Since Sherpa is a student-led directory, students will always be the first to open a conversation with a tutor. For that reason, it's really important to make sure that your profile is looking as good as possible.

Here, I'll go through a few of the main factors involved with promoting your profile and maximising the number of requirements you'll receive.

Sometimes parents want to search through a lot of tutor profiles before deciding who to contact. A new feature we have added promises to make your profile stand out and help you portray your experience and personality in a quick introductory video right from the search results. Consider visiting the guidelines page for this video and uploading one of your own.

Your prompts are the most important factor in advertising your profile. Make sure you've written enough to get across your personality, as well as your qualifications and experience.

Make sure you fully include your qualifications (particularly if you are a qualified teacher!) and your experience. For example, how long have you been tutoring? When did you start? Why do you love to tutor? Give clear, enthusiastic responses that really get across your personality.

Captions are the first part of your profile that potential students see when searching through the "Find a Tutor" page. It's now possible to have a separate caption for each of the subjects you teach - so when someone searches for a Maths tutor, they can see a relevant short caption of your Maths credentials to convince them to click through to your full profile. Read more about how to add them here.

I often see profiles of qualified teachers or tutors with many years of experience, with very little mention of their qualifications and how long they have been teaching and tutoring! Make sure your prompts and caption quickly get that across to potential students.

Your profile picture is the first thing potential students see on Sherpa, so make sure it is a clear, professional picture which clearly shows your face. Smiling also goes a long way in adding more personality and warmth to your profile.

When you've had a session, don't forget to ask your student for a glowing review! These add a huge boost to your profile and are also consistently one of the main factors that potential students look at when viewing your profile. They're a huge influence on whether a student will message a tutor or not.

One of the great things about Sherpa is the fact that you set your rate! However, sometimes when getting starting on the platform we may recommend that you decrease your rate slightly to get those first few students. Once you've completed a few sessions and got some positive reviews, this really goes a long way to boosting you up in the search results and getting you some more requirement messages.

Aim to reply to any requirement messages promptly (under 12 hours is ideal) to make sure that potential students turn into introductions, and then bookings. This is also a ranking factor in search results.