Nursing school is hard! On your journey, you may run across (or have already run across) situations that intentionally or unintentionally make it even harder.

It breaks my heart to hear the stories students have shared with us over the years. All of these were just shared within the last month 🙁

I was accused of cheating multiple times by professors.

I had a few great teachers, but the students were not that great and some of the teachers were downright mean.

My program is going through a lot of changes, turn around on teachers, and honestly just a lot of politics and drama

All the students in my nursing class all feel lost and confused, and the teacher told us she was not a teacher

At NURSING.com we want to spread a community of support, the Nursing Family. If you have ever watched a NURSING.com video on YouTube, downloaded one of our cheatsheets, used our products, taken our practice questions, or had a chat with us, you’ll notice that we instill messages of hope and encouragement.

We strongly believe that the saying “nurses eat their young” needs to become a way of the past.

However, unnecessary stress and pressure are still placed on students today.

But guess what, today we KNOW that is not the best way to learn.

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, we know that the BEST way to learn is in a state of flow where a student can approach a new challenge with the tools required to be successful, not a state of panic where you don’t have the tools to meet a challenge.

We want to spread hope for Nursing students. Nursing school is hard, but we want to help take students from that scary place of feeling anxious and discouraged to a place of motivation and passion.

We want to spread this message far and wide! We are all part of the Nursing Family and can help lift each other up!

Over the years, the creativity that we have seen from our Nursing Family has just blown me away. The amazing talents that you bring to the table could help so many people. And many users have reached out wanting to share more! So, for those of you wanting to spread the message of the Nursing Family, here are just a few ways that you can do so.

Create Custom NURSING.com Study Plans

About 50% of students using NURSING.com have used it exclusively and abandoned their textbooks. However, although teachers often give assigned readings to help you zone in on what to study, you do have to find the right lessons yourself in NURSING.com.

Students often use their syllabus to create Study Plans in our system to keep track of what they will need to study for the different upcoming quizzes and tests. Creating study plans does take time, and students do commonly reach out asking for our help. Unfortunately, we aren’t able to provide that one-on-one personal touch for every student out there.

But maybe you could help. If you have been using the system for a while, you may already be comfortable with creating study plans and could offer that expertise to others. You could create custom-built NURSING.com Study Plans based on a student’s syllabus and charge for each Study Plan made.

Our study plans are easy to share and students can import them directly into their accounts.

Another way to approach the Study Plans would be to find groups of students that would pay for a Study Plan for their entire cohort for each of their different courses and sections of their syllabus. You could also create custom NURSING.com study tips that you could send along with each of the Study Plans that you create.

Tutor Using NURSING.com

We have built NURSING.com to be a platform that can be utilized in many different ways depending on specific needs. Students struggling with the NCLEX come to us time and time again on their 2nd, 4th, 5th or 10th attempt at the NCLEX, but finally passing using NURSING.com. Students that are barely passing or actually failing are able to significantly raise their grades and save time while doing it.

However, some students really need the guidance of an experienced nurse, the one-on-one touch, and the accountability that a tutor can provide.

If you struggled but overcame and are looking to give back to other students, NURSING.com is the perfect complement to a tutoring program.

You can guide students through a day-to-day study guide utilizing NURSING.com lessons, a question bank, SIMCLEX, and more. You can help them evaluate their progress in the system and guide them on how to improve areas they are struggling in.

Create a NURSING.com Swag Shop

Before you start I want to help address one thing that may seem daunting when you are first getting started. As you are looking through the setup processes for different shops like Amazon, Etsy, etc, you may wonder whether you should set up a business or just sell as an individual.

For all of the Swag shops mentioned below, it is not a requirement to create a business. What I would suggest is to set up your shop first. Take some time to test your products and marketing. If you start to make money, that is when you want to set up your business. Here is a great article that walks you through the decision and steps to set up a business: Do I need a Business License to Sell Online.

Another example of a problem to tackle later would be setting up a brand. Initially, you will probably want to test your business idea first and set up a brand later, once you have proved your concept.

Ok, now that we have that out of the way. . . let’s walk through several different options for your NURSING.com Swag Shop.

Etsy NURSING.com Swag Shop

About a year ago, a student sent over a special thank you to the team here at NURSING.com. The gift absolutely blew me away. She had created hand-made keychains for us with the NURSING.com logo. Look at these!

We all just fell in love with the key chains she made – so creative and so sweet. If you have a skill that you want to share as well, you could create your own NURSING.com swag Etsy shop. You could make NURSING.com kleenex holders, face masks, custom embroidery, badge clips, anything.

I don’t think I have a creative bone in my body, so I really can’t help too much with the question “what should I sell” but let me go ahead and walk you through setting up your Etsy Shop!

***I will add one caveat here. Etsy is a unique marketplace that is specific to the following: “handmade items, vintage goods, and craft supplies” so if you are looking to sell something other than those listed above, you may want to consider either an Amazon listing or Shopify store (more info below).

If you decide that Etsy is right for you, here is a quick overview of the main steps as well as 4 Pro Tips to help you achieve Success.

Setting up an Etsy shop has five main steps. I have attached links for each step with detailed instructions from the Etsy Help Center to guide you through the process:

And, here are those 4 Tips mentioned above, to help you get the most out of your Etsy Shop:

Tip 1 – Don’t spend too much time creating products

If you are attracted to Etsy you might be a natural-born creator. However, when you first get started don’t spend too much time creating products. You want to make sure your ideas will sell before making too much product. So instead of taking a month to create 100 bags, come up with 3-5 different products and make a prototype of each one.

Tip 2 – Spend a lot of time on product listings

You may have the BEST product available, but if no one sees it, it will never sell. Take the time to really build a great product listing that will rank – rank is how well your listing compares to other similar products. Listings that rank higher will be shown to more customers and have more reach when selling your product.

Printful has a great post to help you optimize your Etsy Product Listings. It is called Etsy SEO: 5 Must-Do Steps to Help You Get Found on Etsy. I would recommend going through each step and focusing most of your time here.

Tip 3 – Focus on your best selling products

Once you have great products and great product listings, you’ll want to really focus additional time and effort on the products that are doing the best.

If you have one particular product that is doing much better than the rest, figure out ways to improve on this product. Can you cut costs when making this product, increase the variation of the product, add more color options, etc?

Tip 4 – Create a marketing plan

There are two critical things to consider with your Marketing Plan

Marketing via the Etsy Platform
Owning your audience.

Etsy has an entire article on Marketing via Etsy. Utilize all their resources and implement their suggestions to improve your listings. Continue to work on these and improve them over time.

However, it is also very important to own your own audience when possible. Instead of just relying on Etsy to bring you traffic, consider what other places you might be able to reach your audience. For example, if you decide you want to sell NURSING.com badge clips you may decide to create content about nursing school supplies. Share that content in a format that feels natural to you, social media platforms, blog, YouTube, etc.

Focus on one main platform, know your audience, and provide value. The next step is to drive those people to a website and build out your email list. An email list is an “owned channel”, which means you can reach out and contact your audience whenever you want.

If this is new for you, then I would highly recommend Pat Flynn as a great resource in this area. This video interview has so much great insight into how to do this: How to Build and Monetize Your Online Audience. However, don’t stop at this one video. Pat Flynn provides so many great resources to help you build Smart Passive Income – which is the name of his blog.

Well . . . there you have it: 4 tips to be successful and links to all the tools you need to set up your shop. Now you just need to decide what you want to sell. That is the fun part! Best of luck on your Etsy shop journey.

And finally, please share your creations with us as well at contact@nursing.com!!

We would love to see what you come up with.

Amazon NURSING.com Swag Shop

NURSING.com members often reach out asking for Happy Nursing or NURSING.com shirts or other swag. We love that students want to share the Nursing Family with others! If you have great swag ideas that your fellow nurses would love, you can use our company logos/images to create your own NURSING.com Swag Shop. There are a number of companies out there that will create custom products that you can list and sell on Amazon.

There are truly unlimited options for creating NURSING.com swag. Here are just a couple of examples of things we have made for our office!

Setting up an Amazon account can seem a bit intimidating. I recommend just taking it one step at a time. Below I have summarized the 3 keys steps as well as provided links to amazing videos to guide you through the process.

Step One – Create an Amazon Seller account

To create an Amazon Seller account you will start by creating a regular Amazon account, however, if you already have one you can just use that. As soon as you click to “Sign Up” it will ask you to log in first.

You will have two options for your account type. You can select either an individual or a professional account. I would recommend starting with the individual account. It will save money unless/until you have more than 40 different products that you are selling. Here is a comparison chart for the individual vs professional account.

To get started you will start here. For step by step instructions for each step of the sign up process Jungle Scout has a great video here.

Once you have completed this first step, the next step is to create a product listing.

Step Two – Create a Product Listing

To do this second step well, this is where you will want to spend most of your time. I am going to break this second step up into a few key questions.

Should I build a brand or sell individual products? For the purposes of creating a NURSING.com Swag Shop, you will want to just sell individual products. For an in-depth explanation of each option watch here.
What is the product ID, and where can I get one? For the product ID you will want to use an actual UPC Barcode, specifically a GTIN Barcode. You can purchase these through GS1. This may seem a bit intimidating at first, but it is a necessary step, and once you get past here you can really focus where it matters.
What should I put as Manufacturer and Manufacturer part number? You can use anything you want here and can make up the part number.

There is a great video here by Jungle Scout here to walk you through step 2, including getting your Barcodes.

The last piece of Creating your Products is by far the most important. The most important thing you can do when setting up your product is to focus on the key areas that will impact your rank (where you show up when users search for different words). There are 6 different ways that you can impact your rank in Amazon.

Product title
Description
Images
Keywords
Reviews
Price

Check out this article for tips on getting the most out of the 6 areas of focus above. You may have the best product, but if your title doesn’t match what users are searching for, or if you only have one poor quality image you are unlikely to sell a lot of your product. Spend the most of your time here and continuously work to improve.

Step 3 – Shipping your product

The first step here is to decide if you will use FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) or FBM (fulfilled by merchant). To have Amazon ship and store all of your inventory you will pay additional fees. However, it can be incredibly helpful if you don’t have the space for storage, or if you don’t have a schedule that allows for the demands of shipping every product to your customers.

Here is a video that walks you through the differences, so that you can decide what will be the best option for you.

If you decide that you want to have Amazon Fulfill your orders, this video walks you through the process of shipping your inventory to Amazon.

It is critical to spend time optimizing your listings to rank well on Amazon, but just as with Etsy, it is also important to build your audience through different channels as well. There is no exact answer as to which other channels might be great for you. However, you want to be authentic so find a place where you are comfortable that your audience frequents.

Join the NURSING.com Affiliate Program

At NURSING.com we have an affiliate program, and as an affiliate, if you recommend NURSING.com and a student creates an account you will get a % of that sale.

If you already have a following (Instagram, TikTok, blog, YouTube, etc) on nursing-related topics you can share NURSING.com which will give them a great resource to help them survive nursing school.

Students that use NURSING.com report saving 4.5 hours per week of study time and increasing their grade by an average of 12 points. Students can learn using a variety of different learning styles, and focus on the most important content so that they can study more efficiently.

The best part is that we will walk you through the process!

This year we will be paying out $200,000 to our affiliates and next year plan to 4x that. We are dedicated to helping our affiliates be successful as well as our nursing students.

Our average nurse affiliates make $150/month with NURSING.com.

So . . . if you don’t already have a following, let me direct you to a couple of great resources.

Blog – if you are interested in creating a blog, the Nerdy Nurse is a great resource to help you on your way. I highly recommend this post – Start a Nursing Blog in 3 Easy Steps.
YouTube – if you would like to start on YouTube, Hootsuite has a great post – How to Create a YouTube Channel to Grow Your Brand and Make Money.
Social Media – before starting on social media, this article will help with some overall general tips as well as choosing which platform to pursue – How to Build a Social Media Following: 9 Effective Strategies.

However. . . if you already have a following you can apply to our affiliate program here. It is very easy to sign up, and we will provide you with all the resources and info that you need.

Here is a list of our top visited lesson pages. Many of our affiliates will drive traffic directly to these pages with their tracking link when they recommend NURSING.com

Most visited Lesson Pages

To keep up to date with our most popular Lessons over time you can see those here!

So, reach out if you are interested in trying out any of these paths. Just send us a chat or shoot us an email at contact@nursing.com. And we would love to hear your ideas.

. . . so now you can start your journey to making money on NURSING.com. We wish you the best of luck on your journey.

Happy Nursing!

The post Making Money With NURSING.com appeared first on NURSING.com.

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