Earning Some Quick Cash as a Student.
A first year student in need of some quick cash, I decided, a week before my last exam of the season, that I would sell my revision notes.
This decision was one that I had been contemplating for a while. I’ve always had a knack for taking large amounts of course content and compressing it into a more readable format. For years my lower school friends and teachers would tell me that I should be “charging for these notes”, so this time I decided to see whether this was actually possible.
The Audience
Fortunately, my course had a curated list of the people on it in the form of a Facebook group, which was extremely useful as my target audience was already clearly established. This also had benefits over using a targeted email to the school mailing list as I could guarantee the message would be seen, visually establishing how many of my peers had viewed the message.
Now that I knew how I was going to approach the situation, I had to determine how I could post a message into a group of people who freely provide help and support to each other stating that I wanted to sell them a set of notes. This was nerve-racking. I didn’t want to come across as rude or arrogant, I just wanted to let my fellow course mates know that if they needed a detailed, concise set of revision notes, without the hassle of creating them themselves, that the offer was on the table. So I planned the message.
The Approach
I had to be friendly. This was key to my approach because, in reality, I was providing them with a service, so I had to provide excellent customer support right off the bat.
I had to be persuasive. Buying revision notes is something that most students will have done before, just not in this way. Normally students would order a generic, published revision guide for their specific subject area and adapt it to suit their needs. What I was offering was a tailored set of notes, specific to the exam they were due to sit in a week’s time. Of course, I also lightly reminded the group that the exam was only a week away.
I had to be clear. The time then came, where I had to drop the bombshell. I would be asking for actual money in return for the notes. I decided that I would ask £1.99 for the full set of notes, as this was the price I personally would have felt comfortable paying had someone offered me a similar deal. Given that there was a maximum potential audience of around 100 students, I felt that this price would yield a healthy return and was also extremely reasonable given I had researched a lot of the content of the notes before hand. However, when writing the message, I almost lowered the accepted price from £1.99 to £0.99, as I worried that my course mates would be outraged by such a suggestion. When I consulted my girlfriend she suggested that I stick with the £1.99 price tag, as anything less might have suggested that the notes weren’t worth anything at all. This was a sound piece of advice and I decided to stick.
The Message
I read through my draft a couple of times and then clicked send. My heart began beating at an increasing rate as I saw the number of read receipts climbing. I was nervous. What would they think of me?
As I was beginning to regret what I had just done, I had a reply. Someone was interested.
As more people started showing their interest, things started looking up and I was beginning to feel confident again. Then it happened. One of the group members shared a link to some free notes they had been making. I felt like a fraud.
I clicked on the link to find a list of definitions relevant to the course, but that was about it. They were informative and concise, but it wasn’t exactly what I was offering. I was offering definitions, descriptions, summaries, examples and diagrams all summarised in one 15 page document. I wondered whether or not to write a message to the group trying to explain myself, but this would have made things look undoubtably worse, so I decided to let the offer stand.
Shortly after this I received my first payment.
The Payment
Initially, I wasn’t entirely sure how I could accept small transactions in a secure, traceable way. The method of payment would also have to provide me with a notification of any successful payments, allowing me to respond to the payment with a set of notes. I thought about the problem for a short while and then I remembered something I had seen on Product Hunt a little while back.
PayPal.me is a service that allows you to “Share your personal link with anyone so they can send money to your PayPal account in seconds”. This was perfect. When a payment is made through PayPal you are notified right away via email, and the important thing is that the buyers email address is provided to you.
So I created a PayPal.me username (paypal.me/username) and that was it. I could now start accepting payments from anyone at my very own address. I also learned that if you append a number value to the end of your PayPal.me address you can autofill the send money field on the PayPal.me form, for example paypal.me/username/1.99.
The Notes
When I received a payment I would respond immediately with a full set of the notes and a short, friendly email thanking the buyer — the process was very similar to selling any other goods online.
To ensure the notes were successfully delivered to the inbox of the recipient, I would follow up the email with a short Facebook message. In the Facebook message I simply stated that the notes were on the way to their inbox and that they should keep a look out. Most of the emails were delivered without any issues, however I did have one or two reports of the email going straight to spam due to the size of the attachment. With this in mind I also informed the later group of buyers of this via messenger.
The Result
I learned a lot from this experience and it is an idea that I will certainly be returning to in the future. The motivation provided by selling your notes encourages you to further understand your work so that, if someone has a query, you are able to answer it to the best of your knowledge.
It also provided me with a great opportunity to market something that needed to be approached in a slightly alternate way to the traditional marketing approaches.
I’d recommend that any student with the ability to make legible notes tries this method. If no one buys your notes, what does it matter? You still have what is required to go into your exam.
I’ve been thinking about my approach to selling PDF documents / notes online and I feel that there may be an opportunity to make a pretty useful tool to allow people to sell their own notes. If you’re interested or have any questions then just tweet me twitter.com/@tjmrees.
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