Eight ways for tutors to get more students Tutoring space now is more competitive than ever. If you don’t stand out of the crowd, you get lost in the crowd and have to rely on whatever students you can get by chance.
Though your teaching would speak for itself and you will get students automatically once popular if you are good. The question really is how to turbocharge your journey to glory. So here are a few pointers.
Ask referrals: As simple as it sounds, it can make a huge difference in your earnings. Students learning from the teacher, at present, can be marketing vehicles. Make sure one reminds them occasionally about referrals. It is free, risk-free and takes only couple of seconds, a great investment by any means.
Give incentives: Give incentives to people who refer your services. Incentives can be in form of cash rewards, free or discounted tutoring where applicable. Nothing motivates humans better than having something for free.It especially works for students who are generally trying to save money to spend on something else.
Fliers: If you are teaching locally, you can also send one page pamphlets and can get distributed manually or through newspaper distributor in your local area. It’s relatively cheap, focussed and generates awareness of your services.
Summer programmes: During summer holidays, not everybody goes on vacation. Parents are always glad if there child can learn an extra skill, whether it’s dance, Abacus or language fluency. The same is true when the schools close for winter vacations in December.
Group programmes: Arrange group classes for students so they can learn together and pay less in group than each of them would have paid for individual tuitions. This means less expense to students and more earning per hour for the tutor. It’s a win-win situation. Additionally, best feature of groups is they grow over time and can accommodate many students. There are many private tutors teaching groups of 100 students.
Collaborate and network: Collaborate with other tutors for exchanging students according to subject specialisation. Most people are glad to help if they can’t benefit from a student.
Give speech: One can go to educational institutions, whether big or small, where one can give speech to the students regarding something which will benefit them. Though, this takes time, preparation and the obvious skill to speak in front of a large audience, it can quickly expose one to many students.
Add yourself as a local business on Google: This works really well if someone is searching in your city. Search ‘google local business’ on Google for more details. One will need to do a bit of self-learning here it is more or less self-explantory.
Register with tutoring websites: People are increasingly searching online for everything including tutors. Registering with (online, not necessarily, since we are targeting offline tutors) tutoring websites and other classified websites where one can publish one’s profile and tell in detail about oneself can get a lot of students.
(The writer is Arun Verma, founder tutorindia.net, an online tutoring website based in ludhiana)