YouTube Hacks For Marketing Your Online Tutoring Business

It's no secret that Google is the king of search engines and most people will start with a Google search when they're looking for information. This includes people looking for online tutoring. So, getting your business to be ranked in Google's search results is important and a great way to find more students to teach. 

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You might have noticed when searching on Google that YouTube videos are often near the top of the list in your search results and there's a reason for this. Google own YouTube. If you create a promotional video for your online tutoring business and make it search friendly within YouTube, first you'll get views directly from YouTube. As a bonus, you'll also be ranked in Google and your efforts will be rewarded twofold with extra views from Google search results. That's a win-win for you and double the exposure for your business. When running your tutoring business, balancing your time between marketing, lesson prep and tutoring can be tricky. Making the most of promotional materials you create will mean less time spent marketing and more time doing what you love... tutoring.


How to get found on YouTube

So you've created a screencast video promoting your tutoring business. You've edited and uploaded it to your YouTube channel. Now what? Just like most online marketing, creating the promo materials is just the beginning. The trick now is to be found by those potential students who are looking for your services. One of the best ways to do this is to make your videos searchable. That means creating a title with key words that represent what you're offering. For example, for my online tutoring business I offer online English lessons for people who want to learn British English. One of my keyword phrases is 'British English'. To promote these lessons, I created an educational video about the differences between British English and American English spelling, which is something my target market is searching for on YouTube. Here's the video I uploaded:


To help people find me on YouTube, I needed to include the whole keyword phrase 'British English Vs American English Spelling' in three places:

  1. The title

  2. The description of the video

  3. The tag words

The description is a great place to include lots of keywords about the content of the video as well as your tutoring services. You can also insert your website link here so that people can easily visit your site after viewing the video. It's best to put this link right at the top of the description so it's visible when the video is playing. Too far down the description and they'll have to click the 'Show More' button to view it and so it's less likely to be seen and clicked.

YouTube Hack


If you're not familiar with tag words, think of them like behind the scenes signposts that YouTube will use as a way to understand what your video is about and then display it in the search results when people enter certain keywords. So by including the tag words 'British English spelling' and 'American English spelling', my video is more likely to be seen when people search for these words. Here's a behind the scenes look at my video showing you where you can add these all important keywords:


How to find relevant and highly searched keywords.

Including keywords in these three areas of you video is powerful but if it's not a popular search term then it's much less likely that people will find your video and click through to your tutoring website.

A quick hack for finding highly searched keywords relevant for your target market is to use the alphabet soup technique. Never heard of it? Don't worry, it doesn't involve any cooking! It's a fast, free and simple technique that can significantly boost your chances of getting video views by finding out what people are already looking for. Watch the video tutorial below to find out how it's done:


Prefer to read? Here's a quick 5 step summary of the video:

Step 1 – Open YouTube

Step 2 – Type a word that is related to the subject you tutor in the search bar. Add a space, then type the letter 'a' (don't press enter)

Step 3 – Look for relevant keyword phrases that are displayed in the first search results and add them to a spreadsheet.

Step 4 – Replace the letter 'a' with the letter 'b' and repeat for all the letters of the alphabet. For each new letter, look for keywords or keyword phrases in the dropdown menu that are related to your tutoring subject.

Step 5 – Choose the most relevant keywords and include them in your video title, description and tag words.


Good work.

Now your promotional or educational video is full of searchable and relevant keywords that your potential students are typing into YouTube and Google. As you upload more videos to YouTube, your presence on Google will increase, leading to more traffic and ultimately sales of your lessons.


To show you this in action, if I go to Google and type in “British English Vs American English Spelling”, you can see the top two search results are YouTube videos. The one at the top is mine. Woo!

Top of Google for my tutoring video

You can see the title is very clear. My website address is in the description followed by the keyword phrase 'British English Vs American English spelling'. Because my video is at the top of the search results, people who are searching for this information are likely to click this link, which will take them to my YouTube channel. By including a link to my website in the description box, it's easy for them to click this, find out more about me from my site and then complete the contact form or book a lesson.


When I ask new students where they found me. A lot of the time they say YouTube or Google. So it just goes to show you how powerful this free online marketing hack can be as a way of getting your online tutoring business in front of potential students.

Now it's your turn. Let me know how you get on and as always, you can add your questions or comments in the box below.

Matt Thompson
 

Matt is an online English tutor and founder of Smart Online Tutoring. He's a big fan of technology and when he's not teaching or helping others with their online tutoring businesses, you'll find him on the badminton court.

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