Digital Marketing Basics for Yoga Teachers
Digital marketing is how we can leverage the internet and digital technology to promote and grow our yoga business. Digital marketing for yoga teachers consists of email marketing, social media, blogging, websites and search engine optimization (SEO), internet ads, digital tools like Google my Business, and much more.
Every yoga teacher should be using some if not all of these forms of digital marketing to grow your teaching into a full-blown business and finally achieve the freedom you’ve been searching for.
Although it may seem daunting, difficult and draining to focus your attention on digital marketing (and p.s. It can be) it really is essential to grow your yoga business. If you want to live your passion of yoga and make a full-time living off of doing what you love and break free from the traditional 9-5, the tools that digital marketing brings you will be your key to success.
Your Yoga Website
The first thing I tell an instructor is to get a website. A good one.
A website is a great way for students to find you online and if they find you in a different way, it’s where they go to learn more about you and what you offer.
Your site should include clear information about your offerings, teaching style, schedule, contact details, and testimonials.
A blog section is a great way to share your knowledge of yoga as well as utilize it for SEO (search engine optimization). If you sell products, memberships, or courses this is a great place to promote that.
Take a look at my homepage below. You can browse my site here.
To get a website there are a few steps you’ll need to take.
1. You need a domain
2. You need a platform to host your domain
3. You need a website platform to design your site on.
For each of these steps there are a ton of companies to choose from.
There are some platforms that are all-in-one like Wix or Squarespace and these are very popular. Wix and Squarespace are great platforms for yoga teachers to use because they’re very user-friendly and you don’t need a ton of tech experience to be able to use them. They do come at a monthly cost, however I would take this as the cost of doing business.
There are some options that are more cost effective than the all-in-one platforms. If you want to save money every month then using WordPress (this is what I use) to build your site is the way to go. WordPress.org is an open source software that you can build your website on, this means there are tons of free options and plugins to make your website exactly how you want it to be. You’ll have full control over your website.
If you use WordPress you’ll need to get your domain and hosting from another platform built specifically for that. We recommend Bluehost, you can buy a domain and host your domain here and it integrates seamlessly with WordPress.
The downside with WordPress is that it takes much more time and effort to learn how to use the platform and to maintain your website. However, it could be worth it to learn since you have much more control and ownership when you use Bluehost and WordPress.
To decide which platform you’d want to use, think about your time and how much effort you want to put into this aspect of your business.
Social Media
Using social media as a digital marketing tool for your yoga business is a little different than using it for your personal life.
Social media isn’t just about posting selfies and pictures of your dinner plate. Social is a valuable digital marketing tool. With that being said, I don't think you need to use all forms of social media or even focus most of your attention there. Different social platforms include Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and more.
To figure out which social platforms you’ll benefit from the most, think about what you want out of your yoga business.
Instagram is a great way to connect with your community in real-time and promote your local classes and workshops.
Pinterest is a great way to get people to your website, it’s complimentary to SEO.
Youtube is a great way to grow an audience, sell memberships, and showcase your teaching style.
To make things easier, up-cycle your content to multiple platforms. A blog on your site can turn into multiple instagram posts/stories, TikToks, a Youtube video, and a few Pins on Pinterest to drive traffic (people) to your site.
Take things slow, start with 1 blog a month that becomes 1 youtube video, 1 weekly post on instagram and tiktok, and 3 pins. Once you start gaining momentum, you’ll be able to post more and make it not so draining.
E-Mail Marketing
Along with your website, your email list is one of the most important things you can use to grow your yoga business. Your email list is yours, social media and Google can change their algorithms and your business can suffer, but your email list will remain the same.
To collect emails, bring a sign-up sheet to every class, workshop, and event and have people sign up with their email address. Online you can simply ask your community if they’d like to join your list for updates on you and your offerings.
With your emails you can send monthly or weekly updates on your offerings, sales, new blogs you’ve written or events you are doing. This way your community and you can stay connected without any interference.
There are a ton of email marketing platforms to choose from, from Mailchimp, to Constant Contact and more. We recommend Mailerlite, it’s the platform we use for all of our sites.
Search Engine Optimization
Ranking Hire in Search Engines for Yoga Teachers
As stated before SEO means search engine optimization, it is how your website reaches the top of the page on search engine platforms. It is one of the most highly valued things you can achieve on the internet. How you do this relies on a few things, the keywords you use, the age of your website, the trust your website has in the eyes of the search engine, and more. Let’s dive in to the basics.
Keyword Research for Yoga Teacher Websites
Keywords are the words that your potential yoga students will be using to find you online. If someone were to search “ yoga teacher (your city)” what would come up? You want to be on this list.
For the common keyword of “yoga teacher (city name)” that you may want to rank for, you need to make sure these words are all over your website so that Google or whatever the search engine is knows that your website is the right one to serve to people who are searching for that word. However you don’t want to just place a bunch of these keywords on your site with no rhyme or reason, it still needs to make sense for the content on your page.
Some important places these words need to be are in the title, description and the url of the page, some obscure places where people may not think to put them are on the image titles for the images on that page.
Take a look at my yoga website. Here you see that I have the keywords in my Title as well as in my url and I rank #1 for “private yoga teacher Fort Lauderdale”.
To find the right keywords, first think to yourself what you want people to search for to find you. For example, yoga teacher (city name) is great, but you may want to get even more granular especially when you are just starting your site and if you’re in a competitive area. So try your niche, like yin yoga teacher (city name), or sound healing (city name), private yoga instructor (city name). Remember you can have multiple pages on your site, so make a separate one for each of your services and follow this same formula.
For your blog you’ll be competing with not only your city but the whole internet so you may want to do more research on the keywords you’ll be using. There are free tools like Google Keyword Planner and paid tools like SEMrush where you can look up these words. You want words that have a good search volume but are not very competitive.
Once you start growing your yoga business you’ll see which forms of digital marketing are giving you your best return. You can then focus more of your attention on the platform that seems to work the best for you and what you are trying to do with your yoga career.
