What Your Online Presence Can Reveal About Your Skills As A Music Teacher

One thing is sure: to be a successful music teacher, you must be good.

You need to have your craft down.

Skills you have as a music teacher are the number one factor influencing everything you do, especially when running an online music teaching business.

Why did I say this specifically:

“…especially when offering ONLINE music lessons, courses, or programs?”

Here’s why:

Teaching Music In Local Areas vs Online

Even though teaching music online has many more benefits than doing only in-person lessons in the local area, there is one thing music teachers hosting lessons in-person have that those offering online music classes don’t.

Can you guess what it is?

Less competition.

That’s right, depending on the local area that the music teacher is serving and how big it is – you might have an advantage online music teachers don’t have.

For example, you might be teaching piano lessons in a small town where you’re the only teacher offering piano lessons.

Naturally, all the students from the area will take lessons in your studio.

When you move to a bigger city, you might see that it’s a bit more challenging to get new students because hundreds of music teachers are now offering piano lessons.

When you teach music online, it’s like your area is now not only 50km from your studio/home. Instead, it expands to the whole country.

The area you serve expands even to the wide world (depending if you’re teaching music and speak only your native language or you teach in English, of course).

You no longer have the advantage of being the only piano teacher in your town.

You are suddenly competing with thousands of music teachers all around the country and the world.

That brings us to the next point you need to address if you want to succeed.

Why Music Teachers Need To Have Online Presence

Look at your online presence as a sort of portfolio.

A showcase of your work.

As a music teacher, no matter if you teach guitar, piano, or singing lessons – if you’re doing it online – you need a portfolio.

Even if you teach locally only, it will significantly help you have a website and established online presence.

It just makes attracting new students a bit easier.

So a music teacher’s portfolio is not like a traditional portfolio where you write a text listing what you do, your accomplishments, etc.

The best portfolio is the one where you showcase your teaching, expertise, and music performance.

And this is where having a website and social media presence helps greatly.

You can easily upload videos, audio, and other materials to your website that serve as a music teacher’s portfolio.

Students want to meet YOU.

What Students Can Discover About You As A Music Teacher

Ideally, you would have a solid online presence as a music teacher.

For example, if a student is looking to take singing lessons, the first step will be to “Google You”.

What they discover will decide if they will take further action, contact you, or look elsewhere.

Here are things students can learn about You when looking up your online profiles:

• Your music performance skills
• Your teaching method
• Do you have good audio and video quality in your videos (=this is important to potential online students)
• How popular are you (following, likes, testimonials, etc.)
• If you have any student references
• How you work with your students
• Your musical backgrounds
• If you are an expert in what you teach
• If your playing style is similar to what they would like to learn
• Your personality, humor.

Yes, someone looking you up on the internet can find out a lot about you as a music teacher, and you know – the first impression is the strongest one.

So my suggestion for music teachers, both ones doing local in-person lessons and especially ones teaching music online, is to:

Showcase Your Teaching Skills Online

Build and launch your website.

It’s essential to have at least one “entirely yours” profile, one that anyone can access without registering, leaving their information, following you, etc.

Social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, TikTok etc) are suitable for the online promotion of music teachers, but those platforms require potential users to register.

So let’s say you hand out an old-school business card.

If a person interested in taking music lessons from you doesn’t use TikTok, then your portfolio is inaccessible to them.

Also, these 3rd party networks come and go – who remembers MySpace now? (I used it to promote my band back in the day)

Okay, so the important thing I suggest to any music teacher is to start building their online presence, right now.

The sooner you get on board with it, the better.

Use this as an opportunity to showcase to your potential students what kind of teacher you are and how you can help them.

• Showcase your teaching skills.
• Showcase your music performance skills.
• Put up examples of lessons you did.

Tell them more about you and what they can expect to achieve if they start learning music with your help.

If you do this, attracting new students will be much easier.

I won’t dive deep into digital marketing for music teachers in this post, but this is one step you should consider taking, especially if you want to build an online music teaching business.

By the way, if you’re interested in learning more about your options and how you can start your own online music teaching business, you can download my FREE +70 page e-book below:

I hope this post will inspire you to build your website and upload your work online.

Before you go, post in the comments below your answer to the following:

Do you currently have an online presence?

Do you upload your lessons, videos, and other media to the internet? If not, why?

All the best,
Bogdan
Founder, MusicTeachingBiz.com