Tutor advertisement ideas | How to advertise as a private tutor | How to Advertise Tutoring Services Online
How to advertise tutoring
My name is Kris Amerikos and I've been advertising tutoring for over 10 years. It started with my offline, brick-and-mortar school in Russia. Then, I picked up social media marketing and digital marketing as a way to get more clients. When I moved back to the United States those skills came in handy because I needed to do the digital pivot and move everything online.
When I first learned about tutoring advertisements and understood that I had the possibility to reach the entire world it changed things for me. Sure, it was a daunting task at first. I've literally spent thousands of hours testing different types of market and advertising. And it felt overwhelming to learn how to market myself as a private tutor and then turn that into an online teaching business that makes $1,200,000 per year. That's the transition I went through and I hope this article helps you go through a similarly epic transformation of your own.
Advertise tutoring services online
The big question that most tutors have when they move online is "Do I really need to have a website?" Let's be real here. Websites can be a pain in the neck, but they make you look a whole lot more professional than someone who doesn't have a website (or doesn't know how to use one they have). If you want to advertise tutoring services online, then at some point you'll probably want to set up a website and market yourself as a private tutor on your website.
Some tutors prefer to use marketplace websites where they make a profile and perfect their tutor bio to attract students amongst the audience that the website has already grown. This removes the need for the tutor to do any complicated, expensive marketing stuff. The downfall of this strategy, which is why I recommend against it, is that you are totally dependent on that website to produce new clients for you (not to mention that they take a percentage of the money you've generated).
Representing yourself requires a little more work and a lot of learning new skills, but it's worth it because you build assets that you can keep for the rest of your life. If you build your name and your career on someone else's website, they own everything you've built and they can easily take it away from you. That's not a position you want to be in.
Online tutoring ads
One way to advertise tutoring services online is to place online tutoring ads. These types of tutoring advertisements come in many shapes and sizes (literally). You may have seen these ads when you were scrolling through Facebook or Instagram. Or maybe you've seen them on the very page you are reading right now! Those are Google display ads. Or maybe you've seen them in special forums for tutors where websites sell advertising to businesses and tutors who want to reach their audience. Or maybe you've searched for something in Google and seen sponsored results. Those are Google search ads. Or maybe you've seen ads when you were watching YouTube videos. Each type of ad has a different format and each platform has a different audience and method for delivering your ad to that audience.
Tutor advertisement ideas
First and foremost, solve a problem. Show people that you solve a specific problem and you've got a proven solution. If you've done that right, you need to find the right people - the ones who are looking for a solution to this exact problem. Your advertisement should relate to the plight of your ideal customers - they have a problem and they are looking for a solution. The way you talk about yourself, your product, and everything else is called your marketing message. When you've done it correctly, your customers and leads will repeat your marketing message back to you. This means they resonate with your marketing.
Lead magnets - Offer something useful for free
A lead magnet is basically something free that we give away in exchange for someone's name and contact information. After they've given us their contact information, we can continue to market to them, so they are called a lead. But not all leads are created equally. It's important to qualify leads as much as possible, so that you spend time on hot leads (ones that are very close to making a purchase decision) and you don't waste time on unqualified leads.
The image above shows a landing page that offers a lead magnet. It's a free seminar that anyone can access by clicking the green button and entering their information in the popup that appears.
Advertising for tutoring business
When advertising teaching and tutoring services most people only think about offense. They understand that they need to do direct outreach and paid ads, but they don't consider how they are going to protect their investment of time, energy, and money. This video talks about the best way to advertise tutoring services online using the following types of tutoring advertisement:
Attack - How to sell your tutoring services
It's important not to sit around waiting for clients to come your way. That's why we need to have a plan of attack and use all the weapons in our arsenal (or create an arsenal by learning new skills).
Direct outreach
Send direct messages to people who want your private lessons or tutoring services. This is the easiest way to get your first sales. It's totally underrated because most people don't want to put in the hustle and manual work that's required in order for you to succeed at direct outreach. At the end of the day, it's just a numbers game. The more people you contact, the more likely you are to sell your product to someone. Be careful to target the right audiences, though. Sending messages to the wrong people gets you nowhere.
Blog / SEO
Write helpful, easy-to-find content that provides value to readers and generates revenue for you. If you want to monetize your blog, you'll need to develop the core elements of your website first. Then, you'll need to do competitor research and keyword research. It's generally not a good idea to target very popular keywords that are highly competitive, and therefore highly difficult to rank for. Instead, find creative ways to gain organic search traffic related to your niche and your audience.
Guest posts
Access someone else's audience by posting content on their platform. Once you've figured out how SEO for blogs works, you'll want to get as many backlinks as possible, which means you need other people's websites to talk about you and link back to your website. When popular websites link to your website it makes your website look better to Google. Remember that the audience of the website you write for will also learn about you and be able to find you.
Email marketing
Plan regular sequences of emails that are automatically sent after someone performs an action on your website. For example, if a person gives you their name and email in exchange for a lead magnet or freebie on your website, you could automize a series of emails. This helps you continue to provide value and increases the likelihood of your leads buying from you.
Paid ads
Show your tutoring ads on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Google, and other platforms. This is really scary for most tutors and teachers out there. When you hear that someone spent $5,000 per day on tutoring ads you probably think they got ripped off. But that's why using paid advertising for your tutoring business can be both very expensive and very profitable. If you know that you can spend $5,000 per day and get back $10,000 per day, then you see the situation differently. The first time my company spent $5,000 per day on tutoring advertisements it was a great a feeling. Most tutors who start advertising their services on Facebook or YouTube spend about $100 or less per day.
Defend - Protect your tutoring advertisement
It's not enough to just have great marketing and be able to find new leads and clients. We also need to protect what we've built by keeping our audience interested and updated.
Copyright / Trademark
Officially register the name of the brand, product, service, or website that you are going to invest your time, energy, and money into. If you've already set up a legal entity, such as an LLC or corporation, then you probably want to register it as an asset of the company you've set up. The name you use can become a trademark if you file with your government's trademark and patent office. For the majority of websites, a copyright is placed at the bottom of each page, in the section called the footer.
It's also important to have a terms and conditions page and include a link to it in the footer. You can take a look at our terms and conditions page and the other pages we've linked to in the footer of this page to get an example of what you might use for your tutoring website.
SMM (Social Media Marketing)
Maintain an active social media presence, especially on the platforms where you run paid ads for your tutoring services. By growing a following on that platform, you are taking advantage of free retargeting impressions. Usually, if you want to reach an audience, you have to pay to advertise on platforms that attract your audience. But social media platforms allow us to reach our following over and over again for free.
Newsletter
Regularly send out newsletter email broadcasts to your lead list. Your mailing list is a great asset that can be used to generate sales. Remember to keep the content of your newsletters information, fun, and on topic. It's OK to make a quick offer at the end of the email, but don't try to sell from beginning to end. Otherwise, your lead list will dread getting emails from you or, even worse, they might unsubscribe from your mailing list.
Brand search
Help people who are searching for you find you more easily by bidding on your own brand search terms. It might sound funny to spend money on your own name as a keyword, but believe me, if you are successful, your competitors will buy your brand keywords and try to steal your audience.
Updates
Keep the information on your website and social media pages up-to-date at all times. I personally find this to be the most challenging aspect of my online tutoring business. Things change so fast that you have to use systems to organize your social media, ads, email sequences, landing pages, paid products, and everything else.
English tutor advertisement
I've spent nearly $2,000,000 USD advertising English teachers on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Google, and more. Being seen by millions of people across the globe helped position my brand as the solution to our audience's problem. My biggest advice is to sell a decentralized product at a high price to a small, targeted group of people.
How to advertise as a private tutor
It's all about how you represent yourself. There are signals that we send, sometimes subconsciously, that communicate professionalism, experience, planning, and forethought. Before you even think about advertising your tutoring services, you need to be one hundred percent clear on who your target audience is, what your niche is, what your product is, and what your prices are. It is a generally accepted business practice to test your business using organic (free) audiences, organic leads, and organic traffic before investing money into ads.
Where to advertise yourself as a tutor
I started running tutoring advertisements on Facebook before any other platform because you can get a lot of feedback from your audience in the form of comments. People can be unkind sometimes, so brace yourself for mixed reactions to your tutoring ads.
When you advertise teaching or tutoring services on Instagram you need to remember that this is a visual platform. People watch videos and look at photos, but don't read much text. Images that include text typically perform better.
YouTube
Out of all the different platforms and channels that you might use to run tutoring advertisements, YouTube probably communicates the most brand authority. There's something about being forced to watch a video that makes a person remember you.
Google Display
When people see you everywhere they go, we call that omnipresence. That's what you want to have. You want people to be reminded of you constantly so that you are top of mind. Google display ads will let you show up on nearly every website across the Internet. Wherever your audience goes, you'll be there.
Google Search
When someone types in a search on Google they get lots of results. You can work for years to rank at the top of the search results organically (for free) or you can pay for Google search ads and be at the top now.
Tutor advertising website
Setting up your own tutoring website seems difficult, but there are so many resources available for you to learn skills related to websites and practice using them. Today most websites aren't built from scratch. They are built using web constructors like WordPress, Wix, Weebly, Shopify, and many others. That means you don't need to know how to write code or do computer programming (although knowing some HTML can greatly help you).
How to advertise tutoring online
If you follow the steps listed in this article and in the videos on this page, you will have a huge advantage and be ahead of 90% of the tutors who are advertising tutoring online. Ideally, you want to be able to get new clients whenever you are ready for them - and paid online advertising will let you do that for your tutoring business. You just need to measure how much it costs you to get a new client and compare that to how much the client pays you.
How to Advertise Tutoring Services Online and Monetize Teaching with Social Media
This video is for you if you:
- Are a teacher who is learning how to advertise tutoring online
- Have tried to advertise for tuition or create a tutor advert before and haven’t had much success
- Want to advertise as a tutor because you are looking for students to tutor and not sure where to find them
- Want to perfect how you advertise tutoring services online
- Don’t yet know how to find students for tuition but are ready to learn
- Have tried online tutoring sites for teachers, tutoring agency, Wyzant tutoring, tutoring ads on craigslist, but nothing has worked and you’ve come here thinking: “I need students for tutoring like YESTERDAY.”
Let me tell you why social media is the best place to advertise tutoring services online. A lot of people have been coming to me and asking me how to find students online. Whether you teach English online, teach any other subject online, sell online courses from your own website, or get paid to write lesson plans - my answer is social media.
Then they say “How do I monetize my social media?”, “How do I take people from my social media pages and make them buy my lessons and get them to buy my courses or whatever it is that I am selling?” They say “I’ve asked all the experts out there and I am coming to you. Kris, how do I do this?”.
So, I tell them it’s really easy. And it really is. There are just three steps to follow to learn how to advertise tutoring on social media and get paying clients. But before you know the three steps there are three rules of the marketplace that you need to know.
3 rules of the marketplace
Money = value
First of all, the money that you make is proportionally related to the value that you put out into the marketplace. If you don’t put any value out, you don’t get any money back. You can post tuition ads, look for the best tutor advertisement sample or tuition advertising format, but if you don’t provide value, you won’t last.
Money = goodwill
The second thing that you need to know is the money that you make is proportionally equal to the goodwill you have in the marketplace. You can advertise tutoring services online every second of your free time, but if people don’t trust you and you don’t have goodwill built, it won’t last.
Money = amount of offers that you make
And then, also, the income that you make is equal to the amount of offers that you make in the marketplace. And a lot of people hear this and they go out there and they just start making offer after offer after offer and that’s a mistake. Because first you need to focus on value. You actually have to do those three things in order.
So, if you don’t put any value out, you are not going to get anything back. It doesn’t matter how many offers you make. Now, sure, you could dump a bunch of money into paid ads and make the best tutor advert in the world and maybe you are great at marketing and you could figure it out and you could get a few sales. But typically that is not what’s going to happen and if you are reading this post, then probably you don’t have a lot of money to dump into paid ads and you can’t invest a lot to advertise tutoring services online like that. Instead, we need to follow these three steps:
3 steps to advertise tutoring services online
Build value
So, step number one was "build value". And that should be mission number one for you. That should be the most important thing at the top of your list right now. And there is a really easy way that we can do that. There are three ways that you can build value for your audience and people who watch you or read your posts.
Current situation
You need to find out what situation those people are in right now. So, where are they in their journey? So for example, if you are teaching English online, find out their level, what they have learned before. Or if you want to start teaching art classes you need to find out what skills they have so far.
Desired situation
You need to find out where they are going on their journey, where they want to be.
Your tutoring advertisement positions you as the solution
You need to start helping them go down that path. You need to become the guide who shows them the way to go from where they are right now to where they want to be. So, that’s a really easy way for you to provide value to people. Like I said before, you can’t become an online tutor and start a tutoring business without providing value.
And the interesting thing is that once you start providing value to them, you are building goodwill on the market place and that’s step number two.
Build goodwill
You want to build goodwill. And then, that makes it really easy to do step number three - it just makes it so easy to make offers at this point.
Make offers
Now, making offers is also another thing that a lot of teachers have trouble with and they say, “OK. Make an offer. How do I do that, Kris?”. So, here is how:
Get their attention
First you are going to say, “Here is what I’ve got”. You’re going to say, “Hey! It’s me! Look at this new thing I’ve got!”. That’s it. Really easy, right?
Demonstrate value
Step number two of making offers is this. You are going to say: “Here’s what it does.” You are going to say: “This is the new thing that I’ve got and here is benefit A, benefit B, benefit C. This is how it’s going to help you.”
Use a call-to-action
Step number three of making offers is you’re going to tell them what they need to do next. So, you’re going to say, “If you like this new thing that I’ve got, then go to myrandomwebsite.com and enroll in my courses / sign up for lessons with me / book a free consultation”, whatever it is.
So, that’s a really easy way for you to just go right through these three steps. And that’s how to market yourself as a tutor. So, that’s how you can start selling online courses, or your online lessons, or selling your own stuff online.