Tips to Maximize Earnings As A Private Tutor

These tips were courtesy of a long time private tutor who has developed a steady base of high paying clientele after years of networking and hard work.  To get top dollar, the first strategy is to be in a large, wealthy city.  Or at least focus on attracting clients in your town’s affluent area.  This way, you can set rates as much as $70/hr of standardized test prep.  When a good client base is built up, you could be earning an extra $10 – $20,000 per year for relatively little work.

So, here are the tips she gives to maximize your earnings as a private tutor:

First: Go where the money is.

College kids are broke, and working a student job at a university means a student job at a university wage. That means high schoolers and middle schoolers. Best part about them is that your students are not your clients: their parents are. Their six-figure-earning parents.

Second: Check out WyzAnt and make a profile there. Check out prices other tutors are charging. You could also get started contracting with an agency, which is what I did. I never poached clients from the agency I worked with, but it gave me great experience. I made between $22 to $30 an hour with the agency, and I got a lot of experience with standardized test (SAT, ACT, ISEE, AP) prep.

Third:  Professionalism is key. If you don’t project confidence and professionalism, people won’t invite you into their homes and trust you with their kids.

Fourth:  Print up some business cards. Set up a gmail account with your full name, and set up a Google voice number associated with that account. Don’t use your personal email for business correspondence. Whenever contacting clients, students, or agencies, make sure you use proper grammar and punctuation.

The clients I have now I got as referrals from friends who also tutored. They moved on, went to law school or got too busy in their graduate programs, so they referred those clients to me. Then those clients referred me to others and so on and so on.

Now I’m able to charge a minimum of $60 per hour for regular work and upwards of $70 for test prep. The main reason I’m able to charge that much is the area. I live in a large city and there are quite a number of wealthy people with kids in private schools. I do good work, my students improve, and my clients are happy.

The real money is in-home tutoring.