So, you’ve fulfilled your dream of becoming a yoga teacher! Congratulations! Perhaps you’ve found a studio where you can teach a few classes per week, or perhaps you’ve gone all out and landed multiple places to spread yoga love and you’re staying busy with a fully loaded enlightenment schedule. Whatever is the case, even if you’re having a great time doing what you’re doing now, you’re probably wondering: how can I build my business as a yoga teacher?
Even though we love helping people bliss out on the daily, we have to face facts that simply teaching a few classes every week is not going to be sustainable for our professional or financial futures. There’s so much more we can be doing to get our message out there. Check out our suggestions below to help you get started on helping more people and getting yourself established as a true yogi entrepreneur.
10 Surefire Ways to Build Your Business as a Yoga Teacher
1. Create a Brand…
Hone your style of yoga. Find out what you’re great at and capitalize on it. Offer your students something they can’t get from another teacher, because you’ve made a point to be awesome at what you uniquely do. People tend to find a teacher or two that they click with and keep coming back to their classes. You’ll find the students and studios you jive with if you create your own niche and live and teach it authentically.
2. …Then Promote That Brand
Self-promotion can seem awkward, especially since we mainly become yoga teachers to help people, not show off how good we are at yoga. But it’s important, especially in this day and age. Make Facebook and Instagram pages separate from your personal pages just to promote yourself as a yoga teacher. Then keep your audience engaged. Post regularly, and post with the intention that got you into this in the first place: health and helping others. Give people pointers, demonstrate safe ways to do poses, and promote your classes and offerings! No one will know what you do unless you tell them about it.
3. Start a Blog
If you have a way with words, a blog can be a great way to promote yourself, reach more people and keep your students and audience engaged. Keep in mind here that, again, uniqueness is key. The blogosphere is saturated with yogis trying to make their way. Just make sure your message is authentic, that you’re passionate about your message, and that your intention is to help people with that message.
If writing isn’t exactly your cup of herbal tea, you can always start a video blog and offer online tips and classes to your students. Either way, this route has potential to connect you with more clients than traditional in-person engagements can. Again, it’s the world we live in- you might as well embrace it!
4. Teach Private Sessions
This is not only a great way to make more money since you can charge more for one-on-ones, but it’s also a great way to increase your word-of-mouth referrals. If you give someone a private session and they tell one or two friends, then those friends love your time together and tell one or two of their friends….well, you get the idea! Pretty soon you’ll have a community of people asking you for private lessons, coming to your classes and living a healthy lifestyle right along with you.
5. Care For Your Students
Speaking of creating community, we can’t emphasize enough how important it is. Since we are in the business of helping and educating, caring comes as a natural extension. Practicing non-attachment with your students can be good advice to the wise, but that doesn’t mean you can’t care for them. They’re the most important part of what you do.
So, listen to them. Be present with them. Offer them suggestions as far as your knowledge reaches, then refer them to someone you know and trust if you can’t be of assistance. After all, they’re the reason you wanted to be here in the first place, and they’ll be the reason you’ll be able to keep doing what you love in the future. Love them, and they will certainly love you back!
6. Create a Signature Workshop
Developing a unique workshop is an excellent way to help students work on a specific aspect of their practice. As they are a higher priced offering, they’ll benefit your pocketbook, and can boost your popularity as well. Someone who doesn’t regularly attend your studio may come for a workshop and get interested in your usual classes because they liked your teaching style. Workshops have immense potential for networking and connecting with students. What’s more, you can design a workshop that can be used at multiples studios or locations and get some longevity out of one class or series.
7. Host a Retreat…
It’s a fact: yoga retreats are crazy popular right now. And you know who’s leading them? Teachers just like you. It can be daunting to host your first international yoga retreat, but we’ve got tons of tips for you in our blog (Check out our “Planning a Retreat” Series Part I and Part II). Hosting a retreat at an exotic location like The Goddess Garden has the potential to catapult your following and career in the direction you want it to go. They can be a lot of work, but they can also be endlessly rewarding, which brings us to our next point….
8. …And Then Host Some More!
Keep on hosting! Whether you choose to use the same retreat space multiple times, or you want to get adventurous and hit different spots each time, keep on taking people on yogic adventures with you. If you’ve got wanderlust and you find a few students who also love wandering, keep it up. Hone your retreat style, get your system on lockdown, and host away. You’ll develop regulars, and the regulars will love it so much that they’ll influence more frequent flyers, and pretty soon you’ll have your own troupe of yogi travelers!
9. Manage a Yoga Studio or Fitness Center
This can be excellent experience and a strong networking move if you have aspirations of opening your own studio in the future. And you don’t necessarily have to limit yourself to being a manager. You can be a health and wellness director or a yoga advisor for studios or gyms. There are plenty of on-the-side jobs that are absolutely related to yoga instruction that are great career moves to diversify your resume in your field.
10. Partner With Other Like-Hearted Professionals
Again, networking is important- not just in the student realm, but in the peer realm as well. It’s a great idea for you to befriend and collaborate with like-minded people in the health and wellness community. Herbalists, massage therapists, mental health professionals, medical professionals- you name it- if they care about health and wellness as much as you do, they’re probably a great friend and professional fellow to have.
From collaborations to spitballing ideas, to discussing issues in the fitness and health field, these connections have so much potential for you personally and professionally. If we all empower each other to be leaders in our trade, imagine what a difference we can make in the world! And who knows, maybe you’ll own your own comprehensive holistic health center with one of your industry peeps one day!
Becoming a yoga teacher could be the first step you have taken on the path to a fulfilling, rewarding and lucrative career. There are so many ways you can diversify your knowledge and spread it to more people than you ever thought possible. All it takes is some drive and creativity and a genuine interest in helping and engaging with people. We hope we can help you on your way by being a place for you to land, whether it be hosting your own retreat, or taking a personal retreat yourself!
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