You may have noticed various websites popping up to match people up–some are for dating, of course, but others are for matching artists and performance venues, such as www.matchbook.org in New England, and others are for helping students and teachers find each other.
I checked out a few of these student-teacher services to review and describe a bit about how they work, how much they cost, etc. One seems a bit better organized than others, so that’s the one I’ll discuss this week. It was started a little over a year ago, and is called Click For Lessons.
Based in San Diego, the site has grown tremendously. It matches students with potential teachers not only in music, but also in dance, singing, languages, acting, and art. A lot of the categories are musical instruments, so at first I assumed the main use of the site was for music, but the site’s blog has an article listing the most popular lessons requested in 2006, and many of them were for dancing.
The site’s most popular lesson requests last year were, in order: piano, hip-hop dance, guitar, salsa dance, belly dance, acting, violin, ballroom, and drum lessons. These accounted for over 60% of the requests. Of course, that leaves quite a few other kinds of interests, especially when considering that the site said it received more than 200,000 requests last year.
The idea is to give potential students the opportunity to look up teachers in their home area, without charge. If there are teachers within 50 miles (or another distance selected by the student), those names will show up. The student can then look up what the teacher listed about his or her bio, methods, prices, etc., and put in a request to contact the teacher. The teacher receives an email “lead” in order to contact the student, and hopefully, a new student arrives at the studio door not long afterwards.
After two free leads, teachers can choose how many leads per month they are willing to pay for. The cost per lead is a one-time charge of $3.95 ($4.95 is the lead is for more than one student) or there’s an option to pay $6.95 per lead to get exclusives, where no other teacher is contacted.
The site seems pretty well put together, and considerate of both teachers and students, including a good privacy policy, although there are lots of ads at every step of the way.
If you’ve tried the site, post a comment below about how it worked (or didn’t work) for you. I hope to give it a shot, and follow up on the results in a later blog.
by Chris Hoovler — Tue Feb 27, 2007 @ 5:45 pm
by Anna Lisa Ohnstad — Wed Mar 7, 2007 @ 11:02 am
by Jerene Murrey — Tue Sep 25, 2007 @ 12:42 pm