Teachers make a lot of things that get used once and then quietly disappear into a Google Drive folder. A reading comprehension exercise for Tuesday’s class, a revision pack assembled before exams, a worksheet that took three versions before students stopped getting confused by the instructions.
Some of those materials may be useful to other teachers too.
That’s the fairly simple idea behind selling lesson plans and curriculum resources online. Rather than taking on another tutoring student or adding more teaching hours to the week, you create a resource that another educator can buy, download and use in their own classroom.
We think this side hustle makes the most sense for people who already teach. Not because outsiders can’t make educational resources, but because teachers have something rather useful that is difficult to fake: they know what happens when a worksheet meets an actual classroom.
What Can You Sell?
Almost anything a teacher would otherwise have to prepare themselves can potentially become a product, provided it’s your original work and you have the rights to sell it.
That might be a single worksheet or classroom activity, but we’d be more interested in resources that save a meaningful amount of preparation time. Revision packs, assessment materials, reading activities, project guides, presentation slides and complete lesson sequences are all possibilities. At the larger end, sellers may put together entire units containing several weeks of lessons, exercises and assessments.
A good way to think about it is to forget about “digital products” for a moment and ask what you’d happily pay another teacher a few dollars for at 10 p.m. when tomorrow’s lesson still isn’t ready.
That’s probably closer to what people actually want.
Start With What You’ve Already Learned in the Classroom
An experienced teacher doesn’t need to sit down and brainstorm 50 product ideas from scratch. The classroom has probably already supplied them.
Maybe there’s a fractions activity you’ve been tweaking for years because the textbook explanation never quite lands. Perhaps you have a revision pack that colleagues regularly ask you to send them, or an activity you keep using because even the usually disengaged students get involved.
Those are the materials we’d look at first.
The fact that something worked well for your own students doesn’t guarantee people will buy it, of course, but it’s a much better starting point than choosing a topic because a marketplace search suggests it is popular.
It also gives you something increasingly valuable in a crowded educational-resource market: a reason for the material to exist.
There Are Already a Lot of Worksheets Online
This is the less attractive side of the business.
Teachers looking for resources aren’t exactly short of options. There are free worksheets, publisher resources, education websites, marketplace sellers and now an endless supply of AI-generated exercises. Another generic set of multiplication questions isn’t going to be particularly difficult for somebody else to reproduce.
We’d look for the annoying, specific classroom problems instead.
A broad resource called “Fractions Worksheets” has to compete with almost everything. A resource designed for students who understand basic fractions but keep struggling with equivalent fractions has a much clearer job to do.
The same applies outside traditional academic subjects. A substitute-teacher pack that can genuinely be picked up and taught with minimal preparation may be more useful than a beautifully designed activity that takes 20 minutes to understand before the lesson even begins.
Teachers aren’t necessarily looking for more content. They’re looking for something that makes tomorrow easier.
You Need to Check Whether the Material Is Actually Yours
This is the boring part, but it’s an important one.
If you created materials while employed by a school, don’t automatically assume you can package them up and sell them. Your employment agreement or school policies may say something about intellectual property created as part of your job.
The same goes for things you’ve included inside the resource. A worksheet may be your own work while still containing an illustration, photograph, extract or font that you don’t have permission to redistribute commercially.
We’d check this before uploading existing classroom folders wholesale.
In practice, many resources will probably need some cleaning up anyway. References to your particular school can be removed, instructions can be rewritten for teachers who weren’t there when you created the activity, and any third-party material can be replaced where necessary.
We’d Rather Sell Something Useful Than Something Pretty
There is a certain look that online teaching resources tend to acquire: decorative borders, colourful headings, cute fonts and an impressive quantity of clip art.
Some buyers clearly like that. We wouldn’t make it the priority.
If we’re printing 35 pages for tomorrow’s lesson, we’re probably more interested in whether the instructions make sense, the answer key is complete and the pages aren’t going to empty the colour cartridge.
Presentation still matters, particularly when someone is deciding whether to buy. A teacher should be able to see what’s included and understand how the resource works before paying for it. But “professionally presented” doesn’t have to mean heavily decorated.
A clean worksheet that has clearly been written by somebody who understands the subject can be a much better product.
Small Products Are Fine, but Bundles Are Where Things Get More Interesting
Selling a $2 or $3 resource is an easy way to start, but you’ll need quite a few individual sales before it becomes meaningful income.
Larger packs can make more sense once you know what people want.
Suppose you sell an individual activity on persuasive writing and it does reasonably well. Over time, you might create related exercises, a marking guide and a short lesson sequence. Those can eventually be packaged together as a larger persuasive-writing unit.
We like that approach more than spending three months building a massive curriculum bundle before you’ve made your first sale.
Let the smaller products tell you what deserves expanding.
It also means the catalogue grows naturally. After a couple of years, you may have dozens of related resources without ever having sat down and decided that you need to produce 100 products.
Marketplaces Are Probably the Easiest Place to Test the Idea
The main advantage of an established education marketplace is that teachers are already there looking for something.
That saves you from one of the hardest parts of starting any online business: finding the first customer.
You’ll give up some control and pay marketplace fees, and there will usually be plenty of competition. Still, we’d rather test a handful of resources somewhere teachers already shop than spend months designing an independent store before knowing whether anyone wants the material.
Titles matter here more than clever branding. If someone needs a Year 5 reading comprehension activity, they are likely to search for something fairly literal. A poetic product name isn’t much help if nobody can work out what it contains.
Descriptions should be equally practical. Tell teachers what they’re getting, which students it’s intended for, roughly how it can be used and what files are included.
You’re selling to busy people. Make the decision easy.
An Independent Store Can Come Later
If the resources begin selling regularly, your own website becomes more interesting.
You can organise products however you want, build an email list and have more control over how the business develops. It also becomes easier to publish useful free material alongside the shop, which can bring teachers to the site through search or recommendations.
The downside is that nobody automatically turns up.
A marketplace brings its own audience. A standalone website starts with zero visitors unless you already have an audience somewhere else.
For that reason, we wouldn’t make “build an ecommerce website” the first item on the to-do list. We’d rather have ten products that people are already buying than a beautiful website containing 60 resources nobody has seen.
AI Has Made Generic Teaching Resources Much Less Interesting
A teacher who needs ten discussion questions about a chapter can generate them almost instantly now. Basic vocabulary exercises, writing prompts and simple quizzes are similarly easy to produce.
That doesn’t mean teachers will stop buying resources. It does mean we’d be reluctant to build a business around material that can be recreated in 30 seconds.
What AI doesn’t have is your classroom experience. It doesn’t know that the first version of an activity took twice as long as expected, so you shortened it. It doesn’t know that students kept misreading question four until you changed the wording, or that the supposedly “easy” extension activity was actually harder than the main exercise.
Those little adjustments are what make a resource feel as though somebody has actually taught with it.
We’d lean into that rather than trying to compete on how many worksheets you can produce.
The Business Can Be Surprisingly Quiet
For a teacher who wants additional income but doesn’t want additional teaching hours, this is one of the nicer features of the model.
You don’t need to schedule another student for Wednesday evening. Someone can buy your resource while you’re having dinner and download it without speaking to you.
There will still be customer questions occasionally, and products need updating when curricula or standards change, but there isn’t a direct relationship between the number of hours you work and the number of copies you can sell.
That doesn’t make it passive income. Creating a good teaching pack can take a substantial amount of time, especially when you’re writing instructions, preparing answer keys and checking everything properly.
The difference is that you don’t have to do that work again for every customer.
Don’t Underprice Everything Because It’s a PDF
Digital products are sometimes priced strangely because sellers focus on the fact that each additional copy costs almost nothing to deliver. But the buyer isn’t paying for the PDF file itself. They’re paying because you’ve potentially saved them an hour of planning on Sunday evening.
At the same time, teachers often buy classroom resources with their own money, so there is obviously a limit to what the market will tolerate. We’d look at comparable products while taking the amount of material and preparation saved into account.
A one-page worksheet and a four-week teaching unit shouldn’t be priced as though they’re basically the same thing.
Once you have several related resources, bundles can also give buyers better value without forcing you to discount every individual product.
Who We’d Consider This Side Hustle For
Teachers are the obvious fit, including former teachers who still have strong subject knowledge. Tutors and people who have worked professionally in curriculum development may have useful material as well.
We’d be particularly interested if colleagues already ask you for your resources. That’s not proof that strangers will pay for them, but it is at least evidence that somebody other than you finds the material useful.
A clear specialism helps too. If you have spent ten years teaching secondary chemistry, we’d rather see you build an excellent collection of chemistry resources than suddenly start producing kindergarten alphabet worksheets because they appear popular online.
Your experience is part of what you’re selling. Use it.