How to Excel at Work as a Dance Instructor

Did you know that dancing is proven to help general fitness, particularly cardiovascular health? Many people will engage in dance lessons for these benefits.

If you’re a dance instructor, figuring out how to excel at work can feel overwhelming. Knowing about the health and mental benefits that dance offers can help, but how can you improve as a dance instructor?

If you’re looking for ways to advance your teaching ability, we’re here to help. Read on for a quick guide on the many ways to improve your dance business.

Find a Niche

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Your first step to teaching dance is to find what niche you want to excel in. Dance is split into dozens of categories for you to pick and choose from.

Your technical skills will help across different categories, but you should still have a specific dance as a dance instructor. Primarily, this is because you’ll often have students who are looking to learn that type of dance.

Excelling in fitness-based dance such as Barre or Zumba is one way to build your niche. You’ll attract people focusing on fitness as well as people looking for new ways to dance.

Once you’re comfortable in your niche as a dance instructor, you should work to expand your dance business. Take the lessons you learned in your starting niche to expand your teaching ability.

Keep Your Social Media Updated

Another critical part of excelling as a dance instructor is to keep your social media active. Many people use social media to find new businesses.

According to the University of Maine, there are nearly 5 billion social media users. You can reach these new students by keeping your social media both active and accurate.

If you have contact information, make this available on your page. Doing so will help students reach out to you if they need to.

Keep a Regular Schedule

When designing your dance business, you should make sure you have a regular schedule for teaching dance. But what constitutes a “regular” schedule?

Regular doesn’t relate to standard hours but instead relates to keeping your hours consistent. Dance lessons should take place at the same time, and if possible, at the same place.

As such, this means you’ll have several schedules to manage if you’re a dance instructor for several types of dance. You can’t teach Zumba, Jazzercize, and step all at the same time!

Keeping your hours consistent will help students work you into part of their regular schedule. As such, you’ll see many of the same students while you’re teaching dance. You’ll build a rapport and relationship with these students over your lessons.

You should also consider most people’s schedules when setting your hours. Setting your lessons to take place at noon on a workday will dramatically limit who can come to your lessons. Keep them to weekends or after the workday so that nearly anyone can attend.

Promote Your Lessons

For starting business owners, it’s easy to overlook marketing. You can quickly become overwhelmed by the other ways to improve your teaching ability that you don’t think about promoting your lessons.

Marketing is one of the most important parts of your dance business. An effective marketing strategy will help you to excel at the business end of your dancing business.

Think of the best ways to promote your lessons in your area. Social media ads are a great way to do so, as these will most often reach local students. Reaching students on the other side of the world won’t help fill up your dance studio.

You can also consider flyers and posters. Place these advertisements for your business in places where like-minded dancers will see them. Gyms, dance studios, and clubhouses are good places to start.

Use Online Platforms

Another great way to market your lessons is with your online platforms. If you’re keeping your social media updated, this platform should already be ready for your promotion.

Short-form videos or informative posts are great ways to reach your audience with information. You can make sure that the business side is booming so you’re always teaching to a full studio.

You can also use your online platforms to help teach technical skills. A great way to grow your audience, both locally and non-locally, is by uploading instructional videos to your social media platforms. These videos are perfect to showcase your technical skills and attract new students.

Broaden Your Horizons

Once you’re set in your niche, you shouldn’t stay in that market forever. Doing so can cause stagnation and will lead to you only having one category.

As you grow more comfortable, you should consider teaching dance in other styles. Your teaching ability will grow as you perfect and master new styles of dance.

Best of all, learning more styles can improve your technical skills. What works in one style of dance may improve your preferred niche, for example.

You should keep your first styles to ones similar to your niche. That way, you can transfer some of your starting audience over to your new venture.

Grow With Other Instructors

Finally, you shouldn’t see other instructors as competitors. In some ways, you’ll be competing for the same audience of students. But in others, you’ll help each other grow in the new styles of dance.

Consider taking lessons with one of the instructors in your community. You can take inspiration from their lessons and see how you can add these skills to your instruction.

Just make sure you aren’t stealing their lessons outright! You should always add your own flair, both out of respect for the original dance teacher and to help improve the lessons.