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This forum has taught me much, and I would love to give back and share some of my experience.
Why tutor?
If you are a college grad with a decent command of English, math and/or a particular subject, this is a great way to make side cash when you need it while meeting new people and building social and business skills.
This doesn't scale, but you can use tutoring to buy time while building another business, or you can become good at it and increase your rates until you can comfortably live on it while having a choice, whom and when to tutor. You do have to love learning and teaching others.
Established tutoring chains also allow you to "work your way up", from doing grunt work such as teaching zillions of test prep (e.g. SAT) classes to bored students to becoming an executive coach who is flown in on a helicopter. This is not for everyone, and at times you'd have to sacrifice true teaching and true learning for the sake of making more money, but this path does exist.
My experience
I have been doing tutoring for occasional side cash for the last 7 years. My students have come from
- wyzant.com
- EndeavorTutoring (New York Private Tutoring), a small boutique tutoring company in NYC
- craigslist
- gmatclub forums
- a smaller tutoring website I can't remember
- word of mouth
I have also gone through training at a major tutoring chain and through the interview process at Manhattan GMAT, but was not selected by either.
I have taken SAT, ACT and the GMAT and scored in the 99-th % on all three.
My target demographics were people in need of advanced math / computer science expertise. I also helped a number of people with GMAT essays, but did not charge money for that, as I found it difficult to brand with my credentials being on the math/CS side.
The main ingredients of tutoring as a business are subject expertise, finding a suitable niche, and managing relationships.
Teaching skill, unfortunately, is not in the top three, as
- most clients and parents can't really evaluate it
- teaching skill only matters in a long-term teacher-student relationship
But first let's understand, why people want to hire a tutor.
Why do people want to hire a tutor?
First, many people hire a tutor for their children, particularly if the children are in high school (or younger), or in the first couple years in college, whereas more mature college students, those in grad school and professionals tend to hire a tutor for themselves. But the reasons are similar:
- there is a homework assignment that they need help with. Some will just want the answers, and there are tutors and even legal companies that can furnish just the answers, which is, of course, unethical.
- there is a school project that they need help with
- there is an upcoming exam that they need help preparing for. Some will also be content with the tutor sending them the answers by text message during an exam and not want to actually learn the material. I have always refused such requests, but many are willing to pay for that.
- they need help preparing for an upcoming test such as SAT,ACT,LSAT,GRE,GMAT. There are also tests taken in high school, middle school, and even elementary school placement tests; I have no experience with those, but there is also a huge tutoring market within each category.
- they don't have a specific test in mind but are just uncomfortable in a course. This can be mostly psychological, in that they just need emotional support in a nurturing environment, or they can be completely behind and it may well be too late to turn things around.
- they need help with the college admissions process that goes beyond tutoring, such as with a personal essay.
- they want to enrich their knowledge in a particular area. This is more common for professionals, but I also worked with a bright high school student and another exceptionally bright middle school student who were both far ahead of everybody else in their class and just wanted to know more. This is rare, however, and most tutors are unable to provide tutoring of this kind.
Many people are looking for a "quick fix" either because they aren't willing to put in the work, or don't have money for long-term tutoring, or both. Client's budget is the most important limitation followed by your expertise and their level of comfort with you. Note that some people, particularly the more affluent ones, prefer going through an established and expensive tutoring / test prep company.
Let's now move on to the three main ingredients for being a successful freelancer or for successfully tutoring for an existing tutoring / test prep company.
Subject Matter Expertise
You need to know the subject you are tutoring to the point of fluency. Countless students complained to me that their previous tutors simply couldn't solve the problems. If you aren't fully comfortable with, say, college math, then tutoring college math is not a good gig for you. You can tutor something a little easier such as ACT prep or high school geometry, or look for other side hustles.
My scores on the standardized tests were in the 99%-th percentile in all sections of SAT, ACT, GMAT, including verbal ones. Note that I did very little actual test prep tutoring as it was not the most profitable with my background and positioning in the market, but I have met a fair number of other tutors and speak from experience: to tutor standardized tests, you should be at least in the top 95% for the section you are tutoring (or, say, 90% if you are bringing some other extraordinary value such as deep sensitivity to psychological nuances). After all, you are competing with high school kids! Same goes for other types of subject matter expertise that aren't that easily measured.
That is not to say you cannot brush up on your skills. You can and then you will get some gigs, because it is a huge and lucrative market, but those gigs won't be high-paying. You will get a $20/hour kind of gigs where you can to travel across the city for that one hour, or you'll be teaching for 3 hours on a Saturday morning for $17/hour for some test prep company and you'll have to spend another couple hours to prepare, because that company has "high standards". So bottom line, if you want to be a tutor and if you want it to be a relatively easy gig, pick a subfield that you are very fluent at, and if you aren't fluent at any academic field, this may not be for you.
Finding a suitable niche
The tutoring market is subject to the rules of supply and demand. This will affect not only the rate you are able to charge, but also the difficulty or ease of negotiations, the expectations from the students, the amount of travel you will have to do and so forth.
If you live in a rural area, you will need a car and will have to drive around. Unless, that is, you can make the students come to you, which is often not realistic. If you are in a sparsely-populated area and don't want to drive around, your best bet may be joining the closest Princeton Review or Kaplan (established tutoring companies), as then you'll be working at their training center. There are pros and cons of working for such companies. Pros include training, abundant supply of students, and opportunities to learn how to make a lot more $, but you'd have to first work hard and long to get those opportunities. Another advantage is that you may succeed with a lower subject matter expertise than you would need otherwise. Cons include lower pay in the beginning (sometimes significantly lower pay for a long period of time) and the need to adjust to the company's schedule and policies. As those companies deal with a lot of mediocre and low-paid tutors (while charing 3-10X that much from the students), they have little tolerance for misbehavior; you MUST follow their rules if you want to work for them.
Your niche will also determine the length of your typical tutoring relationships. If your target customers don't have a lot of money, they won't be able to pay for a lot of sessions. Therefore, you either need to charge very little, or you need to only engage students for short periods of time. The latter isn't good: not only is it a waste of your time to be constantly looking for new students, it also limits your personal growth as an educator, limits opportunities for word of mouth that only come from long-term students, and places additional demands on you: with a new student you always have to be at your best, while with an old one it is OK to occasionally be a little tired or not on your A-game, they will understand.
Some niches are very competitive, such as SAT prep in NYC at $50/hour. If you are aiming at that demographic and you aren't part of an established company, you need a good way of finding clients. Having a website with thoughtful blog posts can be of great help, or you can go via cultivating many relationships. You would want to following the admissions cycle and be aware of all the latest trends and developments if you want to get more than an occasional last-minute student who just couldn't find anybody else. For the competitiveness of this market, I ended up giving up this niche and focusing on material that was more difficult; however, as with every competitive niche, there is always room for yet another tutor who is willing to hustle.
Just because you can establish yourself in a niche doesn't mean you will like it. For example, one issue I've had with raising my rates close to the $150/hour is the type of clients I was getting. Those were often people with money willing to help their children advance in life, and the atmosphere was at time nervous, with children clearly being under pressure to deliver to their parents' expectations. However, the clients in the $100/hour niche were a lot more fun, including a lot of entrepreneurs learning tech on the side just because it will come useful at some point in the future. Those were some of my best clients who naturally became friends: guys who just wanted me to help them advance in life (by learning more about math or coding) and were willing to pay for it (within their means) without feeling bad. As tutoring is a personal relationship, it is better when the client feels good about paying you.
Managing relationships
As mentioned earlier, tutoring is best when you have long-term clients, and to have a long-term client you need to manage the relationship. They have to be satisfied and feel that they or their children are getting something out of it. Of course, it only works if they have the money, but after that it comes down to social skills. Some of it is not unlike being a good teacher: the students have to feel challenged, but also need the satisfaction of immediate gratification. Most of those who need help with their homework will be looking at results: have their grades improved? You can talk all day long how learning is not about better grades, but if their grades aren't improving, even if it is "good for them" in your opinion, they are going to another tutor. They are not hiring you to just teach them knowledge, unless they are from a small minority who want just that; they are hiring you first and foremost to get help with their homework, their exam, raise their score and the like. When I went through the training by a major tutoring chain, they were very explicit about it: (paraphrasing) "...some are trying to teach the students, how to think, teach them to understand math or English better. This is not what we are doing here. WE RAISE SCORES."
The logistics, issues of scheduling and travel also have to be addressed satisfactorily: if meeting with you isn't fitting into your students' schedule well, they aren't going to continue working with you. This means that it is essential to keep your schedule open, particularly if you are just learning. Ideally you should be a full-time tutor who can meet at any time (or if you can't, it is because you are busy with other students. You want to make it easy for students to book you, before they change their mind and go elsewhere. ).
When it comes to new students, you must answer new inquiries within 24 hours, ideally within 3-6 hours. These days most students will go elsewhere if they can't get in touch with you quickly enough, so if you are open to new students, either check your email often enough or set up some other notification system that works for you. You have to be clear on details such as scheduling, location, and payment — in other words, "professional".
After the session, it helps to send the student a recap of the lesson with any helpful links for future study. Some platforms such as wyzant.com have this functionality built-in; for other students, you can do it manually by email. My recommendation is to do it after every session with every student, at least for the first 1-2 years. The benefits far outweigh the effort: you will be able to charge higher rates, and this time will pay for itself. Your students will think of you more often, will feel you are overdelivering, and will be more likely to continue. You will also get a firmer grasp and fluency of the subject matter. Reviewing the notes you had sent after a previous session will help prepare for the next one.
Getting started as a tutor
Start by deciding, what subject and what demographics you want to teach. You may be comfortable with high school math or with college-level physics. If you are interested in tutoring graduate-school level Japanese, consider that there is very little demand for this kind of service — and that you won't be able to charge very much for it either. You are lucky if you get $30/hour for advanced Japanese classes, because those who want it probably don't have money (because they spend all their time in grad school studying impractical subjects — and their parents probably aren't rich either, rich parents' kids go for an MBA, not a PhD in Linguistics).
On the other hand, if you want to teach middle-school English, you may be comfortable with the subject, but are you comfortable with middle-school kids? If you don't have experience working with kids, I recommend you start from tutoring college or high school, or find another way to get experience with younger kids such as volunteering. E.g. I have spent 6 months helping a 9-year old boy learn to read, once a week, for free, and it's been a very enlightening (and rewarding) experience. Consider also that tutoring middle school is even more about psychology and relationship management with the parents. If you want to be making good money here, you have to be working with the kids of affluent parents, who will have to trust you with their child's safety and emotional well-being; it is not enough to simply have knowledge of the subject.
Regarding your rates, start on the lower side. When in doubt, err on the lower side, much lower than you want or think is practical. In the beginning you are a newbie and won't be creating that much value. You don't have reviews or testimonials to make your case either, so don't be picky: set low rates and take any work you can get, even if it involves traveling cross-town to teach 1 hour at a minimum wage. Register on a few websites such as wyzant.com — one of my favorites — and don't worry about the commission they are charging. Worry about getting experience and social proof in the form of 5-star ratings and good reviews, as those can later be shown to clients who came to you from another source or to a private tutoring company you may want to work for.
If possible, try joining a test prep chain or an established tutoring company. Despite the low pay rates, they can quickly teach you about the business of tutoring and give you plenty of practice experience including lesson plans. That does have its downsides, particularly take established cookie-cutter curriculums with a grain of salt, as those are made to raise scores and keep happy parents coming back and paying for more — but also learn from those.
The easiest kind of tutoring is help with homework or practice problems for an exam, because the student already knows what they want to work through. You don't need a plan or a vision for where they are going; just helping them work through the problems. Except for test prep — where you do need a plan — much of other tutoring is like that. This means that you can get started when you don't quite know what you are doing and learn as you go.
Offer your students a refund for the 1st hour or the 1st session. Many platforms and test prep companies do it anyway; people rarely ask for it. If somebody leaves you a low rating on an online platform and you can remove the rating by refunding the money, do so. Generally speaking, you should always refund the money if you have received a 3-star review or lower, as those hurt your reputation immeasurably. You should aim for 4.8 average or higher on any platform, and you should not have more than 1 three-star review, preferably zero. There is no upside to having poor reviews, as far as I can tell, even though in theory those can should that the reviews are "authentic".
You should also give some thought to jumpstarting your profiles by having a couple initial 5-star rating and a good testimonial. Find an acquaintance who needs tutoring, give it to them through a particular platform at a nominal cost, and have them leave you a good review. If you have an empty profile, you will be waiting for years to get your first gig (trust me, I have tried), but once you have a review or to, you chances go up considerably.
When it comes to getting students, remember, you should be prospecting all the time. Keep looking for more platforms to add your profile to, keep messaging people on craigslist, walk around the block and hang flyers. Until you get several long-term students, spend all your free time on prospecting and thinking of other creative ways to find students. If you were a B+ college student and you have basic social skills, you are already qualified to tutor high schoolers, at least for the minimum wage ($15/hour). So first focus on getting your first 5 students, then focus on 5 long-term students (5-sessions minimum), then get those numbers to 10. Always ask for 5-star reviews if working through a platform, and always ask for a testimonial after a 5-session long-term engagement, even if you keep tutoring that person. A testimonial can also be posted on Linkedin if you have not met through a particular tutoring website.
Once you get this kind of minimal experience, start raising the rates until you can't get the students any more. Try to get to at least $50/hour if you are in NYC/ San Francisco (translate the rates for other countries) or $35/hour if you are in a rural area. After you get to that point, think about improving your teaching skills, better branding, or narrowing down your niche to a higher-paying demographic. But until then, it should only be about building your skill through quantity.
---
Hope you've enjoyed reading so far, and please let me know if there's anything else you want me to touch upon.
Why tutor?
If you are a college grad with a decent command of English, math and/or a particular subject, this is a great way to make side cash when you need it while meeting new people and building social and business skills.
This doesn't scale, but you can use tutoring to buy time while building another business, or you can become good at it and increase your rates until you can comfortably live on it while having a choice, whom and when to tutor. You do have to love learning and teaching others.
Established tutoring chains also allow you to "work your way up", from doing grunt work such as teaching zillions of test prep (e.g. SAT) classes to bored students to becoming an executive coach who is flown in on a helicopter. This is not for everyone, and at times you'd have to sacrifice true teaching and true learning for the sake of making more money, but this path does exist.
My experience
I have been doing tutoring for occasional side cash for the last 7 years. My students have come from
- wyzant.com
- EndeavorTutoring (New York Private Tutoring), a small boutique tutoring company in NYC
- craigslist
- gmatclub forums
- a smaller tutoring website I can't remember
- word of mouth
I have also gone through training at a major tutoring chain and through the interview process at Manhattan GMAT, but was not selected by either.
I have taken SAT, ACT and the GMAT and scored in the 99-th % on all three.
My target demographics were people in need of advanced math / computer science expertise. I also helped a number of people with GMAT essays, but did not charge money for that, as I found it difficult to brand with my credentials being on the math/CS side.
The main ingredients of tutoring as a business are subject expertise, finding a suitable niche, and managing relationships.
Teaching skill, unfortunately, is not in the top three, as
- most clients and parents can't really evaluate it
- teaching skill only matters in a long-term teacher-student relationship
But first let's understand, why people want to hire a tutor.
Why do people want to hire a tutor?
First, many people hire a tutor for their children, particularly if the children are in high school (or younger), or in the first couple years in college, whereas more mature college students, those in grad school and professionals tend to hire a tutor for themselves. But the reasons are similar:
- there is a homework assignment that they need help with. Some will just want the answers, and there are tutors and even legal companies that can furnish just the answers, which is, of course, unethical.
- there is a school project that they need help with
- there is an upcoming exam that they need help preparing for. Some will also be content with the tutor sending them the answers by text message during an exam and not want to actually learn the material. I have always refused such requests, but many are willing to pay for that.
- they need help preparing for an upcoming test such as SAT,ACT,LSAT,GRE,GMAT. There are also tests taken in high school, middle school, and even elementary school placement tests; I have no experience with those, but there is also a huge tutoring market within each category.
- they don't have a specific test in mind but are just uncomfortable in a course. This can be mostly psychological, in that they just need emotional support in a nurturing environment, or they can be completely behind and it may well be too late to turn things around.
- they need help with the college admissions process that goes beyond tutoring, such as with a personal essay.
- they want to enrich their knowledge in a particular area. This is more common for professionals, but I also worked with a bright high school student and another exceptionally bright middle school student who were both far ahead of everybody else in their class and just wanted to know more. This is rare, however, and most tutors are unable to provide tutoring of this kind.
Many people are looking for a "quick fix" either because they aren't willing to put in the work, or don't have money for long-term tutoring, or both. Client's budget is the most important limitation followed by your expertise and their level of comfort with you. Note that some people, particularly the more affluent ones, prefer going through an established and expensive tutoring / test prep company.
Let's now move on to the three main ingredients for being a successful freelancer or for successfully tutoring for an existing tutoring / test prep company.
Subject Matter Expertise
You need to know the subject you are tutoring to the point of fluency. Countless students complained to me that their previous tutors simply couldn't solve the problems. If you aren't fully comfortable with, say, college math, then tutoring college math is not a good gig for you. You can tutor something a little easier such as ACT prep or high school geometry, or look for other side hustles.
My scores on the standardized tests were in the 99%-th percentile in all sections of SAT, ACT, GMAT, including verbal ones. Note that I did very little actual test prep tutoring as it was not the most profitable with my background and positioning in the market, but I have met a fair number of other tutors and speak from experience: to tutor standardized tests, you should be at least in the top 95% for the section you are tutoring (or, say, 90% if you are bringing some other extraordinary value such as deep sensitivity to psychological nuances). After all, you are competing with high school kids! Same goes for other types of subject matter expertise that aren't that easily measured.
That is not to say you cannot brush up on your skills. You can and then you will get some gigs, because it is a huge and lucrative market, but those gigs won't be high-paying. You will get a $20/hour kind of gigs where you can to travel across the city for that one hour, or you'll be teaching for 3 hours on a Saturday morning for $17/hour for some test prep company and you'll have to spend another couple hours to prepare, because that company has "high standards". So bottom line, if you want to be a tutor and if you want it to be a relatively easy gig, pick a subfield that you are very fluent at, and if you aren't fluent at any academic field, this may not be for you.
Finding a suitable niche
The tutoring market is subject to the rules of supply and demand. This will affect not only the rate you are able to charge, but also the difficulty or ease of negotiations, the expectations from the students, the amount of travel you will have to do and so forth.
If you live in a rural area, you will need a car and will have to drive around. Unless, that is, you can make the students come to you, which is often not realistic. If you are in a sparsely-populated area and don't want to drive around, your best bet may be joining the closest Princeton Review or Kaplan (established tutoring companies), as then you'll be working at their training center. There are pros and cons of working for such companies. Pros include training, abundant supply of students, and opportunities to learn how to make a lot more $, but you'd have to first work hard and long to get those opportunities. Another advantage is that you may succeed with a lower subject matter expertise than you would need otherwise. Cons include lower pay in the beginning (sometimes significantly lower pay for a long period of time) and the need to adjust to the company's schedule and policies. As those companies deal with a lot of mediocre and low-paid tutors (while charing 3-10X that much from the students), they have little tolerance for misbehavior; you MUST follow their rules if you want to work for them.
Your niche will also determine the length of your typical tutoring relationships. If your target customers don't have a lot of money, they won't be able to pay for a lot of sessions. Therefore, you either need to charge very little, or you need to only engage students for short periods of time. The latter isn't good: not only is it a waste of your time to be constantly looking for new students, it also limits your personal growth as an educator, limits opportunities for word of mouth that only come from long-term students, and places additional demands on you: with a new student you always have to be at your best, while with an old one it is OK to occasionally be a little tired or not on your A-game, they will understand.
Some niches are very competitive, such as SAT prep in NYC at $50/hour. If you are aiming at that demographic and you aren't part of an established company, you need a good way of finding clients. Having a website with thoughtful blog posts can be of great help, or you can go via cultivating many relationships. You would want to following the admissions cycle and be aware of all the latest trends and developments if you want to get more than an occasional last-minute student who just couldn't find anybody else. For the competitiveness of this market, I ended up giving up this niche and focusing on material that was more difficult; however, as with every competitive niche, there is always room for yet another tutor who is willing to hustle.
Just because you can establish yourself in a niche doesn't mean you will like it. For example, one issue I've had with raising my rates close to the $150/hour is the type of clients I was getting. Those were often people with money willing to help their children advance in life, and the atmosphere was at time nervous, with children clearly being under pressure to deliver to their parents' expectations. However, the clients in the $100/hour niche were a lot more fun, including a lot of entrepreneurs learning tech on the side just because it will come useful at some point in the future. Those were some of my best clients who naturally became friends: guys who just wanted me to help them advance in life (by learning more about math or coding) and were willing to pay for it (within their means) without feeling bad. As tutoring is a personal relationship, it is better when the client feels good about paying you.
Managing relationships
As mentioned earlier, tutoring is best when you have long-term clients, and to have a long-term client you need to manage the relationship. They have to be satisfied and feel that they or their children are getting something out of it. Of course, it only works if they have the money, but after that it comes down to social skills. Some of it is not unlike being a good teacher: the students have to feel challenged, but also need the satisfaction of immediate gratification. Most of those who need help with their homework will be looking at results: have their grades improved? You can talk all day long how learning is not about better grades, but if their grades aren't improving, even if it is "good for them" in your opinion, they are going to another tutor. They are not hiring you to just teach them knowledge, unless they are from a small minority who want just that; they are hiring you first and foremost to get help with their homework, their exam, raise their score and the like. When I went through the training by a major tutoring chain, they were very explicit about it: (paraphrasing) "...some are trying to teach the students, how to think, teach them to understand math or English better. This is not what we are doing here. WE RAISE SCORES."
The logistics, issues of scheduling and travel also have to be addressed satisfactorily: if meeting with you isn't fitting into your students' schedule well, they aren't going to continue working with you. This means that it is essential to keep your schedule open, particularly if you are just learning. Ideally you should be a full-time tutor who can meet at any time (or if you can't, it is because you are busy with other students. You want to make it easy for students to book you, before they change their mind and go elsewhere. ).
When it comes to new students, you must answer new inquiries within 24 hours, ideally within 3-6 hours. These days most students will go elsewhere if they can't get in touch with you quickly enough, so if you are open to new students, either check your email often enough or set up some other notification system that works for you. You have to be clear on details such as scheduling, location, and payment — in other words, "professional".
After the session, it helps to send the student a recap of the lesson with any helpful links for future study. Some platforms such as wyzant.com have this functionality built-in; for other students, you can do it manually by email. My recommendation is to do it after every session with every student, at least for the first 1-2 years. The benefits far outweigh the effort: you will be able to charge higher rates, and this time will pay for itself. Your students will think of you more often, will feel you are overdelivering, and will be more likely to continue. You will also get a firmer grasp and fluency of the subject matter. Reviewing the notes you had sent after a previous session will help prepare for the next one.
Getting started as a tutor
Start by deciding, what subject and what demographics you want to teach. You may be comfortable with high school math or with college-level physics. If you are interested in tutoring graduate-school level Japanese, consider that there is very little demand for this kind of service — and that you won't be able to charge very much for it either. You are lucky if you get $30/hour for advanced Japanese classes, because those who want it probably don't have money (because they spend all their time in grad school studying impractical subjects — and their parents probably aren't rich either, rich parents' kids go for an MBA, not a PhD in Linguistics).
On the other hand, if you want to teach middle-school English, you may be comfortable with the subject, but are you comfortable with middle-school kids? If you don't have experience working with kids, I recommend you start from tutoring college or high school, or find another way to get experience with younger kids such as volunteering. E.g. I have spent 6 months helping a 9-year old boy learn to read, once a week, for free, and it's been a very enlightening (and rewarding) experience. Consider also that tutoring middle school is even more about psychology and relationship management with the parents. If you want to be making good money here, you have to be working with the kids of affluent parents, who will have to trust you with their child's safety and emotional well-being; it is not enough to simply have knowledge of the subject.
Regarding your rates, start on the lower side. When in doubt, err on the lower side, much lower than you want or think is practical. In the beginning you are a newbie and won't be creating that much value. You don't have reviews or testimonials to make your case either, so don't be picky: set low rates and take any work you can get, even if it involves traveling cross-town to teach 1 hour at a minimum wage. Register on a few websites such as wyzant.com — one of my favorites — and don't worry about the commission they are charging. Worry about getting experience and social proof in the form of 5-star ratings and good reviews, as those can later be shown to clients who came to you from another source or to a private tutoring company you may want to work for.
If possible, try joining a test prep chain or an established tutoring company. Despite the low pay rates, they can quickly teach you about the business of tutoring and give you plenty of practice experience including lesson plans. That does have its downsides, particularly take established cookie-cutter curriculums with a grain of salt, as those are made to raise scores and keep happy parents coming back and paying for more — but also learn from those.
The easiest kind of tutoring is help with homework or practice problems for an exam, because the student already knows what they want to work through. You don't need a plan or a vision for where they are going; just helping them work through the problems. Except for test prep — where you do need a plan — much of other tutoring is like that. This means that you can get started when you don't quite know what you are doing and learn as you go.
Offer your students a refund for the 1st hour or the 1st session. Many platforms and test prep companies do it anyway; people rarely ask for it. If somebody leaves you a low rating on an online platform and you can remove the rating by refunding the money, do so. Generally speaking, you should always refund the money if you have received a 3-star review or lower, as those hurt your reputation immeasurably. You should aim for 4.8 average or higher on any platform, and you should not have more than 1 three-star review, preferably zero. There is no upside to having poor reviews, as far as I can tell, even though in theory those can should that the reviews are "authentic".
You should also give some thought to jumpstarting your profiles by having a couple initial 5-star rating and a good testimonial. Find an acquaintance who needs tutoring, give it to them through a particular platform at a nominal cost, and have them leave you a good review. If you have an empty profile, you will be waiting for years to get your first gig (trust me, I have tried), but once you have a review or to, you chances go up considerably.
When it comes to getting students, remember, you should be prospecting all the time. Keep looking for more platforms to add your profile to, keep messaging people on craigslist, walk around the block and hang flyers. Until you get several long-term students, spend all your free time on prospecting and thinking of other creative ways to find students. If you were a B+ college student and you have basic social skills, you are already qualified to tutor high schoolers, at least for the minimum wage ($15/hour). So first focus on getting your first 5 students, then focus on 5 long-term students (5-sessions minimum), then get those numbers to 10. Always ask for 5-star reviews if working through a platform, and always ask for a testimonial after a 5-session long-term engagement, even if you keep tutoring that person. A testimonial can also be posted on Linkedin if you have not met through a particular tutoring website.
Once you get this kind of minimal experience, start raising the rates until you can't get the students any more. Try to get to at least $50/hour if you are in NYC/ San Francisco (translate the rates for other countries) or $35/hour if you are in a rural area. After you get to that point, think about improving your teaching skills, better branding, or narrowing down your niche to a higher-paying demographic. But until then, it should only be about building your skill through quantity.
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Hope you've enjoyed reading so far, and please let me know if there's anything else you want me to touch upon.
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