Depending on where you’re working, it might be possible to quietly gather contact information (most critically email addresses) from your existing students ensure them that you won’t be spamming them with offers of cheap Rolexes! This information will form the first few lines of your all-important contact list, a master database of all the potential students you’ve ever been in contact with.
They know and respect you, and are in a position to recommend you to their friends, family and classmates. Unless you’re arriving in the online ESL field as a brand new teacher, you have the luxury of using your existing students as the basis for a larger, ongoing client base. But the very vibrancy of the market poses a challenge: how can teachers hope to differentiate themselves from the competition, when veteran teachers and low-cost providers are so well placed to sign up these eager students? How can we reach, sign up and maintain relations with a range of students when so many others are doing the exact same thing? In such an active marketplace, creating a studio of online students might seem as easy as posting an advert on Craigslist or creating a simple website and then waiting for the students to come knocking. However, if you’ve decided to strike out on your own from the outset, you’ll need to put some time and effort into creating the client base for yourself.
This relieves you of the burden of marketing, using social media and generating a contacts list, although it’s important to stress that many school-based online teachers eventually ‘graduate’ to working for themselves, and that their existing students will form the basis for the client base as an independent teacher. If you sign up to work for an online school, then they will handle the tricky business of finding students for you.
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