Music Teacher’s Helper continues to grow as more teachers hear about how easy it is to manage your studio schedules, finances, and more through our software. Be a part of spreading the word and earn some extra income on the side by joining our affiliate program today. We pay you 20% recurring commission for any teachers you refer to us.

Here are the latest updates we’ve made to Music Teacher’s Helper:

• The mobile site was closing the reconcile screen prematurely. This is now fixed.
• If you recently emailed us and didn’t get a response, please try again. Uservoice sent some emails to us without a return address.
• Few automatic invoices failed to run. We found the bug and this is now fixed. We’re sorry, thank you for your patience.
• The Student Contact List Report included everyone, even former students. We’ve now added a filter so you can choose who you want to see.
• Former students were appearing in the Student Account Summary Report list. We’ve now removed them.
• Affiliates are now able to reset their own passwords if they forgot them.
• All-day events did not filter on the calendar view. This is now fixed.

Are you a social media expert?

with people you know and meet people you don’t.  In fact, social media is all the buzz in advertising in today’s market. It’s free, it’s fast, and you can hit a large market.  Big companies are even hiring social media experts whose full time job is to tweet you, text you, and message you about hot deals and cool stuff.  It’s the next big thing in marketing.  But should you use it for your private music teaching studio?  I do.

Facebook.  I love Facebook, mostly for its ability to quickly and easily connect with a ton of people, specifically my friends, family, high school classmates, and even my piano students. You can quickly and easily get messages to all or some of the people you know, advertise your studio, and share tips and tricks for practice times.   But Facebook is rife with privacy issues.  If you’re going to post personal items on Facebook, you must be vigilant about using discretion and privacy settings.  After all, some, if not all, of your posts may end up in Google searches.  You also need to watch that some distant relative doesn’t tag you in an unflattering photo from your third cousin’s wedding.  It might reflect poorly on the image you are hoping to portray to your private lesson students.  Avoid posting anything that you don’t want the entire world to know or see.  Don’t post rants about people or places, instead, keep your posts positive, fun, and inspiring.  Better yet, create a separate page based on your studio website.  You can invite all your students to visit, as well as post events, ads, or information that you want your students to see.  It’s a great place to offer an incentive for referrals.  You can also join Facebook groups such as your local high school band page or church page.  From there, you can meet new poeple and make new connections.  Don’t forget to ask people to ‘like’ your page so they can find you later or share you with their friends.

www.facebook.com

LinkedIn.  LinkedIn is a more professional venue, and a great way to network with other private teachers, businessman, and other professionals.  It’s a great way to get your resume and credentials out there, as well as advertise your studio website.  You’re not likely to find young students on LinkedIn, but you will be able to network with people who can lead you to new students (such as their professionally employed parents).  Be wary of attaching your Twitter and Facebook accounts to LinkedIn.  It’s much safer to keep this account strictly professional with no personal references.  Include a great looking head shot so people remember you as a person, not just a name on the computer screen.  You can also join various discussion groups through LinkedIn, so you can find job openings or people looking to find a private music teacher.  Don’t forget to link your profile to your free Music Teacher’s Helper website.

www.linkedin.com.

Twitter.    The key to Twitter is in being succinct.  You only have 140 characters to get your message out there, so the more concise you can be, the better.  You can invite your friends and family to follow you on Twitter, and you can gain followers by following people you like.  Whenever you tweet, you should add a hashtag that compliments your tweet.  So if you tweet about piano practice, you may want to end your tweet with #piano or #musicpractice.  A hashtag is like  a keyword.  Other Twitter users can search for keywords, and hopefully, your tweet will come up.  Again, make sure to link your account with your Music Teacher’s Website.  Be careful of privacy issues, and keep an eye on your followers.  It is polite and expected to follow back appropriate followers on Twitter.

www.twitter.com

Google+.  Google plus is like Facebook without all the fancy bells and whistles (and with less privacy problems, too).  It’s a great networking tool, and I’m sure it will be gaining popularity as time goes on.  Invite your friends and family to join, and create ‘circles’ to categorize them in.  You can then associate with people that are in their circles, and thereby expand your own.  Being so concise will inspire your creative writing, too. www.google.com.

There are a few tricks to good, social networking.  First, post often, but don’t spam.  I love hearing what local business men and women are doing, but I get annoyed by the people that post every half hour.  I just don’t have time for that!  If your are networking to advertise, post things that are relevant to your studio, such as practice tips, composer tidbits, and available lesson spots.  It’s also a great place to offer incentives or advertise specials, if you have them.   Routinely look for new people to connect with by checking your family and friend’s pages and searching for groups and individuals.  Avoid ranting and raving or gossipping in your posts.  Keep your comments positive and helpful.  If you are going to post about your students, make sure you have their parents permission.  People love to see photographs, but be very careful what you post and who you tag.  If you want to post photos of your students, you should probably get written permission first.  Lastly, always be aware of privacy concerns.  If you don’t want the entire world to know, play it safe and just don’t post it.  Link your accounts to your free Music Teacher’s Helper Website so people know where to find you.

The native iPhone app is almost finished and we plan to submit it to the Apple iTunes store by the end of January. Please see below for our the latest updates and changes.

• We improved the Daily Summary report. It now gives a detailed view of each lesson’s participants and it includes global/studio-wide events.
• The social buttons on the footer caused Internet Explorer to popup a security question too often. We decided to remove them for your convenience.
• Good news to all affiliates! We’ve increased the cookie retention time from 60 to 180 days. This will give new referrals more time to decide if they want to sign up for a free trial. Remember that if there is no time limit on how long they take to upgrade to a paying account after that point.
• Fixed a rare bug when calendar events were not showing up when viewing day view.
• On the studio website’s contact form, parents needed to retype everything when they entered the wrong captcha. This is now fixed.
• On the email notification of “Send Email to student with lesson notes,” the lesson category did not show up. This is now fixed.
• Practice Log did not always show the top practicer correctly. This is now fixed.
• The student’s email address had been saving properly but it did not appear on the Edit Student page. This is now fixed.
• On the Reset Login page. The auto email caused confusion to some because there is no link to the login page. These reset login emails now include a link to your studio website.
• We added Singapore Dollar to the currency list.
• On the studio websites, the registration page’s option to disable the student username and password fields did not work. This is now fixed.
• On some rare occasions, calendar events were disabled and some teachers were unable to click them. This is now fixed.

Right now, we’re working on a native iPhone app and are making good progress. We’ll keep you posted and let you know when it’s ready (no launch date yet). In the mean time, remember to check out our mobile app at http://www.musicteachershelper.com/mobile

Give the Gift of an Organized and Automated Studio

Also, now is the time of year when many people start thinking about gifts for their friends and loved ones. If you know a music teacher who could benefit from Music Teacher’s Helper, what greater gift could you give them than paying for a month or two of their Music Teacher’s Helper subscription? It’s easy! Take 30 seconds and send a Music Teacher’s Helper gift certificate today! It’s the perfect gift for any music teacher.

Latest Updates

Here is a list of the updates we launched in November, 2011.

• The Top Practicers section of the Practice Log now filters the list by date range. It also no longer shows inactive students.
• Parent email addresses were not showing up for child students on the Manage Students page. This is now fixed.
• When Automatic Invoices were set to repeat weekly, the schedule on the right sidebar displayed Dec 31, 1969. This is now fixed.
• It was possible for parents to register their child twice on an event. This is now fixed.
• Some symbols, such as the TM symbol and the quarter note symbol were not showing properly on studio websites. This is now fixed.
• On the Transaction Log, the Invoice column displayed an invalid invoice number. This is now fixed.
• The mic icon was doubled in the day and week view. This is now fixed.
• On the Affiliate’s Referral Report, trial signups that didn’t upgrade were showing Yes under the Active column. This is now fixed.
• The instructions for Automatic Data Entry for Paypal were obsolete and had caused confusion to some. We have now updated them.

New “Running Balance” Column on Billing History

When you click the “Billing” menu, then click a family’s name, you’ll see all of that family’s transactions, including all payments, lesson charges, and more. Now, you’ll also see a “Balance” column, showing the running total balance of that family’s account. This will make it much easier to find discrepancies and to know how much a family owed at a given time.

Restore Email Templates to Default

Sometimes, after making a lot of changes to an email template, or importing from Word, it’s possible to find changes to your template that you’re not sure how to fix. Now you can restore an email template to its original message by simply clicking ‘Reset System Template’ on the sidebar.

Bug Fixes

• Default email notifications were double-spaced instead of single spaced. This is now fixed.
• After editing a former student, the page went to the Active Student List, it should be taken back to the Former. This is now fixed.
• Students added to inactive parents caused billing errors. This is now fixed — the parents are updated to active.
• A rare bug when sending manual email reminder resulted in duplicate emails.
• On Students > E-mail Students. The spell checker didn’t work in Firefox. This is now fixed.
• Daily summary report was being sent to cancelled and inactive accounts. This is now fixed.
• Uploaded midi files on the resources page had boxes with red x in front of them. This is now fixed.
• The Advanced Search was broken and inaccessible. This is now fixed.
• The apostrophe sign did not appear correctly in the email subject of the invoice. This is now fixed.
• The formatting of the teacher’s email reminder notification was hard to read. This is now fixed.
• Billing History running balance column sometimes displayed a balance of $1 when there are payments over $1,000. This is now fixed.
• Simple search on the Manage Student page wasn’t working properly. This is now fixed.

Block Holidays and Other Events on Your Calendar

You now have the ability to block holidays and other events on your calendar! When you block a day, it will prevent any events from being created on that day, so you no longer have to worry about accidentally scheduling lessons over holidays or when you’re on vacation. To setup Blocked Dates, simply click the red “block” icon in the corner of any day on the calendar. Click it again to unblock. Or go to Calendar -> Blocked Dates to setup a recurring blocked date.

Foreign Language Support

We’re also pleased to announce that Music Teacher’s Helper is now available in Portuguese! Select your language from the top-right corner of the page before logging in, or from the Settings page after you login.

We’re now ready to begin translation into other languages as well. If you’re interested in helping translate Music Teacher’s Helper into your language, please contact us at translations@musicteachershelper.com for details.

Bug Fixes

• Some people have been experiencing slowness in the midnight hours during our nightly backups. It should be faster now, but we’ll continue monitoring it and make adjustments as necessary. Please let us know if you continue to experience slowness at any time.
• The tm symbol on the studio’s website was not shown properly. This is now fixed.
• Parents were unable to reset passwords from the secure section of MTH. This is now fixed.
• Daily Summary report displays lent items due incorrectly. This is now fixed.
• Lesson email reminders sent with an apostrophe on the subject line were not shown correctly. We’ve fixed this.
• Deleted accounts were able to receive expiring credit card email notifications. This is now fixed.
• Inactive accounts were getting auto-deleted even though they were paying accounts. This is now fixed.
• Under studio ‘Website Pages,’ some teachers had entered symbols on the slug which broke their website. We’ve added validation to fix this.
• Lesson reminders were incorrectly being sent to some students. This is now fixed.
• Fatal error appeared while sending invoices for some teachers. This is now fixed.
• When logging in to the affiliates section it redirected you to a non-secure page. We’ve fixed this and made the pages https.
• When the website link at the top of the page was clicked, it redirected some people to the Page not found page. This is now fixed.
• PDF Invoices were blank if opened using Safari on the iPhone. This is now fixed.
• A few lesson reminders were not sent to their recipients. We’ve found the bug and this is now fixed.
• To affiliates who received the monthly report, We’re sorry about the confusion. We’ve fixed it and the executive section won’t appear again.

Thank you for using Music Teacher’s Helper and for continuing to spread the word!

New Features

• We’ve changed the Google Sync method to use an iCal feed, allowing you to instantly sync your Music Teacher’s Helper calendar to iCal, Outlook, Google calendar, and other. See Settings > Calendar Sync for more info.
• Swiss Franc currency added.

• Cancelled lessons weren’t shown as cancelled on the mobile app. We’ve fixed this.
• On the mobile app, phone number did not show if the home phone was blank. This is now fixed.
• On the new iCal feed, lessons were moved 1 hr after November 1st which for the end of daylight savings. This is now fixed.
• The layout on the mobile version was too wide and too small to read. This is now fixed.
• PDF Invoices were printing codes when the studio title has an apostrophe. e.g. “Joe’s Studio.” This is now fixed.
• On the Transaction Log, when you clicked a fee, it went to the list of fees rather than the edit fee page. This is now fixed.

If you know teachers who may be interested in Music Teacher’s Helper, then you’ll be pleased to hear that we are re-launching our Affiliate program on August 1st, with some major changes. The most exciting news is that you we will now pay you 20% recurring monthly commission for every teacher you refer to Music Teacher’s Helper! This is a great way to earn some extra money for simply telling others about MTH. (Existing affiliates, please note that this commission only applies to new referrals who sign up after August 1. Old referrals will earn you the same commission as before.)

We’ve also completely redesigned our affiliate interface, improved the reports, and created a way for you to offer promotional discounts to teachers as an incentive to sign up. You can either send teachers to your affiliate link, or you can give them your promotion code, which you’ll receive after you become an affiliate. When teachers use your affiliate link or promotion code when they sign up for their free trial, they’re linked to you, and when they start making payments, we’ll pay you 20% of whatever they pay us, for as long as they use Music Teacher’s Helper.

This is the perfect time of year to spread the word about Music Teacher’s Helper, because so many teachers are looking for a better way to manage their studios for the upcoming school year. We encourage you to post about Music Teacher’s Helper on Facebook and Twitter, send emails to your colleagues, and write about us wherever you can. Just be sure to include your affiliate link or promotion code so you can get paid for anyone who signs up because of you.

It’s easy and free to become an affiliate. Click here to become an affiliate now.

In addition to our affiliate program, we also fixed the following bugs this month:

• Repertoire Tracker “Next” link was broken. This is now fixed.
• On the calendar, the feedback & support widget appeared when printing directly to the printer. This is now fixed.
• When editing students, the username and the password field was sometimes auto-populated with data, depending on your browser settings. We’ve fixed this.
• Error messages appeared sometimes when students tried to register. This is now fixed.

• Good news to all UK Teachers! we’ve added a ‘Language’ option in ‘Settings’ that changes ‘check’ to ‘cheque’ in the system.
• Welcome emails and lesson note emails are now recorded in the email history.
• When using Safari, some buttons appeared doubled. We’ve fixed this.
• Lending Library wouldn’t let you lend an Library item with an apostrophe. This is now fixed.
• The website address overlapped on the pdf version of invoices. We’ve fixed this.
• We’ve made the ‘Create Invoices’ page more clear by changing the ‘View / Save Options’ section to ‘Save in History’ & ‘Save and Email.’
• Invoice printing/emailing were generating error messages. This is now fixed.
• Photo captions were disorderly when the sentences were too long. We’ve fixed this so you can put longer photo captions now.
• We’ve fixed a rare bug in the Edit Parent form where usernames and passwords were not being updated.

You can now submit your own feature requests and bug reports, and see their progress along with everything else we’re working on. You also get 10 votes you can put toward your top choices for what you’d like us to work on next. We hope this tool will help us better understand which features are most important to our customers, and also give you a better idea of what’s coming. We think this will be an important tool that will allow us serve you ever better.

We’ll be implementing it fully over the next couple weeks, but for now, please visit http://mth.uservoice.com to submit the ideas that are most important to you. If you have e-mailed our customer support team in the past about a new feature request, please resubmit it again here so we know it’s still important to you.

Uservoice also has a nice help desk/e-mail ticket system and knowledge base, which we’ll be testing over the next few weeks, so you may see some changes to the support pages as we’re working on this. We welcome any feedback you have.

Finally, here are the updates and fixes we completed on Music Teacher’s Helper in May, 2011.

Latest Updates in May, 2011

• Some website templates had strange characters on the header quote. We’ve fixed this.
• File Area is now sortable. Just click the column header that you want to sort.
• Students/Families Owing report now displays the Amount Due correctly when it’s a large amount.
• The resources page on your studio’s website is now sorted in the correct order.
• The photo gallery on your studio’s website is now in a two-column layout.
• When issuing a credit, a negative sign is now automatically placed in the amount field.
• Some studio website template pictures were obscuring the gallery photos when they are zoomed. This is now fixed.
• We’ve increased the e-mail quality check on the your website’s student registration form.
• You can now print blank calendar pdfs.
• On the calendar view, one of the calendar location icons was causing the event popup to appear broken. This is now fixed.
• Fixed a small typo on our signup page. (“in shown” to “shown in”). Not sure how we missed that one…
• You can now delete records again in the file area.
• The ‘Disable Help Messages’ checkbox was not functioning. This is now fixed.