Earning Money as An Online Tutor

Traveling the world is the dream of people worldwide. The idea of going to a new country, walking to your own villa or a hostel before moving on to your next destination is a romantic prospect. But there’s one issue holding people back: money.

Most people never get to climb Kilimanjaro or spend 3600+ days on the road because they don’t have a way to make money. If there’s one thing that remains consistent across borders, it’s that you need money to live. Creating a side hustle, whether you’re offering online tutoring or language services to others, is a necessity.

How to Make Money as an Online Tutor

As a digital nomad, it’s crucial that you have a lot of income sources to keep money flowing into your pocket and so that you can establish some savings. So, for example, if you’re a freelancer who invoices clients and there are gaps between payments, you need to have money coming in from other sources or clients.

Platforms like Train the brain offer the opportunity to sign up and become a tutor.

Why would you want to be a tutor?

You can make great money helping others with subjects that you know well. People are even paying for homework help online – something you can definitely do.

The key to success is simple:

• Find a platform where you can offer tutoring. Platforms provide you with a potential customer base that is already interested in some form of tutoring. However, if you have a social media base built around your favorite subject, you can even sell tutoring directly.
• Set up a schedule. We’ll be covering this a lot in the next section.
• Create tutoring packages that include multiple session purchases upfront to make more money from each client you sign up.
• Price yourself competitively to attract more clients and earn a fair rate.

Tutoring is like any other side hustle in that you must treat it like a business if you want long-term success.

What does this mean?

Create a schedule where you’re either working or marketing your tutoring. If your schedule isn’t filled with students, market until you are. If you just add yourself to Train the Brain and then just sit back and relax when you’re not getting any work, you won’t make money.

Promoting yourself on social media, online tutoring across multiple platforms and impressing your students by providing impeccable tutoring services will help you make money with this side hustle.

Scheduling Traveling Around Tutoring

You’re traveling, but you need to make money, too. Many people have this dilemma, and one of the hardest things to grasp is that you need a schedule. Sure, you might want to go to Trevi Fountain this month, the Colosseum and really enjoy the nomad lifestyle.

And of course, you can do both with a schedule.

The schedule you choose should:

• Allow you to work hours where you’re not tutoring
• Optimize your working hours so that you can still enjoy your destination

For example, let’s assume that you’re in Puglia, Italy and want to enjoy the beach. You won’t want to work nights so that you can enjoy the sea during the day. This means that you either need to work:

• Early mornings
• Late nights

You need to be awake and tutor during your session, so it’s a good idea to choose a time where you still have some energy.

Depending on your preference, you can also opt to have varying schedules, such as:

• Work 3, 12-hour days and have 4 days off to travel and explore local places
• Work full days for a week and take the next week off
• Work just a few hours a day, every day

If you’re used to working from 9 to 5 and you try maintaining this schedule while traveling, you’re going to miss out on a lot of fun. Also, nomads who are going across time zones may need to alter their schedules based on each time zone.

When you let your existing students know of these changes ahead of time, it shouldn’t impact your repeat clients.

Pricing Your Services

How much will you charge for your tutoring? This is tricky because different types of tutoring demand different levels of service. For example, the average hourly charge for tutors are:

• $18, according to PayScale
• $25, according to Indeed

You may or may not be able to charge this much. For example, if you’re tutoring students in a country where salaries are lower, your rates may be lower. Alternatively, if you’re tutoring in advanced calculus, you may be able to charge more.

However, some platforms have set prices already, so this takes pricing out of the equation for you.

Subject Ideas for Choosing an Online Tutoring Specialties

Finally, you need to do one of the most important things of all: choose your specialty. Are you bad at math? Don’t offer to tutor others in this subject. The great news is that there is tutoring for everything.

Find your niche, and someone will want to learn what you’re able to teach.

A few of the most popular tutoring options are:

• Academics (math, English, history, etc.)
• SATs, GMAT and other standardized tests
• Languages
• Chemistry
• Physics
• Specialty services (for people with learning disabilities, dyslexia, etc.)

Language is a huge opportunity for tutors. For example, if you’re in Brazil and living it up, you can make many great friends and money by offering English tutoring (or your native language) to people in the area.

In fact, people worldwide are learning languages online and willing to pay good money for it.

You can 100% teach a language online. Some people need help with the basics, while others just want someone to converse with every week to improve their speaking skills.

When you find your niche (you can have multiple ones), be sure that it’s something that you love to do. If you like to teach others a subject that you love, you’ll make good money doing something that you are passionate about rather than being disengaged the entire time.