Do you need to pivot your yoga business and take your teaching online? Here are 5 things you absolutely should do.
- Start building your email list
- Start creating free content to attract your audience
- Decide on your style – live or recorded content?
- Decide on your business model – single classes or subscription?
- Create a Facebook group to collect your community
Start building your email list
Yes, you will hear me saying this a hundred times and the first couple of times you will probably think ”WHY is she going on about email all the time?”
Email might seem like something ancient, maybe even the first thing you started doing when internet appeared in your life but you’ll be surprised to know this:
Email is still THE best way to build a community and stay connected to your tribe. Meaning having an amazing email list equals having a great group of persons who are interested in your yoga service.
BUT WHY EMAIL?
Pretty much everyone in the world has an email address and 96% of those people check their inbox EVERY day.
You can also be sure that the person receives your content (given you’ve set it up properly to avoid ending up in the spam folder).
If your content will be shown or not to your followers is something you can’t control with social media, since there it’s the algorithm controlling if your post will be displayed to a person or not.
It can depend on a ton of things, for example if this person has interacted with your content before, if she has interacted with similar content etc. And you have no control over this.
You own your email list, compared to your Facebook, Instagram or TikTok community. If Facebook decides to shut down your group, your community is lost.
The people on your email list have in some way signed up to receiving content from you. It means that they are genuinely interested in what you do and your services and are great potential clients.
If a person buys something from you, even the cheapest thing like an e-book or free class for a couple of dollars, it’s about 30% likely this person will buy from you again. This means there’s a lot of value in nurturing your email list.
Start creating free content to attract your audience
Maybe you already have collected your current yoga students in an email list. Maybe you’re even nurturing this community with a weekly newsletter. If so- that’s amazing! You’re on your way. If not, it’s about time you start.
At least once a week you should provide some kind of free content to your community. This can be an informative newsletter to your email list, where you tell them about things you know they would love to hear about.
It could be a free yoga class on YouTube every week. Maybe this is what they need in order for them to sign up for your new online yoga studio or buying more online classes from you.
It could be a Facebook Live where you either give a short free class or walk them through some yoga techniques, for example breaking down Chaturanga or the difference between up dog and cobra.
Maybe you are ready to start a podcast where you either talk about yoga related topics or invite other yoga teachers and inspiring persons for interviews.
Your imagination is the limit! Go wild!
Decide on your style – live or recorded classes?
Or maybe a mix?
You need to know what your target audience prefers. Do they appreciate that this is a live session where you are actually THERE, LIVE, and you can possibly see them and chat with them before and after? Maybe you let them ask questions during class or stay for a Q&A session at the end. If you know this would suit your students live classes is the right way for you. Many students consider live sessions to be more authentic and statistically live classes get more engagement than recorded content.
If you decide on live streaming classes, the next step is to decide on which platform to broadcast on. And of course it once again it comes back to where your target audience is. You can use for example Facebook Live, Instagram Live, Youtube Live, Zoom, Google Meet and many more. There’s also the possibility combine them, for example using Zoom as the main platform, where you can see and interact with your students, but at the same time broadcast it on Facebook Live or Youtube. This is of course very beneficial if you have a Facebook Group who will get notified automatically when you start a live session.
However if your students love to be able to decide on their own when to practice and maybe stop the video and give that headstand a bit of extra time – then recorded classes is the way to go.
If live streaming videos have the benefits of bringing authenticity, recorded videos can be used over and over again without you having to be present every time. However that often requires them to be more carefully produced, both the actual shooting of the video, as well as the yoga class. Recorded videos often contains less of chatting and the sequence is carefully planned an executed.
I would say that live classes generally have slightly lower expectations on them, regarding video, environment and unexpected things happening. Though sound is equally important for both recorded and live yoga classes, people generally like recorded classes to be edited and beautiful, possibly with a branded intro.
Decide on your business model
There are several ways to go about this. If you decide on offering live classes you should have a drop in price, and a monthly price where the students paying per month can attend as many classes as they wish for during that month.
If you already have a yoga business you most likely have some sort of payment method, and if not it’s time to investigate in whats available in your country. There is also the option to use Pay Pal, you can set this up here-
If you are planning on selling recorded classes a subscription solution is the most profitable solution, but it requires that you produce new content regularly. For this you can use platforms like:
If you are new, and your audience is still rather small you can also use an online yoga studio that basically does all of the marketing for you, for example:
No matter what you choose though, as I said earlier in this post; you need to create free content to attract your audience.
Create a Facebook group to collect your community
Facebook groups are a great way to tie your audience tighter to you and for you to really connect with your students. The reason I prefer Facebook groups to other platforms is that my audience is already on Facebook and even though there might be platforms out there that provides better solutions, they would require for my clients to log on to a new platform, and after working with user testing and usability for fifteen years I know that’s not going to happen.
So I create my communities where my clients hang out, and Facebook offer a great variety of group types for you to choose from, depending on what you plan to use your group for.
It’s good to know that if you collect your students in a Facebook group, instead of just having them liking your Facebook page, they are more likely to see your posts in the group, meaning communication will be easier.
You can also easily create events for all your live classes, schedule posts to announce the release of your new class on YouTube and Facebook will notify all your group members and you will most likely get more people to see and know about your business and your services.
One thing to remember though is that Facebook owns your group and can at any time shut it down. Therefor it’s important to try to collect the emails of your group members. You can do this by offering them a freebie, a piece of free content they receive in their inbox after having signed up with their email. This means you get them on your email list and can communicate with them both via email and in the Facebook group. And as I said before, YOU own your email list.
These are 5 things you should consider doing when you plan to take your yoga business online!
Is there any one of these you are struggling more with than the rest? I would love to know!
