Day Ten – How To Make Money From Groups Part I

Group teaching can become your main source of income, the primary way you teach. The advantage to you is that you can leverage your time and reach a wider range of people. Does that fit with your vision? It will demand more of you as a teacher. You have to go verbal. Using touch as a communication tool alone (i.e. “hands on”) simply won’t cut it any more. Many teachers – to their dismay – have already discovered the truth of this with a bored group of students watching another person getting in and out of the chair. It’s great for the person getting your chairwork, but the attention span of the remaining members starts drifting away. You can’t teach chair and table in a group setting. You must do activities. What activities? The activities that your students choose. Finding Activities That Will Build A Community You can guide what activities you do from your side by choosing who your students will be. This is called “finding your niche”. Why is that so important? Because to make group teaching your core business - instead of the sideshow it usually is - you need to build a community. A community is built around a common interest. Naturally you might ask: “Why not make Alexander Technique the common interest?” Remember your teacher training school days - how did that function as a community? There are some schools that do really well – usually the larger ones - but a lot don’t – usually the smaller ones…. People come together, they are polite, but there are such huge differences in background, that blending everyone into a cohesive group is a hit and miss affair. Maybe there was one really good period in your training, but a few people left, or a teacher changed – something disrupted the chemistry, and it was not so fun anymore. This is a common experience. And schools like that never grow - have you noticed that? Be careful of creating the same “no growth” model for your group teaching business. Group Size or Group Content? One remedy for a disparate student body is to insist teaching groups of 23+ people in them. Aside from the effort to build a group that size, I wonder if you feel able and willing to teach 23+ in a two hour class? If you do, a group that size will work, because with that many people to choose from, the only people who can’t find a companion are the people who don’t want one. However, if 23+ is too many for you to teach at once, then you will attract and retain more long-term students if you help them develop a skill unrelated to Alexander Technique. Classical musicians are the obvious example, but so are swimmers, people who run, dancers – all of them will stay longer in a group of people interested in the same thing. Do You Have A Unique Selling Point (USP) For Your Groups? [NOTE: This second half of my blog is a paid area describing ideas and exercises (to design and market groups) which are explored in a secret Facebook group together with 46 other teachers and students. You can join anytime and be part of the discussions.] The key to attracting people within a niche, is to find the one reason, above all others, why they should come to you and no-one else. Can you find a compelling reason? You can read more about USPs in this post W06.01 How Tom Made $1 Billion From A USP.

Assuming you have a niche in mind, go through these four steps to develop a USP for your group: First, list all the worries they have. What keeps them awake at night? If you too are one of these people (dancer, musician, office worker, lost soul) then you can start asking your Self that question. If you are teaching some of them already – invite them to stay over for coffee one day and talk with them. Of course you have a questionnaire that you keep of new students? Go back and look at those, see what was written. Gather accurate, reliable information. Second, who else is offering solutions to these problems? Here keywords can help. Use google to type in some of the problems from your list in the first step. Now notice if any google adds appear. If they do – you are in luck. This is a niche where people are spending money. If no adds appear, you might question the idea that you can build a business with this niche? Keep typing in search words till you come across some google adds. When you do – this is the market that has money to spend, and the google adds are your competition. Third, explore the solutions your competition are offering. For example, if I search Public Speaking, I come across 11 google adds. The top one talks about fear, the second, about career choices, the third about building confidence. So there are two markets here: one is people who worry about their performance, the second people who want to make some money doing it. Could you mix these into one product? Go deeper (visit the website and landing pages) and find if there is there a gap in their offers? How could you present your service in a way that answers their need in a unique way? An obvious example is stage fright. How about a USP is that claims stage fright is an asset, not a problem. They problem would be if you didn’t have it! Something along those lines. That will attract their attention at least – now can you sell it? Can you convince someone that this is a new, revolutionary way to think and you are the only person who can deliver on this promise? Then you might have your USP… Fourth, test it. Use your USP as a blog post title and notice how popular it is. Type it into google and see what kind of results it brings up (any google adds?). Use it as an email Subject line, and notice if anyone writes back (a sure sign that you are grabbing their attention). If you can find out - what are the opening rates of that email compared to other emails you have sent? Of course there are even more sophisticated ways of testing (using google adds mostly), but for the technically challenge, this is better than no testing at all. Hitting it to our group is probably the least effective, but worth a try too! Your customer is your expert - remember that. Let them teach you. A USP can double as a workshop title, but when they are effective, you keep using them again and again. A great USP will always define you for your niche – it includes the benefits they get from studying with you. Share your USP exercising with the group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ATCSProMembers/