Foundations
Components of a Teaching Business
These are the absolute essentials you need to know and constantly pay attention to in your music teaching business. It’s important that you do the following to consistently work ON your business, and don’t solely work IN your business (creating & teaching lessons).
Jason Aaron Wood
Lesson instructor:
Professional guitarist, teacher & music education entrepreneur. Teaching since 2008.
The Four Components of Your Teaching Business
Every successful teaching practice rests on four essential elements:
Lead Generation – How you grab the attention of potential students in the first place. Without a steady flow of prospects, you’ll never fill your roster.
Conversion – Turning curious browsers into committed clients. A clear offer, straightforward pricing, and a simple signup process make the difference between interest and enrollment.
Retention – Once you have students, keeping them engaged with real value ensures they stick around month after month. Consistent wins, fresh content, and clear progress keep motivation high.
Referrals – Your happiest clients can become your best sales team. By building in incentives and rewards for recommendations, you turn word-of-mouth into a predictable source of new students.
In the video, we’ll dive into practical strategies for strengthening each component—so you can build a teaching business that fills up, stays full, and grows organically over time.
Lead Generation
Sooner or later, EVERY student will eventually drop off.
That's why you need to constantly be attracting the attention of potential new students, and there are several ways to do this:
Offering something of value for free (called a Lead Magnet) in exchange for the user's email address and first name is the #1 way to reach people interested in what you offer.
This can be a PDF guide or infographic, an image (or pack of images), tablature, backing tracks, or some combination of files in a "lesson pack" (usually a .ZIP file). Really anything that offers real value and makes them want to download it can work here.
This gets them on your email list, and based on the topic of what they downloaded, you can automatically tag them in your email list — and that lets you send them targeted emails when you have something to offer on a related topic, so they're that much more likely to respond by signing up for or purchasing whatever it is you're telling them about.
No matter which other lead generation methods you use, building your email list should be happening at all times.
Nowhere else is your following really yours, except for your email list.
Good old-fashioned fliers posted in stores where your potential students (or their family members) might see them still works great.
Now sometimes the person seeing the flier won't be the potential student themselves, but their parent or spouse, especially in places like grocery stores and non-music stores, so make sure the wording on your flier appeals to emotions (fun, easy, etc) rather than topics that only musicians would understand (like mentioning specific techniques or theory concepts). And if you're posting a flier 5 minutes away from your studio, make sure you put that nice and visible on the flier!
So this ultimately means making at least 2 versions of your flier — possibly 4, if you do a "local" and "non-local" version of each:
1. A version for the spouse or parent to see and bring home on behalf of your potential student
2. A version that the musician themselves are likely to see (mostly for music stores).
Having a few high quality video lessons online (mainly on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook), you can get eyes on your lessons that might not otherwise find out about you.
Mind you, it's vital to learn how to get people to actually SEE your videos on each of these platforms. Merely creating a video and posting it does not guarantee that anyone will see it, so this is FAR more complicated than it might seem on the surface. But, it can be one of the most powerful forms of lead generation.
If you go through your local community center and arrange to teach classes for a set-length of time, often the students who attend will be interested in continuing with you after the classes end. So by making sure they have your contact information and reminding them as the end of the classes approach, you may be able to gain students through the marketing arm of your local community center.
Simply making helpful posts on social media, without being overtly salesy, can raise awareness about your lessons if you (a) do it consistently and (b) do it in a way that sows the seeds of goodwill.
By seeking out groups on Facebook, Reddit, and stand-alone guitar forums, and actively paying it forward, and occasionally mentioning how you solve a given problem when you work with your students, you're passively letting people know you offer lessons AND helping them for free — and if you're helping them in a substantial way, they will notice and start respecting you as an authority on the subject, and some of them may reach out for lessons as a result.
Let's not forget good old fashioned advertising. The main way to reach clients has always been to pay for ads where people will see them.
If you can afford it (ie, you're not flat broke right now), then running paid ads on Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and/or Google is a great way to get the attention of people who are already interested in guitar playing, and you can tweak the ad targeting to your own specific aims.
Conversion
This is the step where a lead becomes a paying client.
There are 3 main ways this generally happens.
In my experience, this has been the most successful method, hands down.
Fun fact: People often decide to sign up for lessons because they LIKE YOU, not just because they think you're a great player or teacher.
No text conversation, let alone an impersonal landing page, can compete with having a direct conversation. Whether it's in-person or over a video chat (like Zoom), this is the opportunity for you to win them over and make them like and trust you, and that's much easier when you can both just chat casually in real-time.
Whether to call it a Free Introductory "Lesson" or "Consultation" is up to you. I've done both, and in my experience, calling it a "Lesson" gets more people to book a free session, but some of them are just looking for a freebie and have no intention of paying for anything, although you might convince them otherwise. Calling it a "Consultation" however makes it clear that the call is ultimately leading to signing up for something paid.
In both cases, I always made sure to make it a friendly conversation, with no pressure, and with my guitar on me so I can demonstrate anything that comes up on the spot, ask questions about them, their guitar playing, their goals, their experiences, what hasn't worked for them. It's all about THEM. I always aim to give them some value to walk away with either way, whether they become my student or not.
Then eventually, in the last 10-15 minutes of the call, it comes down to logistics for them — I ask them how often they were looking for lessons, and tell them how I have multiple packages, ranging from my lowest price to my highest price, and how many lessons and how often. I have my signup links all on one page where I can quickly copy them and paste them into an email, or into the Zoom chat even, so they can set up their enrollment and get access to all of the content automatically.
Just as they're about to download something free is a great time to test how serious a lead is by offering them an upsell for a very small amount of money. The amount can vary, but something under $10 is a good rule of thumb.
You simply set up your landing page funnel to first redirect to an upsell page, before arriving at the confirmation/thank you page (OptimizePress makes this super easy and there are built-in funnel templates for doing exactly this). The upsell page offers an info product related to the exact same subject as the thing they were downloading for free, but extends the benefit — for a small price.
This is NOT where they become "your student," though. But it IS a vital step in what's called "qualifying leads" — identifying the interested parties who are in fact SO interested that they're willing to actually spend money.
Your email list should automatically TAG those users who DO buy the upsell accordingly, so that you can target those subscribers in your future relevant emails.
While it's a lot harder to sell lessons directly this way, it can be done if (a) your offering is irresistible enough and (b) your sales copy communicates that value in a way that MAKES it irresistible.
It's easier if you use the ad/sales copy to direct people to something FREE first, though, like a Free Introductory Session or a free downloadable lead-magnet, THEN upsell them directly from there.
Sales Copy = The message you use on your own landing pages on your website to sell products and services.
Ad Copy = The message you use in ads and social media posts to try to direct people back to your website where they can get whatever you're offering.
Retention
It doesn't do much good to keep chasing after new students if they don't stick around. So it's essential that you also retain the students you already have for as long as possible to keep giving them value and keep them moving forward.
Here are some ways to do that:
This ensures they're invested for at least 4 lessons at a time, whereas having them pay lesson-to-lesson essentially invites them to leave at any time.
Having them commit to an automatic payment plan shows they're serious about learning and that they recognize this is an ongoing journey you're guiding them on, not just a one-and-done quick fix with no long-term commitment. Committing to paying comes with committing to getting their money's worth, hence committing to ongoing action.
Remind them occasionally of what they said their goals are, and give them content that supports those goals. They'd feel bad if you're the only one working toward THEIR goals, and if they've been slacking off this might give them the little nudge they need to get moving forward again.
(To be clear though, don't MAKE them feel bad; you should always be the person they want to be around, and that happens when people feel good about themselves when they're around you. So always be supportive and act in their best interest, no shaming.)
Keep giving them achievable mini-goals along the way. That gives them something to feel good about in the lessons, and can keep them motivated to keep going.
Fun is the main fuel source to keep going with guitar playing.
Sure, some guitarists may have occasional bursts of extreme motivation, but that WILL run out if it isn't FUN.
This means your lessons need to be fun, but ALSO teach them how to have fun with guitar playing when they're on their own. You are the source of fun but the whole process needs to be fun or eventually they'll just stop doing it.
Setting up events, like an open mic night or a recital, for example, can do wonders for keeping students enrolled, because all these great things are happening for them because of you. It's hard to want to walk away from that.
This is another great thing about group classes — the other students also become a reason for them to stay. Sometimes this goes far beyond just having a good time in class together, too — some of my earliest students have now been working in bands together for over a decade, and they only met by being in ShredMentor classes.
Receiving praise directly ("good job!") is obviously important too, but when a student makes a breakthrough, it takes it to a whole new level when you publicly congratulate them and feature them with their guitar. People want to feel seen and heard and appreciated, and you offering them the visibility of your following means a lot, and goes a long way toward forming a bond.
Sometimes, as much as you're there to teach them guitar and get them results, people just need someone to talk to who has their back.
As long as it's in 1-on-1 format (ie, they won't be monopolizing any other students' time by doing so), I recommend you allow a student to just talk for most or even all of the lesson, even if it isn't entirely related to the guitar.
Of course, it can become uncomfortable for you, since you're not their therapist, but as their teacher and mentor, you sort of... are. They realize you're their guitar teacher so there's only so much you can do if they tell you their problems, but we all need to be heard sometimes, and the goodwill this extends will go a long way in forming a bond with your students if you allow yourself to be the person they feel comfortable talking to.
Referrals
All that work generating leads doesn't HAVE TO be entirely on your shoulders. If your students are happy with their lessons, there's a good chance they have friends who also like the guitar and might want to play and they might send them to you — if given incentive to do so.
The thing is, it probably won't even occur to them to send their friends your way UNLESS you show your students what ELSE they can get if they do. If you don't tell them they'll never think of it on their own.
As with everything, it can be anything, as long as you're providing REAL VALUE beyond what they're getting with lessons.
Some examples:
They need to be shown that you have referral bonuses, so have a special webpage where they can see this, and put a CTA (Call To Action) in the sidebar of their student lesson account with an attention-getting title, like "Get Bonus Lessons Here!" which leads them to that page where they can see an itemized breakdown of your referral incentives.
Comments:
Next video:
Components of a Teaching Business
Defining Your Niche & Target Student
Subscription vs. One-Off Lessons
Crafting Clear Cancellation & No-Show Policies & Providing Replacement Lessons
Advance Payment & Subscription Models
Your Teaching Website
Platform Comparison: WordPress, Patreon, & Udemy
Booking & Content Access Tools
Gear & Studio Setup
All Things Green Screen
Lessons in this module:
Unconfigured Element
The Lesson and Module List element is designed to list a collection of all the modules, chapters and/or lessons in selected course. You have either not select your course yet, or your selected course is invalid. Please fix this to use this element. Use help to find out more.
Need help? We are here for you...
If you have a question, simply hit the "Contact Us" button to reach out to our team.
About
Info
Social media
Youtube
Campfire
© Copyright Your Company. All Rights Reserved