How a fiction writer and blogger built a full-time business teaching SEO
In this case study you’ll learn how Teachable allows you to:
- Turn the content you sell online into beautiful, professional online courses
- Create a reliable income source that allows you to travel and work from anywhere
- Expand your opportunities to reach more clients worldwide
From Freelance Legal Writer to Full-Time Online Business Owner
Yuwanda Black started working as a freelance legal publisher in New York in 1993. She worked on copyediting, proofreading, and more. As she grew more successful, other aspiring freelancers began asking for her expertise and advice—so much so that she started putting together ebooks compiling the knowledge she was sharing over and over again.
Although her online offerings originally started as simple PDFs, when Yuwanda found Teachable, she transitioned the information she was already selling as PDFs into online courses.
Today, Yuwanda makes a full-time income online, combining the money she makes through her SEO copywriting courses on Teachable with working on select SEO writing projects for clients one-on-one. And, since her business is entirely online, she works from wherever in the world she wants. As she says, “I can work anywhere, as long as I have an internet connection.”
Selling Information Seamlessly
Before finding Teachable, Yuwanda’s system of selling ebooks online was very manual, and had three major problems. First, she wasn’t using an automated system, which meant that when someone bought one of her products online, they had to wait for her to actually send them the product. For someone who loved to travel, this was a problem—Yuwanda was often in different time zones than her clients, meaning they had to wait to access the information they purchased.
Second, Yuwanda built her website herself, and it wasn’t mobile-friendly. As an entrepreneur in the 2010s, it was clear to her that it was incredibly important to make her site easy for clients to access—and buy from—on mobile. Lastly, her clients were asking her for more in-depth, hands-on instruction than what she could offer through ebooks alone.
When Yuwanda found Teachable, she was able to solve all of these problems and more. Teachable’s automated system allowed her to sell her products, allowed potential customers to find and purchase them, and allowed for immediate access to the information she was selling. Yuwanda also loved that Teachable handled all the tech stuff—including making sure her site was mobile responsive—for her. Lastly, moving into an online course format allowed her to create high-quality, in-depth content that her audience perceived as a more premium product than ebooks because the courses guided them to outcomes more effectively than PDFs. And, in her words, Teachable “just looks prettier!”
How Yuwanda’s Life Has Changed
Today, Yuwanda’s SEO copywriting courses make up a big portion of her online income. For the last decade she’s made a steady stream of revenue off her main course—“SEO Copywriting Training. She earns the rest of her income with just the work she really wants to take on. Instead of hustling to fill out a freelance schedule, Yuwanda only takes on the SEO copywriting clients that truly interest her and help her keep her skills fresh. On the side, she’s able to write and self-publish romance novels.
What’s most important to Yuwanda is that she’s able to do all of these things from anywhere in the world. She takes advantage of her status as a mobile entrepreneur to travel much of the year—she even lived in Jamaica full time for several years.
“Teachable has allowed me to get mobile–it really opens up the world when you’re not tied to a specific place.”
Yuwanda is just and an example of what creators can accomplish on Teachable.
What you can achieve with Teachable
Increase the value of your knowledge by creating a premium online course product.
If you’re already selling information online through ebooks, PDFs, or coaching, Teachable can help you transform your knowledge into a professional-looking, high-value product with a higher potential price point.
Sell your knowledge seamlessly with Teachable’s fully-integrated payment processing.
Never worry about manually granting access to your content—simply create content on Teachable, set up a pricing plan, and the rest is entirely automated. Your students can purchase your course and get access to it while you’re sleeping (or on the beach).
Create products that can keep earning you money for years to come.
Once you create an online course product on Teachable, you can continue to earn money on that same product as long as it stays relevant—freeing up your time to create new content, seek other income streams, or travel.
Take advantage of best-in-class technology, without coding anything yourself.
You don’t have to know how to make your site mobile responsive. We’ll handle that part, plus we’ll continually keep your course site up-to-date with the best technology available.
Work from anywhere in the world.
Reach clients worldwide from wherever you like, and trust that the technology is working well, even if you’re in a different time zone than your clients.