So, you’ve been tutoring for a while now. You know who your students are, you have your own niche, and you’re doing a pretty good job squeezing in those 45 minute HIIT workouts in between scheduled Preply lessons. Good for you! The big question is — what’s next? There are only so many hours in a day, and you can only hike your price up so much before you start losing your students to hungry competition.

As you may have guessed from the title, the logical next step is to quit your tutoring platform and embark on a beautiful journey across the world. That, and building your own website, of course (one comes before the other though, I won’t tell you which). Still, easier said than done, right? What even are the benefits of having your own website, you might ask, the tutoring platform provides you with a consistent flow of students, time management tools, and teaching resources. Why on earth would you give up this security and convenience?

Though there is nothing wrong with the aforementioned arguments, building your own website (and this officially marking the start of your tutoring business) would open the door to a myriad of new opportunities waiting to be explored.

1. Scaling means going independent

Yes, Preply and italki are great for stability — why wouldn’t they be? They’re both platforms, designed to bring knowledge-hungry students and knowledgeable tutors together in a simple and efficient way. And they both do this phenomenally. The only problem is, just as with all platforms, you can’t control the market prices. This means that once you’ve reached a certain point, you’re consistently overworking or undervaluing yourself as a tutor. This makes it extremely difficult to increase profits while keeping your working hours the same, or even reducing them. Creating your OWN platform, on the other hand, would allow you to offer a variety of services at your own set price. This is by all means not exclusive to tutoring — through your website, you can host webinars, sell e-books, offer coaching, and so much more! But we’ll get to that later, first, we’ll need to examine the foundation of your website.

2. Consolidate your niche

By this point, you’re probably clear on what your niche is. Your students have similar needs, and you have developed an effective approach to teaching each student. There may be a few outliers here and there, maybe a couple of students you’re teaching on a different program, but on the whole, you know what you’re doing and what kind of students will benefit most from your instruction. While language teaching platforms encourage you to be specific about what you offer, a website would let you take full control of the steering wheel and paint your own portrait.

An example would be creating a website dedicated to teaching travel English. On the website, you could have travel vocab lists, examples of common dialogues when traveling (e.g. ordering food in a restaurant, conversation with a taxi driver etc.), travel story videos, and blog posts that you’ve written about your travels around the world (see what I’m getting at here) at different language proficiency levels. Students looking for someone to help them prepare for the SAT reading section will click out of your website automatically – this is great, because it limits the amount of resources wasted on retaining irrelevant customers. On the other side of things, travelers, adventurers, international employees, or even something as miscellaneous as airbnb owners who host many guests from the country whose language you’re instructing in are likely to be interested in the services you offer and will be immediately drawn in by your captivating website interface.

3. Expand on marketing

Finally, having your own website would enable you to market yourself as a credible tutor much more effectively (if done right) and you’ll see that students will be more willing to pay higher prices for your tutoring services. This is because, as seen in the travel example I gave above, a website can be a much richer representation of what you do and will add credibility not just to your brand as a tutor but to your tutoring capabilities in general. After all, you wouldn’t consider starting your own website and ‘businessizing’ your tutoring unless you knew what you were doing, right?

Of course, all great things come with risk, to which scrapping your current tutoring platform and building your own is no exception. Before you hit that ‘delete account’ button and beat your chest triumphantly, there are a couple of caveats that you’ll need to consider.

4. The burdens of marketing

While taking charge of your own marketing is exhilarating, it can also prove challenging. On your language platform, you don’t need to be a marketing genius to find students – the platform does that for you. While it’s common for the platforms to constantly mess up their rankings (much to the frustration of top tutors), the platforms do tend to have a history of delivering students on a more or less regular basis. Once you leave the platform, however, there is no such guarantee. It is up to you to find and retain students. There are multiple ways that you could go about this. First, you could try to take your most loyal students off the platform and offer them discount prices. Secondly, you’ll need to set up social media accounts to increase your visibility, perhaps even invest in SEO or advertising. Lastly, you might need to reach out to your network and request referrals, as in “if you happen to know anyone who needs tutoring in xxx, please drop them this link”. At the initial stages, this can prove to be a mammoth task – fear not! With time and practice your recognition will be growing in an upward trend (if not exponentially). Create a marketing strategy and stick to it (reference to blog about creating a marketing strategy), if it doesn’t work, switch some things up and try again. Whatever it is you do, keep in mind that marketing yourself is tough, even for the seasoned marketer.

5. The challenges of creating value

Value is crucial to having your own website. The whole purpose of the website’s existence is to provide your beloved customers with additional value that is not available to them on the tutoring platforms. This can mean additional resources, a wider range of services, original learning materials and so on. However, creating something of value that is actually applicable to your target audience is no walk in the park. Not only is the idea generation process itself a challenge, but the realization of ideas can be practically and technically difficult, not to mention time consuming.

This is why before you start out, it’s a good idea to have a comprehensive content plan (link to creating a content plan article). Make sure your plan outlines the types of content that you’ll be creating and how you intend to produce it. Think about the following – what tools will you need? How much will you need to invest in these tools? Will you be creating everything yourself or will you outsource some tasks to third parties? Once you have a solid content plan with guidelines, you’ll find that generating content is a lot more straightforward, if not easier.

6. Time constraints

While there is a certain romanticism tied to the idea of leaving your tutoring platform and starting out on your own, it is worth remembering that this is essentially a full-time job. Specifically at the initial stages, you’ll have a lot more work than usual – designing the website, creating content, and setting up your social media accounts are just some of the tasks you’ll have to undertake when starting out. So don’t jump off your platform just yet. Starting your own tutoring business has the potential to become a major return on investment – the time you put in today is the time you’ll save tomorrow. So don’t be discouraged! Just keep in mind that the amount of time that will go into building your tutoring business may be more than you initially expected.

Hopefully, I haven’t scared you away by listing the potential risks. Fortunately, you don’t need to take a full plunge and risk everything straight away. Work on the development of your website alongside your routine tutoring job. Once you have everything ready and your website starts gaining some traction, you can gradually start the full switchover. You’ll find that one of the most challenging tasks you might face is reaffirming your niche and filling your website with relevant materials. As always, PrepYourLesson is here to help, providing you with hundreds of resources and materials at your fingertips.