Te acher zone
Y
oga teacher trainings give you the tools and knowledge
to conidently teach yoga but building a sustainable
career and a proitable yoga business becomes a
challenge if you don’t have the essential business and
marketing skills.
In most instances, teaching yoga requires setting yourself up as
a small business owner. Many excellent teachers don’t have the
essential business skills to really succeed in making a good living
teaching yoga.Being a yoga teacher and being a business owner
simply requires diferent skill sets.
Knowing how to build an engaged community and how to extend
your ofering to bring multiple income streams into your yoga
business is essential if you really want to sustain teaching yoga full
time and not get burnt out in the process.
Many yoga teachers are struggling inancially. They’re teaching
15-20 classes a week, with no days of and are still struggling to pay
the bills.
They’re being paid for their teaching time in the studio but they’re
also spending time travelling between studios and planning their
classes. Time that’s not ‘paid’.his simply is not a sustainable way to make a living
from teaching yoga.
It leads to burn out and can also result in many full-time
yoga teachers having to take on part-time jobs to support
themselves inancially.
It’s a story that’s echoed time and time again in my Facebook
group where one of the teachers recently posted:
“Being a yoga teacher in London is tough: the constant travelling,
with some studios not paying you enough, the competition that is
out there, and cost of living and studio hire being expensive...I’ve
learnt to hustle but I’m getting tired of it. I feel that the yoga teacher
‘struggle’ or ‘burnout’ should be a thing of the past”What’s the solution?
The solution is to focus on building a proitable and sustainable
yoga business and to do this you need to learn essential skills that
allow you to generate other income streams.
Being a yoga teacher doesn’t start and end with getting your yoga
teacher training certiicate and all the best yoga teachers never stop
improving on their craft.
Just as you’ll continue to improve your teaching, you also have to
understand business and marketing or work with people that do.
Studio classes don’t pay the bills, but they can help you to gain
exposure and grow your community. Community is key and it’s
important to stay connected with your students through email
newsletters, your website and social media.
It’s therefore essential to learn how to use these channels to
connect with your students online and to ind out what they really
want from you and to build an engaged and loyal community.
When you know what your ideal students want, you can create
higher-priced oferings speciically for them, whether that’s
workshops, retreats, or online courses.
To transition from the studio teaching model to creating
successful higher priced oferings, you need to have the four
foundational elements of your yoga marketing strategy in place.- Build your online hub
Your website is the foundation to everything you do, it’s the online
hub for your community.
Having a website gives you the opportunity to create content such
as a blog to attract potential students and to capture their email
addresses through opt in forms placed across your site.
Your website opens up opportunities to generate extra income and
more freedom - particularly if you use your website as a tool to start
teaching online.
Lots of yoga teachers all over the world are creating online
courses and classes with the aim to reach more people and generate
more income in their business – a solid and efective online yoga
business strategy.
Understanding how to take your classes online can help you to
reach bigger audiences and can have a huge positive impact on your
yoga business.- Ofer free, valuable content
If you don’t already have an efective content marketing strategy
in place, you are likely missing out on a lot and losing a lot of ideal
students in the process.
As well as positioning you as an expert through the content that
you share, you’ll increase awareness of your yoga brand, attract
new eyes online, boost traic to your website, get people on to your
list, convert them into students and retain them – all through the
content that you create and share online. - Growing your email list
Email over social media any day!
If you want to build a sustainable, long lasting yoga business, you
must prioritise growing your email list over your social media following.
Social media is rented land with every changing algorithm and if
Facebook or Instagram closed their doors tomorrow, how would you
contact your followers?
Spending time and efort on email marketing is one of the best
things you can do to grow your yoga business.
Once you’ve got a potential student on your email list, you have
the opportunity to show up week after week in their inbox to deliver
value and to build a relationship – and this is how you build a loyal
and engaged community who go on to invest in your higher priced
online oferings.
So get on board with email marketing now, don’t put it of, and
a year down the line when people are booking your yoga retreats
as a result of your email, you’ll be smiling inside that you made the
decision to start growing your list. - Be visible online
You need to be there in the places where your audience is
hanging out online. This means doing Facebook Live, getting on
Instagram Stories, showing up in their feeds and generally sharing
and extending your teachings from the studio and into the digital
landscape.
There are ways to make this easier such as creating one piece of
content every week and sharing it across multiple places.
Learning how to navigate the world of yoga business and
marketing can be overwhelming enough so it’s good to know that
there are online resources and courses to get you started.
Head to digitalyogaacademy.com to get access to a free business
resource library and start learning how to build a sustainable and
proitable yoga business.Kelly McHugh is a yoga teacher and business coach who helps yoga
teachers to learn how to efectively share their message and build
their communities.