Music Teachers: Your website has too many pages!
Or not enough. It’s Goldilocks Syndrome. Too little or too many. But don’t worry, we’re going to show you the pages your website needs. Follow this guideline and your website will be just right. As a music teacher, your website has one purpose: get people to sign up for music lessons. Anything that is not serving that purpose needs to go. Keep reading and we’ll tell you the 5 pages every music teacher should have on their website. As a music teacher, your page is NOT about you. Your about page is NOT about you. Read that again and really let it sink in. Here’s the hard truth about teaching and life in general. For the most part, people do not care about you. They care about what you can do for them. Almost every private music teacher website looks the same: “My name is John Smith and I have a BA in Tuba Performance from Really Good Tuba School. I also have an MA from Even Better Tuba School. I studied with Dr. Frank Furter, Julius Caesar, and Dr. Tuba McGee. I have been teaching for 8 years and I enjoy teaching students of all ages and strive to make tuba a fun and enjoyable experience.” Sounds a little ridiculous written out like that, right? But that’s what most parents will read because they don’t know any of the people that you studied under and don’t really care what your degrees are or what school that you went to. They already assume that you are a skilled and trained music teacher. You don’t have to lay it out for them. At least not in explicit detail. Instead, music teachers need to talk about their studios and students. Talk about how happy and engaged your students are and how your studio helps them to get there. This is where you get to quietly brag about yourself and your studio through telling people how awesome that your students are. The entire point of this page is to help parents to picture their kids in your studio. Don’t talk specifically about lessons (that comes next), but about what makes your overall studio unique and why students and families should want to be part of it. Make sure to include testimonials and lots of pictures. [ONE NOTABLE EXCEPTION: If you are only trying to attract the highest quality students, then you should talk about your pedigree and what separates you from other highly skilled teachers. But this will be a VERY small percentage of music teachers. This is only for the music teachers that are working with students that are winning national competitions and getting into top music schools. For the rest of us, focus on the students and families.] Music Teachers need a “Lessons” page on their website. This is your information page that talks about what you offer. Do you offer private lessons? Group classes? Bands? Talk about them here, but keep it brief and include lots of pictures and a testimonial or two. Use bullet points, not paragraphs. If you confuse your audience, you will lose your audience Most teachers do well on this page because it’s where we get to talk about what we DO. Don’t go into crazy amounts of detail but go for a sales pitch. What makes your lessons unique? What do you do better in your lessons than ANY other studio in town? Music Teachers should have a “Pricing” page on their website. This is one of the first questions that people will ask. If you put your pricing on your website, I bet you'll stand out from the competition simply because your competitors probably don’t list their pricing! We want to be transparent and give all of the information that we can so that people will want to contact us and sign up. I have had a commercial studio for 5 years and I still don’t know how much some of my competitors charge. And it’s not for lack of trying. Short of sending over a spy, I’m not sure how I could ever find that information. It’s not on their website. It’s not on their social media pages or any other directories. People want to know how much things cost. Make it simple for them. (If you’re afraid to talk about prices, you need to check out our blog post about pricing!) Lay out your pricing simply but this page isn’t just about pricing. This page is about VALUE. Not only do we proudly display our pricing information, but we get to brag about what an incredible value it is. What is included in your pricing? Access to apps and games? Free student concerts? Swag bag on signup? Access to the teacher to ask questions during the week? It may seem odd but, as an exercise, write down EVERYTHING that you do for a student that isn’t physically teaching them the lesson: Lesson prep, student concerts, communication through the week, access to music apps, lending library, videos for students to watch, etc. When it’s all written out it looks pretty impressive, doesn’t it? That’s the point. We want to drive home the value that they are getting for the price. Can you believe that you get ALL of THIS for only this small amount of money each month?? Wow! State your pricing cleanly and then drive home the value. Make sure you include pictures and testimonials, even on the “boring” pricing page. Make sure that they can see why they want to be part of your studio while they read over the business stuff. Music Teachers need a “Contact” page on their websites. Put all of your contact info on this page: phone number, email address, physical address. Put a Google map. Include a simple contact form with 3 fields: 1. Name, 2. Email, 3. Message. You can personalize that a bit if you like but keep it extremely simple and don’t ask for extra information. You want them to send you a message and you want to make it as easy for them as you possibly can. Don’t complicate it. Also, you guessed it...include some pictures and testimonials here. Let them look at pictures of happy, smiling kids and read about how much Kate LOVES piano lessons as their finger is hovering over the ‘send’ button. Music Teachers need a “Sign Up” page. Keep this page simple and uncluttered. Just the form...and maybe a picture and testimonial. Make it very easy for them to Sign Up here and get the information that you need without getting too much extra. I like to get information like student name, age, instrument, and experience so that I can have an informed conversation with the parents about signing up their kid for lessons. I don’t like to go in blind, so this gives me a little bit of information. One of your goals should be to run the most efficient studio as possible. Similar to the Call To Action, you need to teach people how to contact you and what information you want them to give you. If your main type of contact on your website is an email address or a phone number you are missing out on a great way to save yourself time and get more inquiries. Most emails or phone calls are either generic requests for information (“I’d like some more information on guitar lessons”) or woefully lacking in information (“I have a nine year old that would like to take piano lessons. How do we get started?”) The first request means that your website is probably a bit confusing or lacking information because they couldn’t find the information they needed. Or, that they just don’t read and want someone else to do the work for them. Let’s be real. That definitely happens. The second request gives you more to go on but still leaves so many unanswered questions. Is the nine year old a beginner? Any prior experience? What style of music do they like? What days and times are they available? What kind of piano lessons are they looking for? You are going to have to ask all of these questions and more through emails, phone calls, or in person. Unless it’s through email, you probably won’t have a written record of the information either. BONUS: All of your pages should have a Call to Action! Throughout the page and at the bottom tell them EXACTLY what you want them to do. Public Pages Music Teachers Should Never Have On Your Website Those five pages are sufficient for most music teacher’s websites. But what about all of the other pages that you may be thinking of? Let’s look at a few… Studio Policies
We have helped THOUSANDS of music teachers revamp their website so that they can convert visitors into paying clients. This is what we do. And we’re doing it again in our next Music Teacher Bootcamp! If you’re frustrated with your website, you need our Music Teacher Bootcamp! During Bootcamp, we’ll look at your: - landing page - sign up form - improving the look, function, and results - search engine optimization We’ll also be covering your: - goals - policies - pricing - social media. AND we’ll be doing a 5 day challenge to get as many new students as we can. Click here for more info on our Music Teacher Bootcamp.
1 Comment
7/7/2022 07:40:41 am
What an exquisite article! Your post is beneficial right now. Thank you for sharing this informative one.
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