I’ve Started Tutoring English Students as a New Side Hustle to Supplement the Drop in Writing Income

It won’t make you rich, but it might help pay the bills and you’re bound to meet great people from all over the world

Many writers, even top writers, have commented on the significant drop in earnings that seems to be occurring across the board at Medium. Looking back over my views and reads for previous work, almost all of my older articles (before this past year), got thousands of reads and I’d say at least 50 percent of them earned over $100 and 25 percent of them earned over $1000.

Now, about 50 percent of my articles get over 100 reads, and maybe 5 to 10 percent get reads in the single digits. Before last year I never had an article with under 100 reads. It’s a struggle to break the $100 mark each month.

My earnings from NewsBreak are also in the toilet. They seem to have a policy of determining how much a contributor will earn each month and adjust RPMs to make this happen. No matter how many views I get, I earn about the same amount, which isn’t much.

I returned to Hubpages, which I hadn’t published on except for the occasional article for about two years. While I’m not publishing there frequently yet, I’m trying to increase the number of articles I post there. But these articles take more time as they want long form magazine or academic style articles with a sweet spot of around 1260 words. Right now, I think the best I can hope for is to meet the $50 minimum required for payout amount each month, or perhaps just a bit more.

I kept hoping that Medium and NewBreak would introduce something that would increase writers earnings and hung in there since the beginning of last summer. They don’t look like they will, at least not in the near future. I realized that Hubpages wasn’t likely to change their model much, as they’ve kept it roughly the same except for some tweaks when Google’s algorithm changes for several years.

VIPKID

Seeing my savings dropping month by month I knew I needed new income sources or at least one big one to help me pay the bills. I had started the application process at VIPKID, a large company that hired people to tutor students in China. I’d successfully gotten through the written application and first video teaching demonstration when China put new restrictions in place that prevent foreign tutors outside the country from teaching students in China.

At first, all the news about the company stated they were shutting down, and I was unable to get in touch with anyone there to find out what was happening or complete my application process. However, they have actually changed the company in order to replace Chinese students with students in other countries and I am hoping to be able to either continue the application process or start over again if necessary. They are the biggest online tutoring company that doesn’t require you to have a teaching certificate for at least some of the countries they serve. I’ve heard also that the pay is quite good.

Preply

I searched for other platforms, and found a few that I wanted to explore. I almost signed up with Preply but while they let you set your own fee, most people set them at $20 an hour. This wouldn’t be terrible except they take a commission which includes keeping 100 percent of the fee for every first lesson you teach. After that they take between 33 percent and 18 percent. Each lesson is an hour so at first you are teaching new students for an hour at a time and making nothing until people start rebooking you. I didn’t like this setup though for some it might seem doable and if you can set your fee higher and still get students to sign up with you, the income might be okay.

Skoolie

Skoolie is one of the most popular tutoring platforms and they pay a higher fee than many others. I liked it because in addition to being able to set tutoring times you can just jump online when you feel like it and answer quick questions, have a quick conversation or help someone with a particular assignment without needing to teach an entire lesson. However, you are required to have a government issued teaching license to be accepted so I wasn’t able to join this platform.

Wyzant

Wyzant is a company I signed up with several years ago, but didn’t really follow through with. This site is more of a marketplace where possible jobs are sent to you and you contact the student to see if you’re a good fit.

You choose five subject areas you feel competent to tutor in from a list they provide. The application takes 3–5 days to approve but you can qualify to teach the five areas you selected while you’re waiting. This consists of taking a quiz. You have only one chance to pass the quiz and can’t retake it. This is a downside. They say if you want to review before taking the quiz to do so but they don’t provide any materials. So, you have no way of knowing what they might ask and even though you might be very capable in an area, if they ask about enough things that you aren’t familiar with, you won’t have the opportunity to tutor in that area or possibly with Wyzant at all.

Wyzant keeps 25 percent of what you charge students. However, you set your own fee and tutors here typically charge more than on other sites, with around $50 a lesson being average.

italki

I’ve also looked into italki. This platform lets you tutor even if you don’t have a teaching certificate. Those with teaching credentials can tutor as teaching professionals and those without can still tutor informally as community teachers. You can charge from $5 to $80 a lesson and italki takes a 15 percent commission.

Cambly

In a Meetup writing group, one of the participants mentioned that she’d just started tutoring with Cambly. I looked into it and signed up. I started tutoring on it at the beginning of the month and have had a lot of fun.

Some students want formal lessons, which Cambly provides or you can add your own links and materials if you choose to do so. Others just want to practice their English and I’ve had some great conversations with people from around the world.

You can set reserved hours for students to sign up with you, scheduled hours where you have a student confirmed for the time, or priority hours. Priority hours are like reserved hours but Cambly will feature you so you are more likely to get students to call in. If no one calls in, they pay you for 15 minutes regardless, but I’ve never had that occur. They seem to be good about getting your profile in front of students during priority hours.

The only things I haven’t liked about this platform so far are that when you are doing priority hours you may have a student who calls in with a lesson they want to do and you have to teach it cold. Most of the time, if the student’s English is okay, you can do this easily enough. But sometimes I’ve had students who were absolute beginners and couldn’t understand anything in

the lesson at all. This meant I needed to go back to the library and try to find something that was more basic, then teach that cold. Lessons also aren’t always ideal, and parts can be hard to explain even when you are working with intermediate speakers.

The only other thing I don’t love about tutoring on Cambly is that you don’t earn much. It’s probably the lowest paying platform I’ve seen, paying 17 cents a minute, which comes out to only $10.20 an hour. Sessions are usually 30 minutes but sometimes students want less depending on the package they’ve signed up for.

Overall, though, I’ve had a blast tutoring on this platform. I’ve met students from 14 countries so far, and many had intermediate English skills so they were easy to talk to, without the need to do a lot of correcting. Many seem eager to share their culture with me and ask about my own.

While the money may not be great, what tutoring online has given me during this time of Covid with the number of more transmittable variants growing, increasing the amount of time I stay in has been a Godsend.

Have you done any language or other tutoring online? If so, how did you like it?

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