Do You Even Need A Website? Here's What It's Costing You

Do you even need a website, or is word of mouth enough? In this episode I answer that honestly, for teachers with no website, an outdated one, or one that has never quite earned its place. I talk about what most music teacher websites get wrong, why trying to appeal to everyone appeals to no one, and what changed when I stopped writing generic copy and started writing the truth about who I am and who I teach. I cover what families are looking for when they land on a website, the mistakes that turn ideal students away without you realising, why your pricing page is telling people something whether you mean it to or not, and the specific story of how I rewrote my own website, and what happened afterwards.

In this episode:

• Whether a music teacher really needs a website, or if word of mouth can be enough
• What families are looking for when they land on a music teacher’s website
• The common mistakes that make a website feel unprofessional or uninviting
• What your website should say about you and your studio
• Why your pricing page, or the lack of one, is telling families something
• The simple changes that make the biggest difference
• My own website rewrite story, and what changed when I told the truth

Resources mentioned:

Episode 7: How I Built A 50-Person Waiting List

How To Attract Your Ideal Piano Students

Access the show notes here: Episode 9 Show Notes

Transcript

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Do you even need a website as a music teacher? It's a fair question, and if you've built your studio entirely on word of mouth, on recommendations, and you've got a waiting list that fills itself, you might have decided, no, I don't need a website. For years, I would not have argued with you. But today I want to give you a straight answer. It might not be the one you're hoping for. It's not a generic yes, everybody needs a website if they're a music teacher. Because the honest answer depends on what your website's for. And for most teachers, myself included, for a long time, have never really worked that out. So whether you have no website or you have an old website that you've not looked at in years, or if you're rather proud of your website, this episode is for you because your website is doing far more work, or in some cases far less work than it should. I'm Victoria. I started teaching piano part-time 18 years ago alongside a career in pharmaceutical market research, and I made pretty much every mistake you can make when it comes to running a teaching business. But today I run a thriving studio from my home on the south coast of England with students I love and a waiting list I'm proud of. I started this podcast because I want that for you too. If you've ever said yes to a reschedule you really didn't want to do, felt your heart sink when your phone buzzed with another last minute cancellation, or found yourself putting off increasing your fees for another year because the timing never feels quite right, this is the podcast for you. I've been there and come out the other side with a teaching business that lights me up every single day, and I'm here to help you do the same. I've mentioned before that when I first started my part-time piano teaching, I got a lot of advice from my childhood piano teacher who is a good friend to this day and only lives a few miles up the road. And she gave me lots of really helpful advice, lots of really good advice about cancellation policies, even though it took me a while to actually take them on board and enforce them myself. But one thing that didn't occur to me at the time was the idea of having a website. My piano teacher never mentioned having a website. I don't think she had one, it's possible she had a basic one, but it didn't feature in any of her recommendations to me. And as far as I saw it, it was this thing that was way out of my league having a website that you had to pay for, and that would come out of the income you made from the teaching. And because I was just doing part-time teaching and I only had a few students at the time, it just wasn't the right thing for me. The main bit of advice uh that I heard from my teacher was that I would gain new students through word of mouth. Now, having gone through the whole process and hearing almost every teacher online, whenever the subject comes up, how do I find new students? Guaranteed that 90% of the music teachers will respond with, oh, word of mouth. People, you know, you'll get a student and then they'll tell their friends and you'll get more students and so on. And there is an element of truth to that, but it's the most frustrating piece of advice when you're just starting out because you have no one to talk about how good you are as a music teacher, and no one ever seems to address this or acknowledge it. The other side of it is yes, word of mouth can get the ball rolling and it can keep new students coming your way, but the pool from which those students are coming is pretty small compared to what a website can offer you. Your word of mouth referrals are restricted to the immediate circles of your current students and families. So the easiest situation to think about is mums in the playground or dads in the playground and both. Talking to each other about their child who's just started music lessons with this music teacher and sharing their contact details because they want to start their child with a music teacher for that particular instrument. So I want to say, I'm not trying to diss the word of mouth concept. It has its uses, it is very useful and very prominent, and it's in fact it's the way that many music teacher studios have been filled for many, many decades, but things have been changing over the last few decades with respect to how students and families find their new teachers because of the internet, because of Google. It's become much more common that if you are going to search for a music teacher for your child, you go and Google it, you have a look and see who is in your local area thanks to Google Business Profile. But I would like to say that if word of mouth alone has filled your studio so far, that really is a genuine achievement. And I'm not going to say oh it doesn't work, because clearly it does. But word of mouth as a marketing approach, i.e. as a way to gain new students, has its limits, especially when teachers want to grow beyond their current circle of students and families, and not needing to be dependent on referrals that might dry up unpredictably. Having a more predictable way to attract new students to your studio is where the website really gains its place. For most prospective families outside of your existing circle, so nothing to do with any of your current students or families, whether by school connections or local area connections, most of those prospective families, your website is the very first contact they have with you. And it happens so long before you actually ever get to speak to them for the first time. So that's their first experience of you, and they are already going to be forming an opinion about whether you're the right teacher before you even know they exist, before you even know they're looking at your website. So if your website is vague and generic, if it's out of date, or if you don't have a website, you're not just missing an opportunity. You're really just relying entirely on referrals to do the work a website could be doing for you around the clock. So you don't need to rely on the goodwill of your current students to leave a review either online or to talk about you in whatever social groups they're in. And none of us like asking for reviews, do we? I try and make a point of asking mine every so often to leave me Google reviews because it's very helpful, but it's not an enjoyable part and it's kind of something that we can quite easily push to the side, and so we do. If you have a website and it says something specific about who you are and who you teach, it does all the filtering and the introducing for you before you even exchange a single message with this prospective student or family. So the first time I realised my website was a bit generic and bland, I thought it was great until I learnt more about marketing, online marketing and how this whole thing works, is when I started engaging with other music teachers online, primarily piano teachers to start with, but then more broadly any music teachers because we're all in a fairly similar situation when we work for ourselves. Listening to what other teachers and mentors were talking about online. Nicola Kentan pops into my head quite frequently because she is the mastermind behind Vibrant Music Teaching, which is a membership for music teachers. It's a fantastic membership, but she has done she's got a YouTube channel and she's made loads and loads of really useful games that I've used with my students, but she's also got some really good advice when it comes to running your studio. And she was one of the first people I heard talk about all the things about cancellation policies and running your studio really effectively. I also started listening to some online marketing experts a few years back on podcasts, Amy Porterfield and Jenna Kutch, you might not know who they are, but they speak very eloquently about how to engage with your ideal client in the generic term. Obviously, it's our ideal students or parents of our ideal students. And so I started to absorb some of these ideas about marketing, and it was sorry, I should probably just say at this point, when you hear me talk about marketing or anyone talk about marketing, I used to get really switched off and think, what? That's nothing to do with anything I know about. I'm a music teacher and I just want to find my students and teach them. But I have to tell you, having even the smallest bit of knowledge about marketing goes a long way to helping you create the studio of your dreams. To create the studio where you attract your ideal students and you can teach at the hours you want to teach, and these students are the ones you want to teach because of X, Y, and Z. There needs to be some kind of marketing, which is just the term that describes how you communicate about yourself in a way that enables your students and families to find you. You're forgiven if you think that the website is really just a place for people to find your contact details and get in contact with you. In reality, your website is where your ideal student decides whether you're the right teacher for them or not. When someone lands on your website, they've usually already decided that they want lessons in the particular instrument they are looking for a teacher for. What they are working out is whether they want lessons with you specifically. And unbeknownst to them, they're looking for trust signals. They're looking for evidence that you are a real, established, legitimate teacher, not someone who might disappear after they make their first payment. So trust is a really big factor here. They're also looking for relevance. So do you teach someone like them? If it's a retired adult, have you got anything on your website that refers to teaching adults or adult beginners or retired adults, anything at all that allows them to see themselves in your students cohort? And they're also looking for a some kind of warmth and connection, some kind of sense of who you are as a person and a teacher, not just a list of qualifications. Now, just a note on the qualifications side of things. It's absolutely fine to put your qualifications up on your website as evidence that you know your stuff. The one caution I would make is that you're not just all singing and dancing about the fact that you have X, Y, and Z qualifications. Because although it does go some way towards building trust with a potential student or family, it doesn't actually tell them anything about who you are as a person. And we know full well that the relationship between the teacher and the student or the teacher and the family is so important, and it's and it's based on things that have nothing to do with whether you've got a qualification in this or that. It's whether your personalities go well together, whether your approach aligns with their expectations, whether your methods are acceptable to them. I'm not suggesting anyone's got unacceptable methods, but you know what I mean. It's not really about the qualifications. As a bare minimum, that will just be out there in the world. Yes, I've done this many grades, yes, I've completed this professional development qualification, but you need to go much deeper to actually have some way of building a connection with your prospective students and families. Having a website in itself is a really big trust signal because the vast majority of people know that you need to put a little bit of financial investment into a website, so it's a good indicator that you are the real deal. You are a teacher of said instrument and you offer lessons for that instrument because you've put money into a website that says so. It tells a prospective family that you are established, there's a way to contact you, and that you're serious about what you do before they've even exchanged a single message with you. It moves you away from the unfortunate stereotype with piano teachers in particular, that we are all retired old grannies who are just doing some extra lessons to boost our pension. No, we're not all grannies, are we? And it's the stereotype that persists and is gradually going away with time. And hopefully, this podcast and all the stuff that we all talk about online is moving it away from that identity because it's a bit cringy now, isn't it? Having the website is an immediate tick in the box that yes, you are a real music teacher and you care about what you do enough to put the effort into creating a website to attract your students. I have a student who I teach currently, and he first contacted me through my website, as most of them had. He wanted to start learning to play the piano but without learning to read music because he has limited time to master it. This was so far outside of my comfort zone, and I initially actually replied and said, I don't think I'm the right teacher for you before even arranging a consultation lesson, because I just thought this isn't my area of expertise, I can't offer what he needs, so I was honest and I just said I don't think I'd be the right teacher for you. And I suggested that he keep looking for another teacher. But he replied and convinced me to do a trial lesson, and I'm so glad he did because, as I said, he is a current student today, and he is wonderful, he is a lovely person, he's a joy to teach. And when I agreed to take him on, I said, please be aware that this is a first for me teaching someone how to play the piano without reading music. So it's been quite a good learning curve for me, but he was fully on board. He did actually say that he had contacted several of the other teachers in the area, and he chose me because he got the best vibes off of my website and all the content that I put out there. From the detail I'd put in about who I am, my approach to teaching, and how I feel about music. It's a great example of how showing who you are to the world will help encourage the right students to find you. And even though I'm not teaching him to play the piano by way of reading music, it has pushed me out of my comfort zone but in a really good way. I have had to, and I have enjoyed doing this, develop other ways to communicate how chords are structured or elements of technique, and it's all without relying on sheet music, which is uncomfortable. I should say it was uncomfortable actually, but now I'm so used to it, it just feels like a normal way of teaching, but it's one that I never considered being comfortable with. So, really, it's been a very positive thing for me as well, and I look forward to his lesson every week. Oh, and I should say he was completely happy with my honesty, he took it on board, and he's still with me today, and he plays beautifully. He's played some really wonderful songs. So I think it's useful at this point to talk about some of the common mistakes that are made on websites that actually turn families away. Don't worry, I've made a lot of these mistakes too, and it's worth understanding about them now, even if you don't have a website so that you can log it for later, or if you do have a website so that you can maybe consider are there any things you could improve that will improve your uptake of new students. So I'd say to start with, the biggest mistake is trying to appeal to everyone. Saying something like, I teach adults and children of all ages, beginners to advanced, whether you want exams, festivals, or just to play for fun, it feels generous and inclusive, but it actually has the opposite effect. When you say everything, you actually connect with no one. So the more specific you are about who you teach and how you teach, the easier it is for the right family to recognise themselves in your words and actually reach out to book a consultation lesson. My own early copy on my website was something like that. It was this scattergun effect. I was trying to hit every single person who might possibly want piano lessons, which meant it didn't really connect with anyone. And thinking back, it it really does make me cringe because it's just this generic catch all statement that doesn't mean anything, it doesn't show anything about who I am, nothing about my personality or who I want to teach or what I love about music, it's just rubbish. And when I really think about I did put or just for fun, you know, if you just want to play for fun. That's probably the worst bit for me because it's suggesting that all the other things aren't fun. Preparing for exams, preparing for festivals, and playing in recitals is not fun. When it should be fun, there should be fun in all music making. So I really regret putting that in as my first attempt at my website description. Some of the other common mistakes are if you use imagery on your website, which I would encourage you to do because nobody wants to just see text on a website these days. If you only use imagery of young children, suggesting you teach young children, but you also teach adults, any adults that come to your website will not see themselves in your studio, so they probably won't even bother to to contact you and ask if you teach adults. Whereas you're sitting there ready to teach them and they've got no idea that you're even possibly the right teacher for them. Having no sense of personality on your website or your ethos, your ethos of of teaching, puts your website into the bland category. It means if they have Googled, for example, piano teachers in my area and then they've gone and looked through half a dozen websites, I can guarantee you your website is not going to stand out in their memory for any reason if there's nothing for them to hold on to, if it's just a standard blurb about the fact that you teach all ages and all abilities and for any purpose. You need to have some warmth around the copy. When I say copy, I mean the text that you put on your website. Sometimes people leave out-of-date information on their websites, out-of-date fees or availability or photos that look really dated, or it's been the same photo for years. It's one of those things that you don't need to constantly be tweaking your website, but it helps if maybe at least once a year, if not more often, maybe once every six months, go and have a look at your website and see if you're still happy with it. See if you, as a prospective student, would be enticed to understand more about this teacher if you landed on your homepage. Because if there's nothing to reassure a nervous enquirer before they click through, you're just leaving all these potential students not on the table, that's the saying, isn't it? You're just leaving them to wander off and find another teacher, and they could have been your perfect match as a student. And something I have noticed is the vast majority of adults who inquire about music lessons with me have a fair amount of nervousness about it because it's a vulnerable position to be in as an adult. If you have ever gone for lessons as a teacher, you'll know exactly what I mean. Even if it's lessons in something else. As an adult, we expect ourselves to be accomplished at everything. So being in the learner's seat is quite a vulnerable and exposed place to be, and it's quite uncomfortable. Even though we know that we were there once, we were probably more than likely there as children. But when you're an adult, it's very different. So these potential adult students need even more encouragement and support, and they need to feel even more looked after, I suppose. Not in an over-the-top way, but just to know that they are not going to be made to feel silly or ridiculous or stupid. And so if you can be warm in the way that you write text on your website, that goes a really long way to developing this trust that we need in order to make first connections with potential students. So I'm not going to be exhaustive about this. There's a whole bunch of mistakes that could be made on websites, so I'll just run through some of them. I've reviewed some websites for other teachers, and some of them it's just standard practice for what's easy to read and easy to consume online. And don't forget, lots of people will be Googling on their phones and on a phone screen reading your website, not just on a desktop. So it needs to be easy to read on a phone as well. So they're obvious but they're really important. Typos or grammatical errors really shouldn't be there. When you are an educator of any kind, the expectation is that you can create text that is correctly spelled and with correct grammar. If you have too much text all bunched together, very few people will have the patience to read all of that. So definitely break up every couple of sentences with a picture. You can use stock imagery. There's lots of free imagery available if you don't have students yet, or if you do have students but you don't want to post pictures about them. Remember with GDPR and consent for sharing pictures of your students, that's all very important too. But having some kind of imagery, you can even just take pictures yourself of your instrument, your piano, your studio surroundings. It can even just be nice pictures like my mum's pink hydranger that we rescued from her house when we were clearing out her house back in 2019. It was in this little pot and it had six little flower heads, and now it's This enormous beautiful hydrangea bush in our garden. I'll take some pictures. I need to post them because it's so beautiful. I use imagery from that hydranger every year because it's so lovely. And I know it's just flowers, and that's nothing to do with piano teaching, but it's things that make websites look aesthetically pleasing. You can add personality to it, and that particular plant is very meaningful to me for obvious reasons. So it adds more of who you are when you take your own pictures. That's just an aside. If the text is too small to read, that's going to put people off, so make sure the text is big enough. And think about the layout of the pages so that the information is clear that it's not all crammed into one long page that you're scrolling through. So creating different pages for different things like your about me section and a contact me section and a my favorite pieces section or why I teach or you know FAQs, all the rest of it. Just a very short note on elements of branding, uh, because this might feel like it's going a bit too far. But if you have a website, you can very easily create your own logo using Canva. You don't have to pay someone to design a logo for you if you don't want. I certainly didn't, I just created mine on Canva. And one thing I would recommend is although it's very tempting to use elements of music in your logo, that's still fine, but I've seen a lot of logos that look very similar to other logos because there's only so many ways you can look at a treble clef or a bass clef or a musical note. I decided to steer clear of that and just go really simple. I literally have a colourful background on my square logo and in white letters Victoria Clark piano. So it's my whole name and the instrument I teach. And it's worked out fine for me. And it means it's very clear as soon as that logo is seen by a prospective student, whether it's on your website or whether it's on your social media pages, you are a teacher of that instrument, and they'll remember your name if they can see your name in the logo. So those are just my recommendations. You don't have to stick to those at all, but those are some of the things that I have seen. Some things that can not come across in the way as they were intended. Also, having a confusing studio name. So going for a play on words that is something to do with music, it is clever. Some of them work really well, and some of them don't. Some of them actually come together to form different words, and that can be a bit embarrassing if you try and create a website made of these unusual words that when you string them together, you get some other words you didn't intend. So just be aware of that if you're you're doing that. And I'm saying this as someone who went down this whole thought process myself. When I was trying to name my studio, I thought, oh, I bet I could be really clever with some musical words and create a studio business that sounds absolutely musical and is really clever, but no, I steered away from that after realizing it could go really wrong. When you are writing text for your website, put your personality into it. Don't try to be extra professional because it can come across as a little bit corporate, kind of cold, a lack of personality, a lack of warmth, and it's okay to not be writing in perfect prose. So I know everything we learned at school was obviously right with correct grammar and spelling, but it's okay to write in the way that you speak. So that someone reading something on your website is starting to get to know you by the way you write, the by the way you might speak. So when they meet you in person, it will feel familiar, it will feel more personal, and it again goes towards building that trust, which is going from zero and it needs to go up to whatever percentage, I don't know, for the potential student or family to sign up for lessons. Okay, so what should your website actually say about you? It is down to you how much detail you put in. I would say one of the most important things to include is what you believe about teaching, not just a generic list of services. That's that's the quickest way to have someone glaze over and scroll past. If you don't run your studio as an exam treadmill, i.e. exam after exam after exam, then say so. Make a point about it. I've made a point about it on my website because it's the last thing I want to do is find myself in a situation where I've taken on a new student and I didn't realise the parent was gung-ho on going for exam after exam, and I disagree very strongly with it as a process of learning to play the piano because it's so damaging in many ways. I think this is a topic for another day. But it's if you make that clear up front, then those particular families will see that and they'll go elsewhere. They'll go find a teacher that does that, and that's fine, that's good. It means you're streamlining the process of finding your ideal students by basically repelling the ones that you don't want to teach anyway. It's it's a good thing. If you love working with nervous adult returners to the instrument that you teach, say that. Include reassuring language about the vulnerability of coming back to an instrument. When they read it, they will know that they see themselves in your studio because they will feel seen and heard even though they've never spoken to you directly, because you were talking about the things that are on their mind, the things that worry them about coming back to an instrument as an adult who has nerves. It's a vulnerability that you're acknowledging, and therefore it increases the trust factor with you. So the families that feel at home with you are the ones that you are wanting to attract. They are the ones that connect with your approach to teaching. They will have more connections than are probably stated in your website copy that you won't realise. There'll be more connections in personality and in view towards learning an instrument and the purpose of learning the instrument and so on. So the more you can put about yourself, the better. If you want to attract daytime students, such as retired adults or home educated children, you have to say it on your website. You have to be direct and say, I teach retired adults and home educated children because of X, Y, and Z. And any photos and imagery that you use on your website need to reflect the range of students you teach, not just the easiest group to photograph. So again, use stock photos if you're not sharing real student photos. As long as you cover the students that you are wanting to attract, they'll see themselves in those pictures. So for my own website, when I was making some big changes to it, I was a little bit uncomfortable including some things, and I dithered a lot, and I thought about the pros and cons and I decided to include it in the end. And this particularly is the referencing losing my mum quite suddenly in 2019. I included it not to make people uncomfortable, but because it is a big part of my story. It's the reason I switched from part-time piano teaching to full-time teaching, because losing her in the space of a month made me realise just how short life is and how much I love teaching the piano, and that it only made sense to if it didn't, you know, adversely affect any other areas of my life with my husband and my children. Then I wanted to teach full-time. I wanted to do the thing that made me happiest because life is so short. So I included it in there, and it is quite a vulnerable thing to include. But do you know what? I've mentioned this in another episode. One of my current students, who is one of my favourite students, I shouldn't have favourites, but I do. We all do. She is an adult student, and she directly contacted me through my website after reading about losing my mum because she had recently lost her mum. So it was I know that's a very specific situation, but that connection is what prompted her to send me a message and then book a trial lesson, and here we are today, a few years on, and she's a wonderful student. We have so much fun playing duets together, and it all came from sharing that one very painful but specific detail about my life and the reason that I do what I do. It shows the passion I have for teaching the piano. It's the reason that I do all of this because it makes me so happy and I know that I am making the best use of my life. I'm not forcing myself to do a job that I used to think I was expected to do in an office where I feel so much intense social anxiety that my weight drops, because that's what happens when I get really anxious, and all these other negative physical responses to high anxiety. It's why I do this. So it was worth sharing, and I'm glad it's on there because it's a real part of who I am. And anyone who reads that, even if they don't have a connection with that or if it's a bit upsetting, my website will be that much more memorable than a generic I teach everyone, no matter what age or ability. You won't be remembered if if that's all you can say about your teaching. So some of the other details that I put onto my website were the way I love playing the piano, what playing the piano has represented for me individually, uh, because it has provided a way to express myself without words. And as someone who was intensely shy as a child and a teenager, I've almost gotten over it now because you know we talk to lots of people all the time, don't we? I'm still better one-on-one, but it allowed me to have this amazing thing that is to this day and will do for the rest of my life, be so good for my mental health, for mindfulness and for focus and for achievement and satisfaction and all the things that playing the piano provides for me. I talk about that on my website because I want to help other people discover that joy too. And I know not everyone will have the same experience as me in playing the piano. We're all different, and everyone will get something different from it. But if I can impart or share or enable other students to experience even a fraction of what I experience when I play the piano, that's what I want. I want to share the love about music, and that's my why. And I put that on my website because I want my students to know that's how I feel about music. I'm not just, you know, sure, I'll teach you whatever, and I'm not really into this, and you know, that's not me. And I'm sure that's not you either. Otherwise, you wouldn't be listening to this. So it's a really good idea to try and think about what it is that drives you, why do you teach music? What do you love about it? What do you love about your own instrument? All these kind of questions. I'd like to talk a little bit about pricing. This is a topic, whether you have a website or not, whether you publish your fees online or wherever you advertise about your music teaching services, there is a divide between music teachers who do publish their prices and those who don't. So I think it's worth talking about. Whether you do publish them or not, and you have a website, your website is communicating something about money. So a website with no pricing information at all can read as a bit evasive. I know that when I'm searching for anything, if I can't find the prices for the service that I'm looking for, I won't bother contacting them. I'd rather just be able to see rather than having to speak to someone who I might get sucked into a conversation with and then I realise you know it's too expensive for me or it's too cheap and I don't trust it. Just I find it personally, I find it better being able to see prices. So think about your potential students. If you don't put your prices up anywhere, it puts the burden on the family to ask, which lots of them just won't want to do. In today's world, it's all about ease of communication. Very few people these days would rather phone a potential music teacher. They would much rather send an email or a message, whether that's via Facebook messaging or WhatsApp or through a website, would much rather do that than phone and speak to someone. Even though you could communicate much more clearly and quickly, and you get a much quicker read of the person when you actually speak to them because we pick up all sorts of clues in voices when we speak to them. Most people don't want to do that. So if there is any kind of barrier to making contact with you, they'll just go elsewhere instead. Compare it with a website with clear, confident pricing. This really signals professionalism and it also saves you from awkward conversations further down the line. Your own approach and your reasoning for it, whatever that is, deserves an honest airing here rather than a one-size-fits-all rule. So, as I said, my childhood piano teacher, she gave me all of this advice, and her advice was actually not to put any prices up, to invite them for a consultation lesson and then discuss it then, because then they would see the value they're getting and they would understand what you're offering. I agreed and I did that. Although, in the very very beginning, I um I put an ad on Gumtree. I don't know if Gumtree is still around. I put an ad up on Gumtree and I said, Piano teacher in training looking for five students to build experience as a piano teacher. And I offered 30-minute lessons for £10 each. And I was very happy to publish that because that price was so low, and because I was framing myself as in training, it took some of that imposter syndrome away, even if it didn't remove it completely. It made it easy enough for me to put the ad out there and feel okay taking £10 from someone for a half-hour lesson. When I switched to full-time teaching in 2019, I did publish my prices because I had decided between everything I'd heard about up until that point that being obvious about my pricing was important. If I was too expensive for some students, that's fine. They would just look elsewhere. But I had understood by that point that if you go in too cheap, you either arouse suspicion in the sense that I wonder why they're so cheap, they must be a terrible teacher or not think much of themselves, or not have much experience, or it just attracts the wrong kind of students. The students that look for the cheapest teachers are very unlikely to be your ideal students. There's no such thing as getting a deal when it comes to music tuition because it's such a long-term thing and the journey is long. It's one of those things that if they are trying to scrimp and save by finding the cheapest teacher, they're probably not going to stick around for long. They probably don't value or maybe don't understand the concept of music lessons and that it is a long-term thing if you want to get something decent out of it, a decent musical education. And of course, instruments are expensive. Certainly, pianos are expensive, and the least expensive decent digital piano starts at about four or five hundred pounds. So just a note on that. You'll attract the wrong students, then other things can go wrong. Equally, you don't want to be too expensive, but this is where most teachers fear the most, and I don't think I've ever seen anyone put their music teaching fees at a really high rate and not worry about it. I everyone errs on the side of caution, in fact, and many many music teachers undercharge, either knowingly undercharge or just don't believe that they are worth more, which is something I talk about a lot. We are worth more than we think. So, fast forward to today, I absolutely always put my current fees on my website. I make it really clear, I explain how it's priced, how it's charged, because I do the monthly billing, what it costs per hour and per month, and you've got the FAQ section for more details. Like I said, I feel really strongly that prices should be published because it's actually one of the first questions most people ask, and that's not because it's the most important, but I think it's just a reassurance of am I stepping into something that is wildly out of my league because it's always a possibility, or is this what I was expecting to pay for piano lessons or harp lessons or violin lessons or whatever you offer? It's just a reassurance that you need to get out of the way first so that you can get on with the more important uh topic of understanding whether it's going to be a good fit, you and the student and from both sides. Now, something I would advise against is if you put your pricing on your website but it's really unclear what it covers or how much it's for. So if you have like a complicated billing system where you bill for a certain number of lessons but you get a certain number of buffer lessons free during the year for missed lessons, and if you have lessons during holiday periods that they cost this much, and I'm only mentioning this because I saw this conversation in a Facebook group, and it was all about this teacher who was upset that the student had refused to pay the notice period, but when she shared her uh studio policies, it was so complicated, very few of us could actually understand how it worked in practice. There were so many different clauses that, oh, in this case this would happen, in this case, this would happen. And if you have that to do with your pricing on your website, if it's too hard to understand, people are just going to run in the other direction because no one wants to feel stupid when it comes to money and numbers, and being clear is the quickest way to just ticking that box and moving them forward to let's meet in person and discuss the real stuff. So after setting up my website for the first time when I switched to full-time teaching, it stayed like that for a couple of years, and then as I became more knowledgeable about all of this and how it worked, and connected with more piano teachers and music teachers online and engaged in professional development, I learned enough that made me realise there was a rewrite needed for my website. I switched around a lot of things. One of the things I remember, one of the biggest things I remember changing, was changing who I was writing for. So the first time I wrote my website copy, it was like I had a megaphone and I was saying, I'm a piano teacher, I do this, I can offer this, come and get it. Obviously, I didn't say come and get it, but it was that kind of approach. And what I switched it to, which is what you need to do for a website, is you need to think about one particular student, your ideal student, and speak directly to them. Right in a way that is addressing them and the things that they're worrying about, so that when they read the text on your website, they'll connect with it, they'll understand that they are the person you're talking about, and they'll be that much more engaged with this is the right teacher for me, I'm going to contact them and have a trial lesson, or book a set of lessons. Alongside the rewrite, and obviously changing my offering from bland to this is why I teach, this is what I love about it, these are the people I teach. I also added whole new sections to the website beyond just basic pages. And actually, when I allowed myself the creativity and freedom to think about that, it was a lot of fun adding more stuff to my website that just gave a richer picture of who I am as a piano teacher and what my students experience in my studio. Obviously, at this point, you need to have students to be able to share what they're experiencing in your studio, but even without that, you can still share about the things you love about your instrument and teaching and what your approach to teaching is. So I added pages like I put a student gallery page up, obviously, with permission from parents. I had uploaded unlisted YouTube videos, so they weren't searchable on YouTube, but I put links to them on my website so you could see in the student gallery it was some of my students' favourite pieces that they'd performed and duets of me playing with them, and it was lovely. It was all kind of our favourite pieces. And it's sharing the joy in teaching right from a beginning stage because these were really early beginners, so it was a good demonstration of the kind of things you can expect when you start learning to play the piano. So it was quite helpful actually, in a way of grounding expectations of parents if they didn't know what kind of journey it would be. Sometimes, more often than not, the expectation is that learning to play what seems like a fairly simple piece of music actually takes a good couple of years rather than a few months in most cases. So it serves that purpose as well. Managing expectations and being realistic. I also added a virtual Christmas recital page, so I took separate videos of students playing their Christmas pieces or Christmas duets with me, and then I stitched them together into a virtual Christmas recital. That I posted on YouTube as an unlisted video and then shared the link with parents, and individual videos I posted on my website on a separate page to celebrate what we had all learned for that particular Christmas. I of course have a recital page, so after my first recital in 2024, I've done three of them now. I haven't uploaded any new any new ones yet because I've been so busy with everything else. But that was a real proud moment for me having hosted my first recital and just wanting to share it with the world and saying if you come and have lessons with me, you get to take part in my summer recital every year, and it's this wonderful celebration of music and what everyone has learned and a way of sharing the joy of music in this way that is so accessible. I did also create a blog page. I wrote a great blog post for talking about the importance of the piano parent, but I've only written one for that side of my website. Obviously, the teacher side of my website is running full steam now, and there's a whole load of blog posts as well as these podcasts. But for the parent and student side, I only did the one blog post. My intention was to write a lot more, but you have to limit yourself, as I mentioned in my last episode, you can't be everything to everyone, so I had to pause some things. I would like to say actually that part of my rewrite for my website was influenced by my time on the piano teachers course, CERT PTC, a few years back, and one of the modules was about your professional identity, and it was so helpful because it went into a lot of the things that I've mentioned, but this idea of what is your why, why do you teach, and put it on your website so that your potential students and families can see it and connect with you and get to know you. So that was a prompt that I needed to really make a decent change to my website. And the result was amazing. It's just it's gone from strength to strength. I've had more inquiries than ever before and a regular stream of inquiries, and that's where my waiting list has built up so much. If you've listened this far and you don't have a website, I would like to thank you for being so open-minded. It's okay that you don't have a website. Some of the objections I've had about not having a website as a music teacher are things like I don't have the time or skill to have a website. And I would say to you that I am not a techie person, although maybe I shouldn't say that anymore because I've learned a lot of things along the way. I don't it doesn't come naturally to me. Let's put it like that. But I have managed to create my website without too much trouble. My website is made through Squarespace, so it's really user-friendly. You don't need any insider knowledge, you don't need to be a coder or anything like that. You just need to be able to do drag and drop and get images and write text. So it's a really, really good option. There are other options. Wix also offers similar structures for websites. I pay just over £200 for the year for my Squarespace website and £16 for the year for my domain. That's my victoriaclubpiano.com. And so that totals on average 10 lessons worth of income. It's not very much when you consider it's an entire year. And if you get even if you get one student per year, which you would not, you would get many more through a website getting all the inquiries, it pays for itself very, very quickly. So it is an outlay up front, but it's an extremely worthwhile one that continues working in the background. Having this real piece of internet real estate out there that anyone can land on anytime when they're looking for a piano teacher or a music teacher for whatever instrument you teach, it's always available. It doesn't require you to do anything other than set it up and respond to inquiries as they come in. So it's a highly valuable thing to have to secure your student cohort and waiting list if you'd like to build a waiting list, and it secures your income and it takes away so much of that fear about losing students. You realize just how much you you still worry about losing students when you finally get to the point that you don't worry about losing students anymore. And the way you get there is by attracting your ideal students who, of course, join your studio and then never leave because they are your ideal students. So then you start building a waiting list, but the whole system works to provide that security that we all need as music teachers. If you do have a website and you feel like you don't have time to redo it, you don't need to overhaul the whole thing. The highest impact stuff really is the text that you write. So you can leave the images as they are for the most part, if they still apply to the people that you teach and the ethos that you have, but just writing directly some statements that explain who you teach and what you're about and why you love teaching, what you do it for, that can take you half an hour at most. And of course, with AI these days, you can bounce ideas back and forth. If you're a bit uncomfortable about writing text, writing prose, you can get support from AI. One caveat I would just say is don't just ask AI to create something for you and then copy-paste it into your website because these days it's very easy to spot what was created by AI. If it uses language that you wouldn't normally use, phrases that feel unnatural to you, then don't put them in there because then you're portraying a version of yourself that's not real, and then when your prospective students meet you, it will feel a bit jarring because it won't connect with the person that you are. So just be a bit careful if you're using AI. I would suggest you could dictate what you want to say in the way that you want to say it, and then you can just ask AI to review it with this in mind. You know, would this communicate what I'm trying to communicate? Would this attract my ideal student who is this, this, and this? Can you improve it in any way whilst keeping my tone? All that kind of stuff if you want to go down the AI route, which is absolutely fine if you do. The biggest fear I had about changing my website was fearing that being specific about who I teach would put people off. I really believed for quite a long time that if I didn't list every type of student I could possibly teach, that I'd be excluding them from contacting me at all. But once I understood a bit more about marketing and communication, it became so obvious that you need to connect with specific people by speaking directly to them. So once I got a bit more comfortable about being open about who I was and who I wanted to teach, my website inquiries soared. They really picked up the pace, and alongside other things I was doing to increase my visibility online, of course, but it made a huge difference. So being specific doesn't shrink your audience, it sharpens it. It turns away the people who are not your audience, your non-ideal students and families, and the families who recognise themselves in your words, they're far more likely to inquire than families who are left guessing whether you're right for them. If they don't know, if you do everything, they'll think, I can't tell the difference between teacher A and teacher B. You don't want to be selected on that basis or missed out on on that basis. And for those of you who don't have a website at all, where word of mouth really does feel like an approach that is secure and has lasted you for this long so far. What I would say is even when word of mouth is how they heard about you, the vast majority will still actually go and check you out online before they message you. Most people will go and find out a bit more about you, even though they've got a recommendation from a friend or a family member or someone they trust. If you're online, they want to know. And when they Google you and your own website pops up, like I said before, that's an immediate trust tick box. If social media pages show up that are active and you're sharing lots of things about yourself and how you teach and what you love about teaching, those are some other tick boxes for the trust factor. So word of mouth can support a studio, but for a long-term approach, it is risky because depending on the students who you currently have, because they're the ones who are most likely going to be talking about you, it's less likely that students who've left will still be talking about you because it's not part of their everyday life. Your pool of potential students is restricted to the social circles of and connectivity circles of your current student cohort and their families. Having a website really does give you this massive security blanket that works in the background no matter what, and is very valuable these days for the way people look for new music teachers. They will nearly always go online, Google or other search engine. And so if they can find you straight away, it makes it that much easier. There's fewer barriers for people connecting with you if you have a presence online of some kind. So it's okay if you don't have a website because you're terrified of how it all works and you don't want to be confused and you don't want to accidentally sign up for something that's really, really expensive. The way it works these days is much simpler and it's much more accessible. Everyone can have a website these days, and you don't need lots of specialist technical knowledge. And the benefits of having one just continue to bloom throughout your teaching career. So you've got your supportive website running in the background, you update it every so often with your new fees, which you hopefully are increasing every year, and you are sharing bits and pieces about yourself ideally on social media. But if you don't like social media, just your website and anything in your local community, letting people know who you are and that you're there allows your ideal students to find you. As I like to do every episode, I want to leave you with one little task that you could try this week. So if you do have a website, I'd like you to see if you can go and open your website and put yourself in the shoes of a stranger looking for a teacher for the first time. Try to be objective and read your home page and your about page properly and ask yourself, does this sound like me? Would I know who this teacher is right for? Would I recognise myself in this teacher? If you can't, it's not got enough specificity and personality in it. You don't have to change anything straight away, but just noticing what your homepage communicates is the first step, and noticing what does or doesn't sound like you is a great thing to do, and that's your starting point. If you don't have a website, that's fine too. I'd like you to try and do an ideal student profile exercise. Now that sounds really complicated, but it's just literally thinking about your ideal student, the best student that you could hope to teach, and describe them. So age, experience, home life, family life, all the things that go into making them an individual. There is a lot more about this in episode seven, which I will link in the show notes, but that would be a really useful exercise for you. And then once you have an idea of this ideal student, I'd like you to think about your current students and see which ones maybe line up with this ideal student. How many of your current students actually align with your idea of an ideal student? And it might help you understand whether you need to be attracting more of your ideal students, or if you've actually hit the jackpot with word of mouth and you happen to have stumbled upon a whole load of your ideal students, that can happen too. But it's a useful exercise to get you thinking about who do you really want to teach, not just the ones that have landed in your lap. I'm not saying you're going to go ahead and fire a load of students, not at all, but it doesn't hurt to start thinking about the people you really want to teach. Because students move on, and if you want to start encouraging more of your ideal students to find you, then you can take some of the steps that we've talked about in this episode to start moving in that direction. So just to finish off, I would like to express how grateful I am for my website because yes, it took a little bit of work and it took a bit of thought to get it to where it is today, but it is such a valuable asset for me that exists in the background and does so much active work on my behalf for attracting my ideal students, which means I have a lot of my ideal students in my current studio. I have a big waiting list of more ideal students waiting to have spaces when they become available, and the impact of that on me as a music teacher is manifold. One of the biggest I've already mentioned the security and support that it provides, the quality of my students that I teach. Obviously, it's very unlikely that you'll ever have 100% ideal students in your studio, but having more ideal students than less just leads to a happier teaching life. More satisfying, more successful. Your students are happier because you're the right match for them as a teacher. They make the progress that they want to make. You are satisfied by the progress they're making. You feel fulfilled as a music teacher. They are students who, for example, want to take part in recitals if you run recitals. They are students who are getting the joy out of music that you want your students to have. When you reflect back on your why, your ideal students are experiencing those things that you want them to experience. They are the reason that you teach. So thank you for listening to this episode all about websites and what they mean for us as music teachers. I hope I haven't overwhelmed you with the amount of information I've shared today. But if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out and send me a message. I am more than happy to chat and share some advice. But thank you for your time and I hope you have a wonderful day. See you in the next episode.