When I was a kid, I took piano lessons. I went over to my teacher’s home on Thursday evenings for a half hour lesson. It wasn’t a full time job for her – she taught music at a local elementary school as well, but she was always fully booked.

Musical expertise isn’t the only skill you can teach from home, although it is always popular. You can tutor for just about any subject offered at school, as well as giving outright lessons in foreign languages or other expertise. And if you have time available in the afternoon and evenings (or during the day in the summertime), you can at least supplement your income, if not tutor full time. Rates differ, of course, depending on your location and the subjects you can teach. To determine an appropriate rate, check what other tutors in your area charge.

It isn’t hard to start tutoring – you may need to gather a few necessary items, such as sheet music if you plan to give instruction on a specific instrument. The hard part is usually finding students. However, there are a number of ways to find paying students that need your help:

• Consider contacting other tutors who handle the same subjects, especially if you know that they have more students than they can handle. They may be able to direct their overflow to you.
• Ask local schools to allow you to hang flyers on their bulletin board, as well as give your name to the teachers who handle your subjects (i.e. if you tutor calculus, make sure the local high school math teachers know). Don’t forget to look at different age levels – you may be able to help students in elementary school or college, as well as high school.
• Look for local home schooling networks. Parents who home school may ask tutors to take over on subjects they have less familiarity with.

There are also a number of companies that hire tutors or teachers and handle scheduling and finding students. Companies like Kaplan and the Princeton Review both hire tutors for specific tests like the SAT and MCAT, while many other companies hire tutors for school subjects. You may want to check what companies operate in your area.

Websites like TutorLinker and Tutor Match work to help tutors and students connect. These websites typically ask you a number of questions including your availability, expertise in a list of subjects and location to help students and parents find the right tutor. However, some websites have only low traffic, so you should not rely entirely on one website to provide your income.

While most tutoring takes place either at the tutor or student’s home, or a convenient location near the two, there are a number of ways to tutor online. There are several websites, such as Tutor.com, that allow tutors to work through the website. It is also reasonably easy to set up your own website – you only need a basic website listing rates, a web cam and software such as Skype to have a video conference with a student anywhere in the world