How to Become An Online Tutor: Online Tutoring Guide for Aspiring Tutors

Last updated: October 24, 2023

There’s something really special about taking all the knowledge you’ve learned over the years and passing it on to someone else. Becoming a tutor can allow you to help someone learning a new skill or field improve their knowledge and understanding of a topic so that they can find success in it. Online tutoring can range from teaching high school students chemistry to university-level calculus. It can also be a fun skill, such as teaching piano online. You’ll need to have some credentials to be able to tutor people, but with your skills, some epic teaching materials, and an ability to attract students into your online tutoring business, you’ll be well on your way to understanding how to become an online tutor.

1. Gain credentials to prepare you for tutoring
2. Choose the best remote platform to offer tutoring online
3. Build out your teaching materials
4. Set a reasonable rate as an online tutor
5. Find students looking for online tutoring
6. Help the learner achieve their goals
7. Hire other tutors to expand your business
8. Sell your teaching materials to other tutors

How to Become an Online Tutor in 2023

1. Gain credentials to prepare you for tutoring

What first drew you to the idea of online tutoring? Did you graduate with a degree in a specialized academic field? Or maybe you became a master at something unique, like a cool hobby. The information you’ve got stored in your brain can be so helpful to someone starting. When people look for teachers or companies that offer tutoring, they’re looking for someone with the skills, competence, and education to help them. Not only do you need to have completed the right training for what you teach, but you’ve also got to be pretty good at teaching that content to others in a simplified way that’s easy for them to understand.

You can gain the knowledge and credentials to tutor someone by being a college student, teaching a high school student, or graduating with a degree in your field. If the tutoring you’re sharing isn’t based on a school system, you’ll need to supply other credentials or highlight how you’ve developed skills. If you’re tutoring people in math, you’ll want a math degree with a high GPA. If you’re training someone in business, you’ll be better off creating online courses for them with some mentorship offered along the way. Still, you’ll need to have built a successful business before teaching that to others.

Aside from the technical know-how, being a tutor isn’t as simple as just knowing the subject. How engaging are you? How easily can you break down complicated subjects into simplified lessons? Can you share your experience learning a subject with someone so they can understand the best way to learn a subject? In addition to having a degree in your field, you might also go to a teacher’s college to help you learn how to teach and get tutoring certification. Or you could take public speaking classes to help you master your ability to communicate in a fun and effective way. Teaching online needs to be more engaging than teaching in-person as people often get exhausted from watching videos online. When preparing yourself to become a tutor, think about the whole tutoring experience. Examine all the skills you’ll need to be an effective tutor online.

2. Choose the best remote platform to offer tutoring online

Becoming an online tutor is easy as there are excellent platforms where you can offer tutoring online. For example, if you want to start your own tutoring platform, you can use a platform like Payhip. Payhip has an online course feature where students can learn at their own pace as you drip out content each week or share it all at once (your choice). Once students complete the course, they can receive a certificate from you to use as their own credentials for course completion.

Alternatively, you can become an online tutor by offering coaching services. For example, if you teach content writing online, you might have services where you help people by reviewing their drafts in a 1:1 setting. You can set up video calls to give people feedback and milestones along the way.

Tutors can also set up a digital downloads section on the Payhip platform. Not everyone learns from courses or 1:1 interactions. This could be a helpful add-on if you want to write an ebook as an author or sell digital downloads that complement the online courses you sell or the coaching services you offer.

The cool thing about Payhip is that you can bundle online courses with coaching services and digital products all on the same website. This can expand your online tutoring job to ensure you build a fully functional business. If you take advantage of all the fantastic features Payhip offers, you won’t need to spend hours looking for jobs. You’ll have multiple ways to make money from your students while ensuring they get the proper education, skills, tools, and experience they need in their field.

You can also stay on Payhip’s Free Forever plan as you build your website and work on attracting your first few students, which only charges a 5% transaction fee per sale once the money starts rolling in. You can take your time to do outreach and build your network of students when you first start as an online tutor. Alternatively, you can join as an online tutor for a third-party site like Preply. But it’s always best to own the whole website and student funnel when creating a community of students.

3. Build out your teaching materials

As a tutor, you’ll need to build out your teaching materials. You’ll need presentations if you’re creating a live course or worksheets if there are homework projects you’ll assign to help strengthen a student’s knowledge. Ultimately, you’ll need to have resources that not only people can take notes from but also allow them to have an application to what they’re learning. After all, most learning comes from doing it instead of the classroom. Creating materials that would enable people to practice what you’ve taught will be what helps level up the knowledge so that students can succeed.

You can create teaching resources using Canva, PhotoShop, Google Slides, and more tools. You’ll be able to find templates online for making worksheets, puzzles, task cards, flashcards, and more. As a tutor, you’ll need to decide what types of resources you’ll need to create based on the topic and grade level you teach. For example, if you tutor young kids, you might have word searches or crossword puzzles for them to do as homework. However, if you’re teaching at a university level, you might only create slides with set office hours for 1:1 conversations.

4. Set a reasonable rate as an online tutor

Setting rates for your tutoring business will depend on the skill level of the tutors in your program and the niche they teach in. For example, for elementary or high school students, your tutor rate might cost $25/hour, where you’ll pay a tutor $15 an hour, and your business keeps $10. However, you might charge $100/hour or more if your tutor has further education or impressive credentials.

Alternatively, if you’re creating an online course, you might charge up to $300 for an introductory course. However, an advanced course might cost students $1,500 to $2,500 depending on how hands-on you are, how high-level the content is, and more.

5. Find students looking for online tutoring

You can’t become an online tutor without any students enrolled in your business. You can find students by running ads for your business, reaching out to local schools and partnering with them, adding signs or posters on university or college campuses, hosting a booth during orientation week at a university or college, creating a website that’s optimized for search engines, adding a blog on your website to drive traffic, sharing clips of your course material on social media, and more.

Alternatively, you can also build a personal brand around yourself as an expert, add a listing in your local newspaper or classified websites, add your business to tutoring directories, go on podcasts sharing your knowledge as an industry expert, tell students to tell their classmates about you if they need help, and more.

So, there are multiple ways to help you grow your business. You can try some of the above to see what drives people to your business most profitably.

6. Help the learner achieve their goals

Once you’ve enrolled students in your business, you need to help them succeed. Ask students what their goals for your sessions are and create a plan to help them get there. While tutoring them, you should have projects that you grade to help ensure that they’re ready for any upcoming academic tests in their schools. Giving them practice tests and helping them solve the answers without doing the work for them will help them understand your teaching method. It would help if you taught the subject in a way that clicks with them. So, testing them in your session or 1:1 will ensure that you know they’re absorbing information well.

7. Hire other tutors to expand your business

The difference between being a freelance online tutor and creating a fully operational business depends on your ability to scale your business. Hiring online tutors for your business will help you generate more sales as you can teach more subjects without doing all the work yourself. You can outsource the work to experts in various fields to create course content up to your standards while profiting from the material. You might pay a tutor a one-time fee or by the hour to create a course on a subject that’s engaging, actionable, and easy to understand. Then, you can use that course to share with others. You might hire them to answer the occasional question for 1:1 coaching services. However, you can set a price that allows the tutor to earn some income while the business still makes a profit.

There’s no such thing as a one-person business. A one-person business is just a freelance tutor trading time for money. The goal is to make money teaching passively, so you earn more with less work. When you scale your business to hire multiple online tutors, you can build an online community that can one day be sold for an even higher profit. Plus, when you expand your business, you’ll meet many unique personalities with different communication skills that’ll allow all your tutors to become masters at their craft. You can find tutors via job board sites like FlexJobs. Once you create your posting, you can ask people to make an example lesson via a video to showcase how they teach, how engaging they are, and how much expertise they have in a subject area. You also want to be able to test candidates to ensure they truly understand their area of expertise with a level of depth.

8. Sell your teaching materials to other tutors

As you grow your tutoring business, you can search for other ways to make money from your courses, resources, and more. One of the assets you can sell is your teaching materials to other tutors. If you teach at a college level, you might offer materials that tutors can teach to students if you don’t have the capacity to provide the support people need. You’ll always have unique assets and knowledge you can share once you start your business, so you won’t have to pour hours into creating more. You might share links to your teaching materials on Pinterest so people can buy the assets directly from your website. On Pinterest, people can freely share links to their product pages. You might also join teacher forums to let them know a few tips for tutoring in your field while sharing a link to the information assets you offer. If you’re an academic, you might share additional tutoring resources with your teaching assistant to help support their students. Some people might have a whole site devoted to assets, but it’s best to keep everything on your tutoring business website so that people choose your business first when looking for an online tutor.

Time to become a tutor

Now that you understand the fundamentals of how to become a tutor, it’s time to take action to start your journey as one. Whether you create a tutorial as a course or a lab session for your students is up to you. Giving students the knowledge, perspective, and experience to understand a topic allows them to become experts in their field, pass a challenging class, or pursue a career path. If you’ve been thinking about launching a tutoring business, you can sign up for Payhip today to offer online courses, membership sites, digital downloads, physical products, or 1:1 consultation services.