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Has your yoga studio got shuttered due to COVID-19?
Then you have to stop depending on your physical location and start teaching yoga online.
In this guide, you’ll learn exactly how to do that.
Here’s what we’re covering:
And, more.
Let’s get started.
Covid-19 has proved that having a physical yoga studio isn’t a sustainable solution anymore.
The best way to move forward is to go online, and there are many reasons why:
Moving online offers the perfect opportunity to grow your community while reaching out to millions of people around the world. Given the fact that more than half of the world’s population is using the internet on a daily basis, launching your own online yoga business, allows you to meet people at their ‘natural’ habitat.
As opposed to teaching yoga in person, teaching online offers no limitations on the number of students you can have, which makes this a great way to grow and scale your business. While in the real world a class that has 25 students is considered to be full, a live-streaming yoga session can easily accommodate 1000 or a lot more.
By teaching yoga online you will be able to make decent living, and earn much more than working offline.
What’s great about teaching yoga online, is that you have no rent to pay. This means that your profits are much higher than they would if you worked at a physical studio.
Apart from scalability, you also get to have greater flexibility in terms of working since you can do this on your own terms, your own hours and from the comfort of your home. Likewise, it becomes easier for your students too to access your online yoga school, as there is no commuting involved and they can be just a few clicks away from you.
Job prospects for yoga instructors are growing and it is expected that by 2028, more people will be interested in taking up yoga practice.
While the salary can vary depending on your experience, network, and style, Glassdoor says that the average pay for a yoga instructor is $19 per hour, which can be great to start with.
As an online yoga instructor, you can choose to price your lessons per hour, per class, or per membership. Creating a membership site will allow you to offer exclusive training content to loyal monthly or yearly subscribers offering different pricing options ranging from $55 to $500. There is also the possibility to offer exclusive packages that bundle up a set of videos, online courses or classes.
For a class, you may charge from $35 if you are a beginner and up to $75 if you are an experienced instructor. It’s entirely up to you to set your own pricing rates for 1:1 or group classes, but it’s important to investigate the market first, to check what your target audience is likely to pay and see what your competitors are doing.
Coming up with your own online yoga business is easy once you figure out how to do it and craft a plan on how to get there.
To help you get started, here’s a step-by-step guide you can use:
Step #1: Gather Your Equipment
As an online yoga teacher, you will need a mat – or other essential yoga props needed for the type of yoga you practice e.g. aerial yoga.
Then of course you will need a computer/laptop with an internet connection, a video editor tool, and access to a video conferencing software to conduct live classes with Zoom or Skype.
Apart from that, you will need a camera, a tripod, a microphone (preferably wireless) and some lighting equipment to record your videos. Before you invest in a HD camera, try your smartphone since these days they come with exceptionally high-quality cameras.
If you need further assistance with choosing the best video production equipment, this free online course resource can help you out.
Step #2: Discover your teaching style
How are you going to instruct your online yoga classes? Using video is the best way to show people what you do, but have you thought about how you are going to conduct your sessions?
While there are many types of instructional videos, these are the three most popular ones when it comes to teaching yoga:
If you don’t know what works for you best, experiment with different styles until you find the one you are most comfortable with. Also, make sure to check your audience’s reactions and gather their feedback to see which they prefer the most.
Step #3: Build your business website
Online presence is everything when it comes to teaching yoga online. If you are serious about it, you will need to build your own website where you can share instructional videos, your business news, blog posts or any other information that your prospective and existing students will find useful.
If you don’t have the web design skills for it, don’t worry.
LearnWorlds has all the tools you need to help you build a powerful website within minutes. Our brand-new website builder comes with tons of templates that you can easily customize to fit your style.
Step #4: Set your prices
How much will you charge for your yoga classes and how?
It’s important to decide how much you want to earn as a yoga instructor early on. This should help you set up a monthly revenue goal and calculate how much you should charge individual classes.
Anywhere between $20 to $30 per hour is a respectable rate to help you get started.
However, the best way to go is through subscription or membership. With subscriptions, you give people the option to access your gated online content for a X amount of money per month or year.
To make it work, consider creating different pricing tiers for beginners and advanced students. Alternatively, create package deals mixing your classes with other products you have on offer e.g. a yoga course, or a yoga teacher training program.
Step #5: Invest in marketing
Once you have everything set up, you are ready to start promoting your yoga business. While there are many clever marketing ideas that can get your business where most eyes can see it, building a sales funnel first and foremost is essential.
A sales funnel is the process that can make strangers your students, and it starts with getting their attention. Sharing content on social media, driving prospects to your website, building an email list, offering a free trial or a short video sample on what you do are all great ways to get people interested.
All in all, yoga teaching success is found in the details. As your online business grows, you will figure out what works best for you and your students and make the appropriate changes to meet their needs.
Meanwhile, there are some things you can do to ensure that you are giving your best:
Tip #1: Create a YouTube channel
Retaining a YouTube channel alongside your yoga business is an awesome way to build your reputation as a yoga instructor. It can also help attract more students in the long run.
This is the case for Adriene, who managed to get over 8 million subscribers on her YouTube channel – Yoga With Adriene. And all that by offering free yoga video workouts.
Just like Adriene, you too can come up with your own yoga workouts creating a set of video tutorials with exercises that people can try out. From there, you can easily direct them to your business website to check out your exclusive classes and course content.
Tip #2: Build your own yoga community
It goes without saying that as an online yoga teacher, you will need to build and maintain a working relationship with your students. Being part of a community helps people to grow while keeping them motivated towards achieving a common goal – to become more healthy.
To make it work, consider using Instagram and Facebook, as your main communication channels. Creating a Facebook group will help you connect with your student network better and in a more sincere way while going live on Instagram on a scheduled time can help people see more of the real ‘you’.
Also consider offering them physical products that are essential for workouts to make them feel welcome to your community. Merchandise like t-shirts that have your brand’s name on it or a slogan that means something to everyone is a great way to create a sense of belonging.
Tip #3: Try out new techniques
An excellent way to differentiate yourself from the competition is to add some variety in your yoga practice. As you grow your business, experiment with different yoga postures and offer modifications to help your students out. Also, try out different types of yoga or schedule weekly live classes to help a niche group of people overcome health-related problems e.g. those suffering with back pain or yoga for babies.
Tip #4: Listen to your students
Keeping your students happy and engaged comes as a priority. To do this, you need to constantly work on getting to know them better and discovering what they need every step of the way. Holding a Q&A session or simply asking for their feedback is a constructive way to improve your teaching ways. It also gives students the opportunity to express their opinion or make their own questions.
Tip #5: Keep learning
To stay relevant as a yoga instructor, you need to continue learning. Make your best to attend yoga festivals, retreats, conferences and events that take place all over the world.
If you can’t travel, you can always look for and join a live yoga training webinar, summit or workshop. Yoga teacher training can also be found online by many instructors. This should help you learn all there is to know about new developments in yoga practice, and give you the opportunity to talk and catch up with other yoga teachers.
On top of these activities, you also have the option to offer your knowledge to others and train your students to become yoga practitioners themselves.
Choosing LearnWorlds as the online teaching platform that hosts your yoga school, can help you in a number of ways.
LearnWorlds comes with a powerful set of tools that you need to create, market and sell your online classes to students all around the world. With our platform, you can easily build your school’s website from scratch, create a strong online community and offer unique interactive and social learning experiences.
Here’s why LearnWorlds is an excellent choice for teaching yoga online:
Teach yoga through subscriptions
With an all-in-one platform like LearnWorlds, you can create a membership site that offers exclusive access to your yoga lessons and premium content.
Without the need of a website plugin, your membership site on LearnWorlds comes with the following:
All of these features allow you to smoothly run a profitable subscription-based yoga business. To get started with your membership site, learn more about subscriptions here.
Build a strong yoga community
LearnWorlds is one of the most popular learning platforms when it comes to creating an online school. That being said, it comes with a robust community learning capability that offers unique experiences to students while nurturing interaction.
With this build-in community page, you can easily reach out to students, create posts, comment or like their messages just like you would on social media.
Each student can have their own profile and directly interact with each other, either individually or as part of a group.
Invest in your video content
LearnWorlds comes with interactive video settings which allows you to edit and customize your videos by adding your own questions. They also automatically create a transcript that presents to your students a narrated text which they can follow as you speak.
All your video classes can be embedded or uploaded directly to your LearnWorlds school. Whether you are offering a course or structuring a yoga class, you can create your video tutorials and then add them on the platform as part of your curriculum.
What’s great about LearnWorlds is that it provides copyright protection for your video content (as well as PDFs). You can learn more about it here.
Offer a live yoga class
With the Zoom integration, LearnWorlds allows you to conduct your live yoga sessions, webinars, formal and informal meetings – like Q&As, through its own platform.
The only thing you need to do is sign up on Zoom and start scheduling your live appointments with your students. Get started by following the instructions from this article.
Explore the EU market
Every successful yoga instructor is known by the number of people in their following. The bigger their network, the bigger the profits they should expect to make.
With LearnWorlds, you now have the opportunity to tap into a bigger market while making it easy for people in Europe to find you and pay for your online classes.
Stripe, which is the PayPal alternative, accepts payment from EU countries and it is supported by LearnWorlds. Currently we are the only global course platform that accepts local payment methods that EU students are most familiar with.
The Stripe integration allows you to accept local payments through the following payment gateways:
EU customers who are more familiar with these would be more likely to sign up to your online classes.
Many yoga instructors are currently using the LearnWorlds platform to operate their online yoga schools and are doing great!
Here are a few notable examples you can take inspiration from:
Example 1: True You Academy of Yogic Science
Behind ‘True You Academy of Yogic Science’, we find three female yoga practitioners – Jerry, Pamela and Lily. As qualified yoga instructors, they have made it their mission to help other yoga teachers and health care professionals recover from life-traumas and unhealthy lifestyles through the practice of yoga.
Currently they have three courses on offer, all of which students found to be eye-opening and helpful. Testimonials on the website say that students have benefited from them, especially the trauma-informed training which helped them deal with complex addictions and realize their true potential.
Example 2: To Baby and Beyond
‘To Baby and Beyond’ is an online academy that teaches massage, yoga practices and paediatric first aid administered to infants and toddlers. Academy’s founder and director – Julie Cleasby, is a registered nurse specializing in child health and development and she is the creator of the courses offered on the site.
As you can see, there is a variety of training programs available, providing infant, toddler and preschool yoga teaching. Apart from paid courses, Julie offers a free course and courses with time restricted access while working on another two that are coming soon.
Example 3: Tara Lee Yoga
Tara Lee Yoga is an online yoga academy unlike any other. Tara and Clare are both experts at what they do as yoga trainers, and they are offering classes on pregnancy yoga as well as a range of workouts to try at home.
What’s great about their website is that it is simple, yet effective, which proves that less is more when it comes to website design. An introductory video that shows Tara explaining what this academy is all about is more than enough to welcome new students.
As you move down the page, you can see the course learning objectives, which is an awesome way to show prospective students what they can take out from the lessons.
Example 4: Music Love Yoga
Last but not least, comes ‘Music Love Yoga’ an academy that was created by Renuka. Having taught yoga to more than 1000 students all over the world, she offers unique online classes that can help increase strength, flexibility and confidence.
A three-step process shows that joining her academy offers an easy and enjoyable learning journey. On her website, Renuka explains who can enroll in their courses, and how they can benefit from them. Also, the academy has a blog – a unique feature available for every LearnWorlds instructor, who wants to add more credibility to their online business.
‘Music Love Yoga’ makes use of a subscription-based pricing model that gives students the opportunity to choose which plan works best for them. Apart from single course subscriptions that come with a 3-day free trial, it also has a 66-day and an unlimited class access subscription plan.
Just like the rest of the fitness industry, the yoga practice has been severely hit by the coronavirus and is still suffering from its consequences. Nevertheless, hopes are higher than ever and yogis all over the world are taking advantage of the new emerging opportunities to teach yoga online.
Yoga classes are one of the most popular and growing online course topics right now.
Are you ready to teach yoga online?
With LearnWorlds, you too can start fresh today with the ambition to offer your knowledge across the limiting geographical borders.
Get your free 30-day trial with LearnWorlds today, and discover where it can take you!
Have any questions related to teaching yoga online?
These FAQs may be able to help you out.
Q.1: How to teach yoga classes online?
Create your yoga video classes using the appropriate equipment e.g. camera, microphone, and video production tool. Then choose the online learning platform that works best for you and upload your content. Finally, create a website and start teaching.
Q.2: How to teach yoga online live?
You can start teaching yoga online through YouTube Live or any other video conferencing tool such as Skype or Zoom.
Q.3: How to teach yoga online using Zoom?
Start by creating an account on Zoom. Then schedule and host a live Zoom meeting and prepare to conduct a live yoga class. Check out this tutorial video on how to teach yoga through Zoom.
Q.4: How do yoga instructors make money online?
As a yoga instructor you can make money off your YouTube videos through the ad revenue system. Alternatively you can create your own online yoga studio or business to offer online yoga classes and courses through paid student memberships.
Q.5: Is it easy to teach yoga online?
The easiest way to teach yoga online is by creating an online course and offering yoga classes online. Building your online yoga school doesn’t require any technical or coding skills and can be easily done through an online learning platform like LearnWorlds.
Q.6: Do customers feel comfortable with online yoga classes?
Obviously online yoga classes are very different from traditional one-to-one classes but they come with a lot of advantages. An important one is that it allows people to avoid commuting as they are allowed to attend classes from the comfort of their own homes.
Q.7: What are the difficulties of teaching yoga online?
Not having the right tools and equipment that can help you build your online yoga studio or offer yoga classes online are the main struggles. Once you do, it becomes super easy to teach yoga online.
Q.8: How can you bill clients when teaching yoga online?
The best way to bill clients when teaching yoga online is to come up with subscription plans that give them access to exclusive yoga classes and course content. This will allow them to pay their monthly or yearly fee online through an online payment gateway such as PayPal or Stripe.
Kyriaki is a Content Creator for the LearnWorlds team writing about marketing and e-learning, helping course creators on their journey to create, market, and sell their online courses. Equipped with a degree in Career Guidance, she has a strong background in education management and career success. In her free time, she gets crafty and musical.
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