Knowing how to build an engaged community and how to extend your offering to bring multiple income streams into your business is essential. If you really want to sustain teaching yoga full time and not get burnt out in the process, you need to know the business secrets of successful yoga teachers.
Yoga teacher trainings will develop your teaching skills. But how do you then run a profitable yoga business and become a successful yoga teacher if you don’t have the business skills?
Becoming a confident and authentic yoga teacher is just one part of being a successful yoga teacher. And it’s unfortunate that many excellent teachers don’t have business skills under the belt to really succeed in making a good living teaching yoga.
And these business skills are essential. Being a yoga teacher and being a business owner simply require different skill sets.
Knowing how to build an engaged community and how to extend your offering to bring multiple income streams into your business is essential. If you really want to sustain teaching yoga full time and not get burnt out in the process, you need to know the business secrets of successful yoga teachers.
Most yoga teachers are struggling financially. Some teachers are spending their week teaching 20+ classes and are still struggling to pay the bills.
When you take a closer look at this, those teachers are being paid for their time teaching in the studio but they’re also spending time travelling from studio to studio and planning classes.
Time that’s not necessarily paid for.
In the long term, this option is not a sustainable way to make a living from teaching yoga.
The other option is to build a profitable and sustainable yoga business. To do this you need to learn new skills and look at generating other income streams.
Ultimately, your success will depend on WHO you are as a person. That is because being a yoga teacher does not start and end with attending a yoga teacher training and receiving a certificate.
Being a successful yoga teacher is made up of multiple elements that will impact your successes and your failures.
Failure can sometimes be the very best thing that happens, because it forces you to grow. And out of that growth, your yoga teaching career can reach new heights.
In order to have a “successful” yoga career, you first need to determine what that means to you. Think whether it’s owning your own studio or positively impacting the lives of your students. Whatever your goals, the reality is teaching yoga is a challenging career path.
Start with a vision
Retreats, workshops, online classes, corporate….
There are so many things yoga teachers can offer – but you can’t do them all.
When you try to do so many things, a lot of these things will not be aligned with what you truly want for yourself. Defining your vision helps you to narrow down on where to put your engird and go after it.
The more you can crystallise your intention of what you want to create for yourself and then create daily habits to help you get there, the more you can manifest it.
Know your message
Create a higher priced offering
Public classes don’t pay the bills, but those classes build awareness and give you exposure. Once you have that, then you want to stay connected to your students through email newsletters and social media.
Use these channels to “listen” and find out what your community really wants from you.
When you know what your ideal students want, you can then create higher-priced offerings that match their needs. Those offerings could include retreats, private classes, yoga coaching or e-courses.
Build your online hub
All successful yoga teachers have a website and there are many reasons why you need a website.
Having a website can open up opportunities to generate extra income and more freedom.
Your website is the foundation to everything you do, it’s your home and hub for your community. So when you have higher priced premium products your website will help you to promote these offerings.
So these extra income generators could be workshops or retreats or teaching online.
With the rise of yoga streaming sites, it seems digital yoga is only going to grow.
Once you’ve built up a following, it’s easy to set up a password protected page on your website to host your yoga videos. If you do it yourself, you’ll likely make more money this way than going through a big site that pays per view with so many other – often bigger-name – teachers to get lost among.
Understanding how to take your classes online can help you to reach bigger audiences. And that can have a huge positive impact on your yoga business.
Never stop learning
This is one of the most important business secrets of successful yoga teachers.
All the best yoga instructors, never stop improving on their craft. If you believe that you are all-knowing as soon as you have finished your training, you will never become as successful as you could be if you choose to live every day with an open mind.
Every time advice is taken from someone else, you will find yourself in a better position than ever before. And consequently at some point, in a position to give out that advice for yourself.
Continuing to participate in training classes and workshops, in addition to keeping up-to-date with the relevant reading material will ensure that you continue learning throughout your career. At some point during your time as in instructor, you will come across things that you aren’t quite as good at. Taking these realisations on board, and working to improve in each area will mean continued development in your art, day after day.