For many teachers, private tutoring has become a popular alternative career to working in a school. Tutoring offers added flexibility and the ability to set your own income. Below are some tips on how to start a tutoring business from home.
Know Your Subject
A passion for your subject is essential. Whether you’re teaching kids or adults, you need to have the knowledge to gain your students’ trust. An understanding of the curriculum and school examination system could be useful if you’re tutoring school subjects – experience working in a school could be beneficial. You should also consider obtaining relevant qualifications. If you’re teaching a non-curricular subject, such as teaching a foreign language without examination or teaching someone to play a musical instrument without grades, you may be able to come up with your own itinerary, although having qualifications could still be useful for gaining client trust.
In-Person Vs Virtual Lessons
You can choose to either tutor students in-person or tutor them via virtual lessons. When tutoring in-person you need to decide whether to go to your clients’ homes or to invite students to your home. The former is usually preferred as it means that you don’t have to convert part of your home into a classroom. Virtual lessons are another option that could allow you to teach students remotely via video call. Virtual tutoring also allows you to take on students further afield instead of being restricted locally.
Managing The Business Admin Side
As a private tutor, you’ll be working for yourself. You need to be able to keep on top of all the necessary business admin. Consider setting up an office in your home. If you’d prefer to divide your personal and home life, consider buying a separate phone for business use and use a service like PhysicalAddress to separate your business mail. You’ll need to calculate your taxes and expenses each year and file a tax return. Downloading some accounting software could be useful for automating a lot of this.
Marketing Your Business
You will need to find a way of marketing your tutoring business. You should consider starting by launching a website. Consider investing in some SEO and PPC advertising to help increase the reach of this website. You should then consider setting up social media pages on the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn. You can then use these social media pages to run promoted posts. There are various others ways in which you can market your business from door-to-door flyers to email marketing. Try to do your market research to work out exactly where your target audience can be found so that you can target these places. For instance, if you’re thinking of tutoring maths, work out exactly who the types of people are that are hiring maths tutors.
*collaborative post