Paso por paso. Step by step. This is what I always say to others when it comes to learning music, but I often forget to say it to myself. Creating an online business and teaching curriculum can be overwhelming. It is easy to get scattered with your work time and even after a full day of work, it can feel like you have accomplished nothing. It takes time to build something of value but with the added demands of an adult life (as opposed to a student life), we now have to use focus to become productive. Switch Off to Switch [...]

One of the biggest draw cards for online business is the ability to leverage resources and scale the size of business as a whole. For instance, as an individual guitar teacher, I would struggle to maintain a studio of 50 students a week, but online I can easily manage an entire school of over 600. There are several elements that help the leveraging process and one of them is automation. Automation allows you to delegate certain tasks to a piece of software that will take action when certain processes are “triggered”. It can be a little bit of a mind bender [...]

Traditionally, when we study with a teacher, we meet with them privately or in a group, pay them for their time and leave. This business model essentially trades time for money. The student pays $x for an hour of the teacher’s time. If they want more, they pay more. This is a wasteful use of our time. All artistic practices have core fundamentals that students need to learn. Repeating this to every student individually is also redundant and wasteful. These two aspects of traditional teaching are redundant, and they are also limiting your ability to serve a larger audience. Teaching online [...]

Derek Sivers, the creator of CD Baby, writes in his book Anything You Want that your success is directly related to the amount of people that you help. I believe in this idea, and I feel that guiding your efforts with the aim to help first and foremost will result in a successful business. After all, what businesses really do is solve problems. There is a time and place to provide training and information for free. However, for the sake of your own sustainability and also the dedication of the student, you need to charge a fee for your tutelage. As [...]

When creating materials for online education, add what is necessary and nothing more. Bloated courses can become confusing and cumbersome. Long videos take a long time to watch and too much text is taxing. Padding things out to make them seem substantial doesn’t benefit anyone. Keep it simple. There is power is simplicity.