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Earn $3,500 a Month Teaching Excel

For over three years, Sumit Bansal worked as a marketing manager at IBM in New Delhi, India. His work in data analysis and client presentations required him to use a lot of Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint. Naturally, he got really good at it.

Sumit started a blog - which is now his full-time job - because he wanted to share answers to questions his colleagues were asking him about spreadsheets. When he got a positive response from those colleagues and a few friends, it gave him more confidence that his blog was useful.

Then he began to write tutorials and create videos every week. He signed up for Google Adsense, where he would get paid when website visitors clicked on ads. This wasn't an immediate gold rush: his first few months, he earned only a few dollars a month.

Traffic grew and the payouts increased, but not by much. It wasn't until a year and a half after starting the blog that he found a real way to make money: by creating online courses. Within an hour of sending the email announcing his first course, he got five sales. The course was as basic as they came: he called it "Excel Course." Yet as basic as it was, it was clear that he was on to something.

Those first few sales affirmed his faith in the blog he'd worked on all this time. He celebrated by taking friends to dinner, he bought himself a few books, and then he got back to work. That was four years ago.

Sumit now has three courses for sale: that basic Excel course (which sells for $127), an Excell Dashboard Course ($297), and a Visual Basics for Application course (also $297). The courses don't all sell every day, but more often than not. at some point during the day he'll get a notification that either $127 or $297 has arrived in his bank account.

Not only that, he often gets positive feedback on how the courses are helping people do better work. He recently read an email from one of his students who mentioned how he used the techniques shown in the course to create a dashboard. That employee received a standing ovation in a department meeting. Another student emailed him to say that the course helped her move from contract employment to a full-time job.

One of the reasons why Sumit's courses work so well is because he's intentional about what goes in them and what doesn't. Many similar training programs don't cover all the necessary topics, or they end up overwhelming the student. Sumit took a lot of time to make sure his are structured in a way where he includes the essentials without adding anything unnecessary.

From revenue of around $4,000 each month, he now makes about $3,500 in net income - a large amount of money in India. He has $700 in monthly expenses, including rent at his coworking space, some important subscriptions, and his email marketing tool.

Next, Sumit is focusing on creating two new online courses. He's also able to start a different project with a friend, using earnings from his blog to get started. Check your formulas: the spreadsheet hustle is thriving.

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