The Guitar Teacher Training Program: How You Can Get Guitar Students, Make Money and Change Lives

Have you ever thought about teaching guitar but felt unsure where to start? You might wonder if you’re ready, whether you can find students, or how to make teaching work financially.

The Guitar Teacher Training program is designed to guide you step by step through the process of becoming a confident, successful guitar teacher—no matter where you’re starting from.

We are going to learn how to teach guitar locally - and everything you need to do so.

Why Do Most Guitar Teachers Fail?

Now it's no secret that most guitar teachers don't make very much money. We all know guitar teachers that are struggling to get by, struggling to find students and would possibly be better off getting a 'real' job (maybe you're one of them?)

But there's usually a couple of reasons why that's the case. The teacher is:

• Dependent on a third party for finding students
• Has a third party dictacting the price (for example, if they work at school or a local music service)
• Is unable to keep students for more than a few lessons
• Their students repeatedly miss lessons (did you know that my students would miss naerly 30% of their lessons? Fixing that problem made a huge difference, to me and my students)
• Offers 'standard' lessons that aren't that beneficial or motivating to the student

The more things that are outside of your control, usually the worse off you'll be.

In Guitar Teacher Training, you'll be trained on how to:

• Create adverts and websites that bring you new enquiries and new students
• Create lessons that motivate and inspire students so that they keep coming back
• Set your own prices
• Create you own programs and lesson formats that help students make real progress, have fun and play music
• Create the support systems you need to allow your business to grow without taking up all your time on boring tasks

When you have these things in place, you have a low more control over your time and your income.

You'll be able to create exciting musical experiences for your students that gho way beyond what you can offer in standard lessons.

What You’ll Learn in the Program

This isn’t just a series of videos—it’s a practical roadmap to becoming a guitar teacher and building a sustainable income. Here’s how we’ll do it:

1. Learn How to Teach Guitar with Confidence

• Develop lesson plans that engage students and keep them motivated.
• Learn how to teach chords, strumming, basic melodies, and even music theory in a way that’s simple and fun.
• Master techniques to teach different types of students—from kids to adults, beginners to intermediates.
• Troubleshoot common challenges like unmotivated students or those struggling with finger strength or timing.

I started out travelling to students houses with a pile of papers and “vomiting” chords and theory at them - I had no idea what I was doing. But over time I developed the confidence and skills to take on students from beginner to advanced, and to take students from beginner to advanced.

I’ll give you a jump-start on that process so you can start teaching with confidence knowing that you’re helping students and know what you’re doing, by understanding what learning is and how to help students along the way.

2. Build Your Business Systems

• Learn how to set up your teaching schedule for maximum efficiency and flexibility.
• Create systems to track student progress, manage payments, and handle cancellations.
• Develop a professional yet approachable style that keeps students coming back for more.

Over the years of teaching I’ve tried all sorts of systems for managing payments, scheduling students and organising myself… it’s been a time consuming and expensive process.

I paid $100s per month for things I didn’t need that actually made my life more difficult!

We’ll go over the simple, effective and most cost-effective tools you can use to manage your business.

3. Advertise for Students

• Discover easy ways to find students in your local community.
• Learn how to create simple but effective ads and flyers.
• Learn how to create a website that gets potential students reaching out to you.

There are 100s of ways you can advertise yourself, and it's not just where you advertise, but how you advertise - and EVERY guitar teacher gets this wrong.

When I started out I was dependent on agencies and ineffective methods of advertising. I would get a student or two every month.

When I learned how to do what worked properly, I was getting multiple phone calls a week.

Most guitar teachers shy away from learning this, but the truth is… it’s not very difficult. If you've already learned how to play guitar, then learning this will be simple.

4. Build a Sustainable Income

• Set competitive rates and create attractive lesson packages.
• Learn how to retain students long-term, maximizing your income while helping them grow.

A good teaching business relies on three key concepts: A solid format for delivering lessons, getting new enquiries and helping students make progress.

When you have all three, you’ll have a growing business that almost runs itself.

Some people believe that the key to keeping students long term is to “hold back” on what you teach them, but this, aside from being totally unethical, couldn’t be further from the truth.

The key to keeping students long term is to accelerate their progress - we’ll go over how to do this and why it works positively for retention.

Common Fears and Assumptions—and the Reality

Fear #1: “I’m not good enough at guitar to teach someone else.”
Reality: You don’t need to be a virtuoso to teach guitar—most students are beginners who just want to play their favorite songs or learn the basics.

You do need to be able to play songs from start to finish. I’ll teach you how to turn your current skills into valuable lessons for students. If you can play songs from start to finish with a band, you are good enough to start teaching.

Fear #2: “What if my students ask a question I can’t answer?”
Reality: It’s okay not to have all the answers. In the program, you’ll learn how to handle questions gracefully, look up resources when needed, and grow your own knowledge along the way.

Assumption #1: “I need a formal qualification to teach.”
Reality: While certifications can be helpful, they’re not necessary to start teaching guitar. What students care about most is your ability to connect with them, understand their goals, and help them progress.

This program will show you how to create a great experience for every student. Your qualification is your ability to help (and the truth is… most local teachers can’t do this!).

Assumption #2: “Everyone learns online these days.”

Reality: This couldn’t be further from the truth. While it is true that a lot of people learn online, there are a huge amount of people that want to learn locally… but can’t find a teacher. Or to be more accurate… the right teacher has not found them! We will go over how to be that teacher and find those students. The truth is… finding local students is 100x times easier than finding online students.

Assumption #3: “I need a social media following to get students.”

Reality: When it comes to teaching locally, no-one cares about your social media followers. They care about learning guitar. If they wanted someone famous to teach them, they could easily find someone online, but they don’t want that, they want someone to help them.

I only had a one year music “qualification” when I started teaching. After I had developed my teaching business, no-one asked for my music qualifications… let alone teaching qualifications! I had no social media followers. No-one cares about that stuff. We will cover teaching extensively, going into theory, pedagogy and epistemology.

Students care about one thing: Making progress. If you can help them make progress, nothing else matters.

Why Join The Guitar Teacher Training Program?

How It Works

1. Sign up.
2. Access the first module include the Fast Start guide.
3. Grow your skills and your teaching business with step-by-step guidance and weekly assignments.
4. Once a week you get a new lesson with a simple and practical exercise to follow.

Common Frustrations—and How We’ll Solve Them

Frustration #1: “I don’t know how to find students.”
Solution:  You’ll get clear, practical strategies for advertising to build a steady stream of students. You'll be shown strategies that work and you can see examples that I've used.

Frustration #2: “I’m worried I won’t make enough money.”
Solution:  We’ll focus on creating lesson packages, retaining students, and expanding your teaching options to build a reliable income. Exactly how much you can make is determined by how much teaching you want to do and your local demographics.

Frustration #3: “I don’t know how to structure my lessons.”
Solution: You’ll learn proven lesson frameworks that are easy to follow and adaptable to any student. I’ve taught these frameworks to other teachers… and even to professional actuaries teaching students for actuarial science exams! Teaching frameworks are universal, but we'll look at how to apply them to teaching guitar and music.

Program Schedule

We'll be covering everything that you need to know and do in order to find, teach and train your students.

The program is divided into four sections with an introduction:

Program Introduction

In the program introduction we talk about the big picture of what we are trying achieve and how we are going to go about achieving it.

We dive into the simple, but powerful, mathematics that will control what we can achieve with teaching.

These simple concepts are overlooked by most teachers, which is why they are either overworked, or (sometimes and!) underpaid.

We'll explore how to use these concepts so that we can have plenty of students, making lots of progress creating a good income.

We also have a Fast Start guide so that you can start getting a handful of students as quickly as possible.

Section 1: How to Get students

Here we learn what it takes to find students.

You'll learn about paid and organic advertising, how they work and how to write adverts.

We'll look at every aspect starting with the fundamentals behind what goes into writing a good advert and exactly who we are writing an advet for.

We look at examples of bad adverts (courtesy of my early years!) and talk about why they don't work, and then look at examples of adverts that did work for me and why they worked.

We'll also cover how to make a website and what you need to put on your website.

Finally, this section wraps up talking about what you do when a potential student phones you and how they move from being interested, to being a student.

Every lesson comes with clear instructions on what you need to do next, so that week by week you are building your skills, and then writing your own ads and creating your website.

Section 2: How to Teach Your Students

After completing Section 1 you'll be starting to get enquiries and now you have to teach these people guitar!

We'll cover the basics of lesson planning, how a lesson should be structured and how to help students overcome problems in their playing.

Not only that, but we'll take a deep dive into pedagogy and epistemology so that you can learn how people learn, along with practical examples of how we put these ideas into practice.

This knowledge will help you plan more interesting, useful and fun lessons for your students and help them make progress in their playing.

Section 3: Developing Groups and Programs

Once you have students coming in and some teaching skills, it's time to take things to the next level.

In this section we take you beyond doing the standard 1-2-1 lessons and show you how to create programs that are more interesting and help your students more than a simple 1-2-1 lesson would.

This has huge benefits for not only the student, as they will have more fun and learn faster, but also from a business perspective (after doing the introductory lesson, you'll learn exactly why this is the case).

It also completely removes all scheduling problems, makes your lessons better value for money, removes logistical headaches and makes it easier for students to sign up!

Section 4: Logistics

As soon as you have more than a handful of students, logistics can start to get overhwhelming...

There's payments, scheduling, taxes, new student enquiries...

If you setup the advertising correctly, you can end up getting quite busy very quickly!

In this section we cover all the logistics that save you time, minimising your administration so you can do the things that matter - like teaching and playing guitar!

We'll cover payments systems, booking and scheduling systems, email systems and how to integrate and automate as much as possible.

We'll also cover teaching aids and how to create professional looking music for your students.

Who Is This For?

This is NOT a program for beginners - you need to be able to at least play songs from start to finish with a band.

This is NOT a program for people who want to teach online - we are not going to talk about becoming instagram famous. We are going to talk about building a local teaching business with real people.

This is for guitar players who want to build a local guitar teaching business (here's a tip: Building a local teaching business is actually EASIER than becoming Instagram famous, and you'll make more money than being Instagram famous!).

Here's an email from Sheryll (named changed) who wanted to know if the program was suitable for her:

Email from Sheryll

My reply

Her reply

My reply

Your Support

Even the greatest program in the world won't be perfect, and you're going to have questions.

That's why every lesson in the Guitar Teacher Training program has a Question and Answer area where you can ask questions and get help.

There's also a student forum that I personally monitor and reply to, so you can get feedback on problems that you are facing.

Everyone is going to, at some point, find that they are unsure about how to deal with a situation, or want to get feedback on something, and the student forum let's us do that.

The forum is private and only visible to Guitar Teacher Training students.

The Guitar Teacher Training Program

31 lessons, delivered as one lesson a week, including forum support for the duration of the program.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much is the program? Will this work for me? What is in this program? When will I get access to the program? Am I good enough at guitar to teach? Does this apply to teaching other instruments? How can I cancel? What happens if I cancel?

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