Advertising/Promoting web development programming online tutoring

December 6, 2015 7:03 PM

What are the best methods to promote/advertise one's online tutoring business? Adwords, classifieds, blogs, or tutoring sites?

I currently have a profile on a tutoring service online and have had some recent success in obtaining a few students. A couple through contacting me through their service and a couple through cold-emails. I have been enjoying being able to offer my services so far but I would like to be able to find more students online. I've tried posting locally on craigslist but think I need something more automated and general. Would adwords be worth it for this kind of business? So far the lowest hanging fruit seems to be students taking University courses in Java, Python, PHP/mySQL. I'm more interested in teaching absolute beginners or low intermediate learners.

posted by andendau to Education (3 answers total)

I think AdWords is going to be pretty hard to target efficiently (and costs money when you do).

I'd find other places people go to learn about the topic (like whatever you get when you google "how to learn java") and if those are community sites, forums, or such, post a message there -- read the community's rules first and respect them of course.

I frequent forums for various topics and I see "Where can I find a tutor for X?" posts all of the time.

More advanced: create your own resource and use it for promotion. Assuming you're tutoring via Skype or other video method, I'd make a YouTube channel and make some videos where I explain various concepts. People learn a bit, they see you're good at teaching, and they can pay to have an in-person lesson.
posted by mmoncur at 7:22 PM on December 6, 2015

You can offer courses through Udemy.com, which is a MOOC site, allowing experts to deliver online courses.

You can make money and get free adverts from the site itself.

Disclaimer: I have bought courses from them, but am not affiliated in any way
posted by theobserver at 6:21 AM on December 7, 2015

Response by poster: I think both of these suggestions are sensible. Probably the easiest thing I could do is set up a blog and write articles related to what I know. Creating course-ware sounds interesting to me. I'm not sure that I would want to do it through udemy. If I make enough of an online presence for myself then it might be worthwhile to offer it through my own site. Good food for thought.
posted by andendau at 8:39 AM on December 8, 2015