GOOGLE LINKS and ADVERTISING

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Permalink Reply by Christian Stapfer on February 27, 2010 at 9:23am

Since no one has answered yet let me offer some ideas:
First, I have not seen your primary web presence. Since you are trying to do online tutoring, I think it is necessary for you to have some reasonably attractive and informative web presence - but I don't think it is necessary to do a great deal of duplication. Are you sure that your primary web presence is ok? That there is nothing that might possibly put students off? (By all means have other people take a look at it and have them tell you frankly how they react.)
Of course, it might be useful to have entries in myspace, facebook and, who knows, twitter: but I think you should use these sites merely to refer interested students to your main web presence. Otherwise you'll only get bogged down maintaining a great deal of redundant information.
As to how you can create your profile on myspace or facebook: why don't you search youtube for some instructional videos on this topic? I believe there are some such videos that can get you started. (I wouldn't be surprised if myspace , facebook, and twitter had such instructional videos right on their sites.) And if you do not want to make those entries your primary web presence, then, I think, it's not going to be much work.
Why do other online tutoring sites have "thousands of clients" whereas you find it difficult to attract even a single paying client? (Note: if a commercial operation claims to have "thousands of clients", that might not really be true but only part of the impression they have to convey.)
Let me see: For one, tutorvista has easy access to a large reservoir of relatively cheap tutors. For another, tutor.com is, I believe, not a purely commercial operation: some of its tutors are volunteers, and they have special arrangements with public libraries, maybe possibly also with schools: which may help them acquire paying clients, too. Also, tutorvista and tutor.com have been in the online-tutoring business for several years now: they have a relatively impressive online-presence and reasonably good online-tutoring tools. Also: if they have been doing a good job the last few years then, in a new market like this, the number of clients tends to grow exponentially (until there is too much competition or too little demand to support that kind of growth). For you, the situation is much different: It is not clear (to me) how impressive your web presence happens to be and what your tools are; you seem to be working alone (yet want to compete with these already relatively large organizations!) and you try to get started when the competition is way ahead of you (in: advertising, tools, word of mouth / reputation, number of people working for them, ...).

As long as you are working alone (and it seems to me that you are, indeed working alone) as a tutor it does (to me) not seem a good idea to directly compete with a large operation like tutorvista or tutor.com. Instead, I would advise you to offer a more personal online-tutoring relationship. Because that's perhaps the only competitive advantage that you have at the moment as compared to established companies like tutor.com and tutorvista.

As to finding sites where you can advertise for free on the web: why not do a google search or, again, try to find a youtube video for that? My searching youtube with "advertise for free" did turn up some videos that just might be useful.

Regards,
Christian

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Permalink Reply by Gihane Doeman on February 28, 2010 at 9:57pm

Since no one has answered yet let me offer some ideas:
First, I have not seen your primary web presence. Since you are trying to do online tutoring, I think it is necessary for you to have some reasonably attractive and informative web presence - but I don't think it is necessary to do a great deal of duplication. Are you sure that your primary web presence is ok? That there is nothing that might possibly put students off? (By all means have other people take a look at it and have them tell you frankly how they react.)


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Hi chris. thanks for answering. I am really not sure what you mean by "web presence." Do you mean my website? Or do you mean the methods of advertising. Did you even see my website? Im confused. However, I will take your advise and see if anything on youtube will help. Im actually going to post a video to youtube advertising my site.Now I have read some of your post on here. Where did you specifically find your clients. I know you tutor for free, but I would still like to know. Were they students you were already tutoring face to face and then started to do tutor them online or what? Im curious.

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Permalink Reply by Christian Stapfer on March 1, 2010 at 10:03pm

Hi Gihane.

No, I haven't seen your website (I tried to find a link to it in one of your posts but did not succeed) and, yes, by "web presence" I did mean something like a website or a blog: something that allows you to present your complete offer, not just to place a small ad...

If you are able to produce a nice video for youtube that's a really good idea, I think: very likely much more effective than a mere advertisement.

It is true that I did face-to-face tutoring initially. But since I happened to advertise face-to-face tutoring on the web, I pretty soon got a first request from someone from a remote corner of Switzerland (a young lady who happened to live on a farm in the mountains - and, surprisingly perhaps, she had a computer and an internet connection!). We tried tutoring by phone first, but within just a few days switched to online collaboration (with Microsoft's NetMeeting at the time). That first online collaboration continued for about 9 months, until the student had improved to the point of being able to continue learning math on her own...
After that experience I began advertising my free support as an online-tutor as well. But I never tried to shift one of my face-to-face students over to online collaboration (I suppose because I felt that online-tutoring was a lower quality kind of tutoring as compared to face-to-face tutoring). So for several years I did both face-to-face and online tutoring.
Then, when requests for online-tutoring began to come in more often, and I finally managed to get a tablet-pc and a free whiteboard (of my own making) that's fully compatible with the tablet-pc (i.e. that takes full advantage of the tablet-pc's pen input: resolution and pressure information) I decided that it was no longer necessary, maybe not even useful to do my tutoring face-to-face. So I stopped advertising face-to-face tutoring, thus switching to online-tutoring only.
I still get requests for face-to-face tutoring from time to time, but I almost always refuse to do that because face-to-face tutoring has so many disadvantages for me (and, I believe, for the student as well). Besides, most students who manage to find my ad on the internet already do have a sufficiently good internet connection to at least try online-tutoring.

As regards advertising: I have been doing my advertising online only for several years now. If I should happen to have too few students (which hardly ever happens anymore) I place one or two ads on free advertising sites (I usually have to take those additional ads rather quickly down again because they tend to attract too many students, thus driving me into overload). And then, there is my website. Judging from the statistics (Google Analytics) that I get for my website, it catches enough traffic to produce a sufficient trickle of requests to keep me busy. Sometimes I even have to refuse to support additional students. By the way: are you analyzing the statistics of your own website. Do you even collect statistics for your website? If not: try Google Analytics, it's easy (as long as you don't try to use advanced features), and it's free...

Um, oh I forgot one ad that I have placed permanently. It is just one ad in a list of about 80 tutors (most of them offering face-to-face tutoring, and all of them - except myself - expecting to be paid, of course). That's an ad on a website that seems to catch significantly more traffic than my own, but it is specialized to math teaching and tutoring. The owner has a Ph.D. in mathematics and is even a lecturer at the University here in Zurich, I believe. At least it must have been that way when I managed to get my homepage online the first time. Because I could see that my homepage quite suddenly appeared on the first few pages of a Google search for the relevant keywords (this is true only for a search limited to German, my homepage hardly ever pops up on the first few pages of a search for pages in English - which is perhaps all the better, because my English is not as good as it probably should be if I were to tutor a native speaker of English).

Regards,
Christian

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Permalink Reply by Gihane Doeman on March 1, 2010 at 10:28pm

thank you for your response. Very informative. I would really like to know what are the exact free site you seem to get the most response from. I mean there are so many. I tried to google free classifies. It brings up millions of sites. Some are highly trafficked. Some have barely any ads. Plus I have to wonder how many people go looking for a site made up just of ads. Besides craigslist....Anyway here is my site. www.AceOnlineTutoring.com

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Permalink Reply by Christian Stapfer on March 2, 2010 at 12:50am

Hi Gihane.

Your website looks ok to me, though you don't have a video showing online tutoring in action, so to speak. That might be an advantage, depending on how impressive / natural / pleasant you can make online tutoring appear to be in that video...

The sites where I have placed ads in the past were all in German (so probably of little use to you). The first was http://www.flohmarkt.ch/subcat.php?cid=109. I got my first online student through that site in 2002. I stopped using it when it began to look too crappy for my taste.
Then I used http://www.piazza.ch/de/kategorie/dienstleistungen and / or http://www.gratis-inserate.ch/.
Since I am getting enough requests without putting up any ads on these sites I have not done so for at least two years now.

In addition to these three sites, as I wrote, there is the site of Dr. Christof Luchsinger who has a not particularly impressive list of tutors (offering mostly face-to-face tutoring) http://www.luchsinger-mathematics.ch/kurse/nhl.html
My name and a link to my homepage are on this list as well: they have been on that list for about 5 years now. Depending on what Dr. Luchsinger does to promote his list of tutors, there may be more to it than being merely one dull list of names among many - but I do not know the particulars of what Dr. Luchsinger is doing ;-)
Dr. Luchsinger seems to be mostly teaching statistics and financial / business mathematics, which is not really my field (although I am a math tutor).

There are also specialized websites that advertise tutors only where one can put up ones ad, if not for free then at least at a relatively moderate price. - But I have never tried one of those, yet.

There are perhaps indirect forms of promoting my free math tutoring as well because I sometimes contribute to blogs that concern themselves with education in general and online-tutoring in particular. Even though the people who read those blogs regularly are unlikely to be looking for math tutoring, my entries to those blogs may produce some accidental search hits and they might conceivably slightly increase the rank of my homepage in Google searches.

Regards,
Christian

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