Hey there, yoga enthusiasts and aspiring business owners!
Do you like to strike a pose? Fancy yourself as a yoga teacher, business owner and entrepreneur?
Turn your yoga dream into a successful and rewarding business. But let’s be honest – starting a business can be daunting. So let me share with you some budget friendly advice and tips.
Starting a yoga business from home is the simplest and cheapest way to get started. As you scale your yoga business you can consider buying or renting a yoga studio – but that’s a problem for another day.
Grab your yoga mat and your laptop and let’s get started!
Table of Contents
The growing demand for yoga
There is no doubt that yoga is becoming more popular over time. It’s recognized to give many benefits including:
- physical health
- mental health
- stress relief
- exercise
One of the benefits of yoga is it can be practised by people of all ages. From young, fit individuals to older people with limited mobility and flexibility. In fact yoga will help people regain lost mobility in a slow, gentle manner.
Yoga can be practised by pregnant women, children and senior citizens. In fact, anyone can practise yoga – which means a large target audience for your business.
Health benefits of Yoga
Yoga improves a number of health issues, and benefits the physical, emotional and mental health of practitioners including:
- blood pressure
- anxiety
- depression
- lack of flexibility
- strength
- balance
- posture
- regular practice reduces chronic pain and the risk of injury
You can emphasis all these benefits in your marketing of your yoga business.
Assessing your abilities and resources
What yoga skills and experience do you have?
Any potential clients will want to determine whether you have the skills and experience to help them. If you don’t have any recognized awards you can provide free YouTube videos showcasing your skills and expertise. More on how to easily embed YouTube videos on your website later.
Social proof from testimonials (even if only from your friends and relatives) can help provide credibility.
Assess if you are able to start a yoga business from your home
First, obviously, you will need a room or space where you can provide yoga lessons. The size of the available space will determine the size of classes you can accomodate.
You may decide to only provide one-on-one lessons. In that case, it should be easy to provide tuition from your home.
Also, you should determine how easy it is for people to travel to your location. What is the potential number of people who could travel to your location? What are the demographics for you local area? (young, old, wealthy, single, and so on)
Determine your budget
How much are you prepared to spend to start your business? Equipment costs are low, just a few yoga mats and yoga bricks will do. Don’t splash out on expensive refurbishments and furniture, you want to spend more on marketing your business at first. Later on, once you have positive cash flow, you can upgrade your yoga space.
You will need to register as a business and file the appropriate paperwork for your country or state.
In addition, you will need a website to promote and market your business on. You may want to consider other marketing tactics such as online ads, flyers etc.
Creating a business plan
Define your goals and objectives. What does success look like to you? It could be 2-3 one-on-one coaching sessions per day or teaching a class of 40 people!
Better to start with small, achievable goals at first. That way you won’t get discouraged if you don’t immediately get a large client list.
How do you plan to market your business?
People are busy, so some online element, such as a website and social media presence is a good idea. You can supplement with more offline strategies such as ads, flyers, banners etc.
Identify your competition and how you will differentiate yourself. You will likely have to compete against bigger, more established businesses so it’s important to think what your strategy for growing your business will be.
Building your reputation and marketing your business
Marketing your business is essential. The easiest way to market your business for free is to set up a website. Produce content for your website that covers:
- yoga and its benefits
- promote your classes
- your philosophy/approach to yoga
- news and information about your business
- special deals, promotions and offers
- free trials / signups to your classes
Below is a free yoga theme for WordPress (a popular platform for websites and blogging). I’ll show you how to install this theme up so you can start marketing online and signing up clients without delay.
For a website you will have to sign up with a hosting provider. This hosting service will provide you with a website server and the software and services you need to create and maintain a website.
I use SiteGround for this website and can recommend it. I’ve reviewed a few hosting providers on this site. Check out the reviews below.
WP Engine Review: Grow your business with the #1 WordPress platform
Secrets for using SiteGround as your global hosting provider
Once you have a hosting account, you can follow the step by step instructions from the hosting provider to set up a WordPress website. I wrote about setting up WordPress on a SiteGround account here: How to build a website using WordPress
Install a Yoga theme
The next step after installing WordPress is to choose a Yoga theme. Don’t try and manually create a yoga website from scratch, it will take too long and waste valuable time you could spend marketing your business.
Grab the free Neve theme from ThemeIsle. From the WordPress admin section of your website do the following:
- select “Appearance” from the left hand sidebar
- select “Themes”
- select the “Add New” button
- type “Neve” into the search box and click the “Search” button
You should see something like the screenshot below. You can now click on the big orange “INSTALL” button to install the free version of the Neve theme.
This theme is great but it’s not yoga themed. For that we need to install a free “Yoga starter pack” that will install yoga content and pages for us automatically.
First go to the Appearance page (click on this item in the left hand sidebar menu) and then select the Neve Options sub menu item.
Here you will see the Starter Sites option as shown below in the screenshot:
This allows you to install a Starter site to get your website up and running quickly with content specific for your niche – in our case a yoga themed website. Select the yoga starter pack as shown below:
Select and install the yoga starter pack and be sure to select content from the starter pack. As you can see from the screenshot below, you can import an entire yoga themed site with content.
Congrats! You now have a complete yoga themed website with content installed for free. You will need to edit the website to have content that’s specific for your yoga business. In particular you should edit:
- Home page – includes photos, text and the benefits your yoga business provides to customers
- About page – describe your philosophy and approach to yoga and some information about yourself
- Classes – what classes do you provide, yoga class schedule
- Contact page – let people contact you via email, address, social media accounts and phone number
- Blog – blog articles describing yoga benefits, news and information about your yoga business
Spend time on your website providing answers to as many common questions as you can. Address any concerns a potential customer may have. For example, here are some concerns you may want to address:
- do I have to be fit and in good shape?
- can I practise yoga if I’m pregnant?
- I am not very flexible, can I still do yoga?
- How difficult are the lessons, are they suitable for complete beginners?
And so on… The more concerns you can address the more reassured a potential customer will be.
Don’t forget to provide updates about your classes, schedules, offers and deals your yoga business provides.
Don’t limit yourself just to text and images. Videos are a great way to showcase your yoga skills and your yoga teaching abilities.
As promised earlier here are the steps to embed a YouTube video on your website:
- Upload video to YouTube (see YouTube documentation on how to do this)
- Go to the YouTube page for the video
- Click the share button underneath the video
- Copy the link from the popup box (you can click the “Copy” button to get the link)
- Paste this url directly into your WordPress page (e.g. paste “https://youtu.be/v7AYKMP6rOE” into your WordPress page)
WordPress recognises a YouTube video and will correctly format and show the video. Let’s try it for the embed link shown above:
Simple! Now you can create your own yoga videos and embed them into your website. This shows potential customers your expertise and knowledge of yoga.
Explore yoga niches to differentiate yourself from competition
Let’s face it, yoga is popular. Many people would like to start a yoga business so you need to think about how you can differentiate yourself.
One way is to niche down, rather than provide yoga classes for everyone, serve a smaller more niche audience. You can better provide your services to a smaller audience. Here are some suggestions:
- Yoga for busy people (10-15 minute yoga exercise)
- Yoga for pregnant women
- Yoga for over 50’s
- Yoga for people with back pain
These are just some ideas, there are an infinite number of niches you could address. If you are finding it hard to get traction with general yoga classes consider niching down. Don’t be afraid to check out the competition to get ideas about how to market and sell your services.
Managing and growing your business
Some tasks you will need to do to manage and grow your business:
- Setting up a system for managing finances and operations
- Offering new classes and services to keep customers engaged
- Continuously improving your business through customer feedback
- Evaluating opportunities for growth and expansion
Final Thoughts
Setting up and running a yoga business from home has many challenges. From finding your target audience, acquiring social proof, creating an online presence and doing marketing and outreach.
Here is a recap of the main points in the article:
- Assess your skills, abilities and experience – be honest
- Find social proof – use your relatives and friend if necessary, create YouTube videos to showcase your skills
- Determine your budget, don’t overspend on fixed assets (furniture, physical items) instead spend more on marketing and outreach
- Create a business plan (your goals and objectives – be realistic)
- Create a website and social media channels to promote your business online
- Be patient, it takes time to build a successful business
Good luck!
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