To grow a successful guitar teaching business, you should understand:

*The correct action steps you must take in order to grow your business and effectively teach your guitar students.

*How to take every step in the most efficient manner.

*The correct order to take these steps in, in order to quickly grow your teaching business.

The majority of guitar teachers either take incorrect steps or complete the right steps in an inefficient order because they have some kind of insecurity, are afraid of failure or are procrastinating. Fear leads to mistakes when one is trying to follow through with a strategy and make it a lot less easy to teach guitar students. Additionally, these mistakes make it hard to make a great income through teaching alone.

Mistake #1. Waiting For Too Much Time Before Teaching Guitar

The majority of new guitar teachers don’t think they are musically talented enough to teach for a living. They end up working a normal day job and continue procrastinating on their guitar teaching goals until eventually they give up on them.

Reality: Teaching guitar does not require being a virtuoso musician. You only need three things to start teaching guitar:

1. Your musical skills need to be better than those you teach. So even if you aren’t highly musically talented yet, you can still work with beginners or intermediate players.

2. A passion for teaching and helping others.

3. A strong commitment to developing a successful guitar teaching business.

Mistake #2: Being Afraid To Promote Your Guitar Lessons

Many guitar teachers who are just starting feel afraid that they aren’t good enough teachers to promote their guitar teaching business. They think, “Once I get a little better, then I’ll promote myself more”.

This is a completely wrong way to go about it. Here is why:

Will you learn more and get tons of experience by only teaching a small handful of students or by teaching as many as possible? It’s clear what the answer is, but the reasons behind this answer are not as clear. Obviously, you’ll get more experience working with a lot of students, but not only because you teach more people in general.

Here are the actual reasons:

1. Every guitar student is different than another. Each student has different musical goals, struggles, interests, personality types and comes from different backgrounds. Work with as many types of students as possible, and you will improve as a guitar teacher very fast. If you only work with a few students, you will never improve on some aspects of your teaching. These blind spots make you much less effective as a guitar teacher.

2. When you have a lot of students, you force yourself to work on developing various aspects of your business. This helps you to grow your business, so you can work with more students while teaching them as effectively as possible.

This free guitar teaching eGuide helps you to get guitar students .

Mistake #3. Not Teaching Group Classes

Teaching group classes instead of 1 on 1 helps your students improve right away. (This guitar teaching business video discusses why.) It also helps you make more money from the time you spend teaching.  

What you should do: Put your students into group classes right now and learn how to teach them effectively in this format.

Mistake #4: Waiting To Charge What You Think You Are Really Worth

A lot of guitar teachers mistakenly believe the following: “I should start teaching lessons either for free or cheap. Once I gain experience, then I can begin charging more.”

This is a very poor approach. Here is why:

People often associate cheap rates with low quality content. This means your students will come in expecting low quality from you (since lessons are cheap). This takes away your drive to become a much better teacher. As a result, your students don’t get all the value you have to offer and you don’t make as much money as you should.

Mistake #5. Not Getting The Guitar Teacher Training You Need

A lot of guitar teachers never get trained because:

1. They don’t even know that guitar teacher training exists .

2. They don’t have a strong drive to improve their teaching skills.

Guitar teacher training is the best way to invest into the growth of your business (it’s not just an expense). It helps you earn way more money than you would on your own.

This is how:

*You discover effective promotional strategies for getting more students.

*You gain a huge credential that no other competitor has (even if they went to college for music). This helps you convert more students who contact you into paying students.

*You understand better how to make your students into great players in less time. This creates a sparkling reputation in your local area and helps you get more students through referrals.

Note: You might know that I train guitar teachers. So you may conclude that everything written here is for the purpose of attracting you to join my guitar teacher training program. If you think this, you only have the half of it correct. Of course I want to help guitar teachers like yourself achieve success. However, the benefits of guitar teacher training are clear whether you work with me or not.

Mistake #6. Not Planning For Success in the Long Term

Many guitar teachers think only in the short term. They only think about how to get the next batch of students to cover them for the next month or two.

This approach is acceptable if you only want to make a few bucks, teach a small handful of students and work way more than you need to. On the other hand, if you want to earn a ton of money, teaching hundreds of students on part time hours, you cannot use this approach.

Keep the end in mind as you work to grow your guitar teaching business. Do this by determining where you want your teaching business to be in the next few years.

Break down your long term goals into small bite-sized chunks. Start with the end goal and work your way back from it to where you are now. This is the number one method for determining what action to take next while remaining congruent with your long term goals. This gets rid of unnecessary guessing in your business. It also keeps you from feeling trapped or burned out.

Mistake #7. Going In The Wrong Order To Solve Your Guitar Students’ Problems

To get your students to achieve their musical goals, you must help them solve many problems. The order in which you do this is very important. If you fix their biggest problems first it makes them feel less motivated and confident. They look ahead and feel overwhelmed by all the things they need to learn. This causes many students to quit lessons.

Fix the easier problems first. This boosts your students’ confidence, makes lessons more fun and helps them to trust you.

This free guitar teaching resource helps you get guitar students .

Author's Bio: 

About The Author:
Tom Hess is a professional electric guitar teacher and composer. He also mentors guitar teachers from around the world in his guitar teacher training program. Visit tomhess.net to get free guitar teaching tips and read more guitar teacher articles .