How to start teaching English to private students

Are you wondering how to find your own students for private tutoring? Maybe you’re just getting started as an online tutor, or maybe you’ve been teaching for a while now and want to build up your own, independent tutoring business.

Many new teachers choose to start teaching through different online platforms such as Cambly, VIP Kid, and iTalki. These platforms can be a great way to start your teaching journey as they take care of the recruitment side of the business for you (finding students for you), and some platforms also provide the lesson materials ready for you to teach.

However, there are also several disadvantages to using such platforms. Depending on which platform you choose, you may have to work a very inconvenient schedule and they can be inflexible if you need to change a lesson time due to some unforeseen reason. Some platforms are also very strict when it comes to their teaching style requirements,  and the teaching materials they provide might not always fit your teaching style or your students’ learning styles. With some platforms, you might also have a rather limited ability to decide how much you charge per hour.

This is why choosing to find your own students for private tutoring may be a better solution if you’re serious about your teaching career and want to grow your income. It can be a challenge to get started and build a solid student base, but once you get established as a tutor, you can end up earning more money and having more freedom with your schedule as well as your teaching style. 

A few things to keep in mind

In this article, we will explore six ways to find your own students for private tutoring. However, before we jump into this, it’s important to first take some time and think things through. 

Choose your niche 

Before promoting yourself as a tutor you should make sure to decide what kind of students and what kind of classes you want to teach.

You might first think about teaching anybody and everybody so that you can fill your schedule as quickly as possible. While this works for some people, when first building up your student base, it’s generally better to find a specific niche and focus on attracting those students.

As a private tutor you’ll need to think about yourself as your own personal brand. When students see you they should know – “That’s tutor Jane, she helps people pass their IELTS exams”, or “That’s tutor James, he helps adults to rekindle their English language skills”, or “That’s tutor Mark, he’s great at helping kids have fun while learning English”.

If you try to be all of the above things at once then you’ll likely struggle to build up a particular reputation or any single student base.

So, to start with, you should consider:

• Are you interested in tutoring kids, teens, or adults?
• Do you prefer to teach English (or another language) to beginner, intermediate or advanced students?
• What kind of classes do you offer, conversation classes or perhaps just exam preparation classes?
• Will you only teach online or also in person – if in person then what students bases might be near you (high schools students, foreign university students, foreign workers, etc.)

Establishing your focus will help you to come up with a clear plan for recruiting students, and will also help your potential students to decide if you’re the right teacher for them and their goals.

Research tutoring rates in your niche

Before you start promoting your tutoring services, you should make sure to thoroughly research the average rates for students in your niche. 

If you aim to tutor students face to face then you should research how much other tutors pay in your area to teach similar classes. Similarly, you can conduct your own market research, finding people from your target niche and asking how much they would expect to pay for a one-hour lesson. This could involve the old-fashioned way of leaving your house with a clipboard and asking people in the street that fit your target profile. It could also include joining groups online and asking questions there or posting polls.

The goal should be to understand roughly how much you should be charging. You don’t want to end up undercharging for your skills, time, and effort, just as you won’t want to overcharge and end up scaring away potential students.

Beware of poaching students from your current employer 

If you’re already working as an online tutor for a teaching platform, you may be thinking about inviting your students to keep on taking classes with you outside of that platform. There are many reasons why it is not advisable to do that! 

The majority of the teaching platforms (if not all of them) will ban you from ever teaching with them again if they find out that you’ve been poaching their students. Before inviting your students to get off the platform and book classes with you privately, make sure to read the contract you signed with the teaching platform you’re working for. If it specifically states that you are not allowed to take students off the platform nor accept their offers to pay you outside of it, you should refrain from doing it. Why? Because even if you stop teaching on this platform at the moment, you never know if or when you may need to come back to teaching for them again.

Now, let’s look at ways to find your own private students

Finding your own students for online teaching is not as hard as you may think it is! Here are five ways to find students for your tutoring practice. 

1. Set up a website to advertise yourself 

Students will often want to learn about you before purchasing your tutoring services. Having a simple website can be a great way to advertise yourself and show off your skills. You can list your qualifications, your TESOL certificate, information about your prices, and can also let people book a trial class with you.

If you have relatively limited computer skills then this might seem out of your reach, but don’t worry. It’s surprisingly easy to set up a quick website nowadays. Websites like Wix allow you to cheaply and easily make a website thanks to their website builder tools. They even have ready-made tutoring site templates that you can adjust to match with you – tutor template 1, tutor template 2.

2. Start with friends and family

If you want to find your own students for private tutoring, the first thing you should do is to get the word out. Start with your friend and family. Let everyone know that you’re looking for students. Let them know what kind of students you’re looking for and ask them to refer any potential students they may know to you. That way, if aunt Mary’s friend’s daughter needs some help with her English essays, aunt Mary will immediately send her your way! 

It’s important to do this early on, as for new private tutors one of the main challenges will be about building up your reputation. If a friend, family member, or ex-colleague can vouch for you then you’ll have a much better chance at attracting a potential student.

It’s unlikely that you’ll build a full schedule immediately this way, but once you get a few students you’ll soon see how they’ll spread the word with their friends, and slowly your reputation will start to build up.

3. Join networking groups

Another efficient way to find students for your tutoring classes is to join networking groups for expats and language learners on platforms such as Facebook or WeChat in China.

There are thousands of groups that bring together people who share similar interests such as language learning, or who share similar life situations such as being an expat living in a specific place (for example: Turkish expats living in America). By joining these groups, you’ll be able to advertise yourself and your services to anybody who might be aiming to improve their language skills. 

Just make sure that you read the rules when joining any groups and be respectful with your posts. If you jump in, ignore the group rules, and start posting adverts 5 times a day, you’ll likely get banned for spamming the group. We’d recommend posting no more than one advert per week in a group. If the group’s main focus isn’t about learning English, then it’d be better to wait for a few days before posting anything at all – you should observe the group and look for opportunities where offering your services could add value and help the members. When you first start networking it can feel quite slow, and it might seem like you’re getting nowhere. However, if you keep regularly looking for opportunities to join new (relevant) groups and engage with them, after a month or two you’ll be surprised at how big your network gets.

4. Create your social media presence 

Social media has become a very powerful tool in recent years. If you’re looking for students for private tutoring, you can use the power of social media to help you! If you’re more interested in teaching online then building a social media presence and following can be especially useful as it’ll help you to get noticed by potential students all around the world.

You’ll want to first set up your profile on whichever platforms your students are likely to use, and ensure that you present yourself in a way that would match well with your target niche.

After this, you can start to plan what kind of content your target students would be interested in. If you’re targetting young learners then you’ll want to share fun, attractive content such as short videos with you teaching certain new words (farmyard animals, facial features, hobbies, and interests). You should keep in mind that with young learners you need to make content that’s fun and engaging for the students, but also shows parents that something useful is still being taught. For adult students, you could do the same as with younger learners, but make content that speaks more to their interests – travel/work/leisure. You could post free classes to demonstrate your value and encourage them to book lessons with you for tailored help. You could also share quizzes/tests, worksheets, tips, and other advice.

The key here is to think about who your audience is and create valuable content for them that they’ll enjoy and learn from! This will help you establish yourself as an authority and build trust with your followers. If you’re dedicated and consistent with building your social media presence as a tutor, your followers will eventually become your students! 

5. Start your own blog or Youtube channel

Another great way to find your own students for private tutoring is to start a blog or a YouTube channel dedicated to language learning. Google and YouTube are powerful search engines that people go to in order to research answers to their most burning questions.

By creating blog articles like this one or informative videos for your YouTube channel, you’ll be able to answer questions that potential students might be searching for online. Eventually, you’ll end up building a viewer or reader base which can help to bring a steady flow of new students.

6. Advertise yourself on local marketplaces 

Advertising yourself on local marketplaces is probably the most common method tutors use to find their own students. Every country has a dedicated marketplace site. Usually, people use these marketplaces to sell things they don’t need anymore or find cheap alternatives for something they want to buy. However, many of these sites also offer the possibility for people to advertise their services. This is a great place for tutors who are looking to find private students! 

When creating your ad on a local marketplace site, make sure to write a compelling description that will appeal to the kind of students you want to teach. Add relevant details, such as who you teach, what’s your teaching method and style, and if you teach online or you’re willing to go to your student’s house. Sometimes it may be hard to stand out on a local marketplace site due to the competition. To help your ad gain more exposure, ask your friends and family to share it with their friends or on their social media platforms!