A Primer For Teaching Music Online - WeGotGuru.Com

If you are a Professional in the Music Education field, trying to build your clientele or running a Music Educational Institution, chances are that you would like to increase your visibility among the section of people who could be your potential clients. It may be of interest to let the world know about your skills and bring focus to your abilities and achievements.

If the above mentioned goals are of interest, then the points raised in this post could be valid ideas to consider in this Social Media driven world. These are not my ideas; but ideas tried and tested by various professionals all around and found to be successful. I have modified some thoughts to make it adaptable to the Musical Education domain.

Checklist :

-Identify the 'Expertise' you can provide. (Be it Genre of music, style of music etc)
-Articulate why it could be better than comparable 'Expertise' available elsewhere.
-Create an Email Signature which will announce your 'Expertise' to the world. (All email tools let you add Email signatures under settings)
-Write a short description of your Expertise for eg. carnatic music lessons online and its unique nature (if applicable) and read and modify it a few times. You could use this for your various profiles or web page.
-Apply for a Web domain and create a web presence. (IF you create a domain for your company like 'yourcompany.com" it may cost money and need Web expertise - so you could start with a free service like Google Pages)
-Create an appropriate logo for your expertise or institution.
-Figure out your competition and study them well. (What is working, not working etc)
-If you do create a web site, try and get some links to that web site (request colleagues, friends, clients who have their web sites for learn indian classical vocal online, but most importantly provide 'valuable content' that will get you links without any requests)
-Create a personal email. (you@yourcompany.com) (Again this can cost money, so consider its value for your situation)
-Create a Facebook profile for yourself and a Page for your Services or Institution. (Facebook 'profiles' and 'pages' are different. Pages are for companies. Both these options are free, however.)
-Create a Vanity Facebook URL which is easy to remember (You need 25 people to 'fan' your Facebook Page for this)
-Create an email subscription through your Webpage as well as Facebook page, so that visitors can sign-up for updates. (One of the free options could be Mailchimp.com)
-Create a LinkedIn profile and create a Product/Services page.
-Create a Twitter account and start posting updates and connecting with people.
-Create a Blog account and start to write relevant posts which maybe useful for your clients.
-Announce your Blog and posts through various channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. (Consider NetworkedBlogs.com for this. Free and easy as well.)
-Start using Google Reader to get up-to-date on latest events in your domain. This could also give you ideas for valuable blog posts which can help your (potential) clients.
-Be familiar with various other Social Media avenues like Tumblr, Stumbleupon, Delicio.us etc.
-Be proactive on all these Social Media forums. Respond, answer, be helpful, be sensitive. Dont push your own Expertise, services and products much.
-Create a YouTube account in your name or that of your Company. Create some content and start announcing your presence. Especially videos like concerts or teaching demos for carnatic music lessons for beginners will be valuable to add for indian classical music bay area
-Setup Google Alerts and track any updates about your company, services, products and yourself.
-If you see blogs or individuals mentioning your company, services or you, engage and add value. Dont ever make it confrontational. Always be helpful and positive.
-It is a good idea to be setup with different payment instruments. Especially if you plan to teach online. Credit card/Paypal/Bank transfers are all methods which may work.
-If you have a lot of clients, consider an 'Email marketing tool'. These allow you to consolidate your contacts, easily send them updates/newsletters, keep your emails Anti-Spam and help you tie your campaign into Social media tools, provide sign-up sheets and many other features. Mailchimp.com is a good option for indian classical music bay area
-Once you start blogging and publishing more online, its good to understand about the 'Screen capture tools' available. These help you capture screen-shots easily. Windows comes with some tools to take screen shots which can do the job. Other tools to look at are Picnik or Jing - both have free versions and are easy to use.
-If you are actively planning to use YouTube for publishing videos, then please do a study of various 'Video creation tools'. There are good quality free tools available today for learning indian music online. You could consider creating Videos of a computer screen as you teach a software or of you teaching a musical instrument or of a concert performance etc.Consider Jing from Techsmith.com for Computer screen capture.
-Online Communication tools are good for an online class (Examples are Skype, ooVoo, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk etc)
-For a better interaction there are Video Conferencing tools. These allow for a better interaction with multiple people and document sharing etc. Vyew.com/oovoo.com are good free options.

These are a few ideas. I will keep updating this list. Also I will post more details for various of these topics, so please follow this blog for future updates. Happy Online Music teaching!

Bala@WeGotGuru.com

About WeGotGuru :

WeGotGuru.com is a 'Global Online Platform' for Teaching and Consulting.The company provides a web presence, tools and training to empower Professionals to establish their online marketing campaign, get online visibility and transact business over the internet. The WeGotGuru platform provides for each member a Personal profile page, Public listing, Online payment, Messaging and Chat tools, Video upload, Blogging tools, Discussion forums, a Marketing tool box, Review infrastructure, Online invoicing etc among other tools. We strive to provide seamless access to Social Media and Web 2.0 concepts for these professionals.

Anyone with an 'Expertise' in a range of areas can easily engage with Clients anywhere in the world and interact with them directly. The website is a portal for managing and consolidating all their ‘Knowledge activities’ in their domains.

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