There are a lot of different learning products that your private tutoring business can offer. Obviously private tutoring in a variety of subjects is going to be your most popular learning product, however, it doesn’t have to be your only product. You can also offer foreign language tapes, maps, textbooks, teacher guides and other reference materials to your students and customers.
If you advertise your tutoring business via a website then you might as well get the most from your website investment. One way that you can bring in more money with your website is to sell products on it in addition to promoting your tutoring services. If you don’t want to carry an inventory or if you don’t want to author your own learning guides then you can sign up for affiliate programs. Then all you have to do is place a banner ad on your website and you will earn commissions on all orders that originated from your site.
If you have a Spanish tutoring service or some other foreign language tutoring service then flash cards, vocabulary tools and grammar reference books can all be sold on your website. You can create these materials yourself or you can find a wholesale distributor to buy them through. If you decide to sell items on your website make sure you keep track of what you buy, when you buy it and how many items you sell. Also keep all receipts of your transactions to make doing your taxes easier at the end of the year.
December 23rd, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Obviously the course you chose should depend on what you want as well as how you learn. This Pimsleur course offers conversational Mandarin, not reading or writing. In fact that is what I want right now. It proceeds almost entirely by immersion with very little discussion of grammar or pronunciation. That is not perfect for me, though it might be for you. I will come back to it. This Pimsleur course is entirely audio and so is very well suited to learning as you drive or walk or whatever.
This is very convenient but there is another reason for it: Pimsleur has theory that if you look at written Mandarin (or any language) too early then you will have trouble acquiring a native accent, because you will pronounce the written Mandarin with an American accent (supposing you are American…). This may be exactly right, if Mandarin is only your second language. If you have already learned several languages with reasonably correct accents then maybe you will have less tendency to make that mistake.
The problem with immersion-only Mandarin for me is that this is an intimidating language for Americans. The musical tone of each vowel changes the meaning of a word and the tones are hard for me to learn.
So I am going to cheat on Pimsleur by also using Chinesepod downloads (mp3) and their written supplements. Sometimes I really can’t be sure if a syllable on the Pimsleur CD begins with b or d. I can’t always tell if a tone is rising or falling (although the narrator often steps in to help with that). So I will look it up. If Mandarin is your first foreign language maybe you should start with straight Pimsleur for just the reasons they give. Mandarin, even more than most European languages, is useless if you do not have a good accent.
The other course I tried was Living Language Ultimate Mandarin. That course is not only conversation. It comes with a very nice textbook. And it requires that you spend considerable time working with the book in front of you, and so not driving or otherwise “on the go.” They said their course was the equivalent of 2 years of college courses and that may be true. It aims at all around mastery of spoken and written Mandarin including the simplified character writing used on the Mainland and exposure to the traditional characters used on Taiwan and in Hong Kong. I do not expect to ever reach that level, and anyway I would probably start with Pimsleur and Chinesepod.
Pimsleur courses are reliably very good.