Why You Struggle To Attract New Guitar Students

Why You Struggle To Attract New Guitar Students

By Tom Hess

Are you tired of struggling to fill your guitar teaching schedule with new students? This is a very common problem amongst teachers in the guitar teaching community. The reality is, you MUST know how to attract a lot of guitar students on a continual basis in order to make good money teaching lessons. However, this is NOT done by only advertising as much as possible. You need to clearly demonstrate to all potential guitar students that you are the number one choice for a guitar teacher in your local area.

In this article, you are going to learn 6 ways to quickly attract new guitar students. However, before you read the information below, it is important for you to test your effectiveness at attracting guitar students to understand how to improve your current methods. Take this test about how to attract new guitar students to assess your skills in this area. After you have evaluated your skills in this area of your guitar teaching business, return to this article and continue reading.

These are the six things you need to do for/demonstrate to potential guitar students in order to get many new students very quickly:

1. Make it clear to potential guitar students that your guitar lessons are very unique and special when compared to any other lessons being offered locally

You will struggle to attract a lot of guitar students when your lessons are judged purely by price alone. When this happens, your students will view all guitar teaching as a simple commodity where the only point in working with one teacher over another teacher is to save a few bucks. In this case, they will always select whoever is cheapest. To overcome this objection, you must help them understand the major benefits they will get while working with you (that they cannot find anywhere else). Additionally, you must communicate to them that you will be able to offer them these things while simultaneously saving them time and money. The question is, how can you prove this? Here are a few ways:

• Show any potential guitar students a list of the students you’ve trained to become excellent guitarists and musicians.
• Explain how you’ve actually been ‘trained’ by an experienced guitar teacher trainer to get the best results for your students. Keep in mind that this is totally different than having a degree in music, since this kind of degree will not help you improve as a guitar teacher.
• Don’t teach exclusively one on one lessons – use a variety of unique formats that will bring your students tons of additional benefits and help them advance their playing faster. Find out how you can do this for yourself by watching this video about how to build a guitar teaching business.
• Become the local expert a style your target students want to learn.

Once you do these things, the following will happen:

1. Prospective students will see that you really are the best option for them.

2. Other local guitar teachers will start losing students because their students will soon discover that YOU are the one who helps guitarists achieve their goals faster than any other teacher in the area.

2. Personalize your guitar teaching to meet the unique needs, goals and learning styles of your guitar students

Here’s a question you should never ask: “What is the greatest method for teaching guitar students?”. Instead, you should be asking the following question: “What is the best way to consistently get MASSIVE results for my students?”. The answer to this question (as you might suspect) is very complex. However, it starts by using the following line of thinking:

The greatest, most successful guitar teachers do not merely teach ‘guitar’ they teach ‘people’. What am I talking about exactly? Do not search for an all-encompassing teaching method. Instead, search for strategies that will help each of your students achieve their specific musical goals as quickly and effectively as possible (while keeping them highly motivated throughout the learning process).

3. Help your guitar students learn what they NEED (not just what they think they ‘want’)

You don’t want to be that one guitar teacher who teaches his students only what they ‘believe they should be learning.’ It’s very easy for students to distract themselves and stray away from their ultimate musical goals when they try to learn things that ‘seem interesting’, but have no real benefit for them. With this in mind, they will often try to convince you that they should be learning these kinds of things and this can be very distracting for you as well (if you allow it to be so). Truth is, the overwhelming majority of students have no idea what they should be learning and why they should be learning it. That is why they are the students and you are the teacher. You will attract many more guitar students once you turn your existing ones into truly great musicians. This only happens when they achieve their musical goals as quickly and effectively as possible, so don’t let them get off course simply when they ‘think’ they should be learning something.

4. Work with a proven expert to improve your guitar teaching skills

#1 mistake made by most guitar teachers that ruins their local reputation (taking away their ability to earn good money): teaching guitar lessons with a trial and error approach. There is almost nothing worse than telling your students that you have learned how to teach guitar through trial and error. Many of them will take this as a sign of your own incompetence and will pursue lessons with someone else who seems more capable of helping them get results. Think about it. Would you pay someone to fill a cavity in your tooth if they were working on a trial and error basis? Would you sit down in that dentist’s chair? Didn’t think so! The same applies for your guitar students. They are not stupid, they can tell a hack teacher from someone who has really perfected the craft of guitar instruction. Don’t overlook this point – find an expert guitar teacher who will show you exactly what you need to do to get the very best results for your students.

Chances are, you know that I offer training for guitar teachers. With this in mind, you may be under the impression that the only reason I wrote this article is to advertise this program... but it’s not. Truth is, it really doesn’t matter to me who trains you to become an excellent guitar teacher. I’m merely informing you that you need to do this in order to become successful in your guitar teaching business.

5. Enrich your students’ musical lives by expanding their guitar playing goals to make them bigger in scope

In most cases, people who want to learn guitar from you either:

1. Have no clue what can truly be accomplished with guitar. They have a very limiting understanding of how to set truly BIG goals.

2. Don’t have faith in themselves and as a result pursue very small goals based on what they think is possible rather than what they REALLY want to accomplish.

For instance, many of your guitar students might think that they merely want to learn how to play fast guitar licks, specific songs or styles. Fact is, if you showed them how much they could truly achieve, they would want to accomplish much more. Mediocre guitar teachers will simply help their guitar students learn songs, play cool licks or reach other small goals during their lessons. Eventually, the student will be able to do these things and will quit because there seems to be no reason to continue (since the teacher never made them aware of the greater musical possibilities beyond their basic objectives).

It is your job as a guitar teacher to open the minds of your students to a whole new dimension of musical possibilities. This will motivate them to continue working with you for a long time and tell everyone they know about your lessons. Make it a point to help your students build up their musical goals from very basic ones to bigger, more long term ones and help them grow into excellent musicians.

6. Truly care A LOT about helping your students (and show this to them!)

Once you prove that you truly care about helping your guitar students (more than any other guitar teacher could) you will be able to attract new students and keep them for very long periods of time. There are countless ways you can do this, however, to keep this article short I will only mention one: Rather than spending all the money you make teaching lessons on other things, use some of it to directly increase the amount of value your students get from having you as their teacher. Hold group jam sessions, parties, dinners or other events that can only be attended by your students. Do not charge them for this! Give it to them 100% free to let them know that they are part of something truly special and that taking lessons with you brings much more benefit beyond simply learning to play guitar. Most guitar teachers never do anything like this (making you really stick out in the crowd!).

Here Is What To Do Next

After reading this article you have discovered many ways to attract a lot of new guitar students. To get the most benefit out of this information, begin implementing these ideas into your guitar teaching business right now. Once you do this, you will quickly gain many new students, earn more money and develop a positive reputation in your local community as the best guitar teacher.

If you haven’t done so already, assess yourself to see how much you know about how to attract new guitar students.