Productize to Clone Yourself and Earn beyond Hourly Pay
WHAT Productize is and WHY You Should Start Productizing Yourself
When I was a HS inclusion SPED teacher, I felt the need to clone myself. I needed to support a lot of students in different classrooms but there is only one of me. Now, there is a way to clone myself and earn beyond hourly or per-project pay. That way is called “productize.”
What is Productize?
We usually earn money by selling either our time (employment) or products. Productize mixes both where you take a specific skill or knowledge, then you package it into a marketable product that can be bought again and again. I asked my free virtual assistant, ChatGPT, to “Give me a chart where different types of teachers can productize specific skills, knowledge and expertise. Make columns with teacher type, expertise, productized offer.” Below is what it produced where I boxed the productized offer in red so you’ll easily see them:
Can you see how you can productize your expertise? All you need to do is to:
select one of your expertise - if you don’t know, think about what your work colleagues ask you always like editing their lesson plans, creating slides, etc.
create a product from your expertise: workbook, lesson plans, online courses, guidebooks, etc.
put it in a selling platform where you can sell it, preferably without any fees like Teachers Pay Teachers, Etsy, Gumroad, Amazon KDP etc.
Productize to free yourself from per-hour limits
If you are employed, you are paid per hour. Even though you increase your per-hour-pay, it still be limited by the number of human hours you can offer. When you productize yourself, you are not bound by time. Here are other benefits of productizing yourself:
Scalability - you can reach more people without physically being with them. Your books, online courses, guidebooks, etc. will reach more students instead of you going to their classes or homes. Basically, you are “cloning” your expertise through your productized items.
Efficiency - productized services usually use templates and systemized workflows. For example, if you teach reading for non-readers, you would have created general steps that others can follow.
Potential for Increased Revenue - because you are not limited by time, your productized offer can be bought again and again by people anytime.
Streamlined Client Interaction - productized services bring clarity on deliverables and limit client interaction to what you selected to offer. Sometimes, if you are a consultant, boundaries might easily be overlooked.
Next, I will tell you how you can easily start productizing your services.