If you’re a yoga teacher, you should consider taking your business online to teach yoga classes. Holding yoga classes online allows you to reach a global audience from the comfort of your own home anywhere in the world. While many people think teaching online is complicated – it’s actually quite simple.
Switching to online teaching allows you to sell yoga products and memberships which opens up new revenue streams. That means you can teach at your own pace and make your lessons available 24/7.
Preparation
While it may seem daunting at first, having a yoga-related website and online teaching platform doesn’t require learning any special skills. There are plenty of excellent and affordable tools that allow you to start your new business venture.
Here’s what you need to prepare to teach yoga classes online:
- A streaming platform to stream your classes
- A website where you can teach yoga live
- A way for your clients to sign up to classes
- A payment processor to get paid by students
If you also want to sell yoga products and offer pre-recorded video lessons, you’ll require the following as well:
- A website with a membership platform that allows you to host and sell yoga products and videos
- An email marketing solution that enables you to deliver the required items and stay in touch with your clients
It may seem like a lot, but many excellent tools can help, we will take a look at them in this article.
Platform
There are many ways you can teach yoga online. For example – you can livestream on YouTube or Instagram on a weekly schedule. Alternatively, you can use a dedicated video platform to hold your classes individually or for smaller groups.
While it’s easy to set up streaming on social media networks, the main issue is that you have zero control over your YouTube or Instagram accounts since these are third-party platforms. If your account ever got disabled for any reason – it might be difficult to get it back, which in turn affects your revenue and income.
With all this in mind, it’s a better idea to go with a dedicated video service platform that’s easy to use. For example, you can test Zoom, which has become quite popular for video conferencing.
The free Zoom plan allows you to host up to 100 people on your stream at once, up to 40 minutes total. If you need to hold longer classes, you’ll need to purchase their Pro plan, which is $14.99/month.
You also need a website where people can learn more about your lessons and sign up to your classes. Since most third-party platforms take a cut of each sale or transaction, we recommend creating your own website using WordPress.
By building your own website, you have complete control over your website and can take your business in any direction you’d like.
Website
Once you create your website, you’ll need some helpful tools to offer various functionality to your customers, like taking payments, signing agreements, purchase memberships, and so on.
Let’s start with some basic steps – necessary pages on your website.
Pages
You need only a few pages to get started:
- A page about the author/owner (About)
- A page dedicated to services (Services)
- A page dedicated to yoga classes (Classes)
- A page where customers can sign up and pay (Sign Up)
- A page with a contact form where people can reach you (Contact)
On the About page, you should provide more information about yourself.
For example:
- Your previous experience with teaching yoga
- What makes you an expert
- How you got into yoga
- Your photo
On the Services page, you need to describe the services you offer and provide details on what customers receive for their money.
On the Classes page, include all relevant information on your online classes, and provide as much information as possible. This is where you need to put dates and times of your yoga classes and other information such as duration, start time, skill level, type of class, and everything else that might be pertinent to your classes.
Sign ups and payments
To have customers sign up to your classes and accept payments on your website, you can use WPForms, it’s a handy WordPress plugin that lets your students sign up and process payments.
While there’s a free version of this plugin – you’ll need a Pro plan to accept online payments and signatures. WPForms support PayPal and Stripe credit card payments and has a dedicated signature addon that you can use to have your students sign agreements digitally.
Memberships
Memberships are a great way to scale your online yoga classes. When teaching live classes, you only get paid for when you’re teaching live, which limits your earning potential to your availability and class rates.
We recommend expanding your business by selling yoga-related products and offering yoga course memberships directly on your website. In addition to a new revenue stream – you also don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
To sell memberships, you can use a plugin that lets you create custom packages and restrict access based on purchases. We recommend MemberPress, which is one of the best membership plugins for WordPress.
Their Basic subscription offers PayPal and Stripe integrations, no additional transaction or monthly fees, subscription management, email automation, drip content, content access expiration, and more.
You can create your membership courses based on skill levels and have different content for each group (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced). That way, your customers can purchase a subscription for their level or even multiple subscriptions as they progress through your courses.
Since you’re likely to use videos on your website (as instructional classes), it’s best not to upload video files to your website directly. Video files are often huge, will eat up your disk space and potentially slow your website down. Instead, you can opt to use streaming platforms like YouTube or Vimeo to host your video files and embed them in your membership posts.
Newsletter
The majority of people that visit your website won’t likely sign up for class or purchase anything on the first go. That’s why we recommend building an email list using email marketing software. An email list allows you to catch your visitor email addresses and then offer them discounts to get them to sign up to your classes on your website.
If you’re using WPForms and MemberPress plugins for your website, you can use Constant Contact as your email marketing software as it perfectly integrates with these plugins.
Here are some semi-free alternatives:
Final words
Traditionally, yoga is taught “offline” in gyms and outdoor places; however, last year proved it’s time for a change, and it’s wise to diversify your options as a yoga teacher. You can still teach yoga in real life if your local covid regulations allow it. Still, we recommend considering moving your lessons online and adding additional options such as selling yoga products and courses to increase your revenue.
