Are you looking for more Students?

Sometimes, you just run into a dead-end trying to grow your tutoring side-hustle, so where do you find your next Student?

There are several ways to locate more students when you are an independent private tutor (i.e. not working for a tutoring company). Here are 5 ways you can find more students to build your income:

1. Word of mouth

Get your existing clients to tell their friends about you, and provide you with online or written references. If you are tutoring school students, ask their parents to reach out to their networks (family, friends, colleagues). Word of mouth, even today, still rates as one of the most trusted sources of information when it comes to personal services, such as tutoring.

2. Join a platform like begyn.co

Begyn and a couple of other similar platforms (we won't list them here, as that would be counter-productive 😅), put a significant amount of effort into SEO and other internet marketing techniques to draw potential customers to their websites. Relevant blog posts, such as this one, are key to their strategies, so a great indicator of how much traction a platform will provide you is based on how actively they post useful or helpful blog entries.

3. Place ads on Gumtree

We see this a lot, so it must be somewhat effective. We would recommend you re-issue your ad at least every fortnight, more frequently if possible, otherwise it gets moved down the list as it ages. This is a common problem for a variety of platforms, so keep your ads fresh! This is a low-cost method, but your success is going to be determined by several factors beyond your control, for example, Gumtree doesn't permit effective digital marketing for free, and you can definitely get lost in the noise

These last two approaches are more useful if you need to build a near full-time income stream, but they won't be worth the effort if you are looking for two students. If you need 20 students to make this a full-time gig, then read on!

4. Build a social media brand

Surprisingly, this is effective and relatively straightforward - Facebook and other social media platforms take away a great many of the headaches of web design, structure, and communication, leaving you with the task of providing content that catches the attention of customers. You will need to build a following for your brand, or, use some of the other techniques in combination, to get your brand noticed.

5. Build your own website

This sounds like a lot of effort, but realistically you can be up and running with a templated structure in a few hours. Keeping it up to date and expanding your reach using focused digital marketing strategies is probably going to wear you out, and take away from your ability to tutor. Other options are definitely more successful for a solo operator.

Other options

You can choose other marketing approaches, such as google ads, but the size of your buying power will drastically limit your reach in the vast ocean of noise, that is the internet, so save the money for petrol, and choose a low-cost marketing strategy!

After several years of running our own platforms, we've observed a some good behaviours (the inverse of which are bad for your business):

firstly, respond to any inquiries in a timely manner, even if you cannot currently take on more students
secondly, keep your profile outcome-focused - parents will automatically assume you are smart, so no need to trumpet your own academic successes, what the parents (and I am one) want to know is how your current/former students have succeeded, and, what your capabilities are.
finally, a good platform should be able to indicate your availability to tutor (days and times of the week, and when your schedule will free up to allow for new students) so make sure you keep your platform aware of your availability!

5 ways to find more students to tutor