What can I do to maximise the number of students I get from the site?It is very easy to multiple the number of students you get from this site several fold. We see from everyday running a big disparity between the most and least successful tutors. This page was written to give some advise on how best to get the most from irish-grinds.com and the Grinds Ireland free tutoring service. The first three suggestions relate to filling in the registration form, the rest to simple things you can do after.1. Wise tutors sell themselves!Use the additional information section of the application form to it's full advantage. You want to appear personal, real but maybe not too down to earth. It mite be a bad idea to be using slang and check your spelling. Note that if your main audience is junior and leaving cert students, it is most likely their parents that will contact you, and know that they are looking for someone to trust with their son's or daughter's education. The opposite is the case if you are a third level or university tutor, you will almost certainly be contacted by the intended student themselves. They sometimes are looking for someone who is an authority in the subject but other times for someone they can relate to, i.e. someone who has passed a similar course only a few years prior.2. Location of Studies.Where can you give grinds. This is not as simple as simply mentioning your rough location. Whether using a well known search engine, our the irish-grinds.com own search tool. Students or their parents, search with keywords. If someone searches for grinds in a particular village or small town, you need to have mentioned that place for your name to appear. It's not just enough to mention your county's name, but try to list all the villages, towns you are willing to service. This will increase drastically the number of contacts you make because of the service.If you are a third level tutor, the most important thing is to mention any universities, colleges or Institutes of Technologies, plus their abbreviations you are near. Remember people search by keywords! Note, if you don't write your county's name, your details will be completely excluded from the associated Grinds Ireland website . We are not a human edited service and it's unfeasible to manually add someone's county into the database. 3. Prices and ratesMoney is obviously an important factor when a student/parent is considering contacting you. We can't really advise you on the correct rate for private tuition because for different locations, times and tutors, it's quite different. Some tutors of higher education may want to charge more, so use all the space available to tell why you are worth the money. If you give notes or books with this price, mention it in the additional info. The name space is also great place to use, placing your academic intials after your name can be a really good idea. Also mentioning your full name, and not just your last or first can instill more confidence.If you've never given grinds before, and really don't know how much is suitable, check to see how much other tutors of a similar background are charging. Ask yourself as a "new commer", can you honestly charge as much as someone with years of experience. You may also need to be more competitive in inner-city areas, or around universities were we have a higher density of tutors. Country and small town tutors may get less students, but are freer to choose their hourly rate. The Irish Grinds system allows you to enter a range of values and not just one fixed price. So for example if your small class rate is 9 euro and your one-on-one intensive tutoring is 12 euros. You could enter a range like 9.00-12.00. These rates are not suggested rates, just a way of demonstracting a correct format. Please don't lie about your rate. There is nothing more annoying than phoning up a tutor, to find out they've understated their hourly rate so they could get more calls. Do you really expect the person you've lied to, to hire you to teach their son or daughter. The most you will get from this tactic is a few angry exchanges by email or telephone from people who live locally to you. Ask yourself do you want this? 4. It is very important to get your webpage indexed in the major search engines.Out of some 500 tutors, only about 150 have got their webpages indexed by google and this is a big advantage to them. Those 150 tutors can have their webpages at the very top of search engines for their particular set of keywords, and services such as our special search only looks though these indexed pages. Although we do submit all our tutors' pages to the major search engines, most search engines only index a percentage of our pages. They attach an importance to a particular page by the number of other pages on the internet linking to it. So it is advisible to link to your page from any other site you can. The more the better as the higher up on a search engines results you will appear.There are many great internet noticeboards and discussion boards on the internet, some of them will be unique to your area. If you open an account with them, most of whom are entirely free, you can post an ad about your ability to offer private lessons to students. Don't forget to link to your irish-grinds.com webpage. This will get it indexed and improve its rank as mentioned above. But this is not the only reason to open an account, Internet forums and online discussion groups can also be a great place to form relationships with potential students. They are normally great informal settings, that after you get used to, can be great fun. Most of these as you can see are regional. We invite you to do google search for a discussion group or noticeboard in your area, but also you may consider posting to those who aim at a more global audience. The more the better! 5. Still want more students and you are you willing to pay for it.Unfortunately Grinds Ireland doesn't as yet offer a premium service. We are committed to databasing as many of Ireland's tutors as possible for easy to use reference by students or parent. Offering additional services to paying costumers would get in the way of this. But that's not to say their is nothing you can do to increase the number of students who view your details and the number of potential students. You may decide to open a Google Adword account and for set keywords you can direct internet users to your web details. This is very inexpensive with as little as 5 cents for most visits. You can set a daily limit on the amount you spend, target people from only certain counties. It's really a very economical way to increase the number of student and most importantly you are in control. If you want a webpage with no other advertisements for this please contact us below. |