Your Popless profile and settings allow you to control when you tutor, how much you charge, and what subjects you teach. In this article, we will outline the various settings available to you and explain how you can use them to optimize your tutoring sessions. With these tools at your disposal, you'll be able to connect easily with students, schedule appointments, and deliver high-quality tutoring services. So, let's dive in and take a look at your profile and settings:
Creating your tutoring profile
Choosing your username
Lesson settings
Availability settings
Cancelation policy
Coupon settings
1. Creating your profile
Because your profile is the face of your business on Popless, it's important to spend some time polishing it to highlight your strengths and accomplishments. It is your primary marketing tool, especially for students who do not already know who you are, and it's the tool you use to set up your tutoring services and enable students to book your time.
A well-crafted tutor profile can help you stand out in a crowded market and give students the confidence to choose you as their tutor. If you're having trouble setting up your profile, bio, or summary, we are available to help edit and finesse your text. You can also look at the profiles of other tutors, for reference.
You can learn more about creating a great profile in the following article: How to build a great Popless profile.
2. Choose your username
This is the name that separates you from everyone on Popless. It will also be the basis for your unique Popless profile URL. Once you set your username, students will be able to find you by going to popless.com/{yourUsername}. It's a good idea to keep this short to make it easier to share your URL and for your students to type it in.
3. Lesson settings
With lesson settings, you are building a section of your profile that tells students what services you offer and how much you charge.
Default lessons and setting your price
By default, you’ll see four lesson: 15 min, 30 min, 60 min, and 90 min lessons. You can change the prices of each lesson as well as make the ones you don’t want to offer inactive. Once you’ve updated your prices, be sure to save the changes.
If you are not sure how much to charge, here are some guidelines:
When you set your price on Popless, you are setting a per-lesson rate, but it's best to think about your time in terms of a per-hour rate. Tutors on our platform charge anywhere from $10 an hour to $100 (or more) per hour. You need to determine what you think your time is worth and what you think your students will be willing to pay.
We highly recommend experimenting with different price points so that you can reach the right balance between your earnings on each review and the number of reviews you are receiving.
Meeting packages
Meeting packages are discounts you can offer to students who purchase a large number of tutoring sessions in advance. These discounts are intended to encourage students to commit to a larger number of sessions, which can be more cost-effective for the students and more convenient for you.
Meeting packages can be a useful way for you to attract more students and build a stable client base, while also offering a cost-effective option for students who need ongoing tutoring support.
Minimum booking notice
This setting will determine whether Popless should mark you as unavailable for session times close to the current time. If you are always around during your available hours, set this to 0-1 hours. If you prefer to have more advance notice that a session has been booked, then you should set this to a longer duration.
Your goal should be to set it to whatever it needs to be to ensure that you don't have sessions that are canceled by Popless because you didn't accept them before the scheduled start time. This is a really poor experience for the student and may cause the student to book with someone else, especially if it happens repeatedly.
4. Availability settings
You need to set your Availability if you want to tutor on Popless. It's how you let students know you’re available so they can book time with you. You can set your availability by navigating to your calendar. We have some tips below, however, we've also written a full article on effectively managing your availability in this article.
Calendar
This is where you allocate the blocks of time you will be available for tutoring each day. Here are some tips for optimizing bookings:
Try to set aside a variety of times to account for the fact that your students may come from different time zones and may have different work schedules. It is best to set a general chunk of hours you are available and then fine-tune your availability day-to-day via the Google Calendar sync feature.
Be sure that you are actually available during the listed times. Forcing a student to reschedule their session because you were unavailable during an open time slot looks unprofessional and may cause the student to cancel the session and not come back.
Calendar syncing
Calendar syncing is a core part of what makes scheduling work smoothly on Popless. Your overall availability determines the possible hours you can be booked. But if you connect your Google Calendar, then you will also be automatically marked as unavailable during any event on your calendar. For example:
Suppose you set your availability to 1:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, but you have a doctor's appointment on Friday from 2:00-3:00 p.m. If you put that appointment on your Google Calendar, then Popless will automatically remove that block of time from your availability, leaving you with open slots from 1:00-2:00 p.m. and 3:00-8:00 p.m. on that day.
Tip: Keep in mind that the calendar sync feature will only block off the exact times listed on your Google Calendar. So if it takes you 30 minutes to get ready and drive to the doctor, then you might want to have the event on your calendar start 30 minutes before your actual appointment so that you don't have a session overlapping it.
Calendar syncing works in the other direction too. It enables Popless to push all your scheduled bookings to your calendar so that you have an independent way to keep track of all your upcoming tutoring sessions, which will come in handy when you're making plans and scheduling meetings.
Setting up unavailable time
If you are going to be unavailable for tutoring for a block of time and don’t want to update your calendar in Popless, you can create a Google Calendar event to set yourself as unavailable during that time.
First, you'll need to sync your Google Calendar with Popless. Jump to the Calendar section of your Account settings, and scroll to Google Calendar. From there you can enter your Google account settings, so Popless can access the events on your Google calendar and set your tutoring availability accordingly. Once they're synced, if you've got an event on your Google Calendar, Popless won't allow students to schedule your time during that event.
It's that functionality that will enable you to set unavailable time, above and beyond your Availability settings in your profile. This is useful if you've got a vacation planned, or are planning on taking a class, or have some other upcoming short-term commitment.
To block out time:
Use your computer to open Google Calendar.
Click the Create button in the top left.
Create an event that corresponds to your unavailable time, by giving it
A title, and
A date and time (be sure to click All Day as needed).
Expand the More Options button, and make sure Busy is selected, over the description box.
Save.
Timezones
The timezone of our availability is based on where you are located. When students view your availability, it will be displayed to them in the timezone they are located.
5. Cancelation policy
This section allows you to set up your cancelation policy for tutoring. This sets a timeframe for when a student can cancel or reschedule a lesson that has already been booked with you. Your chosen cancelation policy will appear in your profile to alert your students. Or if you wish, you can choose not to enable any cancelation policy.
Cancelation policy options
The cancelation policy options available to you are:
Flexible: 24-hour window: Students can cancel or reschedule for free up to 24 hours ahead of the scheduled time.
Moderate: Three-day window: Students can cancel or reschedule for free up to 3 days ahead of the scheduled time.
Firm: Seven-day window: Students can cancel or reschedule for free up to 7 days ahead of the scheduled time.
6. Coupon codes
Use the Coupon codes section to generate discount codes to offer special pricing on your lessons. These codes offer a lot of flexibility. They can be in the form of percentages or a dollar amount (in US dollars), can be single-use or multiple-use codes, and can have a limited usage timeframe or be unlimited. Once your coupon codes are created, you can revisit and edit or deactivate (or even delete) them at any time. You can also find out how many times the code has been used.
For a student to use a coupon code, they need to have a Popless account, then go to your Popless page. (It'll be at popless.com/@YourDisplayName.) From there, they'll choose a date and time, continue to the payment phase, and be able to enter your coupon code.
As you walk through the process of creating a new code, you'll encounter the settings listed below. To learn more how coupons can be used to grow your business, review the following article: Personalize your prices with coupons.
Coupon code
This is the code itself. Coupon codes are not case sensitive and it's a good idea to keep them short. It's also useful to pick codes that correspond to who or what the coupon is for. For example, there’s value in giving people coupon codes to students with their names in it, so they know you've tailored them personally.
Discount type and value
Here you have the option to give a percentage off or a flat dollar amount, and then set the exact value. So if you want to give out a 20 percent discount, you'd select Percentage and then 20%. We strongly advise against creating a code that awards 100% discount. The codes will apply to a single purchase, so it's possible people you give a coupon code to could purchase a multiple meetings with it - this might be a higher-value prize than you had intended. If you want to give out a code for a free lesson, it's safest to generate a discount with an Amount value that's equal to the cost of that lesson.
Note: Promo code balances do not carry over. So if a student applies a $100 promo code to a $20 lesson, there won't be any remaining balance. It'll just be used up.
Usage limits
As a general rule, Popless giveaways limit uses to one per code, and we generate a new code for each winner when we award discounts or free lessons. There may be situations, though, when you want to generate a coupon code ahead of time to incorporate into your group class, or to send on Facebook. Clicking Limit no. of times this promo code can be applied, and then entering a number, will let you fine-tune how many times you are willing to give out that discount. Remember that you'll also be able to limit your discounts by time period, which is another way to keep a lid on the number of times your codes can be used.
Promotional period
Here's where you can pick the start and end dates for when your promo code is valid.
This is an easy way to set a limited-time discount with unlimited uses. For example, if you want to give all of your students a five-percent discount during the month of July, this setting allows you to do so. It's almost always a good idea to set an expiration date to your promo codes, just so you don't get hit with a surprise discount in the distant future. If you'd like your discount to be fairly open-ended, consider setting the expiration date to the end of the calendar year. If you want to motivate students to book your time soon, set a short promotional period. Your students won't have to take their lessons during the promotional period-just submit the booking request and complete the payment step.
The bottom line
Your Popless profile is comprehensive by design. It's there to help you succeed as a tutor, and the more conscientious you are about filling it out and updating it, the more effective it will be in supporting your practice. Polishing your profile may take some time, but when it's kept complete and current it will serve as an essential tool both for promoting your Popless profile and ensuring that sessions run smoothly.
