A Guide to Becoming an Online Tutor - No Fancy Equipment or Techie Skills Required
If you're looking to break into the world of tutoring, working as an online tutor may be the perfect opportunity for you. In this guide, we'll cover everything from setting up tutoring sessions and marketing your business to choosing a software platform that works for you.
What Does It Take to Become an Online Tutor?
Becoming an online tutor is much simpler than you might think. You don’t need a lot of high-tech, expensive equipment or techie skills. Aside from a computer or laptop and internet, all you need is a headset. It doesn’t need to be fancy. This one from Amazon is great to start. If your laptop camera is lousy (like mine), you can take it to the next level with an inexpensive external camera. This is the one I use. I also have a Zoom account. I started with the free account and upgraded to the lowest-tier paid account once I had more students. Many tutors use Google Meet, which is free. That’s all the equipment you need! Assuming you have a laptop or computer with internet, you can get started with a very small investment of just over $50! Wow! You’ll make that back with your first tutoring session.
Develop Your Teaching Framework and Curriculum.
After you’ve chosen your online tutoring platform (Zoom, Google Meet. or other), it’s time to develop your teaching framework and curriculum. This is where you decide how you will structure each lesson, the topics and subjects you will cover with students, and what goals or objectives you have for their learning. It is important to clearly outline the areas in which you are comfortable teaching so that potential students can easily identify if they would like to book a session with you. Remember, the more you niche your service, the better you can position yourself as an expert in that niche. You’ll also save lots of time planning lessons when you only have to plan for one subject and grade level.
Find Clients and Promote Your Services.
Now for the scary part, finding students! As a teacher, could you ever imagine yourself thinking, “I need to find more students”? Probably not! You’re used to wishing for less students when you’re teaching a class of 30 or 40 kids. Tutoring is the opposite. You’re looking to attract students, but not just any student, the perfect students! This is why establishing what you want to teach and who you want to teach before you start looking for students is really important. If you have your perfect student in mind, that’s who you’ll attract through your advertising and networking. Where will you find these perfect students?
Here are three suggestions for where to advertise your services to your perfect students:
- Facebook groups: This is not the same as paid Facebook ads (I do not recommend paid ads for beginner tutors and I don’t use them myself). You can advertise and network in your local parenting, school, homeschool, and community groups and find your perfect students there.
- Network: Talk to other service providers who serve your perfect students: piano teachers, art teachers, coaches, other tutors, etc. Yes, I did say other tutors. Tutoring is not a competitive sport. We are much more successful when we work together. Maybe another tutor will be fully booked and can refer you to any students they can’t take on. Not all tutors teach the same subject, which means that you could work with a tutor who teaches a different subject and refer students to each other.
- Create Content: Offer something of value to your perfect students and get it out there on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, your website, and any place your perfect students may find your amazing content. This does take some work and commitment and you won’t get students right away from content creation. However, if you are diligent, over time you will start to get a nice stream of students from your efforts. For example, check out @mattgreen.jgm who is a really cool science tutor who raps about science on TikTok.
It can be really tough to start any side hustle while you’re teaching in the classroom because teaching can take a lot of your time and energy. There’s not that much left to give at the end of the day. I want to make this easy for you. I want to take the learning curve and guesswork out of it. That’s why I wrote Tutoring Dreams: Three Steps to Starting Your Tutoring Business. It’s everything that I learned in my first year of tutoring. I want you to have these 3 steps in one easy guide so you don’t have to spend a year learning them. You can just start tutoring and making money. Best of all, it’s free. You can get a copy by clicking here.
If you are thinking of tutoring, and want to give online tutoring a try, I’m here to help! Check my YouTube channel for more tutoring tips!
