Latest updates and news

New Training Course: Launching a Product or Service

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A new training course is available to help you launch your own guitar teaching product or service. If you have read through the EXP series of business guides, you've probably considered starting your own product or service to earn an additional stream of income. Knowing how to effectively launch a product or service can ultimately determine if your product succeeds or not.

The purpose of the training course is to show you how you can test any business ideas you have and how to decide which products to develop. Two case studies are provided so you can see the entire process in action.

There's a bit of work involved in creating your own product or service and launching it, but the teachers who go through the effort find it's definitely worthwhile. If you've had an idea in your head for a product or service, it's worth testing out to see if you should actually produce it. Use this course as a way to test your ideas and launch products likely to be successful.

Access the course here: Launching a Product or Service

In addition to this course we're available if you need a hand launching your own product. We can help you plan your launch and promote it. Don't leave things to chance, give yourself an advantage and get us to help you out.

New Business Guides: Advertising Using Facebook

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Most of our business guides so far have focused on free strategies to attract new students. There are times when these won't be enough and paid advertising will bring you the results you're after. If you want to quickly build up your student base or spread the word, paid advertising can be significantly more effective than free methods.

Facebook Ads are an easy way to target specific people unlike any other advertising. You can target people based on location, age, gender and interests - something that isn't possible with almost all other advertising options. To use Facebook Ads effectively, you need to understand what makes a successful advertising campaign and how to set it up properly.

We've created two detailed guides to help you set up a Facebook Ads campaign and how to track it once it's set up. By the end of the guides you will be able to create an effective ad campaign and understand what needs to be done to improve it's effectiveness. We've focused the guides on advice to make sure you don't waste money. We've tested the ads out with teachers and know what works. Read through the guides to use the ads properly.

BMK-14 Using Facebook Ads: Setting Up A Campaign

BMK-15 Using Facebook Ads: Keeping Track of a Campaign

Of course if you need further support, we're happy to provide you specific advice and guidance for your personal situation.

New business guide: Understanding the Sales Process

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You may not think of your job as a guitar teacher as a sales role. But the reality is everybody is a salesperson. Every time you try to convince your student to practice or get them to learn something new, you're selling. Of course whenever you speak to a prospective student, you're selling yourself and your lesson service.

Because sales is a big part of our professional lives, it's important to learn the sales process. We've created a new business guide to explain the basics of the sales process so you can use it to attract more students and keep the students you already have.

After reading the guide you will be able to use marketing much more effectively and know how to control the entire sales process from start to finish. If you're just starting out as a guitar teacher this guide will help you start on the right foot to attract your first students. On the other hand if you've been teaching for years, the guide will give you a way to refine your skills and stay competitive in the future.

Access the guide here: BMK-02 Understanding the Sales Process

Once you finishing reading the guide, it's recommended you do a self-assessment of your current sales process to see where you can make improvements.

New business guide: Building an email list

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One of the most effective strategies you can use straight away to grow your guitar teaching business is to start building an email list. The main reason you would want to do this is it will allow you to build up a potentially large group of potential future students or customers. Even if you don't feel the need to grow your guitar teaching business now, having your own email list will provide you protection from future events.

Think of an email list as an investment in the future. You spend a bit of time to set it up now and a couple years from now you could have a significant number of people keen to hear what you have to say.

To achieve this we have put together a detailed guide that will explain exactly what you need to know to set up your email list. Read through the guide and if you need extra support in putting your list together, ask us to give you a hand.

Access the guide here: EXP-04 Building an Email List: Getting Started

We are currently working on more guides to show you how you can use your email list to generate multiple streams of income. Get your mailing list ready so you can use the strategies later on.

New Business Guides: Advertising and Online Courses

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A common problem we see with a lot of guitar teachers is that they waste their money on ineffective advertising. The hard part with advertising your guitar lessons is that it can be difficult to work out if the money spent will be worthwhile or not. That's why we've created a guide that will help you identify which advertising options are best for you. You will be able to look at any advertising available and figure out if it's worthwhile.

The guide will use a few examples so you can see the process in action. If you're currently spending money on advertising or considering advertising your guitar teaching business, this guide will make sure you don't waste your money.

Access the guide here: BMK-01 Comparing Advertising Options

 

We've also created a guide to show you one potential way you can grow your guitar teaching business. Selling your own online courses has the potential to bring you significant income. You could create some courses as a way to supplement your income or if you work at it hard enough you could even earn all of your income with courses. The technology and software available now makes it easier than ever before to create your own online guitar courses.

The guide will give you a quick overview of what you would need to do to create your own course.

Access the guide here: EXP-03 Selling Online Guitar Courses

After you finish reading the guide you can always contact us for more support and we'll be happy to help out.

Easy Business Plans for Guitar Teachers

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An important side to being a guitar teacher is the business side. Understanding how to keep track of your progress, how to market yourself and how to grow your business are extremely important.

Having your own business plan can simply the business side of things and give you direction. Rather than sift through a lot of information on business plans, we've put a simple tool together to help you create your own business plan. We've cut out all the irrelevant information that plague so many other business plans while focusing on the key points that make a difference.

Our tool will provide you with a quick snapshot on what you need to focus on and what you need to do to succeed. You don't need to know anything about mission statements, executive summaries or any of the other fancy aspects of business plans. The whole point of our new tool is to provide you with exactly what you need to succeed.

Create your own business plan here

If you're a Live and Teach Guitar Member your plan will be saved and you will be able to view and update it any time you log in. You will also have the option to request support from us. We can go through your business plan with you and provide you with guidance on strategies you can use to achieve your goals.

If you want to read up on business plans before you create your own, we've prepared a guide at BPL-04 Business Plans for Guitar Teachers to give you some background information on what makes a good business plan.

SEO Resources for Guitar Teachers

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Up to 97% of people now use online methods to find local services and products. That means if you want to stay competitive as a guitar teacher it's essential that you learn to control your presence online. This can be difficult so we've put together a few resources to help you learn the basics of SEO and how to use it.

Whether you're just starting out as a guitar teacher or have been teaching guitar for decades, you will need to understand how to be competitive online. Our guides and resources will help you rank higher on search engines such as Google and Bing and attract more students. You don't need to become an SEO expert to achieve this and our guides have been kept as basic as possible so you can focus on the essentials that will give you the best results.

SEO Guides

We've put together two guides to help you understand SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and how you can use SEO as a guitar teacher.

BWS-02 SEO Basics for Guitar Teachers

This guide explains the basics of SEO and how to use basic SEO principles to make sure your website remains competitive. Simply reading this guide and applying the information will improve the ranking of your site in Google. As your competitors probably don't understand SEO this guide alone is enough to put you ahead of them.

You will learn what types of search terms to target that will bring you the most relevant visitors from search engines.

BWS-03 Structuring Your Website

This guide will help you set up your own website if you don't already have one or if you do have one, it will help you improve it. The guide explains how to structure your site so it receives the most traffic possible from Google and the other search engines. You will learn how to target certain keywords and how each page relates to one another.

A detailed Case Study is provided to give you a clear picture of how to use the information and structure your site. Of course we can even provide email support if you need help along the way.

Online Marketing Report

On top of the guides available, you can request for free a detailed Online Marketing Report. This report will assess your current online position and provide you with specific recommendations you can implement to improve your online presence. This report alone can make a difference between not showing up on Google and ranking first for relevant search terms. If you have your own website we will also analyze it and provide information on what's working and what you can improve. After you receive your report we provide ongoing email support to help you implement the recommendations or make any changes to your site.

Your local competitors probably don't know about this report which means you can have a clear advantage over them. You can draw from our extensive experience and use it to your advantage. It's free for members so there's nothing to lose.

A Website Designed for Guitar Teachers

Finally, if you don't already have your own website, you can set up your own as part of membership for free. The advantage you receive with using our tools to set up a website is that you will have support from people who know exactly how to promote guitar teachers online. We can work with you and set up your site exactly how you like it while making sure it uses effective SEO principles and strategies. We've done this with quite a few guitar teachers and know what works and what doesn't.

Leave the guesswork out of your marketing efforts and let us help you succeed. It's what we're good at and we're more than happy to help you out. If you need more support you can always email us here.

Guitar Lesson Plans for Kids

New guitar lesson plans for kids

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We've been working hard on creating effective guitar lesson plans for kids. Unlike other students, young kids have special requirements and require extra motivation and incentives to practice. We've tested quite a few different options and developed two new series of guitar lesson plans you can use with your children students.

In-build incentives in our guitar lesson plans for kids

From our testing we've found that including a simple incentive within the actual lesson plan dramatically improves the student's motivation, focus and effort. Each guitar lesson plan we develop for children will use some form of incentive to maximize this effect. One of the most effective inbuilt incentives we have developed is the reward that students can color in drawings on the lesson plan after they successfully learn the songs.

This means the student has an extra incentive to practice hard and learn the entire song. Instead of learning it for a bit, getting bored and moving on to the next song, they will have an extra reason to keep practicing. After the student learns the entire song and receives their reward (the coloring in), we've found that the benefits continue. We've found that students 'take ownership' of the song and their colored in lesson plans. They continue to practice the song and every time they see their colored in work, it reminds them of the benefits of practice.

While the inbuilt incentives we have developed in our guitar lesson plans may seem simple, they're very effective. We're constantly testing out different variations and forms of incentives and you will see more of these in future lesson plans.

The KID guitar lesson plans

The KID guitar lesson plans will focus on worksheets and trackers you can use to get your student involved with guitar. They will be very interactive and use inbuilt incentives to encourage the students to practice as mentioned above. Here's the first resource in this series and more are being worked on right now.

KID-01 Practice ChartGuitar Lesson Plans for Kids

This simple resource will help you develop a daily practice habit in your students. The resource covers five weeks of practice and uses effective incentives after each week so you can see how the student is tracking. The great thing with using this resource is that after the first five weeks, the student will have developed their daily practicing habit so much they will continue to practice without any extra incentives. Of course every student is different but we've tested this with many children and found it very effective.

The KDS guitar lesson plans

The KDS series of guitar lesson plans will focus on simple children's songs. Each song will teach the student how to play the single note melody while gently incorporating more difficult concepts such as partial chords, rests, muted hits, etc. Each song displays the backing chords so you can accompany the student. As mentioned above, the inbuilt incentives in each guitar lesson plan will encourage the student to practice on their own. The simple rewards reinforce good behavior and develop good habits.

KDS-01 Baa Baa Black Sheep

KDS-02 Eensy Weensy Spider

KDS-03 It's Raining, It's Pouring

KDS-04 If You're Happy And You Know It

More songs will be added to the Lesson Materials Section over this and future months as we develop more effective incentives and layouts.

Updates: Best practices, psychology and Keith Richards

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We're spreading our reach to a new guide series and starting to cover best practices from expert teachers so you can quickly develop your abilities. Here's our latest resources:

PRO-09 Keith Richards

This 'in the style of' lesson will introduce your students to Keith's rhythm style. A couple of the examples use Open-G tuning so it's a great way to introduce alternate tunings to your student at the same time.

SCA-11 Modes Reference

This is a simple reference sheet containing the seven modes of the major scale. Your student will be able to easily compare the modes and learn the intervals in each one. This will work best when used in combination with the individual modes lesson plans (SCA-04 - 10)

New Psychology Series (TPS Series)

This series takes the findings from a wide range of psychology studies to improve the quality of your teaching. When you learn to understand how students think, you can create a better learning environment.

TPS-01 Understanding Needs

You need to understand your student's needs before you expect to give a quality lesson. This guide will break down the way all humans' needs work and what you should watch out for in your lessons. Teachers who don't bother reading up on this topic end up experiencing issues that could have been easily avoided.

TPS-02 Body Language

This guide will teach you how to read your student's body language so your lesson can remain relevant and interesting. Plenty of examples are given so you can easily gauge the student's interest levels and adjust course if you need to.

TPS-03 Structuring Your Lesson

While you have a lot of flexibility in how you give a lesson, all lessons should follow the basic structure given in this guide. The reason is because it has been tested and results in a better learning environment for your student. Whether you're a new teacher or have been teaching for decades, it's essential you read this guide and follow the advice given.

TBE-02 Eliminating Points of Failure

A Point of Failure is something that can drive your student to giving up guitar. Sometimes it only takes one Point of Failure for the student to completely give up and leave your lessons. By learning to identify these Points of Failure in your teaching style and eliminating them, you will retain more students and keep your students motivated.

New Training Course: SWOT Analysis

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A new training course has been created to help new and experienced guitar teachers analyze their guitar business. This course has been written specifically for guitar teachers so there's no business jargon to worry about and everything relates directly to your teaching business.

Performing a SWOT analysis is actually easier than it sounds and the course provides you with a simple step by step process.

By the end of the course you will be able to:

  • Have in your hand a detailed strategy on how to improve your teaching business
  • Understand what to do to protect yourself against threats and issues
  • Have a simple method you can repeat anytime you want to improve your business

Every guitar teacher will benefit from this analysis so check out the course:

Access the SWOT Analysis Course here

After you complete the course you can contact us for further support and we'll help you achieve your business goals. We're working hard on providing you with all the tools and resources you need to succeed and this course will definitely give you an advantage.