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Build your Tutor Website – Setting up Hosting – Install WordPress

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Been a crazy week here – one of those that I just want to forget. Tonight will make five funeral visitations that I’ve had in two weeks. Thankfully no immediate family, but a reminder that life is short so we should take advantage of every day.

We’re continuing our series on building your website. Today we’re going to buy hosting and install wordpress.

Below is the first video –

  1. Log into Godaddy.
  2. Find where you change the DNS.
  3. Purchase hosting (if you haven’t yet) – the host we use is http://www.bluehost.com/track/blitzpromo/
  4. Find out the DNS numbers you’re going to input in Godaddy. If you use Bluehost they are currently –
    DREAMHOST.COM           66.33.206.206
    NS2.DREAMHOST.COM           208.97.182.10
    NS3.DREAMHOST.COM           66.33.216.216
  5. Wait a half hour or so. Check to see if your domain is live.

 

The second video is for installing wordpress.

Just follow the instructions. Remember if you have a different host – then do a search if they don’t give clear inst

Using the NCAA tournament to get more business.

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Teamwork

Teamwork (Photo credits: www.xpressmats.com)

Welcome to the Friday promote your tutor business blog.

If you’re like me, maybe you’re watching the NCAA tournament. This got me to thinking about some ways you may be able to incorporate the tournament into helping build your business. It works for colleges but it could work for you as well (even if you tutor grade school and high school). Many folks love sports and discounts, so what you want to do is to incorporate both of them.

You’ll probably want to make sure a team in your state is in your tournament, so it wouldn’t work very well in Kentucky this year (but maybe next year). There are a number of different ways you can do it, use your imagination and I’m sure you’ll be able to come up with something on your own.  Here’s my idea.

1. Run the contest on your facebook page and blog.
2. For every win your team gets you’ll have a 10% discount. If the team loses then they’ll get have of the discount rate it was at. The next day after a game – give them a special number to call and make sure you are able to answer the telephone. So if your team wins two games, the discount would be 20%. They lose the next game so the discount would go down to 10%.

3. Make daily posts on your facebook / blog / twitter etc. Build up the excitement and anticipation. Make sure they realize they could lose the discount at any time (by half).

4. Set and keep firm time limits. Let them know when they need to order by.  Give a limit of total number of discounts. Let them know when your team loses, what the discount is and when they need to order.

Hopefully this will help you land a few more sales during a time when most of the US is focused on basketball.

Enjoy your weekend, I’m going to go watch the game.

Ideas for promoting your Spring Break program

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Panama City Beach, Florida, during spring break

Panama City Beach, Florida, during spring break (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today we’re going to talk about ways to promote your Spring Break programs. We talked a little bit in our last newsletter about using a Spring Break program to increase your revenue. We’ll pretend that we’re going to have a Spring Break camp on Thursday / Friday during normal school hours. We’ll be doing the camp for any high-schoolers and we’ll be talking about how to study and how to take tests. On Friday afternoon we’ll have a bonus ACT / SAT prep program.

So where would we advertise this?

  1. We would announce it on our Facebook / Google plus / newsletter and blog. We want to do this before we advertise, because we may be able to fill up the class by doing this alone. We want to do this 3 weeks or so before the break. In your advertising you want to make sure you highlight what you’re doing, where it is, how much it costs and how it benefits.
  2. At the same time you do #1 you’ll want to make sure to inform your current customers.
  3.  A couple of weeks from the event put up some brochures / tear sheets in places where your potential customers hang out. You should already have a list of these; use the ones that have worked well for you.
  4. Ask your local schools if you can put up some posters on their bulletin boards.
  5. Contact former clients (I use email for this) – letting them know about the Spring program.

You should now have filled up your class, or you should have enough students so the program would be profitable for you.

Enjoy your weekend.

Creative Ways of Advertising your Tutor Business – Using Snow Go Reports

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Description unavailable

Description unavailable (Photo credit: pennstatelive)

Hope you have had a wonderful week. Today we’re going to talk about an easy way to promote your tutor business. We have a lot of snow days in our part of the country. If you notice there are a lot of news outlets that run snow / go reports. I’m not suggesting you advertise with major outlets because it can be very expensive. What you can do is advertise with other folks that provide the same information.

For example in our region of the country we have a Facebook fan site that is dedicated to providing us with good information about school closings. There are also websites dedicated to this.

The hardest part will be finding someone that provides good information consistently. Once you’ve found a good source you want to contact them. An email could look something like this –

Dear (make sure to use their name),

We interested in advertising our tutor business on your website / school closing postings / etc. We would be willing to pay you $50 / month for postings during the months of Feb. and March.

Please let us know if this interests you.

They will probably be flattered or amazed that you would want to advertise with them. Make sure you use a contract, then send them your payment.

Your ad could like something like this –

This Snow Go report brought to you by Acme Tutoring. We offering you $23 off your first tutor session. You can find the details at our website (include the url) or call us at your phone number.

Enjoy your Weekend!

Promoting your Tutor Business – Getting Started

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elevator

elevator (Photo credit: Jose R. Borras)

Hey it’s Friday. Hope your week has been going well. It has gotten cold here again, but at least we don’t have any snow and the flu bug hasn’t come calling yet.

Today we’re going to list some things you’ll want to make sure you have. These tools you’ll need as we talk about some simple ways to promote your business, which we should be doing every Friday here on our blog. Since we’ve talked about most of these before, we’ll include links to where we talked about.

  1. Business Cards – http://www.cleverapple.com/blog/how-to-get-your-first-tutor-student-part-3/
  2. A Brochure – http://www.cleverapple.com/blog/how-to-create-a-brochure-and-a-30-second-commercial/
  3. An elevator speech – we’ve not really talked about this. You should have a 30 to 60 second speech memorized about your business. This can be the part you add to a conversation when someone says… “What do you do?”  Some guidance on what you can include in your elevator speech can be found here. http://www.dumblittleman.com/2007/08/how-to-craft-killer-elevator-pitch-that.html
  4. An email signature – in every email you send you’ll want to make sure you have an email signature for your email. You’ll want to include your tutor business name, what you tutor, your phone number and website address. Every email program is different so just search Google for details on how to set it up.
  5. A promotion journal – Get a notebook and write down every day what you’ve done to promote your site. You should make it your goal to talk to at least one person about your business every day.  Critique yourself. List what you did well during the conversation and what you did poorly. Work on improving.

Enjoy your weekend.

Tips for advertising your tutor business

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Advertising Dept Truck

Advertising Dept Truck (Photo credit: The Rocketeer)

We talked to you last time about getting a calendar and including some important tutor dates. Here it is in case you missed it. Today we want to talk about some ways you can advertise / ideas for
tutor sessions during the various time periods. http://www.cleverapple.com/blog/how-to-create-a-tutor-calendar-plus-discounts/

A reminder – we’ve talked about these things many times before on this blog.
— You want to use a mix of free and paid advertising.
— You want to make sure you are tracking your advertising. You’ll want to continue what’s working and can what isn’t working.

Start of school – One of my favorite times of the year for a tutoring business. Usually there are back to school bashes where you live. You’ll want to make sure you have plenty of brochures and business cards printed and you’ll want to hit up as many of those as possible. You will also want to make sure you have some tear sheets printed up for as many bulletin boards as possible.

Something else that has worked well, but you wouldn’t think it would work. Free classes for parents on how to help your kids with homework. This does a few different things.

1. Allows you to give back to the community. Puts the name of your busines out there. You’ll be able to run free spots on TV, radio – since you’re giving stuff away.

2. It expands your contact list by giving you names of parents and the grades they have children in.

3. It shows parents that you know your stuff.

End of school – It seems like a long time away, especially since in some places school hasn’t even started yet. The end of school is a perfect time to focus on your Summer programs. It is also a good
time to remind those who didn’t do so well during the last school year, they can get a headstart on making the next school year awesome.

A great place to get students during this time is from teacher referrals. If those aren’t available, advertise in the last issues of the school newspapers, advertise in locations close to school. Many schools send end of the year goodies. You can create something (with your advertising message) and send it home with the kiddies.

More on Tuesday – we hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Facebook Changes and Updates

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA - SEPTEMBER 22: Facebook CE...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

One thing I recommend you do in your tutoring business is to setup a Facebook fan page. This is a great way to advertise your business and connect with your customers for FREE. I watched a webinar on Saturday about the recent changes and here are my notes.

Facebook Changes – Update

Got these updates from Jo Barnes from the Social Network Academy. A lot of good stuff and you can find more of her stuff here.

There has been a bunch of frustration with facebook lately- what everyone needs to remember is facebook is a baby… as they grow it will change. Google plus is a major contender so they need to make changes in order to survive… a big reason for the changes.

The News Feed –

Key changes – the ticker bar. Real time updates on all of your friends are doing. Reminds me a bit of twitter. The ticker is a part of one of the big changes on facebook. A bit ago they allowed you to integrate facebook into your website. That’s called open graph. F8 – on Thursday they announced an extension to the open graph. They have now introduced an ability to interact with things… not just I Like… but I am listening, I’m cooking etc. An extra layer of interaction to things. More of a connection. This won’t show on the newsfeed but on the ticker.

If you hover over the ticker bar (which is on the Right side of facebook) you can see the whole post if you wish). You can load apps that will allow you to show people what you’re doing. An example is spotify. Be thinking of a way you can do that for your business.

The ticker bar does move fast depending on how many friends you have.

You can move the ticker bar. You can also hide the sidebar (or move it back).

The News Feed

There is now a ‘top stories’ at the top and ‘recent stories’ at the bottom. This replaces the thing we used to have – most recent and top stories.

The goal is engagement. If you’re on facebook a lot you won’t even see the top stories. What does it mean for you and your business. You will need to work a bit harder to get on the top stories… and not all of your posts will show up in the recent stories.

Edgerankchecker.com – will help you figure out what your edgerank is. You will need to get visitors to your facebook page and get them to engage. You don’t want to post a lot every day, just a few times / day.

You will need to work on producing your own, quality content.

You now have control over what you see. Now you can create lists (which is just like Google Circles).

Marking a post as ‘top story’ will increase your edgerank. You can also tell which updates you want to see.

You can also post just to a list – you can create a post that will only go to the list. Click on the list and then click post. On the wall on status update you can choose the list you want it to go to.

The Timeline – Details on how to create one can be found here –

The timeline takes over the profile page.

Lots more great stuff – once the complete webinar is posted we’ll post a link to it.

Here is the full webinar.