.com, and CJ Affiliate by Conversant (formerly Commission Junction). Between them, they offer just about any digital information product or physical product you can think of.
You offer the products for sale, for example, on your blog or e-commerce website.

Each product has a unique link that tracks back to your account with your affiliate partner. When a prospect clicks on the link, they are taken to your partner’s shopping cart for check out. Once they buy, that purchase is recorded and you get a commission. It varies depending on the affiliate partner, but is generally 5 percent to 25 percent (or 50% or more with digital information products).

As you can see, there’s little risk on your part and virtually no investment needed either.
All you have to do is handle the marketing to get your prospects to buy (through social media, email marketing, blogging, or whatever method you choose). But after they click the affiliate link, it’s out of your hands. You don’t have to ship products or handle any customer service questions. And you certainly don’t have to maintain an inventory.
You can see some of the top free ways to market your online business here.

3. Blogging

If you have expertise and/or a passion or interest for a subject — and who doesn’t — you’re ready to start making money with a blog. With a service like Blogger (www.blogger.com), you can start up your blog totally free. You can also create your own site and secure your own hosting for a low price.
You may think blogging is all about writing. And it can be if you want it to. But written blog posts are just the start. You can post photos, videos, links to other sites, repost news and other articles… anything is game, really, as long as it is related to your niche.

What sort of content should you provide? Anything that is engaging to your prospect. Topics like “how-to,” top 10 lists, commentary on trends in your niche, tips and tricks articles… basically, you need to provide useful content. Need blogging ideas? Here are 40 ideas for your blog.
You make money in a variety of ways.

Google AdSense: These are pay per click ads that appear on your blog. Every time somebody clicks on an ad (which are supposed to be about a subject related to your niche), you make a few cents. Small amounts each time, but it adds up.
Blog ad networks: You can also work with ad networks, like Blogads, and run banner ads on your blog.
Affiliate marketing: You know this one already. You include links to products you are promoting as an affiliate and every time somebody buys the product, you get a commission. With a blog you can integrate advertising with content to make it even more likely you’ll get the sale. For example, you could do a product review — which is useful content — and then include a link to buy the product under an affiliate link.

Here are a few successful blogging tips to make sure people can find your blog — and will keep coming back. This is key to building a following and making your blog a profitable venture.

You need to provide useful content in an engaging way. If your blog is boring or the information can be found everywhere else, nobody will read it.
You have to post content on a regular basis. People thirst for the new. So make sure you put up articles, videos, or whatever consistently. It could one post per day or three times per week — whatever it is, maintain the same schedule. If you start being scattershot in posting, you’ll lose readers.
Be genuine. Yes, your blog is supposed to make money. But you can’t make marketing pitches all the time. Focus on useful content so that your readers come to know, like, and trust you. Then they will naturally click on your advertising or buy the products you recommend.

Do all of this and you’ll attract the notice of search engines like Google, which are always looking to put sites with useful, relevant content on top of the search results. This is what content marketing is all about.
You could start a blog in less than an hour. But it will take time to make money as you build readership and a small percentage of those folks end up buying your products.

4. Online Video

Have you watched a YouTube video lately? Of course, you have! This is one of the world’s most popular websites, with more than 1 billion users watching hundreds of millions of hours of video each day. And it’s not all cats doing funny things, by any means.

You can leverage YouTube’s reach to make money online. No, you’re not trying to create a viral video, so to speak. Although if it does go worldwide and is seen by millions, that’s a good thing.
Instead, you’ll be following a proven strategy for maximizing views of multiple videos on a regular basis. You’ll be creating useful content… something engaging that people want to watch. And it works in many, many different niches.
It could be a how-to video, a talking head video on a topic of interest to people interested in your niche… the sky is the limit.
One of the most popular — and money-making — types of videos out there right now are in the “Let’s Play” category. Basically, viewers watch people play video games. The players provide commentary and expert tips on mastering the game. People of all ages watch these videos and the most popular video creators can make thousands of dollars.
So you can see that just about any niche could work. Probably something you’re passionate about could be a profitable niche. Which brings us to money.
You make money with ad revenue. Your first step is to create a YouTube account and start uploading videos. Then you enable monetization on your YouTube settings. Basically, this gives Google the go-ahead to include short AdSense ads with your videos — you’ve seen those if you’ve watched a YouTube video. When viewers click on those ads, you get paid.
Some tips to create professional looking videos (no expensive pro equipment needed):

You can use your smartphone or a simple video camera. But make sure the lighting is good so you and everything else in your video is clear and easy to see.
Make sure the audio is clear. Make sure there is no air conditioning hum, construction noise, or other distraction.
Use simple editing software like iMovie to put titles at the beginning of the video and to edit out any flubs.

Above all, remember that your videos can be simple and don’t have to be slick. Just provide useful content and be engaging and interesting — being funny helps too.
And to extend the reach of your videos, be sure to post them on your Facebook business page, Twitter, your blog, and other channels. Let people know you’re in the video business now.
In addition to ad revenue from YouTube videos, you can also use your YouTube channel to drive traffic back to your website; where visitors can read your products reviews, click on the ads on your website, or even get onto your email subscriber list - where you can make multiple sales with your email list.

5. Information Products

When you have an internet business, it doesn’t have to be about selling physical products. In fact, digital information products are one of the easiest and quickest ways to make money. Outside of affiliate marketing, it's probably one of my favorite ways to make money online.
There's not shortage of ways to create information products, but the most popular formats include:

Audio: a recorded teleconference, interview, a course or some other spoken word product…
Video: a recorded webinar, a how-to, an interview...
Text: an ebook, an instruction booklet of some sort, a travel guide…

In each of these categories, you can really get creative and make any type and format of content… as long as it’s engaging and useful.
No matter which way you do it, it’s passive income, money while you sleep because you put these products up for sale on your website and a customer can buy and download them any time of day or night, automatically. All you have to do is check the sales periodically to see what topics or types of products are selling best… so you can make more of those.

Putting It All Together

The trick with any online business is to make sure you’re in a profitable niche market. So be sure to keep an eye on trends, check out bestseller lists on sites like Amazon, and consider what people are discussing on social media.
One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to restrict yourself to just one of these e-commerce opportunities. Start out with one, get it going. Then add new revenue streams as you’re able. That will grow your income and ensure that you have something to fall back on should one business start going south.

July 24, 2017

Five Ways To Make All Students Into Lead Learners (Teachers)

by kingsolo4real, in

It has been established long ago that the highest form of learning is teaching. When one is put in the position to teach others, one learns the content and concepts at the highest applied level in order to successfully communicate it to others.

Screen Shot 2017-07-21 at 11.37.46 AM.png

This reality has led many educators long ago to turn as much of the instruction in their classroom over to students through student presentations, projects and more.

That being said, too many students still never have this opportunity to become Lead Learners - where they learn at the highest level by having the responsibility of teaching others. Here are five ways all educators can expand the opportunity for all students to learn at the highest level by all becoming teachers:

STUDENTS AS PROFESSIONAL PRESENTERS

Screen Shot 2017-07-24 at 3.55.39 PM.png

Again, students have been giving presentations in many cases for years in certain courses. I suppose even the early years of Show & Tell were intended to have every student present, or tell a story. Well, we need to challenge all of our students to become master story tellers and presenters. All students need to have multiple opportunities to become an expert in various research-based deeper learning activities where they get to present their findings, conclusions, applications and more all in a professional environment using professional applications and technology. Additionally, we need to teach the explicit skills required to deliver a professional presentation. Too often, we assign presentations only focus on the content instead of the delivery as well. Of if we focus on the delivery, we don’t actually teach the requisite skills. We all know Death By Powerpoint. Well, let’s teach students to avoid this. There are dozens of resources, but having students get exposed to things like Nancy Duarte and Slide:ology would be appropriate (http://www.duarte.com/book/slideology/). In addition to getting all students to be master presenters and storytellers in order to achieve the highest levels of learning, these presentation skills will be used repeatedly in job interviews and professional environments for a lifetime.

STUDENT ROLES

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Again, we have had students in various school roles for years. We have had Teacher Assistants, Cafeteria Volunteers, Attendance Monitors, Class Monitors, Drum Majors, ASB Officers and many others. But it’s time to ratchet this up a bit - or even a lot.

For example, what if one’s class or program had a Media Coordinator responsible for coordinating the video work? Or a Social Media Coordinator handling the class Facebook, Instagram and Twitter Accounts? How about a Project Coordinator responsible for calendars, roles, timelines and deliverables? One could keep going with a Design Coordinator, Social Coordinator, Web Coordinator, YouTube Channel Coordinator, Community Coordinator and many others. How about Peer Coaches? If it’s good enough for adults, why not students? It’s not about titles for title sake (although students do respond to positions). It’s about students taking greater responsibility for the strategic roles in the classrooms. It’s about allowing students to bring their expertise and experience forward for the greater good, while also enhancing their skills, resumes and portfolios.

Another former school of mine created the Student Project Coordinator as a means to expand the role of students. Students who were advanced in a given curricular area, or showed tremendous enthusiasm and skill, could apply for this position that had students in the role of facilitator of learning. Instead of Teacher’s Aide, or gloried gopher, a Student Project Coordinator lead sessions, coached small groups, organized model lessons and demonstrations, and much more.

PORTFOLIO PRESENTATIONS / DEFENSE OF LEARNING

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We need to create systems where students have to not only do regular presentations, but also practice reflective learning in regular semester or annual presentations. These not only get them to present their best work and learning, but also again teach them again and therefore continue to learn at a higher level. If it’s good enough for graduate students and doctoral candidates, it’s good enough for all students. Many classes, programs and schools have started to have their students do Final Reflective Oral Presentations - Defense of Learning - in order to capture this deeper learning experience. My former school - Minarets High School (www.minarets.us) - designed a year-end portfolio presentation students would do each year entitled the Personal Brand Equity. This culminating project not only required them to analyze and assess their learning and best work, but also do the same for them as a growing, learning and ever-improving young adult (skills focus). See some pics of these presentations here: http://bit.ly/PBEPresentationPics. Reflection, presenting and teaching will represent the highest form of learning these students can both experience and demonstrate.

STUDENTS AS EXPERTS

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All students need the opportunity to become experts - experts in various focused areas of their content studies, as well as experts in professionals areas of choice. As our educational pedagogy becomes more project-based, students will have greater opportunities for deeper learning like this. In their core and other courses, teachers and students will collaborate to design challenges and areas of inquiry where students focus deeply on specific aspects of the content and its application. PBL expects that students will have voice and choice on what they study deeply and how they will demonstrate their learning. In that spirit, many teachers are discovering the tremendous opportunity to make their students experts through choice projects such as 20 Time Projects or Genius Hour pursuits. These are in-depth and often long-term project pursuits specifically based on a student’s interest. They choose what they want to learn more about and how they will again demonstrate it. It’s the ultimate version of Student Voice and Choice. But again, it clears the adult or teacher out of the way giving the student full rights and means to become the expert, to become the teacher and to ultimately the Lead Learner in this given area. Not only does this lead to learning at the highest or deeper levels, but also relates to the skills our students are going to need in the gig economy. They will often have to create their own work. For more on 20 Time Projects/Genius Hour, please visit: http://www.20time.org/, http://www.20timeineducation.com/ and http://www.geniushour.com/.

CULMINATING OR CAPSTONE PROJECTS

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Again, educators need to explicitly design project opportunities that are culminating, capstone type projects for our students. This is not a new idea. We have had senior projects at the college and secondary level for years. However, these can take a 2.0 to them as well where students have a chance to choose areas in which to pursue for their culminating learning experience. At my last high school where I served as the site leader (www.minarets.us), we created the Senior Legacy Experience. This was our version of a senior project. Students could choose an area that they were advanced in throughout their four years (AG, Arts, Athletics, AP, Academics, Media, IT, Core Subjects, etc.) and then pursuit something that would be impact the school and community. Check out the Minarets SLE Projects here: http://bit.ly/SLEProjects Unlike the portfolio, reflective quality of the Personal Brand Equity or Defense of Learning presentations, these are more again about student choice, expertise, passion and deeper learning. These are also often opportunities for students to see their learning and work have impact beyond themselves. These could be applied well beyond the senior experience. Maybe we do them at least as we move from elementary to middle school, middle school to high school, high school to postsecondary, etc. There are many ways and reasons to design these capstone experiences. So, instead of another template, think about how we can create these for all of our students in our courses, programs and schools.

As usual, I’m not pretending that this list is complete or the best. However, I would like to challenge all of us to think of our students as teachers, experts and lifelong lead learners. They can all teach and therefore learn at highest, deepest levels.

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