Diversify your offerings: How to find private yoga clients
Heraclitus famously said “The only thing that is constant is change.” This applies to everything in life, including the way we teach and practice yoga. Originally, yoga was transmitted from the teacher directly to the student – the student would go looking for the teacher and choose to study with him over a period of time. As more people became interested in yoga, one-on-one teaching gave way to yoga classes – first to small groups of students who were interested in the spiritual aspects of yoga, then to larger and larger crowds who were mostly attracted to yoga’s physical benefits. Then came huge yoga conferences and festivals, with more and more people taking part.
I wonder if after growing and expanding for some time, yoga teaching is changing course again. It seems like a lot of yoga teaching has moved online, which can hurt the bottom line of some larger yoga studios, but it also makes the yoga practice a personal rather than social activity again. I wonder – what will come next? What will the future of yoga teaching look like if students are afraid to come to busy yoga classes because of the latest virus scare? Or simply because we have less and less motivation to leave our houses for non-essential things anymore since everything we might possibly need could be delivered to us or accessed right from our homes? Of course, the need to move our bodies will never go away, but what form will it take? Our aches and pains won’t magically disappear, but the way we expect and consume yoga content is already different.
What this means for yoga teachers is simply that we need to adapt with the times. We cannot put all our eggs in one basket. If you are relying on yoga classes for your income, and your yoga studio suddenly closes (as happened to me before), what would you do? Did you diversify your yoga offerings enough so that you have something to lean on if your main teaching option becomes unavailable? Working with students one-on-one online or in person can be an option; offering online courses or writing books can be another. Many of those options can also withstand the pressures of a potential quarantine if things get worse from the public health standpoint now or later. The private clients I work with online are never concerned about us infecting each other :). Online options also expand your reach from people who live in your immediate neighborhood to anybody in the world who has an internet connection and speaks your language.
Whatever you decide to do, it is best to plant some seeds ahead of time before it becomes urgent. However, your ability to expand your yoga offerings in person or online hinges on whether potential yoga students know who you are and whether or not they trust your expertise.
Developing expertise in a specific narrow area is essential if you want the right people to be able to find you. “I teach yoga” is very broad, and there are many other people who do the same thing. “I help people to deal with aches and pains” is a little more narrow but still very common. “I work with people who are dealing with back pain” is more specific, but “I help office workers who experience back pain from sitting too much” is the most specific and is very easy for your potential clients to relate to. There are many ways to frame your yoga niche. For example, my niche is yoga sequencing, and everything I do in person or online exists under one umbrella: “Every yoga practice must have purpose, order, and meaning.” There are yoga teachers who integrate yoga with art, or those who specialize in yoga and healthy eating, and the ones who teach compassionate listening. All those things are needed, yet they target completely different audiences. If you want to have a better idea about who your audience is, you need to first figure out who you are as a yoga teacher and what kind of students you want to work with. Then, you need to find a way to connect with those people and demonstrate your expertise to them.
This is exactly the path we follow in our new CE Course, Where to Find Private Yoga Clients and How to Attract Them. In this course, we start by figuring out who you are as a yoga teacher and narrowing down the types of students you want to work with. Then, we cover five reliable channels for finding private yoga clients and discuss how to connect with potential new clients via those channels. This course also teaches you how to:
- Establish an effective personal web presence,
- Figure out the logistics of seeing clients one-on-one,
- Create systems that ensure the ongoing flow of clients,
- Set your goals and intentions for one-on-one work.
Adding private yoga clients to your yoga teaching roaster can boost your teaching confidence, deepen your knowledge, and ensure a steady income. Although this course focuses on reliable ways to ensure a steady stream of private yoga clients, you can use the same strategies to find students for your classes, workshops, or series. It all boils down to developing expertise and being able to demonstrate it to others in person and online.
This course is grounded in my personal experience over the past 18 years and contains the strategies I used many times to find countless private yoga clients. In addition to prerecorded video content, you will also get a workbook with short assignments that show you how to apply the lessons you learn in your life and teaching right away. At the end of the course, you will complete a final project and get feedback on your work. This final project will help you organize your thinking about who you are as a yoga teacher, which groups of people you want to work with, and how you can present your services to them in the most effective way. After completion of the final project, you will also get your 4 CECs with IAYT and Yoga Alliance.
Check out a short video below to get a better idea of what this course is about.
This course is available free of charge to Sequence Wiz members, along with other exclusive video content on special yogic techniques, teaching yoga to beginners, working with private yoga clients, and more!
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