Hosted

As I said, in most cases you can get a hosted blog or website for free these days. The good thing about it, besides being free, is that you don’t have to take care of updates and general maintenance work as it is done by the webhoster for you. The companies which offer hosted websites offer free tools where you can drag and drop your pages together which is especially helpful when you have never designed a website before. Most of those services also offer a bunch of adons and extensions for your website like shopping cards, contact forms and scheduling applications. The disadvantages are that you don’t have 100% freedom of what you can do with your website / blog. For example there will be a link on your site that promotes the service you are using unless you pay a monthly fee to get ad free. You won’t have your own domain but a subdomain which might look a bit unprofessional. You can link your site to your own domain name but again, this will cost a monthly fee. Most often you cannot run your own Google Ads on the website or blog which might be interesting for you as revenue stream or the webhoster will run their own ads on your site. All in all it can cost you a lot more money later on to get your hosted site ad free and linked to your own domain than hosting it on your own from the start.

Self-Hosted

A self-hosted website or blog brings you of course much more freedom but also much more work, of course. It also needs some basic skills in coding and understanding of how a server works etc. But if you are willing to invest a bit of time it can be learned quite easily as it is no rocket science either. The advantages are besides the general freedom of what you would like to display on your site and what not, ads for example, that you have absolute control about the files your are hosting, the design and all that. Basically you can say that a hosted website or blog is like a desk in a co-working space and a self-hosted website is your own office. You can paint the walls and arrange the furniture as you like.

Website

You can imagine a website as a business card on the Internet or an advertisement in the yellow pages. You design it once, publish it and then usually stick with the layout for at least one year, sometimes even more. On the website you will find all information needed for a potential customer to understand who you are, what your qualifications are, what your service is about, how much it costs, how the client can contact you etc.

So the advantage is clearly that it is a very straight forward way of giving information to potential clients, you spend some time on the creation but once published you can leave it as it is. The disadvantage is that a website most often is not very personal, as it is static. It does not create a need to come back for new content.

Blog

The word blog is a short form of the original word weblog. And the first blogs were exactly that, a log in which people wrote their experiences when they surfed the web, much like the old discoverers had their ship’s log when sailing the ocean to find new land.

So a blog is normally a daily updated web journal and hence most people expect to find new content on your blog on a regular, preferably daily basis. Starting with the disadvantage here: you need to spend a lot of time writing new and interesting content for your blog which can sometimes be hard. If you are experienced and wrote a daily journal as a kid or still today it might be easier, of course. Also keep in mind that you need to write something related to the service you are offering. You cannot / should not write about your personal experiences on your business blog. Hence finding a topic related to your service on a daily basis can be tricky but certainly not impossible.

The positive thing is that a blog is very sticky if done right. You will soon gather a growing fanbase of readers who then might convert to customers or who might recommend you to others looking for a teacher in your particular field. It also underlines your expertise of the topic you want to teach and, very important, it will help you tremendously in getting better page rank on the search engines and hence more traffic to your site.

I remember when that evening had passed I started thinking about the possibility of launching a place for educators to go to and learn more about how to become an independent online teacher/tutor. This then led to the launch of the first E-Teachers Academy which was behind a paywall at a time even before Rupert Murdoch hadn’t thought of the possibility. Well, maybe he did but at least he didn’t go public with it, so we were first

During this phase I learned a lot from my subscribers through their feedback and questions. Due to other possibilities that came along through my blogging, the E-Teachers Academy has been the poor cousin for some time, a situation, I was not at all happy with but I had no chance to prioritize it otherwise. Especially, the nagging questions what I would do with the ETAcademy, coming from various start-up founders and active online teachers as well as our relative success on twitter even when being rather silent motivated me to rethink the concept and my dedication to it. So thanks everybody for being a pain in my neck!

As life is a flowing river and behind every bend there are new opportunities, I am thrilled to announce the relaunch of the E-Teachers Academy.

The Motto

As you might have noticed, ETAcademy now has a motto.

disciplina confundenda est

If you are familiar with classic Latin literature you will notice the adaption of Cato’s famous motto “Carthago delenda est” Carthage must be destroyed. The motto of the ETAcademy hence says “Education must be disrupted”.

I want to send out my special thanks to Mair and Irene who helped brush up my rusty Latin and made sure that the new motto is correct. I’m fairly happy with what we’ve come up, girls!

The Aim

Although the ETAcademy is going to have a different structure and business model, the aim did not change. ETAcademy wants to provide anyone who is interested in sharing knowledge on the Internet, may it be through live lessons, videos, courses, books etc with the necessary background knowledge to succeed in this endeavor.

The Business Model

The new E-Teachers Academy will offer a lot of content for free, probably up to 75% or more. We will finance the ETAcademy through advertisement and sponsorship, affiliate links, paid courses, e-books and merchandise.

The Time Frame

In the coming weeks, the E-Teachers Academy will still be a construction site. Nevertheless, we are already reviewing the existing content, brushing it up and are going to start posting it in the different faculties. First webinars and other live events are planned for the beginning of September which aligns well with the new semester and gives us time to continue working on the curriculum whilst you can hopefully still enjoy your holidays.

Thank you again for all your support through the past years. The ETAcademy team and I hope that we are going to help you with building your business and to connect with fellow edupreneurs. Together, let’s disrupt education.

disciplina confundenda est

Kirsten