Hosting & Platform
Your Teaching Website
Here we'll address setting up & building your teaching website, a MUST for your teaching business. From domain names to hosting to what content it needs to contain to how to structure that content, we'll cover it all here.
Jason Aaron Wood
Lesson instructor:
Professional guitarist, teacher & music education entrepreneur. Teaching since 2008.
Your Teaching Website
First things first — you're GOING to need a website for your teaching business, no matter what.
This is your public face to the world, your "home base" where people will find you and contact you, and ultimately book lessons. And for that, I specifically recommend a WordPress website or other Content Management System, or CMS.
You could just use a simple static HTML page and use CSS to style it and Javascript to create additional functionality, but a CMS not only does all this for you — it's easy to install and comes with SO many more features (both built-in and via plugins), including the ability for your students to have their own accounts, which is a must if you want to control which user can access which content (especially for privacy reasons, if for example, you're providing video recordings of a student's Zoom lessons).
Why WordPress?
While other CMSs exist (like Drupal and Joomla), WordPress is by far the easiest to use, the most widely used, widely supported, well-known, and the most stable. AND it has plugins for just about any additional functionality you can think of.
So that's the one I recommend you use. (I have used Drupal for 15 years and recently moved over to WordPress; you're looking at this course on a WordPress site right now.)
And the home page of whatever website you build should be a sales page — a traditional landing page where there's nothing to click on EXCEPT to take ONE ACTION: to contact you for lessons:
What Your Teaching Website MUST HAVE
1. Home Page = Landing Page
The home page of whatever website you build should be a sales page — a traditional landing page where there's nothing to click on EXCEPT to take ONE ACTION that you define: to contact you for lessons:
That means RESIST the temptation to put all kinds of the typical menu links on it — Home, About, Lessons, Contact. Don't even put a menu.
Why? Because every one of those links is a distraction — each one is SOMEWHERE ELSE for the visitor to click that isn't part of where your landing page content is leading them: to request a free introductory session with you.
You're not building a website like Amazon or Facebook, where there links everywhere. You want your website visitor to take ONE ACTION — so that's why you only give them one action they can take.
This is why WordPress is so helpful, because it's widely supported, and using a few affordable plugins, you can create your Landing Page, Contact Form, and Booking Form all on your own website.
Now, for landing pages, it's on the pricier side, but I highly recommend the OptimizePress plugin for your WordPress website. It's $199/year, but it includes a fantastic landing page builder (with loads of slick, professional templates to get you started), funnel building tools to grow your email list and/or construct more complex marketing funnels, an online course builder (which again, you are looking at right now), along with an easy-to-use built-in membership payment plugin that makes setting up subscription plans nearly effortless. Use the features in this plugin well, and it will easily pay for itself.
2. Student Contact Form
That ONE LINK on your home page needs to direct users to this form.
To be clear, this is NOT a standard "Contact Us" form, where there's just a "Name," "Email," and "Your Message Here" field. That type of form will not suffice, and that is not what this form is for.
The form you need will collect a lot more information — specific information— so you will need to create this form using a plugin like FluentForms, or one built-in to your Booking Form (*below), because the purpose of this form is to collect certain information about the prospective student. This information is for 3 main purposes:
The information you're looking for can vary, but to give you an example of what I have always wanted to know (and why), here is a list:
Secondly, they're reaching out to me about my lessons, explicitly asking me to help them with their guitar playing, so they're going on my email list because that's what it's for — I SELL guitar solutions, after all.
So until they tell me to stop (by unsubscribing) they're going on my email list so I can keep trying to help them by sending them relevant solutions to the problems they told me about, like they asked. Emphasis on "relevant" because I'm not spamming them — that would be hurting my own business to do that.
So know this from the start — you need to segment your email list & tag users all along so you can target your subscribers with emails based on what they asked you for in the first place, with emails addressing them by their first name (using *|FNAME|* achieves this on Mailchimp, btw).
Sometimes people just have trouble getting connected on Zoom (and I've held those introductory calls completely on the phone before many times; it's just easier sometimes). But far more often, when people aren't on the call at the time they scheduled, it's because they flaked out.
So I give them the benefit of the doubt that they DID mean to book this and pursue guitar lessons with me, and I call them and say "Hey there! You had booked an appointment for a free introductory consultation with me for right now, so since I didn't see you on the call I just wanted to call you in case you were having trouble connecting."
Sometimes they just forgot and the call begins a few minutes late. Sometimes they made other plans and forgot completely that they even booked it (one good reason not to allow people to book these calls more than a few days into the future!).
However, sometimes they made other plans because they just changed their mind and didn't care enough about my time to cancel the appointment. And sometimes, they were just unreachable and never got in contact again.
In these cases, I have historically made it a point not to market anything involving appointments to these individuals, so as to never give them the opportunity to similiarly waste my time again. However, I do still add them to my email list because they may just be a great candidate for an online course, a book, or other info product.
Remember, they were interested ENOUGH to at least fill out the form; they're just unreliable so they've disqualified themselves from in-person teaching (at least without a really good explanation about what happened the first time and an apology).
Also, a beginner doesn't really even know if they CAN learn to play the guitar, so the tone of my conversations with them will be extra supportive because they need successes ASAP to demonstrate to themselves that YES, they CAN in fact do this.
First, if they're under 18, they're not the person I'm going to be dealing with for anything except teaching the actual lesson content. Their PARENT(S)/GUARDIAN(S) are the ones making the decisions and the payments, so it's a very different dynamic.
Also, on that same note, if the person is under 18, their parents might not even KNOW they are reaching out to a paid professional talking about signing up for lessons. I've had this happen twice, and I actually modified my contact form with conditional fields that appear if the person enters a number less than 18 into the field, requiring them to provide their parents' name and phone number so I can reach out personally.
Because sadly, yet predictably, a teenager secretly trying to set up guitar lessons with you without their parents' knowledge is not going anywhere productive and is only going to waste your time. So finding out their age helps filter out these situations before they can even happen.
Additionally though, the person's age also determines how I'm going to teach them. The way you teach adults is very different from how you have to approach teaching kids. Also, there's a significant difference in attention spans, so shorter lessons based on fun is more appropriate for kids, while adults can handle longer sessions that get into the thick of some complicated things like theory analysis.
So finding out their age tells me a bit in advance about what types of things I will recommend to the student (or their parents on their behalf) in the free introductory consultation.
Asking for this info up front, with youtube links, gives me a chance to hear the exact version the student has in mind ahead of time, get a clear idea of what kind of sound and style they're going for, and find common threads between styles, genre-specific tendencies, typical scales and patterns, etc that I can make informed recommendations based on during the free intro call.
This instills confidence and trust, and makes the student feel heard, and forms the core of my understanding of their musical goals.
Now additionally, I ask the following 3 questions, partially to find out their goals beyond just the "playing guitar" stage, but also to get THEM to be thinking about the big picture, and as a result to grasp the enormity of the journey they're embarking on, and to fittingly take this pivotal first step of that journey (these lessons) seriously:
Why SO Many Questions? — Your Contact Form as a Quality Filter
Now, you may be thinking "GEEZ that's a LOT of questions!..." and you'd be right.
Especially when I've already told you the main goal of your teaching website is to attract students, and all convential online marketing advice urges you to just collect ONLY an email address and MAYBE a first name, I'm here advocating putting a LONG, DETAILED FORM on your site.
And here's why: you don't really WANT just anyone booking a call with you. This form is meant to intentionally filter out certain people based on the traits that would make them unpleasant to work with — and those happen to be the very same things that would make them unwilling to complete this form.
Someone who can't be bothered to even TELL you what THEY WANT you to help them with is beyond help.
Let your competitors deal with students like this. The lessons haven't even begun and already they're showing they are unwilling to even put in the effort to merely articulate the very things that they want to achieve when asked. You can't help this person. There's a LOT of hard work and effort ahead and you can't do it FOR them — THEY have to be the one to do it.
It's also an indication of their communication. Trying to continually assess their progress is going to be pulling teeth for you and require a disproportionate amount of your energy, needlessly.
So ultimately, the conventional marketing wisdom of just collecting an email address and their first name is still totally valid — it's just not relevant here. That's for building your email list and offering lead magnets. THIS is for gatekeeping ready access to your 1-on-1 time.
And if they do fill out the form, and then blow off the free introductory consultation, as a general rule, don't offer it for free again. If they want another one and haven't indicated any concern that they wasted your time the first time, simply explain "I'd still love to help you, and unfortunately you've already redeemed your free introductory consultation, but if we were to meet it would be [$95, or whatever your highest single-lesson rate is]. If that's okay with you I can send you an invoice/link to set that up?"
And at that point, they'll either say no and not waste your time further, or they'll pay money and redeem their reliability and potential to be your student.
Remember: You want students, obviously, but you want students that are motivated, reliable, and respectful. Because when they're NOT those things, they drain your of your energy and make it much harder for you to give your BEST to all of your students. And a form like this lets only those types of people in.
3. Booking Form
The next and final stop is an auto-redirect to your booking form when the prospective student presses the "submit" button on your form. (Or, preferably something titled "Book My Free Consultation Now!" rather than "submit.")
Your booking form is where the person can choose from your available time slots and make an appointment. This is infinitely preferable to trying to discuss availability verbally, and it's important to automate this in your business.
To create your booking form, there are 2 main options:
Both cost money, but once again, your business runs on appointments, so consider this part of the cost of doing business.
I used ScheduleOnce for about 12 years, and they're great. The service got increasingly more complex and powerful as they added more and more features, so it has everything you need. In fact you can even put your really long contact form RIGHT IN the booking app and skip the separate contact form page altogether.
That said, it was more expensive and I had just moved from Drupal to WordPress, so I switched to the FluentBooking plugin, which is great AND cheaper. AND it's all part of one website.
Getting the Actual Website
Domain Name ( . com )
The first step is to secure your ".com" — and I mean that both generally and specifically. That's called your domain name, and it's what people will type into the internet address in their browser. And specifically, I mean make sure it IS in fact .com — not .net, .info, .us, .io, .rocks, or any other ending. DOT COM is still king.
Which means you've got some brainstorming as well as some searching for what's available ahead of you.
Serious SEO Tip:
If you're teaching in-person lessons, here's a tip though: go with "GuitarLessonsIn[YourCity].com" or "[YourTown/City]GuitarLessons.com" rather than the name of your school like "BobJohnsonEliteGuitarSchool.com." This is because (a) people very likely don't know your name and won't be searching for it so it'll get lost in the Google results, and (b) people WILL be searching specifically for "guitar lessons in [town/city]" so if that's the actual NAME of your website, that's going to come right up at the top of their search results.
If you live in a small town that's a suburb of a larger city, use that city in your domain name, however.
It's more important that they FIND your site than it is to have the equivalent of 'vanity plates' for your website domain.
You can expect your domain name to cost about $22 per year. You can pay for multiple years at a time (often the default is 2 years). Set it to auto-renew, no matter what!
Searching Domains with Your Intended Hosting Company
Hosting is the service where your actual website, itself, is running on a computer somewhere, so that when someone types in your web address, it loads in their browser. Hosting is what makes your website go "live."
All of the files that make up your website (html files, javascript files, css files, and/or your entire WordPress website) are really just files on a computer at the hosting company. You're paying monthly for shared space on one of their computers when you pay for hosting.
Hosting is a monthly cost, and varies. Currently I pay $16.99/month for this website through A2Hosting.com. (No affiliation, that's just who I use. I also chose them at the time because they had dedicated Drupal hosting plans, and they also have excellent WordPress hosting with very simple installation.)
It's always easiest when you buy your domain name from the same company where you're going to host the actual website. (You can still have them through different companies, but it's more complicated.)
A Warning About GoDaddy:
I used to use GoDaddy, but after 19 years of giving them non-stop business & watching them become more and more unscrupulous, I DO NOT recommend doing business with them, except for MAYBE buying domain names, which you MIGHT get at a slightly lower price. But the hassle of dealing with them outweighs the savings IMO.
So while I do still have some domains through GoDaddy, I don't buy new ones through them any longer, however tempting their $12 website for a year promotion may appear on the surface. And I definitely DO NOT host websites through GoDaddy and do not recommend you doing it either.
That said, you CAN use their domain search tool if you want, and then just buy it elsewhere, because when you buy a domain through GoDaddy, within 3 days you'll begin being hounded by random phone calls from call centers in India trying to sell you possibly non-existent web services, and this will go on all day, every day, for weeks at a time (I recorded HOURS of myself pranking these incoming spam/scam callers for fun eventually).
And when you call GoDaddy for support, you'll wonder whether you're talking to someone from the same Indian call center, based not only on the accent but on the overt rudeness.
Securing Your Domain Name:
Chances are, a lot of the domain name ideas you look up may be taken, so this is where you're going to have to experiment a bit, but I strongly suggest keeping your domain name as short as you can while still legible (don't make them decypher acronyms or obscure slang, for example).
Once you find THE ONE, buy it, and get WordPress hosting to go with it.
It's best to do this as part of the same checkout process, because it'll automatically tie the hosting account to the domain you bought, so setting it up will be a lot easier than doing it separately.
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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
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