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Promotion Ideas

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It’s been awhile since I’ve posted. We’ve been pretty busy with our NCLEX tutoring site.

We have talked quite a bit over the years about discounts around the holidays. What if you need the cash flow? We all get in a tight spot every now and then. Here are a few ways to give discounts, while adding to your bottom line. Use these ONLY if you have plenty of TIME (you’re not booked).

1) Create a discount(s) that gives extra tutor sessions.
2) Email your current students – offer them buy / prepay for x number of tutor sessions and get some free.
3) Add something of value to your tutor packages for a limited time – buy five sessions today and get free  entrance to the weekend studyathon… or something similar.

Those are some ideas. If you would like we can do a tour of our NCLEX platoform, which helps streamline most of the things you have to do, just let me know by posting a comment in our Facebook.

Improve your sales process for more tutor business

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Improve your Tutor Business

Improve your Tutor Business

I want to share with you today a couple of changes I made to my NCLEX Tutor website and how those changes worked.

Here was the visitor flow before.

Step 1 –

A qualified visitor fills out a form detailing their Nursing student history.

Step 2 –

Follow up email from us – letting them know we received the email. Making sure they had the required book in order to take the assessment tests.

Step 3 –

They responded they did have it, we would respond letting them know to take three assessment tests, email them to us and then we would let them know what would happen moving forward.

Step 4 –

They email the results to us / we send them a spreadsheet and a calendar.

Step 5 – hopefully they ordered.

So why the long process. One thing we wanted to do was to filter out a couple of things. Our program requires the student do a certain amount of work. We can tutor them 20 sessions a week, but if they don’t put some effort into studying then it won’t matter. We are providing them with something valuable as a freebie (they get an assessment and a calendar and spreadsheet highlighting what they need to study).

What Changed / Why I changed it

We monitor sales and ad spend very closely. We want to make a profit with our advertising, like you do (I hope). We had a week where we spent a few hundred bucks and hadn’t made a single sale. So we paused the ads and reviewed things – what could we tweak to make things work better.

I decided to work first on the system we used (the steps above).

We decided to smooth things out a bit and showcase what we’re doing for the student.

We decided instead of emailing results in Step 4, we would segment things. We Emailed them the spreadsheet with a note. To better serve you and create a perfect calendar we need to call you so we can ask you some more questions about what your situation is.  We would give them some times to schedule the phone call and then we would call the student. During the conversation, we would learn more about the student, talk to them about creating the tutor program and more importantly speak with them about the different solutions we offered them.

After the call we would email them with the calendar and a discount code – the code included a time limit.

We emailed two customers in our pipeline and telephoned them, sent the calendar and had two new customers. So we have restarted the ad campaign, again we’ll keep you updated.

So how can you implement this?

  1. Try to offer a freebie that allows you to telephone the customer. Doing this lets your prospective student (or their parents) how well you do your job.
  2. Make your freebie something that is useful and will help them even if they don’t decide to tutor with you.
  3. One thing we’ll be working on is shrinking the filter a little – just like anything else you’ll want to fine tune this as you grow your business.

Questions / Comments, we would love to hear from you.

 

Finding the Money Keywords for your Business

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Grow Your Tutor Business

Grow Your Tutor Business

What’s Happening – Hope you have been doing well. We’ve been busy here. The weather cannot decide if it wants to be spring or not but the calendar definitely says that it is spring or will be in a few days. If you’re tutoring subjects that flow with the school year, now is a great time to start planning what you’re going to do when school is out for the summer.

The Lesson –

We talked last week about finding your money keywords using Google Adwords. Now we want to use those findings and tweak our website so that we won’t have to pay for them. Some keywords are more difficult than others, but for each of them you’ll follow the same procedure.

  1. Figure out where you’re ranking now for those keywords.
  2. Review your competitors for the keywords.
  3. Ensure that you have a landing page for each of the keywords (max of two focus keywords for a page).
  4. Tweak the pages – details on how to do that can be found here – http://www.webpageplanner.com/how-to-seo-a-blog-post
  5. Make sure you have internal links to the page.
  6. Ensure that you have external links to the page (at least from all of the social media sites).
  7. Based on your competitors – formulate a plan to overtake their rankings.

We’ll be creating a video that will explain everything – should have that for you by next Thursday so stay tuned to our blog and Facebook.

Marketing Tip –

Spring break is an excellent time to have some extra three or four day long camps for whatever you’re tutoring. Parents may not have any time off, when they’re children or off. It makes a great introduction to how well you can tutor. Just make sure to learn when they break is and do some local advertising to get the word out.

 

Don’t forget –

You have realized by now how hard it is to get a customer. Now that you have the customer it is important to make sure that you’re doing a good job. You can find out from test score improvement as well as general grade improvement, but the best way is to ask the student. Every three or four tutor sessions I like to ask them the following questions.

  1. Are you learning? That should be your goal – while a test score can show improvement, asking them about it can help to reinforce that.
  2. What are we doing that you like? What is working for them? Keep doing it.
  3. What could we improve on?

Every student is different, sometimes it may take a little digging and prodding to find out what works best for them. It is worth all the effort when they recommend you to their friends.

 

Additional Income – Creating a Course for your Tutor Business (part 1)

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A better business.

So I want to change up the focus a little. We had a couple of questions from the past couple of posts / newsletters about how we create the backend for our NCLEX website. Since our blog and this newsletter are all about providing you with information that you want, that’s what we’re going to be talking about for the next few weeks. Today we’re going to talk about should you create a product or not. Creating a product, one that people log into and learn is not an easy process, the good thing is when you have finished it, then it is done and you’ll only need to update it. The NCLEX course – we’ll take a closer look at it next week on our blog, took us about three months of working 5 or 6 hours a day to complete.

We update it every few months, and we do the tutoring for it now. Has it been worth it, we’re still working on it. This summer we should break even, although this week we’ll be starting an ad campaign for one of the aspects of the site, and if it goes well then, we’ll break even before then.

So, it is important first of all to make sure that you actually have content that would make a good course online.  The history of our NCLEX course is a long one. We didn’t start off with the current one, first we created a Math course… and it flopped, then we made a flashcard course… another flop, then we built our NCLEX course and it did well. Through all of these mistakes we learned things and hopefully you’ll learn from our mistakes so you can have a successful project the first time.

Make sure –

  1. You have enough content for 8 to 12 lessons or modules. These modules you’ll want to drip out to the people that purchase your course. This means when they buy the course they’ll get access to week one, a week later the next piece of content will become available and so forth. You do this for a couple of different reasons. We’ll get into those in a bit. Let’s pretend for example that you tutor Math – you think that you could create a course that prepares someone for taking their ACT or SAT. You’ll then write out the modules and think about it.
  2. Now do some research on the internet. Search for what you’ll be selling. Example I would search for ACT Math Course. You want to make sure there are some paid advertising – if someone is paying to advertise, that means that they are making money selling it.
  3. Create a brief outline of your modules and talk with your current students (and parents) – what do they think about it – they can give you some ideas of what to add.

When you create your modules, you’ll only want to create the first few modules, until you have sold a few of them. That was my mistake with the math course. Next week on the blog we’ll talk about some things that you’ll need – we’ll show you behind the scenes at our NCLEX site. Till then work on coming up with 8 to 12 modules. Need some help, please feel free to send us a note at info@cleverapple.com

Getting Students –

Students should have had at least one test since the Christmas break – now is a great time to focus in on that. An example – “Failed your first math test, Ace the next one…” you get the idea.

Business Tip –

Using high school or college students are a great way to get some work you needed done for your business without paying an arm and a leg. Here are some tips – https://www.eremedia.com/tlnt/your-next-hire-should-be-in-high-school/

Reminders –

If your business didn’t do so well last year or you think you’ll be getting a refund from Uncle Sam – now is probably a good time to do your taxes. If you use an accountant now they are less busy, but every day that it gets closer to the tax deadline in April they will begin to get swamped. I know an accountant that gets only a couple of hours of sleep the week before the deadline and then he goes on a two week vacation the day after. Even if you think you owe, now is a good time to get them done, you just don’t need to pay until the day the payment(s) are due.

Enjoy your week!

How to Setup a Groupon Deal for your tutoring business.

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Today we’re going to explain to you how to set up a Groupon deal for  your tutor business.

Step 1 – Go to https://www.groupon.com/ Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Run a Groupon deal.

Step 2 – click the local image and fill out the form. Groupon will contact you with details about how to set up your campaign.

That is pretty simple. Before I go on, there are horror stories about using Groupon and there are some people that tell you that doing it can be bad for business. Here is one good explanation of that – http://mywifequitherjob.com/should-you-use-groupon-for-your-small-business/

So why would I say that you should test out a Groupon. So lets pretend for a minute.

Just to make the numbers easier we’ll pretend that you’re going to sell ten $10 tutor sessions for $5. So basically this is letting the groupon folks try it for free.

So you sell 10 for $5 and give Groupon half of it. So you’ve made $2.50 x 10 or $25.

Let’s say that out of those 10 new one session customers that you sell 2 of them your normal tutoring sessions.

$10 x 2 (number of customers) x 4 (months in the semester) x 8 sessions a month = $640.00 money for the semester. If you retain the customer for more than a semester then you’ve made more money.

A few things to remember –

  1. Make sure to check out the costs of doing your offer first.
  2. Don’t say you can fulfill more than you can. If you can add ten new tutor slots for a week or a month or whatever then do that. Don’t say you’ll sell 20 and then have to scramble to get the tutors.
  3. Test it and let us know how you did. I’m trying to figure out a way to do it for my businesses. If you offer something that is sold and no one ever uses again, then I can definitely see how you could lose money. Tutors generally have long term relationships with their customers. This could also be a good idea for people that sell complimentary things – like say pillows and sheets. You could Groupon the pillows, then try to sell them sheets.

Enjoy your week.

A Better Tutor Business

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Our goal this year is to help you grow your business. We plan on sending a newsletter out every couple of weeks – we also plan on posting the off weeks on our blog (on Thursday) – the blog is here.

http://cleverapple.com/our-blog/

Targeting the right people is super important to getting new students no matter if you tutor high school math or how to crochet. This week we’re going to begin an exercise in doing just that. We’ll continue to use our NCLEX site as the guinea pig, that way when we give you suggestions and things to do, we’ll do those as well and share our results.

First get a sheet of paper (or a notebook you’ll use just for this). First list all of the subjects you tutor, then list all of the different types of students that you tutor. So if you tutored high school Math you would list all of the different types of Math you tutor (Algebra, Geometry, etc), then students would be Freshmen, preparing for the ACT etc. Next I want you to think this week about what you like tutoring the most or the segment you serve. Think about your tutoring services or products and then I want you to choose your favorite. For me I like to tutor students that have failed their NCLEX, helping them to pass it makes me so happy. Today’s task isn’t super hard but it is really important, so spend some time and then choose one.

 

Getting Students –

Review your goals. How many new students do you need to reach that goal, now break it down to contacts. How many contacts does it take you to get a new student. So if it takes you 20 contacts to get a student and your goal is 2 new students each month, you’ll want to contact 40 people. Now break those down into days – how many do you need to contact?

 

Business Tip –

Need a spreadsheet for your mileage – here is a free one – https://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/mileage-tracking.html

Mile IQ is a great app you can get – https://www.mileiq.com/

Reminders –

It is the beginning of the semester, a great time to do some advertising in your schools about your tutor program. Need some ideas – here are more than a couple – http://cleverapple.com/?s=getting+tutor+students

Enjoy your week!

Some Tutor Business Tax Tips

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tutor-business-taxes

No one likes to pay taxes, but I don’t like the alternative either (if you don’t make any money in your business then you don’t owe any money). Since the last quarterly payment is due this weekend and filing your taxes is around the corner, I thought we would give you a few tips.

Note: I am not an accountant – so please seek the advice of your accountant when filing your taxes. It is impossible for me to know all the regulations that might pertain to you.

  1. Keep records – it is VERY important for you to keep good mileage records, if you use your car to travel to your student’s home. When I did this I kept a mileage log every day, with notes in it when it was a trip to someone’s home. This will be used to determine the percentage you use the vehicle for business and will help you figure out your deductions. If you haven’t been keeping records, then start keeping them now.
  2. I recommend buying a computer for just business use, that way there is no concern if you used it strictly for business (or not).
  3. Make sure your home office is just for business – otherwise you won’t be able to take the deduction. I have a room in my house that is dedicated to that, but you can start with just a corner of the living room.
  4. It may come as a surprise that you owe money. It caught me off guard the first year I was in business. After that I was more prepared. For your quarterly payments (although they really aren’t quarterly) I would set aside a certain amount of money each month, that way when payment time comes around you’ll be prepared. You can take a big hit around April 15th because you’ll have to pay any additional taxes you owe and you’ll also have to make payment one for the 2017 tax year. Now would be a great time to get a general idea of what you owe, so you can start saving for that payment.
  5. Don’t wait till the last minute to try and get all your deductions together. I make it a point to do it every week, so when tax time comes around I just have to print it and take it to the accountant. If you get a burst of business during the year, you’ll also want to speak with them because you might have to adjust your estimated payments, the same goes for if your business takes a down turn, you may be able to pay less – just ask them about it.

I hope 2017 is the best year you’ve ever had for your tutor business!

Some discount ideas for your tutor business

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rp_2003452102_30aeb442ea_m.jpgI hope your November is going well. It still feels like summer here in Kentucky. We have had so many 70 and 80 degree days I think we’re getting spoiled. Today we’re going to talk about discounts. Black Friday and the Christmas shopping season will be here before you know it. Your customers will love getting a discount from you.

  1. What kind of discount are you going to offer.
    Think for a moment about your business and where you are now. How many customers do you have, how many additional customers can you handle for the spring. Or do you need more customers now? Do you want it to be a deal for one of your current programs or something new that you’re going to develop?

    We’ll pretend that we’re booked pretty solid for the fall, we’ve talked to our current students and know that in the spring we’ll have two or three slots open. We want to get some concrete numbers so we decide to offer a couple of different discounts. One for new students and one for current students.

  2. How much are you going to discount / creating the offer.

    By now you should know how much a new student brings in with your current prices. We’ll say for our example that a new student brings in $150 / week or averages about $450 for a semester. We normally keep the students for 3 semesters so the life time value of our customer is $450 x 3 = $1350.00

    We decide we’re going to offer three different discounts – this will help us learn more about our customers and help us test out some things for the future. We want to learn what kind of discount works best.

    We will offer –
    -20% off for current tutor students that sign up and pay for their tutoring in advance for the remainder of this semester and next.
    -Buy one month get the next month of tutoring free if someone signs up to be tutored for all next semester.
    For January and Feb – buy two sessions, get one free.

  3. Implementing the discount

    Create a web page on your blog for each of the discounts. Each of the discount codes need to be different. If you get most of your business over the phone, make sure that everyone that works for you needs to ask if they have a discount code. An easy way to keep track is by using a spreadsheet.

  4. Covering all of the bases

    Limit the number of people that can take the discount and keep to those discounts. You’ll want to note this in your advertising and you’ll want to make sure to mention that on the web pages you create. Explain in detail how the discount works – don’t leave anything to their imagination.

    Example:
    20% off. Five current tutor students of Clever Apple will get 20% off for the rest of this semester and next semesters tutoring (Up to 25 sessions). Payment for these sessions must be made in advance. See below for pricing options – it includes the 20% off. Make sure to use 20off when you’re ordering.
    List the prices.

I hope this will help you get some more customers.

Next time we’ll talk some about some ways that you can get the word out.

Facebook Advertising for your Tutor Business

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Hope everyone is doing great and has plans for a wonderful holiday weekend. I wanted to share with you some results from a Facebook ad campaign we worked on the past couple of weeks.

cleverfb-1

Some highlights:

  • The campaign lasted from August 22nd till Sept. 1st 2016.
  • We were highlighting a new program for our NCLEX site – we were offering a coupon.
  • Almost 1800 people visited our website (1799).
  • We spent $189.08 for the campaign.
  • Cost per click or visit 11 cents.

 

The campaign generated 6 new signups (sales) for the monthly program we were highlighting.

3 – $9 / month plans.
2 – $19 / month plans
1 – $29 / month
===================

Total – $94.00 / month.

This is a new program so we don’t have solid numbers for how long these subscribers will stay with us. We’ll guess an average of 5 months.

Total – $$470.00

It generated a couple of other signups to.

1 @ $97
1 @ $149
==========

$246

Grand total – $716

Ad cost – $189.08

Profit – $526.92

 

So are we pleased. Yes we are. Next week we’ll go over some of the backend things we did with the ad. Probably in the middle of Sept. we’ll be tweaking the ad a little and running it again to see how folks respond. The greatest thing was the 11 cents / click. We do Google advertising quite a bit, the lowest I can get a click thru for if everything is working perfectly is $1 to $1.25 a click.

Enjoy your day and if you have any question let us know.

Pokeman Go and your tutor business

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pokeman-goUnless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about Pokeman Go.

Here is a link that talks about the game.

http://www.pokemon.com/us/pokemon-video-games/pokemon-go/

So you get the game, then you go outside and search for characters to add to your game. If you see people wondering around mindlessly bumping into stuff while they are looking down at their cell phone, then that is probably what they are doing.

I think this is an opportunity for businesses since you can ‘buy’ a lure. This lure adds one of the characters to a location that you choose. These lures are in place for 30 minutes. Like any new opportunity that comes along for advertising the cost is currently $10 but I’m pretty sure that it will be going up in the near future.

I’m still doing some research on exactly how it works – do you choose the character, is it random. If you purchase two lures at different times of the day or different days, are they the same character that shows up or is it different. I have a bunch of ideas about how this could work for businesses. What I need to think about is how that it could work to increase traffic and sales for your tutor business. I’m sure I’ll think of one and then I’ll make sure to share it with you.

If you had a normal business – like say a coffee shop then you could buy a lure when you didn’t have much business, then advertise that you bought a lure and that they will be there between this time and that.

Do you guys have any ideas? Let us know in the comments or our Facebook page.