Discover ten key points to learn what you need to consider to teach English to Chinese students online.
If you haven’t yet done so, grab our Teacherpreneur Digital Business Plan to get you started on the right track!
Choose an appropriate platform
There are many different platforms available for teaching English online. You need to choose one that will work well with your goals and budget. Here are some things to consider when choosing a platform:
Platform Features
Language Learning Goals
Budget
Time Commitment
Experience Level
Availability
Support
Reputation
Cost
Other Considerations
Platform Features
To teach Chinese students online you need a platform that can enable a few essential functions, these are, online payments, online class bookings in the students own timezone and tutor / student communication.
There are a few more but these three are essential. Without these you will not convince a Chinese student or their parent to book with you. No bookings equals zero income. You also need a platform that allows for 1-1 lessons as well as group lessons or even seminars.
Group lessons allow you to increase your revenue whilst also providing a heightened learning experience for your students. 1-1 lessons allow you to also offer VIP sessions to Chinese students who prefer this style of learning.
Online payments for class bookings, courses or resources need to be accessible from China and they need to integrate quickly and swiftly with your booking system.
Timezone
Timezone appropriation is really important for Chinese students. It is not good enough on your website to simply offer a link of a timezone conversion app, that will create doubt and confusion in a students mind and possibly convince them to not book with you.
A better solution is to have a platform that automatically converts to the timezone of the student when they are visiting your platform and does equally the same for you.
This provides a clear idea of times and there is no confusion of classtimes.
Our Teacherpreneur program has a complete tutoring system built into our Teacherpreneur blueprint. Everything is set up and ready for you to add your classes, courses and payment options. More about that can be found here.
Language Learning Goals
Chinese students are very clear about the goals they have for their language learning. And because of that they are also very clear on what sort of tutor they want. If your marketing does not align with that, you will not find any Chinese students to teach English online to.
On your own platform you can offer students lots of different options to demonstrate your expertise as a tutor whilst simultaneously demonstrating to Chinese students how you can help them achieve their learning goals.
One smart way of doing this is by offering a FREE assessment. This can be created by using a quiz and again we have this in our Teacherpreneur system.
Quizzes are an excellent way of getting new visitors to your platform to interact and engage with you because they have to provide their email so that you as their tutor can give them feed back; As well as helping you to decide what sort of learning materials and tutoring lessons you will need to provide to the student.
Set up your profile
Once you’ve decided what type of platform you’d like to use, you’ll need to set up your profile. This includes uploading an image, adding links to social media profiles, and filling out your contact information. For increasing Social Media bookings and sales we love using this app here. It’s perfect for Social Media as it is optimsed and it can be accessed in China. You can also start to sell resources on here directly which can only but increase your income.
Create lessons
You should also consider creating lesson plans and make some of these directly available for sell as an online course This enables your students to learn more about your style of tutoring as well as helping Chinese students understand how to learn new vocabulary and grammar rules. They can also help them practice speaking skills with native speakers if you add in some video lessons.
Promote your courses
There are several ways to promote your courses. One of the easiest ways to promote your lessons and classes to Chinese Students is to use social media platforms such as Wechat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Another option is to post links to your courses on blogs and websites and don;t forget Tik Tok. Tik Tok is available in China. We also have a great Contentpreneur Challenge and of course the ESL Content Vault to help you out with knowing what content to create and how to attract Chinese students online.
Budget
Although it is important to not overspend or purchase things that you do not need for your tutoring business, you will need to spend something. As our Teacherpreneur Evoloution System provides everything you need to set up your online tutoring business, yu can save money there for sure.
Time Commitment
Setting up and growing any business does take some commitment of time. However one of the attractions with teaching Chinese students online is that by creating your own lessons and courses, you can spend 1-3 hours a week creating actual lessons, maybe 1-2 hours giving feedback and 2-3 hours per week on content creation and marketing. So with very little time and a good tutoring system structure you do not have to commit to spending large amounts of time to see results.
Experience Level
One thing Chinese students care about is their results. It is for this reason that often like to see results from other students. In a nutshell private Chinese students are not bothered if your degree came from Califonia or Exeter. They want to see evidence of results which is why your Content is really important.
One way that you can demonstrate this is by creating a small introduction video on your website. You can talk about how you have helped Chinese student prior, what were their achievements and how you did this. If possible it would be really good if you can have a Chinese student give you a video testimonial that you can feature on your website.
Availability
It is important for Chinese students to cleary see and understand availability. This is why an Online booking system is so important for Chinese students. They can see when lessons are and see if your availability works for them. Remember that most Chinese students take multiple extra curricular lessons after school, not just English.
Support
It is important for Chinese students to know that they can get support from their foreign tutor online. Our Teacherpreneur system has an inbuilt 24 hour helpdesk. It works by students submitting a ticket that is assigned to a tutor of choice. This pops up on the students page when they login to reassure both student and parent, that help and support is their if required.
Reputation
Teaching English Online to Chinese Students has gone through many cycles in the last decade. Recently Chinese authorities had doubts over some foreign tutors and due to that a number of very strict rules were brought it. These mostly apply to foreign tutors working for Chinese platforms, not private tutoring. But is is still a good idea to understand what is required. Yu can read more about that here.
Cost
You can set up your entire tutoring business online with our Teacherpreneur evolution system for a very affordable price. Details can be found here. What is important is that with an online business that is set up the right way and marketed correctly you can go from a few lessons a week to a fully fledged online Teacherpreneur business very quickly. But if you start with a poor structure, no investment in the correct systems and softwares your growth will always be stilted.
Successful tutors that teach Chinese students online often have their own line of digital products, resources and learning materials that can be sold as a stand alone option or as an addition to the lessons and courses themselves.
Being able to sell these directly to the student from your own platform or website 24 hours a day is how you will grow your Income as an online tutor considerably.
Other Considerations
Whilst it is easy to put a lesson plan in front of a Chinese student that was purchased from a lesson provider online, this is clear to a Chinese student that it’s not really a tailored lesson.
If you can create and write your own lessons for Chinese students and your own materials you will increase the value of your Unique Selling point. This also gives you the opportunity to create a brand instead of just a random lesson plan.
People will always pay more for a brand and as a business owner and tutor yourself, it is far more rewarding both financially and creatively. Read how I did just this and scaled from 0-50K clients online with an online, adult ESL language school.