Guitar Teaching Training Overview

From dead broke to making a living teaching guitar... and how to avoid the mistakes I made

Guitar Teaching Training is a program to show everything that I learned while teaching guitar as a full time income while working part-time hours.

At my busiest, I was earning over $6,000/month, teaching in the late afternoons/evenings on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday each week.

While I can't guarantee the same results, I can show you everything I was doing.

Program Overview

Here is the course we will work through, with a new lesson going online every Tuesday:

1. Business Maths: All businessses are governed by a set of simple mathematical rules. We'll go through how the maths of business works so that you can get started with right way, focussing on the right things.
2. Why Do Students Want Lessons From You? In order to understand how to find and teach students, we need to understand why students are coming to us in the first place. In this lesson we'll break this down.
3. Copywriting Basics: How do do you write an advert? What do you put on your website? This is something that every new (and many established) guitar teachers get wrong. Getting this right allows you to easily write adverts that attract students.
4. Branding Basics: What is branding and how does it apply to a guitar teaching business? We'll be looking at the simple strategies you can use to look more professional than other teachers, get better search results and charge a higher price.
5. Paid Advertising 1: It's time to put your new advert writing skills to use and start your first paid advertising campaign. We'll look at how you can spend just a few dollars a day and start getting people who want to learn guitar to reach out to you for lesson.
6. Paid Advertising 2: In our second paid advertising strategy we'll look at an "out of date" strategy for getting students that few people use. I personally used this as my main way to find students and filled my schedule quite quickly.
7. Organic Advertising 1: We'll look at the first of two organic advertising strategies. We'll walk through how to build this step by step.
8. Organic Advertising 2: In the second organic strategy we'll look at how you can do a few simple things to find students long term... for free.
9. Booking Introductory Lessons: Now that your phone is ringing off the hook we need to know how to talk to potential students. The simple guidelines we'll cover here will help your new students come in ready to learn and sign up for lessons.
10. The Introductory Lesson: What do you do in the first lesson you have with a potential new student? Getting this right ensures that they come back for lessons... and that they actually start learning guitar!
11. Teaching 1: How Students Learn: Few guitar teachers take the time to consider how a person learns before they start teaching. In this lesson we'll cover the learning process, what's involved and how it will guide how you teach.
12. Teaching 2: How To Break Down Topics: Here we'll go through the general principles involved with breaking down music topics for students, with several concrete exampels so that you can see the process.
13. Teaching 3: The Importance of Training: This is something guitar teachers always get wrong. It leads to students quitting and not making progress. When you get this right your workload decreases and your students make more progress. It's a key part of teaching effectively.
14. Teaching 4: Creating Levels For Songs: This method allows your students to learn faster, learn together and learn the music they want to learn... no matter the level they are at.
15. Teaching 5: Creating Learning Paths For Students: Your students are going to want to learn, and need to learn, multiple skills. How do you navigate the complex web of skills they need to learn? In this lesson we'll cover this in detail with examples.
16. Teaching 6: Creating a Curriculum: There's no need to re-invent the wheel. As you gain more experience teaching you can create teaching systems for yourself and your students, making teaching easier, simpler and more effective.
17. Group Teaching 1: Group Teaching Basics: Group teaching is a key to long term growth as a business, as a teacher and for your students. From the prior lessons on teachign theory you'll understand why this is so important... and when it doesn't apply. In this lesson we'll cover the foundations to teaching groups. It's always scary the first time, but once you get used to it... it's actually easier than teaching a 1-2-1 lesson!
18. Group Teaching 2: Improvisation Classes: This most fun your studnets will have on guitar - these classes are super easy to run, super fun for your students and helps them learn, apply and actually play music with each other!
19. Group Teaching 3: Songs/Ensemble Groups: All students will want to learn songs - we'll cover how to teach them in a group setting and get your students playing together in little bands and duos.
20. Group Teaching 4: Theory??? Should you teach music theory in a group lesson? This is more challenging than other topics and we'll go through possible approaches.
21. Group Teaching 5: Mini 1-2-1 Lessons: This is a super easy to implement strategy for teaching mixed group lessons. We'll look at how you can run these type of classes.
22. Group Teaching 6: Beginner Group Lessons: Teaching beginners in a group setting can be particularly challenging, so we'll break down how you can do it effectively.
23. Group Teaching 7: Composition/Songwriting: This can be a really fun class for students when taught right, helping them express themselves creatively on guitar. We'll look at how you can run these classes to help students become creative songwriters, without overloading them with theory or having them get frustrated with themselves.
24. Creating a Lesson Schedule: Now you have multiple types of classes that you can run, we'll look at building them out into a schedule, how to present this to your students and how to charge students for attending classes.
25. Logistics 1: Teaching Locations: Where do you teach from? How do you find a place to teach from? In this lesson we'll go through possible options, what students prefer and what you can do with your current resources (teachers always have more options than they realise!)
26. Logistics 2: Payment Systems: How do you take payments? We'll break down the main options, the best options and how to integrate them into your business.
27. Logistics 3: Money Management, Accountants, Taxes and Banking: Even if your business is only a few students, it's importnat to manage the money side of things properly. We'll break down the simple approaches you can implement to manage the financial side of your business effectively and avoid nasty surpises.
28. Logistics 4: Lesson Agreements: It's important that you and the studnet understand how lessons and payments will work. In this lesson we'll go through what a lesson agreement is and why you need one. We'll use examples of good and bad agreements from my own business, talk about what you need in yours and what you can do if it is breached.
29. Logistics 5: Software for creating worksheets, books etc: We'll go through the software tools available and how to use them to create effective resources for your students that save you time.
30. Logistics 6: Events: In this final lesson we'll talk about the dufferent types of events you can run and how to run them. Events turn your business into a community.

The third Tuesday of every month will be a live feedback day where we can talk 1-2-1 (depending on availability) to discuss any problems or questions you might have.

The exact order of lessons may change, and lessons may be added or removed.

Live call feedback: I'll schedule out several hours on the third Tuesday of every month for this. Calls will be 20 minutes long.

Disclaimer: While I can't guarantee you will earn a certain income, I will show you everything I used to earn over $6,000/mo teaching guitar 3-4 evenings a week.