Step one (40) in building a website is finding your competition. There are a number of reasons for doing this but the main one is that we want to find out who we need to beat. We’ll continue to use the example of our being a Lexington High School Math tutor.
We search first for Lexington Math Tutor-
The first black circle over 12000 tells us there is some competition but not very much.
The presences of ads (red circle) tells us the most important thing and that is that people are making money tutoring Math in Lexington. People don’t run ads unless they are making money.
Most of the results on the first page (first ten) are from what I call mega sites. Again this is fine and once we get into the nitty gritty, you’ll see with just a bit of SEO of the website we’ll be able to rank higher than they are.
What I want to do is to begin clicking on the list of sites. I like to use an excel spreadsheet, with the following headings.
Site – Location — Types of Math — Cost for Tutoring — Website / Facebook / Other Social Media – Rank
Site – site name
Location – where is the tutor site located – or do they not have a location
Types of Math (or whatever subject you’re tutoring – self explanatory
Cost of Tutoring – if they don’t have this information, then call and ask
Website (the URL) the url for the other items
Rank – how does the site look / what ways could they improve.
We want to make our site better than any of them.
Review the first 10 or 20 of the urls in the search results.
Looking at Wyzant the rates are between $30 – $50 a session with some (a few) lower prices.
If you have Wyzant’s in your area, check them out. Also if you want (and another promotion idea) you may want to join them for some new clients. Most of them don’t charge you unless you get a client, and you can join more than one if you wish. Whether you decide you want to join, pay attention to the tutors that are successful. They have spent a lot of time getting that way. They have worked hard on their profiles to make them stand out from the crowd. Learn from them.
Here are some you may want to join – make sure you read their terms of service and how much they’ll charge you (read the fine print). (41-44)
https://www.wyzant.com/tutorsignupstart
http://www.care.com/business-p1369-q43501273.html
http://lexington.universitytutor.com/tutoring_jobs
https://www.tutorselect.com/becomeatutor
Next week we’ll look at choosing a domain name and hosting.