Being online and using social media is, nowadays as well for many yoga teachers, a must. To be a yoga teacher and having just finished a 200-hour course, unfortunately, is not enough. You need to acquire certain savvy techniques to be seen, especially if you are new to the area. The best referral is still "word by mouth", but if you don't know many people in your area, a website and social media strategy can help you get visible. I remember after India moving to Spain and because I came up when people searched for Yoga around Cadiz on the Internet, I was the one invited by a Spanish marketing company from Madrid to be part of a campaign and earned in my first few months a big bonus taking part in a couple of exhibitions.
Yoga Marketing involves building a website and a good solid social media strategy, being present in at least a couple of social media forums.
Business Page versus Personal Page
Is it enough to have a personal page, or should you get a business page on Facebook?
"Marketing tips for Yogis so that you can teach your passion."
There are advantages and disadvantages to each. A personal page's advantage is that people seem to see your posts more since on a business page, you are almost expected to have a budget to here and again boost your posts or advertise. However, it is also possible to combine your business page with your personal page tagging your name in the post or vice versa on your business page (if it is a place). On a business page, you are allowed as many followers as you wish, whereas, on a personal page, your friend limit is restricted to 5,000 people.
You can track social engagement on a business page. Facebook usually sends an update regarding your pages to tell you a lot about engagement and your audience. There is also a Facebook Pixel you can install on your website to track certain data (social media referral to your website etc.).
Nowadays, a yoga teacher's success often seems to be more judged by their brand and social media status than with the actual teaching years. It takes years to be an expert in any discipline. It's easy to feel discouraged by seeing people posting as if they have had all those years just because they created what seems a successful social media following, but remember to stay humble and if you do have this experience stay on your path and shine your light to keep encouraging change in others. In the end, it does not matter how many exotic pictures we post but how many lives we got to change in real life. It does not matter how glamorous somebody looks (especially in yoga, if this person has not transformed us in a subtle positive way). However, you can transmit this message about your experience, maturity and transformation via Social Media! For this, you must start to define exactly who your audience is and who you write for.
Define your audience, age, interests, gender etc.- be very specific about who this person is. It is not enough to just say "anybody who likes yoga".
On a business page, you can plan well ahead, which means you do not even have to be online all the time (if you dislike social media and being too often on the internet); that is, you can schedule your posts.
Targeted advertisement can help you to get new students!
Furthermore, on a business page, you can also create ads, which can attract more people. You can target an audience based on interests, age and demographic location (lookalike, new, or existing followers) and tailor it to your ad. Since you can check engagement levels, that is, you see when they look at your posts, how old they are, where they come from etc. – you can tailor make your posts, or you may suddenly realise that your audience is somewhere else, and you can plan a workshop there!
Social Media does not help to get a better ranking, and it does not matter how many likes your posts have, but it helps to increase traffic, which is good for your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). It is good to build connection, trust with people who follow you and lead to revenue by clicking on what you have to offer and purchase from your website.
Websites
There are plenty of website hosts out there. WordPress is the most known, but Wix also offers quite an easy way to build and structure your online presence. You can also use YogaWordPressTheme, which will help you choose a theme and provide an easy template. Wix also offers plenty of templates, and all you have to do is being creative and start writing about what you offer!
Think of a name (brand - I'm not too fond of all this branding, but it is part of modern reality), title and logo. This is more important and counts for Google to see you as a trusted provider of content online as a person or yoga studio. Define a mission. What is your mission, and how can you attract the right audience with this?
What inspires you about yoga, and what do you want to share with others. Design some visual elements, a logo or a slogan you stand for. Use pictures, videos and make sure your text is about 300 characters minimum. You may not have pictures of you doing challenging postures, and people indeed get attracted by pictures. Still, again, think of who you want to attract; not everybody inspires you to perform difficult postures (we are more in need of letting go of tension and stress), and you can make simple postures look very serene and real. As I mentioned before in another blog, I see social media's future as being as real as possible.
They say in content marketing, "content is king", and that's what it is. Create high-quality content and then post it; it helps you attract your audience and traffic to your website. You can write articles, posts, blogs about different "in" subjects etc. For example, check on Buzzsumo, Quora, Google Trends, or Google. People also ask for – what currently is "in".
Write some Evergreen content (content that can stay as a basis for your website and does not expire), create some seasonal content (e.g. yoga in the winter, in the summer, spring or autumn) and make sure you update dates class timetables and events regularly. When you create seasonal content, publish it a few months before the season to make sure Google bots have received your content, indexed it (you can submit a sitemap to google search console - needless to say, that you have to connect your website to Google Analytics and Search Console). This ensures that your content will come up when the time arrives.
Your love for yoga and interesting articles attracts people to see value in you to give away knowledge. It might also be something that you like or be creative about. If you are not, don't worry, it is only one way of many ways. You can also offer something, such as lesson plans, handouts, tips, etc. You save them in a PDF file, and people can download them from your website or after signing up, you send them a handout.
The key point is that with so many studios run by business people with wealthy people behind them (often being able to afford a person responsible for marketing), it is even more important to know how to stand out. You can monitor those studios and might even learn some things from them. It does not mean we should copy exactly, but we can draw inspiration from what other "successful" teachers or studios do. Like anything in life, it depends on the perspective you take. In the beginning, I was almost shocked when I saw people copying me; now, I see it as a compliment and think that I inspire people. However, there is a point in being honest and copying a complete idea or format (yes, it has happened, it took me years to design some of my courses, and my whole idea and format have been copied without acknowledging where it came from. That's not cool.
However, try not to copy word for word. Be aware that duplicate content can penalise a website. Neither is it cool if you take the work of others and present it as your own!
Language
Make sure you adjust your language to the audience you address. If you mainly deal with older adults, use a bigger font and be more descriptive; younger people prefer more pictures and less text. Always use a clear voice targeted to YOUR AUDIENCE. Make sure you update your readers with interesting material. Make it valuable and engaging to them. Could you share it? Ask others to share it. You can share it on Quora or your social media portal (this will drive even more traffic to your website). Blogging also helps you increase (if you use trendy keywords) to channel new organic (free) traffic to your website.
People who search for your keywords might see your blog. Pictures are important, so make sure your picture also contains keywords in the Alt and are not too heavy to show up on mobiles or laptops. People get attracted more by pictures than a long-written piece of scientific research. Be yourself in those pictures. People seem to be obsessed with infographics, so if you inspire in getting creative, that might be a good way to get people to share your content. It also helps create backlinks to your website when people start sharing your infographics in their blogs with your website link.
This is another important way to create trust with google and rank your site higher in search results. If you are lucky and get featured on other websites (which have high authority, that has a higher valued Page Authority) is even better. You obtain a high page authority when you rank good and fulfil the criteria by google to be a trustworthy brand that provides relevant information to its users, have an easy navigational website with external and internal linking in place.
You can write about something you want to know better, so at the same time you learn or something you feel you want to share (for example, how you overcame a painful experience using yoga as a tool or what has changed since you practice yoga or how yoga makes you feel). Make sure you offer a sign-up option to be notified if you write a new blog and entice people to sign up so that you can build up your database. Another idea is to write about what to do with certain painful joints, e.g., with wrists, if students have weak wrists in positions, such as Downdog. Always finish what you write with a CTA (call to action); a call to action could sign up, read more, call you for more information, sign up for your next workshop etc.
Try to make yourself a plan of action and be consistent, e.g., email your students once a month. Seek to differentiate yourself and let your personality shine through the writing.
There is no need to be formal or too academic about it unless you write for academics only. Even tools on the market help us plan, like one tool as the name "asana", and lets you schedule tasks.
Email marketing
When I worked in marketing, we tested headlines; that is, we chose two headlines and checked which ones produced more emails. Try to write a catchy headline. Mailchimp lets you do this and lets you also test subject or content. It also tells you when the best time is to post things.
People get so many emails that sometimes they delete things without even looking at the content, and you don't want your blog to end up in the bin without having been read because you forgot to write a headline, or the headline seemed of no interest to anybody even thus you wrote this wonderful piece of content.
After a while, reassess if analytics work, that is, if nobody reacts or reads anything, rethink and make some changes if necessary.
Make sure all you send out is spell checked, reuse old articles, blogs and edit them, you can design out of blogs and old pictures a video, you can turn videos series into a DVD, articles about subjects into a podcast or PDF E-book etc.
If you are into Videos or have the skills to make them, you can upload them on YouTube or Vimeo and share them on your site, in a blog or on social media.
Think of anything that can entice people to sign up for your products or services, e.g. come to a workshop or retreat instead of only coming to regular classes.
Yoga Marketing: If you want some help, get in touch, and I will help/mentor you to create a successful social media strategy and website. For a small fee, I am happy to design this for you. Also, you can join my business yoga course.
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