Hosting & Platform

Booking & Content Access Tools

Here I'll help you choose the best options for booking and for controlling students' access to content, and I'll direct you to specific tools to make all of this effortless, streamlined & automated.

Dedicating time to automating as much as you can in the beginning is paramount, so that everything is up and running reliably and you are free to spend your time and energy where it really counts, on helping your students and attracting more of them.

Having your booking and content access running smoothly also assures that the signup process is as frictionless as possible for your students, so in this lesson we'll get into those aspects of your business.

Here you have 2 main options, both paid:

1. A WordPress Plugin like FluentBooking

2. A subscription to a service like OnceHub

FluentBooking

If you've followed my recommendations so far to set up a WordPress website, in my opinion this is your better option because (a) it's cheaper overall and (b) it keeps everything in-house — they stay on your website the entire time.

They have multiple pricing options, but for our purposes I'll only address the options for using the plugin on 1 website. There is an annual subscription rate of $63/year, OR you can just buy the plugin outright for a one-time payment of $199. 

OnceHub (ScheduleOnce)

Another reliable service I'd recommend, if you prefer to use a subscription service for bookings and simply embed their booking page(s) on your website is OnceHub, using their ScheduleOnce service.

The 2 pricing options that you'd want to consider are their basic $10/month subscription, or if you want your contact form and booking form combined into one experience that's available on their $19/month subscription (this is the one I used for nearly a decade).

They offer different booking pages and different "event types," so what I recommend is having 2 booking pages, one for your enrolled students and one exclusively for people booking your free introductory sessions. I did this with ShredMentor from the start, and it kept random strangers from booking different kinds of lessons I offered, and allowed me to only offer those options to people I was actually working with.

Zoom

Now while you're automating booking appointments, you'll also need a platform for actually having those appointments if you're meeting online. That platform needs to be stable, reliable, secure, and trustworthy, and while there are many online conferencing options, the only viable one is Zoom. And that will cost you roughly $17/month — once again, this is the cost of doing business, and it's well worth it. 

Aside from its stability and trustworthiness, it is also widely supported and integrated into many other services, so your automated booking service can also be set up to create a Zoom meeting link and send it to the student automatically.

Remember, when COVID shut down the world for part of 2020, Zoom rose to the challenge and played a huge role in keeping businesses running, and the world of remote work hasn't been the same since. Zoom literally changed how people work since 2020, and if it's stable enough for that, it's stable enough for lessons. And now that they've finally included their "Original Sound for Musicians" feature, allowing you to turn off their built-in noise cancellation that previously ruined lesson experiences by filtering out your guitar playing as "background noise," it's THE go-to platform for video lessons.

OBS Studio

And if you really want to level-up your students' Zoom lesson experience, using OBS Studio lets you do just that, by sharing your camera, your mic audio source(s), and any other video sources, so you can create custom screen layouts displaying tablature, notation, fretboard diagrams, or anything else. And if you install a green screen in your teaching space, you can offer an even better experience, where you can put yourself in front of the visuals and literally point at what you're showing your students. 

We'll cover a LOT more about this in the Video Production module of this course.

Here as well you have 2 main options:

1. A WordPress LMS Plugin like OptimizeMentor (included with OptimizePress)

2. A tier-based subscription system like Patreon

OptimizeMentor

If you're already using OptimizePress for your landing pages, funnels, course pages, and checkout process, then once again in the spirit of keeping everything on one website, the built-in OptimizeMentor suite for building online courses has all of the content access you need.

It can be a little overwhelming and confusing to set up at first, but their documentation is excellent and once you understand the structure and how it works, it's very easy to set up and use, and content access permissions are built-in based on however you set them up.

You can also create a dedicated "My Courses" page where all of the user's paid-access content is located, so it will display whichever content they should have based on their membership level.

One additional benefit to using this is that the payments go straight to you, cutting out the middle man (except for PayPal, Stripe, or Square - whoever's processing your payments).

Patreon

If you prefer an established subscription-based content platform then you can't go wrong with Patreon. You can set up tiers and get as simple or complex as you want with how you structure the benefits and pricing of each one, and you can organize content by custom Collections that you create and organize as well as by directly tagging each piece of content however you want.

You can also set which tiers to publish each post to (or which tiers to exclude), and posts can also be scheduled so that you can have them go live at a specific time in the future.

The one downside to Patreon is that on top of what you're already going to pay in fees for payment processing, they will also take a cut, so you'll get even less. It's up to you whether this is worth the additional cost though.

Patreon AND WordPress: The Patreon WordPress Plugin

Then of course there's the best of both worlds — You can use Patreon, post your content there, and then use the Patreon WordPress Plugin to automatically transfer content to your WordPress site AND control users' access to the content based on their Patreon membership status and tier. 

There's a LOT of extra WordPress functionality you can add to your Patreon content this way, so that's the main reason you might want to do that — plus you can upsell via featuring products on your website that are related to the content, if you wish.

If you have a question, simply hit the "Contact Us" button to reach out to our team.

Contact

London Street,
London,
EC1 5TQ,
UK

About

Info

Social media

© Copyright Your Company.  All Rights Reserved