Why Common Sense Guitar Teaching Ideas Lead To Failure

Whether you are new to guitar teaching or have been teaching for a while, you have likely struggled at times to make good money. Fact is, this is a common problem for nearly all guitar teachers and can be overcome with the right knowledge and implementation. However, most teachers lead very frustrating lives because of the following:

1. Many guitar instructors have a hard time making ends meet in their guitar teaching business and make less than 35k annually.

2. Most people who teach guitar have no experience teaching highly skilled students.

3. The overwhelming majority of guitar teachers achieve little success and only teach for 1-2 years before quitting to work in a different profession altogether.

With this in mind, consider the difference between the above group of unsuccessful guitar teachers and the very small group of highly successful guitar teachers (making up the top 1%). These successful guitar teachers:

1. Take home a total of $100k or more each year from guitar teaching alone.

2. Have strategic systems in place to quickly transform their students into great guitar players.

3. Are highly motivated and have plenty of extra time, energy and resources to invest into the improvement of their guitar teaching businesses.

4. Commonly do not work full time hours each week (they work much less).

Although most people find these facts surprising, I know for sure that they are a reality for countless guitar teachers around the world. How do I know this? In my guitar teacher training program, I train people every month to reach their full potential and become part of the small percentage of highly successful guitar teachers.

Additionally, the majority of guitar teachers out there do not fail because they are necessarily ‘bad’ at teaching guitar. Instead, they fail because they believe in the ‘common knowledge’ they have heard being perpetuated by other unsuccessful guitar teachers. These approaches seem rational at first glance, but in fact are highly damaging for your guitar teaching business in many ways.

Here are seven commonly accepted guitar teaching approaches that guarantee failure:

1. Letting Your Guitar Students Tell You What They Need To Learn

Most guitar teachers make the mistake of assuming that it is up to the student to tell the teacher what they need to learn each lesson. This assumption is totally wrong and makes no sense at all. Your guitar students (for the most part) have absolutely no idea what they need to learn in order to reach their musical goals. If they did know, why would they come to you for guitar lessons? ...They wouldn’t of course. YOU must decide what your students need to learn in order to achieve their musical goals. To do this you must perform two simple steps: First, learn their long terms goals. Second, design a specific strategy for them based around these goals while also helping them to understand how what you will teach them IS in their best interest.

Your guitar students will never become great players if you allow them to tell you what to teach them. At most, they will be able to play a few isolated ideas but will never be able to put it all together to become a great musician. In most cases, if you teach guitar using this approach, you will quickly lose your students when they do not start seeing big results.

In addition, not being able to effectively get results for your students will affect your reputation in a very negative way. Once you develop a bad reputation as a guitar teacher in your area, you will essentially be left with two options: Quit teaching guitar or find a new location to teach in.

2. ‘Only’ Focusing On Attracting New Guitar Students

When you first begin teaching guitar, you obviously need to find new students. With this in mind, it is easy for most guitar teachers to ‘only’ think about attracting new students while ignoring all other aspects of their guitar teaching business. This approach will present you with these problems:

• Since you do not have a solid strategy for ‘keeping’ your students, you must invest countless hours into your promotional efforts due to the fact that the new students you gain only replace the ones you lost.
   
• Your guitar teaching business will grow at a very slow rate (even if you can gain new students faster than you lose them). Fact is, you can grow your business much faster by working to improve in many different areas at once, such as: retaining students for a long time, getting your current students to recommend you to others and turning potential students into actual students once you have made contact (as well as various other areas).

Following this approach WILL prevent you from making a lot of money through guitar teaching (especially during difficult economic times)

Fortunately, you can avoid these problems by making an effort to consistently improve in ALL areas of your guitar teaching business. By doing this, your business will improve exponentially and the amount of effort needed for major growth with decrease over time.

3. Charging Less For Lessons In Attempt To Gain More Students

Many guitar teachers think that charging less money for lessons is a great way to attract many new guitar students. They think that guitar students will rush to sign up for lessons because the other competitors in their local area are too expensive for them. You might think that this would help you stand out from the competition in a positive way. However, in reality it is totally the opposite. Here’s why charging cheap rates will lead you to failure:

• The fact that you charge very cheap rates for lessons tells potential students that you are either new to teaching guitar or are not very good at it. In fact, most students assume that teachers with higher priced lessons charge more because they can get better results. So by charging a small amount for your lessons, you are really only driving away serious students (who are ready to spend money). The more serious a student is, the less likely they are to even think about taking lessons with you when you are the cheapest guitar teacher in town.

• When you start teaching guitar while charging very cheap rates, your students will see this and think that all guitar teachers are the same (except for the price they charge for lessons). This (of course) is totally false. However, you must take this into consideration when determining your lesson rates. If you charge cheap rates from the beginning, it will only be more difficult to raise them in the future after you have conditioned your students to think that all teachers are the same.

• When you gain new guitar students who were only looking for the ‘cheapest’ teacher, they will take lessons with you much less seriously. You will quickly find that these types of students do not practice or put out much effort because they do not feel like they are getting much value in return (based on how much they are spending). The more a student has to spend for lessons, the more seriously they will take it.

All of these issues will hold you back from ever reaching significant success as a guitar teacher.

So how can you solve this issue and how much SHOULD you charge for guitar lessons? Always make sure that you charge a ‘minimum’ of the average price in your local area (even if you are just getting started). Next, work to make your guitar lessons as valuable as possible in order to transform your students into great guitar players very quickly. Once you can do this, you gain the leverage to raise your rates and have a justified reason for doing so. Take your guitar teaching to the next level by finding your own guitar teacher coach.

4. Making Changes To Your Guitar Teaching Business Based Only On What Other Local Teachers Are Doing

As a new guitar teacher, you will naturally be inclined to look at what your competitors are doing and try to use this information to build your guitar teaching business. However, as you read earlier in this article, the overwhelming majority of guitar teachers are unsuccessful. With this in mind, it makes no sense for you to try to copy the same things they are doing.

Instead of following what other local guitar teachers do while taking a trial-and-error approach, you should surround yourself with successful guitar teachers who are already making good money in their teaching businesses. Of course, no teacher in your local area is going to want to share his/her secrets with you (since you are competing with each other) so your network must be made up of guitar teachers who do not compete with you locally.

In my guitar teacher success program, you will learn how to teach guitar and become highly successful alongside a powerful network of highly motivated (and experienced) guitar teaching professionals from many countries world wide.

5. Not Enforcing Your Lesson Policies

Most guitar teachers who are new have a fear that enforcing their lesson policies will cause them to lose their students. The truth is, this may help you retain a few students for a short period of time, but will be devastating for your guitar teaching business in the long term. Here is why:

A. By not enforcing your lesson policies, you will build up a student base full of non-serious students who will continually frustrate you by being late to lessons, not paying on time and not taking lessons seriously.

B. Due to the above point, you will use all of your energy on ‘non-serious’ students and have little left to spare for the SERIOUS students who really do want to learn, pay on time and practice every day.

C. When you allow students to break your lesson policies, you will constantly have to deal with endless requests and complaints rather than actually helping your students become great guitar players. This means your students will not get the results they want, you will earn significantly less income, become frustrated and ultimately join the majority of unsuccessful guitar teachers I mentioned earlier.

Here is how you solve this issue: Remember, YOU are the teacher and YOU understand what is best for your guitar students. Create your lesson policy and expectations based on this understanding and make sure that your students know exactly why this policy will help them become much better players. If they do not comply, do not teach them (that’s right, refuse to work with them).

6. Becoming A Guitar Teacher At A Music Store

It is a very common belief among new guitar teachers that working at a music store is the best choice for making a good living because:

A. They will have to do less work to find new students since the music store will do this for them.

B. They feel it is more professional to work from a music store instead of working out of their own home.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Here is why teaching guitar from a music store will cause you to fail:

• It is simply not true that music stores will do all of the promotional work for you. In reality, they do not have a strong incentive to get students specifically for ‘you’. Learning how to get more guitar students through your own efforts is crucial to your success regardless of where you teach from.

• You do not get to keep all of the money you make from teaching students when you work at a music store. Instead you are forced to pay the store owner a big part of your income. This adds onto the difficulty of trying to make a good living teaching guitar.
   
• To make things worse, music stores generally are very strict about the teaching formats they allow. In many cases, you are limited to teaching only private 1 on 1 lessons and not allowed to help your guitar students progress faster using other formats. This makes it harder to get big results for your students.
   
• Since you can’t get great results for your students, it will be very difficult to develop the positive reputation needed to grow your guitar teaching business to the next level.

The most successful and highest earning guitar teachers never teach out of music stores. Instead, they run their own business and hire other guitar teachers to work for them. If you want to make a great living teaching guitar, you must treat it like a business and learn all you can in order to improve every aspect of it.

7. Promoting Yourself As A ‘General’ Guitar Teacher

Another misconception that most guitar teachers have is that you should try to reach as many students as possible through a highly generalized marketing approach. These teachers promote themselves by saying they teach in ‘any’ style.

Fact is, marketing yourself as a general guitar teacher will only appeal to students who don’t know what they want to learn. In most cases, these students will not be very serious about learning guitar. As a result, they will frequently not practice, stop taking guitar lessons without warning and will try to find ways around your lesson policies.

The truly great guitar students who are highly motivated, dedicated and loyal will never look for you if you market yourself as ‘teaching to all styles’. Why? Because they are searching for a teacher who is an expert on the specific style they want to learn.

When you gain a schedule full of students who aren’t very serious about learning guitar, you WILL become frustrated from endless cancelled lessons, late payments and other issues. Although these problems are only partially related to the topic of becoming a ‘general’ guitar teacher, they are fully caused by it and will hold you back from earning a living as a successful guitar teacher.

With this in mind, you don’t want to become an expert for a style of music that no guitar student wants to learn. Nevertheless, you will see much more success by marketing yourself as the local ‘blues’ guitar expert (or ‘rock’, ‘metal’, ‘jazz’, etc.) instead of allowing yourself to blend in with your competitors as a teacher to ‘all styles’.

Most importantly, know that you must fill your guitar teaching schedule with the ‘right’ students if you want to make good money as a teacher. These students will quickly progress on guitar, study with you for years and help you expand your business by telling others about their positive experience.

Although I have not discussed ‘all’ of the things that cause guitar teachers to fail, after reading the points above you have gained a better understanding of why most commonly accepted guitar teaching approaches are actually ineffective and problematic.

Get your own guitar teacher coach now to avoid falling into the same traps that most guitar teachers fall into. Once you have the knowledge, training and coaching of a successful guitar teacher trainer, you will quickly become the number one guitar teacher in your local area!