How To Leave Your Day Job & Teach Guitar For A Living In The Least Risky Way Possible

By Tom Hess

Are you sick and tired of working at your current job? As a guitar player, you already understand that this type of job prevents you from spending as much time as you’d like with your instrument and stops you from building a music career. However, this isn’t your only option. Reality is, teaching guitar is an extremely effective way to do something you love while also earning a great income.

So why is teaching guitar a better option that working a regular day job?:

-Teaching guitar is extremely stable. For instance, if you have 56 students, this is just like having 56 individual paychecks. So if one student leaves, it’s not a big deal, because there are 55 other source of income still coming in. This is totally unlike a normal job where you get one paycheck only – and your entire well-being depends on that one check.

-As a guitar teacher, it is easy to earn a lot more money than you every possibly could at a normal job (it is not at all unheard of for guitar teachers to make $100,000+ per year).

-Guitar teachers do not have to work full time to make good money, unlike at a regular job where working full-time is the only way to pay your bills and survive.

-You get to make your own time when you are a guitar teacher. Want to take a trip out of town? You can do it. Want to start working on growing a music career? No problem. Additionally, you will actually make money for your time off. Contrast this with working a normal job where you have to request vacation days (where someone else decides when you can or can’t take time off).

Keeping these things in mind, it’s common for guitarists to ignore guitar teaching because they think they aren’t ready to teach students. In reality, even if you believe you aren’t prepared to teach, it’s likely that you are. The following are some FALSE beliefs guitarists have about teaching that make them afraid to take action:

Guitar Teaching Fear #1: You aren’t sure if you have enough things to teach over a long period of time.

Reality: It’s not necessary to know the entire year’s lesson plan just to teach your first student. In fact, you should NOT overwhelming your students with new information during every single lesson.

Guitar Teaching Fear #2: You haven’t reached a high enough level as a guitarist.

Reality: Some of the best guitar teachers are NOT virtuosos or anything close. In fact, you can teach only beginning students if you want to and make a ton of money doing so.

Guitar Teaching Fear #3: You couldn’t make it through a lesson and would embarrass yourself.

Reality: You don’t have to have tons of guitar teaching experience to get results for your first students. With time, you will only develop into a better, more refined teacher.

Guitar Teaching Fear #4: Guitar teaching won’t pay the bills after you quit your day job.

Reality: It’s not as hard to quit your job and teach guitar for a living as you might think. Developing a new guitar teaching business requires almost no cost – in other words, you can start earning money teaching while you are still working at your current job with absolutely NO risk of losing money in the process.

Get a better understanding of what you need to work on right now to become better prepared for teaching your first students by checking out this free guitar teaching skills assessment.

How You Can Phase Out Your Day Job To Get Into Teaching Guitar Full-Time.

For tons of guitar teachers, leaving their day jobs might feel very risky. Fact is, there is nothing to be afraid of, it’s actually very easy to phase out your day job without putting yourself in financial ruin. The following is what you need to do right now to start transitioning away from your day job and begin teaching guitar for a living:

1. Work Hard To Build Your Guitar Teaching Skill Set

Regardless of what your current guitar teaching skill level is, you WILL be able to eventually get amazing results for your students. Take the following steps to start building your teaching skills:

-Teach exclusively in an area you are already strong in (such as showing students how to play rock riffs, classical guitar arpeggios, etc.). Most likely there is already someone out there who you can help with this.

-Find a guitar teacher trainer who can show you effective strategies for transforming so-so students to great students, plus effectively teaching students of all kinds of learning styles.

-Learn more about teaching beginning guitar students.

Now that you have read the ideas in this article, you are much closer to actually teaching guitar for a living. To fully prepare yourself for teaching guitar and leave your day job, fill out this free guitar teaching skills assessment.

2.Make it a point to attract “serious” guitar students only

-Create a website and advertise online in addition to using flyers in local guitar stores (with the owner’s permission), grocery stores, parks, schools, full parking lots and neighborhoods.

-Try to better understand how to convert the potential students who contact you into paying guitar students. This is not as hard as it may seem, find out how to do it by checking out this free resource on getting tons of guitar students to take lessons.

-Fill your weekends with as many students as possible, then save the profit you make from doing this. After you’ve earned enough from this to pay for six months’ worth of expenses, quit your day job and focus on growing your teaching business even further.

Author's Bio: 

About The Author:
Tom Hess is an electric guitar teacher and music career mentor. He helps many guitar teachers learn to how to teach guitar for a living. On his website you can get additional free tips about guitar teaching, guitar teacher articles, mini courses and guitar teaching skill assessments.