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May 24, 2024 12:35 PM Subscribe
I want to help my dear friend & French teacher get more clients — does your local rag, mag or newsletter offer free adverts? Where should she post?
She is brilliant, a bilingual/native speaker with a PhD but he's struggling with enough workload as we live in a very seasonal place in the south of France.
Online is a strong option she's very keen to explore more but think less italki & marketplaces, more tailored & long-term individual 1:1 basis.
I found a magazine for Swedes who live in our part of the world, which offers free adverts and thought surely there must be more out there. All and any suggestions welcome!
She is brilliant, a bilingual/native speaker with a PhD but he's struggling with enough workload as we live in a very seasonal place in the south of France.
Online is a strong option she's very keen to explore more but think less italki & marketplaces, more tailored & long-term individual 1:1 basis.
I found a magazine for Swedes who live in our part of the world, which offers free adverts and thought surely there must be more out there. All and any suggestions welcome!
we live in a very seasonal place in the south of France
Do you mean that a lot of the people she teaches are tourists? If so, one thing she can do is start offering them an online option if they want (using her own Zoom account or whatever setup she likes). That way at least some of them might continue taking lessons after they go home, and if she's comfortable with this she can let students know she'd be delighted to teach anyone they might recommend her to back home.
If she doesn't mind getting into social media, she could set up a LinkedIn profile that people recommending her can link to. If she really doesn't mind getting into it, she could do all the typical marketing stuff that people do there, like writing blog posts about learning French ("business French" might be a good hook if she wants to go beyond targeting tourists), and following people and getting followers or whatever the dance is these days. And if she really, really doesn't mind she could do the same on other platforms. It's a lot of work, though, which she may or may not find soul-sucking or worth the effort, and if she doesn't know how to do it she'll want to observe and research first.
If you want to you can also lurk online on Facebook forums, subreddits, expat groups, and so on where people are likely to go for advice about either finding a good French teacher, or things to do when staying at your friend's location. Then when you see relevant questions you can plug your friend.
On more traditional lines, I wonder if she might be able to approach some hotels/hostels/pensions/airbnbs/etc. and ask them to distribute her business cards, or carry her flyers, or put up a sign for her lessons in return for a small amount and maybe offering an "X% discount for [host] guests".
Finally, if the other language she's bilingual in is English or another language that lots of tourists speak, she could offer lessons in that to local residents during the off season. (If it's English, she could probably also teach schoolkids or prepare older students for standardized exams. For that matter, some schoolkids might even need some French grammar lessons.)
If she does end up expanding to international students, she'll need to think about how to get paid (paypal?) and figure out any tax implications. (It's probably not an issue but she should check.)
posted by trig at 1:56 PM on May 24
Do you mean that a lot of the people she teaches are tourists? If so, one thing she can do is start offering them an online option if they want (using her own Zoom account or whatever setup she likes). That way at least some of them might continue taking lessons after they go home, and if she's comfortable with this she can let students know she'd be delighted to teach anyone they might recommend her to back home.
If she doesn't mind getting into social media, she could set up a LinkedIn profile that people recommending her can link to. If she really doesn't mind getting into it, she could do all the typical marketing stuff that people do there, like writing blog posts about learning French ("business French" might be a good hook if she wants to go beyond targeting tourists), and following people and getting followers or whatever the dance is these days. And if she really, really doesn't mind she could do the same on other platforms. It's a lot of work, though, which she may or may not find soul-sucking or worth the effort, and if she doesn't know how to do it she'll want to observe and research first.
If you want to you can also lurk online on Facebook forums, subreddits, expat groups, and so on where people are likely to go for advice about either finding a good French teacher, or things to do when staying at your friend's location. Then when you see relevant questions you can plug your friend.
On more traditional lines, I wonder if she might be able to approach some hotels/hostels/pensions/airbnbs/etc. and ask them to distribute her business cards, or carry her flyers, or put up a sign for her lessons in return for a small amount and maybe offering an "X% discount for [host] guests".
Finally, if the other language she's bilingual in is English or another language that lots of tourists speak, she could offer lessons in that to local residents during the off season. (If it's English, she could probably also teach schoolkids or prepare older students for standardized exams. For that matter, some schoolkids might even need some French grammar lessons.)
If she does end up expanding to international students, she'll need to think about how to get paid (paypal?) and figure out any tax implications. (It's probably not an issue but she should check.)
posted by trig at 1:56 PM on May 24
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posted by HearHere at 1:02 PM on May 24