Tech of Business

Host Jaime Slutzky jumps right into this episode by answering the question, “how long should your online music course be?” Depending on the audience, your course will vary widely on how to best present the material for student success. For example, a course for busy professionals who are taking music as a hobby may need content released on a more relaxed schedule or self-paced whereas a course for children may be best suited with a weekly drip. A successful online course needs to have a clear goal in mind, so it's imperative to structure your course effectively and spend time planning. The end goal for you, the teacher, is to have your students be successful, so keep them in mind at every step of this process. Once you've figured out the course content and completed planning, you can start creating all the materials. Luckily, Jaime also offers recommendations for this, too! Listen in for a crash course on creating the right size online course for you AND your students! Topics discussed in this episode: How long your online course should be Using modules to structure your course Having a clear vision for the course What students need in an online course Why online courses have a lot of drop off Creating the online course and Jaime's software recommendations Jaime shares how two clients created their “right size” course Easy action item to get you started! Apply for the Online Music Course Accelerator for help building, marketing, launching and selling your course! https://onlinemusiccourseaccelerator.com Connect with Jaime: Instagram Facebook Get your free guide to making money teaching music online here! Check out Jaime's recommendations for editing and hosting your course: Camtasia Thinkific It's time! Round 3 of the Online Music Course Accelerator is open for application. Click here for details.

So you've created and launched your online course successfully, now what? You have more time, freedom, and funds to allow you to enjoy the fruits of your labor, but does it stop there? Most likely not, because if you have made it this far, chances are your dreams of expanding online will continue to grow and you love a good challenge. In this actionable episode, host Jaime Slutzky wants you to consider three prompts that she will go over to help you envision what you want your studio to look like now that you have successfully launched your online course. Jaime takes you through a thought exercise to help you gain insight on where you want to take your music school next. Since you are a creative person with a go getter attitude, you will probably have a ton of ideas after doing this exercise, so Jaime goes over how to narrow down your idea bank to suit what is truly aligned with your goals, and much more! Tune in to today's episode to hear how you can continue creating to help you expand your online school. Topics discussed in this episode: What does it mean to envision our studio after you've successfully launched your course Freedom you get from launching your course How is your course benefiting the people in your course? Looking at the growth of your studio through your online course Envisioning what your studio will look like 6 months down the road The two camps of teachers that approach us for enrollment in our music course Understanding who you are making this course for Narrowing down the idea bank How to connect with your online students How to avoid self sabotage Three prompts to consider in today's episode Connect with Jaime: Instagram Facebook Get your free guide to making money teaching music online here!It's time! Round 3 of the Online Music Course Accelerator is open for application. Click here for details.

There are many online tools out there to help with organization and ideation, however our host Jaime Slutzky has found two specific excellent tools that have helped her in her business, as well as create her online course. Jamie uses Trello and Todoist to separate her roles within her business as business owner, and running her business. Using online tools in a simplified way to separate your roles within your business is going to help make things so much smoother. Trello can be used for ideation where Todoist can be used for organizing and setting deadlines. Another benefit is these tools are they can be used from your computer and your phone so you can work whenever and wherever your creativity hits, as well as stay on top of productivity. Tune in to hear how you can use both Trello and Todoist by following Jaime's step by step processes to elevate your online course today! Topics discussed in this episode: How Jaime uses Trello Step by step process of creating a Trello board How Jaime uses Todoist Step by step process of creating a to do list in Todoist Importance of NOT working out of your inbox Combining Trello and Todoist Why Jaime likes to work inside Todoist and Trello The order in which you should use Trello and Todoist Action item for you! Connect with Jaime: Instagram Facebook Get your free guide to making money teaching music online here!It's time! Round 3 of the Online Music Course Accelerator is open for application. Click here for details.

You probably already know that there is no one right way to do things online. This applies to expanding your music teaching business online too! There are an infinite number of ways that you can make online work for you. The key is to do something every day towards achieving that goal. If your goal is to create a new online revenue stream, like a course, membership, seminar, or workshop, you're in the right place! Today, we're going to break that goal down into smaller, more achievable actions and discuss some of the big (and small) things you can do each day to work toward making your dreams a reality. Tuning in, you'll learn why consistency is key, how to break seemingly intimidating tasks down into the smallest actionable components, and how you can get more done in less time, plus so much more! Join us to find out how you can make every day count as you create a new online revenue stream. Topics discussed in this episode: ● Why consistency is key! ● Jaime's favorite achievable daily actions ● The important role flexibility plays in making every day count ● Why you should break tasks down into smaller actionable components ● What we mean by ‘action begets action' ● How to stop procrastinating and get more done in less time ● From main facets to buckets to actionable steps ● How to use Trello and Todoist in your online business Resources mentioned: Eat That Frog! Trello Todoist Connect with Jaime: Instagram Facebook Get your free guide to making money teaching music online here! It's time! Round 3 of the Online Music Course Accelerator is open for application. Click here for details.

In the early days of COVID, schools were hyper-focused on implementing remote learning modalities as an emergency response. As the pandemic has evolved, however, so too have education responses. As we begin the 2023 school year, it appears that we have reached a crossroads between the online world and the offline world! This crossroads is the theme of today's conversation with business strategist and voice maven, Michelle Markwart Deveaux, who is the CEO of FaithCultureKiss Studios and the Founder of The SpeakEasy Cooperative, a vibrant online community for voice teachers and voice-related entrepreneurs. Michelle has her finger on the pulse when it comes to both online and offline music education and, in this episode, she shares how you can take advantage of the unique value proposition that being online presents. There is so much more to teaching music online than your lesson plan and there is a definite mindset shift from teacher to business owner, which Michelle believes is critical to your success. We touch on what it means to be a business owner who is in the business of teaching, rather than changing your identity. Michelle shares her advice on structuring your business model around what you want your workday to look like, creating the course content that your audience needs, and focusing on important curriculum development, plus so much more! There is no doubt that this discussion is going to get you thinking and help you make the impact you desire, so make sure not to miss it! Topics discussed in this episode: What Michelle means when she says we are at a crossroads How music teachers have adapted to online modalities of running their businesses A look at how the shift to online has become a unique value proposition for teachers Tips for structuring your business model around what you want your day to look like Key differences between online courses, one-on-one modalities, and in-person teaching The value of pull marketing over push marketing: what does your audience want? Responsibilities that come with choosing your path at the online/offline crossroads The important mindset shift from teacher to business owner Why hybrid models with online and in-person offerings are so attractive right now How the online space has encouraged curriculum development What you should be thinking about as you move into your next phase of growth Learn more about The SpeakEasy Cooperative on their website. Connect with Michelle: LinkedIn Instagram Connect with Jaime: Instagram Facebook Call with JaimeIt's time! Round 3 of the Online Music Course Accelerator is open for application. Click here for details.

Now, let's start this off with a question: don't you wish that you could be a fly on the wall in a successful online music studio? Like, understanding how they are successful with online live interactive lessons and how they navigate the student experience for courses? That's what we're talking about today… so cozy up, I'm excited! Whether you came to teaching online because you wanted to or because it was the only option available to you, I'm glad you're here and I'm glad that you are thinking about what else you can do to enhance your studio experiences for students. Live interaction This is where you are in front of the screen in real time with your students. Before the lesson begins, the teacher will get organized: Computer related equipment, such as camera(s), microphone(s), lighting, headphones and proximity to router/internet strength Teaching equipment and supplies, such as instruments, sheet music, audio files, video files, activities, games, PDFs, etc. Use checklists for this. You'll thank yourself every time! Student readiness also involves a checklist and might include a sound check or quick check in prior to the first lesson. Making sure a student is ready for the lesson is a huge piece of the lesson being a success from the start, so be sure to communicate effectively and over deliver lesson links. I promise, this is valuable! Now, inside the live interactive lesson, don't wing it and don't take the lesson down to the second or minute. Just have a really good idea how to keep the student engaged and motivated during the entire interaction. The screen creates a barrier, do whatever you can to drop the barrier by making things fun and experiential. And wrap up your lessons with action steps, homework and recapping the session. If you're using Muzie.Live then that is a perfect place to insert the post-lesson summary. And you can also include your pre-work list in their practice room. (No this podcast episode is not sponsored by Muzie, I just really like their software for online music lessons!) Asynchronous Student Interaction Let's go through the touch points: how you interact with that student before, during and after they go through your course Before is from the time that they purchase your course through the time that they access that first lesson. The first communication is setting the stage and help them understand what they have signed up for. This can be done via email, text message, inside a facebook group, a slack channel, a discord channel or whatever your preference is. Make sure that your students feel like you are in communication with them and that you are giving the best of you to them so that they can truly do their best. There is no such thing as too much communication! Set expectations Equipment & supplies How they're going to access the content Links that they need What to do if there's a problem During is while they are actively learning and working through the course Assignments / feedback loops Quizzes and self-assessments Open door / office hours / q&a calls Regular email communication Music is not created in a vacuum, It is created through energy. When your students feel like you are pouring energy into them by providing them with feedback and with a space where they can experiment, they are going to continue to show up to the material. They are going to succeed! After the course is complete is when they are done with it (or no longer have access to the material) Ask for a testimonial and feedback. Encourage them to take the next step (and tell them what you believe is a great follow up to this course.) Send a survey Send a certificate of completion Shout them out on social media Make a big deal about it. It's not a lot of work from your side and it is so well received A few special links for you: ConvertKit Let's Connect on Instagram Jump on a call with me It's time! Round 3 of the Online Music Course Accelerator is open for application. Click here for details.

About our guest Ishita Arora is the CEO & Founder of Dayslice. She came up with the idea of creating Dayslice from an interesting perspective; as someone who had friends who were teachers and instructors who had expressed frustrations with their processes when it came to how their businesses were run, and as someone who has tried booking lessons with instructors in various fields and seeing the issues that came along with that. She wanted to come up with a way that took the frustration out of running the crucial parts of people's businesses - for both the teachers and the students - to make the experience seamless! What is Dayslice: Dayslice steps in for your bookings, payment collections, reminders, communications and more - to automate these systemic functions. Using Dayslice, you will have more time to focus on your favorite parts of running your online music studio! Why Dayslice: Dayslice was created with the user in mind, with the focus being ease of use and quick set up, so that you can focus on YOUR zone of genius to run your business and not also worry about learning a bunch of new tech to do it! Think about how much time you've wasted in the past (or, maybe you're still stuck here) trying to come up with branding for your business. We're not all graphic designers - and Dayslice takes a huge part of that off of your plate! They integrate with Pexels so that you get access to beautiful, high quality images and branding for your business that will be automatically sized to look “just right” at the top of your dayslice page. And when it comes to colors, pull a couple from your new pexels photo or use existing brand colors. Dayslice will create a custom gradient with them to theme your site with ease. The main feature of dayslice is calendaring and payments. Students can purchase single or multi-packs of lessons and schedule or reschedule as needed. Dayslilce has simplified the scheduling process and by taking payments ahead of rendering your music lessons, you won't be chasing after missing funds. Making it easy You are in control of how students can purchase and schedule lessons. Lesson lengths are whatever you choose, with your desired buffer between them and according to your desired general availability with consideration for what is already on your Google calendar. You are in control of your prices. Prices can be set for individual lessons and bundles or multi-packs at whatever number you desire. Students can book all sessions at once or book as they go. Optionally, you can set an expiration date for multi-packs. Dayslice is also very passionate about their customer service, feedback, and the user experience - and because of their dedication to their clients they make themselves so easily available to you. They have options to reach out to support via email, text, getting on a call, etc. The days of talking with automated robots who can't answer your frustrations are gone with Dayslice! Learn more about Dayslice, Ishita and her team at these links: https://hello.dayslice.com/ hello@dayslice.io For a quick demo or answers to specific questions book a 15 minute call here: https://dayslice.com/shinal/onboarding And as a great bonus opportunity you can get 30% off your first paid month of Dayslice Pro with code: expandonline30They also have a promotion running currently that anyone who signs up automatically gets a free month trial of Dayslice Pro so they can really assess the product to see if it's a good fit before they put in their credit card! Excited about hearing of the new software that could bring your online music studio all kinds of ease? Let's talk about it! You can go on over to Instagram and Facebook to send me a message or go ahead and schedule a time to talk with me over at https://callwithjaime.comIt's time! Round 3 of the Online Music Course Accelerator is open for application. Click here for details.

Let's talk about Instagram Reels! Here we go… 5 Reel prompts, done 5 times each to make an absolute difference to the way you reach more ideal students (and their families) on Instagram. Yes, I know these prompts can be used on other platforms or for other content creation needs, so go with it as you see fit! Check out my IG: https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ #1: Behind the scenes This includes taking snapshots or short clips of things that are going on day-to-day in your business. Students don't necessarily see this stuff, and by showing them more of yourself and your studio workings, we can start to build a connection. #2: 3 Quick Tips Three is an ideal number because you have up to 30 seconds on a reel and we want to make sure that we are giving ample time to the tips. The tips should build on each other. #3: Trending Audio This one is super, super fun because the first thing that you have to do is go on Instagram and watch reels. Take note of what audio is trending and resonates with you. When you tap on the audio at the bottom of the reel, you'll be able to use that audio in your own reel. I like to save the audios so that I can keep on searching and then go back and create when I think I've had a good sampling. The Instagram algorithm really likes trending audio. When you use trending audio, your reel becomes part of the audio's story which increases your reach. #4 Do This, Not That This is a strategy where you can showcase what people normally do and what you recommend they do instead. Keep it fun and exciting and positive. And while we're talking about this, it's a great time to remind you that your reels do not need to be all talking head style… you can intersperse screens with just text or scenery or whatever. When you use your voice, you don't need to have the text on the screen, but I do like to always make my reels available to be appreciated without audio. And for #5, we have two options depending on who your target viewer is #5a: Student montage and/or student wins This allows your reels viewers to see real successes that your students have achieved and to envision themselves having those wins. #5b: Your growth Share what podcasts you're listening to, what programs and courses and books you've purchased to help you do more, faster, better in your studio. Personal and professional development type content is what you're showcasing here. It's saying this is how I am improving myself and my business so that I can benefit my students even more and help them progress even further. My challenge for you is to use each of the five prompts five times. You'll be creating 25 reels over the course of 25 or more days. I'm personally posting 4 times a week, so it'll take me just over 6 weeks to post my 25 reels. Find a cadence that makes sense for you and structure your reels so that they are in alignment with your Instagram goals. Ready to take the next step: Join Elevate: https://onlinemusiccourseaccelerator.com/elevate/ to learn more about social media and email marketing for studio growth. Join the waitlist for OMCA: https://onlinemusiccourseaccelerator.com to be on the shortlist for the next round of our flagship program where you'll have full support throughout your online course creation journey. Have questions or want to connect? https://callwithjaime.com is the best way to get on my calendar And finally, take part in the challenge. Tag me or send me your reels. I would love to share them in my IG Story!

Let's make your business truly work for you ~ this means going from being a solo music teacher and elevating yourself into an online studio owner! You have a very solid foundation of teaching your one on one students and whether you do that online or if you do that in person or you do it in a hybrid approach that is your core offer right now… It's now time to build out from that core offer so that you can have multiple revenue streams which stem from it. These new revenue streams will logically fit before your core offer, alongside your core offer, in parallel with your core offer or after your core offer ****** Connect with Jaime https://callwithjaime.com | https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ ****** Guess what? This podcast is not about building one-to-many programming… surprised? Well, that's one objective I hope you have on your future plans, but there are revenue streams that can fall in place, increase your top line and bring you joy that take far less time to get going. For many music teachers, the joy of teaching music is in the interaction with students, so the idea of “taking you out of the scene” doesn't necessarily appeal to them. There are actually two revenue streams that you can start implementing and creating right now based on what you are currently doing within your existing lessons. 1) Digital Downloads The first revenue stream you can add is digital downloads. These come about by creating something out of the proprietary content that you teach in your lessons. Maybe you create worksheets or workbooks or exercises for your students, throw them into canva to make them look pretty. Then you can make them available for purchase through sites like teachers pay teachers or your own website. And you can also sell these of course through social media. These digital downloads are a huge benefit to the person who buys them because it's a lesson in a box. It makes it really easy for other teachers or ambitious students to be able to access quality teacher resources without having to interact with that teacher. And they don't need to be elaborate or complete; one or two of these is fine. They are the beginning of a new revenue stream. Affiliate Marketing The second revenue stream is referral or recommendation income. You'll make a percentage or flat rate of the purchase price of products and services that you already recommend to students and other teachers. You are seen as a trusted advisor by your students, right? So when a student says, what book or equipment or supplies should I be using, you let them know what you think would be best for them. So why not monetize that aspect of your business? I'm not suggesting marketing or recommending products that you don't truly love only for the affiliate income, but look into making some side income from products and services that you do like and use. One way to do this is to become an amazon affiliate or an Amazon associate as they are referred to. This is easy to setup and many of the products on Amazon are included in the program. There is a fairly high referral volume that you need to maintain, so if you aren't generating enough leads, this might not be as lucrative. The way that I actually prefer to become an affiliate for a product or service is to go directly to the creator and inquire about their direct program. If they don't have one, they might also have a reseller level. Affiliate programs and digital downloads are some of the fastest ways to get started building a secondary revenue stream online. Of course, I am all about the courses and all about the workshops and all about the live online programs. These are just some of the additional nice-to-have options that you can start to implement to diversify your income as you're working on those bigger, exciting projects! ELEVATE! When we begin to think about online income, it's time to build an audience who is ready for the material that we are delivering. Welcome ELEVATE! This is the Online Music Teacher Marketing course that I have developed with Brocha Kahan. It is a course designed to help you build trust with an audience online so that you have a larger pool of people who might be interested in one or more of your revenue pillars. Elevate is now available on demand! You are able to join that course at any time. Click here to learn more! I'd love for you to come into Elevate! and for you to start building the framework online so that you can have multiple revenue streams. The best place to start… Take a look at your current interactions and teaching what you are currently doing with your students, how you're bringing your students on, what process you're taking them through, at what point you feel that they have graduated or matriculated to the next level of study. Don't just look at a student as a student; watch and learn from their student journey. The student journey is everything! What digital assets you create → that revolves around what your students are doing. The affiliate products or the products that you recommend or promote to them → that's all about the student journey. The courses and workshops that you are going to create → those all intersect with your student journey. The more we can benefit the student, the person who is paying for whatever it is, the more you're going to be able to build these revenue pillars. Check out Elevate! Please remember that building a successful online business is not a sprint, You don't have to implement all of these things all at once, all at the same time and try and promote and market every single thing. Do things methodically, do things one after another in a logical way that benefits the student journey. Connect with me on Instagram and Facebook!

Welcome to the Expand Online podcast, I'm your host Jaime Slutzky and this is episode 235. Today's topic came about after a recent conversation with a prospective client who was just so unsure how to take his music studio from where it currently is to where he wants it to be. See, he has consumed a lot of free content online and didn't know how to invest in his business to see those results. He wanted to know if I thought a course was the right next step or if I thought a more interactive program would do better or if he should just work with me privately. I knew that all three options could work for him, but that it wasn't up to me to tell him what to do. It was best for me to lay out the key differences and potential of each option. And I did... and now I'm coming here to the podcast to do the same for you. But before we get there, know that this conversation came about because he booked a call with me at https://callwithjaime.com and you can do that too. Or if you are all about the DM's send me one over on Instagram or on Facebook. Now, then, let's talk about getting to the next level for your studio. Buying a Course Online courses are a fabulous way to learn something new. They work really well when you are certain you know what you want to learn and you have the self-discipline to take the time to consume the course material and implement the suggestions provided inside the course. I love courses; I've been helping clients create courses since 2016 and don't plan on stopping anytime soon… that being said, for your business, you want to be really discerning about what the course promises are and make sure that they fully align with what you want to achieve. If you want to get started with online marketing, then I would strongly recommend joining Elevate! which is the course that Brocha and I have developed. This course will help you start and grow your email list and begin to truly leverage social media for business growth. And we do everything in this course to keep it completely relevant to music teachers. There are thousands of courses you can purchase. Some are sold directly by the course creator, like Elevate! others are sold through course marketplaces like Udemy and membership sites like Skillshare. While many of the courses on those types of platforms are fine, they are discounted in such a way that the creators don't make a lot of money from them and you're likely not going to get any level of support from those creators or platforms either. Most likely, the courses that are going to help you get to the next level for your studio are going to teach something about marketing or sales or product development or product delivery. Before buying a course, make sure that you like the style of the course creator… do a little research on them. If they have a podcast, listen to a couple of episodes. Or check YouTube or Facebook or TikTok or Instagram and watch their videos. Even shorts and reels can help you determine if you like their voice, mannerisms and style! A course is a lot like what you do – your teaching is generally linear, your students need to be able to identify how to play the notes on the instrument before they can play the notes on the staff on their instrument. Truth be told, a course is only going to get you so far… they don't come with accountability, support or personalization. For that, your course creator is going to either offer an upsell to the course or a higher level program. Interactive Program Now, the next level of offer to consider is an interactive program. This is more than just a course with support. It's really built differently. It's built with individuality in mind. OMCA is an interactive program. We have the underlying structure of instruction which is linear and then we overlay it with individual attention for each of our clients. One client might need to spend more time on sections 1 or 2 whereas another client will breeze through 1 and 2 but then spend more time on 3 or 4 or 5. I really think that interactive programs are perfect when you want to do something bigger, like build a course or expand from a single teacher studio to a multi-teacher studio. These programs are going to help you spread your wings. When looking at interactive programs, understanding the timeline and recommended time investment is paramount. The coaches who run interactive programs have ideas on how long each component is going to take their participants in order to achieve the promised results, staying on track is going to help you keep going. At this time, I recommend linear interactive programs to most people, because frankly I've been burned in a few non-linear programs that I've joined. When you're looking at joining a program, you'll find that some are evergreen and some are open-cart close-cart. The open-cart close-cart programs provide you with built in accountability because you're starting the program at the same time as a cohort of participants and by default you're all going through it in parallel. Evergreen programs allow students to join at any time which is extremely convenient for participants because you don't have to wait, but you might not find your biz bestie in those. Just as with courses, do a bit of due diligence as you seek these programs out. Make sure you believe that the program is going to help you take your studio to the next level and that you can effectively learn from the provider. Also ask questions about past participants and other leaders in the organization who will be working with you. Right now inside OMCA, our clients work directly with me and Brocha. In time, we are hoping to bring on additional advisors or coaches who can work more closely with our clients providing them some of the technical and wordsmithing services that we do right now. I was just looking at an interactive program for myself and the structure is that the recorded content is from the provider and all the interaction is done with their staff. This isn't a bad thing, but it was an important thing for me to understand as I determine if it's the right program for me. And that's what I want for you as well. Oh, and one more thing about interactive programs, most of the time they are going to come with the strongest guarantee. More than courses and more than coaching too. Coaching So, now with coaching, this is where the relationship is entirely one-on-one. It's like your private lessons. You'll work with your coach to get to a certain objective or for a specific period of time. Most coaches book 3- 6- or 12- month packages which may include done-with-you, done-for-you, reviewing your do-it-yourself elements or a hybrid of these. When hiring a coach, it's helpful to understand what they are best at and how they can help your business move forward. There are seriously thousands of different coaches who each approach coaching differently. Some will provide you with templates and methodologies to work through together while others will ask a ton of questions to help you get to the answers that are inside you. When I coach clients, I mostly do the latter. I want to understand what they are wanting to create or do and then work through their tech roadblocks. I generally include done with you and done for you services because it's far easier for me to get in and do the technical work and then provide a cheat sheet to my clients to use over and over again. And coaching is going to be a unique relationship. No two clients that I coach are going to come to me with the same wants and needs and goals. It's my job to truly understand them and only offer coaching services to those people I believe I can truly help move their studios forward. I'm not going to coach my clients on things that I'm not the best at. And I hope any coach that you consider working with is going to be as discerning as I am. Oh, and while I'm here, I just want to mention that group coaching is something that I consider an interactive program. It's much more coach guided and not goal driven. What's your next step Well, if you're looking to add a new way to bring students into your existing offers, then a coach or a course is probably going to serve you best. If you are looking to add a new revenue stream to your business, then an interactive program or a coach is likely the direction I would recommend. If you're looking to become more efficient or streamline processes, you can probably find what you need with any of the types of services I have mentioned in this podcast episode. Investment Now, before I leave you to take your next step, the last thing I want to mention is the investment… There are three investments we're going to make: financial, time and energy. Courses, interactive programs and coaches are all going to require each of these. Going all in on a course, program or coaching opportunity is the best way to get a return on your investment. If you spend a lot of money but don't put your best time and energy into it, the return is not going to necessarily be there. If you put a ton of time into a program but the financial investment is low, the return might be positive but it might not truly move your studio forward. And if you put a ton of energy into it but the program doesn't align with your studio growth goals the result is not the movement you were hoping for. OK, I'm going to wrap up with this… if you are ready to get to the next level, then decide what that looks like and do your research. Feel great about your course, program or coaching investment and visualize what your studio is going to look like on the other side! I see great things for you… and I would love to chat, so book a call with me https://callwithjaime.com and we'll connect soon.

This is the time of year where it's really important to put together new systems and processes for the upcoming school year or academic season. Here are some tips and strategies for onboarding and offboarding your online students. These students could be taking real time lessons with you, they could be in your course, they could be coming through some of your workshops or master classes or be part of your membership. With any kind of online relationship, you're going to want to make sure that you have onboarding and offboarding. Onboarding your online students If you have been following me for any length of time, you know that I always recommend some kind of welcome sequence that is triggered off a purchase. If someone is signing up for your course, there needs to be a welcome sequence. If someone signs up for your lessons for the first time, we want to have a welcome sequence. If they sign up for a workshop, a welcome sequence. If they sign up for your membership, a welcome sequence! This welcome sequence is part of onboarding, there is more to it though. Inside your welcome sequence, you will want to help your new student understand the culture, the access points and all the other nitty gritty details of your programs. We also want there to be reinforcement because it's not always the case that people are going to read your emails. You don't know the state of your students' inboxes, so repeating the information is going to help with initial success. If you need students to purchase anything additional in order to participate in your lessons or your course or whatever you are offering, be sure to include that in not just one of the emails, but included in pretty much every email because we want to make sure that they really do get it and are going to show up to that first lesson or to the first day of the course or to the first day of the workshop, ready for action, ready to learn. In addition to emails, you may decide you want to have an onboarding call. If you choose to have an onboarding call then be sure to have a list of things that you want to go over with that student, so that you are running this call and it's not them asking you a million questions. We want to make sure that this call is really tangible and, it's going to probably reinforce a lot of what goes into the welcome emails. The last thing that we want to make sure that we cover is access. Access to you, access to the lessons or course or membership or whatever, access to any additional or supplementary information or resources and an understanding of the flow. Access is for either live or pre recorded content and especially hybrid. Every student is going to be clicking some link somewhere to access the session with you or the content. This link is probably to a gated portal with an email and password or a username and password. Make sure that everybody gets access to whatever portal it is right away that they test it out! The second part of access is helping the student understand their access to you in. You may run a slack channel or you may give voxer access, you might have a community or a facebook group, you might allow your students to access you and to communicate with you via text, via email, via DM and, via who knows what! We don't want to give our students unlimited access to us. Email is going to be one of the ways that they can communicate with you because we are using email for outbound messaging which means that we should also use it for incoming messages. The rest of their access to you is truly up to you. Offboarding This is the process by which we wrap things up with our students. We make sure to close the loop and wrap up the experience in a really positive way. It's probably going to be some kind of offboarding email sequence. This might start a week or two before the end of lessons or before the end of the session with a course or a workshop. Inside the sequence we're going to be thanking them, praising them for all their progress, asking for a testimonial and so on. Having an experience that helps them wrap things up is also going to clearly list out what they are losing access to and what to do if they want to retain access for longer. That is something that you are going to have to decide for yourself exactly what you want that to look like. In addition to that off boarding email sequence, we also want to make sure that we clean things up. Make sure that all of the payments are done in full, make sure that any resources or any videos or what have you is passed along., Make sure that you clean up their access. This one's a really tricky one. Be sure to remove the students access. Tagging your students Both during onboarding and offboarding, inside of ConvertKit or whatever email marketing system you have, make sure that you have your clients tagged appropriately. Set it up so that you know who is a student and who is an expired student inside there with tags or otherwise. This may help you with segmenting down the road. It is just one of those internal tasks that if you set it up once, you never have to think about it again. But that data is going to be there when you want to use it. As I said at the top of the episode, this is a great time to create new onboarding and offboarding policies, procedures and systems because you are kind of at the point right now where there is turnover and there are new things coming. Take a little bit of time and map out the beginning and end of your students journey. It is going to make next school year flow that much smoother. Be sure to connect with me on Instagram and book a call by going to https://callwithjaime.com And share this episode with another music teacher!

Are you asking the right questions? It is sometimes so obvious that people are just floundering and I don't want you to flounder… I want you to get the right answers to the questions that you actually need in order to accomplish your online goals and dreams. Have you booked a call with me recently? If not, go to https://callwithjaime.com and do it now. The first thing that we need to do in order to ask the right questions is to know what we're actually trying to understand. I have three concrete examples for you for this episode… I get a lot of questions about software tools and for 95 or 98% of those questions, the answer is it doesn't matter what the tool is, it matters how you implement it. People don't need to ask me which of the software solutions should I be using (you usually know which one that you're looking at.) These questions are either seeking outside validation that they're making a good choice or because they don't actually know what they're doing. Instead of this question, a good question would be to ask for guides or guidance for implementing this particular piece of software into my music school. That's going to give you a lot better answers! That's going to tell you how to do it, how to do it, cut and dry, easy peasy getting started. It doesn't matter most of the time which software tool you're going to implement. The key is to make sure that you are implementing the software fully completely and succinctly. When we're asking advice on what kind of tools to use or what kind of system to implement or what kind of pricing plans to have, you already know what you want to do, it's more a matter of making sure that you have the right strategy to implement that properly. The next type of question that I hear asked all the time. is for recommendation or referrals to other professionals. The question is, does anybody know a piano teacher in this city or a piano teacher who uses this methodology. I've got a student for them. That's not the right question. When we're looking to grow our referral network, the right question for us is to ask for recommendations on other teachers who have similar philosophies to us, or contrasting philosophies. It doesn't matter the instrument that that teacher teaches, obviously that will get drilled down later on, but we want to make sure that we understand the character of the people that we are potentially going to be sending business to. It's really understanding the essence of their teaching and their teaching methodologies and things like that. Yes, of course, we want to make sure that it's a piano teacher, not a saxophone teacher. If we're looking to grow our network of piano teachers, but you get the idea, we don't care what they teach, we care how they teach. And similar to that, we also don't want to be creating posts on our social media that are saying that we have lessons available or that we have an opening or things like that because you're not going to necessarily get the best right student for that spot. Instead of saying I have lessons available and I use this methodology, pose your question asking for people to envision your next student. Does someone know of a student or a child or an adult or whatever it is, who is interested in this and this and this and has tried this or that or another thing! By asking a question in this way we are allowing people to create an image in their mind of the ideal student for you. This makes it so much easier for them to say, I know somebody! Wrapping up Even though that first question about software seems drastically different than the post saying you've got availability in your studio for a new student, they're actually coming from the same place and being directed to the same people. The same place, meaning these questions are coming from a place that lacks specificity and they are coming from a place of generalities. The same people, meaning when you post on social media, you're attempting to listen to a lot of voices and the voices that are coming in are not necessarily expert voices or people who even understand what you offer, what you need and what would be best for you. This is why I think it's really important when we are asking our questions online that we ask the right question with lots of specificity and the ability for someone to paint a picture in their mind of the right answer. Instead of asking a million people their opinion on something that really isn't going to sway you, ask one person that you trust implicitly and go with that or go with your gut. You are asking the better question when it's moving a decision into action. Paint a picture for the people who want to help you and they will have a far easier time interacting and engaging with your question to provide you with something that is tangible. I hope that this conversation has helped you with reframing some questions because social media is a great place to get feedback and advice. Don't stop asking questions. Think about what the question is and why you need the answer and of course how to paint the picture, so people give you an answer that you're going to actually be able to use!

The dreaded two letter word “N-O” is one of those words that none of us like to hear and none of us like to say! We don't like to turn down opportunities. We don't like to turn down money. We don't like to turn down the changes to positively impact someone else's lives. But NO, is such a powerful word. No creates an opportunity for you to spend more time, energy and money on things that truly serve you. Have thoughts for me? Instagram or Zoom, your choice! Look at your roster, look at your goals, look at your time commitments! Look into everything that goes into your days, your weeks, your months and even your years and see how using that little two letter word can shift how things go. Emotions of Saying No Generally speaking the easy no, doesn't come with a lot of emotion. It is, no, this is not in alignment with my business or no, I don't offer that service or no, I am not available for that. Easy, emotionless and effective. The ones that bring up emotion are when somebody comes to you saying “I want you to teach me…” or “Can you teach my child…” You may realize or decide that You're not the right teacher for whatever reason. You might not be able to give them a best in class experience You can't make the schedule work with them Adding the student into your roster is going to create an imbalance Sometimes when we say no, it's because we have made a commitment to grow our own business and by bringing that student on, it stifles our own growth. This is pulling at the heart strings for sure… I would love to work with this student because they would be absolutely amazing, but I can't because otherwise I'm stifling the opportunities that I am trying to create for myself. When we say these emotional No's, we beat ourselves up over it, right? We're like, oh, can I find a way to make it work? We're always trying to bend over backwards and find a way to say yes. I want you to stop that. You don't have to say yes to everything and everyone. A yes now means no to your own future. Saying yes to something that is not ideal right now will undoubtedly make it harder for you to accomplish your own goals. You are not only a fabulous music teacher, you are also a fabulous business owner who has hopes and dreams and goals. The little letters N. O. allow you to reach for them and work toward them consistently. When you say no to someone, they generally are going to respect that and respect you and not tie a whole lot of emotion to it. It's all your own emotions and that's why we have to be very pragmatic in this space. Emotions being told No Think about it when someone has said no to you, what do you tie to that no? Do you say “Oh my goodness! Well they're just like throwing away good money” or That was a really stupid thing for them to say! I'm amazing.” Come on! Usually we're like, “okay, moving on” and take it at that. Giving yourself permission by saying No Regardless of whether it's an easy no or a difficult no it's important to understand where that no is coming from. Identifying what space that no is allowing us into will make it easier for us to continue to say no to the things that don't serve us. When we say no to a new student… we're saying yes to our one to many program we're saying yes to our family we're saying yes to more gigs we are saying yes to vacation we are saying yes to fill in the blank. When we say no to something that's local… we might be saying yes to something that's online or to something more well targeted or something that opens more doors elsewhere. When we say no to having a new in-studio student (because we teach online using Muzie!) we are saying yes to the boundaries and studio policies and procedures. When we say no to discounting our services, we are saying yes to knowing our value. When we say no to you, name it, we are saying yes to ourselves. Always. You are saying yes to yourself. You're saying yes to your goals. You are saying yes to the future that you are looking to create! Say the right yes is say the right no's and you're well on your way to teaching music on your terms in a way that is very much in alignment with your personal and professional goals!

Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of online marketing… it existed before the social media platforms and still performs better than just about any other online marketing method… that's not to say that the others aren't important because they are crucial… can't have an email list without generating traffic to that list – and that's where Elevate! comes in… the social media + email marketing course for Music Teachers. Click here for details: https://onlinemusiccourseaccelerator.com/elevate/ If you're not on my email list go to https://expandonlinenow.com there'll be something awesome for you there (it changes periodically, so depending on when you're listening/reading, it might be one of several different free gifts!) And, if you're looking to skyrocket your music studio with an online course be sure to go to https://onlinemusiccourseaccelerator.com OK, so now into email marketing! We're specifically calling out emails that you send through ConvertKit (or one of the other email marketing platforms) in this episode. If you don't have one yet, click here to sign up for your ConvertKit account. You'll be happy you did! Every email relationship begins in one of three ways. When someone downloads your freebie When someone buys a product or service from you. Manually in the back end of the system. (Which usually comes about from an offline conversation or from social media.) Make sure that you have consent before using your email marketing system to send emails otherwise you run the risk of being marked as spam and not being able to use email marketing. People sign up for your email list for a variety of reasons, their level of being ready to buy varies greatly. And really the goal of sending emails is for them to keep you top of mind, we want to do this in three ways. Showing up in their inbox consistently Having great subject lines (which entice them to click) Providing value We don't want the message inside of those emails to fall flat and this is where we are in the thick of today's episode. Here are 5 templates for broadcast messages The flushed out email Start with an opener — the subject line and teaser. Then guide the conversation — use a compelling statement Then reassure your reader that they can do what's next — provide evidence they can't refute Teach something — use bullets or numbering to lay it out in an easy to follow manner Reassure your reader that they will be able to follow your steps — summarize and validate their concerns Provide a call to action — tell them what to do next! Quick Tip You're going to call out a quick tip or you know, a sparklet that inspired or motivated you or a student. It's going to be a paragraph or maybe two paragraphs long. The CTA is likely going to be reply to this email. Social Invitation This email is an invitation to do something on social media. It may be to check out your recent reel or to join your Facebook group. For this one to be really effective, we want to have a compelling reason why this is going to benefit them. Ask yourself: Why is this going to benefit your reader? Why are they going to take the time to click the link Story telling Here we get to go behind the scenes of your business or a theory or a methodology or maybe you'll take a side in a polarizing issue that is relevant and timely/trending. (Make sure it is relevant, not just trendy, okay?) Promotional Here's where we present an offer for a product or a service or new openings! The key with your promotional emails is that they have to feel authentic. They have to mesh with the vibe of all of your other emails. Your promotional emails are number five because we have to set a precedence inside our emails before we start using emails for promotion. Sending lots of emails is only good if people open them, engage with them and look forward to them. It doesn't help to send emails all the time and for people to mark them as spam or for people to continually unsubscribe. That doesn't move your business forward. The best way to get started sending emails regularly is to put it on your calendar. Then schedule time for the creation that is set outside of the timeframe to send. With regular and consistent emails people will start anticipating your emails. Everything that I talked about in this episode is included and I go much deeper inside of Elevate!

Did you know we are in week 25 of 2022 (as of the time of this recording.) I know that because every single one of the emails that I send out to my email list is coded with the week number and email number for my internal references! I love looking at the stats between the first email of the week and subsequent emails, which had more opens? Which had more click-throughs? Another thing I love is connecting with you – here's my instagram https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ and a call link https://callwithjaime.com. Let's connect! Are you ready to ELEVATE your online marketing? Well good, because you're in the right place. Brocha and I just launched ELEVATE! Online Music Teacher Marketing, check out all the details here → https://onlinemusiccourseaccelerator.com/elevate/ (And if you're reading this way in the future, that link will still be active!) The topic at hand is how social media marketing and email marketing intersect and feed and grow from one to the other and back and forth. Social media marketing Social media marketing is a tool that we can use to reach more ideal students online. It is as simple as that and most of the time, I'm talking specifically about Instagram and Facebook. What you do on social media is to engage people (specifically people who don't yet know who you are.) You want to educate and entertain and motivate and have people thinking. That's what you want to do with social media marketing. We want to create an opportunity to open the door for further conversation and this is done through consistent action, not done just by posting and running. That is probably the biggest taboo thing with social media, we want to be social and interact. Posting is super important but interacting with potential students is absolutely crucial. This is where searching and exploring come into play… they will help you find potential students and interact with them on their posts! Soon, you're going to start to have conversations! They may exist in the comments or they will be in the DMs. Next, we want to invite people off the platform. This comes in the form of inviting them to join our email list, get on a phone call or a zoom call with you. Consider social media as the first entry point into people's world of knowing who you are and what you're all about. And then from there, it's all about extending the relationship, growing the relationship, nurturing the relationship. Someone might not want to go from a single comment that you make on their post straight into lessons or even into a phone call with you. They may want to take several steps, they may want to join your email list, get your emails for 2,3,4 weeks or months or years and then hire you and then buy your course and then join your membership site. It isn't always a 1, 2, 3 thing. Oftentimes we have to take them through more steps than we probably think is necessary. But this is where the other side of online marketing is crucial. And that is your email marketing. Email Marketing Email marketing is a way to connect with people who express interest in what you're saying or doing. And we do this by getting them to open emails from you and learn from you for free from inside their inbox. Now, the stats on the number of people who open their emails and take action versus the number of people who take action on social media is incomparable! It is through the roof. People are much more likely to click on a link from an email than they are to click on a link in your bio on Instagram or even a link in a Facebook post. We want to really invite the conversation, nurture the conversation, engage with people through email because this is the way that they are going to begin to take action. This is the way that they are going to raise their hand and say: “You know what I am interested! You know what, I think that you might be the right teacher for me!” Basically, we're using email marketing with social media to first bring people into our sphere and then nurture them into becoming a paying student or client or customer. It is a 1-2 punch. It's also true that from your email list you can direct people back over to social media such as by inviting them to join your Facebook group! This is a perfect 1-2-3 approach to building lifelong super fans. Social media marketing and email marketing are brother and sister! They are attached to the hip. They work best when you use them together. That's really what I wanted to share in today's episode. Now, if you have started an email list and you don't have a strategy for it, what good is it? what is it doing for you? And, if you have started using social media and trying to market from it, but you don't have a strategy then what good is it? Take a step back and think about what you want to accomplish through online marketing and then look at the tools, social media and email marketing to figure out how they can work to help you and to support you. Elevate is going to take you through all of this. Take an honest look and say, can I do better? Can I do this more efficiently? Can I have a strategy that I can measure results against? Here's the key takeaway – all this is well and good, but you only know how well and good it is when you measure your results!

Do you love listening to this, business podcasts and other music-related podcasts? Are you thinking about what your studio could look like if you had your own podcast? Have you been thinking about ways to truly expand while also becoming an industry leader? Well then, this conversation is absolutely for you. You're joining Heidi Kay Begay from Flute 360, Ben Kapilow from All Keyed Up and me as we discuss starting a podcast, developing your podcast goals and so much more. Ben started his podcast near the beginning of the pandemic as a way to better himself as a piano teacher. Heidi created her podcast as part of her doctorate and recently started her second podcast with a cohost. I have been running this podcast since 2018 and like to say "I haven't missed a Wednesday!" This podcast episode came together directly out of the Expand Online Summit which I hosted last month. Heidi, Ben and I had a different conversation on there and we all thought it was important to bring our collective voices to one another's podcasts. This podcast episode in its entirety can be found on all three podcast feeds... so be sure to go and check them both out as well. The biggest takeaway I hope you get from this conversation is that if you want to create a podcast, now is a great time to get started. It doesn't have to be scary or feel overwhelming... you've got this and I am happy to support you however best I can. Reach out and book a call: https://callwithjaime.com or connect with me on Instagram and Facebook!

As we approach the back half of the year, it's so vital to schedule our income generating activities along with all other facets of our business (particularly the growth aspects) so that we reach our goals without stress and sacrifice by the end of the year. Connect with me: https://callwithjaime.com/ https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ https://m.me/jaimeslutzky/ Let's get to it! I like to work backwards and from goals rather than moving forward from a planning perspective. Oftentimes there are a lot of dates that just don't work in the back half of the year ~ such as holidays, vacations, birthdays and days you just don't want to work. Those are immediately blocked off the calendar, go do it now. Then it's time to map out our initiatives (like a course!) and our established income sources (hello lessons). Get specific on your calendar – know your course launch date and mark it. Know the hours that you're going to work with students - mark those days and times on your calendar, even if you don't yet know which student is going to fit into which slot. Once you know your new initiatives, backtrack into those launch dates. Courses will take anywhere from 3 days to 16 - 18 weeks…. This is depending on your level of experience with creating a course and your topic and everything else that goes into it. Think about where you are right now and figure out how long you believe it's going to take you to create that course and then put time on your schedule every week to work on that course. And then insert some buffer time in! We always think we're going to get things done faster or they're going to be easier or that distractions aren't going to happen. So if you're thinking okay for 12 weeks, I'm going to spend four hours a week on this course, maybe you should factor in five hours a week. Or maybe it would be more in line with your style to increase your hours during certain specific weeks to make sure that you hit that goal. When we know when something has to be done, we can back into this. I know that you can do this because you have most likely taken your students to examinations or to recitals or to competitions or to auditions and you have learned how to back them into that goal. By creating a schedule that says I'm free and I'm busy, it allows us the capacity to see what else we can add and to see what systems and processes we need to fix. It also allows us to see kind of where our income generation is. When we do this, we're able to see what else we can add. If you add in all of your students' spots and you realize that you don't have that 4-5 hours every single week to work on your course in order to hit that timeline then what? Are you moving the timeline? Are you adding more hours of work time? How are you going to make that course a reality? It's a serious question. There is so much to do when you are running an online studio and truthfully, there are so many opportunities! Regretfully, I see amazing music teachers, bouncing from this to that to something else. It is not feasible to try and pack your schedule with income generating activities alone. We also want to include on our schedule initiatives to streamlining our systems and processes. And admin time and marketing time and collaboration time and creative time and oh, you know that first thing that we started with time off! (We want to make sure that that doesn't get eroded.) Start with the “regular schedule” of September - December, then figure out how you're going to tackle summer. Think about when you want income generating activities, marketing activities, systems and processes during the summer… how do you want to get it all in so that you have your goals clearly outlined and available to attain? It is way too easy to sit down at the computer or pick up the phone and just kind of keep on working, creating boundaries, finding boundaries, enforcing boundaries. That's what your schedule also allows you to do. To recap… your schedule is going to be filled in this order: Non-negotiables Existing obligations (student/income generating activities) Business operations & marketing White space New initiatives The other thing about the back half of the year is because summertime is here, It allows us to make sure that we are on track to hit our income goals. If you determine from your existing obligations that you're $1000 short for each of September through December in order to reach your income goal, the new initiatives and unscheduled time will be spent to build a new revenue stream to bridge (and exceed!) that gap. You have so much flexibility and so much opportunity to experiment in the summer. When the days are longer, people might sign up for something that's earlier in the day, later in the day or at a different time of day than they normally would be able to. Getting creative is the key to success! I want to make sure that you're as successful as you desire – all this by saying yes to scheduling! It allows for everything NEW to take shape. I would love nothing more than to help you bring that product to market. I work with my clients on courses, membership sites, workshops, streamlining their tech, envisioning what's next and so much more… so book a call with me https://callwithjaime.com and we will determine the right way to create the online successes you crave!

226: Delivering your online music programming the right way No matter how you teach music online, there are some steadfast rules to follow to allow your students to achieve their goals and love the online learning experience you provide. These include: Providing an unforgettable experience Effective communication Being available Providing an unforgettable experience I believe this is the most important! Making sure that your student is excited about the WHOLE experience! This includes: What they're going to learn The environment in which they're learning And how they feel empowered to continue coming to the device - despite the distractions at home (you know, the pets, the people around them, the neighbors, the chores, etc!) It's your job to make sure that they feel validated when they come to the screen to learn from you. What you're teaching them is going to help better themselves as a musician - so creating an unforgettable experience through live lessons and interactions (as well as anything that's pre- recorded) is job #1. Effective communication This gets glossed over more than it should... I'm talking about effective communication. All of your communication, every link, reminder, email, text message - needs to come across at the right time and with authority! If you teach lessons, be sure to have adequate reminders with a link - be sure to include your vital information and not leave your messages so vague (for example: Reminder: You have a lesson Thursday at 4:00 pm) This same message applies to recital and billing information. Always be sure to send complete and concise information for your students and their families. Make sure that they feel like they have the easy job of “just pressing play” - make it easy for them to come back! Being available Lastly, making sure to set the right level of availability! In person, it's really easy to set your availability. Students can access you during their lessons, or class, or via email. With online, theoretically, they can have much more access to you and that may be great - but at the same time makes it feel like you're always working! Which is why it is important to set the appropriate level of availability and expectation for your students. If you are running a course where there is an interactive option, assignments and feedback - I suggest that you make it clear that assignments are due by X time by X date and that you review all assignments and send feedback at X date and X time. This not only sets your students up to not be “knocking” on your virtual door at all times - but also allows them to plan for their own success and creates clear separation and boundaries! Now, as your studios / courses/ workshops etc continue to grow, a lot of teachers like to create forums - or a community where people can post their videos / audio to ask questions and connect with other students who are going through the same course to get feedback. When you set up a community aspect, be sure to make it clear that you are not responsible for answering back every single question or comment and be sure to clearly define what level of involvement you have within that community or forum. The last thing you want is for people to not get responses from you and start questioning your authority - help them understand your role within that community or forum. Additionally, you want to figure out and effectively communicate how you want students to communicate with you when it comes to billing matters, scheduling matters, personal inquiries, feedback on things other than course material - how do you want students to communicate with you then? Tip: The fewer ways your students can communicate with you, the better! But when you're picking ways of communicating be sure to pick ones that make sense for your students' audience. How are they using online tools best? Are they texting, using Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat (hey, you never know!) - Relatively, how will the parents communicate with you vs. the kids? So, as a quick recap: Make it an unforgettable experience EVERY time your student shows up! Be an EFFECTIVE communicator! CLEARLY communicate YOUR availability and the level of expectation they should have. Did you enjoy this episode? I would love your feedback. Do you want more episodes like this? Do you want me to go deeper? Let's connect! Connect with me: https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ https://m.me/jaimeslutzky/ https://callwithjaime.com

In this episode, I highlight some of the most overlooked secrets that when utilized will help with successfully teaching music online. Secret #1: Audio is more important than video for the most part Secret #2: Teaching can be done in real time and asynchronously with both one on one students and groups Secret #3: Lesson plans are vital to getting the most out of teaching time Secret #4: You can use other people's content in your teaching as long as you do it right Secret #5: You don't need to amass a huge following on social media or YouTube to be successful at building an online music education business. If you are thinking about expanding with courses, membership sites, group programs, workshops, so on and have questions about the tech and the strategy, please book a call with me by going to https://callwithjaime.com. When it comes time to create a profitable, successful online music education business, it's a matter of building the right combination of offers. One-on-one lessons alone are not going to do it. One-on-one lessons plus A, B or C? Now we're starting to talk! One-on-one lessons don't even need to have to ultimately be part of your online offering. You could do everything else online and just not even touch one-on-one lessons. There are no rules, there are no boundaries, there is no permission required to expand online. When you book your call at https://callwithjaime.com we'll start manifesting and realizing how you're going to build and be successful with your online music education business. Don't be a stranger, connect with me on Instagram and Facebook!

This episode is far different than the regular episodes you'll find on the feed, but I know it's going to provide you with insight and value that will benefit your online music education business! Sam Reti from Muzie.live invited me onto his platforms (FB group and YouTube channel) to debrief the Expand Online Summit, discuss what If you didn't catch the Expand Online Summit, here's a coupon to grab the All-Access Pass for $100 off. This coupon (PODCAST224) expires on May 31, 2022. I mention providing a coupon to the members of the Muzie community and want to extend it to you as well. Click here to redeem. Sam started the conversation off by asking me to share a bit of my story… So, in case you're new to the podcast, I am including it here in the shownotes! I am a technology strategist. I am not a music teacher. I am in awe of the music education space because the thing that differentiates music education from a lot of other spaces is the opportunity and the exploration and the creativity that you bring to your students. For me being able to put my tech stamp on that and to be able to make it so that you can do more of what you are amazing at! For me, music education is kind of like the vertical that I chose to say “this is where I know tech can make a difference.” We take the conversation into Muzie and into the music teaching landscape. There is a divide right now between the MUST BE IN PERSON and the I CAN DO AMAZING THINGS ONLINE. Sam and I are both in the online camp (imagine that!) One big stumbling block for a lot of music teachers is the business side, which is something I make sure to address each year during the Expand Online Summit and we get into during the conversation as well. Business-savvy-ness is not taught in music school, even to the students who want to become teachers and studio owners. The focus always seems to be on the music… someway somehow this will get changed, and hopefully my products and services will become part of that solution! My big thing this year with the summit was scaling beyond sessions! The question is really what else can we do? We don't have to just teach one on one lessons anymore because online gives us a new way of teaching. It's a matter of shifting perspective… can I be a successful teacher if I am not doing X, Y or Z? X: teaching in real time Y: teaching in person Z: teaching private (one-on-one) If we're not real time, what does that mean? If we're not in person, what does that mean? If we're not one on one, what does that mean? Because I think I'm not a music teacher, I come from the perspective that we can eliminate all three of those and still be a very successful music teacher. This works when we make sure that we put the student and their journey and their musicality at the forefront of our courses and content and delivery. It doesn't matter what you're teaching. If you don't keep your student front of mind as you're creating it, then what's the point? Keeping your student front of mind as we're building out online courses, is one of my biggest pillars that I work on with my clients. Constantly I'm probing with questions like How is your student going to feel successful? How is your student going to walk away from this time that they spent in front of the computer learning something that is foreign to them and feel good? An online course is a way to get perpetual and passive income. It's all about adding another vertical to your teaching. It also helps ideal prospective students realize that you're the right teacher for them and absolutely elevates your private one-on-one lessons to a higher price point and exclusivity! We then go on to talk about being location and time independent… be sure to listen to that part because I had a bit of a hard time pulling all the nuggets out without making these shownotes way too long! In the online space, it's super important to help people to say yes early and often! Yes to your freebie Yes to your low priced offer Yes this is the right teacher for me Yes I want to take this course Yes Yes Yes! I tout email marketing so so much and that was the topic of my talk during the summit last week. It is so crucial and a significant step to treating yourself more like a business owner than just a teacher. There are pillars to developing your online business. Student facing, back-office, marketing/social media and mindset/psychology/motivation/inspiration. To be successful, these need to be in balance. Focus on one, get it where it works for you and then move onto the next. We then went down the rabbit hole of tech tools… which is sometimes fun and sometimes overwhelming. While I didn't say this, I want to emphasize that you don't need to evaluate every piece of software, just evaluate a few and make a decision. A decision is better than indecision and it doesn't have to be permanent. Honestly, one of the motivations I have for hosting the summit is to tap into and excite the audiences of my speakers. It's amazing to me how many disparate music education communities there are online. And I think because I'm not a music teacher, I can kind of come in and be friends with everybody. At least that's my goal is to be friends with everybody and be able to just help the whole industry elevate. There is always going to be something new to learn or way to grow as a teacher. Sam said “we have sort of signed an agreement to always be learning … as soon as you stop learning, you stop teaching because you're not teaching the newest thing anymore.” Fear is a topic we discussed. Fear around trying something new. Fear about falling behind. Fear about perception by others. Do what is best for you. Today and always! Sam and I are both passionate about software (I think I said that already) so we go back to it again and again in this conversation. And Sam was able to strategically shift my love for all things code into something that is totally applicable to teaching… love that! And we got back to the Expand Online Summit again… click here to buy the All-Access Pass if you missed it. Sam noted that the summit has evolved year over year. So I shared a bit about the way the world was and that I catered the content to what the attendees needed at that time. And right now, you need to see what options are available to scale beyond sessions! The enrollment in the summit in 2021 was higher than the enrollment this year. BUT the engagement and number of hours of content viewed this year greatly surpassed the amount from last year – because the audience was right for the material and the time and place were setup for growth and opportunity! I'm really excited to see where we take things next year. It's gonna be awesome! Be sure to check out Muzie.live, look into the Online Music Course Accelerator and Book a Call with me!

There's a first time for everything! I recorded this episode live during the Expand Online Summit yesterday. If you're not currently attending the summit, click here to join us now! This sessions also coincides with the upcoming webinar I'm doing with Brocha Kahan where you will Learn the 3 Steps To Creating and Selling an Online Music Course, click here to sign up for the free webinar. Let's get one thing clear, there are not currently enough high quality online music courses. There is plenty of opportunity for you to lay claim to your specific domain. I do however believe that beginner or basic courses are not going to bring about the income and impact goals you're probably seeking from your online course… so let's get a bit more specific, shall we? Just because you've always learned it one way or you've always taught it one way, it doesn't mean that there is a course out there that does the exact same thing. Online courses are really different from interactive lessons, because online courses are designed to be self-motivating and self-paced. Essentially they operate in a vacuum where there is no external factor helping students move along. We have to build some things into our courses that we may not have thought about when it comes to lessons. I always say that an online course is far less about your content and it's more about the experience that you create. And I think that's the biggest difference between the courses that were out there before and courses that are out there and being created now and in the near future, is that they are experiential! It's not just sitting down to watch something and hope we learn what is being taught. I want to have the opportunity for students to really feel connected to you as their music teacher. We don't want them to say “oh that was nice, next!” we want them to say “that was amazing! What else do you have?” Another thing that I think is different now than it was before, because there was less opportunity to find courses that were teaching the thing that you wanted to learn, you just took whatever course it was. Now, as better, more proficient music teachers learn the fine art of online courses, we are now creating the course as another connection point between you and your online students. Online courses in 2022 no longer need to be marketed to everybody, the niche can be super narrow. When it comes to thinking about creating an online course, think about not necessarily what a gap in the marketplace is, because there's lots of places and that's often the concept that people give. But I like to help you find a place where you find extreme joy or a place that you find that your students always need assistance or support with. These are often things that you find repetitive! Things that you tend to do with a lot of your students. Or something that you are so extremely passionate about and you haven't had time to work on consistently. Thinking about your students is a great starting point for your online course. What would make their music journey richer, stronger, more powerful? What would tie them into that more? Those are the kinds of things that we want to be adding into the online music education space and there is room for you to do it. A reason I don't recommend creating beginner courses is because those are the courses that are filling up Outschool and Udemy. Those teachers are “a dime a dozen” and you're far better than that. And also people who are just starting out don't know the difference between a great teacher and a good teacher and an average teacher and a poor teacher. You're a great teacher, you are looking to really create an evolution of your business, a new foundation of your business online. If we create a course that is even one step or two steps beyond beginner or even intermediate advanced ~ that next level or the level after that you are opening up an opportunity for people to work with you in a way that improves their musicality. It improves everything that they are striving for. When we create our courses, we are creating them with the students' results in mind. Nobody that I know is creating a course for the masses (quantity of students or money!) Every single music teacher that I work with and that I am motivated by and that I have the opportunity to connect with, they are creating their courses to create an impact. Yes income is important, but we are really motivated on the student's success and the student journey!. The most valuable aspect of online courses is that we are in a position where we can create a course that allows your student to connect with you… even though it's asynchronous learning. They get to learn on their own time, but they feel connected to you and you care about their journey. There are a lot of ways for us to make sure and to support our students moving forward into and through the course. According to Thinkific, on average, only 5 - 15% of students complete an online course. Check out this article. You can separate yourself from the market by having a course that is singularly focused. Check out next week's webinar where I discuss the bounded rule. Essentially it's all about thinking more about the student and what they're trying to accomplish. When you move into creating courses, you have to extrapolate what is most valuable from your 1-1 lessons and what will make the biggest impact. What will help that student progress without you right there in the room with them (or live on the screen.) It is important for your online course students to be able to assess that they are successful, that they are going to be where they want to be every single step of the way. We want them to feel confident in the course and feel excited to come back and come back and come back. I would say that the best courses are ones that are created entirely around the student. Where are they at? Where are they trying to go? How can we get them one step closer through every video, every handout, every audio, every quiz, every piece of material that we provide inside the course. How does that move them forward? And how does that allow them to feel confident that they are ready to move to the next level? S o that is our podcast episode for today. I don't see any comments, but that's okay. I have had so much fun recording this episode with a live audience. So definitely if you enjoyed this, I am recording it and I am throwing it up on the feed with no editing, that feels so good. If you want me to do these again, please just reach out to me, let me know, Let me know that you enjoyed this. If you are listening to this in the feed and not signed up for the Expand Online Summit? What are you waiting for? Go to expandonlinesummit.com and you can jump on right in! Quick links: https://callwithjaime.com https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ https://m.me/jaimeslutzky/ https://onlinemusicccourseaccelerator.com

Let's go behind the scenes of the Expand Online Summit! This is the third year that I am running the summit and be sure to go to expandonlinesummit.com and get yourself a free ticket which gives you access to the sessions for 48 hours. There is also the option to purchase extended access through April 30, 2023 right after you register. My first task was to figure out how this summit is going to be different from last year's summit and from the summit before that. It came down to the state of the world. When I did the first summit, it was 2020 and I had started sending out invites before the pandemic. But I recorded the very first session when my kids were already home because school had closed down. We were in a state of uncertainty and closures and unknowns. The sentiment of that summit was “you can do something online and be successful and you can do something to sustain yourself through the uncertainty that is coming.” Last year, I really wanted to focus on doing better and putting down roots online so we weren't feeling like a fly-by-night operation anymore. We were really saying yes to online For this year, I realized that the people who wanted to come to the summit this year have said yes to expanding online. It's not a matter of if they're expanding, but how they're expanding. And so I put the theme together of scaling beyond sessions. What can we do beyond flipping on the Webcam and getting out in front of the computer screen and teaching a lesson through videoconferencing. We gotta do better than that! It's 2022, the Internet has gotten faster, the tools have become more robust and so on and so on. S Next for this year was sponsorship opportunities. My summit is extremely focused; it is geared 100% towards music educators and I know that there are some amazing companies out there that cater to music education and helping music educators to do more, bigger, better, faster. I created some really great sponsorship packages which yielded four incredible sponsors. Muzie.Live (Sam Reti) The SpeakEasy Cooperative (Michelle Markwart Deveaux) Duet Partner (Neylan McBaine) The Cascade Method (Tara Boykin) Their sessions are not to be missed and the cool thing is that two of these sponsors signed up as sponsors after we had recorded their sessions. They said, you know what, I'm fully invested in this summit. I want to be a part of it, I want to promote it, I want to sponsor it and kind of just have a ringing endorsement. One of the reasons I felt it was important to bring sponsors this year was to add a little bit more authority to the event. I want the Expand Online Summit to continue going on for years and years to come. I want to make it into the premier event for online music educators. That is my goal, that is where I want to take it and I feel like we are getting there now that we're in year three and we have solid sponsors and we've got great registration and all of that stuff, Inviting Speakers My first step this year was to look at the amazing folks who spoke on the summit previously. I then reached out to some of them and invited them back. Once I had my “yeses” I looked at the topics we were going to be able to cover and identified holes that I wanted to fill within the theme of scaling beyond sessions. Then I reached out through Instagram and email with the ask. The best part is that some of the people that said yes to attend have never done summits before. They have great products, great services for music educators, but they just haven't played in this arena and I feel so privileged and honored that they said yes to participating in something that is so new and so different from anything that they've done before. Recording and Producing the Summit Content I recorded most of the sessions on Zencastr. A couple were recorded on zoom. Then I use Camtasia to edit and Vimeo to host. This is what takes the longest – from here I also pull together session highlights which I use to create the playbook (more on that later!) I keep track of everything in a Google Spreadsheet although I actually prefer using Airtable, I just didn't get organized with it this year. Summit Buildout and Testing The speakers provided free gifts for the attendees (with email signup) and/or discounts/offers/coupons for the All-Access Pass holders. It is my responsibility to make sure that the links they provide work and do what they are supposed to. This takes time but I need to make sure that whatever link someone provides me works and it delivers the content that they said, it's going to deliver and that that experience is on par with everything that I am putting together in the summit. It doesn't make me look good or make the attendees feel good or the speakers if I put a wrong link in or if things don't work smoothly. It is on me! One of the discounts inside the All-Access Pass is 10% (that's $600) off the Online Music Course Accelerator program that I run with Brocha Kahan. The All-Access Pass is as low as $67 and will go up to $297, so if that's the only offer you take, you're still ahead $303 :) The total value of the All-Access Pass is over $3600! Now onto the tech stack… WordPress website Deadline Funnels ThriveCart Learndash Gravity Forms ActiveCampaign Tidio Beaver Builder / Beaver Themer That's a lot but I'll tell you that it was SO MUCH EASIER this year, because I already had so much in place and ready to use from last year… Especially the emails that I needed to write for my automations and swipe copy for the speakers to promote the summit. Most of it just went so smooth. I didn't have to do that much and I am so thankful. I mean obviously there's still a ton of work but I didn't have to write a ton of copy from scratch. I feel strongly that that is the reason why this year's summit is going to be even more successful because I didn't have to focus on those little details. I just had to go and plug and play and do the work, which is actually probably one of the reasons why I was so excited to record this episode for you! Gamification and Engagement The final elements of the summit that I feel is crucial to share about are the BINGO board and the Playbook. The BINGO card makes it fun to show up and attend/participate in the summit. There are pre-recorded and live elements and the BINGO board is helping people get into it. And the Playbook is all about making the most of the content. I say this in several of the sessions – the summit is not for entertainment purposes alone, it's a motivation, inspiration, education tool. The Playbook helps to take the ideas from the sessions and make them real and tangible. I am working to make the Expand Online Summit the premier event for music educators who are expanding online, creating online products and services. This summit is part of the launch strategy for the 2nd round of the online music course accelerator which is starting later this month. If you are interested in creating an online course and you want strategy support, camaraderie and hands on assistance making that happen, the online music course accelerator is absolutely for you. There's so much opportunity for music teachers to double down on what you're creating online. I wish you all the best, look forward to seeing you at the summit and connecting with you to see if OMCA is right for you and with that. Hey, here's my Instagram – send me a DM, okay?

This episode is sponsored by Muzie.live About our guest Nate Lee is an International Bluegrass Music Association award-winning instrumentalist and renowned teacher of private lessons and music camps. A veteran performer, Nate has played with the best in bluegrass, including Alan Munde, Becky Buller, The Kentucky Colonels, David Grier, Irene Kelley, Town Mountain, and the Jim Hurst Trio. ​Although Nate is in demand on stage and in the studio, his first love and finest skill is teaching. Teaching professionally since 2003, Nate has gained a loyal following of students who enjoy his comprehensive teaching methods and relaxed, encouraging demeanor. With an affinity for turning beginners into jammers, and jammers into professionals, Nate has developed a curriculum that teaches you to play well with others, and become the player you've always wanted to be! In 2014, Nate took his teaching business online and has since become a leader in the online music teaching industry, developing new methods for teaching, marketing, and running a business. In 2021, Nate put his 19 years of music teaching experience into Lesson Business Blueprint, a course that helps musicians break into the online teaching world. www.TheNateLee.com www.PlayNately.com (pronounced “Nate - Lee” with emphasis on the first sylable. Here's a video with the pronunciation https://youtu.be/RnFq8UoXzdo) www.LessonBusiness.com Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/lessonbusinessblueprint/ https://www.instagram.com/playnately/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/lessonbusiness/ https://www.facebook.com/playnately/ Conversation Highlights Nate started teaching online in 2014 at the bequest of a student How to set your online space up for student progress and a positive student-teacher relationship How to make online lessons better than in person You don't need to teach the same way you learned, just as your music has evolved, so to can music education Removing geography as a barrier to teaching the students who are a great fit for your personality and style Structuring a teaching schedule that works for your students and yourself How online teaching allows for other expansion opportunities Building a waitlist Cooperation and collaboration with other teachers Connect with me Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ Book a call: https://callwithjaime.com Sign up for the Expand Online Summit: https://expandonlinesummit.com

Here's a short, actionable and hopefully thought provoking episode for you today! I chose to discuss inspiration and motivation because those are largely the purpose and intention for the Expand Online Summit (which is coming up in just a few weeks!) It's all about inspiring you to take action on your dreams and your ambitions and giving you the motivation to get started even if you don't have everything figured out. If you're not on my email list, click here to sign up now so you can register for the summit as soon as registration comes out. Internal Motivation This is probably one of the hardest things for us to do… motivate ourselves internally without an external force. Some ways to be internally motivated are to provide yourself with your own rewards. Such as… if I complete this then I get to do this if I do this, then I am going to buy myself that Internal motivation is when you provide the shiny object for yourself. We have to want it, whatever that thing is, it really just has to be important enough. It has to be something that you are striving for. I tend to think of it as something experiential, it's more the spa, the vacation, those kinds of things that you are rewarding yourself with! I also believe that the clock is a good tool to use to motivate yourself. if I get this done by two o'clock, then I can go for a walk if I get this done before the kids are home from school, then I can play a game with them It is your internal motivation that says if I do this in this amount of time, then perfect. I am off to the races and I'm able to do my reward. External Motivation External motivation is other people or other things motivating you. These can be your family and friends, these could be influencers, these could be coaches, this could be anything or anyone! They just need to be somebody else who dangles that carrot in front of you and you have to accomplish something in order to be able to actually get that carrot. While I don't love fear of missing out as a motivator, FOMO can act as a motivator. If you see everybody else launching their courses and you're sitting there saying “I don't feel like it” ~ allow their enthusiasm to motivate you to do things that you don't necessarily feel comfortable with or that you don't feel ready for or that you're insecure about. Use other people's energy. That's really what external motivation is all about ~ using other people's energy to motivate yourself to do something that you know you need to do anyway. Inspiration Where can we get inspiration? Nature Nurturing Reading Watching YouTube / TV / Streaming Getting inspired can take you far… but be sure that you don't look for inspiration from competitors or people who are doing the same type of work that you are! Get inspired by things that are outside of business. It's a lot easier to work in our business on the things that we're passionate about when we are inspired, which is why I think it's important not to spend too much time looking at what other people in our field are doing. It doesn't benefit you to see that someone else is launching a group program when that's what you want to do; put your blinders on to them. Now, if you see a personal trainer that you follow or admire who is launching a group program, that's a great inspiration because you're like, oh well, they're just like me, they were doing private lessons and now they're doing something group and there's no conflict of interest, there's no oh they they're going to get all of my clients or things like that because they're in a different industry, they're in a different vertical, It makes it a lot easier. Avoid trying to get inspired by people who you could see as competitors, even if they really aren't. Now let's wrap up with ths: It is possible to have the success that you are looking for! That's what we look for with inspiration… looking at what others are doing to help fuel us and get us internally motivated. From there we can seek outside motivation (and accountability) to see this idea through. Nothing that we do and create online lives in a vacuum. Everything is continuously building upon other things, whether they're your content, your products, your services, or other people's products, content and services, it's all an ecosystem. So when you add something new to this online space, you are elevating this online space and you are creating your own impact. The only way that you're going to add something to that space is to be inspired and motivated and follow through. Follow through is the secret sauce to everything. It is the reason why there are people who have launched hundreds of courses and there are people who haven't even launched their first, even if they started on the exact same day! Follow Through. Follow Through. Follow Through. Make it a point to use that inspiration and that motivation to get something out into the world. Connect with me! https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ and book a free call https://callwithjaime.com

Consider this podcast a ringing endorsement for Thinkific. It's 2022 and the platform has grown in functionality and versatility since the last time we discussed Thinkific at length here. Thinkific is the only tool that I recommend for online course delivery. Thinkific is essentially a website that you can use to deliver an online course. There's so much more to it though and now the team over there has made it easier than ever to deliver your online course. This episode is not discussing your course content but rather the mechanism for actually delivering that course content to your students. The course builder. The course builder allows you to build your courses with a variety of different types of lessons: Video lessons Audio lessons Downloads Text Images Quizzes Surveys Multimedia lessons (where you're embedding something from another website.) For the most part video lessons, downloads, text-based lessons and maybe an audio lesson or two are going to help you build out your course content. Inside the course builder, you have drag-n-drop functionality which makes it easy to move things around and reorganize your content once it's up there. You can always add more lessons even if your course is already published. And it reflects for your students in real time as you add or change things. Also inside the course builder, we are able to set pricing. Pricing options include free, flat rate, subscription and split pay. And there is also the ability of doing more than one pricing option, such as pay in full or split pay. And course content can be set to drip on a certain schedule, based on calendar date or days since enrollment. Site Builder / Page Builder This area of Thinkific was called site builder for a while and now it's called page builder and I tend to use them interchangeably. This is where you get to build the sales page for your course. We can build a really dynamic and beautiful sales pages which flow right into the purchase and enrollment all on the same platform. There are fewer widgets and whathaveyous this way. Just like in the course builder, site builder or page builder has drag-n-drop functionality and it has a lot of modules that will make it easy for you to build an attractive and highly converting sales page. This is super important as you scale your course offers… when the website/sales page is able to sell the course for you, then you have fewer steps to the sales process and ultimately have more students enrolling. Also, just like in the course builder, anything that you do in the site builder or page builder will reflect immediately when you hit publish right onto your site. Game Changers The real power of Thinkific and the reason why I decided to talk about it today on the podcast is two things: Thinkific Payments Thinkific App Store First Thinkific Payments The Thinkific Payments are built upon Stripe and allows for a streamlined checkout. The checkout process is simple and elegant which, as you know, is super important! We want to make the process of someone paying for our course as easy as possible. In addition to making the buying process easier, we can now add upsells after the purchase… like coaching or a getting started call or a bonus course… the sky is the limit. And we can also process refunds right inside of the admin portal rather than having to go over to stripe to process those refunds. Second Thinkific App Store This is a storefront where you can install add-on components to enhance your Thinkific school. There are integration type apps, like for ConvertKit, Hello Audio and Zapier. And there are functionality tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel. But the real gem of the Thinkific App Store is the 3rd party apps which enhance the student experience. I'm going to call out two of them – Peerboard and SuperPowerUps. Peerboard creates a community experience (think Facebook Group) right inside your Thinkific school. Beautifully integrated. SuperPowerUps take your student experience up ten notches (at least). With these, the student journey through your course has limitless potential! If you're thinking about creating a course soon, be sure to jump on the wait list for the Online Music Course Accelerator program that I run with Brocha. You can get on the waitlist here → https://onlinemusiccourseaccelerator.com And let's connect on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ or via zoom → https://callwithjaime.com

What does it mean to scale beyond sessions? It means that you're doing something in your business that allows you to accomplish the goal of not only making money when you're working one on one privately with your students! I'm throwing the links that I mention in the podcast right here… Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ Book a Call: https://callwithjaime.com Online Music Course Accelerator: https://onlinemusiccourseaccelerator.com Join the Expand Online Email List: https://expandonlinenow.com Here are the three steps that you need in order to scale beyond sessions… Step 1 is to decide! Making the decision to scale beyond sessions is the way that you're going to open the door and figure out how you are going to scale beyond sessions. There is so much power in saying yes! Saying yes to this idea and giving yourself permission to explore what it would look like for yourself in your life and in your business. What is keeping you from scaling beyond sessions? What is holding you back from making the decision to move forward? Nobody is going to judge you…. They aren't going to say that you're not as good a music teacher as they thought because you don't offer private lessons all the time, or that you have diluted your business. In fact, it's really the opposite. When you add other ways for people to learn with and from you in an online space, you are actually creating more opportunity. You are taking your one on one sessions and elevating their status within your business because those are your top end product and all these other things that you're adding in can potentially be extremely profitable for you and extremely affordable and accessible to the audience who is going to receive them. You can't get there without deciding. If you're thinking “I can't do this” or “I can't commit to this because I don't know x or y or z” a quick reminder for you – it's all figure-out-able! There are a lot of people with the bits and pieces that you will be able to cobble together. You can do plenty of research on google or on youtube; you can hire a coach or consultant; you can take a course… There are a number of ways to go ahead and really truly scale, you just have to decide that you are going to invest in yourself. You can be successful when you are all in! If you don't say Yes 100% when you make the decision, then you're gonna give yourself out and you're going to take the shortcuts or you're going to stop. But when you decide and you're all in, you will be successful! Step two is to trust yourself. Trust that you are the right person to bring something new to market. You are the right person to teach what you do in a new online manner. There is no one right way to create an online product. You already excel at teaching. You already know what you're really good at and who you connect with and how you are able to help them accomplish whatever it is that they are working on. Now is the time for you to trust yourself. Trusting yourself is easier said than done. We can often sabotage ourselves. We can often diminish our value. We can often sidetrack ourselves. We can do all of those things to derail our progress. We made the decision to move beyond sessions. We trust ourselves that we can do it and that we have the tools that we have, the resources that we have, the capacity to do it. Be careful of self doubt, it can absolutely stop you in your tracks. Don't doubt yourself too much… push through and trust that you are going to bring the right product to market in the right way. Step 3 is to create deadlines. I believe that the best way to have a product come to market is to set a realistic timeline and to give yourself rewards for meeting those deadlines. Instead of merely saying “I want to create a course.” tell yourself instead “I want to create a course and pre launch it on X date, launch it fully on y date and have this many enrollments on Z date!” That becomes tangible. And then reward yourself when you reach each milestone. Deadlines are not just those three things… everything in the process can have a deadline or a metric to work towards. You can do this. You can scale beyond sessions. I believe in you. Let's make this happen. When I say it's all a matter of deciding and trusting yourself and setting deadlines. I didn't talk about any of the hard work, Right? But these are the three things that you can keep coming back to time and time again, so that you actually accomplished the goal of whatever it is that you are creating, whatever you see and that vision that you have for yourself of how to get away from only offering sessions and doing something new online. Decide, trust yourself and set yourself deadlines. Now, the truth is, these are all well and good but external accountability and external decision making is almost as important. It is a lot easier to move beyond sessions when you have somebody outside of your business who is helping you along in the process. This is where I can (and would be honored to) come in and support you… jump on a call with me https://callwithjaime.com

A lot of questions have been coming up recently around video and broadcasting and recording and teaching! While I don't have all the answers, and there truly is no one right answer, this episode should be used as a launching pad for determining your own video needs! Let's start with the first tool that comes to mind with online video… Zoom. Zoom is easy. People understand it nowadays, they know that it is there that they just click on a link and that they are able to access a live video conferencing environment. That's what Zoom is; Zoom allows for people to meet and do whatever it is that they want to do. Zoom is not the best at audio quality, but it is far better than not being able to connect and see each other. In addition to that, Zoom has a recording feature, which makes it really nice to be able to record live meetings and live interactions. In fact, you can also jump into your own zoom meeting and record it and use that video inside your courses. You can record your entire course on zoom and there's nothing wrong with it. It's a great place to start. Now. If you want to get more specific for the different purposes of video content. We can go into other channels. Live Online Music Teaching Platforms Back in November, I did a deep dive series on four of the platforms that are designed for video conferencing for music lessons. They are designed to have a high fidelity, which makes the audio quality that much better. They are designed to foster the classroom feel or the lesson feel and they're really, truly best in class products! These tools are Muzie, Musicology, Rock Out Loud Live, Blink Lessons and there's now Forte Lessons as well. Here's the link to the founders series. I would recommend checking these tools out and find the one that is right for you right now. If you teach on Zoom, fine; if you teach on one of these other five platforms, fine; no problem! Let's switch gears away from the live teaching to discuss broadcasting. Broadcasting Broadcasting is going live! Whether it be on instagram, Facebook or YouTube. It is doing something live, that is a one way push ~ a one way video interaction. (Technically you can bring someone else into your broadcast but that's not exactly the point.) With Instagram, you're gonna broadcast directly using the camera on your phone because Instagram is a mobile app. With Facebook and YouTube, you can use the native app, whether it's on your phone or otherwise, or you can use a third party tool such as a StreamYard or OBS. (You can also use Zoom for this, although it puts a large Zoom logo on the broadcast!) Browser-based broadcast tools StreamYard and reStream (among others) are web based browser tools that allow you to do broadcasting. They are designed to give you more control and provide you with a better experience for those broadcasts than the native apps. If your viewers leave comments, you can pop the comments up on the screen, you can put up your own lower thirds, you can put your own logo in and a few other bells and whistles that you can't do natively. I personally use StreamYard to broadcast into the Expand Online Community and I go live inside the community every Monday at 10 AM Pacific. OBS - Open Broadcast Software OBS was designed for a number of different uses and most of it started with gaming, I believe. OBS is free to download and open source, meaning it's built by its community! Within the app, you can do whatever you want from adding multiple video cameras, multiple audio inputs, screen input and more. These all go into what are called scenes. A scene has a certain layout on the screen and you can toggle between multiple scenes during your broadcast. OBS is a great too but it takes a little bit of time to set up and get comfortable with. I think that it is worth the time when you have time to start figuring it out. I would definitely set aside time and plan on not being productive during that time so that you can watch a lot of Youtube videos, you can learn how to use that software if you are interested in doing more broadcasting. Recording for Courses and Social Media When I think of recording, I think of videos that you upload to instagram, Youtube and Facebook as well as inside your courses or your membership sites or your group programs. Essentially they are “produced videos.” Recording the raw video content can be done with whatever camera, equipment and software you want. The production comes from editing. I personally use Camtasia and many of my clients use iMovie. When I am creating direct to camera videos, I'll record them right in Camtasia so that they are readily available for editing. I use Zencastr, which is a browser based recording tool, for recording interviews and panel conversations (like those that are in the Expand Online Summit!) Did you enjoy this episode? I would love your feedback. Do you want more episodes like this? Do you want me to go deeper? Let's connect! https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ https://m.me/jaimeslutzky/ https://callwithjaime.com

It's time to talk seriously about what it looks like to UPLEVEL and feel motivated to move beyond what you've always done and INTO what you want to be doing! Mindset Our mindset is the way we look at things. We look at our business through a certain lens that defines it's going to bring in this amount of money, it's going to take this amount of work, it's going to bring us this amount of joy, it's going to cost this much energy, it's going to do this or it's going to do this. And by putting all these things together, we create a vision for what our business does. Now, when we want to uplevel we have to push that vision… we have to say “Okay, instead of my business making $100 an hour, my business is going to make $150 an hour!” And then we have to explore how that feels and begin to own it. We want to be able to push all of these little triggers inside our mindset so that we can develop a new vision for our business; one that allows for growth. We push and we prod and we allow ourselves to feel uncomfortable. The work is helping ourselves push through that uncomfortable so that that it doesn't feel uncomfortable and instead becomes our operating manual. It's okay to feel the push and the pull because often times when you have that money block or that roadblock or stumbling block, we might be inclined to pull ourselves back and stay static. We stay where we've been instead of pushing and extending our mind around this new normal that we are trying to create. Most of the time when I'm working through mindset stuff with a client, it's a matter of not necessarily feeling comfortable as the authority. But you're here reading these shownotes because you have been teaching in whatever shape you have been teaching for however long you have been teaching and you know your stuff. It's sometimes very hard to take control and take command of our authority ~ being that person, being that teacher, being the person who is going to create this course, deliver this course and execute on the promises that are laid out on the sales page. I believe it is really important as we are upleveling is to own our authority, to own our craft, to own our expertise and push and push ourselves so that we can say YES to our growth! Language Language and words are funny. It's what we use every day all day; we use it in writing, we use it in teaching, we use it in oral correspondence, we use it all the time! I think that one of the nuances with upleveling our language is that we want to stay accessible but we also want to be able to command a greater level of authority. One of the simplest ways to uplevel our language is to change how we describe what we do… Instead of being a piano teacher or a violin teacher or a music teacher, change it to I run a piano studio, I run a violin studio, I run a music studio. Just by changing that language from being a teacher to running a studio or being a studio owner, we've been able to elevate the way that we speak about ourselves. Other ways that we can change the language include how we describe our lessons. Instead of them being half hour sessions or hourly sessions, we can start talking about monthly packages or monthly lesson packages. Again what we're doing here is elevating the language around what we do. Even though you're doing the exact same thing, you're sharing it in a way where someone says, oh wow! instead of just okay. Upleveling our language also involves what we have written down. Perhaps it's in the agreements that we have with our clients or with our students or with our families. These could be studio policies, payment policies, makeup policies, health policies, and so on. Go back through what you have written down and align the language with your new terminologies. Also in the process of upleveling our language is how we present ourselves online. Where do you describe yourself (website, social profiles etc.)? How might you be able to use those words that you're using to uplevel your personal way of thinking about your business and the way that you have communicated in your writing here too? If you're doing videos on Youtube or on instagram or on Tiktok or wherever ~ start using your new language (even if that feels a little bit uncomfortable right now) and embrace it and start using it where you're showing up online already. This is a place where you can flex your muscles because it's a low barrier, you're already here! Actions I just gave you an example with the video stuff. We also want to be embracing this upleveling inside our lessons, inside our offers, by adding new offers and creating higher level packages! This is where you begin to expand and flex so that you are not reliant on just one source of income. Maybe you add a group theory class that you run once a month… maybe you offer practice feedback or bonus community jam sessions… That's taking action. It puts your new mindset and new language into practice. You are stepping into greater things which will then allow you to continue to grow by doing small things. When you do small things and add new offers and take action on the ideas, you're further cementing your role, you're authoritative role, your studio owner role! Now this gives you room to further step into online because you've upleveled and it fits, you don't feel like you're stepping into someone else's shoes. You don't feel that imposter syndrome. You don't feel unworthy to ask for that six month commitment. You feel excited about the opportunities that you're creating for other people. That's really the key when we uplevel... We are creating greater opportunities for our students, for our community, for their future, their enjoyment and their appreciation of music. Have feedback for me on this (or any podcast episode!) https://CallwithJaime.com https://instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ https://m.me/jaimeslutzky/

215: Why learning from a course works well for teachers Do you like taking online courses? It's truly amazing to see and hear the feedback and motivation from music teachers who complete online courses. These courses help with new concepts within their lessons and offerings, navigating online business, becoming a better boss or studio owner and so much more. If you're looking to expand online, let's connect – Instagram, Facebook, Email or a Zoom call – they all work… and think about taking a few high quality online courses! Being someone else's student! Quite simply the biggest benefit to this is that you know what you want to learn and there are teachers who are creating amazing courses focused on exactly that exact topic. So instead of signing up for a larger program that is bloated and might contain a lot of content that you don't actually need, taking a course that is very specific to what it is that you want to learn is going to make the whole process faster and easier and better for you. Flipping the switch It's sometimes hard to go from being the teacher to being the student. A great place to start is to pay as much attention to the program that you have signed up for as you want your students to take when they take a program from you. And then set your intention: Why are you doing this? What is the benefit to you? What is the benefit to your business? What is the benefit to your students? When we're clear about why we are investing our time, money and energy into something, it is a lot easier to see the process through. Then allocate the appropriate amount of time to do the course. Block off the time on your calendar for when you're going to go through each of the components of the course. Most of the time courses are going to involve going through the content from the course and doing practical to apply the concepts. Being a great student in online courses is not just sitting and watching the instructor – so make sure that you set aside time for the practical application side of things. This will aid you to be really, really successful. I believe that as a teacher, you also love to be a student. And with online courses, we have the ability to take the most niche micro concept and learn it from the best teacher on the concept, no matter where they are located and what time you're ready to learn it. There is no need to fly somewhere to learn from them; it's not like you are taking a one-on-one program or paying by the hour. When are you most motivated to learn? That's when you can sit down and take your course! Think about how you learn… do you learn orally? Do you learn visually? Are you better at typing up your notes or writing things down? Do you have a specific room in your house that is more conducive for learning? Are you going to learn better in your teaching space or is there another space where you're more likely to be a better student? Set yourself up for success. Give yourself the space to learn and apply what you are learning because then you will have become the best student that you possibly can for this teacher and for yourself, which in turn is going to help you be a better teacher for your students. If you're thinking about creating an online course of your own, then you have added to your own toolbox. So that you can build a successful course for your own students. Being a student in someone else's course is a great way to test the waters, to test the platforms, to test the modality and all of that stuff so that you can then take all of it and do something inside your own business. Being a really good student helps you become a really great teacher. Online courses are a great way for you to continue your education without a lot of overhead and with a lot of ease and grace. I encourage you not to pack your schedule too thick. Give yourself some white space in order to really process what you're learning and give yourself the white space so that your students also get the best teacher possible. I hope that this was a little bit of motivation and a little bit of inspiration for you! Now, let me tell you a bit about the online course that I have coming out in the next couple weeks (this section will be updated when it's available for purchase!) The course will be covering starting your studio email list the right way, so that you attract the right leads and nurture them in a way that aligns with your goals and values. You will learn how to invite social media contacts to join your list, how to deliver a freebie, how to properly onboard a new subscriber, what nurturing is and what it isn't and receive templates to get started in real time (that means you're going to be TAKING ACTION while you go through the course!) This course is coming soon, send me an email at jaime@techofbusiness.com and let me know you're interested – I'll add you to early access list!

Let's nurture your prospective students… These are the people that you've connected with on social media. You've invited them to your email list, you've had conversations with them and they're not quite ready to sign up to learn with or from you. The goal of nurturing is to make sure that you have done the groundwork so that you arethe first teacher that comes to mind for them when they are ready! This goes way beyond sending studio updates via email, because let's be honest, nobody outside of your studio families really cares about that! What we are looking for is to share value and to help the recipient get something out of your emails. Nurturing is done both in automation and in broadcast messages. Automations The most common automation is an onboarding program welcome sequence. Someone signed up to receive whatever free download you are sharing and you deliver it via email. Then you send another two or three or four emails afterwards and that is the beginning of the nurturing. That is where you are giving them as much as you possibly can while making sure it still ties back to the freebie. The idea here is that they start to believe that they can do it that you are a teacher that they can trust that you are a teacher that brings them success. That is the initial phase of nurturing. With any other initiative that you have, such as a webinar, a challenge, a master class or a workshop. Anything you offer where people sign up we want to nurture them in those options. I'm primarily talking about people who sign up for something that is free because it's a low cost of entry, right? There's no cost, it's just time. Therefore they are more likely to not show up and do the work, which then means that it takes us a little bit longer to get them on board to get them into the flow of saying, “okay, yes, I am worthy and my music is worthy of taking the time to do xyz.” And this will make it easier to nurture them into our sales conversation. ideally we want to make sure that they are really ready to purchase, really ready to invest in themselves and into their music. When we have people sign up for our freebie or any of our events, we want to include some kind of nurture sequence that helps them say this provider, this music teacher is doing something out of the goodness of his or her heart that is going to give me value, whether I give them money or not. We want them to always feel like they're getting something of value. The nurture sequence and nurturing doesn't stop at the time of the event. There are emails before, during and afterwards. The longer that a prospective student stays in your sphere and open your emails and takes the steps that you lay out inside of your emails, the more likely that they are going to keep you top of mind when they are ready to purchase. If your webinar led to a product that they're not interested in, that's okay. That's where our broadcasts come in. Broadcasts Just because someone doesn't purchase on your conversion event doesn't mean that the nurturing of them was wasted. If they're opening your emails, you're still nurturing them, you can keep nurturing, keep motivating, keep inspiring every single step of the way. Send broadcast messages on a weekly basis. I like creating those emails on the fly as opposed to batching or pre-writing them. Broadcast messages can be structured any way you want. They can be long, they can be short, they can have bullet points, they can have paragraphs, they can have any structure you want. The idea with a broadcast message is to show up consistently in someone's inbox. “Oh, it's Thursday, there is an email from Jaime!” Inside these messages we can send motivational content, inspirational content, informational content. We can also invite sales. We can invite for feedback. We can invite for a lot of things. The content of these broadcast messages is designed to help someone say, “oh yeah, that's right, I am interested in this!” It's important to know the behavior of your audience, these people that one day are going to become students or sign up for your course or your workshop or your webinar or your master class or whatever it is that you are offering next, which is why it's beneficial to get to know how people actually are consuming your emails by looking at the open rates and things like that. Another thing that we can do based on sending out these automation as well as these broadcasts, is to cherry pick or hand pick people who have been regularly opening your emails and clicking on links and then connecting with them in another way. Most of our nurturing is going to happen via email, through this constant stream of information that we're sending. But if you see that someone is opening every single one of your emails and that you've connected on Instagram, go ahead and send them a DM just to let them know that you see them! It's another avenue to deepen the connection. It's these little things that we can do because every single person on your email list is a person. They are not a machine, they are not a robot. They have feelings, they have lives, they have desires, they have passions, they are a full human being and when we treat them as that and we nurture them and build value into the relationship they are going to say yes! It may take one week, it may take three years, but I can tell you you are more likely to get an eventual yes if you continue to nurture rather than just sending out promotional messages or messages that don't nurture their spirit and their soul. That's what I've got for you today. I hope that you enjoyed this and are thinking about nurturing your future students today! Be sure to connect with me. https://callwithJaime.com https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ https://m.me/jaimeslutzky/

I talk a lot about the zone of genius and about it being a place where your passions and your skill set collide! In this episode we discuss balancing your passion with your skill set so that you can spend more time in your zone of genius being productive. Before we get there, I want to make sure that you know that you are in the right place. This podcast is for private music educators who are looking to expand online. You are looking to create group programming, membership sites, courses, collaborations, workshops, things that are delivered in the online space in a one to many capacity, meaning it's you as the teacher providing your knowledge and your teaching to a larger audience at one time. It can be asynchronous (meaning on their own time) or it can be live on camera in real time. Either way, this podcast is here to help you maximize your teaching potential through online means. Why do I do this? Because I love technology and I love everything that it allows my clients, music teachers just like you, to provide to people interested in exploring and expanding their own musical knowledge and acumen. I am passionate about this because I know that the idea of expanding online is exciting but the technology can make it a little bit daunting! My entire reason for being is to take away those tech obstacles, those tech insecurities, the tech roadblocks so that you can truly deliver what you are meant to deliver. If you are interested in working with me or you know, another music teacher who is looking to expand online, send them my way. Just go to https://callwithjaime.com and book a call. It's that easy. Now, let's talk about passion and skill set and all this fun stuff inside the zone of genius. Skill Set This is what you are truly gifted and good at doing. It can be breaking down difficult concepts for beginner intermediate students, it can be explaining creativity, it can be teaching history or anything. Where are you just so talented? It could be at building a curriculum or at teaching a lesson or at the physical “doing.” This is your skill set, this is your toolbox and it's really important for us to understand what's in our toolbox (and also what is not in our toolbox.) What skills might you just not possess even though you are running an online business? I'd recommend making a list which might include things like: video editing creating a social media calendar uploading videos to vimeo or to Youtube or to Thinkific or to wherever you are uploading videos nurturing and writing emails and social media the accounting side and reminding yourself to invoice clients figuring out if a student is the right student for you! Your skill set is yours. All these other things that you have to do in order to run a successful business, don't have to be in your skill set. You may have to work through them and do them but ultimately, we actually want to make sure that they are built in a way that they don't take over all of your creative energy! The things that aren't in your zone of genius or in your skill set are actually things that we want to streamline and create systems and processes around so that they take up less time, which will allow us to spend more time with our skills with the things that we are really good at and then pairing that with what we are so so passionate about, which ultimately has us spending more time in our zone of genius. Passion So what is our passion? What drives us, what fuels us? What gets us excited to wake up in the morning? What is it that you could do, whether you were paid a penny, nothing or thousands of dollars to do? What is it that is so intrinsically bound to your joy and enthusiasm? That's passion! Balance And now we want to balance passion with our skill set inside of our zone of genius so that we are productive and can continue to create new products and opportunities for our students. If we spend too much time in our passion, we can start a lot of projects, but they never see the light of day. If we spend so much time working through our skills, we can have the most robust, but sometimes dry curriculum and content to share. How do we create balance inside of our zone of genius? I do it in three parts (all time blocked.) Passion Block Give myself time blocks for sitting in my passion for coming up with all the ideas; for mulling over something or just getting caught up in the music or just getting caught up in the experience. Essentially just getting caught up in the joy and the opportunity. Skill Set Block Then we take another time block where we look at everything that we came up with when we were just thinking in our passion and feeling and moving and experiencing joy and asking myself what can I execute? What do I already know? Sometimes we want to learn things, we want to do more, we want to increase our skills and there's a time for that for sure, and we'll get to that in a moment. But first we want to take what we can already do, what we already know how to do, how we can translate that and work through translating to create something out of that passion with the skills we already know. Growth Block And then the third part of creating this balance is investing time and energy, maybe money or resources to increase your skill set so that you can do more things. We also want to explore some of those things that we think we might be passionate about, things that have piqued our curiosity allowing us to go deeper. We want to spend time exploring what else we can be passionate about and exploring how else we can increase our skill set. It's kind of a cyclical thing… If we spend too much time in our passion, coming up with thousands of ideas, but not enough time making sure that we are actually doing it with the skills that we already have, then we can feel like work has become out of reach because we're not balanced in our zone of genius. If we are spending so much time creating things from our skill set, things that we know how to do that we can just rattle off but not spending time making sure that we are still passionate about what we are creating, we end up imbalanced. Nobody wants to be imbalanced, we want to be rising, we want our zone of genius to be an expansive space. When we work inside of our zone of genius, we always create new opportunities. We are not constrained by our passion, we are not constrained by our skill set, we are not constrained inside of our zone of genius. We just have to make sure that when we do spend time in there that we are doing it in a way that it creates opportunity for us to expand for us to hone our skills for us to become more passionate so that we can then translate that outward into everything that we do in life and in business. Balance doesn't mean 50-50 always and forever. It means ebb and flow and come back to neutral. It's not like you're going to stay static, you are growing, you are creating an opportunity for more! Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we go so far one way or the other that we lose sight of our why. We lose sight of what brings us joy and we lose sight of what is easy. If we can do more that is easy and more that brings us joy, then we are winning every single day! Connect with me: https://callwithjaime.com or Instagram or Facebook

In case you're new here… I am taking a moment at the top of this episode to share a bit about me and what I'm all about! I am a technology strategist who works primarily with music teachers, who are expanding into one-to-many programming. What this means is that you are a teacher who has offered lessons and sessions for years and are ready to take all of the knowledge that you have, all of the practical experience that you have and all of the insight that you have gleaned and convert that into something that you can offer to more students at one time! This could be through courses or a membership site, it could be group programming, it could be workshops, it could be any number of online mechanisms. The key is that you want to do something different. You want to expand in new ways and flex your muscles. I also work with teachers who want to create resources for other teachers. So you don't have to necessarily expand online by doing more of what you've always done. You can take those practical approaches, those methodologies, everything that you've gleaned and create something that works for other teachers who haven't yet had those experiences. They haven't worked with your exact set of students and they don't have your exact set of insights. I love working with music teachers because you create opportunities for others to tap into their creativity and into their zone of genius. That's what it's all about. Working more inside of your zone of genius. The zone of genius as I describe it, is the space where your passions and your skill set collide. I consider this an expansive space because when our passions increase, we have more opportunity to spend time in our zone of genius. When our skill set increases we have more to offer inside of our zone of genius! I want you to be spending time creating and impacting your students and the greater community. That's me in a Nutshell; I work with my clients on creating pathways out of the 1-1 into the one to many. This includes everything from your website and your email marketing to structuring your courses and getting it all online. Every single part of this process comes together when we work on it as a cohesive unit. If you are interested in any of that, be sure to click here: https://callwithjaime.com! Let's talk about 3 ways to formulate your online course idea. #1 Taking the 30,000 ft view That is looking at the landscape of the music industry or of your particular instrument or your particular modality and looking at it from that 30,000 ft view and seeing where there might be potholes or where there might already be skyscrapers and then honing in on those places that you know need improvement. If you see from that 30,000 ft view that there are beautiful skyscrapers for miles, but then there is a hill that has been completely untouched, you want to develop that hill. It's here when you look at that one spot inside this landscape that allows you to truly make an impact and build your own skyscraper. This is looking at where there are gaps in the market; gaps in the online education space, because it becomes easy for us to fill those with something that's useful and needed. #2 Look at your own teaching business Ask yourself: What do you teach most often? What do you teach without prep? What do you teach that you feel is so foundational and so critically important that every student needs to know it? What do you teach that is so unique and revolutionary that you wish everybody knew? This is the second place to look. Here we can review our own curriculums, look at how you teach, why you teach, where you teach, who you teach and tap into something that you feel so insanely passionate about. This is where you could create the most incredible course that would help any single person who is seeking whatever it is you want to create. Here you are creating a superior course than anybody else and creating it out of your own track history, your own loves and your own teaching style. That is the secret sauce. This is the most common way for people to create online courses – by tapping into something that they have done for days, weeks, months, years, decades with their students and then converting it into something that they can teach in a mainstream course manner. By far, one of the most valuable aspects of this type of course is to focus on making it something that is done in a way that anyone can learn it. The way to do this is to imagine creating the course for five or 10 specific students and normalize the lessons so that all of them will find success. This will help you create a program that doesn't need you to be involved with each student. #3 Look at the needs of your audience This starts by truly identifying your ideal audience. Identify who you want to create the course for and then communicate with them. Take the time to understand where they are, what they are struggling with, why they're struggling with it and how you can fill the gap for them. Here we're saying “I want to work with this particular subset of musicians.” And I know that I can offer something, I don't know exactly what it is yet, but I want them to tell me This is the method that allows you to build an audience while you're creating something for that very audience. Start thinking outside the box to start thinking inside your zone of genius. I truly believe that every single music teacher has a course that they can deliver. Now, if you are ready to get started begin with creating your own micro course (a four lesson course on a micro concept!) You can fast track yourself by going to https://expandonlinenow.com/micro-course/ to grab my made-for-music-teacher micro-course templates. I love being in conversation – Instagram – Facebook – Zoom Call. You can do this, creating something online that has never been created for is within your wheelhouse!

The internet is abuzz with programs and it is abuzz with opportunity. And because of this, it is abundantly clear that your tech does not dictate your success. It's really important for us to remember that the success of our online programs is not hinged entirely on technology. It is not the critical piece that is going to bring everything into focus and into profits. This is a re-release of Episode 171 (because as you hear, I'm a bit stuffy and I couldn't record a full episode!) I want to see you have online programs that fill your heart that give opportunity to your students, whether they're young or old, new or experienced. I really just know that this online space is a perfect medium for your education products. The technology you use doesn't make a difference! That's not to say that the tech isn't important. What I mean to say is that whatever technology you're using, that is not what's going to be the tipping point for the success or failure of your program. The technology has a supporting role. A crucial one but it's supporting! Your material on the worst platform will do better than lousy material on the best platform, which really is to say that your content is what is going to determine the success of your program! Your content is the reason for students showing up and taking your course and what is going to determine the success of your program is the way the student feels as they are going through the material. We want them to have a really great experience with you before they sign up. We want them to have a really great experience with you as they are signing up. We want them to have a really great experience with you in the onboarding process. If your program is something that they can start right away, we want them to have a really great experience inside the program. If your program is something that has a specific start date and they may have signed up weeks beforehand, we want them to feel really warm and supported during the time between their sign up and the official start date. Once we're inside the program, we want them to feel supported. We want your students to have many wins every single time they sit down at the computer. We want them to feel connected with you and be engaged and know that they are going to have another win tomorrow. We want them to feel amazing when they are finished too! Those are ingredients for your course to be successful. And it is super important to have the right tech at every step of the way. There are a lot of steps and a lot of tech to choose from. When you have the right technology and the right outlook for using all of these pieces and creating this experience, you're absolutely going to be building success; success for your students as well as success for your program as a whole. Here's a metaphor for online course success… If someone comes in as a caterpillar and they go through their metamorphosis and come out as a butterfly, they are winning and your course is winning. If they come in as a caterpillar and are never able to cocoon themselves, how are they going to become a butterfly? It's experiential learning at its finest! If you're not building your technology base properly, you're going to be scrambling. We always want to make sure that we're using the technology to support students efforts every single step of the way! That is my secret sauce. That is the piece that I will make sure works so perfectly so that you can show up with the content! You can show up with the big smile and the warm embrace and the critique and the feedback and all of the pieces that they need in order to feel success from the material that they're learning and making those small wins… and the technology just works in the background. When we've got the right tech in place, nobody thinks about the technology, nobody worries about how it's all going to come together! The technology conversation only comes to the surface as woes and not as whoa! You know what I mean? It's only when there are problems that the technology is to blame. When things work right, nobody cares about your technology. When we're creating online programs, we want to make sure that our videos and audio are recorded at the best quality and that they are delivered in a way that looks professional. we want to make sure that any sign ins and sign ups and payment processing are smooth. we want to make sure that the navigation that happens within the program is logical and makes sense on a phone, on a tablet or, on a computer. we want to make sure that whenever our students, our members, our clients are interacting with our programs that it's easy and straightforward. The success of your online program is not hinged on the technology. It is absolutely the content and delivery and the wins along the way. But if you don't have the technology in place, it's not going to be possible to have all those little wins because there are too many things that are going to come up. Your success is not hinged on the technology, but the technology makes the success easier to achieve! My goal is to help you get what you want online with ease and grace and confidence. Remember this: tech is an opportunity to help you reach your own goals. Tools mentioned in this episode: Thinkific LearnDash Connect with me: Book a call Instagram Facebook

When you are sitting on something good and valuable for other music teachers — what do you do? Turn it into a digital product of course. And that example what Joslin Romphf Dennis has done. If you recognize her name, that's because she was a guest in episode 184! I'm this episode, we discuss the next level of Joslin's online expansion and so much more. One theme that runs through this episode is that doneis better than perfect. It's a hard pill to swallow because if you're like Joslin then it's probably not how you usually do stuff. Even with her new digital download — Joslin's didn't think she would be ready until now or even next month because she felt that there's so much work to do. So instead of doing busy work and waiting until everything was perfect, she took the advice of a trusted advisor to just launch it and then if stuff needs to be fixed then you fix it. So she launched. And it's was good. It is still good! What Joslin has created is called the singer's oral skills drill book for teachers. It is full of examples, musical examples written out for singing teachers specifically to help their students prepare their ear training skills. Joslin modeled this after the royal conservatory of music syllabus for vocal practical exams, but it is 100% usable for preparing your students for choral auditions and other non-exam based opportunities. This digital product was built toremedu one of those things that tends to fall through the cracks a little bit. Everyone seems busy working on repertoire and vocal technique and learning songs and learning assignments and things like that so that ear training tends to fall away unless you actually have something to prepare for like an exam! Joslin built all of the levels from grade one to grade 10. Each level has level specific examples according to what is required by the RCM syllabus. When this whole idea started, she was thinking “I'm the only teacher out there that doesn't want to build a dominant seventh chord in my head” and other material she would need to use. And this personal guide was started … and then what started to happen when Joslin was telling people about it and they were like, “can I have a copy?” If you have created something that you use regularly in your studio, talk about it with your peers, you might be sitting on a diamond and not even know it. Another thing is that Joslin didn't set out to create this product, she was seeking an existing resource and there just wasn't anything in the market that for her needs. Think about it — How much easier is it for you to just have a sheet where there's like 80 Iterations of dominant and diminished seventh chords and you can just pick from them? And so Joslin started to sort of just disseminate her little examples in little photocopies, because other teachers needed what she had created. Joslin was 100% her first customer for this resource. And because she was confident in it, she was able to showcase it in such a way that other teachers wanted it. And now, she can sell it with even greater confidence to even more teachers who will use it for the benefit of their students. This digital product is an entirely new vertical for Joslin's business — providing something that is for other teachers and there is so much power in that! As a teacher you can put yourself squarely in their seat. You understand everything every nuance because you are them. Seriously, the best person for you to be creating, a course, a download, a workshop or whatever it is is you x number of months or years ago. Joslin loves this because “it's nice to be a contributor to the industry”. Some of the nuances with creating a digital product: Not infringing on others' copyrights Protecting your Intellectual Property Collecting and remitting taxes Staying in love with the product through the messy middle Tackling the internal and external nay-sayers Acknowledging your journey What kept her going? “This is something that people need because I needed it so badly and it did not exist.” So… the selling side and the delivery side. Joslin went with the built in functionality of her SquareSpace site to sell and deliver. You could use any number of tools for this — and I would be thrilled to talk about those with you. Book a call at https://callwithJaime.com Joslin has several versions of her product — individual levels, bundled levels, everything and other combinations. She wanted to make sure her customers got what they wanted and needed and didn't have digital dust collecting on irrelevant files! Joslin isn't done. She has some research to do for where and how to distribute these next. That's phase 2. She had created the product and is validating it by getting sales. Passive sales - waking up in the morning and saying, oh, I got new money overnight! Now it's more marketing. More publicity. More validation. And the iterate. Improve deliver ability and conversion rate. The digital product space is such an exciting vertical to be in right now, because there is always somebody new who's going to find your product and then if we can make it so that you are part of their core system and your product becomes something that they rely on, then you have a customer for life. And as much as teaching the student is what every single listener is all about, making sure that their students are successful as a business owner, there can be more verticals, you don't just have to offer lessons to students, that's why music studio or musics stores the stores that sell the instruments often bring in teachers because they're adding a second vertical. Teachers who have an independent studio where the primary business — when you add a new vertical that's when we go from being a teacher to being a business owner. Joslin shared her business coach - Michelle Markwart Deveaux and the Speakeasy Cooperative as part of her support system and success journey. We don't do this stuff in a vacuum. We are better in community and conversation. Remember that, always. And you might pop into and out of communities throughout the process — some tech focused ones to get the product created, some marketing focused ones to launch, some industry specific and some general business. They all have a place and value. If you are a music teacher and you have an idea for something like this and you make sure that it's not something that has necessarily been done to death or is a saturated item that you can literally do whatever you want. You don't need permission from anybody. You don't need anybody to tell you that it's okay to do it. You just have to figure out how to do it. Don't be afraid to ask for help! Here are a few ways to connect with Jaime and Joslin: Jaime on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ Joslin on Instagram: https://instagram.com/jrdvoicestudio Joslin's digital product: http://jrdvoicestudio.com/the-singers-aural-skills-drill-book-for-teachers

A few links for you… then we'll get to the good stuff… Jaime's Instagram @jaimeslutzky The Expand Online Community Book a free call with Jaime http://callwithjaime.com Eric's Instagram @getfons Fons on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/getfons/ The Fons Family on Facebook Try Fons Okay, let's do it. Eric is the CEO and founder of Fons.com – a business software for anybody who does appointments type business, or client type business. He's a music teacher and a classical guitar player. Where did his inspiration come from to create this software? He attributes it to a lot of the pain points that he was experiencing in his own music studio. Fons is designed to run the business side of any kind of client or appointment-based business types, and was initially built for music teachers and music schools. The hardest part for many music teachers is the business (aka money) side because of all the awkward conversations… Fons takes care of all the stuff that involves asking for money, automating payments, automating cancellation policies, etc. trying to make it as simple as possible for both the customer and the service provider alike. This ultimately allows the providers the time and energy to do more impactful work. Fons put you in an empowering position instead of a needy position. It also creates a professional relationship that makes it simpler for the parents, who are often the ones that are paying for music lessons – it's an understanding of the terms of services and billing, which leads to a great client and provider experience. Eric also takes us through a bit of the user interface of Fons, including booking appointments, how that talks to billing, the agenda, video chat features, the marketplace, etc. There are some extremely incredible features with this software, and being that this was created by a music teacher, it's multifaceted in a way that will set you up for success. The Fons Family Eric runs the vibrant Fons Family community on Facebook where people have connected from all over the country to help each other, share and test ideas. It's a collaborative space where members aren't afraid that someone is going to steal their idea or compete with them. And the reason for this supportive and encouraging space…? There are not enough music teachers in this (and every) country! You can carve your own space and do things in your own way, learn from others in the industry, get inspired, do things on your own, bounce things off of other people who are in a very similar vertical, but not necessarily doing exactly what you do. We have so many opportunities at our fingertips in the online space. Yet, we need to use the right tools for the task at hand… With Fons, if you're offering a service in real time, whether it's one on one or it's a group, you can build that billing, reminder, and scheduling process within the software – which is ultimately what Fons is designed to do. Fons doesn't try to do everything. It is a niche software tool that helps with scheduling and payments. It helps you run your studio with more efficiency than most other methods people are trying. This is a must listen, I have only provided you with a short snippet of what we talked about here in these show notes. Tell me, do you prefer long show notes or short ones? Message me on Instagram @jaimeslutzky and I'd love to know what you learned or are inspired to do now that you're done listening to the episode and reading through these notes :)

Have you met Dr. Katherine Emeneth online or in person? She is the founder of KE Creative, a digital company that focuses on the business education and empowerment of classical musicians. She and her team coach classical musicians on how they can create a full time living by staying in the craft through understanding finances, learning music entrepreneurship skills, and how to effectively build a network. Katherine teaches privately through her studio, the Georgia Flute Academy, and enjoys performing with various ensembles in the southeast. A few links for you: Book a Call with Jaime http://callwithjaime.com Connect with Jaime on Instagram https://www.Instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ Connect with Jaime on Facebook https://m.me/jaimeslutzky/ Connect with Katherine on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/katherineemeneth/ Connect with Katherine on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/katherineemeneth Classical Musicaneer FB Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/classicalmusicianeer Katherine's Website https://www.katherineemeneth.com/ Katherine is one of the OGs in the online music education space… she continues to provide in person lessons, play professionally AND has a thriving online business. This should be a reminder that online business is viable for a lot of music teachers and that we don't have to stop doing one thing in order to do something else! Katherine's aha moment came from the realization that as long as she was playing, volunteering, and teaching flute, then that was all she really needed to make an impact on the world. She didn't need a tenure position, like she had thought. And one of her gifts is being able to get a music studio off the ground – she did it in her hometown and she's done it again after moving. She's become a pro at this… which is good because as she says: “My number one favorite thing is teaching kids.” Katherine's online course The Music Teacher's Playbook is a 14-week class where she teaches people how to grow a successful private studio from nothing, just as she's done. She's been teaching this course live online for the past 6 years. It's great that we have teachers like Katherine who are creating opportunities for other teachers to be able to follow in their footsteps… the business side of the music education space is one of the least taught and most needed aspects of the industry. (Check back next week for another great episode that touches on the business side too!) And just like everything in business, Katherine has evolved what she offers online, how she shows up and her approach to working with her students. Katherine also shares with us some super helpful exercises and tips to get you thinking about why now is the right time to act on your ideas and get your online music course going – this part is a must-listen! Can I make you think for a couple of minutes? You have so much talent and skills that are needed for the next generation of musicians and as next step for musicians already on their paths… What are you the expert in? What topics are your students interested in? Draw up an outline – and act on it! Katherine says, “If you're ready to do it then just do it, just get it out there and see what happens because the longer it stays in your head then the more time you're allowing you to talk yourself out of doing it.” Just as we need to act on the ideas, we also need to be okay with being uncomfortable putting ourselves “out there” online… Be exclusive and not inclusive, because you're not going to please everyone! And that's okay! I'll leave you here with the same statement that Katherine leaves on the podcast: You can do whatever you want in your life. There are no rules. There are no boundaries. Whatever you think you were taught in school about, you can't do this until you do this or you can't charge this until you do that. That does not exist. That is not a thing. You create your own rules in your own endeavors and you decide what you're going to do based on what you want to do if you want to go for it and put something out there and you know, be vulnerable, then you should do that for sure. And I find that, you know, a lot of people don't put things out because they're scared of what other people will think. But my big advice for that is if you believe in it strongly enough, it doesn't even matter what other people think because you're 100% behind it. So do it anyway. Make it exclusive instead of inclusive. Help me thank Katherine for her time by leaving a rating and review for this episode and sharing it with your flute and music teacher friends!

Micro-courses are generally courses that take the student between 30 minutes and 2 hours to complete. It's not a lecture, but rather a series of short and actionable teachings that lead to a specific result. I am so passionate about micro courses is because you can get them done quickly, you can create them quickly and you can spend more time connecting with people who need this micro content! Be sure to head over to https://expandonlinenow.com/micro-course/ and take a look at the resource I have for you there. This episode was inspired by a Facebook live that I did inside the https://expandonlinecommunity.com on January 10th. In fact, the first part of the episode is some of the audio from that event. Again, a micro-course is designed to help the student achieve one specific objective. And the benefits are plenty: they don't take you that long to create there is an immediate ROI for the student They are easy to recommend to others (hello raving fans!) I'm guessing that your network on social media is full of other music teachers… and you can't really market your lessons or teaching programs to them, right? But, you can absolutely use that network of teachers to get more students into your micro-course. See, you can sell that by yourself all day every day to every one of your students, everyone who might want to become one of your, your students in the future and so on and so forth. You can also reach out into your network/community and let them know that you have this standalone course that would be very beneficial for them to introduce to their students before they start taking lessons or at a particular point on their student journey. This micro-course becomes an avenue for partnerships and collaborations with other teachers! I would bet that you have 3-5 hacks or techniques that you teach on a regular basis with 70-80% of your students that you could put into a small product like this. When you do that, you are opening yourself up to being a greater member of the online music education community; you are opening yourself up for future collaborations. These courses are not going to cost a lot of money for people to participate in or to go through somewhere from maybe $17 up to like $70 depending on what you're offering. But that's okay because this is just one micro-course, and you could have many! Imagine having a micro-course for $17 that has 10 people each month go through it, that's an extra $2000+ each year… from a $17 course! A micro-course must not need a lot of practice between the lessons. Instead it needs to be a quick build from one lesson to the next. When we're structuring one of these micro courses, we want to make sure that there are sections or lessons, not just a big long lecture. Break up the content into somewhere between three and five lessons. the first lesson is going to set the stage and get them into the right frame of learning the middle lessons are teaching the nuances or the relevant pieces of information so that they can figure out and say “yes, I'm making progress!” the last lesson is tying it all together and creating a practical experience People like to be entertained and a lot of people who watch informative educational videos on YouTube never implement what they watch. They never bring that into their lives. That's what we want to avoid and that's why I'm recommending a micro-course because we're packaging the information not just in a consumption way, but in an absorption way. Micro-courses are extremely powerful as an online music educator building a multi-faceted education business. you're going to have your free content and that could be anywhere on social media or on your blog or on YouTube. micro-courses where people can learn something specific longer courses, workshops, webinars and programs one on one and mentorships etc. We are layering in all the different ways that you can have an impact and help to contribute to all the vast resources of online music education. Your-micro course, if it's super specific and super tangible, has the potential to sell hundreds of units every single month. Look at your own practice, how often do you look online for a new resource? See… there's a market here! I encourage you to take action and create that micro course! I look forward to connecting with you on Instagram or Facebook. Also, book a free call with me at http://callwithjaime.com

Let's get right to it… creating anything online is going to take time, but how much time do you want to dedicate to making your new online program a reality? What it looks like is whatever you want it to look like. There are no steadfast rules for how you create and what you create and how long it's going to take to create that new program. Somebody might sit down and create an entire course over a weekend while someone else who is equally talented and passionate might take six or eight months. While there are no rules, there are some guidelines that I do strongly recommend. #1 Create when you are in your Creative Zone Don't try to force your program creation into open time slots where you are not at your most creative self. It's counter-productive. There are a lot of other things you can do in that time, like balancing the books, but you want to be creating when you're most likely to produce something that feels amazing. If you only have an hour of creative time every day, it may take you longer than someone who has eight hours a day for two straight weeks that they can feel in-the-zone! It doesn't matter the speed at which you create your program, as long as the program that you are creating matches what your audience needs. And that brings us to the second point… #2 Know the program audience Knowing who your course is for is far more important than trying to create it quickly. It is far better off to do your market research do a pre launch get early adopters build the program that is actually needed When we rush the process of creation without an established buyer audience, we're throwing darts! I don't know about you, but throwing darts is not what I want to be doing with my future. I would much rather just walk down the sidewalk and know exactly the path that I'm on! #3 Program creation includes a lot more than the content It's not just about how many modules and lessons, nor the software, the launch strategy and the delivery mechanism. All these need to be factored into the timeline! Everything takes time. Even if you're a wiz at creating the content, how does it take for you to get the content showtime ready? Even if you have an established audience, how much time do you need to prime them for the upcoming program launch? Even if you already have you tech, how long does it take to get it all working together (and tested?) #4 We work faster when we work smarter Make sure that you're allotting the right time to do the right work. This is not only the headspace and creative space we've talked about but also the right heart space and white space outside of creation. The goal is to create a quality program, not to get overwhelmed by your new project. Don't rush the process – no need to feel a crunch that is completely self-inflicted. I'd rather see this program take four months for you to create and for you to come out at launch with so much energy and so much passion than for you to spend two weeks cramming it together then not have the energy to pour into the launch! Like I said, how long does it take – it depends! It absolutely depends on where you're at and what your goals are and how much of your schedule is filled. It's as simple as that. There are a lot of ways for us to optimize our available time. My clients are going to take somewhere between 6 and 12 weeks to create their programs. And most programs are going to be between 4 and 16 weeks or lessons or modules. 6-12 weeks is optimal because you want to give yourself enough time to do the non-creation elements of a successful program too. When you grab your calendar map out more time than you think for each part. Program development Content creation Editing / production Pre-launch / warming your audience Launch There is absolutely no point creating a course or workshop or membership or program if you don't take the time to make sure that there are people who are waiting with open wallets to sign up. That's it – it takes as much time as you want, but needs to also take as much time as you need to be SUCCESSFUL! OK, I'd love to get feedback from you on this episode, hit me up on Instagram or Facebook, book a call with me at http://callwithjaime.com And, if you are interested in having a support and guidance through the Online Music Course Accelerator → https://onlinemusiccourseaccelerator.com is where you must go!

Ready for another On Air Coaching Call? Great, today I have with me Ms. April, a voice, piano and theory teacher from Ontario Canada. I have a great affinity for Canadians because I am one! Although I've been living in the USA for my entire adult life! Anyway, let's get right into the coaching call highlights. In March 2020 (doesn't that sound like the start of every conversation lately???) April had to quickly shift from in person teaching to online teaching. And once she did, she realized that theory was something that just didn't translate as well as the other parts of her lessons… which made her go down the course creation path. April's initial goal was to have her existing students continue with their theory. That's it. Just some courses that her students could use to learn the theory outside of lessons. Using the theory books that she was already teaching, she received permission from the publisher to record herself teaching the material week by week. This is what she sent to her students. It was a solution that worked for her and her students. She received fantastic feedback from parents too! The feedback has led many parents to request that theory continue to be delivered via online courses instead of inside the lessons, whether online or in person! What can you give to your current students in order to make it more successful for them in their own learning? That's the first place that you can look to create an online course! Now that April knows her courses are successful at teaching theory, she wants to go beyond her private student base… and now we're getting into the coaching part of the call! She has tried to be present online, on both Facebook and Instagram. She has done some ads, but doesn't want to be spending a whole lot of money with that without knowing if it's really helping. She is focusing on trying to get the word out, doing interactive posts, and sharing what she's offering. She realized that instead of just trying to outright sell her courses when people would inquire, that having a little bit of a conversation with them rather than just trying to sell it to them outright was a much more successful approach. I asked her if she was interested in having a larger group of students go through the theory courses together, rather than independently which piqued her interest, for sure! Which got us talking about launch events (how fun, right?) That could be a challenge, a workshop, a webinar, etc. - or even an email sequence of some kind and get them to buy into your methods and your teaching style through some free introductory outlet. April and I chat about some ways to come up with that free content that is valuable to her audience, as well as ways to incentivize signing up right away. April's students are kids and therefore it's really talking with and to the parents that is going to lead to courses being purchased. You could do a webinar for parents - show them how getting their theory through video lessons is going to help their child be more successful, and show them exactly what their child is going to be going through in their online course. Show them that there's THIS potential. And the other way that we determined that April could have more students using her theory courses is to collaborate with and partner with other music teachers who use the same collection of method and theory books. The thought being that if other teachers were not interested in creating their own theory courses, they could send their students to April's courses and form a partnership with her. This direction is something I really hope April pursues because it's a winning one for all parties - April, the students and the other teachers. As April continues to explore launch events, she's going to want to evaluate the benefits of groups or cohorts going through a theory book at the same pace. It might include having monthly workshops or group zoom sessions to discuss a set of lessons. And it might come to a point where April has a few teachers that she works with who do those group lessons with her – these are the teachers who have all their students going through April's theory courses while they teach the method books and practical elements. There is really no limit online – right? We're always expanding! So, there's the angle of going straight to the parents and the angle of working with other music teachers… but the fundamental elements don't change: need to have some kind of launch event that will entice the other party to be open to the possibility of this format for their student/child. “It's really the teachers that use the theory, it's not the parents that go out seeking theory lessons.“ Back to the launch events… we discuss the role of an email marketing platform (I recommend ConvertKit BTW) and April's question specifically is “what would be the step by step that you would take in order to get them onto that list to then have that progression go through of the know like and trust email sequence?” The two methods of having people join your email list are through some kind of freebie that you're giving away or through the launch event. For freebies… I love when we can do a download that the parent can learn about the advantages of piano. Are you on the fence about piano lessons for your child? Here are some of the reasons why and here is an activity that you can do with your child to see if they're ready. Any time that we can educate the parent and inform the parent and excite the parent where they can translate that into the conversation that they're having with their child. It's a winning situation. When I'm working with people who work with adults, it's a little bit different because you want to make sure that whatever your freebie is is something that they can actually do. And in April's case where the student is a child, you want to make sure that what you're bringing to the table is something that the parents feel confident in. It's that it's that trust factor. We talk about linking social media posts with this type of content back to the freebie, instead of it staying in social media land. For the email sequence, I recommend a 5 - 10 day sequence of 3 - 6 emails. Here's your checklist Something really simple that they can do with their child every day or every other day Give them content in the same way that you're going to deliver content inside your course (video content, audio, pdf etc.) - they need to really connect with you and your teaching style Once the email sequence ends, send monthly emails to your list to keep the idea of piano lessons top of mind and for the parents to determine when/if their child is ready. And once the once-a-month thing becomes doable, start sending emails more often. But no more than once a week, probably. And we want these to be educational not promotional :) We wrap up the conversation with a bit more chatter about ConvertKit and using social media. If you're interested in connecting with April, her Instagram account is @msaprilsmusicstudio and Facebook is https://www.facebook.com/msaprilsmusicstudio/. Would you do other music teachers a huge favor and take a moment to leave a quick rating and review for the podcast? Share what you've been loving and insights or takeaways that you've had from this or other episodes. Be sure to book that call with me http://callwithjaime.com/ and let's connect on Instagram!

It's time for another on air coaching call. My guest for this session is Niccole Modell and she is delving into online group programming! And you probably already know, I love online group programming. A bit about Niccole… Niccole is a full time musician, teacher and performer. She has a teaching studio, and offers mostly one on one lessons. She is looking to expand and go into the world of virtual group classes since her days are currently full with private lessons. (It's important to add, too, that Niccole doesn't really have the space or a location for in-person groups right now.) This shift from one-on-one to group feels a little intimidating, and she came on the call with the hope to get some ideas and a little confidence. At the time of this call, she was prepping for her first ever group class where students would be performing for each other in lieu of private lessons, with the hope that if it went well, she would be able to expand on that and maybe offer more of those in the future. To help Niccole best, I needed to first know if she wanted to offer group programming for both piano and for flute, or start with one or the other? It's best to be super clear, so that we can focus on realizing a goal that is realizable rather than trying something too lofty! Niccole thought piano would be a good place to start because she has a lot more piano students than flute students right now. With online group lessons or online group workshops or online group programs of any kind, our job is to help the students see how the group format is going to benefit them. Obviously, it's going to benefit you because you are able to work with more students in less time. But the benefit for the students can be a little bit trickier to demonstrate. It's important that group programs don't feel like a private lesson in a group setting. In order to determine what can make a group lesson cohesive and uniting for the students, I asked Niccole to share some of what she is currently doing in her lessons to make it motivating and engaging for her students. She likes to encourage her students to perform and gives them opportunities to perform and compete (if desired.) She also offers standardized testing every year for really motivated students, and keeps her lessons engaging with games and activities. She provides a well-rounded curriculum with exposure to A LOT of things (history, technique, improvising, repertoire, etc.) at all ages in order to provide value and the ultimate goal of creating a well-rounded musician. These are the same thoughts that go into making a group environment fun and implactur. An example: Group lesson on composition Students work on their composition after some direction from you, the teacher. Once they are happy with it, they pass it to the next student who will get the opportunity to play it! Hearing your own music played by someone else has an even greater impact than playing your own composition. Everyone gets to be part of a collaborative experience. Another example: looking at a historical piece The music is not going to change and you need to repeat the lesson for every student. Instead, using it in a group setting allows the conversation, analysis and appreciation to go further. Perhaps bringing a set of students together on a monthly basis in lieu of their private lesson to discuss the piece would be a great way to get started with the online group programming model. Then we get into logistics and practicality… like how to make it work across student levels or where students have gravitated towards different sub-disciplines. I like to think of it as catering the content to the age rather than the experience level. There are a lot of fun activities that 4-6 year olds enjoy whether they are playing Mozart or Twinkle-Twinkle! While group lessons and group programming are the focus of our coaching session, the reason this is so appealing to Niccole is to help her balance her time (and regain some time) – is that something that you're interested in as well… be sure to message me on Instagram or book a call at http://callwithjaime.com so we can quickly find a way to make that happen. In addition to group lessons sprinkled into the private lesson schedule, I also share some thoughts on a full time group program using an entire 16 week curriculum. This works really well for 4-8 students who all start out at the same level and have a similar goal. You can take the best parts of your private lessons, the best things that you teach and the best methods that you teach and teach them in a group setting and then provide some level of asynchronous support. Asynchronous support in my mind is where students can record a video or an audio file and send it to you… then you provide feedback via video and or audio. This is a great way of providing the personal touch so that students all advance individually all while the learning is done in a group environment! As far as the group curriculum, well you have to hear what Niccole's thoughts are on that! So honest and realistic about where she is at and what she wants to do next :) With group programming, it's all about the journey. We want to take our students to a specific place. We want to take them somewhere so that they can see the trajectory of where they're going. I think that's one of the big differences between programs and lessons… There's an end date which basically says this is when you're ready to take your test. This is when you have been taught the entire curriculum for this stage. Group programs can be as short at 4 weeks and I would recommend tapping them out at 16 weeks. Students are going to progress at their own rate and we don't want to let the group get too far out of sync. Here's an idea for a short group program: teaching kids how to play a song on the piano for their moms for Mother's Day that you offer in April. It doesn't have to be an expert level group. You're just taking them on a specific outcome journey. You're giving them two or three songs that they can play for their mom on the piano for Mother's Day. These are the kinds of ideas that I encouraged Niccole (and you!) to start embracing! These groups can be an additional resource for students who are all gung ho and want to do more, but it can also be an introduction for new students because it's not a super long commitment. The final thing we discuss during this coaching session is about Niccole's group classes coming up next week (at the time of the recording and last week as of the time of the release of this episode!) She asked for ideas that she could use to supplement which would engage and excite her students. improv games, creating music together, repeating back notes and adding on more (kind of like memory) guessing a note games Identify or dissect a song together. And for the younger ones, sending over a coloring page so they can color in when they are listening to their peers. When we give ourselves time to brainstorm without putting parameters or filters in, some great ideas come out. Then we can pluck the best ideas for the moment from that bin of ideas and implement them in our classes. And only at that point, we can figure out the logistics to make it happen. Brainstorming and dreaming are part of every coaching relationship I've ever had, either as the coach or the coached. And I believe that this episode has given you a peek into how my coaching sessions go, so if you're interested, head on over to http://callwithjaime.com and book a call. I'd love to hear from you and chat more about where you're at on your journey! As far as connecting Niccole, you can find her at www.niccolemodell.com.

This is the first of several on-air coaching calls that I am airing this month. Today's episode is circled around adding an email list to your studio, and Joellyn has graciously joined us to ask really pertinent questions. As you listen in to Joellyn's questions, I want to invite you to think about how YOU are going to grow your studio and what the next online step is going to be. One thing I mention in my conversation with Joellyn is ConvertKit, which I really recommend that you check out. (That's my affiliate link) And, as always, I love being in conversation with you. So any feedback that you have for me or for Joellyn, please share with me over on Instagram at @jaimeslutzky or feel free to send me a friend request at Jaime Slutzky on Facebook. Now, for this coaching session where we talk about some of the considerations going into adding an email list to your studio. Joellyn had posted in a Facebook group - about the whole idea of having an email list for her studio and after chiming in on the thread, I invited her to join me for this coaching session. She has been working on marketing this year, but not seeing that turn into new students… it's kinda just been “like a trickle.” So, she also started a Facebook group because that seemed like a new and fresh avenue. And other people were talking about it in regards to marketing- start a community. That hasn't converted to students either… so this is where we start. The Call To Action What is Joellyn inviting group members to do once they start interacting with her content? How does she want her Facebook group and her email list to function together? Part of this journey is really just trying to figure out how you want things to work and discover how you can best serve your audience. Tweaking Joellyn's approach and trying to get people onto her new email list is a starting point. It's really a matter of understanding what you're wanting to get out of that list and how you are going to serve the people on it. Everything that we do, if we don't create it for the benefit of the consumer, then it's going to fall flat. Joellyn and I go on to chat about how to give people just enough in your unrestricted free content to want to provide you with their email address, and the importance of nurturing that audience by continuing to provide value and credibility to the content you share and what you have to offer. I advise Joellyn that, with your email marketing strategy, it's ok for you to give away a lot in there- just because you give the how doesn't mean that you give the energy that's going to help them put the how into practice. “So I'm going to hold their hand really. It's like you can give away everything. But what they're paying for is for you to hold their hand through it.” I asked Joellyn, when it comes to getting people interested in her email list, if she has any ideas as to what type of freebie or product that to give away. Her first reaction was no, but we talked it out. Thinking about quick wins that she's getting in her interest-based piano lessons. This also brought up the question of what type of people she would ideally like to work with? But then also, if the ideal client is working with children, the parents are your audience - so how do you tailor value toward them when it's the child who is actually benefiting? Therefore what does the parent need to do in order to say, YES, my child's ready for piano lessons with Joellyn! Joellyn had the best answer- They need to see the results! And YES, she is exactly right! You don't necessarily need to give away something to DO, you can share results that will make the parents really appreciate the value of your lessons for their child. Something that the parents can see their kid's eyes lighting up, that's the kind of experience we want the parent to have for them to say, OK, I think I might try lessons. The freebie is definitely important being that this email is the one that gets opened most often, but then we move into talking about ‘post-freebie mode' where we switch into educating the parents into all the reasons why having their child in music classes and having their child learn is a value. We can remind them of the freebie and WHY they chose to sign up and get that, and then we go into a little bit more education and giving them the experience of what it looks like to work with a music teacher. We talk all about email sequence and cadence, and I share with Joellyn some of my best recommendations as far as timing and how not to inundate your audience, but how to give them enough information that they are going to take action quickly while this is on their mind, because the longer that they're on your email list, the longer it may take for them to actually take action. It's also important to keep in mind that you want to do what is sustainable for you to make happen as a music teacher, but also that you can recycle your content rather than starting from scratch each time. And remember, the focus of your email should ultimately revolve around what is going to benefit your audience, especially at that moment they are reading it! Give people the opportunity to explore working with you, and then you can offer sales emails every once in a while. Joellyn asks, what's the correct practice on asking people for their email addresses and properly adding them onto her list? We talk about the incentive of the freebie, word of mouth advertising, current students being added, and really knowing that it's permission-based and making sure people are giving us permission to email them. Next, Joellyn asks about what services I recommend most often for email lists? As mentioned earlier, I recommend ConvertKit most often. (My affiliate link again!) And remember, it doesn't cost anything more to go through someone's affiliate link than if you went straight to their website. It just means that they're going to pay me a percentage of what you pay on a monthly basis as a thank you for sending the client over. My reason for Joellyn for going with ConvertKit is because of the price point and functionality. I really like the ease of use and I've been able to help a lot of other music teachers feel comfortable using the platform and I can't say that for some of the other platforms that are out there.They have landing pages and they have forms so you can actually have a landing page right on their site. It doesn't have to live on your website. You can actually have it right in there that you can send people to as well, which is always nice. One of the really nice things about ConvertKit and many of the other platforms that are out there is that you can write your emails in advance. This brought up the follow up question of, could I ask permission through emails? The short answer is yes, you could email them a landing page. As long as you get permission from them, you can add them. You really just don't want to add them blindly. One of the last things that I touched on with Joellyn is when we grow an email list, the biggest advantage to us as the service provider is learning who the people are, who are on our email list. So you want to give people an opportunity to re-engage with you. We talk about fun ways to get the engagement going, and really making the opportunity for a two way conversation We are starting the email with the emails that go out the broadcast emails, but we're always looking to engage with people because the better that we engage with them, the more likely that we're going to create content that's going to be relevant to them and then they're going to become our customers. I really loved this on air coaching session with Joellyn talking about all things related to email list building. Interested in being on the podcast for a coaching session like Joellyn? Be sure to reach out on Facebook at Jaime Slutzky or on Instagram at @jaimeslutzky. And of course, if you would like to have a call with me off air, head on over to http://callwithjaime.com and book a call. I'd love to chat with you!

I am so excited to share Brocha's story with you all. You'll hear all about the trajectory of her music teaching and what she did before creating courses. If you're a music teacher listening and looking for inspiration, this episode is for you! Brocha started her journey as a piano teacher, as she says, “just a regular piano teacher teaching piano....and mostly just teaching my students for exams.” At the time, she was completely content with what she was doing, gave her best to every single lesson. She also acknowledges that doing those things and having had a studio really helped her to transition to her online course. If you have a solid studio and you're looking to fill in the gaps of your actual studio, creating a course is the next step. But you aren't just limited to a course - you can make workshops, you can create a membership... they're also closely related. And this is exactly what Brocha did. After having her first child, she was reluctant to go back to work. So, she managed to build her in-person studio to full-time. The only problem was she didn't really know how to market it, and pretty much just winged it. She focused all of her time and energy on putting 100% into her lessons and making sure her students were happy. Enter COVID. Brocha had wanted to go online for a few different reasons, but she knew she had to put herself out there in order to land students. So, she managed to work on her social media, and ultimately was able to get more students and run her own studio online. She didn't start off full-time, but it was enough to get it going. She said “I literally had no idea about tech or websites. Nothing landing pages, nothing. Marketing, nothing. I literally just learned from scratch. Basically, I had a huge dream to do it.” Brocha admits that she would have had much faster results than she did if she had found the right coach to help her on her journey of creating and marketing a successful online music course. But, she went ahead and taught herself, leading her to the system that she has in place now and that keeps getting her the sales she is getting now! But let's back track a bit… Brocha started learning some of the marketing techniques to be able to get online students. She got to a point where her online studio was good enough, but that was one on one lessons. She quickly realized that in order to be able to be there for her child's bedtime, to be able to create her own schedule, one-on-one lessons wasn't going to cut it, and it wasn't what she wanted to do forever. She started looking for someone to help her go into the one to many model. So she created her own course. She started by thinking- What do my students really enjoy learning? What is missing in the music education space? Now, Brocha has her course, and has also moved into coaching other music teachers. And hey, that's why Brocha and I are working on these projects together! Who doesn't love an organic story like this one? Brocha was teaching in person, then the lockdown happened, she figured out how to get students who are willing to work with her online, figured out the whole marketing thing (and enjoyed it), found success with the marketing and with the course, and has created a framework to help other music teachers do what she herself has done. And of course, had a baby along the way, too. What a journey! Brocha now offers social media and course creation coaching, with a primary focus on social media coaching. With her course and coaching, it really has allowed her to be home with her kids, who have so much of Mom when they get home from school. “If you have a good studio, if you have a good basis for your studio, you're going to be able to do a lot. If you have a good basis for your social media and you have a good basis for quality people who follow you and can learn from you, then they're going to say yes.” If you're listening or reading this in real time and you haven't signed up for our webinar this Thursday, December 9th, be sure to click the link to sign up: https://onlinemusiccourseaccelerator.com If it's after the fact, definitely reach out to us on social media because we have every intention of running this again... over and over and over again. The opportunity is limitless. The opportunity is absolutely limitless. I hope that you found Brocha's story to be the source of inspiration and motivation you needed to take action on your dreams and goals. As always, feel free to send me a message over on Instagram @jaimeslutzky or connect with me at http://callwithjaime.com You can find Brocha over at @iambrocha on Instagram as well!

I am so excited to be in this space with you right now sharing episode 200! This podcast has been a roller coaster and an adventure for sure! Back in episode 100, I changed the name of this podcast and changed the direction of my entire business. And by doing so it opened up doors and opportunities that I am eternally thankful for. I love working with each and every one of my clients. I love interacting with all of the podcast listeners, my followers on social media, members of the Expand Online Community and my email list. It has been an absolute joy reaching in and becoming part of the online music educator landscape. As you know, I am not a music teacher, but that doesn't mean that I don't want to see this industry succeed online. I think that online is the perfect place to do so much more with music education. Download the Make Money Teaching Music Online guide. This episode is about mindset and online music education. My Mindset Sometimes I feel way out of my league and I have to reel myself back in and say to myself that music education chose me as a conduit to help you get where you need to go. Having a positive mindset, for me, is combating the negative self talk. I am not worthy, Do I know enough? Am I going to be taken seriously? Can I really charge that? Are these people going to believe that I can help them with the transformation or the opportunity that they want? Do I have the skills? These (and more) are all things that we kind of continually tell ourselves. They can break us down and keep us out of showing up. Having a positive mindset allows us to show up for our people to show up for the people who want to engage with us on social media, through our podcast, through our emails and most importantly as students and clients. My greatest mindset hack is to remind myself of my definition of the zone of genius: the space where your skill set and your passion collide! Okay, just visualize it. You've got skillset coming at us from the left and you've got passion coming at us from the right and they collide and what happens when two things that come together? They create an explosion! It's an expanse of space where we can spend more time. So the way that I see it, we have a really finite expertise and we have a finite passion and when we bring those together, our expertise can grow, our passion can grow and the product that they create together is even larger. This keeps me so excited to have conversations with you. It fuels me to learn new things and to try new software and to help you accomplish something more and something new. That is my magic. That is what keeps me in the right headspace. Another thing that I do regularly is to remind myself of the journey that I have been on from knowing that I just wanted to be home to raise my kids and to be mom first where work/business allowed me to do just that. As I worked with more and more clients, I was able to get super clear on what I do best. What fills me up the most and what I wanted to do more of it also allowed me to figure out what I wanted to do less of which I think is equally important. These two things keep me in a positive headspace! They keep me wanting to show up every single week on the podcast, to show up every single week in your inbox, to show up every single week inside the Expand Online Community and for all the conversations that I get to have with you. Your Mindset First off -- you are so insanely lucky, you knew that you had a passion and a skill for the given instrument or instruments and modalities that you teach. You are an expert unto yourself. There are not a lot of people who can do what you do and knowing that sets you up for success. You already have experience. You already have successes. You have already done everything you need to to validate that what you're going to do next is going to be successful. Yes, it's going to take work. Yes, there are things that you're not gonna know. But the sheer fact that you've done this before is enough to say, go! You have what it takes to go forward and what you don't know or what you need assistance on can be learned. You can take courses, you can take programs, you can outsource, you can tinker and tinker and watch youtube videos and read blog posts. When you're thinking this is not for me, it's too hard… think back to what I just said: You've done it before, you can do it again. You have what it takes to be successful. The future of online music education Coming out of the pandemic, more and more teachers are going to choose to stay online and reach a larger audience. I think there are going to be more online music programs, more online music courses and more online music group programs. I see a teachers coming together and creating umbrella organizations where there is cross referrals between one program or another program or synergies between educators. In this vision, multiple teachers will work in collaboration, each having their own programs with links and paths through one anothers. And some collaborative programs too! The final thing that I see coming is a greater level of higher music education online. Right now there are a lot of places for beginner knowledge and as we go up the experience, there are fewer and fewer places. As we get into the intermediate and advanced level programming, there is going to be more opportunity for you to take hold and to teach at a higher level at a deeper level. So do I think that music education online is going great places. Absolutely. And do I think that you're going to get there. Yes, 100%! Book a call with me, go to http://callwithjaime.com and let's talk about what you're going to accomplish in 2022 beyond. I would love to be part of your success story.

This is the fifth and final episode of the incredible Founder Series. Has the Founders series inspired you to take a look at any of the platforms we've been discussing? Please share your feedback as a review on Apple Podcasts or by sending me a DM over on Instagram! My business is here to help you expand your music studio and music teaching business online. I know how much passion you have for music education and everything that I put out on the podcast, social media and in my broadcast emails is designed to inspire, motivate, and help you move forward. I know that there is a lot of material, and a lot of things that you could be doing. Sometimes we just really can't do this alone -- that's really what I'm here for. I am here regardless of what phase of your online journey you are on -- from getting your first client or creating your first program, to leveling up and building out your own private empire! This series was all about software to help you provide the best possible private lessons, which are, in my mind, the first major stepping stone towards being able to EXPAND. What you do in private lessons can be extrapolated and pulled out and put into a group format (online interactive group programs, online courses, online workshop series, single workshops, membership sites or anything that leverages the one to many business model!) It's all about your content being delivered to many people through a system. If you have one-to-many programming on your vision board, then you are my kind of person and I'm thrilled you've been enjoying this series. Let's connect on a call- http://callwithjaime.com and if you haven't downloaded the Make Money Teaching Music Online guide, be sure to click here to download it now! Now, to get to what you're actually wanting to see… the questions! What is one misconception about you or your software that you would like to refute. Building a software solution involves a lot of little decisions and some big ones. I asked our founders to share about the architecture and some of the design decisions or technology decisions that they have used. Then, because I know that software works best when it works well with others, we discuss integrations and API access. In addition to the podcast series, I have pulled a ton of content together in a blog post that came out today. You can check it out here! The sooner that you have a platform that you feel confident teaching with, the more opportunities you're going to bring to your students and into your studio. And that's what I want for you, for your online studio to thrive now and well into the future. Please share this podcast series with friends and other music teachers that you know will appreciate it -- and so will I! And so will our Founders! Don't be a stranger - connect with me on Instagram @jaimeslutzky and book a call with me using this link http://callwithjaime.com And if you're feeling inspired and you're serious about making teaching music online your full-time gig, I have lots of ideas as to how you can Make Money Teaching Music Online, so be sure to download the guide now!

This is our fourth and probably most anticipated episode in the Founders Series. Many of your remaining questions about using these made-for-online-music-lessons software options will be answered in this episode. SaaS products, or Software as a Service products, really do require a test drive to determine if they are going to work the way you want them to. It's easy to look at them “on paper” but until we've sat down in front of the screen and interacted with them, it's impossible to know exactly how you will jive with them. And that's what today's episode is all about… using the software and being part of their ecosystem. Before we get into the episode, if you haven't downloaded the Make Money Teaching Music Online guide, be sure to click here to download it now! The software founders in this series are: Michael Grande with Rock Out Loud Live Sam Reti with Muzie.Live Rebecca Featherstone with Musicology Eric DeGrove with Blink Session Music To get started, we talk about $$$ Yup… What is the monthly fee? Do you have a free level, a free tier, or a free trial? And what's included in the different price options? Then to give you a good idea as to what you need to effectively use the platforms and how to make the best experience for your students, we discuss hardware (computers, phones, tablets,etc.) and apps and browser settings. Long ago were the days of computer stores where we pick up software in a box and load floppy discs into the drive to install the software onto our hard drives. Nowadays everything is instantly accessible through app stores and websites. And the same goes for customer support and community. So, I asked what that looks like -- because when you know you're able to connect with other users and the founder in a way that matches your needs, it's a compelling factor! I know you're looking at running the best possible online lessons for your students. And this leads right into the final question of this episode… Other than the live lessons, what else can teachers and students do with your software? This episode was probably the meatiest of this entire series -- I wouldn't be surprised if you want to listen to it more than once! And I'm sure that you know another music teacher who wants to compare and contrast these software options. Will you do me, Rebecca, Eric, Mike and Sam a favor and click the share button inside your podcast app and to forward this episode to another music teacher? I know that making the decision to buy into a new piece of software can be overwhelming and that's truly the last thing I want to see. Reach out to me if you have any questions or would like clarification. And know this, you are in great hands with all of our Founders. If you're serious about making teaching music online your full time gig, I have lots of ideas as to how you can Make Money Teaching Music Online, so be sure to download the guide now! Come back next week for our final episode in this series! And in the meantime, be sure to book a call with me at http://callwithjaime.com so we can chat about where you are on your music teacher journey. You can also find me on Instagram at @jaimeslutzky.

This is our midway point in The Founders Series. (If you haven't listened to episodes 195 and 196 yet, I recommend jumping back to those before proceeding with today's episode, they all kinda build on each other and I want you to be empowered to make the best choice for your online music lessons!) As a reminder, our guests in this series are: Michael Grande of Rock Out Loud Live Sam Reti of Muzie.Live Rebecca Featherstone of Musicology Eric DeGrove of Blink Session Music All of them have graciously given us so much insight already into how their software works to support the online music education community, especially your private lessons. Today, we're diving a little bit more into the technical side so that you can begin to understand how software works and how to best take advantage of all the software updates. The two questions I asked our founders today are: How often does your software get updated? Talk to me about the way you've overcome bandwidth issues to provide a great environment for lessons? The first question covers the software update process -- How often do they update the software? What goes into software updates? How does that get delivered to you?... and so on and so forth. The second question relates to how each software is overcoming bandwidth and latency issues that come from being online. I want you to be able to offer the best lessons to your students and I believe that these software solutions are going to help you get there. I chose this set of questions for this week because all we want is for our software to work and to make us shine, right? And by peeling back a little bit about how the software works, it's going to empower you be super confident that you are going to be comfortable bringing this software into your studio and introducing it to your students. Be sure to hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app. You don't want to miss next week's episode in this Founders Series! Are you ready to Make Money Teaching Music Online? Then be sure to download the guide by following this link. I'd love the opportunity to chat with you if we haven't already done so, so be sure to head on over to http://callwithjaime.com and book a call with me. You can also find me on Instagram at @jaimeslutzky

This is the second episode in the Founders Series. (Be sure to listen to all five episodes in order, to make the best choice for your online music lessons!) Remember when you first listened to a podcast? That feeling of having so much opportunity to learn, be entertained, be informed and gain knowledge… you feel like you're on top of the world. It's kinda the same thing when you hear about a piece of software that was designed specifically for music teachers like you. And I know, because I've seen it, as soon as we hear about one of these SaaS products, we are bound to hear about another and another and another… and soon, our heads are spinning. In this series, I'm taking you on a journey to not just understand what the tools can do for you and your students, but also to help you make the best choice based on what the software provides, the trajectory it's on and some of the guiding principles. Our guests in this series are: Michael Grande of Rock Out Loud Live Sam Reti of Muzie.Live Rebecca Featherstone of Musicology Eric DeGrove of Blink Session Music In this episode, my guests will be sharing with you the why behind the software and some cool features that help to define their products. I want you to come away from this episode with a better idea as to who Mike, Sam, Rebecca and Eric are and the passion they have for the music education industry. This episode covers the following questions: When did you start this company and developing this app/software? Who was your software originally designed for? Why did you decide to build this software? What is the mission of your software? What feature are you most known for? What feature or features are you most proud of? What feature or features have you added most recently? How do you determine what features to add to your software? Remember there is going to be a full detailed blog post at the end of this series which will include the answers in an easy to navigate format. Be sure to hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app because next week we are continuing the conversation with a deep dive into making sure your lessons are as top notch as possible. Are you ready to Make Money Teaching Music Online? Then be sure to download the guide by following this link. I love chatting with my podcast listeners, so whether you've just started listening with this series or have been listening since episode 1, book a call with me at http://callwithjaime.com; I'm also over on Instagram at @jaimeslutzky

This episode is the Introduction to The Founders Series. This is a series of five podcast episodes with the founders of Musicology, Muzie.live, Rock Out Loud Live, and Blink Session Music. This is going to be one of the most powerful series that I have ever done on the podcast -- I'm so excited that you are here to be a part of it. Introduction Sam Reti is the founder of Muzie.Live, an all in one virtual music studio allowing teachers to save time, stay organized and conduct a high quality online hybrid or in person music lessons. Muzie.Live - Virtual Music Lesson Studio Michael Grande is the creator of Rock Out Loud Live, the only United States patented virtual platform that captures the entire tonal range of any instrument. Rock Out Loud Live has high definition audio and near zero latency provides a teaching experience unmatched by any other platform. RockOutLoud Rebecca Featherstone is the CEO of Musicology, a peer to peer video conferencing platform that is built to empower the non power user with interactive and collaborative features, bringing down the barrier of the screen and engaging students, lessening teacher exhaustion, and breaking the barrier of online lessons and making it more like an in person lesson. Musicology - Musicology Eric DeGrove is the founder of Blink Session Music, a platform that exists to help you as a music teacher succeed in teaching lessons online, creating an easier time taking what you've done in person and transitioning that online. Knowing music teaching is more than just what happens online and that it's more than just that video conference, we take into consideration that it's also about what happens before and after the lesson- homework, appointment reminders, etc. Blink Session Music - The Future of Music Lessons About the Series Any one of these software options can change your business. They give you the confidence that when you teach music lessons online you are giving the best product to your students. It's all about setting them up for the success that they want out of lessons. Sam, Mike, Eric and Rebecca have put your music studio at the forefront of the work they do daily on their apps and in their respective communities. They look at technology as an opportunity rather than a barrier so that you can be successful. Whether you decide to look at Muzie, Rock Out Loud Live, Musicology, or Blink Session Music, my goal with these next four episodes is to bring you answers to some of the most important questions that you have about them and how they compare and contrast with each other. Also forthcoming (at the end of the series) is a mega blog post that has all of the details that we discuss in a nice easy to read manner which will allow you to compare the solution side by side by side by side. Why am I doing this series? This series came about because I was seeing a lot of teachers, just like you, asking in all sorts of Facebook groups, what people are using to teach online? On every single one of these questions, I will see the exact same thing, over and over: Zoom with the original audio setting. tagging Sam saying use Muzie.live tagging Mike saying use Rock Out Loud Live tagging Rebecca saying use Musicology mentioning Blink Session Music as the newest on the block. And that does absolutely nothing for the original poster… they have a ton of options shared and no value given. I knew I had the right platform and angle to do something different. This podcast is my response. This series and the blog post are going to become the go to resource to respond to those questions. And, at least quarterly, I'm planning on updating the blog post with the latest and greatest from these offers. As you know, I'm not a music teacher. I'm a tech and strategy gal. I know that teaching a full docket of private clients online is the first milestone to moving onto group programs, courses and membership sites (which is what I focus on with my clients.) This podcast series is something that is near and dear to my heart; I am so gracious that Mike, Eric, Sam, and Rebecca all said yes. They all agree with me that their respective software solutions stand on their own and it's time for there to be a definitive impartial comparison of them. Be sure to hit the subscribe button in your podcast apps so that the rest of the series comes to you, and check out my brand new guide --> Make Money Teaching Music Online. And, as always, don't forget to book a call with me at http://callwithjaime.com and we can just jam on whatever is going on in your business. Or, find me on instagram @jaimeslutzky

When it comes to social media, it's so easy to post things that don't move your business forward and even easier to feel unsure of what to post. Let's set the record straight with a few tried-and-true posts! There's so many trends and so many things going on on social media that I am officially breaking my silence and sharing a few tips on posting… this is going to be run! If you're wondering why I haven't really talked about this before, it's because I'm a techie and never let myself push too far outside of that box. Marketing felt so far outside… but I was wrong. I have thoughts and suggestions that are worth sharing (not to mention that I've been on social media longer than I have had my business and we're already over a decade on that!) Here are three things that every music teacher can and should post on social media on a weekly basis and a couple of things to avoid. #1 Actionable Content My favorite thing to post and this is actionable content. We want to post things that people can actually do and take action on. Here's some examples: If you work with kids and you are marketing to their parents and your social media feed is for their parents, give them some fun activities that they can do with their kids and then in the caption for that post, make sure to tell them what you want them to do when they are taking that actionable content- post to their story and tag you in that where they're now sharing the action that they took with their child. If you are working with adults, maybe the actionable content is to try a certain technique or to do something that allows them to test out actually play the instrument or try something that can then be shared back on their stories or on their Facebook page. The idea with actionable content is to have people associate what they see from you in their feed as something joyful, fun, and exploratory that they can do in their music space. I have a client who does a really great job with this. She works with young children and so her feed is for the parents and she posts things that they can do with their kids in the car. #2 Student Wins and Successes You can and should post your students wins, your students success, your students testimonials, and reviews. These are great because they are putting your work in someone else's voice. This is where you go from being, “Oh that music teacher who posts on social media” to “Oh that music teacher that I want to work with...” because it's in someone else's words. Think about it. How popular are Yelp, Google reviews, Podcast reviews and ratings. People want to hear what others have to say about you. When we can bring that into our feed, it just adds so much power to everything else that we are doing. #3 Authority Posts Make sure your posts are showcasing your authority. They should showcase that you really do care and that your business is thriving and growing. These are: anecdotal things that might have happened in your studio exploratory things that you are trying for yourself in your own music practice opportunities for you to say I'm not just the teacher- I am always learning, I am always exploring, I am always doing, and I can teach to you. We want people to look at you, not just as the piano teacher down the street, but the piano teacher who is constantly improving herself or himself to better their lessons to stay at the forefront of opportunity for their students to have successes unto themselves. Let's work to have people see you as THE piano teacher or THE guitar teacher or THE voice teacher! Authority posts demonstrate that you know what you're talking about. We want people to know that you are truly an authority and that you're not just doing this out of rote practice. OK, you knew it was coming... I also want to note some things to avoid -- Don't shy away from sharing that you have openings or that you are offering a new program. Just make sure that we are not posting exclusively promotional content all the time. Sign up, sign up, sign up, do this, do that, do that, do this. We don't want people to always feel like when they see our stuff that we are expecting them to pull out their wallet, or give us their email address, or join something. Sprinkle in your promotional content because you are running a business and it has to happen. Make sure that your feeds don't feel overly promotional. Avoid sharing too much of other people's content. Like I said, I want you to be seen as the go to, I want you to be seen as the authority. I want you to be known as the best choice for the people who you best want to serve. When we post other people's content, we are essentially saying, here's somebody who knows something more than I do. When we do learn really cool things from other people, let's flip that around and say, “Okay, I learned this really cool technique…” and then you formulate that in a way that it becomes an authoritative post rather than just sharing someone else's content. My goal with this episode was entirely to help you think about social media as a vehicle to grow and to extend yourself and to feel really good about interaction. I love being on social media and seeing your posts. If we are not friends on Facebook, go ahead and send me a friend request at Jaime Slutzky. If you don't follow me on Instagram yet, go ahead and follow me @jaimeslutzky. And of course, if you would like to have that call with me, head to http://callwithjaime.com and book a call. I'd love to chat with you!