Basically, I’m a college writing tutor.
I present myself as helping customers by “grading” their papers before they have to turn them in–in other words, by giving the same kind of feedback their professor would give them, but giving it to them before they turn it in, so they can do better, and get a better grade than they would have otherwise.
I feel certain I’ve got a good idea here. Several of the people I’ve done business with have become repeat customers. And I’ve had no negative feedback whatsoever.
But I have to advertise, and I can not make my revenues come out to be more than my advertising.
Now, I’ve only tried two methods of advertising. One is papering campuses and hangouts with flyers and cards. The other is online advertising through Google Adwords and through Facebook. (Also I have a facebook page for the website.)
On Facebook, I ended up getting a lot of people to become “fans” of my site–but not a single one ever submitted a paper for me to grade.
Papering campusses and hangouts has resulted in no submitted papers.
Adwords did better, but not enough to make up for the cost even of adwords, much less the facebook and flyer costs.
So… ideas? Is there some way I can make this work?
There are a couple of improvements I’d like to make on the site itself. The submissions process needs to be streamlined. Ideally, I’d like people to be able to just upload their paper directly through the site. Even more ideally, I’d like the payment process to be integrated into this. Even more ideally still, I’d be interested in letting people set up accounts. But the three ideals I just listed are in increasing order of me-not-knowing-how-the-hell-to-do-any-of-that-in-html-or-whatever-language-I-should-use.
Also I need to clean up the “testimonials” page for readability.
Other suggestions about the site itself are welcome too. The general theme of my question, though, is how to make the business work. How do I get people to let me grade their papers for a small fee?