So many yoga teachers want to start teaching yoga online. But before you dive into teaching yoga online, there are four essentials that you need to have in place.
There are lots of reasons why teaching yoga online is a great thing. There is a huge opportunity in the world to start teaching going online and increase the impacts you are making on people around the world. It also allows you to generate extra income!
Many teachers want to reduce the number of classes they’re teaching and look at how they can bring other income streams into their business and reach more people. Teaching yoga online is a great way to do that!
Teaching yoga online is a way to avoid burnout from teaching in studios, diversify your business, bring in higher priced offerings and of course there is a lot of players.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to just jump straight in without having these four essentials in place first. You need to set yourself up for success if teaching yoga online is something you want to implement as a long term strategy in your yoga business. Teaching yoga online isn’t a quick fix!
You need to take your time and see this as a sustainable way to grow your business. Despite the best of intentions, many teachers are failing when it comes to teaching yoga online. This is because they are missing these core essentials around building their community.
Teaching yoga online essential 1: Your website
The first thing that you need to have is a website. This is your online home for your students to come to. This isn’t social media!
Your website is the foundation of everything that you do. It’s the hub for your community and it allows you to create content such as blog posts to attract potential new students. This allows you to capture emails addresses with opt-in forms which are really important.
You need your website to promote your higher-priced offerings and premium products like yoga retreats and online courses.
Your website is super key.
If you don’t already have a website either do it yourself or find someone to build a WordPress or Squarespace website for you. It doesn’t need to be expensive! There is no real excuse for not having a website.
Teaching yoga online essential 2: Create valuable content for free
You need to create content consistently with lots of valuable information for FREE. Your students are hanging out online and if you’re not creating content for them then what are you doing online?
There are ways that you can create content easily and repurpose it. If you make a habit of creating a new piece of niche specific content every week this will become easy. Don’t put out generic content. You need to put out content that is specific to your idea students’ yoga journey! Google likes niche content and you will have more chance of showing up on the first or second page of results.
Creating nice specific content is a way for you to be found organically.
Once you have created that one piece of content you can look at how you can repurpose it. If you read through your blog posts you will be able to find ‘Golden Nuggets’. These are paragraphs that you can pull out and recreate into a social media post directing people to the blog post. There’s lots of ways to break up that content and share it in different ways.
Creating Content Is About Building Trust
You need to have a plan with your content creation and put some thought into it in order to build trust. If you’re showing up and sharing content regularly you’re creating trust and creating your following. You will position yourself as an expert in your particular niche.
If you are not creating content you will be missing out on potential students because you’re not keeping them engaged. Once you’ve got students in your community, the ongoing content allows you to continue that engagement with people. This means when you launch your online course later down the line those people that have been following you for some time will be the first to purchase your course. They trust you! You need to warm people up, nurture relationships and build trust for them to be open to paying you for an online yoga course.
This is super important when it comes to having an online yoga course. You could be reaching someone on the opposite side of the world. How did they build that trust with you? How do they know who you are? They know who you are through the free content you share online!
Teaching yoga online essential3: Build your email list
You need to have an email list before you launch an online yoga course. The way you build your email list is to have a piece of valuable content that offers a solution for your ideal student. You share that piece of content in exchange for their email address.
Then further down the line, you can use that content to convert people on your email list into paying students when you launch your online yoga course.
Try to make your free content your best work. You want people to be really impressed by your free content because your students will be imagining how good your paid content is if your free content is this good!
Having your email list is key!
This links back to your website because you need your website to get people onto your email list. If you want to teach yoga online through a course or membership site you need to nurture people so they are waiting for you to launch something. So when you launch something they’re ready!
Imagine that! You’ve for them on your email list because you shared something of amazing value to them. You then continue to show up in their inbox providing real value, showing them that you are the teacher to help them with their yoga journey. This means when you have a program to work with them on a deeper level they’re ready and waiting for it!
But be prepared to work hard to do this. It is a sustainable and profitable business model and something that you can do for a very long time. But you have to put in a lot of work to build your email list!
Teaching yoga online essential 4: Visibility
Visibility is all about getting onto video. Video is an incredible tool to use. Facebook and Instagram want you to use video so they will reward you by making it more visible to your followers. Your organic reach will be far greater than if you just share a post. It can be scary going on video because of fears of being in the spotlight.
But you have to make your message bigger than your fear!
You have to get over yourself, it’s as simple as that. And practice makes perfect. The more you do it the easier it will become. In the beginning, you won’t get many people, you may be on there live and there’s no one. But that’s fine. People can always go and watch archived videos and start catching up over time. So you can use these videos to build up your community.
Use Instagram stories as well because that’s where a lot of people are hanging out. Check in with your own behaviour on Instagram, where do you spend the most time? Maybe it is your stories! When Instagram brings out new features try to be the first to adopt these because they will give you more reach.
Collaborating with other teachers and companies is another way to be more visible such as guest blog posts on each other’s websites. You can also offer advice and help by commenting on posts in yoga Facebook groups.
Bringing it all together
You can see how these four essentials work together. Content is the key one. Content feeds down to all of the other essentials and comes out again with visibility. Show up for your yoga business, your students and yourself!
>>> Video training: 4 essentials to have in place before you start teaching yoga online
