How to Advertise Private Music Lessons Online

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Marketing. Lead generation. Advertising music lessons. However you want to put it, whatever words you want to use, it all comes down to the same question:

How can I find more private music students? How can I advertise the private lessons that I offer?

When you research how to advertise Private Music lessons, it can feel like the possibilities are endless (read: overwhelming), and it’s hard to know where to even start. Just a little bit ago, word of mouth and posting your contact bulletin boards in local churches and coffee shops with the title “Music lessons!” would do the trick. But in today’s ever-evolving and extremely digital world, those tactics just don’t cut it. More often than not, you need an online presence to fill your teaching schedule – you need to know how to sell music lessons online.

That’s where this handy little guide comes in!

We are going to go through the main online avenues to advertise private music lessons, and the best practices, applications, and resources for each one. Let’s dive in!

How to Advertise Private Music Lessons with Social Media

Best Practices

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When it comes to Social Media music marketing, or advertising music lessons on any platform, you have two options: turn your personal account into a business account, or make a brand new account for your business. I personally like to keep my business and personal accounts separate, but if you turn your personal account into a business account, you get a head start with followers and content.

So this turns into, “What is the best practice for me?”

Now for a real, true-for-everyone best practice: Social Media Platforms like consistent content. So whether you’re advertising music lessons on facebook, pinterest, or instagram, you want to be sharing things and interacting with the platform regularly. The more engaged you are, the more engaged your followers will be – and the more people the “social media gods” will show your information to.

The last “best practice” is a simple one – make sure your profile is complete. A profile picture, information on the services you offer, and contact information are essential to making your profile welcoming and easy to use.

A “shortcut:” paid social media music lesson advertisement

If you are wanting to run ads on social media (a completely valid and often very profitable vehicle for music lesson advertisement), Square has a wonderfully easy marketing tool for social media music marketing, especially for lessons and services (John and I use it for scheduling piano tunings and lessons – read why we chose Square in this post).

Learn how Square integrates with all platforms for easy social media music marketing here!

Applications

How to advertise music lessons on Facebook
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Facebook is a great go-to for in-person music lesson advertisement. You can post in local groups, set advertising for specific areas and interests, and create local events for your music studio. Facebook is set up to encourage community, often based in geographical location. It is also possible to advertise remote music lessons (or Skype music lessons), but we like to use Facebook for local recruitment – we’ve found it most effective for those in-person lessons!

How to advertise music lessons on Instagram
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As I’m sure you know, Instagram is a photo- and video-based social media that can be used to reach a fairly wide audience. It is an awesome platform you can use to share photos of your practice space, videos of you (build up that reputation as an awesome musician and teacher!), and even videos of your students – with consent, of course – that ultimately help advertise your music lessons.

One of the things that makes Instagram unique is how important hashtags are to reach a wider audience. You tag these hashtag phrases in your captions, and people who follow those hashtags – but not necessarily you – get to see your content.

If you aren’t familiar with hashtags for private music teachers or hashtags for your specific instrument, check out this great list of music teacher instagram hashtags!

How to advertise music lessons on Pinterest
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I am going to start this one off with a caveat:

If you only offer in-person lessons, if you don’t have a website, blog, or Skype lessons, Pinterest marketing likely won’t help your business much.

Why?

Let me counter with another question: Would you ever go to Pinterest and type in the search bar: “Music lessons near me”?

No. You go on Pinterest to find online resources. Whether that’s blog posts, pictures, worksheets, or online music lessons, they’re all housed on the internet. In-person lessons are not – so as far as in-person music lesson advertisement goes, pinterest is not the way to go.

Let’s say you have one (or more!) digital products to offer. Now Pinterest could just be the thing you’ve been looking for. You can share your blog posts, sell resources for music students or other private music teachers, and even network with other private music teachers with an online presence.

I’ll say that there are two different things you will need to successfully grow your music teacher business with pinterest: A graphic design program and a pinterest scheduler.

At C&S, we use Canva.com to make our images. The premium account is only $12 a month, but they also offer a free option! They have stock photos, templates, icons – they make graphic design easy, even for the complete beginner. If you join Canva using this link, they’ll give you a credit for a free premium photo!

For scheduling, we LOVE Tailwind. There are SO many different features that make it worth the money (Like groups of people sharing similar content – called tribes. They even have ones specifically for Private Music Teachers! It makes it incredibly easy to get your content circulating on Pinterest.)

Tailwind has grown so much over the past 4 or so years I’ve been using it – so much so that I can’t fit all of the ways it’s helped grow my business. I wrote a whole blog post outlining how and why to use tailwind as a musician; click here to read it.

There is so much more to Pinterest for Private Music Teachers that we just can’t fit here, but if you’re interested in learning more, let us know by signing up for our newsletter below! We’ll let you know when our Pinterest Guide for Private Music Teachers goes live.

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Resources

We covered a few of our favorite resources in the Pinterest section, like Tailwind and Canva, but we wanted to share with you a few of our other favorite resources for Social Media Marketing:

  • For Scheduling:
    There are several options out there, but Tailwind is by far the biggest bang for your buck. Canva has also implemented a social media scheduling feature, but I have only used it sparingly – tailwind is all I have needed.
  • For Learning:
    Like we said at the beginning, we know that this whole Online Marketing thing can have a steep learning curve, and you can only learn so much through blog posts – in steps CreativeLive.
    CreativeLive is an online classroom full of awesome video classes by industry giants in every facet of the arts – including social media marketing for artists. You can check out their social media marketing classes for some great tutorials and lessons that will help you grow your studio!
    If you’re looking for some FREE classes, they air live classes all the time, you just need to keep checking back and make time in your schedule – check out their upcoming free live classes!

How to advertise private music lessons with a Website

We’ll touch on most of the important points here, but for an in-depth look at what a good website looks like, check out our handy Private Music Teacher Website guide! A good website is an essential part of how to sell music lessons online.

Best Practices

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With a website for music lesson advertisement, it all comes down to User Experience. Even google uses user experience to decide which sites best serve their users! So a few key points:

  • Make it easy to look at
    No one wants to spend a lot of time on a not-so-pretty site, let alone one they can’t read. Make sure text is big enough and dark enough to read on a Mobile Phone, and make sure it’s pleasing to the eye! If you enjoy looking at your site, it’s likely others will too.
  • Make sure it works
    Links have to go somewhere, and people have to be able to find what they’re looking for. If they can’t, they aren’t going to stay on your site long enough to try to figure it out.
  • Make sure to answer their questions
    Think of what you would type in to google to find a specific kind of music lessons. The instrument, the city, maybe a zip code, maybe the words “near me”… the list goes on. Include those words in your site.
    Also be sure to answer any questions they may have once they arrive on your site: What are your rates? What are your qualifications? Where are lessons held? Do you have any special offers?

Side Note: this is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. These steps are the start to making a page that Google will recognize and show to the right people.

Applications

There are lots of ways you can go about building your music teacher website, some requiring more tech knowledge than others. The best options we’ve found for each level are:

For Absolute Beginners: Outsource It

This one requires the least amount of effort from you, but does require the most money: get someone to build your site for you. If you have the capital, this is a surefire way to make sure your site is set up correctly. Email alyssa.villagrana@candsmusic.com with your budget and vision, and either we’ll build your website for you, or match you with one of our partners!

For Beginners Ready to Learn: Use your Scheduler

If you use an online scheduler or appointment setter (we use Square here at C&S Music, and MyMusicStaff.com is another that comes highly recommended), they likely have a website builder function that will help you easily build a beautiful, optimized Private Music Teacher website with minimal effort. Plus, it integrates right into your scheduler and POS system, which makes using the site for music lesson advertisement incredibly simple and easy.

For Beginners who Want to Grow: Use Wix

There is a reason that Wix is one of the most-used website builders on the internet… it’s easy to use. Not only does their drag-and-drop editor make it so that anyone can build a beautiful website (with no coding knowledge whatsoever), they partner with almost every major application you could ever want, so linking them to your site is ridiculously easy. Hosting, domain name, analytics, even online payments can be done right in the Wix dashboard.

But it also grows with you. As you learn more about design and SEO and everything that makes a great website, you can use Wix for advertising music lessons in more advanced ways.

For Intermediate to Advanced: Use WordPress

We go over this more in-depth in our post on how to build a private music teacher website, and in our free email course that goes into even more detail, but there are just more moving pieces when it comes to building sites on WordPress. You’ll need hosting, and a domain name, both of which you can get through NameCheap for super cheap!

Resources

We’ve already touched on several great resources in this section, but I want to highlight CreativeLive one more time. They have an awesome catalogue of classes, including classes that help you build websites!

Some Miscellaneous Marketing Avenues

Home-School Programs

This one was a game changer for us, guys. It’s often an easy process, and once you’re in their directory, students just find you – no real need for music lesson advertisement, persay. Plus (at least this is the case for our particular homeschool), the students get a set amount of funds per semester for extracurricular activities like private music lessons, so money isn’t as big of an issue as it can be!

Online Directories

There are several Private Music Teacher directories that you can use for private music lesson advertisement, either for in-person lessons, skype lessons, or both! A few of the highest-recommended ones are:

Blogging and Vlogging

This one goes hand-in-hand with both Website Marketing and Social Media Marketing for your Private Music Teacher business. Especially if you are looking to “break into” the online space, these are two relatively easy ways to do it. People like free resources, and are more likely to sign up with you for their private music lessons if they already know you offer something of value! So whether that’s video tutorials on youtube or a blog, or practice sheets or tips and tricks or whatever – be creative – they are easy ways to create some interest in what you have to offer!


Have questions? Comments? Need help, clarification, or someone to cheer you on? Leave a comment or shoot us an email!

This Post Has 7 Comments

  1. Jeff Carbine

    I loved when you said that whether it’s Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram, you want to be sharing things and interacting with the platform regularly. My daughter loves music and singing. I will be enrolling her in Private online music lessons to boost her full potential.

  2. Johar

    This was super helpful for me just starting out! Thanks a lot Alyssa & team πŸ™‚

    1. alyssavillagrana

      That’s great to hear!

  3. Anne Green

    Really helpful info. Thank you.

    1. alyssavillagrana

      I’m so glad you find it useful!

  4. Lance

    Hi I’m a fiddle teacher and jazz pianist who’s interested in having some students. Play standards and Irish music

    1. alyssavillagrana

      That’s wonderful! Have you ever taught before?

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