6 things you need to do to start your successful yoga teaching career!
Written by Ashley Ahrens
You’ve completed your 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training Program and are now wondering how to start your career as a Yoga Teacher?? Read to find out the essentials you need to get started!
This career path can feel very overwhelming at first because you need to generate a lot of revenue streams and different types of work to be able to teach yoga full time - and this takes time, patience and determination to create. Building a weekly schedule of classes takes years to accomplish, but it is doable.
I’ve compiled a list of helpful things you can do to accelerate this process and perhaps be teaching yoga full time in 1 or 2 years.
Before we dive into the tips, please remember that YOU are YOUR BUSINESS. If you teach at studios, you are a freelancer/contractor and not an employee. Some yoga studios do hire yoga teachers as full time employees but this is rare, and for me this is not my ideal situation - I find it bounds your ability to be creative and expand your career on your own terms because all of your time will be spent in one place and it will be difficult to find more time to create your own business. That might be someone’s cup of tea who craves more stability and doesn’t mind the ceiling on earning potential, but it’s not mine!!
Since you are your own small business, you need to create a brand and make yourself look professional and appealing to students, studios and gyms/member clubs or wherever you would like to find work (you gotta stick out amongst the crowds these days, especially when you don’t have much experience!!) You will need to learn some tech stuff, don’t let that scare you - if I can do it, you can do it!! I could barely send an email when I started teaching yoga and through the years I’ve learned how to build websites, integrate different types of software into booking systems and online subscription platforms, design and brand my whole website and all of my social media, learn how to optimise websites for search engines (SEO) and write blogs for the web, weekly newsletters with professional marketing platforms etc etc. You will need time to sit down and learn this stuff though, so be patient!
1. Build a website:
There are a ton of options out there for website hosts now, and this in itself can be confusing and create a barrier to starting to build one. I’ve used WordPress and SquareSpace before and I much preferred SquareSpace because it’s designs are nice - that was basically the only reason!! My current website and Yoga Mentor Academy are both SquareSpace websites, and if you spend some time fiddling around with the back end system, you will figure out how it works. It’s not difficult to do, upload some pictures here and there, write some text, move things around to your liking and design pages and tabs that you think are relevant to your business and offerings. Try to make the text so it is speaking to the student, not talking about yourself. Think about your own behaviour when you visit websites: what draws you in to looking around the site more? What do you find boring? You can constantly tweak and update your website over time so don’t worry about making it perfect from the get go - just make one and have something out there!!! Think about what you want to offer on your website - info on how to contact you? Info about the types of services you provide (privates, corporate, studio schedule, workshops or other events or retreats you’re hosting) Keep your website updated and interesting and the students you meet over time will enjoy visiting it, think about your students and what info they would want to read when you are designing your website, if you make it about them, they will be more inclined to read what you have to say.
2. Make a brand:
Branding may not sound appealing to you, and I totally get it!! I was super resistant to creating a logo/brand and everything else associated with it for ages. The truth is - you will need it. If you want your voice out there amongst all the other yoga teachers, and want to stand out, you will need to have a stand out appearance. Quietly resisting in the background and just hoping you get hired on skill and word of mouth will only get you so far, PLUS you’ll be quite dependant on obtaining work from studios and gyms, as you won’t have your own brand and business established very well. You need to have an identity as a business owner and look professional if you plan to do your own thing as a yoga teacher, and maybe one day be totally self reliant on what you’ve created outside of your regular studio and gym classes. Pick some colours you like and design a logo on the design website Canva, and use them all over everything you put out there!
3. Get insurance:
Make sure you have your insurance updated each year! You need to have insurance to teach at studios and gyms, and just cover your back in general. Regular insurance does NOT cover you to teach women in their first trimester of pregnancy, so I would advise against doing this for liability reasons, even if they really really want to join - its just not worth having the risk! Many teachers in the UK buy insurance through Balens or Yoga Alliance Professionals UK, but there are other options out there.
4. Create social channels and useful content:
Create an Instagram business profile - this is different than the personal one because you can set up a shop and gain more insights through analytics of what content is most popular, and can make more of that! You will also find out things about your main demographics of followers, age range, location etc. This is useful information so you can continue to make content and posts for the people who are already listening. Content nowadays should be interesting, personal, educational, funny and inspiring. The days where you can post a nice picture with #yoga and a Rumi quote are long gone. People are overwhelmed with information out their on social media and imagery, and are looking for helpful accounts that actually make their lives better, not some random picture of a fancy yoga pose (for the most part). Video also does much better on Instagram too, so consider using the video functions: IG Live, Reels, Stories with video, video post on main grid. Live video is favoured in the Instagram algorithm, and Reels too because they are the newest feature. You can use other social channels like Facebook - the business page might not seem like it does much, but have one anyways - and make a private group where your students can chat and connect with you and each other - it’s a different way of communicating rather than commenting on an IG post or sending a DM. I also use You Tube, Pinterest and LinkedIn, you can use whatever you want - Twitter, TikTok, SnapChat, there’s lots of options. Choose where you deliver social media based on what your students like to use, and you’ll find more people like them. Write posts that are useful to people and make them feel heard and supported. I was so anti-social media for ages because I thought it was only for narcissist who posted selfies and make other people feel shit about themselves, judged, and like they had unrealistic expectations to live up to. I have totally reframed how I look at it and now really enjoy posting online because the content I post does help people - people will tell you how much reading or watching something you posted helped them, and isn’t that what our job is? To help people? It’s outside of the classroom yes, but people still need support outside of the studio too. Don’t be afraid to find your voice online, I know it can feel intimidating to post something and be afraid you may get called out for being wrong, but honestly - who is your audience? Is it other yoga teachers waiting to tear you down? Or is it students and regular people who are interested in yoga? Probably the latter! Speak to THEM!
5. Write a weekly yoga blog and newsletter:
You should start to write as a yoga teacher! When I first started teaching I was so amazed that other teachers were writing about yoga and creating blog posts for big pages like Elephant Journal and similar. I never even considered doing this because I have never considered myself a writer, a blogger, or even having anything interesting to share and write down for others to read. I started writing over the pandemic as a way to provide support to my students as we weren’t able to see each other in person anymore, and people really needed extra support through this past year - myself included - it was an outlet and a way for me to reconnect with yogic principles and consider what they meant to me in my own words. It took a little while, but now I quite enjoy writing and once you enjoy it, and give yourself the time to sit down and write - the creativity and ideas start to flow (honestly!!). I started by writing down some topics that I was interested in writing about, then wrote about them when I felt inspired to do so - you can also do a quick Google search and get inspiration and ideas from other blogs. I now do this weekly so I have something interesting, useful and informative to send out to my newsletter subscribers, and repurpose the content from the blog into everything else that I do - break down the blog into IG posts, make shorter posts for Facebook, links from Pinterest to the blog and my website (boosts traffic to your website and increases the rank on Google). I have a spreadsheet of ideas for future posts, and then pick the one I feel like writing about each week, I also ask my students what they want to learn, what problems they have going on in their lives, what I can write about to help them - all amazing ways to get ideas and insight into what you can do to actually help out of the classroom. Send out a newsletter each week so you stay in contact with your growing student base and they don’t forget who you are. If they are reading your newsletter each week, and they don’t come to your classes, they will still be able to know you well and come to trust you, and eventually may join your workshops, and retreats, ask for private lessons, who knows! I know its time consuming unpaid admin work - but you are creating something for the future (a ton of content) to make you look like an authority and expert in your field. This will pay off in the long run, and again - you never know who you are helping in the here and now - be there for support for those who like the way you explain things - because that’s your unique selling point - being able to explain yoga in the way that it works for you. Each teacher has their own voice and will find those students who really resonate with the way that they teach. I don’t connect with everyone who comes to my classes, and you can’t either - but both you and I do help many people who do connect with us and like the way we explain things! Focus on these people and keep speaking to them (this is your niche!)
6. Meet other yoga teachers - build a network:
You can’t do this all on your own, well, you can, but it will be lonely and much harder than it needs to be. Meet other teachers out there who are at the same beginning stages as you are. You will need each other to vent to, your frustrations, your fears, your ideas, ask for support and questions on things that come up while starting your new career and new business. Help each other build your websites, ask for feedback and advice, help each other create sequences and playlists, and just be each other’s colleagues and support in general (because otherwise being self-employed is quite lonely and stressful!) Get to know more senior teachers who have already walked this path of starting brand new and building a yoga business from scratch - they will have super valuable insights for you, and may be able to help you avoid the mistakes they made. Knowing other teachers will help you find more work as well - more cover work, opportunities to start teaching at studios that may be tough to get your foot in the door. Teachers are asked for recommendations for other teachers ALL THE TIME - and if we know you well - we will recommend you!! If we don’t know you, obviously that won’t happen! When I moved to London I knew ONE yoga teacher! I made a concerted effort to go to many studios and get to know the teachers there, meet other teachers in mid-morning/afternoon classes that many teachers practiced in. This is how I know so many teachers now, I met them in class, in training, auditions etc. I had to do this because I did my teacher trainings abroad and did not have those connections from the get-go.