#Overcoming Lack of a Niche The students that have been the most fulfilling to work with are ones that trust my teaching expertise, are interested in becoming stronger independent learners, and are willing and excited to experiment with new ways of learning.

#Overcoming Lack of a Niche I don't exactly do whatever it is to make a sell. I'm super honest about my expertise, relevant experience and what I can or not do. So, I let the prospect student to be the judge: is my way of teaching, expertise and experience relevant, so I can help to achieve your needs and goals? I haven't had many issues.

#Mistake 2: Trying to Please Everyone That's all very true, though when you start your business (or even later when you depend on schools to find your students for you) you sometimes don't have a choice. I completely agree with the fact that it's better to sell ourselves as specialists. Then my difficulty is finding the students, but I guess the subject will be covered later :)

#Mistake 2: Trying to Please Everyone Right now I teach Dutch one to one. I accept all students, which means I've got a nice mix of students - beginner, advanced, those who learn languages as a hobby and those needing it in daily life, etc. I find I get by far the most enjoyment from those at higher levels (B1-B2+). We can actually have interesting conversations, they ask fascinating grammar questions (which I love getting into) and they are confident sharing interesting stuff they came across. I've never really considered this before, but I wonder if it's worth it to focus on this group - specialising in this (maybe even ask a higher rate), and say "no" to beginners, which feels really counter-intuitive.

#Core task 1 I'm thinking about what I could sell and to whom… and right now, the answer doesn't seem to be students, but teachers or languages schools. Recently a school I'm working with has told me that I had a significantly better feedback than their other teachers when it came to using digital tools in online classes. They asked me to have a meeting with the other teachers in order to show them briefly what I'm using. I'm thinking about designing a short presentation during these meetings explaining the benefits of using different tools, and then sell a group training in which I could go through an extensive tutorial and provide some ready made documents such as padlet templates, online resources, handouts ... Action plan : writing an email to the language schools I'm working with to see if they or their teachers would be ready to buy my course. See you in 7 days!