Why You Get More Guitar Students By Focusing On Referrals

By Tom Hess

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Wish you knew how to get more guitar students in order to build a guitar teaching business that makes tons of money and transforms the musical lives of anyone learning from you?

It's actually not as hard as you think.

And no, you don't have to resort to always walking around town to put up fliers or talk to strangers face to face.

Guitar teachers who struggle often make the mistake of only trying to attract new students through advertisements or your website.

Truth is:

This is what the majority of guitar teachers do and it is a big reason why they end up out of business or barely getting by with a small amount guitar teaching business income.

You don't want to end up working back at your day job, right?

Right!

Here is what to do:

Focus on student referrals as a top priority.

More specifically:

Supplement your usual advertisments or promotional efforts by developing and implementing a strong referral system.

What are referrals?

Referrals means your students tell other people about your guitar lessons to get them to get started with you.

This powerful method of getting new students spreads a positive reputation for you and removes a lot of the work you’d have to do on your own to create advertisements.
 

Some teachers ask their students to tell their friends about lessons.

This is better than not doing so, but not a super-effective approach when used by itself. Instead, create a system for getting referrals.

Give your students incentive to refer others by offering them cool rewards like products you’ve made, access to a bonus class (on a specific topic) or anything else you can think of that offers high value.

Try this: Create an annual event for all your guitar students to attend.

Make it something fun where everyone can bring their guitar to jam, hangout, eat snacks and have a blast together. To make this effective for referrals, have everyone bring a friend.

It’s up to you whether you have the friend pay to attend or not, but the key is that they are having a blast and seeing the great community of students you have.

Send every friend (potential student) home with specially designed materials to show them the value your guitar teaching offers. On top of that, tell them to tell everyone they know about you and your guitar teaching business.

Result:

Your phone becomes flooded with the friends of your students (and other new potential students) wanting to begin lessons.

This is the power of referrals.

However:

This is just a single idea.

Creating a system of strategies for getting referrals generates huge amounts of leverage to give you more students than you know what to do with!

Make this idea into a system by creating a schedule of different kinds of events.

Some of these events can be different formats or involve actual guitar teaching, master classes or other special classes. Record them all in order to create an additional source of income later or even as a bonus lesson/giveaway to add tons more value for your current students.

Now you can see how combining this approach with regular lesson advertisements is very effective for getting tons of new students.

Note: you should always test and improve your advertising methods to make sure they are as effective as possible. Read this guitar teaching business article to learn how to make your guitar lesson ads effective for getting new students by avoiding the mistakes most other teachers make.

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