In this episode of the Rock School Proprietor Podcast, hosts John Kozicki (Michigan Rock School and RockSchoolProprietor.com) and Mandy York (Music Time of Milford) delve into the essentials of creating a compelling music school website with expert webmaster Demitris Maddox. They discuss key elements like layout, imagery, and content that effectively convert visitors into students.
In this episode:
- The unique challenges music teachers face when creating effective websites that convert visitors into students.
- Common pitfalls and best practices in web design specifically tailored for music educators.
- The significance of photos and strong website copy, SEO, and pricing transparency in enhancing a website’s effectiveness.
- Comparing pros and cons of various website platforms (WordPress, Impact Builder, Squarespace, Wix) focusing on customization and integration capabilities.
This episode is packed with valuable tips for music teachers looking to elevate their online presence and attract more students.
To access the FREE website analysis tool provided by Demitris vist https://provideimpact.com/henry
Also mentioned: Episode 27: Capturing Amazing Photos for Marketing Your Music School
Join our private Facebook group, “Performance-Based Music Programs and Rock Schools,” a community for like-minded professionals to connect and share insights.
Episode Transcript:
John Kozicki (00:01.743)
Mandy, how are you doing today?
Mandy York (00:03.8)
Good, how’s it going Jen?
John Kozicki (00:05.373)
Good, I’m going to introduce you to Demetris Medics who is joining us today. Hey Demetris, how are you?
Demitris Maddox (00:11.32)
Hello, hello, I’m doing well. Thank you so much for having me on today.
Mandy York (00:15.65)
Thanks for coming. This is great.
John Kozicki (00:15.849)
All right. Demetris, your company is called Provide Impact. You are a web designer. Mandy, we were talking about websites kind of recently on an episode. I talked about how I put websites on my note list. That’s something that I don’t get involved with.
Mandy York (00:32.344)
Yeah, we were.
John Kozicki (00:44.777)
Demetris, obviously that’s all you do. Well, maybe not all of you, but that’s why we wanted to talk to you about this. Mandy, you like to poke around in your website, correct? All right. What platform do you use for that? Just curious.
Demitris Maddox (00:49.052)
for sure.
Mandy York (00:55.584)
I Yep. I manage my own website.
Mandy York (01:04.238)
I use Squarespace. And I built it 10 years ago on Squarespace. Yeah.
John Kozicki (01:06.002)
Okay.
John Kozicki (01:11.015)
Okay, so do you like just kind of getting in there and tinkering and like what is it about? Because the things that I don’t like about building my own website, I’ll get into, but I want to know what you like about working on your website.
Mandy York (01:29.39)
I think I talked last time about just kind of getting geeky about it, integrating all the different systems that I use, my scheduling software and my payment processor and the forms that I can use and setting up a rule to put the answers into a spreadsheet in my drive that I’ll, you know, just all the integrations that you can make and things that you can have your website do for you to organize data and yeah, streamline processes.
John Kozicki (01:55.753)
Gotcha.
That’s cool. you, yeah. No, think that’s important. That’s something you like to do. That’s something that you feel, I’m assuming you feel like good about. But again, that’s why I think we’re talking to Demetrius today because Demetrius, have you found that to be the case with most music teachers or music school owners?
Mandy York (01:59.276)
Just, I mean, really it’s just kind of geeky. It’s a geeky thing, right? Yeah.
Demitris Maddox (02:23.708)
I would say absolutely not. Mandy is going to be more in the minority of teachers who actually enjoy the tinkering around and the playing around. I am all for, and I love it when a teacher is hands-on in their studio and they want to make changes, but a lot of music teachers are sort of wearing a bunch of different hats. They have the teacher hat, they have the parent-admin hat, and now unbeknownst to them, they…
John Kozicki (02:27.453)
You
Demitris Maddox (02:52.956)
they knew, but they didn’t really know that when they started this teaching business, they would now be wearing the website designer hat, the admin hat, you they’re wearing all these new hats that they got thrown upon them just in an instant. And so that’s the reason why a lot of teachers don’t really sort of enjoy kind of wearing that hat because they’re trying to run their studio at the same time that they’re trying to build this website. So they don’t really enjoy it as much.
John Kozicki (03:00.072)
Yeah.
Mandy York (03:19.402)
And as John and I talked about last time too, if you don’t have any kind of like previous experience or knowledge, you’re going to have to take a lot of time to learn these things too. And they don’t, yeah, you don’t want to spend all that time learning something new if you’re not into it.
John Kozicki (03:19.538)
Yay!
Demitris Maddox (03:29.788)
100%.
John Kozicki (03:35.273)
And I happen to know, Mandy, that your dad works in tech. So I’m wondering maybe that’s like, that’s something inherent in you. So Demetrius, web designer, you’re also a drummer, you told me, is that correct? Yeah.
Mandy York (03:39.328)
Yeah. Yeah.
Demitris Maddox (03:48.762)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I started playing drums, I guess, in seventh grade. I didn’t come about it naturally. My mother looked at my schedule when I was in seventh grade and said, you have way too many study halls, so I’m gonna throw you into band. And the only instrument that you didn’t really need to know how to play, play is drums. Everybody I feel like sort of has this inherent kind of rhythm, so I kind of picked it up from there.
John Kozicki (04:04.35)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (04:16.254)
Mm-hmm.
Demitris Maddox (04:16.854)
and I ended up marching drum corps. I ended up teaching my high school band. I taught other high school bands locally. So yeah, I kind of been tapping on tables ever since.
John Kozicki (04:28.457)
And so, and how did you get into web design though too? Because obviously that’s where you’re the music side thing, the music side of your, your background comes into play and it’s relatable. But how did you get into web design? When do you get into web design?
Mandy York (04:28.654)
That’s so cool.
Demitris Maddox (04:36.86)
Mm-hmm.
Demitris Maddox (04:43.516)
Sure. So about 10 years now, my girlfriend wanted to start her piano lesson studio and I saw that she would have to wear all these different hats. So I said, you know what, babe, if I can take this website part off your hands, I could take this marketing part off of your plate. That should free you up enough to sort of just teach. And so that’s how it ended up happening. And over the course of time, I would hop into different Facebook groups and just be super excited about the things that I have learned.
there’s this new conversion rate optimization thing that I learned. Let me share it. Over time, teachers started contacting me sort of naturally like, hey, can you take a look at my site? So I said, sure, I’ll take a look at your site. I would start to kind of give them feedback and kind of help them out, not really making a business by any means, but kind of teaching as I went along. And this is over the course of 10 years now. So to answer your question, how I really got into web design is,
John Kozicki (05:14.76)
Mm-hmm.
Demitris Maddox (05:38.19)
sort of naturally by wanting to help my girlfriend be successful. And so now I’m taking all of those things that I have learned, one from our own experience in our own brick and mortar studio and the experience of all the other teachers that I have helped along the way. And I have compiled it now. And that’s how I got into building websites for teachers.
John Kozicki (05:56.682)
Gotcha. Okay, great, great. Now, I think it’s worth mentioning a website incredibly important for visibility, incredibly important for new clients to find our studios and instructors and to connect and contact us. And as a means to create a strong first impression, we need that website.
Right, we need that website to be good, to look good, to function well. It’s probably one of the most important marketing tools, I think, that we have. I mean, are we all in agreement on that one?
Demitris Maddox (06:42.641)
Yes.
Mandy York (06:42.741)
Websites really important. Yes.
John Kozicki (06:44.465)
Yeah. And then going back to what you were saying, Demetrius, obviously Mandy’s the outlier. She loves poking around on her website. She’s good at it. I see where it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work to create a good website. I built my first website for my first music studio in 2009 using WordPress as the platform. And it’s time intensive.
you know, sifting through themes, trying to find the right theme and then adjusting it and adapting it so that it looks the way you want it to look. And then the colors have to be right. And that there’s there’s so much that goes into even taking one of those existing themes on WordPress and or or Squarespace or any of the other platforms and modifying it to get it to be what you want. I even had to learn a little bit of code at the time.
to make it do the things that I wanted to do. And Mandy, seems like you’ve kind of dove into some of that stuff and you’re okay with it. But point is it’s very time intensive. And that’s why I put it on my nope list. It’s the list that I’m like not gonna, I’m not gonna do this anymore only because to use the turn of phrase that you used Demetrius, we’re wearing so many hats. And.
If I want to be as effective as possible in my business, I have to figure out what I’m going to spend my time on. Websites kind of a time suck. through your company, you’ve created Demetrius, you’ve created Impact Builder Framework is what you call it, right? It’s called Impact Builder. And that’s for specifically for music schools and teachers. So can you tell me a little bit about Impact Builder? I’ve looked at
I looked at the website. I know a little bit about it, but maybe I don’t know if Mandy’s looked at it, share it with our listeners.
Demitris Maddox (08:46.502)
Sure. So John, I do want to comment on something that you just said. You were talking about the frustration of finding these themes. You make the site how you want it. You’re picking fonts and you’re picking colors. And that’s amazing. That’s all well and good. But the thing that’s most frustrating for teachers is that even if you do all those things and even if you build a site that you absolutely love, it may still not bring in students to your studio.
John Kozicki (08:50.569)
Please do.
Demitris Maddox (09:15.42)
And that’s a part that I see a lot of teachers are frustrated with. They’re like, well, I have my bio up there and I have a picture up there and I picked this cool color that I found. So why isn’t it working? And it’s because there is another sort of thing at play. So you have your website, right? And that is the thing. But is it speaking to the visitor who is coming to the site? Is it converting them from just a visitor into a student?
John Kozicki (09:27.048)
rate.
Demitris Maddox (09:43.462)
So there’s a whole nother methodology and science around building a website that is not just picking the theme, picking the font and picking the color.
John Kozicki (09:52.042)
Yes, great point. And I failed to mention that. And you’re absolutely right, because that, like I mentioned on the show before, I have a background in marketing. I worked in public relations. I worked as a writer. So what you’re talking about is exactly that. It’s OK, I’ve created the website. Now, how do I speak to my potential clients? Not just putting that not just putting that bio up there, not just putting the picture up there, right? That’s what you’re talking about. So there’s the marketing aspect of
Mandy York (09:54.318)
Mm-hmm.
Demitris Maddox (10:12.604)
Mmm.
John Kozicki (10:22.093)
knowing what is going to attract those clients, not just, I built a website. Yeah, yeah. So with Impact Builder framework, when I looked at it, it felt very much like what someone would expect to see from a Squarespace or a Wix or a WordPress where there are different…
Demitris Maddox (10:30.556)
Correct. Correct.
Demitris Maddox (10:35.612)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (10:49.489)
I’m using the word themes. I don’t know if you call them themes, but where there are different themes and. In instructors or studios have the option to to choose one, is that correct?
Demitris Maddox (10:52.454)
Sure.
Demitris Maddox (11:02.172)
Correct, correct. So on its face, Impact Builder, you could say, and you could make a case that is very similar to a Wix or a Squarespace, right? If you just look at it on paper, let’s say. But in what you’re talking about is the themes, is this is where Impact Builder is very different from a Squarespace. So if you take the average teacher who will be going on a website like Wix or Squarespace, right? This is their usual journey.
John Kozicki (11:17.001)
Mm-hmm.
Demitris Maddox (11:30.894)
And Mandy, can correct me if I’m wrong, being a Squarespace user. A teacher will hop on one those platforms and they will pick a website. chances are there’s not going to be a website for a private music teacher category. So they’re going to pick a website for, let’s say, a lawyer, right? Because it looks nice and it has the images that they want and it kind of has this kind of feel that they want to have. So now they’re going in there and they have to add in these images.
Mandy York (11:45.806)
Great.
Demitris Maddox (11:59.586)
and now they need to have a lessons page. Well, how do you create this lessons page now? Because you’re not a web designer. So now you are pulling in blocks. Well, I mean, I don’t want to say it like that, but now you’re pulling in different sections to create this lessons page. And is it flowing correctly? Is it speaking to them correctly? So now you have taken this lawyer page, which has looked amazing when you first saw it, and you have sort of modified it to kind of fit your studio at the best that you could. And now it doesn’t have that same sleek,
look and feel that the original lawyer template had, right? That’s most teachers. And I’m not even gonna begin to start about how do you write the copy for these pages because they’re just gonna give you like the standard lorem, lipsum sort of filler text. And you have to kind of know what to put where. That’s what I believe to be the standard way that teachers are building sites on these platforms. Manny, would you say that’s correct?
Mandy York (12:52.118)
Yes. Yep. have a list here of struggles of using Squarespace and that’s one of them is the templates. There is nothing for a music school. The majority of what you see in these templates, are, like online retailers. So something that’s very, lots of graphics where you can, you know, list prices for retail items and click here, click here to buy, you know, it, I have ended up kind of.
Demitris Maddox (13:07.846)
Mmm.
Demitris Maddox (13:16.294)
shoes or something like that, yeah.
Mandy York (13:22.366)
using the blocks. think what you said was accurate, know, pulling blocks into a page and being creative on my own. but no, there, there isn’t something ready to go for music studio owners. You’re totally right.
Demitris Maddox (13:33.03)
for sure.
I appreciate that. And John mentioning the point from before, now, like I said, even if this teacher has built this site, they have the font, the colors and the textures that they want on this website, is it going to convert a visitor into a student? And I would say maybe if I’m being honest, but like I said, where Impact Builder is different, are these what we are gonna be calling student first web design blueprints? Now what these are,
Mandy York (13:37.73)
Yeah.
Demitris Maddox (14:05.672)
is over the course of 10 years, I have learned different methodologies. I have gotten certified in conversion rate optimization, and I have put everything that I have learned into these blueprints so that when a teacher comes onto the platform, right now believe we have eight different sort of blueprints that they can choose from. So the way that it works on our platform is a teacher comes onto our platform, they pick the blueprint that they like the look and feel of.
and how they kind of want their student to be represented. And this template is already pre-built. It has conversion elements that are already baked into it, right? So it is already designed to turn a visitor into a student. Also, the lessons page is already there. All they have to do is when they come in is honestly change the images to be their images. And each section has copy prompts that
guide the teacher really on what they should write, where they should write it, how it should be structured so that there is no guesswork. I’ve had clients that I’ve worked with that have said, know, I really didn’t realize it, but these templates really take the cognitive load off of my mind. And it makes building a website that much easier.
John Kozicki (15:20.72)
Mm-hmm.
Mandy York (15:23.532)
Yeah, staring at a blank text box and trying to figure out what you need to put in there. Right. So you’re giving prompts as to what kind of copy should be on each page. And is this also something that’s going to benefit their SEO?
Demitris Maddox (15:40.358)
Hmm. So I’m glad that you brought up SEO because the impact builder is built with SEO in mind, right? So what I always say to do is you need to write for the visitor coming onto the site. You need to write for that person first. And SEO is something that you can do after it. So just like with a Wix or with a Squarespace, just because you put your content on there doesn’t mean that you’re going to rank high just because of that.
there are things that you need to do on your platform in order for you to rank high, whether it be.
Mandy York (16:13.686)
Okay, so you’re saying beyond just the copy that’s on the page. Okay, yep.
Demitris Maddox (16:17.244)
Correct, correct, just beyond. So maybe way back in the day, when before SEO was like really a thing, you used to be able to just put, let’s say, piano lessons, and Google would rank you based upon how many times you had piano lessons on this page. So they would kind of assume that if you had piano lessons 50 times, then this must be something that people are looking for, because you talk about it so much, so you must be very popular. People have gotten hip to that. Google has gotten hip to that. So what they do now is they’re using what’s called
backlinks. So now it’s not necessarily how many times you have piano lessons on your page itself. It is a little bit of that, but it’s also how many other websites are pointing back to your site. And reason why that’s important is because it’s a lot easier for you to just put piano lessons on your website, you know, a hundred times. It’s a lot harder for you to go to somebody else, for you to ask them, can you please link back to my site?
So it’s kind of like people pointing to your site saying your site is popular because this many people have said that you’re popular. And the reason why we can’t give just a blanket SEO kind of prescription is because it’s local SEO. what I panelists in search for me and in my area, it will look much different than what it looks like for you because it’s local businesses. And within those local businesses, it sort of depends on
you know, who’s ranking high at that time. So that’s what I’m gonna say about SEO.
John Kozicki (17:49.534)
I think it’s worth mentioning also that, and Demetris, you kind of alluded to this in what you just said, but with SEO, people started gaming the system, right? They started packing those keywords into their website. And like you said, that’s when Google got hip to it. And now they consider backlinks a more important aspect of the website. Or,
Demitris Maddox (18:02.182)
Mmm.
Demitris Maddox (18:17.222)
Mm.
John Kozicki (18:18.819)
an important aspect of the website. And this stuff is always changing too. And as long as this stuff continues to change, there’s also going to be quote unquote bad actors trying to game the system. Right? So would you agree that given that the best tactic is yes, you want to be mindful of these best practices like SEO and backlinks, but
not be so focused on that to achieve ranks and get clicks and visitors as you are putting quality content that is relevant to your business on your page.
Demitris Maddox (19:05.211)
For sure, that is a great question. So you’re always going to win if you are putting out quality content, right? And Manny, to kind of speak to your point earlier, because of the way that the Impact Builder Blueprints are sort of laid out and the questions that you are asking, it becomes a super relevant page for that search result. So there are ways that we do structure the page so that it does rank for those things. And if I’m being honest, Google doesn’t really
want you, even though it’s this big industry, Google doesn’t really want you doing search engine optimization or SEO, right? What they would like is they would like for their algorithm to pick naturally the thing that kind of shows up. But we all know that that’s not the case, right? And as long as there is money to be made and people will definitely try to game the system, right? So the way that I sort of see it is,
If there is a, I’m gonna use a prime example, right? So we all know School of Rock, right? That’s gonna be like a very predominant sort of school in this area. And they might be dominating the search engines. And now you have a teacher who is maybe in their second year of teaching. Are they any less deserving of being ranked highly just because they’re new and they may not have this big budget that a School of Rock might have? I don’t know about you, but I would say,
No, they deserve to be up there with just like everybody else. They deserve the opportunity. And that’s what I think SEO really does. It kind of levels the playing field almost and allows the everyday teacher and a teacher who may not have a million dollars worth of budget to kind of go out there and rank high. But as I said before, if you just focus on putting out quality content, that will be much better than doing nothing.
John Kozicki (20:55.165)
Demetrius, what are some mistakes that you see on websites? What are some common, maybe some common mistakes that you see on websites for music instructors or music schools?
Demitris Maddox (21:08.252)
Sure. So a big common mistake is if you look at the copy, is the copy, and by copy I mean words on the website, are the words on the website speaking to the visitor or is it all about you? So a test that I like to do is if you go on your website and you, you know, I can use like the finder key, you can find a certain word on a webpage. If you look for the word I, how many times do you say the word I?
And then how many times, and then look for the word you or your. How many times do you say the word you or your? You should be saying the word you and your more times than you’re saying the words I. So what that would look like in a kind of like an actual kind of framework is instead of saying, teach lessons to six year olds and they will have an amazing experience. You could say something like, your child, see your, your child will love learning here.
and we have lessons designed specifically for them. So just switching that kind of content like that is something that I have seen paid dividends and is also a mistake that I see teachers make.
John Kozicki (22:15.657)
I think that’s a general marketing mistake from, I think just because people don’t realize, they don’t understand what the goal of that, of your marketing efforts should be. I think where that mistake really comes in is, again,
If I am a music instructor and I’m starting a studio and I’m building a website, I’m thinking, okay, people are going to want to know about me, right? They’re going to want to know about me so that I can, so that then they’ll trust me to, teach their, their children or teach them. So the natural inclination is just to say like, okay, here’s my resume. Basically I’ve done this. I’ve done this. I have these, many years of experience. I think it’s a,
it’s a natural mistake to make just because if you were going to get a job, that’s exactly what you would do. You would kind of say, this is what I, you know, this is my resume. But marketing doesn’t necessarily work like that. And I think keeping in mind things like consumer empathy, right? You want to understand what the problem is.
Mandy York (23:19.118)
You
Demitris Maddox (23:19.548)
100%.
Demitris Maddox (23:34.236)
Mmm.
John Kozicki (23:39.742)
that the visitor of your website is looking to solve. What is that need, right? And they wanna understand how you will solve their problem. They don’t necessarily wanna know like, this person went to school at this place and has this many years of experience. They wanna understand how you’re gonna solve the problem that they have, which is I want my kid to play.
I want my kid to play music. want my kid to develop into a well-rounded individual who appreciates the arts or whatever it is. Yeah.
Mandy York (24:20.194)
Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that what you’re saying, John, that is the first thing that they want to know. I think that maybe as they get deeper and they are starting lessons or going to enroll in a program, they may want to know about the teachers, right? But there’s space for that. Right, Demetres? You know, where you do, you have a teacher page where this is the bio of these individuals. Right? It’s not the first thing.
Demitris Maddox (24:20.294)
like.
John Kozicki (24:39.005)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (24:43.229)
Yes, right.
Demitris Maddox (24:47.868)
Correct.
Mandy York (24:50.114)
that they see or hear about though. Yeah.
Demitris Maddox (24:50.246)
Correct, yeah, it’s not the first thing that they are looking for. When a person’s coming to your site, their first thing that they’re looking for is, is this for me? Do you understand me? So if you answer those two questions first, then they wanna know about you, right? So I think the old adage goes, they don’t wanna know about you until they know how much you care. And then once you show them that you care, then they’re kinda more open to sort of learn more about you.
Mandy York (25:00.675)
Yes.
John Kozicki (25:02.984)
Mm-hmm.
Demitris Maddox (25:19.28)
There was actually, I have two other mistakes, John, if you want me to chat about those real quick. Sure. So the first one, and I’ll talk about the last one. The first one I would see is not having videos on your website, right? So I know that a lot of music teachers, they put recital videos on there. Those are not the kind of videos that I’m speaking about. What I’m speaking about is specifically a video that kind of talks about
John Kozicki (25:23.975)
Yes, I’d love to hear them. Yeah.
Demitris Maddox (25:48.922)
what your lessons are like, you know? So if you show people and it’s like the teacher talking on camera and in today’s day and age with sort of a smartphone, you do not need a whole tech setup, just a regular smartphone propped up or even hold it selfie style is all that you need. But explaining what your lessons are like, how they’re different, who they’re for, and you talking to this person who’s looking at the screen is one of the most powerful things that is underutilized. Along with that kind of video,
The second video that I would suggest teachers make would be a what happens at your intro lesson. If you don’t have an intro lesson, maybe it’s what happens next, right? So how that video would look is let’s say you’re teaching inside of your home. You could stand outside of the door of your teaching space, film it selfie style and say, when you guys come in for your intro lesson, this is the room that you’ll be walking in. You’ll be sitting right here. Your child will sit right here at this piano. We have refreshments right here if you need.
It’s just giving them a tour of that space because you know your space, but they’re coming into a space that they don’t know. So making them feel comfortable in this space that they have not been in yet is the thing that’s going to build a lot of trust even before the first lesson.
John Kozicki (27:01.625)
Okay, great, great. So video, was there one other? Another mistake?
Demitris Maddox (27:06.48)
Yeah, this might be controversial, right? And I’m not sure, okay, I’m not sure where either of you land on this topic, right? I have not looked at your website yet, but I believe that a mistake that teachers make is not having pricing on their website.
John Kozicki (27:10.856)
Okay.
Mandy York (27:12.514)
We like that.
John Kozicki (27:17.369)
this is gonna get good. boy.
John Kozicki (27:27.177)
Let’s get into it.
Demitris Maddox (27:28.92)
Okay, so Mandy, are you in the camp of not having it or having it just so know where we’re at? Okay, and John, you’re not. Okay.
Mandy York (27:30.584)
Ha ha!
My prices are there. They are.
John Kozicki (27:37.065)
I do, well, I do not now. But before I explain my stance on this, Demetris, I want to hear your take on it.
Demitris Maddox (27:48.294)
Sure, I think that a lot of teachers don’t have their pricing on their website because it’s easy to not have it, right? So they feel like I want this teacher to call me and I want to build curiosity. So the less that I have on my site, the more it kind of introduces this curiosity thing that they’ll pick up the phone and call. But if you look at your own habits, if you’re going to look for something and the price is not on there,
you’re probably, chances are likely you’re not going to pick up the phone and call. What you’re going to is you’re going to click the back button and go someplace else, right? So, and especially in today’s day and age when information is very accessible, they’re not going to spend time calling you. They’re going to go someplace else. So the second reason, sorry, go ahead.
John Kozicki (28:35.71)
no, I want to hear the rest. I want to hear the rest. Yeah.
Demitris Maddox (28:37.702)
Sure, so the second reason is I feel like teachers don’t have it is because they feel like their website doesn’t justify having this price on it and they need to do a bunch of explaining around their price that they feel like they can do on the phone, right? So there’s nothing that they’re going to call you about that you can’t put on your website. They’re gonna ask you, well, who do you teach? Okay, I teach these people. So.
And chances are if they do call you, the first thing they’re going to ask you is what’s the price? And what is the number one question teacher hate being asked the most right away is what’s the price? Because it’s missing context, it’s missing nuance, it’s missing all these different kinds of things that if it were on your website surrounded by the nuance and the reasons why and a video of you explaining it and positive testimonials, the price would hold a lot more value. And lastly,
John Kozicki (29:15.901)
Mm-hmm.
Demitris Maddox (29:34.044)
Not, I’m sorry, lastly, having the price on your website, it positions you in a certain place, sort of in your local industry. Are you the most expensive? That signals something. You know, if you have two bottles of wine and one is $1,000 and one’s $20, you automatically think that the one that is $1,000 is higher quality. So not only does having your price on your website sort of position you right in the market, it’s sort of…
John Kozicki (29:46.035)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (29:55.347)
Mm-hmm.
Demitris Maddox (30:03.196)
it sort of plants your flag and stops you from having to deal with tire kickers who are just interested in price because if a person can’t really afford like let’s say somebody calls you and they can’t really afford your lessons but you convince them and you talk to them on the phone and then you sign them up knowing that they really couldn’t afford it. The rate of retention that you have might drop because they know they really can’t afford it. And if you just had to the price on the website
they would have self-selected out. That’s my case.
John Kozicki (30:34.025)
Yeah. Those are all valid points. I don’t disagree with any of them. Now I will say with MyStudio, the prices are accessible. It’s just one extra click. Once they click the Get More Info button, then I have their email address, then all the links are right there for pricing for the programs. So it’s just one extra click.
But you do make some valid points, know, so I can’t really argue with them.
Okay, so those are the mistakes. Now, I want to go back a little bit to, because Mandy, earlier you were mentioning how much you love to get in there and tinker with the features and the integrations and the customizations. And I 100 % agree on customizations. In particular, think Demetrius, you mentioned adding photos, like so with Impact Builder.
instructors and studio owners add their own photos. Mandy and I are big, big proponents of having good photos for your studio. did an entire episode on it. Episode 27 was about capturing amazing photos for your studio. What with Impact Builder, what other customizations and integrations are included?
Demitris Maddox (32:04.718)
Sure, so as I had mentioned before, if you look at Impact Builder, it’s very similar to a Wix in Squarespace in that arena of whatever you can do with like a Squarespace website or a Wix website, you can most likely do with Impact Builder. You can change out different blocks of, know, what are they called? Hold on. You could change out different sort of blocks and sections to make the website your own. You can…
add images, you can add photos, can add text here, you can add different kinds of integration. So when people are talking about integrations, what they’re mostly asking about is can I take my music staff sort of site and add it to Impact Builder? And you can because most things just need to be embedded via a HTML embed. So you have all those kinds of customizations. And if you don’t want to use an Impact Builder template for whatever reason,
or you want to build a page from scratch, you have those options to do that also. So there is not really a limit on the kind of customization that you’re able to do. If you want to code your own site, you can. You can change the CSS, you can play around with those kinds of things. Most teachers don’t want to. So in terms of customizations, they’ve really disguised the limit.
John Kozicki (33:27.185)
Okay, and I’m assuming that the integrations include, you had mentioned MMS, My Music Staff, which is like the student login portal, I’m assuming, and probably a payment widget. What about contact forms and integration with, like I use ActiveCampaign for my email marketing, or maybe MailChimp or whatever someone uses. Is it easily integrated?
Mandy York (33:27.662)
That’s cool.
Demitris Maddox (33:38.716)
Mm-hmm.
Demitris Maddox (33:45.82)
Mm.
John Kozicki (33:57.011)
with those platforms as well.
Demitris Maddox (34:00.166)
That is a excellent, excellent question. So there is a yes and a no answer to that, right? So Impact Builder is sort of billed as a all in one solution, right? Because we all know having to manage different multiple logins and platforms just to do the thing that you want it to do. So getting somebody from your website and now they’re in ActiveCampaign and now they’re going from ActiveCampaign, they’re going to, you know, this thing over there, you’re kind of franking, starting together.
John Kozicki (34:06.393)
okay.
John Kozicki (34:12.393)
Mm-hmm.
Demitris Maddox (34:30.18)
a bunch of different things to sort of make the engine run. What Impact Builder has done is we have all the, most of those things sort of in-house. So we have an in-house email platform. So the forms that you create automatically link up to your email platform. We have a built-in customer relationship manager on there. So all of your contacts are already in there. We already have a funnel system and this teachers might not need this as much potentially, but those that do love it.
John Kozicki (34:40.627)
Mm-hmm.
Demitris Maddox (34:58.362)
So it allows you to create separate marketing funnels inside of your website, inside of your platform with a separate domain if you needed it to be. There’s a e-commerce option in there that’s already built in, already ready to go and integrates with everything else. So if teachers want to sell like different sheet music things or arrangements or maybe even their lessons, they can do that. And last but not least, there is a calendly style booking calendar.
So if you want somebody to book a time to come in for your intro lesson, you can book it right then and there. So it does have those integrations. And if you wanted to, let’s say you came to the platform and you, for whatever reason, are hated our email platform, we easily can integrate with ActiveCampaign, easily integrate with MailChimp and all those other kinds of providers.
John Kozicki (35:31.497)
Okay.
John Kozicki (35:45.054)
Okay, that’s a lot more robust than I expected, to be honest. There’s a lot going on there. You mentioned payment integration. Now, I might be getting way into the weeds on this one, but it definitely made me curious. If there’s payment integration built into Impact Builder, what is the payment…
Mandy York (35:51.033)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (36:14.813)
the credit card payment service that is, is there one that’s required? there, can it be any, any bank and any credit card service provider? How does that work?
Demitris Maddox (36:26.492)
Sure, so maybe I misspoke there. So Impact Builder is not handling the credit card payments. It’s just facilitating it. And you need your own payment gateway to handle that. The most common one that people use would be a Stripe, right? So we’ve kind of all heard of stripe.com. So you hook up your Stripe account to Impact Builder. So when you are selling, let’s say sheet music, we’re just the front door.
John Kozicki (36:35.827)
Gotcha.
John Kozicki (36:41.287)
Right, okay.
Demitris Maddox (36:51.888)
Right. We just bring it to the front door. You put your credit card information there. But what you’re putting your credit card information into is your Stripe account. So they’re the ones who pays you out. There is no credit card sort of there’s no payment processor that is needed to be an impact builder member. You don’t need to have it. But if you want to start taking payments, you need a merchant account or a Stripe account.
John Kozicki (36:52.595)
Got it.
John Kozicki (36:58.855)
Right, gotcha.
John Kozicki (37:15.165)
Gotcha, okay, so it’s more like there’s an integration for say like your stripe or your square widget. Is that how it would work?
Demitris Maddox (37:23.612)
Sure, sure. So you can choose to do that, but we already have a native, it’s already kind of natively hooked into there. So if you can take your, now I might be getting too much into the weeds. If you go into Stripe and you take your secret key and your API access, which is just two strings of code, if you copy and paste that into Impact Builder, now you don’t even have to worry about making, like taking a form from Stripe and putting it in there.
any form that you create any payment form any checkout form that you create is automatically linked to your stripe account. So that’s why it’s all native and it’s all integrated together to work together. So you don’t have to manage these different logins in all these different areas. Everything sort of managed under one login.
John Kozicki (38:08.925)
Okay, gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, we were getting way into the weeds, at least for me, and these are the reasons that I stay away from the website building these days. Yep, exactly, exactly. So, I think I mentioned, like I use WordPress for, well, that’s how I built my first website. I’ve used WordPress for multiple.
Demitris Maddox (38:19.75)
Yeah
Mandy York (38:21.304)
Your nope list, right? Yeah.
John Kozicki (38:39.069)
websites over over time. And I will say that it’s come a long way. And I think platforms like Squarespace, like Wix, they’ve also come a long way that they are more user friendly. It’s nice that Impact Builder is is similar. I love that it’s designed specifically for music studios and music instructors for those diehards like myself and Mandy.
who are still using Squarespace and WordPress or someone like Wix. What would you say, and I know I’m asking you a weird question here, but what would you say are like maybe pros and cons of those platforms?
Demitris Maddox (39:26.854)
Sure, so I’m gonna start with WordPress first, right? And honestly, the reason where Impact Builder sort of came about is honestly because of my frustration building those websites over these 10 years, right? I personally had no help building mine. I had to learn everything from scratch and I just wanted to give teachers a leg up. And I love that you guys love your platforms and I love that you love your websites. I’m not trying to…
change anybody. My goal is to everybody in the music teaching industry to have amazing websites. That’s my overall mission. If it happens to be with my platform, cool, amazing, because this is what I honestly believe. My goal is that if we raise everybody’s sort of level, then as an industry, we sort of raise our level together. And this concept came to me when I was actually, of all things, trying to frame a picture. Picture framing of all things. I do not understand why it’s so expensive to frame a picture.
John Kozicki (40:04.094)
Love that.
Demitris Maddox (40:25.852)
No matter where you go, it’s always super expensive. It’s almost like they got together and said, you know what, we’re gonna charge you $400 to frame this thing in a piece of wood and put some white matting on it. So I think about music teachers. So if you look at the industry of sort of people who frame, what do they call it? People who frame pictures or framers, nobody’s undercutting somebody else. Nobody’s saying, well, they’re doing it for 200, I’ll do it for…
free at first and then I’ll do it for 20 bucks. They don’t undercut themselves. But as music teachers, often undercut ourself because the way that we present ourselves, we feel like may not equate to being able to ask for what we’re actually worth. So I say all that to say my goal is to raise the industry level as a whole. So then people aren’t nervous to charge what they’re worth. And so then no matter where this teacher, sorry, no matter where this parent goes,
John Kozicki (40:56.178)
Mmm, yeah.
Demitris Maddox (41:21.606)
they’re going to see, well, this is the standard around here. Everybody’s charging X amount of dollars. Wow. OK, I guess this is what it is. So that’s my goal.
John Kozicki (41:30.931)
Yeah, and I love that. You mentioned undercutting ourselves. Seth Godin calls that a race to the bottom. Yeah, I think that’s a great goal. Sorry, continue.
Demitris Maddox (41:37.446)
Yeah.
Demitris Maddox (41:42.234)
No, you’re quite, I’m glad you agree. So to say, now I’m gonna talk about the pros and cons, right? I’m gonna talk about sort of WordPress first. So these are the pros. WordPress does have extensive customization options, right? That is a big pro. They have a large plugin ecosystem. You can pretty much find a plugin for whatever you kind of need. If you need a hello bar, like at the top of your website, you can put a plugin on there.
Mandy York (41:42.541)
Mm-hmm.
Demitris Maddox (42:11.184)
There is no real monthly subscription to WordPress itself. Right. So WordPress the platform, there’s no monthly subscription. What costs a subscription would be if you wanted a certain theme like a Divi or an Elementor that costs money. It also go ahead. For sure, some 100 percent, they have a strong SEO capability like it is made light. It is made quick. Now this is
John Kozicki (42:27.133)
Well, and some of the plugins, some of the plugins do require subscriptions. Yeah. Yeah.
Demitris Maddox (42:39.696)
WordPress, platform itself. I’m not speaking specifically about like a Divi or an Elementor. And lastly, which are correct, which are themes. Lastly, they have a strong community support forms. You can find help about WordPress everywhere. YouTube, somewhere on Reddit probably, you can find places on Facebook. So that would be the pros of a platform like WordPress. And I’m gonna talk about the cons. So the cons would be, there’s a steep learning curve.
John Kozicki (42:45.063)
Right, which are themes. Yeah.
John Kozicki (43:03.731)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (43:08.969)
Oh yeah, that’s why I have a guy who builds them. Yes, yes.
Demitris Maddox (43:09.02)
to WordPress. Yeah, exactly, right? The guy. It does require consistent updates, right? So you need to update the plugins, you need to update the theme, and you need to update WordPress. And there’s a specific order you need to update those things in. So you’re always updating something. There are no specialized templates for teachers.
Mandy York (43:13.026)
Yeah.
Demitris Maddox (43:36.278)
and it has a possibility to become slow or bloated if you’re adding in a bunch of different plugins. So that’s what I would say would be the kind of a platform like WordPress.
John Kozicki (43:42.918)
Mm All true.
Demitris Maddox (43:49.102)
in terms of sort of like a Wix or a Squarespace. Okay, so this is gonna be like Wix and Squarespace kinda sort of combined, right? It is easy to move things around. So that is a big pro. It does include hosting and basic security. The maintenance and updates are kinda handled automatically. It does have basic design templates available baked right in.
John Kozicki (43:52.155)
Yeah, roast Mandy now, roast Mandy. Do Squarespace.
Mandy York (43:52.472)
Yeah, my turn, my turn.
Demitris Maddox (44:18.662)
There is basic support if needed. So that would be, guess, the pros and sorry, the pros for a Squarespace. Cons would be you have generic templates that may be not optimized for the teacher. I’m talking specifically about teachers here, right? You have limited functionality for scheduling lessons unless unless you’re bringing in something else third party. A con is the content is locked into their ecosystem.
Mandy York (44:34.242)
Yeah, yep, and that’s on my list too.
Demitris Maddox (44:48.184)
Unlike a WordPress where you can sort of download an HTML of your website and kind of move it from platform to platform, you’re kind of locked into the ecosystem. So that could be seen as a con. There are limited marketing tools inside of it. And the last one I’d say is there are no specialized guidance for writing the thing that you need to write on your website, which Manny spoke to about earlier.
Mandy York (45:13.25)
Yeah, yeah, I would totally agree. Yep. And I’m not here to claim that I have an amazing website. really, you know, it does its job. I, it’s my philosophy that the website is kind of a living thing too. It needs to be revisited. This is my 10th year doing this. My website should not be what it was 10 years ago. It needs to be revisited and updated, right?
Demitris Maddox (45:33.585)
Yeah.
Demitris Maddox (45:37.66)
100%.
Mandy York (45:40.392)
and I use an outside scheduling software for my classes. So, it isn’t all like you said, they don’t have everything there in one place, but I integrate my acuity scheduling into, into Squarespace. Yeah. You know, another thing we haven’t really talked about is mobile optimization. That’s something I struggle with too, because I design on my desktop, right? I’ve got this big monitor in front of me and I’m.
Demitris Maddox (45:53.564)
Correct.
Mandy York (46:07.598)
designing my website and then I pull it up on my phone and I was like, oh, that’s not what I wanted it to look like because I know over 90 % of my visitors are looking at my site on their phone, right? Do you have any insight on that? I mean, do you kind of design sites for mobile devices knowing that the majority of your users will access them that way?
Demitris Maddox (46:30.586)
Sure, so it is 100 % always on my mind when I’m designing a website is how will this translate to the mobile version, right? So the impact builder blueprints, they’re already kind of built with that in mind. And if I’m being honest, so are the different templates that you have on like a Squarespace or a Wix theme, they’re mostly built like that. Where they start getting into the weeds is when we start wanting to build our own things, right? So.
Mandy York (46:38.466)
Damn.
Mandy York (46:56.835)
Yes.
Demitris Maddox (46:58.51)
I always have it in my mind. If I am putting two blocks of text next to each other on a website, let’s say, in my mind, I’m like, how is that going to look on mobile? How’s that going to shift and look on mobile? So there used to be this camp that used to say, well, if 90 % of your traffic is coming on mobile, why wouldn’t you just build the mobile version first and then optimize it later for desktop? And I never felt comfortable building the mobile first.
In my mind, I always felt it was easier to take things away than it would be to add things. So my building process is I will design a website on desktop and then I will shrink it down to the mobile view. And it’s a lot easier for me to resize text, resize images and remove elements if needed. Then it would be the other way around where I would need to add images to the desktop to make it more desktop friendly.
Mandy York (47:49.272)
Yeah. I mean, honestly, I don’t think my website looks that great on a desktop, but I really love the way it looks on a mobile device. So there it is.
John Kozicki (47:50.813)
Love it.
Demitris Maddox (47:57.04)
Yeah, correct.
John Kozicki (47:58.344)
I’m going to say, Mandy, I think you do have a great website and I think it looks great. I’m going to kind of reiterate a couple of things that Demetra said. And I think it speaks to the core of what he’s trying to do also, which is I think your website, Mandy, is great because it does convert. You have great messaging on it. You have great photos on it. The, you know, I don’t know what it is that
what the things are that you are not happy with, but I’m gonna guess that they’re probably things that maybe other people aren’t as concerned with it as you are. and again, to what Demetris’ goal is, which is elevating the industry, right? Have a website that looks professional, that represents who those instructors are and those studios are.
that speaks to the client, I think you hit all those boxes. And if I’m understanding correctly, Demetris, that’s what you think is important for these websites too.
Demitris Maddox (49:12.291)
150 % John. Just because like we are, man, we are our own worst critic. There are things that you notice that somebody else doesn’t even notice at all. And what John is saying is 100 % correct. I would rather a website that looked, I don’t want to say ugly, but looked not good and was just text, but the text spoke to the person in a way that made them feel connected to you versus a website with just images and no text.
If you have your messaging dialed in, Mandy, then you are already miles ahead of everybody else. So you may not like your website. There’s websites that I designed that I don’t like it because we are our own worst critic. And when is the painting done? You know, when am I finished? Right. But other people going to it love it. And that’s all that matters. If it works, then it works. It doesn’t really matter what it looks like. The issue that a lot of teachers are having is that their websites are undermining their credibility.
and you seem to not have that issue. So I would say if your website is working for you, then love on it. Keep on at it. You’ve been at this for 10 years. Don’t put yourself down. Like I said, if you love Squarespace and you’re there, great. If a person wants to use my web platform, cool. That’s not what I’m getting at here. If you love your website, then keep at it.
John Kozicki (50:30.461)
Love it, love it. Demetrius Maddox, where can people find you? Where can people find Impact Builder and provide impact? Give us all the details.
Demitris Maddox (50:43.238)
Sure. So what I want to do I actually want to give your visitors and listeners value first. That’s what I preach. That’s what I believe in. So what I’ve actually made is called hero section Henry. We’ve been talking about websites a bunch here. Your hero section is going to be that first top part of your website that is going to be displayed before somebody scrolls. So what this is going to allow people to do is they will be able to take a screenshot of their hero section. They will be able to put it inside of this.
chatbot that I made called hero section Henry and I show you how to do it step by step and it will be able to tell you what you need to fix on your website, how you can write the copy to connect more and the place to find that is at provideimpact.com forward slash Henry.
John Kozicki (51:29.705)
love that. Okay, provideimpact.com forward slash Henry. Demetris, thanks for coming on Rock School Proprietor podcast. We’re gonna wrap it up and this is great.
Mandy York (51:30.254)
Cool.
Mandy York (51:40.002)
Yeah, thank you. love what you do. And I love you’ve got the background in music. So great. Yeah.
Demitris Maddox (51:46.108)
Thank you so much.
John Kozicki (51:48.35)
All right, we’ll see you next time.
Demitris Maddox (51:50.108)
All right.
Mandy York (51:50.36)
Thanks, John.
