The Start Teaching Guitar Podcast: Recent Episodes
Donnie Schexnayder
The Start Teaching Guitar podcast is your one-stop resource for learning how to be a successful guitar teacher. Focusing on both the teaching and the business aspects of offering guitar lessons, STG will teach you how to you find more students, keep them with you longer and help them get better results on the guitar. Even if you never considered becoming a guitar teacher before, the Start Teaching Guitar podcast will give you the information you need to get out of the daily 9-to-5 grind and experience your dream of doing music for a living through teaching guitar.
David Hart has become a friend of mine in recent months, and we meet together via Skype on a regular basis. David has been teaching guitar in Australia since the early 1990’s and he grew a large music school with multiple locations that increased by over 3,000 students in a single year. He eventually […]
The post STG 140: G4 Guitar Network – Interview With David Hart appeared first on Start Teaching Guitar.
There are lots of guitar players out there who would love to turn their love of music into a source of income, and maybe even do music as a career some day. Teaching is one of the more rewarding and more lucrative ways to have a career in music, but many people who would […]
The post STG 136: Beginning Guitar Teacher Questions Answered appeared first on Start Teaching Guitar.
There are lots of common myths about teaching guitar lessons floating around out there. They sound logical, so most people who’ve never experienced anything different just accept them at face value and operate their teaching studios accordingly. The problem is that when you operate based on wrong information, the results you produce are usually […]
The post STG 132: Busting Some Common Myths About Teaching Guitar – Part 1 appeared first on Start Teaching Guitar.
Troy Grady has spent years researching, studying and unraveling the secrets of the world’s fastest professional guitar players and has recently created and released an amazing video series called “Cracking The Code”. In it, he attempts to unravel the mysteries of how famous virtuoso-level guitar players developed their technique, why the average person has […]
The post STG 128: Cracking The Code – Interview With Troy Grady appeared first on Start Teaching Guitar.
I recently discovered a great podcast called The Guitar Channel, hosted by Pierre Journel. He has hundreds of episodes of his show, mostly containing interviews with famous guitar players including Nuno Bettencourt, Steve Vai, Steve Lukather, Paul Gilbert, Al Di Meola, Guthrie Govan, Tommy Emmanuel and Lee Ritenour. In each interview, he asks the […]
The post STG 124: Guitar Advice From The Pros, Volume 1 appeared first on Start Teaching Guitar.
Mobile devices are one of the coolest innovations of the 21st century. Never before in the history of the world have we had so much power and access to so much information in our back pockets. Now you can run your entire teaching studio, communicate with your students, do your marketing and even teach […]
The post STG 120: 5 Must-Have Mobile Apps For Teaching Guitar appeared first on Start Teaching Guitar.
Many guitar teachers have a love/hate relationship with money. It’s awesome to get paid for doing something you love, but it’s no fun working hard doing something you love and not getting paid what you should be. Too many guitar teachers have hangups about money, are getting paid less than they’re really worth and […]
The post STG 116: 5 Methods For Mastering Money In Your Guitar Teaching Studio appeared first on Start Teaching Guitar.
There are a lot of cool websites out there, but the coolest site for small business owners has got to be fiverr.com. There’s no place else on earth where you can get almost anything done that you could imagine and only have to pay $5 for it. There are LOTS of valuable services on […]
The post STG 112: Growing Your Teaching Studio $5 At A Time appeared first on Start Teaching Guitar.
I’ve done lots of podcast episodes about how to become a better guitar teacher; today I want to take a look at this from a different angle and talk about how NOT to teach guitar lessons. There are tons of teachers out there doing it WRONG! Hopefully you aren’t one of them, but regardless, […]
The post STG 108: How NOT To Teach Guitar Lessons appeared first on Start Teaching Guitar.
If you’ve been thinking about taking the plunge into teaching guitar lessons but you haven’t found the motivation to actually get started, then this episode is for you. There are lots of excuses we’ve all made at one time or another for staying on the bench, but today is the day to face them […]
The post STG 104: 7 Guitar Teaching Excuses I Never Want To Hear Again appeared first on Start Teaching Guitar.
This week is the 100th episode of the Start Teaching Guitar Podcast! In this “centennial episode, I’m going to talk about the milestones we’ve hit together with STG and tell the story of how it all came together almost 3 years ago. I’ll also share what I feel has been my “secret to success! I’ll wrap things up with information on how powerful milestones can be for staying motivated and keeping your teaching studio moving in the right direction.
This is the FREE EDITION of this episode of the Start Teaching Guitar Podcast
To give your teaching business a huge advantage and get TONS of cool benefits INCLUDING the full-length, commercial-free version of this episode, click here to start your 14-DAY FREE TRIAL MEMBERSHIP to STG All-Access today! STG All-Access members get access to the following VALUABLE RESOURCES: * WEEKLY full-length episodes of the STG Podcast with no advertising or commercials, including a mind map outline containing my PRIVATE NOTES used to record the episodes * Access to PREMIUM EPISODES that nobody else gets to listen to with more in-depth “how-to” information * Monthly live Q&A calls where you can get ANSWERS to your QUESTIONS about teaching guitar * Access to the STG Podcast Archive, and the FIRST 25 EPISODES that are no longer available to the general public * Access to the STG Community Forums, where you can interact with other guitar teachers from around the world * Much more!
Give yourself a weekly shot of ENCOURAGEMENT and MOTIVATION and the RESOURCES you need to help you build your guitar teaching business! Click this button to start your FREE 14-DAY TRIAL MEMBERSHIP: To call in with a question, a comment or to leave feedback for the show, call the Listener Feedback Hotline at (719) 428-5480 and leave a message! I just might include your recorded message in a future episode.
Items Mentioned In This Episode: Link - Email List Training Course Link - “Done For You” Email Autoresponder Series Link - Group Guitar Launch Formula Link - STG All-Access Link - “Done For You” Teaching Websites
You just finished reading STG 100: Milestones - 100 Episodes of Start Teaching Guitar! Consider leaving a comment!
For more free resources to help you become a successful guitar teacher visit StartTeachingGuitar.com.
Related Articles:* STG 088: How To Beat 7 Common Guitar Teaching Fears * STG 060: Time Management For Guitar Teachers –… * STG 052: Girls Guitar School – Interview With October… * STG 050: 7 Things You Might Be Doing To Drive Your Guitar… * STG 068: 7 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Teaching…
The post STG 100: Milestones – 100 Episodes of Start Teaching Guitar appeared first on Start Teaching Guitar.
A lot of guitar teachers struggle to grow their businesses because they lose students as fast as they come in…it’s like trying to bail water out of a sinking ship, and they never seem to be able to get ahead. The solution is to improve your student retention and keep your existing students around longer, while you continue adding new students at the same time.
In this episode, I’ll give you 7 “secrets of good student retention that can help you shut the back door of your teaching studio and keep more of your existing students from quitting. Using even just a few of these strategies can begin to turn your business around in a relatively short period of time and help you stop struggling to get by and start becoming a more successful guitar teacher.
This is the FREE EDITION of this episode of the Start Teaching Guitar Podcast
To give your teaching business a huge advantage and get TONS of cool benefits INCLUDING the full-length, commercial-free version of this episode, click here to start your 14-DAY FREE TRIAL MEMBERSHIP to STG All-Access today! STG All-Access members get access to the following VALUABLE RESOURCES: * WEEKLY full-length episodes of the STG Podcast with no advertising or commercials, including a mind map outline containing my PRIVATE NOTES used to record the episodes * Access to PREMIUM EPISODES that nobody else gets to listen to with more in-depth “how-to” information * Monthly live Q&A calls where you can get ANSWERS to your QUESTIONS about teaching guitar * Access to the STG Podcast Archive, and the FIRST 25 EPISODES that are no longer available to the general public * Access to the STG Community Forums, where you can interact with other guitar teachers from around the world * Much more!
Give yourself a weekly shot of ENCOURAGEMENT and MOTIVATION and the RESOURCES you need to help you build your guitar teaching business! Click this button to start your FREE 14-DAY TRIAL MEMBERSHIP: To call in with a question, a comment or to leave feedback for the show, call the Listener Feedback Hotline at (719) 428-5480 and leave a message! I just might include your recorded message in a future episode.
Items Mentioned In This Episode: Link - Student Retention Calculator Book - “The Dynamic Studio” by Phillip Johnston
You just finished reading STG 096: 7 Secrets of Student Retention! Consider leaving a comment!
For more free resources to help you become a successful guitar teacher visit StartTeachingGuitar.com.
Related Articles:* STG 062: 5 Ways Your Students Can Sabotage Their Guitar… * STG 040: 10 Characteristics of a Perfect Guitar Student * STG 069 : Are Your Communication Skills Hurting Your Student * STG 050: 7 Things You Might Be Doing To Drive Your Guitar… * STG 076: Why You Need To Raise Your Tuition Rates
The post STG 096: 7 Secrets of Student Retention appeared first on Start Teaching Guitar.
Today’s high-tech world has it’s ups and downs, but it’s a great time to be alive and teaching guitar lessons. There are more inexpensive tools available today to help you run a successful teaching studio than there have ever been in the history of the world, and many of them are absolutely free!
In this episode, I’ll tell you my 12 favorite online productivity tools for teaching guitar and running your own business. Using tools like these can shave hours off your work week, help you stay better connected with your students, keep your important data safe and secure and let you access it from anywhere in the world. Welcome to the 21st century and a brand new age for guitar teachers!
To call in with a question, a comment or to leave feedback for the show, call the Listener Feedback Hotline at (719) 428-5480 and leave a message! I just might include your recorded message in a future episode.
Podcast TranscriptAll right. So, teaching guitar in the 21st century definitely has some benefits. One of those benefits is the way technology has made it a lot easier to run your own business and keep everything organized, and keep everything up to date, and keep everything safe and secure, and accessible anywhere you need it. And it gives you the ability to share information with anyone, anytime, anyplace, however you want to do it. It’s like all the walls have come down in the 21st century, and all of these amazing tools have sprung up over the last ten years that just make it so much easier to run your own business and to be a guitar teacher and do all the things that we do.
So, in this special episode, I’m going to be sharing 12 of my favorite online productivity and business-enablement tools that will work great for guitar teachers, and a lot of other businesses too. But I’m going to share some of my favorites and kind of give you some ideas about how you can use them in your teaching studio. Now, some of them are free and others aren’t free, but these are some of the tools that I use every day to help me run my businesses more effectively and save time, and save money, and save trouble, and all of that. So, hopefully some of them will be useful for you too.
If you have others you think should be added to the list, please share them in the show notes for this episode so that everybody can try them out. I would love to hear what tools you really like and find effective in your teaching studio, and of course I’ll add links to the show notes page for each of these online tools so you can go and check them out yourself.
Alright, so this is going to be kind of a different episode. I’m just going to jump right in and share the 12 things, and talk a little bit about each one.
Tool #1 – JingSo, the first one is a tool called Jing. You’ve probably heard me mention Jing before, but if you go to TextSmith.com/Jing.html, you can check out more information about this really cool tool. But what it does is it’s this little orange ball that sits on the top or one of the corners of your screen, wherever you want to put it on your computer screen. And if there’s anything on your screen that you want to grab a screen capture of or anything like that, you just click the orange ball and then it brings up some crosshairs. And then you just kind of select what you want to capture and then hit the button, and it takes a perfect screen capture of whatever you select, which is handy.
You know, your operating system probably does that anyway, but what’s cool about Jing is that it lets you edit. You can add text. You can put arrows. You can put things in boxes. You can underline things. You can draw on the picture. Whatever you want to do to kind of mark it up and use it to communicate what you’re trying to remember or trying to tell someone, you can do all of that, and then you save it and you can copy and paste it into a word document or into an email, or something like that. You can save it as an image file and upload it to your website. You can even share it online with people with one click, and then just send them a link and they can open it from wherever they are.
So, it’s really convenient and easy to use. It also lets you record screen capture videos up to five minutes long. So, it doesn’t just take picture of what’s on your screen. It can actually record you video-style, talking and, you know, pick up your microphone and add it to the video, and it’ll record whatever you do on your computer screen for up to five minutes. And then you can share that exactly the same way. So, I use that a lot whenever I’m trying to just share quick information about how to do something on a computer screen. You know, if I can pull it up on my laptop, then I can grab a quick Jing video of it, and then upload it and since I’m on the link, and then they can watch it as many times as they want. So, it’s really handy and it lets you, like I said, quickly and easily share everything that you capture and record. You just copy and paste it into a document or it hooks right up to ScreenCast.com. So, with one click, you can upload your photo or your video, or whatever, and then it’ll give you a link that you could send to anyone, and they can open it from there.
So, it’s really cool. What does it cost? It doesn’t cost anything. It’s absolutely free, which is one of the reasons why I like it so much. And what you could really probably use it for, and what I’ve done in the past too, is you can record screen cap videos for your students. A lot of times, someone will just need to know how to do something on your website and you have to keep explaining the same thing over and over again. Well, I’ll just shoot a quick screen capture video and then put a link to it on a frequently asked questions page, or something like that, and then everyone can watch it. So, they can learn how to do it and you don’t have to keep repeating yourself over and over again. So, Jing is a great tool.
Tool #2 – EvernoteThe next one is a tool called Evernote. I’m pretty sure a lot of your guys are using Evernote already, but if you go to Evernote.com, you can check it out. But Evernote is basically an online archive for any kind of idea or any kind of piece of information that you run across on a website that you visit or something that you think of in your head or something that you jot down. You can record voice notes into Evernote. You can save anything and everything you can think of that’s digital, and Evernote lets you organize it into notebooks and lets you share those notebooks with other people. Lets you share the contents of the notebooks with other people and it lets you grab that information from any device that you have, as long as you have an Internet connection.
So, it’s really cool. It lets you basically remember everything that you want to remember and access it from anywhere. How cool is that? And it’s free. There are some paid upgrades available that let you add more features, but the basic service and the one that I use is free. And you could use it in your studio to organize random information that you don’t want to lose, like your student’s contact information, their birthdays. You can type your lesson notes right into Evernote, and then they’ll automatically sync up to the cloud and you can have them on every device that you have and access them through the web as well. You can share them with your students that way. It’s really cool.
You can use it to capture your business ideas. You can take pictures and then save them as Evernote notes. You can record voice messages through the microphone on your laptop or on your handheld device and save them as notes in Evernote, which makes it perfect for capturing curriculum ideas or things like that, and especially for capturing songwriting ideas. Wherever you are, you can pull out your smartphone and you can sing, or talk, or play your guitar into Evernote, and then type some notes along with that, and then it’ll be available for you to go back and reference later. Easy to find and easy to use.
So, the cool thing about Evernote is that you will never, ever forget anything that you want to remember ever again. Just throw it into Evernote and then you’ll be able to instantly search and find it, and it’s really, really, really, really, really cool. So, Evernote is one of the tools that I use every single day, so I highly recommend that you check it out.
Tool #3 – DropboxOkay, the next one is Dropbox. Some of these have been around for a little while. So, if you’re already using some of these, I apologize for the redundancy, but I’m going to mention them because I love them and just in case you haven’t heard of them, I want to tell you about it. So, Dropbox is cool. So, if you go to Dropbox.com, you can find out more about it, but Dropbox solves a problem that a lot of people have had for a long time with doing stuff online, and that is how do you share large files with people.
I mean there are certain things that you can just email, but if it’s larger than a couple of MBs or something like that, a lot of times you can’t attach a file as an email attachment. So, if you have large photos, if you have large audio files, if you have large video files, if you have software, things that you want to share, documents – if it’s big, then you can’t really email it. So, what do you do? Well, Dropbox lets you just throw those files into a special folder that shows up on your computer. It syncs it to the cloud, and then it’s available on every other device that you have a Dropbox account connected to, and you can share it with other people just by emailing them a link to the thing.
So, it’s really cool and it’s the perfect solution. It lets you store large files, photos, or anything else online. Share it with other people. Access it from anywhere. And it’s absolutely free. There are some paid upgrades available, so you can buy more storage space if you want to, but it’s a great way for you to share things like recordings of your guitar lessons. If you do audio recordings of your lessons or if you do video recordings of it and you want to share those with your students, Dropbox is a great way to do that. You can just throw it in your Dropbox folder and then right-click and get the public link, and then email it to the student and then they can download it from there. So, Dropbox is an excellent tool.
Tool #4 – MindMeisterThe next one is MindMeister. MindMeister. So, if you go to MindMeister.com, you can check out more about this cool tool. And this is something that I’ve been using ever since I started Start Teaching Guitar. And I really use mind mapping extensively when it comes to the online part of what I do. And what MindMeister does is it lets you create mind maps online, collaborate on those mind maps with other people online, and it backs everything up for you. It lets them be available on any device. They even have a mobile app for your mind maps.
So, it’s perfect if you’re trying to keep a to-do list or you’re trying to plan different aspects of a program that you want to put into place. You want to keep track of different pieces of information that need to follow a logical flow. Mind maps work great for that. They work really, really good for brainstorming ideas, because you can create these different branches in your mind map and you can drag things around and move them around, and organize things in kind of a visual way while you’re thinking of it. So, it’s really, really cool.
Now, there are some free mind map tools that you can use. You know, there’s one called FreeMind. That’s open source that you can install on your computer and use, but the reason I like MindMeister so much is that everything happens in the cloud. So, all you’ve got to do is open a web browser, there are all of your mind maps, and you can change them. You know, you don’t have to worry about downloading it, installing anything, and two people or more can work on the same mind map at the same time, so you can collaborate with your students. You can do all kinds of cool stuff.
And what does it cost? Well, there’s a free version of it that lets you work with up to three mind maps for free, but after that, I mean I have hundreds of them now, so it’s 49 dollars a year for MindMeister to do all the mind mapping that you want. And that’s a plan that I use, and it works really great. So, what you could use it for is you could organize your thoughts and ideas. You can take notes when you’re listening to the podcast and type them into mind maps. You can brainstorm, like I said. You could do all kinds of cool stuff with mind maps, and then you can access them from anywhere. You can share them with anyone. You can collaborate with your students in real time using mind maps, and it’s really, really cool.
Besides, you can download all the mind maps that go along with all of the Start Teaching Guitar Podcast episodes and pull them right into MindMeister, and be able to search and find exactly what you’re looking for really fast. So, it’s a cool tool. Definitely want to check that one out.
Tool #5 – LastPassThe next one is a tool called LastPass. LastPass. If you go to LastPass.com, you can check it out. And their slogan is: “The Last Password You Have to Remember.” So, what LastPass is, is it’s a password vault and a password organizer. It lets you use secure passwords that you don’t have to remember for every online site or account or login form that you ever use when you’re working on the Internet. Okay, it’s very cool.
Now, a big security problem with a lot of people is that they just use the same username and password for everything online. For their bank. For all of the sites that they log into. And you know, it’s a weak password typically, so it’d be easy for someone to guess, so it makes you kind of at risk of identity theft and things like that. So, the secure way to do it is to have a different username and password for every single site. You never reuse the same one twice, and the password should be really, really cryptic and hard and difficult for people to guess. You know, a lot of numbers and weird characters and stuff like that to make it strong.
But the problem is, if you do that, you can’t remember the passwords. You have to write them all down somewhere, which is not good either. LastPass to the rescue! So, it automatically generates hard-to-guess passwords for your stuff and it saves them on a per-site basis and then, any time you go back to that site, it’ll automatically fill in the login form with the right, secure information. All you have to do is remember one password to log into the LastPass vault and then it automatically fills in everything else for you, and it securely stores your personal information, your credit card information that you use to buy stuff online, your address, phone number, and contact info. You can create profiles for all that stuff, and then any time you want to buy something, you just right-click and then fill the form and it’ll fill in all your payment information and your billing address. It just makes you able to do things like that so much faster and it saves a lot of time, and it’s secure.
And another cool thing that LastPass does is it lets you share login information with someone else, and without you actually telling them what the username and password is. So, if you have a paid upgrade for it, it’s a free program that you can install. It loads into your web browser and it’s really cool. It doesn’t cost anything, but there’s a paid upgrade that will let you use it on mobile devices and let you share your credentials with other people securely. So, let’s say you hire someone on Fiverr to work on your website to fix a problem on your website, or something like that. Well, rather than giving someone you don’t know your username and password, you could enter it into LastPass and then share it with them so that they can log into the site for however long you allow it, but you never have to give them the information. So, it’s really, really cool, and I would use it if I were you because it’ll beef up your online security, it’ll keep all your private info in one secure place so that you can always find anything that you need, and it’ll make the time that you spend online a lot more productive for you. So, LastPass is a great tool.
Tool #6 – XmarksAnd then the next one actually belongs to the same company that makes LastPass, but it’s called Xmarks. Xmarks.com is where you should go to check it out. And what Xmarks does is it does what a lot of these tools that I’m talking about do. It solves a problem in a way that uses cloud computing to make it easier, more safe and convenient. So, Xmarks lets you organize all of your Internet bookmarks and sync them across all of your web browsers so that you have the exact same bookmarks set so that you can find sites that you save to your favorites and stuff no matter what browser you’re using, and you can also go to the Xmarks website and access your stuff there.
So, you can organize it all. You can put it into folders. You can break it down however you want to. Eliminate duplicates. Organize all of your reference links that you use for websites, and then Xmarks will share them out to every browser that you load their add-in onto. So, it’s really cool. So, I mean browsers like Chrome have built-in bookmark sync and there are some things like that, but I really like Xmarks because let’s say you use Chrome on one computer, Firefox on another, Internet Explorer on another computer, and Safari on another computer. If you load Xmarks into all of them, your bookmarks will always be the same. And if you add a bookmark to one browser, it’ll get updated to all the other ones. It’s really, really cool.
What does it cost? Absolutely nothing. It’s free. And if you are like most people and every time you find a cool website, you know, or even within the same websites, like maybe you bookmark articles on StartTeachingGuitar.com or podcast episodes or tools, you know, keep all of your teaching links organized and accessible wherever you are by using Xmarks. And it makes your job a lot easier, so it’s really cool.
Tool #7 – DeliciousAll right, so moving on down the list. The next one is a site called Delicious. That’s right. It’s called Delicious, and you’ve probably heard of it before. It’s a social bookmarking site. You can check it out at Delicious.com. But social bookmarking takes what I just mentioned with Xmarks kind of to the next level. It’s not about bookmarking things so that you can find them yourself later. It’s about bookmarking things that correlate to certain themes and tags that you want to share with other people.
So, you’ve probably noticed the STG All-Access Guitar Teacher newsfeed that STG All-Access members have access to that has a steady stream of links to articles and tools and resources, and things online that are related to playing guitar, teaching guitar, running your own business, and things like that. Well, I use Delicious to create that. Every time I run across something that I like, I have a Delicious widget setup in my browser, so all I’ve got to do is click it and it opens up this Delicious window, lets me tag it, type little remarks if I want to, and it saves it into this Delicious feed, and then I have that setup to be published as an RSS feed that people can subscribe to.
So, once you have an RSS feed, you can subscribe to it in a feed reader. You can make it load into a webpage. So, I have all of those things going on in STG All-Access, but the cool thing about it is that you can add anything that you think is interesting to the people that are going to be looking at it. Like in a split second, you can add stuff to that feed and it automatically goes where it needs to go. So, it’s very, very, very cool. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s free. And what I would recommend using it for is to do the same thing that I do. You could create a curated RSS feed of links for your guitar students, and they could subscribe to your feed or you can put it on a members only page on your website or something like that. And anything that you bookmark in Delicious shows up in that feed automatically. So, you provide this great service to your students and to people that visit your site. All of this awesome hand-picked news that you personally have selected for them to read that’s important to them, but you don’t really have to do anything to make it happen.
So, it’s actually very cool. So, check out Delicious. I’m going to probably do a webinar tutorial in the next month or two that shows you how to set up that kind of curated RSS feed of links for your guitar students that I just talked about, because there’s a few things you have to do to make it work. But it starts out with Delicious, because that’s where all of the stuff gets bookmarked and saved. So, definitely want to check it out.
Tool #8 – BasecampOkay, the next tool is Basecamp. Basecamp.com is where you can go to check it out. And if you’ve read books like Rework, then you’ve heard of 37 Signals – the company that makes Basecamp. And Basecamp is basically online project management software that helps you organize all the details of a project that you might be working on and, most importantly, it lets you collaborate with other people on that project in real time. So, you can setup to-do lists. You can set up text documents. You can upload files. And everybody that has access to the Basecamp site that you give permission to get to your project information, they can all add things and change things in real time, leave comments, add links, and it’s a great way for a bunch of people that are geographically distributed from each other to work on the same project at the same time.
What does it cost? Well, you can use it free for 60 days, which is a very generous free trial with all the features, and then the cheapest package costs about 20 bucks a month after that. So, this is probably not something everyone would be interested in using, but I use it a lot, so I wanted to recommend it. If you ever need to create anything with anyone else, this is the perfect tool. So, if you want to write a book with someone, which is actually what I’m using it for right now, you can collaborate with someone and write chapters of a book in Basecamp, and it’s awesome. You could create an online course with another guitar teacher across the world and work together and share all the same information. And it’s just a great way to do anything that you would ever want to do in collaboration with anyone else.
It’s great for songwriting with another person. Studio projects. Anything. You name it. If you want to work with someone else that’s not in the same physical location as you, Basecamp is the perfect way to keep it all organized and running the way it should. So, you want to check that one out. And then let’s see; I have a few more for you here.
Tool #9 – ZendeskThe next one is Zendesk. Zendesk.com is the website. What does Zendesk do? Well, if you’ve ever submitted a support ticket to StartTeachingGuitar.com for any kind of problem that you’ve run into with my website or anything like that, you have experienced Zendesk firsthand, because it’s an online help desk ticketing system that you can use for your students and your website visitors, and anyone that’s connected with your teaching studio.
So, why would you want to do this? Well, if you have an online presence, especially with like a login-only membership site, like I recommend that you set up so that your students get in and interact in a discussion forum, they can download resources and get access to private things, then there’s going to be situations where they’re going to need to change their passwords, where certain permissions won’t be right that you have to fix. There are going to be times when certain pages won’t load or they’re going to have problems with this or that. And rather than them calling you on the phone or shooting you an email, if you send them to your help desk, to Zendesk, it will organize all of the requests for you in one place and let you store a knowledge base of answers to common problems, and it’s very professional, very clean, very easy to use, and it’s the same system that large companies use to manage all of their online support requests.
The cool thing is, if you’re just starting out, it’s only 25 dollars a year to set up Zendesk. You know, so it’s really cool. It doesn’t cost hardly anything. I mean that’s like – what – two bucks a month to use it. And as long as you don’t grow into this big business where you have multiple people dealing with requests and stuff like that, as long as you stay small, it’s only 25 dollars a year, and that’s what I use for Start Teaching Guitar. And I’m not saying you have to set this up for your teaching studio. I’m just saying if you get a lot of online support requests related to your website or the things that you offer, then it’s a great way to funnel everything into one place and make sure that nothing falls between the cracks.
So, if you want to use it, you could give your students and easy-to-use place to get technical support for your website or anything else that you do. If you teach online lessons via Skype, it’s another great way to kind of improve the customer service experience for your students. So, check out Zendesk.
Tool #10 – LogMeInThe next one is called LogMeIn. If you go to LogMeIn.com, you can see exactly what this tool is all about, but LogMeIn works great if you have a computer in one place and then you’re often in another place. So, maybe you’re like a part-time guitar teacher and you have your teaching computer at home that you use that you have all of your stuff on, and then maybe you work a day job where you have access to an office computer. Well, if you install LogMeIn on your home computer or your studio computer, then all you’ve got to do is go to a web browser from any other computer anywhere else in the world, and then you can login and take over the desktop of your home computer and use it just like you were there.
Very cool stuff. So, I use it a lot when I’m traveling. I’ll use it to remote back into my computer back at home, in my office, and that way I don’t have to take it with me everywhere I go. So, it works out really cool for that. It also works out good for technical support and things like that if you have family members that you help with their computer stuff. Throw LogMeIn on their home computer. It lets you kind of take it over and help them. I do that with my parents that live several states away from me sometimes too.
The cool thing is it’s free. Yay! We like free, don’t we? Free. There are paid upgrades available that add more features to it, but you can use it free for one computer per account. If you travel away from your studio, using a tool like LogMeIn is a dead simple, easy way to have access to all of your computer tools just like you were sitting there at your desk. So, that’s why it made my pick of my favorite top 12, because I like it so much. It works really, really good.
Tool #11 – SkypeOkay, the next one, and I know that you guys have all heard of this one before, but I want to mention it anyway because I really love it. Skype. If you go to Skype.com, you can find out what all the hype is about related to Skype. That kind of rhymed, didn’t it? Well, Skype, to put it simply, is just a voice over IP/video conferencing tool. It just uses the Internet to let you talk to, chat with, and do video with people from anywhere in the world. It doesn’t cost anything. They do have paid upgrades available, like you can get your own Skype phone number and you can call people’s phones and stuff for an extra fee, but just talking to another Skype user online doesn’t cost anything.
And obviously the biggest reason people like us use Skype is to teach guitar lessons online, but you could also use it to hold online meetings, to do mastermind groups with other people from different parts of the world, to communicate with people all over the world for free. No long distance charges. No surcharges. No expensive phone calls. I mean if the other person is on the web and they have a Skype account, you can talk to them for free. You can use webcams and see each other. You can share your desktop and show them things, and take over their desktop and do all kinds of cool stuff. It’s really, really cool.
And there’s another tool that goes with it that I use a lot. I use it to record all of my Skype interviews and things like that, that I turn around and put on episodes of the Podcast. It’s called Call Recorder for Skype. And I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. So, the way that works is you just install it and, any time you make a Skype call, the recorder starts recording. It records the video. It records the audio. And then there are tools that let you split it up into left and right, separate the audio from the video, slice and dice it any way you want to so that you can use that. And if you teach online lessons using Skype, it’s an incredible tool to record those lessons and make them available to your students, and that’s a great value that you can add to the relationship. So, if you haven’t used it before, you definitely want to check out Skype.
Tool #12 – Google Apps for BusinessAnd then the last one is Google Apps for Business. Now, everybody, I’m sure, has heard of Gmail and Google Calendar, and Google Drive and Google Documents and Spreadsheets and Slides, and all the other stuff that Google offers. Google Voice. Google Hangouts. Google Plus. Google. Google. Google. Google. They have a thousand and one different services that they offer.
Well, what you may not have known is that Google Apps for Business wraps the most popular services offered by Google all into one place. One web interface that you can kind of go to, to get to everything, and it lets you use those tools with your own domain name. Think about that for a second. So, instead of Gmail.com, you use Gmail, you use their spam filters, you use their web interface, and everything around it, but instead of @Gmail.com, it comes from @YourTeachingStudio.com. And it lets you use Google Calendar in some special ways that let you collaborate with the other people that are working with you in your studio. It lets you share your documents and spreadsheets and slides. Everything else.
It lets you do voice and video, and all the other stuff you can do with Google, but it packages it all in one place and it brands it for your business. It’s very, very cool. What does it cost? Well, it’s not free. All of their apps are free if you use them individually, but bundled this way with the flexibility and the branding that goes along with it, for one user, it’s only five bucks a month. So, it’s really not a bad deal at all. If you have a small music school with four people working with you, for 20 bucks a month you can have all of this stuff integrated together and give access to everyone in your studio for only five bucks a person. So, it’s really cool.
So, why should you use it? Well, you could give your teaching studio the same suite of integrated tools that large businesses use. You could look more professional and you can be more productive. So, something to check out. And that was number 12, but hey, I’ll tell you what. I have a bonus tool for you. Yay! Free bonus.
BONUS! Tool #13 – QuickBooks OnlineOkay, the last special bonus tool – number 13 – that I use and love is QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks Online. What does QuickBooks Online do? Well, QuickBooks is bookkeeping and accounting software that is really easy to use and very, very, very powerful. It tracks all of your business finances. It has incredible reporting capabilities. And it’s really simple to use, and fast. It like minimizes the amount of time that you have to spend actually doing bookkeeping, which, you know, most people don’t enjoy bookkeeping very much. I know I don’t, so I want to get it done right and as quickly as I possibly can so that I can have time freed up to go do other things.
Well, that QuickBooks tool that everybody’s been using for the last 20 years. They’ve created an online version of it that is web-based and is in the cloud. So, it’s online bookkeeping and accounting software that you log into the web browser, and all of your financial information is there, secure, backed up, and there when you need it. So, what does it cost? This is obviously not free, but you can get a QuickBooks Online Starter Account for only $12.95 per month. And if you actually make a one-year commitment, they will drop that down to like, I believe, ten bucks a month. So, it’s a lot cheaper than buying the software every year and upgrading it and stuff like that, and you have all the benefits of having your data online.
So, you can access your bookkeeping and your accounting information from anywhere. You never have to worry about losing your data, and you can share it with your tax preparation professionals very easily. You just send them a login, and it’s a special login where they can get in and they can get the information that they need. So, you don’t have to print out papers. You don’t have to put together reports. You don’t have to spend hours and hours organizing all this junk. You just send them a link to your QuickBooks account and then they can pull everything they need right out of there. How cool is that? Yeah. So, if you’re already using an online tool, like Music Teacher’s Helper, to track your finances, that’s fine. If not, then definitely check out QuickBooks Online because it let’s you do a whole lot of cool stuff for only $12.95 a month.
So, there you have it. That’s my list of my favorite online productivity tools for guitar teachers. I actually gave you 13 or 14 of them there instead of 12. You know, you always want to under-promise and over-deliver. So, there are lots of others. I realize that this list is not exhaustive. There are lots of other online tools that could’ve made this list. I would love to hear some of your favorites. So, tell me about them in the show notes for this episode so that we can all be more productive guitar teachers together.
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Related Articles:* 10 Online Resources To Help You Grow Your Teaching Business * STG 120: 5 Must-Have Mobile Apps For Teaching Guitar * How To Capture Your Cool Business Ideas * STG 112: Growing Your Teaching Studio $5 At A Time * Recommended Tools and Guitar Teaching Resources
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Maybe you’ve been thinking about starting up your own guitar teaching studio, but you keep putting it off. The root of procrastination is FEAR, and fear will always rob you of opportunities for success. If you can understand and overcome your fears, you can step out into the kind of life you dream about living.
In this episode, I’ll get into 7 key fears that can keep from starting your own business teaching guitar lessons, and for each of the 7 fears, I’ll give you a solution to help you overcome it. If you can muster the courage to face some of these fears, you really can become the guitar teacher you’ve always wanted to be.
To call in with a question, a comment or to leave feedback for the show, call the Listener Feedback Hotline at (719) 428-5480 and leave a message! I just might include your recorded message in a future episode.
Items Mentioned In This Episode:Link – “Done For You” Email Autoresponder Series Link - STG All-Access Link - How To Set Up Your Own Guitar Teaching Website In 30 Minutes Or Less Link - Recommended Teaching Books Link - MusicTeacherWebsite.com
Podcast TranscriptionSo, maybe you’ve been watching other guitar players in your area start teaching lessons, or maybe you’ve been lurking around STG, around Start Teaching Guitar, trying to kind of gather information. Maybe you’ve been thinking about this teaching stuff for a long time, but you haven’t really taken the plunge yet and started teaching guitar lessons yourself. If that’s you, then you’re the person that I’m talking to in this episode, and I’ve got some good stuff for you today.
Maybe there’s something that’s just holding you back. You really have a desire to teach. You know, you really have something good to offer and you know that teaching would be something good for you to do, but for some reason there’s something holding you back. Something you’re afraid of that’s keeping you from taking action and actually getting started as a guitar teacher. Being stuck and procrastinating on something that you really want to do is no fun at all. So, what this episode is going to hopefully do is help you get unstuck. This is going to be awesome.
Benefits of Teaching Guitar LessonsSo, you probably already know a lot of the benefits of teaching guitar lessons. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast and considering it, but I’ll just go through some of them for you. Teaching guitar helps you improve your own skills on the guitar while you work. You know, that’s one reason why teaching is so cool, because hey, you get to work, you get to make money, and you get to improve your own skills at the same time. If you love playing the guitar, like I do, then it’s a really cool aspect of being a teacher. Teaching can also boost your success as a gigging musician because of the relationships that you make with your students, the networking that goes on, the level of expertise that you establish in your local area, not to mention the improvement in your musical skills and learning songs that you teach other people. You know, networking with other musicians that teach. All of those are ways to help you be more successful as a gigging musician that can all come from teaching.
It also allows you to set your own hours. You can schedule your lessons whenever it’s convenient for you for the most part. You can be your own boss. You don’t have anybody telling you what to do or when to work, and stuff. Teaching guitar lets you have the ability to work from home if you want to. So, you could teach out of a music store or out of some commercial space, but you could also teach out of a home office or out of your basement, or out of your living room, on the sofa, if you want to. You know? It’s a really cool thing. So, it eliminates your commuting and stuff, because you get to work from home.
Teaching also gives you more control over how much money you can make. It’s not like you make a flat salary and that’s all you’re ever going to get paid, or a fixed minimum wage type of situation. If you want to make more money, you just teach more lessons or improve the value of what you offer and raise your tuition rates. There’s a lot of control that you have over your finances whenever you become a self-employed guitar teacher. Teaching also lets you get paid to do something that you love, and that’s something that’s hard to put a price tag on because fulfillment and happiness and joy that you get from your work is a really important piece of having a quality life and having a healthy life and being happy with your life.
So, if you love to play guitar and you love to talk about the guitar and you love to teach things to other people, then it could be the perfect career option for you, because you get to do something that you love and get paid to do it at the same time. Teaching also lets you make a difference in other people’s lives. There’s a lot of significance that comes with being a good guitar teacher, because you really make a difference in people. You help them to change the course of their lives in some cases and to pursue a career in music or in music education. And if nothing else, you bring joy and satisfaction and fulfillment into their lives by helping them master something as cool as the guitar. So, it’s awesome.
Another cool thing about it: it doesn’t require any formal training. It doesn’t require a college degree necessarily. If you have a music degree, it will only help, but you don’t need to have a music degree to teach beginning rock students, for example, or beginning country students. Those types of genres. Beginning blues students, bluegrass and things like that. Those genres are not really known for their high level of music education for the most part, so you don’t really have to have a degree in classical guitar or in jazz improvisation, or anything like that, to teach a lot of those genres to beginners. You just need to be one step ahead. Right Now, any training or degree that you have – I’m not downing those things. That will help you be a more effective teacher and a better musician, but it’s not required. If you don’t have it, you could still be a successful guitar teacher without it.
And another benefit is you can get started teaching guitar lessons – open up your music studio – for not very much money. You know, some businesses require a lot of money. Like if you buy into a McDonald’s franchise, for example, or something like that, you’ve got to come up with a quarter of a million dollars of your own money. Either you’ve got to borrow it from the Government or take out a loan, or save up all your money or sell everything you have to get into it, and then basically what you own is a job, right? Well, you can get started teaching guitar for just a few hundred bucks. You know, just enough money to get a website setup and a few things like that, and get your teaching studio in order. Do a little bit of advertising and boom, you have a business with money coming in that’s profitable. You know, not too many businesses will let you do that, but teaching guitar lessons is one of them that does.
So, there are a lot of benefits to being a guitar teacher. Now, most of you already are familiar with all of these things, like I said, or you wouldn’t be interested in this in the first place, but I just wanted to put that out there so that you have some motivation to actually breakthrough some of the fears that I’m going to talk about in a second and experience some of these benefits in your own life so that you can actually get started if you’ve been sitting on the fence and you want to teach guitar lessons, but you’ve never really pulled the trigger on it. You know, you probably keep telling yourself things like: “Oh, I’ll get around to teaching guitar one day. Just not today. Just not right now.” And chances are one of the following seven fears that I’m going to talk about is holding you back and keeping you from starting up your own teaching studio.
So, I’m going to go through these fears one by one and talk about each one, and kind of give you some solutions if it’s something that you feel like you’re susceptible to. Something that might be an obstacle for you in getting your teaching studio launched and off the ground.
Fear #1 – I’m Not ReadySo, fear number one is pretty common. “I’m not ready.” That’s probably the big fear a lot of people have. I’m just not ready for this yet. And if you’re in that situation, you probably keep reading books. You probably keep collecting method books and listening to podcasts, and learning as much as you can, and you keep having knowledge coming in, but you never have any practice of it going out because you’re just afraid that you’re not ready to get started yet. Well, I hear this from a lot of would-be teachers and most of the people that I hear this from, honestly, are actually more than ready to get started.
Some of the people who say this have been teaching family and friends on the side for free for a long time, some of them even for years, but they still feel like they’re not ready to open a business at it. And there’s even other people that are experts at the guitar that know and understand music inside and out, have amazing technique, and a wealth of information to share, and they know that teaching guitar lessons could solve a lot of their financial problems as a musician, but for some reason they don’t feel like they’re ready. Well, if that’s you, I just want to tell you you’re probably a lot closer than you think you are to being ready to start teaching. You probably are a lot closer to being ready to get started than you think. You might not feel ready, but if you ask anybody else, they’d probably tell you, you would make a great teacher and you should’ve started doing it years ago.
Okay, so here’s a solution for this fear. If you feel like you’re not ready, if you’re afraid to get started because you feel like you’re not quite ready, then what you should do is you should pick a date when you will start teaching your first guitar student for pay whether you feel ready or not. You know, feelings are not real. They’re just feelings. They’re just chemicals in your brain a lot of times, and fear is a feeling. And if you’re afraid and you feel like you’re not ready, that’s not necessarily an accurate indicator of reality. So, pick a date and write it on your calendar, and that’s the date that you are going to start. You’re going to put your shingle out there and you’re going to start attracting students, and you’re going to start teaching guitar for money. Whether you feel ready on that date or not, you’re going to start doing it. And sometimes just giving yourself a deadline can help spur you out of procrastination.
And that’s true if you’re a more experienced player too and you’ve been teaching for a while. You can use this deadline trick to help yourself push past fear and procrastination in other areas that you’re trying to expand into too. So, that’s the first big fear. “I’m not ready,” and I’m going to say yes, you probably are. So, take that step.
Fear #2 – I Don’t Know What To TeachOkay, fear number two: “I don’t know what to teach.” This is kind of that fear of unpreparedness or that fear that you are going to mess something up. I don’t know what to teach. It’s kind of like that fear that you have, where you wake up at night in a cold sweat because you had a nightmare that you showed up at work in your underwear or in your pajamas. Because it’s that fear of just not being prepared; of missing something. I don’t know what to teach. Well, there are really two variations on this particular fear.
The first one is: “I have no idea what to teach. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what to communicate to my students in my lessons.” Okay, and then the second aspect is: “I know so much that I don’t know where to begin. I have such a vast musical knowledge. I don’t know how to get down to the level of a beginner and show them what to do. I don’t know what to do to start it off.”
So, if you know how to play guitar, this is for the first thing. You know, if you really don’t have any idea what to teach, if you know how to play guitar, then you have some valuable information that you can pass on to someone else. So, you have the knowledge. You have a level of skill. You have something to share. So, all you have to do is just distill that into a way that you can communicate it to someone that is at a lower level on the instrument than you are, and then you have lesson material. If you’re on the other side, where you know so much that you don’t know where to begin with lessons, then all you need to do is get your knowledge a little bit better organized.
So, the solution I have for you for this fear, for number two, is you want to reverse engineer the process of learning guitar that you followed yourself. Reverse engineer it. What does that mean? It sounds technical. Well it’s not. It means you simply write down all the steps that you can remember following as a guitar student yourself. Okay, so back whenever you were younger and you first picked up the guitar, what steps did you remember following? What did you do to learn the guitar? Where did you start? Then what did you do after that? Then what did you do after that? What progression of concepts and techniques and exercises did you work through? What songs did you learn in what order?
Okay, just take a little trip down memory lane and write all that stuff down. And then put them in the best order that you can for a new student, for a beginner, taking into account what you learned from your mistakes along the way. You know, just because you did it one way, maybe it’s not going to be the best way for someone else. So, if you’ve learned from some of your mistakes, you can make it better for the people that you teach. And then just fill in each of those steps with the appropriate musical concepts, exercises, music theory, repertoire, and other parts. You know, songs. Other things as you think best. Just fill in the blanks with different things that you can do in your lessons with your students.
And then, if you kind of run out of ideas, use some good method books to fill in any gaps. I have some links on this StartTeachingGuitar.com homepage in the Toolbox section of good teaching books that you can check out and purchase, and lots of great lessons materials in those books. Now, I say this a lot. I don’t recommend teaching through them from cover to cover, but they’re a great source for material for your lessons if you kind of cherry pick what you need and put it into your own framework. So, that’s the solution. Just reverse engineer the process that you followed for yourself, and then you can put together an entire curriculum that you can use with pretty much all of your students, starting at different levels, and that will forever solve the problem of: “I don’t know what to teach,” and you won’t ever have to be afraid of that one anymore.
Fear #3 – Nobody Will Sign UpOkay, fear number three. This is one that’s pretty common. Fear number three: “Nobody will sign up.” I’m afraid that if I start that will no one will sign up. If I build it, no one will come. Well, nobody wants to pour hours and days and weeks into starting a teaching studio, and then have no students show up that are interested in lessons. Now, I can’t guarantee that you’re going to have a line of students waiting outside your door to sign up for lessons with you. I can’t guarantee that, but if you’re offering something good, good quality lessons that other people need, and presenting it in a way that they’re liking and interested in and taking notice of, then the chances are very high that they’re going to sign up with you.
Okay, all marketing in this context is, is offering a solution to a problem that people are aware of and communicating it to them in a way that they can understand it and take action on it. You’re solving people’s problems with your teaching studio. Okay, and if you can do that with a group of people, then they’re very likely to sign up. Now, you don’t need, or you don’t even really want a hundred new students in the first month anyway. The best growth is going to happen kind of slowly over time and it’s going to allow you to keep pace with the growth, because if you’ve got swamped with a hundred new students the first month that you opened your door, then you would get overwhelmed. You wouldn’t be able to teach them all. You would never have any time off and you would end up doing a lousy job probably and not giving anybody the best of what they need.
So, you don’t want a hundred new students in the first month, unless you’re a little bit more established, and if you’re teaching group classes and things like that. That would be a great problem to have. But when you’re first getting started, a hundred new students would be like a death sentence almost if you got them all at the same time. All you need are a few students to get started. And if you do a good job with a few new students, things are going to grow from there. Referrals will start coming in, especially if you ask them for referrals. You’ll get better at what you do as a teacher. You’ll get more confidence. You’ll get more established. You’ll kind of find your groove and your niche as a teacher. Things are going to start to open up, and then momentum is going to start to build.
So, it happens kind of slowly over time and it’s an awesome thing. That’s the way healthy businesses grow. They don’t grow too fast. They grow at just the right speed so that the person that’s running the business can grow right along with it. Okay, so if you’re afraid no one’s going to sign up, the perfect solution for that is to go ahead and get started, but start by working your existing network of contacts to find your first few students. So, what I would do is I would ask everybody that you know. Make a list of family, friends, associates, neighbors, co-workers, anyone and everyone. Members of your church. Members of your country club. Members of your local political group or whatever you’re involved in. Whatever kind of stuff you do, band members that you play with. Anyone. Everyone that you could possibly know their first name. Ask them if they know anyone in your area who might be interested in learning the guitar. Chances are there are going to be at least two or three people who are going to be interested in signing up. If you are like most people, I mean Facebook is a good place to do this if you’re active on Facebook and you have a personal page. I have a page with like four or five hundred people on it that I’ve known throughout the course of my life in one way or another. So, actually that’s a great place to ask: “Do you know anyone who might be interested in guitar lessons?”
You know, chances are at least two or three people are going to be interested in your groups of friends and family and associates, and then those people may even know a few other people. So, between all of those connections, you should be able to find a handful of people to get started with. So, if that’s what you do, then you’ll have your handful of students. You’ll have two or three to start off, and then things can grow from there. So, you don’t have to worry about opening your doors and not having a single student.
Fear #4 – My Lessons Won’t Be Good EnoughFear number four: “My lessons won’t be good enough.” And this is a common one too. It’s like the fear that it’s not going to work out. That I’m not going to do a good job. That I’m not going to be able to perform. That I’m not going to be able to deliver what I’m promising. Maybe you’re afraid that you don’t have enough knowledge or skill or experience on the guitar. Maybe you think you’re not a good enough guitar player to be able to teach lessons. That it’s preposterous. It’s like: “Why should I assume that I could be a guitar teacher? You know, I really need other people to be teaching me.” And yeah, that may be true that we all have things to learn, but if you don’t think you’re good enough to be a teacher, then you’re never going to try to do it. You’re going to be afraid.
Maybe you’re afraid that you won’t be able to deliver on your promises to your student. Okay, this is something that every new guitar teacher feels, honestly. It’s across the board. Pretty much everyone deals with this at first. “Am I really good enough to make this work?” And a lot of established teachers who’ve been doing it for a while feel that from time to time too, so just prepare yourself. This is a feeling that you’re going to have. It’s a fear that’s going to pop up every once in a while, and you just acknowledge it, say yeah, I’m feeling a little bit of fear that I might be a little inadequate, and then just let it go and keep on teaching. And before long, it’s going to go away. Remember everybody has to start somewhere. You’re not going to do everything one hundred percent perfect the first time out, but if you don’t quit, you will improve over time.
Okay, that’s just the way it works. Also, you’ve got to realize too. If you’ve got fears like this, you’re afraid that you’re not going to be good enough; you don’t have to jump into this teaching thing alone. You know, that’s one of the reasons I put together STG All-Access; is so that you can have a supportive community of other teachers to help you succeed, and new, encouraging information on a regular basis to help you stay motivated, to help you improve your business skills, your teaching skills, and slowly, over time, get to the point where you’re established and where you want to be. So, you can check out STGAllAcess.com for more information about that, but there’s a whole community of people from all over the world – guitar teachers – that would love nothing more than to encourage you and to help you get to the next level with your business. So, check that out if you think it would help you.
But the real solution for the feat that you’re not going to be good enough, if you’ve never taught before, is to teach a few lessons for free at first to just gain some confidence in yourself. So, the way you do that is you find two or three students who would be interested in one free month of guitar lessons. In exchange for four free lessons, ask them to give you three things in return. Number one: give you feedback on your performance as a teacher. So, after the four free lessons are up, they’re going to tell you what you did well and what you can use improvement in. They’re going to be honest and give you feedback, which is important because that’s going to help you with your confidence level and it’s going to show you areas you can improve so that you can be more successful.
The second thing you’re going to ask them for is a video testimonial, where you just pull out your smartphone and they talk into the phone and say, “This is why I recommend taking guitar lessons with Joe, or with John, or with Edward,” or whatever your name is. You know, with this particular teacher, and then they give you a video testimonial that you can, in turn, use on your website. Okay, and then the third thing that you ask them for is a list of referrals. “Do you know anybody that would be interested in taking guitar lessons with me,” and you get a list of three or four people from them. And then those people you reach out and contact, and say, “Hey, so and so gave me your name and said that you might be interested in learning the guitar. Here’s what I can do for you,” or you have your friend pass your information on, or something like that.
So, you get feedback, you get a video testimonial, and you get some referrals in exchange for those free lessons. So, those are things that money can’t really buy, so the lessons really aren’t free. You’re getting a benefit from that, but even in that case, after the free lessons are up, those students might want to continue on a paying basis. But even if they don’t, you’re going to have what you need to get started with your business and you’re going to have gained some confidence because you’ve taught these people successfully for a month. Okay, so that’s a great solution to that problem if you’re feeling inadequate. It’ll build your confidence if you can do that.
Fear #5 – I Don’t Know Anything About Websites And StuffOkay, fear number five: “I don’t know anything about websites and stuff.” So, this is kind of like a fear of technology or a lack of understanding of technology. So, if you’re not a technical person, you can still be a successful guitar teacher. Yes, you’re going to need a website. Yes, you’re going to need to be able to work social media. Yes, you’re going to need to be able to manage and run an email list and things like that. You’re going to need to be able to do some stuff on your computer. But if you’re not a technical person, you can still be successful as a guitar teacher.
The solution to that is to use easy-to-understand tools where you can. You know, you use simple, well designed online tools to help you wherever you can, and then the other areas where you don’t have easy-to-use tools, get someone to help you. Okay, so this is the solution to that problem. WordPress is a godsend for websites. WordPress with your own hosting account is the easiest website you could ever build and manage, and you could do almost everything yourself with WordPress. You don’t need to pay someone to go in and update the text on your webpage, or your phone number, or your lessons rates, or policies, or anything like that. It’s so easy to go in and do it yourself.
And I have a free video tutorial that explains how to build your own teaching website using WordPress in 30 minutes or less. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. You can check it out. Okay, it’s free. It’s easy. Okay, and for Gold Level STG All-Access members, I actually giveaway a free basic website with free website hosting and a free domain name. If you’re a Gold Level STG All-Access member, Gold or Platinum, Gold or above. So, it’s basically everything you need to get started with your own website. I’ll even install for you, and you’ll have a basic shell of a website that you can go in and add your text, add your photos, and change your colors around, and things like that, and make it look like you want. Add the content, but it’s all there. It is done for you, and you don’t have the monthly expense of a hosting account and you don’t have the annual expense of a domain name. It’s all free with your STG All-Access Gold Level or higher membership. So, you can go to STGAllAccess.com and check out more info about that.
And if all of that is still too much for you, then I can even build the whole thing for you from beginning to end for a set price. So, I can help you with every level of that kind of technology stuff. You could check out MusicTeacherWebsite.com to find more info about that part. But if you use easy-to-understand tools wherever you can and get someone to help you with the stuff that you can’t do yourself, you could get it all done and you can focus on your teaching business instead of worrying about technology. Okay, so don’t let fear of technology stop you.
Fear #6 – I Hate The Idea Of MarketingNumber six. This is a common one. “I hate the idea of marketing.” Fear number six: “I’m terrified of marketing. I don’t understand marketing. I hate the fact that I have to sell myself. I don’t like marketing.” Well, some people are natural marketers. You’ve run into people like that. They’re confident. They’re charismatic. They have an instinctive understanding of what benefits that they offer that are going to appeal to their students and things like that. You know, but those people are kind of rare. Most people, probably most of us, have a harder time with this stuff at first. I know I did.
Marketing may not come natural to you, but you can definitely learn it and you can definitely learn how to do it well and be effective at it. Marketing your teaching studio is not selling yourself. Okay, it’s not about sales. It’s not about cold calling. It’s not about putting yourself in an awkward situation, trying to talk someone into something that they don’t want. Marketing your teaching studio is simply letting other people know what you can do for them. People that have a need for a guitar teacher. Matching your solution with their problem, and then just telling them about it. Letting them know what you can do. That’s all it is.
And if you do it right, students come to you. You don’t have to go to them. You don’t have to sell yourself if you do it right. Okay, they just come to you. And some people are going to decide not to sign up. Some of them are going to come to you and not sign up as a student. That’s totally okay. Maybe they don’t have the money. Maybe they don’t have the time right now. But other people are going to be excited because they found exactly what they’ve been looking for and you’re the perfect teacher for them, and they will sign up.
So, if you have a fear of marketing, you hate marketing, then here’s a solution for you. Really try to understand the benefits that your guitar lessons bring to your students. Okay, and then if you can really approach this conversation from a benefit perspective, then you can help them understand what your lessons can do for them. What problems do your potential students have that your lessons can solve? What pain do they have that you can make go away with your teaching studio? If you can identify those things and communicate it on your website and your emails and your advertising, then you’re not going to have to do any kind of selling at all. You’re going to presell your lessons to those kinds of people and they’re going to come to you. Okay, so you don’t have to worry about marketing. If you do it right, it will work for you and you’ll never have to sell yourself again. So, that’s fear number six.
Fear #7 – What If I Fail?And then the last one. Fear number seven is: “What if I fail?” The fear of failure is one of the biggest reasons people don’t get started with something that seems a little bit risky, like starting your own teaching studio. The fear of failure. This can be one of the biggest fears of all. What if this blows up in my freaking face? What if I put myself out there and it just flops? It falls flat on its face. And what is everybody going to think of me? How am I going to be able to face people if I fail as a guitar teacher?
Well, honestly, in my experience, the fear of failure is usually a lot worse than the failure itself. And failure is not a bad thing. So, the solution to this is to redefine what it means to fail. If your business has a month where you don’t make enough income from your business to pay your expenses, that’s not the ideal situation. Obviously you’re going to be doing this to make a profit, but if you have a month like that, that might seem like a failure in one regard, but it doesn’t have to be. Okay, redefine what it means to fail. Failure isn’t fatal. It’s not going to kill you. Failure isn’t final. It’s not the last word on you as a person, you as a teacher, or your business. It’s not final.
What failure is, is a part of your education. If you never fail, that means that you’re never even trying, because everyone who attempts something bigger than yourself is going to fail at some point. When you fail, what you do is you try to learn from it and you try to move forward, but you just get back up and you keep going. It’s called failing forward. Whenever you fail, you fail in a forward direction so that every failure brings you closer to where you want to be. And then success comes from a series of failures if you just don’t give up.
Okay, so if you think about it in that regard, failure is actually one of your best friends because it means that you’re trying new things. You’re stretching. You’re expanding. You’re taking calculated risks and, if it doesn’t work out, then you learn and you recalibrate, you recalculate, you do some mid-course correction, and you get up and keep going and you never make that same mistake again. It makes you a better business owner. It makes you a better teacher. It makes you a better person. So, don’t be afraid of failure. Instead, embrace it. Embrace it and fail as often as you can, and learn from your failures because the more you fail, the faster you’re going to succeed.
I think it was Thomas Edison. A quote about him. Whenever he was trying to invent the lightbulb, someone asked him, “How did you invent the lightbulb?” He said, “Well, I invented one thousand things that didn’t work, and then the one thousand and first time I tried to invent the lightbulb, it worked. So, it was a process of elimination.” And success for you as a guitar teacher, dependent on your situation, is going to be a process of elimination as well. You’re going to try stuff. Some of it’s going to work. Some of it’s going to fail. You learn from the failure, you redouble your efforts, and you go back smarter and more dedicated than you were before, and then you make more progress. And then you have a small area of failure again. Then you get up, you learn from it, and you keep making more progress. And before you know it, you are successful. Isn’t that awesome?
So, to wrap things up today, if any of these fears have been keeping you from launching your own teaching studio, I just want to encourage you to make a decision to walk into that fear, to push passed that fear, and get started today.
Thank You For Listening!If you enjoyed this episode, or any of the other of the episodes of the STG podcast, and you haven’t left a rating or review yet on iTunes, I would really appreciate an honest rating and review from you. It’s one of the most important parts of the ranking algorithm in iTunes, but more importantly, it’ll show future listeners that this podcast is (or isn’t) worth listening to.
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Related Articles:* STG 104: 7 Guitar Teaching Excuses I Never Want To Hear… * The Secret To Teaching Fearless Guitar Lessons * The Biggest Lesson I Learned In 2011 * Success Lives On The Other Side Of Frustration * STG 076: Why You Need To Raise Your Tuition Rates
The post STG 088: How To Beat 7 Common Guitar Teaching Fears appeared first on Start Teaching Guitar.
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