Your Teaching Website Needs Online Registration

Here are two different scenarios playing out with parents trying to find a new teacher for their child's music lessons.

A parent is looking for a new piano teacher and all they have to go by is a phone number so they'll enter it on a list on their phone and then call once they have time to call because no one has time for phone calls any more. Then when their prospective piano teacher gets the call, they're busy so they'll have to check messages later, write the message down and get back to the prospective parent once they have phone time but prospective parent isn't answering calls so they'll have to leave a message and the next round of phone tag begins. Two days later they connect.

Let's try that again with online registration.

The parent goes to the teacher's website, clicks on the "Register for Lessons" button, enters relevant info on their child and the piano teacher gets back within a few hours and the initial consultation is set up for the next day. Done.

This is why your website needs that very basic feature - it will quite literally put you ahead of other teachers in your area in the queue for getting more students. Being more easily findable and contactable will result your studio getting more students, many of them traveling larger distances.

Both My Music Staff and Music Teacher's Helper have these features on all their packages, and are worth the investment. Best wishes for the new academic year!

4 Choices for Building Studio Websites

In my last article I looked at why you need a website for your teaching studio. Building a website can be daunting, and in today's article I've chosen four services that make the process relatively simple to learn once you take the initiative to start.

The picture above is a slide from a talk I gave at The Royal Conservatory this summer, and it outlines four top choices you may wish to consider when building teaching websites. The prices below are accurate to early September 2018 and don't reflect future increases, decreases, or promotions.

But in reality the price doesn't matter. Once you've got a viable online presence and attract even one student for half-hour lessons for only one semester, each one of these services would have more than paid for a yearly investment.

1. My Music Staff

I use My Music Staff for my teaching website, and I run my studio using its tools. In addition to the website features, you can create a database of students, schedule them on a calendar, and tie those lessons to invoicing features, all visible on student and parent dashboards. You can also accept credit card payments, keep a repertoire database, manage downloads, expenses, mileage, publish a blog, and generate studio reports.

My Music Staff is web-based, so you're engaging with the site in a browser. However, it's a very fast and responsive site, and renders perfectly on any kind of device you're using. The MMS team have a strong Agile software development philosophy, so they iterate the service weekly with new features (their latest new feature as of late August was video streaming, among others). The price is another huge selling point: $12.95 for unlimited students and storage both in the US and Canada.

2. Music Teacher's Helper

I discovered Music Teacher's Helper in 2007 at the Toronto MTNA conference, and this company was the pioneer in the field of integrated studio websites. MTH has most of the same features as MMS although they are app-based, so the development schedule is not as speedy as that of MMS. Where MTH excel is in the large community of teachers writing for their blog and their extensive setup guides that you can buy in order to get your studio set up to compete online. Pricing depends on the size of your studio - when paid annually, the three tiers are US$11.66/month (up to 20 students), US$24.16/month (40 students), and US$40.83/month (unlimited students).

Both MMS and MTH can provide websites, although of the somewhat rudimentary kind. If you want a website that looks genuinely fabulous and has a much wider array of content and features, you might wish to consider the next two options. Be aware that you can use both MMS and MTH on the back-end of the next two options - with a small widget, students can easily log in from your third-party studio site to see their student dashboard.

3. Squarespace

If you don't know anything about building websites but still want something that looks fabulous, Squarespace is one of the best out-of-the-box solutions, with a more sophisticated depth of content that you can offer, including online stores and marketing tools. Take a look at the template selection - there are some beautiful designs here. Pricing as of writing is US$12/month for a personal site and US$18/month at the business tier.

4. WordPress

31% of the internet runs on WordPress. Although the learning curve might be a bit higher than with other services, you'll have access to themes, plugins, and Google Apps to help you get your site started. If you want to go with WordPress.com, pricing options are free (with ads and limited options), personal ($60/year CDN), premium ($120/year CDN), and business ($396/year CDN). Or you can self-host your website and use WordPress's open-source tools.

A small side-note about WordPress - its lead developer is none other than Helen Hou-Sandì, a graduate of Eastman's collaborative piano program. You might remember that a while back Helen redesigned this site - I've kept the same basic design since then.

Houston Symphony Issues Trading Cards

The Houston Symphony is issuing trading cards this season that highlight its musicians, with an initial set of 33 cards initially rolled out this summer.

What a brilliant way to use the musicians of the orchestra as a potential collector's item for students. Many young students of orchestral instruments look up to those in their city's orchestra as superstars in the same way that kids traditionally look up to sports heroes. The trading cards format can spread the message among school classrooms and hallways in ways that traditional grown-up vehicles such as brochures and glitzy websites cannot.

Want to get in on the trading card action? Education World has a tutorial by Lorrie Jackson on how to make trading cards with Microsoft Word.

How Do Parents and Students Choose a Music Teacher?

A friend of mine spent over a thousand dollars a year ago to put a prominent ad in a local paper in order to market her studio prominently. The result was only a handful of calls, none of them serious inquiries. How is this possible? Aren't ads supposed to be the most effective marketing tool?

One of the trickiest things about music education is putting the right students together with the right teachers. Look at the pages of music journals and you would be surprised how little you find on the subject.

For students and parents, the problem is how to find the right teacher. What criteria does one use? Price? Education? Distance?

For teachers, the problem is how to find the right high-quality students. How to advertise? With flyers? In the paper? On the internet?

Katherine Goins in the July Piano Pedagogy Forum attempts to find the answers to these questions. In The Music Teacher Selection Process: Establishing a Reputation for Teaching Excellence, she discusses the results of a survey she circulated among parents and students asking questions about how they identify factors in the music teacher selection process.

Her results showed that 82% of respondents cited word of mouth as the most important factor. Of the nearly 50% of parents who thought a difference existed between music lessons and other activities, Katherine writes:

For this group of parents, program reputation, philosophy, and teacher quality played an important role in the decision process, outweighing factors such as location, cost, and other opportunities.

Her most important conclusion was that reputation does matter, as does networking and joining professional organizations for teachers. Perhaps the most successful trajectory for a teacher is a long tail phenomenon where up-front advertising is less important than having a dedicated core of students and parents who will over time spread the word about their positive musical experiences and put their friends in touch with the teacher that inspired them.

A Parent's Guide To Piano Lessons By Jane Smisor Bastien. Bastien Piano. Special Bastien Books. Music Book. Published by Neil A. Kjos Music Company. (WP29) See more info...