If you have a gift for teaching and a stable wifi connection, online tutoring can be a very liberating lifestyle choice. You could be working on the road from hostel terraces and coffee shops; trying out a new city every month; or supporting yourself financially through the master’s degree of your dreams.

But as with all great lifestyles, getting to the sweet spot takes time, effort and strategic thinking!  

When you’re just getting started, it might seem like you won’t get enough students to make online tutoring your full-time passion. However — don’t panic! Everyone starts out worrying about this. After speaking to some Preply tutors, we have put together 11 tried and tested ways to help you expand your student pool and teach more hours.

1. Create a website or online profile

Having a website, blog, or online profile can make it easier for potential students and parents to learn about your tutoring services and contact you. This one of the best low-cost marketing strategies to get more students’ eyes on your profile. If you create useful resources for your readers, they’ll trust your expertise and want to work with you as a tutor. You can create a website or use a tutoring platform, such as Popless.com, to create a profile and list your services, availability, and qualifications. You can also use your website or online profile to share resources, such as study guides and sample problems, to help students prepare for exams and improve their grades.

2. Offer a free trial session

Consider offering a free trial session to potential students. This can help you demonstrate your teaching skills and give students a chance to see if they like working with you. You can use the trial session to assess the student's needs, identify areas where they need help, and provide personalized feedback and guidance.

3. Create a referral program

Encourage current and past students to refer their friends and classmates to your tutoring services. You can offer incentives, such as discounts or free sessions, to encourage students to spread the word about your services.

4. Make the most of social media

Students love to work with tutors who show their personality, and social media is a great way to showcase your personality! Post the link to your Popless profile on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or wherever your client base hangs out online, and let students find you.

Some tutors prefer to make separate accounts to promote their Popless profile, and use it to share information about your services, availability, and qualifications. You can also use social media to connect with potential students and parents, and to share updates, tips, and resources related to your subject areas.. It really depends on how much work you’re willing to put in to build up a new following, and how comfortable you feel with letting students have a glimpse of your personal life.

5.  Start with as much availability as possible

One of the biggest appeals of online tutoring is that you get to set your own schedule: no more 7 AM starts, no more weekend work, no night shifts. Perhaps it’s even one of the reasons you started doing this in the first place! However, at first, it’s a good idea to add as many available teaching time slots as you can. You can change your availability on the site at any time, so once you’ve got a few great reviews and an established reputation, you can switch to that dream schedule and still expect to attract new clients.

This advice might be a little unpopular, but it does work. Adding more availability — especially at peak times like evenings — will mean that more students view your profile. When more students view your profile, it is pushed near the top of Preply’s search engine. Once you’ve scored the first few positive reviews, students have a much better reason to trust your expertise, and you can be pickier with when you’d like to offer classes.

Similarly, many tutors start using Popless asking a lower hourly rate than they eventually want to earn. This can certainly help you get past the hurdle of those first student testimonials. Start low, and don’t be afraid to increase your prices once your expertise is proven!

6. Join forums and Q&A platforms

From Reddit to Quora and Craigslist to University job boards board, there are a lot of great forums related to learning where you can offer your services. Try to build up a voice in some of these communities. Such forums are perfect to tell others about your Popless profile, showcase your teaching style, and turn readers into students.

Spend a little time on these forums, and you’ll also see students recommending their tutors to other users. If your current students are in the habit of using these sites, don’t be afraid to ask them to make referrals. Word of mouth is every tutor’s best friend!

7. Link your profiles

The chances are, you’re already active in a number of online communities outside of Popless. These can be great places to advertise your teaching skills and boost your online presence.

8. Advertise your services

You can advertise your services in local newspapers, on classified websites, or on social media platforms. You can also consider posting flyers or putting up posters in public places where students and parents are likely to see them. When advertising your services, be sure to include information about your qualifications, experience, and availability, as well as any specialties or areas of expertise you have.

9. Make your profile student-centered

If you’ve followed our first tip, you’ll probably have come to this conclusion on your own, but it’s important to make your video student-centered. That means, it’s more important to talk about what you can do for a student, rather than your own achievements and career history. When looking at tutor profiles on Popless, students are not asking “what is special about this tutor?” They are asking: “what can this tutor do for me?”

Popless tutors are a diverse and interesting group of people. Many of you are highly qualified and have interesting career histories! When presenting your past, think about how you can link it to the students’ needs and wishes. Instead of saying:

• I have a 1st Class degree in History of Art from Milan University.

You might like to say:

• I can teach you about Italian art and culture in my lessons, as well as the language, because I have a 1st Class degree in History of Art from Milan University.

This applies to your description too. You’ll be amazed at what a difference this change of focus makes!

10. Share your profile as an introduction

If you’ve made a brilliant, student-centered, personality-filled video introduction, you should share it far and wide!  Upload it to Youtube or Vimeo and place the contact information of your Popless profile in the description. This is another opportunity to get noticed and maintain a steady stream of new students to your tutor page. Make sure you create an engaging title (20-40 characters) and a description (200-350 words) briefly introducing yourself and describing your professional background.

11. Network with other tutors and educators

Building relationships with other tutors and educators can help you expand your network and find new students. You can join tutoring or teaching organizations, attend professional development conferences, or volunteer as a tutor or mentor to build connections with other educators.

Popless also has a tutoring community on Discord. This is a forum where Popless users submit study questions for tutors to answer. Answer a question, and you don’t just showcase your expertise to the person who asked it. Well-explained answers regularly attract thousands of visitors searching for the expertise you offer; any one of them could become your new student!

“How I became a successful online tutor”

Those are our tips, but what do the tutors themselves say? We asked three successful tutors how exactly they promoted their tutoring services and helped dozens of students from all corners of the world achieve their goals.

Maria Mejia

“I shared the Popless link on Facebook groups because I’m on a few of them. One group has around 40000 people and it’s about learning AP Chemistry and Biology. It’s very active. So, what I do is that if I read that someone is looking for help, I send them a message, not a comment. I usually send a direct message, saying, ‘Hey, I read your post on this group and I just wanted to stop by and tell you that I’m a certified teacher and I can help you out if you want to. Let me know. Here is a link to my profile if you want to read it.’ That’s what I do. I don’t like to be too aggressive. I make sure the message is not too long. If I got a long message, I wouldn’t read it myself being on the other side. Sometimes I receive replies. The replies are from people who are really interested in learning. Usually, it’s something like ‘OK, let me check,’ ‘I’ll go see’ or ‘Thank you very much.’ Mostly, people are nice. If they stop replying, I do not follow up with them.”

Sarah Valdes

Tutor on Popless

“I don’t own a website for myself. I just post a link to my Popless profile on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp groups once in a while saying, ‘Hey, this is my new position, follow me.’ I haven’t had any bad experience doing that. People start wondering how it works, ask me for more details after I share the link with them. Then, I tell them about the platform, a little bit about the packages and so on. I try to guide them into the site, so that they could explore all the things by themselves. So far it’s been good, I’ve been receiving a lot of responses from future students.

“When I shared my Popless profile for the first time, I just wrote, ‘Hey, this is my new position, I’m here on the platform, just click on it and you will see.’ It was a super brief description. And I’ve been trying to do that again but in a more descriptive way, being more friendly.

“Also, I share a little message saying, ‘If you want to improve your grades in computer sciences, this is one of the best ways,’ and paste a link to my profile. It’s just a brief thing because I know that people on social media are like, ‘Yeah, we want things fast.’ People don’t want to read a lot and keeping it short helps.”

David Soprani

“I built my own website. It’s super easy to make quite a good looking and responsive site with Google Sites. It’s an excellent tool and it’s free, you can be up and running in just like a couple of hours. So, I basically set up my own website and I called it College Admissions, with David.

I then joined other communities and pages for coaching students through College admissions and began to publish content quite periodically. It’s very important to grow a community. I feel so grateful for this kind of new opportunity which this site is giving me. I really want students to associate me with Popless.”

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article has given you some tangible next steps to take in order to succeed as a Popless tutor. In a nutshell, it’s all about helping learners discover you through different channels, showing them exactly how you can help, and sharing your personality. It might not happen overnight, but with a little patience, you’ll be working with students from all over the world and making extra money in no time at all!