I'm on holiday this week, which reminded me about why I chose to become an online tutor and the reasons why it's such a great way to earn a living. To take time off, I didn't have to fill in a holiday request form or ask my manager or even book the holiday 6 months in advance. Because I'm my own boss, I have the flexibility to work when I want and so taking a break is on my terms.
UPDATE April 2019: Google have shut down Google Plus so it is no longer possible to follow the steps in this article to use Google Plus as a way to get found on Google. Don't worry, there are still plenty of ways to market your online tutoring business and something that's not going away any time soon is YouTube (which is owned by Google). Click here to read about how to get found in Google search results by using YouTube.
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.
If you're a tutor based in the UK, start with Part 1 to find out how I just saved £200 on my tutoring insurance by becoming a member of the Tutors' Association. If you're outside of the UK, jump to part 2 to learn about why getting tutoring insurance could save you a lot more than a couple of hundred bucks.
Why do you want to tutor online? For me, one of the biggest reasons was to have my own schedule. To decide when I wanted to work and to have a proper work-life balance. I wanted free time, which meant making sure my work schedule didn't get in the way of spending time with friends and family. I wanted to work out how to tutor online but still have a life. I have discovered that the key to making this possible lies in two simple words:
Every day I travel around the world from the comfort of my own home. This virtual travel is made possible by tutoring online and teaching English as a foreign language to international students. When I first started tutoring online, I never thought it would lead to eating chocolate and cheese fondue in the Swiss Alps.
I'll never forget the first time I received an email from PayPal to say that someone had bought one of my online lessons. It was at that moment I realised this online tutoring thing could actually work.
Did you know that YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine after Google? Every day, millions of people are searching for videos about anything you can imagine and that includes online tutoring. As an online tutor, this is a huge opportunity for you to promote your tutoring services and the best thing is, you can do this for free.
People often ask, “Is it possible to tutor online as a full time job?” My answer is yes, you sure can! Here's how I turned a single face to face student into a family of loyal learners who spent £1000s on online lessons with me.
Fresh faced with my TEFL certificate in hand, my very first English teaching job was in Guinea, West Africa. In a classroom of 45 mixed level, mixed age refugees, my teaching materials consisted of a blackboard, a piece of chalk and my coursebook from the 60s! The students were sharing one coursebook between 4 or 5 so I quickly realised I’d need some photocopies. With no electricity, this was kind of tricky and involved a walk to the local market to find someone with a generator and a working photocopier. It was a steep learning curve but one that taught me the value of improvisation and using what you have available to make learning fun and interactive. Fast forward 10 years and I’m now teaching everything on the Internet using my computer and Google Slides. Here’s how I got there:
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