How to Recruit Quality Students as an Online Music Teacher
I'm thrilled to share another teacher spotlight interview with Mellisa Weinert! We cover so much in this discussion there will be something for every teacher to learn!
Mellisa joined TMO in April and I've been thrilled to watch her embrace the lessons and make changes in her studio. She plans to move 100% of her studio online within the next year. Many of her new student referrals come directly through her website and she shares so much in this discussion about how she makes that happen! If you have questions for Mellisa comment on this article so she can see it and thank you Mellisa Weinert for sharing your expertise with us!
Interview Transcript
Carly: How did you hear about Teach Music Online, about the course and the membership? Was it online or from a friend? Just tell us a little bit about how you heard about us.
Mellisa: Last year, when all of us kind of got thrown into a new environment, most of my students decided they didn't want to come in person. They just weren’t sure what was going on. They wanted to know what alternative I had for them. So I kind of looked around for a couple of weeks, and they would send in recordings to me. I quickly decided that didn’t work very well. So I got online and I started researching how to teach piano online, and your program was actually one of the first ones that came up.
I took advantage of the deal that you did last year where you would pay what you could afford, to kind of get started. It was so helpful for me to get going with online teaching. And then I finished that course and got really comfortable with online teaching and the setup and everything. And then I attended your Webinar in April, and you were offering this course and the community that you have formed through all this is fantastic. And it's been really, really helpful. So long story short, I found you on the Internet.
Carly: Well, thank you so much. I actually didn't realize that you had taken advantage of that offer over a year ago. That is so cool.
Mellisa: Yeah, I went through that whole class as quickly as I could, which wasn't as quickly as I wanted to, because I was juggling a lot of different things. But then after that, I thought,’I wonder if she has more.’ And so then I found even more.
Carly: So something that you shared in the membership recently was that you want to shift your studio 100% online, which a lot of teachers are in the middle of making a decision, whether they're going to do that or if they want to go back to in-person or do a hybrid approach. I would love to hear a couple of things from you. First, why do you want to switch 100% online? What are some of the reasons and benefits for you and your students that you've seen over the last year, during the pandemic?
Mellisa: There are a couple of reasons why I want to shift to 100% online. First of all, I've learned that I just really love it. I love the flexibility. I have actually found a lot of my students do better online. They focus better, they listen better, they're more prepared, which is so interesting to me. I did not expect that when I first started teaching online.
Another reason is that I don't want to pay rent to a landlord anymore. It's nickel and diming me to death, and a third of my revenue is going to rent. It just seems silly to pay for a studio when I can have one nice room and teach all of my online students.
I also really love teaching online because I can have students all over the US now, which is something that never would have been a possibility with in-person lessons. My base is growing so much. Before, I had maybe a 1-mile radius. And now I can teach anybody from anywhere.
Honestly, though, the biggest reason that I really want to move all my students to 100% online is that I am one thousand percent a farm kid from Central South Dakota, and I just miss the farm. My parents still live out there on the farm, and I live with my older sister. We own a house together and one day we looked at each other and said, “You're working from home. I'm teaching online. Why don't we move back to South Dakota?” So in order to fulfill that dream and still keep teaching, I want to move all my students online.
Carly: You said so many things that I know teachers can relate to. The ease of being online and saving money. For you, it's saving money on rent. For a lot of teachers, it's saving money on gas or car expenses. And gosh, when you list them out, the pros of online teaching totally outweigh the cons.
There are definitely things when we're in person where we go, ‘Oh, gosh, I've missed that.’ Or ‘I would prefer being with them because I can show them this or that.’ But, we’re also in charge of our own career and our future, and you set that for yourself by transitioning 100% online. This is so exciting, because you can be close to your parents again.
Mellisa: Yeah. It'd be really great. And especially as they age, they kind of need us closer, so it would just be wonderful to be able to help them.
Another nice thing about online, you had said something about the pros and cons to both, and how sometimes you really want to be in-person to show them things. Yes, I completely agree with that. However, I want to encourage teachers out there, if you get a really good setup, where you've got a couple of different cameras and can show them different angles, you can show them so much, almost the same as if you are in person.
Carly: Oh, it's so true, and it takes adjusting. Isn't it interesting that it took a pandemic to get teachers to realize, ‘I've got to make this work’, but it sounds like you have really made it work? You didn't just use FaceTime. You've jumped in. You have multiple cameras.
So tell us, because you mentioned it, what does your setup look like right now? What are some things that you've incorporated that have been really helpful?
Mellisa: The first month or so, all I had was my laptop and my acoustic piano and the camera that was on my laptop. I didn't have a mic or anything, and I quickly realized ‘if I'm really going to make this work and my students are really going to get a lot of it, I need to upgrade my system a little bit.’ So little by little, I upgraded.
The first thing I did was get an actual computer monitor. I moved my Mac mini over to the school and got set up that way. I had gotten a webcam by then, because I didn't have a camera on my monitor. And then I got a mic and I realized, ‘I can do so much more with this. So I got a digital keyboard and moved into my bigger room in my studio, and now I've got three cameras, a professional mic, and three monitors.
Carly: Wow!
Mellisa: And if I need a YouTube video or something for them, I've got that available on different screens.
Carly: I can see that in my setup! That's pretty impressive.
Mellisa: It's so great because I'm surrounded by screens. I can see everything that's going on.
Carly: How did you start getting students that live in other parts of the US? Were you advertising on Facebook, or was it referrals? How did you start expanding that network?
Mellisa: There are two things that I've done to expand my referrals. Some of it is just word of mouth, where my students refer me to other people. But online referrals don’t work quite as well as in person. I got a lot of my in person students that way, but not as much for online students. I also advertise very little, if at all.
My website is where people always find me. So, for the backstory of my website, I built my own website. My sister is a marketing genius in SEO, so she always gives me these little tips, like ‘put this in your SEO, and put this stuff in so people know how to find you’.
Carly: That’s lucky!
Mellisa: It’s so helpful to have her around to give advice. But one of the big things that I've been doing over the last several months is reaching out to all the home school groups I could find across the country. Being a former homeschool kid, I know how to relate to them very well, and I understand what they're looking for in extracurricular activities. Then they get to relate to me, because we all kind of came from the same background. So I've actually gotten quite a few new students doing that, which is great, because now I can fill up my hours and I don't have to wait for kids to get out of school to start teaching, and then I don't have to teach as late. I mean, all of you can relate. Sometimes you have to teach until 9:30 at night and you don't always want to.
Carly: Yeah, first of all, such a great idea. That’s something I've mentioned to teachers, that it’s great to fill those other odd hours, and then you then have freedom during the afternoon and evening hours, when you normally wouldn't want to be teaching. So were you finding a contact for the home school group and emailing them? Was it Facebook groups? What was your way into those groups?
Mellisa: So I actually found a website where there was a list of thousands of different home school groups, and it was divided by state, and they all had a website on there. So I clicked on all the websites and went through, and I've only gotten down to Georgia now I think. I haven’t even made it all the way through.
Carly: Every teacher listening is wondering what that website is now!
Mellisa: I don’t know if I should tell you.
Carly: You can choose. Maybe just tell the teachers you really like.
Mellisa: Anyway, they all had a website. And so I just found the contact page. Some of them were dead links, of course. Some of them didn't have a contact. Most of them had a way to contact them through the website, and I've only had a handful of them get back to me. But that's all you need, since you just need 50 students.
Carly: That's so genius.
Okay, I want to talk about your website. As you know, in the Teach Music online program, we take teachers through the foundations of branding and messaging and then creating a website and building your presence. That way, when they get to the point that you're at right now, where you’re reaching out, there's a process and you have what people need to be convinced that you're the right teacher for them. So for those listening, you can't just do what you're doing and expect some traction unless you have those foundational marketing things in place.
Tell us a little bit about your website. You’ve mentioned it a bit already, but I was so
impressed by everything on your site. I think it's really clean and professional, and you clearly have some systems in place that have been working for you. So, tell us about your onboarding scheduling and onboarding process that you currently have implemented in your website.
Mellisa: Okay. First of all, thank you. I've worked really hard on my website to make it super clean and tidy, and I keep it updated every month because there's always something changing.
Carly: Okay, well, that's huge. We just had someone comment in the membership, “I haven't updated my website in the year” and sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but that is a really big deal.
Mellisa: It is a big deal, and it really doesn't take that much time if you just put it on your calendar that you’re going to work on the website on a specific day. And you don't have to make huge changes, it’s just little things, like if your calendar has adjusted, or you've added or taken away a class, or you've added a teacher. Whatever it is, you don't have to revamp everything every month, just change a little bit. It makes a big difference.
Carly: Right.
Mellisa: So I've tried several different things for onboarding with my website. My website is probably about 14 years old now, because that was one of the first things I did when I first started teaching, I got a website up and running. I never paid anyone to do my website because I think that's something that I don't need to spend money doing if I can do it myself.
Carly: It’s through WordPress, right?
Mellisa: It's through Weebly. I'm really happy with Weebly. They've got fantastic customer service. If anybody is looking to start a website, but you're a little unsure, the widgets are super easy to use. Anybody can do it. If I can do it, you can do it. I'm not super tech-savvy. So the biggest thing that I have done recently for integration on my website is that I have started integrating JotForm, which is one of the widgets that they have within their website. On JotForm, it's really cool because you can create any kind of form that you want, and then you just embed it into your website with the HTML code, which they provide for you. You don't have to know anything about code writing to create a good website, which is great because I know nothing about code writing.
I use an auto form that they fill out right there on the website, and it comes directly to me. Now, up until recently, whenever I got an enrollment request, I would reach out to them, thank them for enrolling, ask them all the typical starter questions, like ‘Where are you with your learning process?’ ‘What class do you want?’, etc. And then I would set them up with their schedule on their payment.
Well, now I have two ways that students can sign up for lessons on my website. The first one is that whole integration with JotForm and I have actually put it in there where they can put their credit card in right away. They can choose exactly what class they want, they can choose how long of a class, etc, because I have three other teachers that work for me. So it's not just piano. I offer. We offer brass and strings and voice and all these different things, so then they can choose their teacher too. Then that still comes directly to me, and we still have to figure out the schedule because I don't have a calendar integrated into JotForm, especially because my calendar changes from time to time, which brings me to my second way.
I recently started using Fons, and when I first started using Fons, it was super confusing, and I was like, ‘Why did I decide to use Fons, this is really complicated!’ But then I played around with it, I got used to it, I asked them a million questions. I had several FaceTime calls with them. They're super helpful over there. So from that standpoint alone, I would recommend Fons. They're just really, really great customer service.
So anyway, I figured out how to integrate it in my website. Now people can click on “Enroll for Lessons” and it brings them to the Fons site on my website. They can choose the time they want and the lesson type that they want, do they want a piano, do they want woodwinds? Now, the downside to Fons is that you cannot have individualized options within the integration. So I can't have an option for 30 minutes clarinet, 45 minutes voice. You just have categories, so they choose the teacher and then they choose what type of lesson. And from there, I have to reach out to them to ask them which class they want specifically, but they already are able to tell me how long of a lesson they want, so that's really nice. And then they're already Fons customers.
Fons is wonderful when you're scheduling. It's a really great way to keep track of your calendar, because if you change anything in your calendar, the student or the parent gets an automatic email, saying, ‘Oh, hey, your class has been rescheduled’ and then they remember, otherwise they forget.
Carly: And it’s great, because it’s a web-based app. So the student gets notifications for invoices, so you don't have to do the same kind of invoicing. It kind of skips over that. It's just automated payments.
Mellisa: Yes. The automated payments are also really, really helpful. Up until I switched to Fons, I was using Wave. The nice thing about Wave was the auto invoicing, so you don't have to send invoices every month. You could do auto payments if the student clicked the option to do that, and it was free. However, the downside of Wave is it wasn't an auto withdraw from the students credit card, so they would have to actually go in if they hadn't chosen auto pay, and actually go in and remember to pay me. Plus, they got these annoying invoice emails all every month and reminder emails and nobody wants their inbox filled up. So that is the great thing about Fons. It just automatically charges them on whatever date that you choose and they can go in and update their credit card. If they get a new one, they get a notification, if their credit card has failed. So it cuts out a lot of back and forth from me to them, which is worth its weight in gold, in my opinion.
Carly: It's so much time when you think about it, that might be 2 hours a week you'd normally be spending. But, that time gone towards teaching is a lot of money. That is so great.
Mellisa: If I can encourage teachers to do one thing, it would be to get your studio as automated as you possibly can. I spend maybe an hour and a half every week on administrative tasks. What a time saver! And then I have time to do other things like clean my house if I need to, or whatever you want to do. As online teachers, you're already spending a lot of time in front of your computer. You don't want to spend more time at a screen if you don’t have to.
Carly: So what else is on your website that you found beneficial to really converting people that come to your website to start taking lessons with you?
Mellisa: The thing that I have found most helpful and I've just learned this through trial and error and questions that I've gotten from potential students is on your home page. Make it really clean and simple, but have a lot of information packed into a small amount of space. So you don't want to overwhelm your student with information on their homepage, but you want to give them a good overview of what you're about. On my home page, the first thing you see is banner virtual music lessons, real music, real teachers, real-time, so they know what you are.
And then I've got a little write-up about what sets us apart, why we're different than other virtual schools. What a virtual school is, and then just a little testimonial down in the corner. So then they can see I have real students and they’re so happy. And then from there, link everything that is important for your current or potential students to see on your homepage. People can click on my banner and it'll take them to the enrollment page, people can click on what sets us apart and it takes them to the teachers page and info about all the different teachers. You know, just different things like that. Make everything clickable and linkable because anytime anyone goes to any website, if they click on something that they think should go somewhere and it's a dead link, they will leave the website.
Carly: I really love your testimonials. You have a lot of testimonials on there and you have a widget where you can slide through them and it just looks so clean.
Mellisa: Thank you.
Carly: How do you get your testimonials? I'm curious. Some teachers think it's hard or awkward to ask for testimonials. Do you do that a few months into lessons? Do they just come to you?
Mellisa: Sometimes they just come to me. At first, I completely agree with other teachers, it is a little awkward to get used to asking for testimonials. As a fresh teacher right out of college, I was really nervous to ask about testimonials, but then as you get more comfortable with teaching, you get a little bolder. As I get older, I get more and more brazen with all areas of my life, so it's got easier to ask for testimonials. But when I first started the school, I started it with the sole intent of love of music for life. I wanted to give my students something that they would just love to do in their free time. And it was something that was part of their life, not something they did as kids or something that they do because they have to. So that's what my tagline is, Music For Life. I don't care if my students ever make it to Carnegie Hall or they become a music major. If that happens, would I love it? Absolutely. And I have had students go on to become music majors and music teachers, and I have one that's in music composition right now, which is really exciting. But that's not why I started my school.
The other part of that is that I wanted to create as much of a family learning environment as I could. I want this to be their safe place. So I get to know my students and their families on a personal level. I know their dog's name, and I know their siblings, and I know all these different things about them because I want them to feel like they can come to me with anything that they feel is relevant to learning music. If they're having a bad day at school, that's obviously going to affect their music lessons. So with that, I have built just a really strong rapport with my students. And because of that, I can say, ‘Hey, guys, I'm working on my website and I'm trying to build the school a little bit. Would you just hop on my website and leave me a review? It doesn't have to be positive or negative. Just leave me a review.’ And nobody that you know personally will leave you a bad review, unless you have its true bad terms with them.
Carly: But they’re still paying you.
Mellisa: Even students that have left, they left on really good terms. So I always make sure that I never burn any bridges. I’m like, you know what? I understand that maybe I'm just not the best teacher for you. That's great. Let me help you find a new one. So that is, I think, honestly, the best way that I have gotten reviews. I just asked them. Sometimes they tell me no. And that's okay. I'm like that. No worries. That's okay.
Carly: And I like how you position it as, ‘Hey, I'm looking to grow this school.’ ‘Hey, can you help me out?’ I think that's a great way to lead into it, saying, ‘I'd love some reviews that would really help me’, because most of the time, people love helping people. If I have someone who I have paid for a service and they ask me for that, usually I feel okay doing that.
One other thing that teachers can do is give your students a couple of cues or prompts for what to share in the emails you send out, because sometimes people go, ‘I don't know what to say’, but you could give them a couple of ideas. Something like, how long have you been taking lessons from me, and what are three things that I've helped you with? Or just something to kind of prompt, so they can say, ‘Oh, that's easy for me to answer’.
Mellisa: That’s great advice because people always need a little bit of nudging to know what to say.
Carly: So you joined TMO in April. What are some of the lessons, or maybe even events, that have helped you? Your studio is already in a pretty good place. What has helped you since joining? Whether that's marketing or business automation, what are the lessons that you found beneficial?
Mellisa: The number one thing that I found most helpful with TMO is the community. It's fantastic to have a place where we're all learning together. We're all online teachers and we can ask each other questions. The feedback that I get from some of the teachers is so, so helpful. So thank you to all of your teachers for helping me with this journey. Learning about the automation, especially with scheduling, I probably wouldn't have come up with this all by myself without a little bit of help from TMO.
Then some of the ideas on how you onboard a new online student. That part of it is still fairly new to me. I haven't gotten that many completely new students who have never taken from me. They're just online students that have been in person that switched over. So that has been really helpful with the ideas of what to ask them, how to get them started, how to teach them how to set up their camera. That's always a really big hurdle. I still have students that put their iPad up, so all I'm looking at is the ceiling. And that's not helpful. You’ve got to set it up correctly. So things like that within TMO have been so, so beneficial, and I've been able to just transition smoothly to online because of those things.
Carly: And especially because you're planning on staying online moving forward, getting all of that set up now is a huge time saver. Otherwise you would have to onboard every single student, without having a PDF or an email template or a video to send them that might help them with their setup. All of those things are about saving you time.
Mellisa: Yeah. Eventually I would like to put two things on my website; I'd like to do a video on how to get your home set up for online lessons and how to position your webcam. That way, students can just click on the video, rather than emailing me to ask what to do. And then the other thing is, I haven't done a welcome video on my website yet, and that’ll kind of walk students through what to expect when they first sign up for online lessons.
Carly: What are some of the new technology tools that you've been incorporating? I know you mentioned a couple of apps that you've discovered that you are really enjoying.
Mellisa: So one of the biggest things that frightened me when I moved to online teaching was how to continue doing games with my students. I play games with my students in-person all the time, and they just love it. Children learn through play. So let's continue nurturing the way that they learn. So when I discovered SproutBeats and how to mirror games from my iPad using PianoMaestro and things like that, it changed my online teaching. Students will start to get restless, and you've taught us really well within the program to take two minutes and play a game with them to help them re-focus so they can get back to playing again.
Carly: It's amazing too, when you find those tools and you go, ‘I don't know how I lived without this tool.’ They really are game-changers.
Mellisa: The other thing that I use a lot is a free app that allows me to share my iPad screen. I'd have to look up the name. I'm sorry, I can't remember the name of the app, but you can do notebook paper, staff paper, and blank sheets. Then I will write examples on there, because yes, Zoom and RockOutLoud have the option to write on the screen, but it’s really hard to write with a mouse when you're trying to do rhythms and things like that. So mirroring my iPad so that they can see what I'm actually writing is a huge help to them. Then we can work out rhythms and different things that I couldn’t ordinarily do without that.
Carly: It's been so fun to talk to you and get to hear your goal of not just going online, but making a life change. It's not renting out your studio anymore. It's completely remote and really fulfilling the dream of being back home, near family. I would love to ask one last question. For teachers who are listening, who have some fear. They have some things that they haven't quite figured out yet. They might be where you were a year ago, when it was a vision, and they might not have that tech set up yet. What would you tell them? What are some of the biggest reasons or benefits to switching online, and maybe some words of encouragement for those teachers.
Mellisa: I completely understand the fear of jumping to online teaching. I was very, very hesitant to do it when I had to last year. I had no idea what I was doing, and my two pieces of advice are: 1. You can do this. The same skills that you have for teaching in person, you get to use online. You know what you're doing. You're great teachers already, just move that great teaching to online and remind yourself that you’re just seeing your student on the screen instead of in person. You’re still the same great teacher you always were.
And 2. Don't try to do everything all at once. Choose one small task per day or week that you want to do. Whether it’s figuring out how to get better audio, so you research microphones within your budget and get that setup, or figuring out how to automate billing. Don't try to do everything at once. I'm one of those people where I jump in feet first and I try to do everything at once, and then I get overwhelmed. Give yourself permission to take your time and do one thing per day or per week. And before you know it, you'll look back in a month or two and you'll say, wow, look how far I've come and this is. This is working great. I love it.
Carly: Your advice is so good. You should be doing what I'm doing, with your experience! You're so eloquent in how you shared your experiences and advice for teachers. I really can't wait to watch you continue making these shifts and seeing you in our events and our coaching sessions. That's what brings me so much joy, watching all these teachers who are each at a different part of their studio. You have a lot of big goals, but you've already come so far. We're all just helping one another and sharing experiences, sharing what works. And I think what's so neat about the community is that it's collaborative, and we learn so much better together.
Mellisa: We do. Let me encourage teachers with a little bit of personal history. When I first started my studio, I was fresh out of college. As a college graduate, I thought I knew how to teach. I didn't know how to teach, but I didn't know that then. I worked in an office job for nine weeks, then decided I couldn't work for somebody else. I had one student who didn't even pay me. I quit my job. I was teaching one student who didn't pay me. And before I knew it, I had 5 students. And then I had 10 students. And I had 20 students. And you don't have to start with a lot, just start with where you are. Keep reminding yourself why you’re doing it. I think for most teachers, it's because you love to teach and you want to share that with everybody.
Carly: Oh, so good. Thank you so much for your time, Mellisa. This was so fun.
Mellisa: It was very fun. Thank you, Carly, and thank you so much for TMO. It has been a lifesaver.
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