Make It Obvious That You Teach English Online For Money Not For Free

Hello Online English Teachers!

One thing you will learn about operating your own online English school is that there's a lot of trial and error. You'll always make tweaks to your website. You'll change the format of your free trial lesson (which you should offer). Your pricing structure will evolve as well. And many other things …

One change that I made had to do with the top section of my online English school website. I made it painfully obvious that I teach English online for money. Why did I do this, and why am I telling you, an online English teacher?

Because I've met sooooo many people from around the world (especially lower level English students) who thought I was the greatest guy in the world because I was offering my time and energy to teach them English for free … as often as they wanted.

They thought I was a volunteer!

As much as I would like to help people in this way, reality dictates that I make money to survive. Money is what puts sushi on my plate. So when I told them that my lessons were not free (those after the trial lesson), they seemed mystified that I would want to charge them something.

So to weed out those students who thought I was a free-free-free English teacher, I changed the top section that was seen on every page of my website: I added pictures of credit cards that PayPal accepts. This was the big one.

If prospective English students saw pictures of credit cards and they still thought that I was St. Louis. English Teacher, wow.

I also added the sentence, "Your 15 minute trial lesson is free … 50 minute English lessons are $ 16.99 to $ 25.00 each." Again, this was quite obvious in my opinion. So any students who came across my site should have understood that I charged money for my online English lessons and online English conversations.

To sum it up, add pictures of credit cards to every page of your online English school site. You should also highlight the price range and the free trial lesson on every page as well. You will thank me because the students who only want a free English speaking friend will not bother you.

Keep in mind that many people are spoiled by the free "static" information that's on the Internet, so when they meet a person (English teacher) who is offering English lessons (live and in-person), they just assume that the "dynamic "information will be free as well. So remember this and you should save a lot of time.

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