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Consider the following two scenarios and ask yourself which makes more sense:

Tutor #1 drives for 10 minutes across town to meet her first client of the afternoon at 4:30. She works with this student for an hour in his busy home while his mother is in the kitchen preparing dinner and his siblings are running around the house. After the session is over, the tutor meets with her client's mom for another 15 minutes and then gets back on the road at 5:45. She then drives for another 15 minutes to the house of her next client which she works with from 6:05 to 7:05. By the time she meets with the parents, packs up, and arrives back home it is just about 8:00. Now it is finally time to prepare dinner, spend some time with her family, and put her little ones to bed. At $30/hr she has earned $60 for two hours of tutoring, almost an hour of driving, and 3 ' hours of time spent away from her home, not to mention that her family didn't see her or get fed until after 8:00.

Tutor #2 decided to switch her face-to-face tutoring business to an online one and now meets all of her clients online. She gets home from work around 4:30, spends a little time relaxing, and then logs on to her computer at 5:00 for her first session. She runs the hour long session and then takes an extra 5 minutes to drop her client's parent an email summarizing their progress. She then prepares dinner, enjoys family time for a while, and then logs back on for her second session at 7:30 after she puts her little ones to bed. It is about 8:40 when she logs off, after running the hour-long session, emailing the parent, and checking her schedule for the following day. She too charges $30 an hour and made $60 for the two sessions but did not have to leave home, waste time in the car, or inconvenience her family at all.

More and more tutors are finding that online tutoring is a more convenient alternative than meeting clients face-to-face. As you may have noticed in the scenarios above, Tutor #1 lost a great deal of time driving around to meet her clients while Tutor #2 simply had to log on to her own computer a minute or two before the session was to begin.

Also, Tutor #2 was able to fulfill her family obligations such as making dinner and putting the kids to bed at reasonable times while Tutor #1 wasn't able to do these things until much later. Tutors who have switched to online tutoring find that they have much more time available to do the things they want to do now that they are not wasting time driving around to meet clients.

Both tutors realize how important communicating with the parents of their clients is and both took time to touch base after their sessions. However, Tutor #1 lost about 15 minutes chatting with the parent after the session while Tutor #2 was simply able to send off an email and update the parent in less than five minutes.

Online tutoring businesses are starting to boom as more and more people begin to realize how convenient it is compared to the traditional face-to-face method. As a result, many different programs or methods of working with students online are becoming available. Some are very basic and may just include a white board or a voice component while others, such as TutorFi.com, are more inclusive and include not only a whiteboard and voice capabilities, but a management system that allows for scheduling sessions and organizing client information.

If you are interested in starting a tutoring business, consider the benefits of running an online business instead of a traditional one and ensure that your efforts will maximize your income and allow you to be as efficient as possible.