Clever Apple - How to Start a Tutor Business

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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.

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.

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.

Finding Followers for your Tutor Business

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My pug enjoying the snow.

My pug enjoying the snow.

It has been a crazy week here. We did survive almost a foot of snow. It has been melting during the day and then refreezing at night which makes me think of driving around an ice skating rink. The only difference is there are now steep drops if you skate off the rink.

We did our revised post earlier this week – http://cleverapple.com/helping-customers-see-your-facebook-posts/ I had meant to do a post yesterday but didn’t get around to it. Normally I don’t have to drive, now I am everyone’s chauffeur. Hopefully the snow melts and the roads get back to normal at least for a few days next week.

We talked some in Tuesdays article about facebook. I had a few questions about getting some initial followers of your page. The problem of course is when you have just a few followers then people are leery about joining your group. I have found that when you have around 100 or so, that reluctance begins to disappear. Here are some suggestions in getting the first 100 followers.

  1. Ask your immediate family on Facebook – as them to follow your page, and then share a post on their timeline. You should have made a good welcome post telling everyone what you’ll be posting, they can share that post with their friends.
  2. Ask your friends list – ask them to share it too.
  3. You can advertise on Facebook, with a goal of getting likes. We’ve done some testing and found that ‘normal’ advertising brings in just as many likes. Promote your welcome post – if you’re tutoring locally then just advertise local – even if you’re tutoring nationally you can start local with your advertising.
  4. Post something every day – every other day. Good content that is related to whatever you’re tutoring.
  5. Engage with your audience.

I hope you have a great weekend.

Helping customers see your Facebook posts

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facebook-postsI mentioned Thursday that we’ll be doing a new series – taking old blog posts and adding additional items that would make them better.

I like Facebook – it has changed over the years though. When business pages first began, almost everyone saw everything that you posted. Now that isn’t the case. A post you make will shop up occasionally and maybe not at all. The big change with Facebook was their advertising. You can ‘push’ a post and then it will be shown to all of your followers (and their friends and random people too).

Here is a post we made about Facebook in 2014 – http://cleverapple.com/tutor-tips-continue-you-have-a-facebook-page-now-what/

So how do you get more of your posts to show up?

  1. Make your posts useful for your target market. If you teach high school math them that is what your page should focus on. At least ¾ of your page should contain content related to that.
  2. Be a news source. The big snow last week would have been a wonderful time to highlight news if you’re tutoring locally. Is school out? Are there areas in town that have been having accidents?
  3. Let knew followers know that the more they react to things you post (like, comment, share) the more likely they will see your future posts.
  4. Explain to them how they can find out when you post – normally they should see it on the left side nav bar. If your business / page isn’t there they can modify things that are shown, they just need to click “edit favorites”.

I hope you have a great day.

Early Ad test results

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We wrote an article on our sister site – http://www.webpageplanner.com/creating-all-of-the-images-for-google-ads-in-less-than-fifteen-minutes about how to use images for Google Adwords. I mentioned that it was cheaper. Today I just wanted to give you some numbers. One note we won’t go into results until we give each of the campaigns a $100 / spend. Currently we are spending about $25 / day for each of the campaigns.

Image Ads – 17k impressions / 129 clicks / Spend $26.79 / Cost 21 cents/ click

Normal Ads – 3k impressions / 17 clicks Spend $26.03 / Cost per click $1.53

Again these are preliminary numbers but we get 9 x more clicks for the same price. Again research is still ongoing just wanted to let you know some early test results.

Facebook Ads, Facebook Analytics – tips for tweaking and tuning your advertising

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A Saturday post, I know a little different. I’m in the middle of watching the Army / Navy game (go Army), I served our country proudly in the late 80’s.

Watch the video below, if you need to watch it again.

Facebook gives you a ton of information and how people who like / friend you are using it and digesting your content. We’ll be doing a more in depth study of a number of these analytics later, but just know they are there and know that you need to be increase / monitoring things at least weekly.

Get a spreadsheet and Create columns for these items from the right side of your Facebook page.

FaceBook Ads and AnalyticsPost Reach –
Post Engagement –
Website Clicks –
Number of likes –

You’ll want each of those numbers to go up.

Review things from the ad you ran. How well did it do. We’ll be talking some more about tweaking and tuning things. Did you sell anything – did you get any new clients, phone calls, emails, facebook fans. Advertising is all about conversions, but conversions can take many different forms.

I had a client once that was complaining because we spent almost $3000 in a month. I did a hangout with him and we reviewed his Google analytics and showed him how that $3000 made him $9430. He had no complaints after that and asked me to spend more.

We will work on helping you get the right ad, in front of the right prospect so you’ll make money too. This may take some tweaking, tuning and testing, but it is possible.

As always if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask.

If you want us to take care of your Facebook advertising, our packages start at about $100 a month and go up from there. If you think you might be interested, send us a note and we’ll send you the details.

How to Create a Local Facebook Ads

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We know Facebook ads work. You can target the Facebook ad to your location. Later this week we’ll talk about tweaking and tuning your ad.

Here are the steps –

  1. Log into your business Facebook account.
  2. Click promote the blue button on the right.
  3. Click Promote your Website.
  4. Add the location you want your ad shown to. You can be a little broad here, then narrow it down.
  5. Interests – What are the interests you want to concentrate on. Again this is a section you’ll be tweaking and tuning.
  6. Think of who your ideal client is. Then input the Age and Gender.
  7. Daily budget – you can adjust it.
  8. Near where it says “Ad Creative” Click Edit. Add your headline, text and an image.
  9. When you’re finished submit the ad.

We’ll talk some about tweaking and tuning things later, but for now you have an ad submitted. It takes Facebook usually less than an hour to approve your ad (or not).

Enjoy your Monday!