The education sector is a fantastic place to start a business. There are a few business ideas you can work with here. However, the best one is starting a tutoring business. Providing tutoring services is in high-demand right now. Especially in older students getting ready to sit their GCSE’s or A-Levels. Consequently, there is a lot of money to be made here.
However, there’s also a lot of competition. So, here are some intelligent tips for setting up a tutoring business, and teaching your rivals a lesson:
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Decide Your Educational Approach
Starting a tutoring business begins with deciding how you’ll approach education. What kind of tutor will you be? Is your teaching going to be similar to generic classroom teaching? Or, will you be more hands on and flexible in your approach. For me, the second option is clearly the best. Most people pay for tutors as they aren’t satisfied with the current teaching in their school. They want something different, more personal to them. Now, you also have to think about where you’ll teach, and how many pupils you’ll teach at once. I find there is no right or wrong answer here. As a tutor, you have the option to create a classroom and teach in it. You can make it look different to normal classrooms, so, your students don’t feel like they’re in school again. But, you can also go to people’s houses and teach. Personally, I think it’s best to go with a combination of these two approaches. Have a classroom where you can teach a handful of students, I’d say no more than ten at a time. Then, charge extra for home visits where you can adopt a more personal approach. It’s smart, as you cater to people that like learning with others, and those that prefer learning alone.
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Create Secondary Sources Of Income
With a business idea like this, you have an obvious source of primary income. People will pay you for your tutoring services. However, this doesn’t mean you should be satisfied with only making that money. Instead, you should create secondary sources of income. What I mean by this is you find additional ways of earning money. From an education standpoint, there is one brilliant way you can do this; sell resources. A lot of your students will want to do some learning in their own time too. So, you can buy textbooks, then sell them to your students. Or, you can write your own e-books on certain subjects, then sell them too. You can learn and find ways on how can small businesses adopt AI to help create such content and make your efforts easier than before. One of my favourite ideas is to create educational DVD’s. These days, people tend to respond better to visual education. All you have to do is create the content, then find a DVD duplication company to do the rest. They’ll burn your media onto disks and may even package them for you. Now, you have some high-quality resources to sell to any of your students. Plus, the benefit of this is that you can sell to anyone too. Teachers in schools may be intrigued by your books or DVDs, and place an order. This is a fantastic way of bringing more money into your business.
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Promote Your Business Like Crazy
A lot of tutors are guilty of not treating their service as a business. As such, they don’t spend much time promoting it at all. They tend to rely on word of mouth, with students and parents spreading the word. My advice is to promote your business like crazy. Think about all the potential pupils you could be teaching. There are schools everywhere, with thousands of students in them. I guarantee you there will be some students that wish they had a tutor and don’t know where to go. So, you need to do two key things. Firstly, create a professional website for your tutoring business. Then, ensure you rank highly for Google searches like ‘tutor’ or ‘tutors near me.’ To do this, you’ll need to improve the SEO of your site. And, I also recommend paying for advertising, so your site appears at the top of the results. Next, you need to create a business listing on Google, and then verify your business. What does this do? It adds your business to Google maps and shows people information like opening and closing times. This increases the chances of people in your local area finding your business. The more you promote, the more visible your business becomes.
Setting up a tutoring business is one of the easiest business ideas out there. If you want to tap into the educational sector, this is the best way to do it.