Traveling the World as an Online Music Teacher (How I Make it Happen!)
Maybe you've heard that teaching online makes it easier for you to take vacations, but you're not sure how to make it work. Listen in to this week's episode where I talk about tips to make teaching long distance easier, how to organize your work, and so much more! I can't wait for you to hear more about how I make my business work for me.
Enjoy this week’s transcript!
I'm Carly Walton and this is the Teach Music Online Podcast, a show where you'll find tips and strategies for growing your music studio. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm so thrilled to introduce a topic today that is so fun and hopefully inspires many of you to do a little bit more traveling while teaching. That may or may not be full time travel. Maybe it’s just having a little bit of mobility so that you can go visit family members for a week in another location, or maybe you want to go to another country and bring your instrument along. There are so many opportunities now as online music teachers that you can travel and still maintain your music studio.
Why would you want to have a traveling online music studio? Having this kind of mobility would allow you to teach from anywhere. This could be RV travel, visiting friends and families in other areas, or world travel, which is what I did with my family for three years. There is a lot that goes into this, but it is 100% doable and I would even say now it's even more doable because of all the new innovative technology and resources we have because of the pandemic. And it's just a really fun way for you to take your career and your studio on the road. I'll be talking about four main areas of traveling while teaching. These areas are studio prep, gear for travel, finances for travel, and marketing for travel.
Studio Prep
Okay, so the first category is studio prep for travel. We're going to go through a couple of things that you can do to prepare all of your resources so that when you're traveling, you have everything you need with you. And for some teachers, if you've been teaching in a traditional studio for the last decade or longer, you likely have a lot of materials. You might have games or other things that are right there in your studio for in-person and online students that make the thought of teaching from anywhere a little bit overwhelming. It can be difficult to not have the same amount of access.
So let's talk about how you can still have access to all the resources that you need. The first thing is to get all of your resources online. Google Drive is incredible. It’s free, and it's a way for you to have access to all of your files, curriculum, everything that we're going to talk about. You can basically have everything organized within Google Drive. If you don't know what that is, all you need to do is create a free Gmail account. Within your Gmail account, you can access YouTube, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets. All of the Google Suite resources are right there. And I've used Google Drive for probably twelve years. I have all of my materials, everything I've ever created for teaching, whether that was in schools or piano lessons or voice lessons, everything is within my Google Drive. And if you can get it organized from the start, starting right now, then you're setting yourself up for a lot of success moving forward because you can find everything. Another great thing about Google Drive is you can simply do a search within your Google Drive if you're looking for a specific student or a specific piece of music or document, and it will find it for you right away, which to me is way easier than trying to go through a bunch of filing cabinets.
Another helpful resource is having digital method books. There are a lot of digital method books out there and digital resources through Marketplaces, as well as composers that we all love. Carol Matz’s Interactive Piano Method. Many of you know how much I love her method books. I think she combines traditional with modern so perfectly. She has a great modern approach to teaching, but she still teaches in a traditional way, meaning she still goes through theory, technique, composition, sight reading and all of those fundamentals of music in a lesson. We can't skip those things, but she combines them into her method book so that it's really fun for students.
Super Score is an awesome app for iOS that allows you to download digital music. And they kind of take digital music to the next level. In Superscore, you can actually zoom in and out on the music and it will adjust to your screen. You can play the right hand or the left hand, you can transpose the music. You can add the metronome. Your students can play along with the music. And as they are playing along, it will wait for them to get the notes right. So there are some amazing features of Superscore that make it a perfect tool for beginners. And if your students have an iPad, it'd be a great resource for them to learn how to play through their piano on the iPad.
The Piano Guys have some amazing music for teenagers, that I love. They have some really fun pop-songs-turned-Classical. Awesome resource. And their stuff is all digital. And then the Faber Atlas subscription is all of my favorite books. They have all of these piano adventure books that we love that you get access to on their website. You can actually just look at any book you need and can screen share it with your students so that they can see that music as well. I know a lot of teachers that have loved the Faber Atlas subscription, which they came out with finally. We've wanted it for years, but they finally did that during the pandemic because everybody needed digital music.
The next topic for studio prep for travel is getting your curriculum digitized. And this actually is not maybe something you've ever done before, but if you have a specific method for teaching, maybe it's all in your head right now, but you always know what comes next for their books. For their theory, when you incorporate pop music or Disney music, what is the path for teaching that you use? Then you figure out how to take it all online to make it easier for you while traveling. That's something I also did before I traveled, I created my digital music curriculum so that I wasn't spending as much time in studio management or in studio lesson planning. A digital curriculum is 100% worth the time and effort.
I often think about how if we are teaching in a school, how many method books there are out there for even just elementary music teachers. I mean, it's incredible how many different kinds of curriculum you could use to teach new concepts. And I think as teachers, we can absolutely provide that for our students and it gives you a much clearer direction and picture for where you're taking students. And it's just amazing because you have way more flexibility when you're traveling. You're not having to spend all of that time planning student scheduling. You’re able to make sure schedules are a little bit more flexible. If you want to travel, you may need to be more flexible with your students. If you have a large studio, you might not be able to get that flexibility.
One idea is to travel on the days you don’t have students. So for us, I think it was Mondays and Tuesdays that I didn't have any students, so we could always fly on those days. We could always be flying to a new location or doing our long road trips on Mondays and Tuesdays, and the rest of my students were scheduled the rest of the week. I also still had that flexibility for rescheduling students to Monday or Tuesday. If I did have something come up on a different day or for some reason I couldn't get great service, I could always reschedule them for Monday or Tuesday.
It can also help to record instructional videos or pre-record the songs that you teach. It’s an amazing substitute for you demonstrating music for the students. This is something I spent a year doing, and you don't have to do this because you can actually just use my library of videos. I recorded all of the piano adventure music and just put it on YouTube, put it in a YouTube library so that when I was traveling, I could open those videos and play them for the students. And then I could also send that link from YouTube to the students to practice with during the week. So it ended up being this amazing resource not just for during lessons, but also for students to have access to during the week. So if you have a specific method book you really love and you're thinking you might not always have access to your piano, you can actually just record that music beforehand. I just had a GoPro above the keyboard and I just played through each song and I was not a perfectionist about it or like performance level in any way. I just tried to make sure there were no mistakes and that I had good rhythm. And then sometimes I even included a few tips at the end of me playing the song in there so that I could just let the video play for the student when I assign them the song. And within most video calling software, you can share videos with the student and it shares the audio to their computer. So that's just another tip. If you haven't done that yet, be sure you're doing that.
Travel Gear
Our second category is gear for travel. What do you need to have with you to make lessons work? The first thing is obvious. It's your instrument, some compact type of your instrument. If you play piano, you could get a Midi keyboard. Or if you're doing RV travel, you might even be able to fit a full size keyboard into your RV. I am in touch with a few teachers who are doing that right now, and I think it's just the coolest thing ever. I traveled with a Midi keyboard. It's an X-Key Air and it was three octaves and I would be able to demonstrate almost anything for my students via my Midi and the YouTube channel. You need a good pair of headphones. I actually like headphones that plug into the laptop because I still don't feel like Bluetooth headphones are as reliable and as direct as headphones that plug into your computer. But if you have some Bluetooth headphones you love, that's totally fine. I just tend to still go towards in-ear plug-in headphones so that there's no latency or delay with the student.
You need a laptop or an iPad for streaming live video, a MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air. Those computers are so durable and reliable. They're really reliable, and especially if you can get one with a new M1 chip. They work really fast. They're just amazing machines that I strongly approve of and recommend. They're amazing. We've used them for years and I actually have one of the new ones with the M1 chip and I'm amazed because there's not any loud noise running while I teach or while I'm working, which makes a big difference through your mic. If you've got a computer that's really noisy, that's going to be a hindrance to your lessons. So that's just a recommendation. If you are out looking for one, don't go buy one. If you can't afford it, maybe work it into your budget for the next year. But if you are looking and in the market for new equipment, I have the MacBook Air. I think it's the new one, so it's 2021 and it's awesome. You need a cellular data plan with unlimited data or a lot of data provided each month.
I use Google Fi. Google Fi allows me to do a hotspot to my computer from anywhere in the world. When we were in Australia, we were in a campervan, and I would use my hotspot on my laptop for live lessons. And I would just say, make sure if you are traveling that you will get service wherever you're traveling to and that you have a data plan that you can use a lot of data with. So if it's unlimited, that's even better, because then you can just do a hot spot to your computer so that when you're in the vehicle or you're in an RV or you're in an airport, wherever you are, you can still work.
Next on our list for gear for travel would be a compact chair or a stool. Having a little stool that spins with a pad on top would be probably ideal because it's small enough for an RV that you could just put it underneath the table. Or if you have a lot of space, get a chair that you're comfortable with. I know it's a funny thing to mention, but if you're trying to create a makeshift station for you to teach them, it's going to be pretty uncomfortable. Those are just things to be thinking about moving forward, if you're doing RV travel. If you are flying to other locations, it's most likely you're going to be staying at a hotel or at Airbnb where you'll be fine. You don't need to bring a chair with you to those places.
Finances
Okay, the next topic is finances for travel, and I have this in here because these are things that often get pushed to the bottom of our list. We're thinking about automation or what we're charging, and often it just gets put to the end, or it's something we just don't want to think about because we know it's a lot of work. So let's talk about it because I want to encourage you to think about these things. If you are traveling, then I would say the best and the easiest solution is to have students paying monthly fees year-round so you divide your tuition equally among your month. You set aside vacation weeks, whatever they are. Maybe that's Christmas and Thanksgiving, I don't know. And then maybe you have one week off for spring break, whatever your calendar is. And then you have your students paying the same amount every single month. There are so many amazing studio payment automation tools you can use. Between My Music Staff and Fonz, you should be able to set it up so all of their payments are automated. You can even create a button inside PayPal to make it a subscription and that one won't cost you anything. It's just a subscription button they sign up for and it automatically has their PayPal pay your PayPal every single month. You cannot avoid the transaction fee, so unless you do bank to bank, there will be a transaction fee. You can make bank to bank work, by saying to the student, if you want to set up your bank to bank payments, I will remove that fee. If not, then I'm going to add this 2.9% fee to your bill every month because that's the bill for the credit card payments. So it's up to you. But that's just a thought, if you want to figure out a way to avoid that fee. Typically it's unavoidable, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. I mentioned Fonz. Fonz has a way of having you schedule your students and it has the parent set up the payment through their phone and this way it's automated. You can even set up a cancellation policy, a cancellation fee, all of those things through Fonz. A lot of our teachers and those in our Teach Music Online membership have been switching over to Fonz and just raving about it. So I will put a link in the bio to both Fonz and My Music Staff.
Marketing
The last category is marketing for travel. How are you going to get new students while you're traveling? And I bring this up because when you aren't traveling, you typically have more time on your hands to spend on social media and marketing and all of those things. So when you're traveling, you need to kind of think about it in advance what your plan is for setting all of that up. So how are you going to get new students? Maybe think about what your studio cap is. Are you switching from in-person to online and you only want 20 students? You can work on your website online, even while you’re out of town.
I recently did a free coaching call all about building a website. So if you want access to that, send me an email and I'll just send you a replay of this call where I teach you how to build a website from scratch. I also have a brand new course called Studio Website Builder. And in that website, I actually walk you through step-by-step how to build a website. I give you all of the templates. I have videos showing you how to design it within Squarespace. So I did that because I know a lot of teachers are just pulling their hair out realizing that they need a website but not wanting to hire someone to do it, but knowing their website currently just looks terrible. So it's actually way easier than you realize. You just need a little bit of hand holding and tips along the way because that's what I needed when I started building websites a long time ago. So I want to provide that for you. Let me know if you want a replay of that video. Having your website ready to go before you start traveling will help you a lot with getting referrals and marketing through social media because you have somewhere to send them because you're teaching online now. You need a Facebook business page, and you need a website. With those two things, there are easier ways to market because you can send traffic to those places and with an awesome onboarding process, you can get students into your studio without a lot of effort.
I teach you how to do all of those things inside the Teach Music Online course, step by step. I don't want you playing this guessing game. I don't want you to be stuck at the tech side of things like, how do you set all this up? So that's what I've created in these courses, is a guide to just help you get those foundational elements set up for your marketing so that your marketing happens a little more automatically and a little more easily because you have somewhere to send all of your students. What is your social media plan? Do you have a plan? Do you not want to do social media at all? Do you want to just run Instagram? Or maybe you just have a Facebook business page, which by the way, I think that's enough. But whatever your plan is, I want you to think about those things before you start traveling. Because again, when you are traveling, you won't want to spend a lot of time in your studio doing that management and marketing. So if you can do a bit of prep work before you go on a long term trip, your mind will just be at ease and you'll still be recruiting students.
I hope that these ideas have been helpful and that it has got you thinking about the possibilities for traveling while teaching your instrument online. I also want to tell you that I'm proof that this can be done. I did all of this in 2016 and 2017 was when I prepped for full time travel. And if you want a recap on that, if you go back to the very first episode of this podcast, you'll hear my episode of my journey to teaching online and how I taught and traveled the world while teaching online. I know that it can be done and I know that it takes a little bit of prep work, but all of those things actually for the prep will help your studio regardless. So all of the things I have talked about are really good things to think about with your studio management, your studio time management, and whether or not you travel full time. Maybe it's just a trip for a week here and there. I think it's good to think through all these things and make sure you're set up for it. We are so lucky to live in a time with this incredible technology available to us at our fingertips.
Thinking back to when I started teaching online and then traveling while teaching, I was using Skype and I had a website and a Facebook page and that's all that I had. And then I used Google Docs for communicating lesson plans or lesson assignments. And now the teachers that I'm working with and coaching, I mean, the tools are endless for crafting your perfect studio. In the show notes, I've linked all of the resources and tools I've talked about today, so check those out. Also, come and join us inside Teach Music Online if you've been thinking about it. If you're hearing these episodes and going, ‘I need to be doing all of these things’, I make it a lot easier inside the membership because we have videos and action steps and checklists and our certification that will really take you through these things in much more depth. Plus, you'll get to be a part of our amazing community of teachers where you can get even more ideas from. We can't wait to welcome you inside the membership.
Thank you so much for listening. I hope that you have an amazing week, and as always, happy teaching.
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