How to Tutor Online: Earn Money in 2024

Online tutoring helps those who enjoy teaching or are already a teacher within physical walls and want to build and expand their digital reach as well.

Online education platforms are a big help that let tutors build their online channels, use various tools, and reach the right audience. Do you want to sell online courses on an eLearning platform and grow your revenue? You can prepare videos on the subject of your expertise and monetize these videos using various monetization options. You can provide videos on subscription or bundle videos into one and sell them as a course.

Follow this step-by-step guide to learn how to tutor online and start your journey toward creating an income source.

1. Get Done With The Basics

Start with completing the most essential steps before diving deeper into creating your online presence.

Know Your Audience 

As an online tutor, you have to uncover who will be the students interested in your courses. Determine the demographics of the students who will need your expertise. Have an idea about their possible age, background, qualification, location, behavior, and other factors. The more clearly you understand your audience, the more confident you will be while creating courses for them.

Choose Your Subject Topic

Always choose a topic or subject you have expertise in; you should be able to dive deeper into the concepts you teach. Knowing your subject well enough would give your students confidence in you, and they’ll be more likely to choose your courses. Take some time aside and determine which subject you’re most interested in and have more experience in.

Choose A Specific Course Pattern

Online streaming platforms provide a few ways by which you can teach your students. Determining what goes best with your teaching style and type of course to ease your journey further. For example, you can teach them in real time using live streaming, or you can upload pre-recorded videos. Some tutors also provide written format courses, and some might be comfortable conferencing.

2. Choose the Right Selling Platform

In this next step, you will determine which resources you want to use to build your online presence. There are two primary ways:

Online Education Platforms

There is an array of online course platforms that let tutors build their channels and set up their online presence. These course selling platforms have everything set up, and all you need to do is upload your courses and choose your revenue options. You can upload pre-recorded videos or live streams to teach your students in real time. Some advanced platforms also offer LMS, which means a learning management system that includes all the tools you need to teach online more conveniently.

To earn money from your videos or online tutoring, you can choose from their revenue options. These options can be SVOD, TVOD, and AVOD, which means that you can earn using subscriptions, running ads in your videos, or giving your courses on rentals. 

Tutors can also earn from donations where the students donate their choice of amount to their favorite tutor. Some streaming platforms offer a particular function or button using which students can easily donate. Some of the most popular online education platforms are GUDSHO, Udemy, Coursera, Skillshare, Thnkific, etc.

Your Own Online Platform 

The next step works for those who don’t want to rely on a third-party website. However, this path makes you do more work where you have to set everything up by yourself. You’ll have to start setting up your own website, which means you’ll work with developers and designers. You’d choose your preferred payment methods, email list, and all the marketing activities.

This is a lengthy process that might take months or even years to establish a strong online presence. However, once it’s done, you can tutor on your own terms with your own branding. Both of these methods would work for online tutoring; however, the one you choose depends on your goals, budget, and time availability.

Decide The Elearning Models And Tools

Night School Model

This model indicates vocational learning, which is also referred to as evening courses. This model lets the learners pay a one-time fee for a particular course, and they get access to the modules, assessments, quizzes, and exams. Many e-learning platforms follow this model, and the majority of learners use this one because of structured teaching.

The Academy Model 

This kind of learning is more subscription-based, where students can pay a monthly subscription fee and access the entire library. Students can choose the courses and classes according to their current knowledge, and as they progress, they might choose more advanced courses.

The Combined Model 

The combination model, also called hybrid, offers the characteristics of both night school and academy models. Students can pay the subscription fee to access the content library; additionally, they can use the night school model as optional. This model brings more opportunities for tutors to increase their overall earnings.

Tools For Content Creation

Tools help you with branding and give you the additional visuals you want in your videos. Tools also make your videos more engaging, inspiring your students to click on them. Now, having to edit videos might give many new creators heebie-jeebies; however, it’s not as complicated as it seems. You don’t have to deal with Photoshop or any such advanced tools; there are plenty of free and simple tools to use, such as Canva. You can use Canva to create interesting thumbnails, a logo, a banner for your channel, etc. Powtoon is another tool to help you customize your videos a bit more; Quizlet.com is there to help you with keyword flashcards.

Market Your E-Learning Courses 

Next, let’s learn how you can promote your courses and increase the reach of your online channel. By following this step, you would let your students know about your existence, attract more traffic, and hence unlock your potential to earn. 

Utilize The Power Of Social Media

Nowadays, social media is the most powerful tool anyone can use to market their business. Whether you’re an individual creator or have people working for you, social media platforms can be the most accessible means to increase your reach. Use platforms like Instagram and Facebook, build your presence, and keep updating your content there. Every viewer is inclined toward watching shorts and reels; you can also break your tutorials into useful chunks and repurpose them to create short videos. 

Implement SEO Activities And Use Keywords

SEO optimizes your content for search engines like Google; as a result, it helps your channel appear in the search engine result pages. SEO is an ongoing work for which you must build a strategy and keep following it for months and even years while tweaking it here and there as needed. You can do it yourself if you have some experience in digital marketing or hire someone who has the relevant experience.

To start with, add keywords in your titles, header tags, and meta descriptions every time you post a video. These keywords are the phrases that your audience searches for in the search engines; think from your student’s perspective, and you will have an idea about the terms that they might search for. 

You can simply use Google’s search bar and “related searches” section to find the most relevant and searched keywords. To advance your approach, you can use keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Answer the Public, etc.

Guest Blogging 

Next, and one of the most effective ways to build your online presence, is to guest blog. This approach refers to writing blogs and articles for others’ websites that accept your niche. You can Google guest posting sites for teachers and explore the websites to decide which suits you the best. 

Next, email the website publisher, offering a guest post you have written for them. Remember that different guest post sites have different rules about the word count, interlinking, images, and other such aspects; follow all these guidelines to increase your chances of getting your post accepted. Since guest post sites attract a huge amount of traffic, getting your post published there would get it read by the right audience, redirecting them to your channel.

Collaborate With Other Creators

Course creators or professionals with an existing online presence can be a significant helping hand to expand the reach of your channel. You can reach out to other creators, asking them if they can collaborate with you or give a shout-out about your channel in their upcoming video or next social media post.

Use Google And Facebook Ads

This one is less of an organic way to promote your channel, which includes paying other platforms to run your advertisements. Both Google and Facebook can run ads displaying your channel and information; you can also promote your Instagram posts by paying a certain amount of money. You can decide how many days you want to run the ads and which kind of audience you want to reach. Such activity is also known as paid ad campaigns, where upon paying, you can have targeted ads, track the results, and know how well the campaign performed. 

It’s recommended to run ads only on platforms where you put regular updates.

Become A Podcast Guest For Course Promotion

Podcasts are way more common nowadays than they used to be. You can reach out to various podcasting channels and ask them if you can provide a free session on a particular topic. This is another form of guest posting where you provide information in the form of audio rather than text. In podcasts, you can offer information free of cost while mentioning your channel to let the listener know where to find you.

Adopt Different Ways To Sell

Online tutoring provides you with pretty good options to make money. Tutors, hence, don’t have to rely on a single resource to generate income; they can introduce numerous concepts on their channel and let students choose from them. 

Sell Online Courses

Online education platforms let you educate your students in real time. This is a great way to connect with your students and communicate with them in real time. However, this doesn’t have to be the only way through which you can teach and monetize your videos. Tutors can create and sell courses in a subject of their expertise. You can make videos on a particular subject, bundle them together, and sell this bundle as a course. You can create as many courses as you want, upload them on your channel, and market them well.

Sell Informational And Educational Resources

There is another way to generate income, and that is by selling educational resources online. You don’t always have to create videos on a subject or topic; instead, you can create different educational materials and sell them separately.

You should only choose your area of expertise and maintain quality throughout your study materials to increase the selling potential. Tutors can write ebooks, notes, activity books, and flashcards and sell them on their channels.

Wrap Up

Indeed, building an online presence as a tutor takes time; however, the efforts are worth it since the benefits are immense. Becoming an online tutor unlocks a wide range of audience that you would’ve missed otherwise. It also lets you earn from various monetization options; you can run ads, provide subscriptions and rentals, and even accept donations.

We hope that you will receive some help from the points mentioned about how to tutor online. Now is your turn to explore some online tutoring platforms and let more and more students connect with you.