4
Promotion
Since Promotion Will Be an ongoing feature of your career as a yoga teacher, it’s worth thinking about it early on and revisiting it often. When you’re first getting started, figuring out your marketing and promotion strategy will help you clarify who you are and establish a presence that can land you your first jobs. It’s a natural next step after articulating your motivation and your visions. And it’s an important thing to revisit when you’re feeling too busy, not busy enough, or stale in your practice and teaching. Some of what you’ll find in this chapter will be appropriate and necessary for you right now; other actions that I’ll suggest will come down the road once you’ve landed your first or next teaching job. Be sure to revisit these steps regularly—the timeline in the appendix will help keep you on track. Putting a little bit of time in monthly will keep your promotion up-to-date and yield you the best results.
For your promotion, you’ll need various assets. These are the materials that specify exactly who you are. They include written content, photos and videos, and other images: from a logo, if you choose to have one, to a color palette, to fonts. Since you know who you are—or since you’re getting to the heart of it through your yoga practice—it makes sense to start by writing your teaching biography.
develop a biography
Whether you are building your website or teaching at a gym, studio, or festival, you will need a good biography. Start with role models. Look online at the bios of your favorite teachers, both those with a national visibility, with whom you may have studied online or at a workshop or festival, and the local luminaries. What qualities do good bios have in common? A good biography is as much about the reader as it is about the teacher, making it clear how people will feel after taking a class or a workshop from the teacher. It should show personality rather than simply listing credentials. It doesn’t need to be cutesy, but it does need to convey the essence of the teacher.
Here’s my short bio that appears on the teacher page of my studio site.
As an athlete, endurance sports coach, and continuing student of yoga, Sage Rountree understands the trickiness of balancing training and a yoga practice. Sage’s classes emphasize intention and efficiency—using the right form and the right breath for the task at hand. There’s plenty of attention to core, the hips, and using the body, breath, and mind to focus. An Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher with the Yoga Alliance at the highest level (E-RYT 500), Sage has over sixteen years’ experience teaching yoga to students of all levels and backgrounds, including several UNC teams and Coach Roy Williams. Co-owner of the studio, director of our teacher trainings, and the author of nine books, including The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga, Everyday Yoga, Lifelong Yoga, Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses, and The Professional Yoga Teacher’s Handbook, Sage has also written for Yoga Journal, Runner’s World, Lava Magazine, and USA Triathlon Magazine.
While it ends with a curriculum vitae–style rundown of my published works, it gives an overview of what students can expect from my classes, then grounds my work in the context of our university town, where the basketball coach is a celebrity. To see other examples of a range of biography lengths and focuses, you’ll find my media kit at yogateacherhandbook.com.
Draft Your Bio
Answer these questions, going into as much detail as you like. Then cull the best sentences and phrases from your answers and distill them into a one- or two-paragraph biography.
▸ What first brought you to yoga? What were your revelations from your first few classes?
▸ What does yoga mean to you?
▸ Who and what have been your greatest teachers? While you may be tempted to simply list everyone you’ve ever studied with, can you think outside the box?
▸ How has your practice changed over the years?
▸ How do you want students to feel in your class? How do you want them to feel after your class? What would you like to hear them say to each other on the way out the door?
rÉsumÉ
If you don’t already have one, get to work on a yoga résumé; if you have one, update it now. This is different from your day-job work résumé, as it’s not a comprehensive catalog of all of your work experience but a précis of only what’s relevant to yoga. Your background in dance or gymnastics or improv theater would go on here; your work as a hotel reception desk agent or a waiter could arguably appear on your yoga résumé, as it’s customer service; the work-study you did in the music library in college or your time scooping ice cream as a teenager isn’t relevant.
Create a document now, save it in the cloud, and add to it as you grow as a teacher. You might even find yourself subtracting items that you used to round out the résumé at the start of your career, but which have now been superseded. At the top, give your name and contact information, including your web page and, if relevant, your yoga-related social media handles. Then add these sections.
Education and Training
If you completed college or graduate school with a major in a yoga-related or caregiving field (nursing, dance, exercise physiology, religion, philosophy, psychology), list it. You do not need to list non–yoga-related education, like your major in statistics or your high school.
If you have taken a 200-hour or a 300-hour teacher training, a children’s yoga or a prenatal yoga training, list it by name with the dates completed. When relevant, give the lead teachers’ names. If there is a particular slant to your training—it’s in a branded style of yoga, or focused on yin or therapeutics or kirtan or something specific—add it.
If you have taken continuing education workshops, or a workshop with a notable teacher, add it here, with the teacher’s name, workshop title, location and date, and a word about content, if it would be helpful.
Teaching Experience
If you’re already teaching yoga, list your classes here, with start and—when relevant—end dates. If you taught at a unique time, like 5:30 AM or Sundays at 8:00 PM, or a prime-time spot like Tuesdays at 6:00 PM or Saturdays at 10:00 AM, add that, as it will let your hiring manager know you’re flexible and capable.
If you’ve been teaching for a long time, you need not list every class, just the highlights. List the locations where you’ve taught, with a line or two about the classes you led.
If you haven’t started teaching yet, you may need to reach to fill your teaching experience section. That’s OK! You probably have taught as part of your teacher training: Describe that. Did you lead ten-minute classes? Sixty-minute classes? Community classes? Did you volunteer to practice on groups of friends and family? Show that you are actively creating opportunities for teaching.
Relevant Skills
If you’ve been involved with running a studio in any capacity, from sweeping floors to stocking bathrooms to checking in students to selling retail, list it here. If you have familiarity with studio management or scheduling software like MindBody Online, Wellness Living, Tula, or Vagaro, highlight that with a line or two about what kind of work you did in the software (class check-in, appointments, contracts).
If you have video production experience, detail it. If you have skill in a foreign language, particularly if you can teach yoga in Spanish or another common language, add it here. Likewise, add CPR/AED certifications, first aid skills, or other special skills.
References
Enlist three references. These can include the studio manager or owner where you’re teaching, if you are; your teacher trainer or other yoga mentor; and a well-spoken student who’s taken your class regularly. If you are not teaching yet, list a colleague from teacher training who can speak about your development and growth as a teacher. Check with each of these individuals to confirm they are willing to give you a positive recommendation before listing them as references.
Bio and Headshot
Include a one-paragraph bio that the studio can use (as you’ve drafted in the previous workbook exercise), and consider adding a headshot. While this would be against employment law for an office job at a major corporation, it’s common in the arts. If you’re applying to teach at a particular studio, model your bio and headshot on those you’ll find at their website. The idea is to make it as easy as possible for your hiring manager to see you fitting in with the existing staff. Your reader should be able to envision pasting this headshot and bio right onto their website staff page.
Ask for Résumé Review
Draft a résumé according to the points above, then share it with your mentorship team for their input. Consider also showing it to someone unfamiliar with the world of yoga, and listen carefully to their feedback and questions.
At yogateacherhandbook.com, you’ll find a few sample résumés and a template for creating your own.
assets
Your biography and résumé will help you land jobs, which we’ll discuss in the next chapter. Condensed elements of your bio and résumé will appear in your marketing material, so they are a great place to start. For your ongoing promotion, you’ll need to collect a few more assets. These are the materials that will appear in your marketing, whether it’s in print or online. They should at the very least include a photo or two, a few lines about your offerings (classes, workshops, retreats), and a consistent look: a particular typeface and color palette that you use throughout your marketing materials (yep, that’s your brand).
Photos
At least every other year during your yoga teaching career, you should spend the time and money to secure high-quality photos from a professional photographer or a talented amateur with nice equipment. Hairstyles, fashion, and bodies change over the years, as will your yoga practice. Having and using current photos will provide an up-to-date picture of what you, your practice, and your class look like. This will help you connect best with the right students for what you offer.
For your session, create a shot list of images you want to be sure to get. A good photographer will have some suggestions, but when you are both operating from a list of must-have shots, things will go most smoothly. Start with headshots, perhaps with a few different looks: one in a yoga top, one in street clothes, one with a big, natural smile, one more posed or artistic.
You’ll also want images of you in a variety of asanas. Be sure that many of these are accessible poses (think tree, not bird of paradise) where your face, smiling or with a pleasantly neutral expression, is visible. While forward folds can feel great to do, in general they don’t photograph well for marketing purposes. Choose instead standing poses that you know virtually all of your students can do with ease.
If you have an advanced asana practice or want to shoot more artistic images, have fun, but save these pictures for promoting an advanced-pose workshop or using on social media with a caption putting them in context.
It’s also smart to have photos of you teaching a class. Every person who’s photographed must explicitly agree to the use of their likeness, so it’s smartest to gather a small group of your peers—for example, your colleagues from yoga teacher training—and stage a class. You’ll also get more experienced yogis that way, with prettier form. You can do a round robin, with each of you teaching over the course of an hour, and you can pool the cost of the photographer. Everyone will wind up with photos to use for promotion. Or you can choose a few regular students who are familiar with your sequences and cues. When potential students look at your photos, they should be able to project themselves into the frame and envision taking your class.
If there will be a photographer in a regular class for some reason, like a local media outlet doing a story on the studio, be sure to get all the students’ explicit agreement to be photographed. To be safe, you can create or download a photo waiver (aka model release form) to have students sign. You’ll find one at yogateacherhandbook.com.
Think about the background in your photos and choose something evergreen. Don’t use an easily-identified studio for marketing pictures, then promote your classes in other studios in the same market using the space. That’s confusing to students, as it muddles the clarity of the studio’s brand and yours.
Look for a neutral background: Choose a familiar outdoor space, or use a white background. If you don’t have access to a studio with a plain white wall, most professional photographers will have a white paper roll or scrim to use as a backdrop. If you expect to record video in a set at home, take some photos there. Or, if your hometown has notable architecture, geographical fixtures, or public art (the beach, Gateway Arch, Chicago Bean), take some pictures there. They will be evergreen, provided you still keep that town as your home base.
Graphics
Choose a color palette and font that convey your brand. If you teach exciting power classes, you might want to choose a bright color and a strong typeface; if you specialize in gentle and restorative yoga, perhaps a more muted palette and more delicate script are in order. If you’re not sure which direction to go, assemble a mood board of sites and graphics that you like, and once you’ve collected several, you’ll likely see a common theme emerging.
A graphic designer can help—perhaps you’ll find one who will trade advice for yoga. You can also commission design help online at Fiverr and set your own price point. If you are making your own design decisions, choose a font that is widely available, like the fonts you’ll find in the Microsoft suite or the Google free fonts. It will make it simple to pass the work to a designer down the road.
While you may have a bunch of energy and excitement around developing a brand as a yoga teacher, you probably don’t need a logo per se. If you feel you simply must have one, seek a graphic designer who will work on trade.
website
You don’t need a fancy website. Even a single page with a smiling photo, your schedule, a brief bio, and your contact information will suffice.
In order to do this, you need a URL—universal resource locator—which is your address on the web. If you don’t already own yourname.com, please put this book down and try to buy it now! While you’re at it, consider buying yogawithyourname.com, yournameyoga.com, yournameyogayourstate.com, and yourname.yoga (yes, .yoga is now a domain you can register). You can do this at any domain registry service like Go Daddy, Google Domains, or Web.com. If you have ideas for businesses, like a dream of owning a yoga studio or writing an ebook that you would sell on a website, buy domain names for those projects at the same time. Rates go down substantially when you buy in bulk.
Owning a URL is like having rights to a street address. Next, you need to put a house at that address, and there are a few ways to do that. One is to go with an all-in-one web builder, like Squarespace or 1and1.com. You can even use these services to buy your URL. They will offer a variety of templates—like house designs—that you can customize to align with your brand. They will even host your site. Your web host is like the lot where the house is built. This is a good place to start, like buying a starter home. As you choose between services, think of your medium- and long-term goals. If you intend to add video content or offer class or workshop registration through your site, you may find an outfit that easily supports these features.
If, down the road, you have specific needs or a big budget, you can get a custom-designed website like what you’ll see at carolinayogacompany.com or sagerountree.com. In this house analogy, these are architect-designed sites. A graphic designer and a web developer work together on them like an architect and a contractor, or a design/builder and an interior designer.
A good starter website for a professional yoga teacher will include the following elements. They can be sections of a single page or discrete pages, but it should be very clear to the viewer how to navigate between these elements.
Welcome
Open with a warm, enthusiastic sentence of welcome, ideally accompanied by an image of you in an accessible yoga pose, smiling at the camera (not a back shot), and possibly also a smiling headshot.
This should say to the viewer, either implicitly or explicitly: “You will find a sense of connection and joy in classes with Chris,” or whatever your message is. What will your viewer gain by taking your class? How will they feel? Mellow? Stronger? Challenged? Uplifted? All of the above?
About
It’s time to deploy the bio you’ve already started! Condense it to a paragraph or two about your yoga journey, again, with a focus on how your students will feel once they connect with you.
Schedule
Keep an updated schedule of where you teach, when, how much it costs, where students can sign up, and where they should park/how to get there via public transit. Add full class descriptions to set students’ expectations. Set yourself a reminder to update this frequently, about every three months. If you offer workshops, series, or retreats, feature them here.
If you offer private lessons, include a description, along with a price list and a way to book. Depending on the web platform you’re using, there may be appointment scheduling built in; you can also use your calendar software to assign availability, or invite your students to contact you to schedule a lesson.
Thus, depending on your teaching offerings, your schedule page could have sections or separate pages called “Find a Class,” “Take a Workshop,” “Go on Retreat,” “Schedule a Private Lesson,” and so on. Note that each of these is a call to action focused on the reader.
Contact
Give students a way to reach you with any questions. If you don’t want to post your email address, there are some workarounds. One is to create a new address (yournameyoga@gmail.com, or info@yournameyoga.com, once you learn how to deploy the custom email addresses that come when you buy a URL), which you can use as a stand-alone or forward to your main account. Another is to use a contact form, which your web builder would supply.
Similarly, if you don’t want to give out your private phone number, you can create a Google Voice number. Any calls or texts to that number can be forwarded to your private number.
Art
Each of these pages or sections should be illustrated with a high-quality photo. Unless you explicitly teach advanced asana, make these accessible poses. Be sure your face is visible in at least two-thirds of these shots. A shot from behind can be artful, but having too many on your site makes you look shy.
If you have some artistic photographs of you in more difficult poses, list them in a section or on a page called “Gallery,” and consider adding a blurb about how long it took you to learn these moves and whether they appear in your regular class. Be sure to credit your photographer. If they are open to bookings, link to their site.
Other Elements
Video. Nice, but not critical to have unless you offer video content online, is a short snippet of you teaching. This could be either a video shot in a staged class where all of the students know they are being filmed, or a quick lesson on a single pose or a unique way to use a prop. A minute or two of video footage goes a really long way at conveying your energy as a teacher, and it will be useful both to potential students and to prospective employers. We will cover how to produce such videos in chapters 7 and 10.
Music. If you use music in class, you can link your playlists on your website. Be sure that you have paid attention to appropriate licensing fees, which we discuss in part 3.
Testimonials. It’s nice to have a blurb or two from your mentors and your students about your teaching. If you’re citing a mentor, use their full name and, if it’s helpful, a positioning phrase “Sage Rountree, co-owner of the Carolina Yoga Company and author of The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga.” If you’re citing a student, a first name is probably enough.
Booking details. If you intend to offer workshops as a traveling teacher, it is helpful to prepare a workshop offerings document. This will be unpacked in part 4. Your offerings list could go on a page called “Bookings” on your website, or you can simply invite people to contact you to request the document.
media kit
Since you’ll already have collected these assets for your website, you can arrange them all in a folder as a media kit. This can be passed to any studios that host a workshop, as well as to journalists who interview you as an expert. I keep mine in Dropbox and share the folder whenever it is requested. Your media kit should include:
▸ Bios in various lengths, including one around 50 words, one around 150 to 200 words, and one full-length biography; when you are presenting a lecture or workshop, these are invaluable for the people tasked with introducing you.
▸ Headshots: recent professional photos of you smiling at the camera; one or two well-lit, high-resolution pictures are plenty.
▸ Action shots: photos of you teaching students who know they are being photographed (obtain a model release!); if appropriate for your brand and workshop content, include photos of you in asanas related to the workshop.
▸ Book covers, podcast cover images, logos, or other supporting materials.
Update your media kit regularly.
newsletters
Real talk: Setting up and sending newsletters is one of my least favorite tasks. But it’s one that, done right, will keep your students invested in your offerings and ensure your workshops and retreats are successful. Like many tedious chores, it feels easier if you spend a few minutes a week tending to it and an hour or two a month batching all your other efforts on it: collecting assets, writing copy, scheduling your content.
Permission-Based Marketing
The formal term for your email newsletter is “permission-based marketing.” Permission is the critical word here: Your students need to opt in to receiving your email newsletter. You can’t just take student addresses from your sign-ups—or, worse, from your studio’s scheduling software—and add them to your list. Students must give you permission to send them emails.
How to get permission varies on where you are teaching and what the venue’s policies are. When you are at a gym, studio, or anywhere you are not the clear boss, be very sure about whether you can solicit addresses from students. Once you have explicit permission from the venue, there are a few options. If you are having students sign a waiver, you can add a yes/no box to the waiver form. Or you can have a separate clipboard for students to add email addresses, which you’ll then manually input. If you’re savvy, you could have your webpage open on a laptop or tablet and let students subscribe themselves. Try to capture them while they’re present; an offhand mention like “You can sign up for my newsletter at mywebsite.com” isn’t going to gain you many subscribers.
That said, your website is a natural place to invite viewers to become subscribers. Do this via a pop-up form or a form that is always visible in the sidebar or footer. Offer something of value in exchange for signing up. I offer a code for a premium video, which gives recipients a 48-hour rental of one of my Core Strength for Real People episodes. You might offer a pose explanation, a favorite yoga sequence, a playlist, a recording of a guided meditation, or a coupon code for your next workshop or series.
It needs to be very obvious for subscribers how they can quickly unsubscribe themselves from your newsletter. You can’t simply BCC your list and not say “reply with ‘unsubscribe’ if you would rather stop receiving these.” (And don’t ever simply CC your list with email addresses visible, which is a violation of privacy.) Readers need to be able to get out easily. This is one of many reasons to choose a respected platform for sending your newsletter. These platforms will also save you the work of removing people from a list manually, and, if you toggle the right setting, will save you the pain of seeing who unsubscribes from your list.
Choose a Platform
You’re likely familiar with the big players in the business: Constant Contact, iContact, MailChimp. There is even a yoga-specific newsletter software, Namaste Light. Each of these offers scaled pricing, so when your list is small they are low-cost or even free. As your list grows, so does your monthly fee.
For several years, I’ve been using a Wordpress plug-in called MailPoet. It’s housed on my website, which is based in Wordpress, and it allows both for creation of newsletters from scratch and for posts to the blog on my site to go out as newsletters. This suits my desire to spend as little time as possible on my newsletter: When I have something to share, I put it in a blog post, which then gets disseminated via various channels: the blog itself, the RSS feed that readers can subscribe to, my social media (via the Jetpack plugin), and, every Tuesday when there is fresh content, my newsletter. This does mean my newsletter isn’t distributed on a regular once-a-month schedule, but it also means the newsletter goes out only when there is relevant content.
Each of these platforms will allow you to segment your audience so that you can subdivide your list to send the most useful messaging to each discrete user. You could set up a campaign welcoming new subscribers, so that they receive a few weeks of introduction to you and your work. You can denote some subscribers as festivalgoers or potential retreat-goers or athletes or yoga teachers, whatever segments work for your base.
Write and Batch Your Work
No newsletter needs to be very long. Shorter is better. Your readers will likely look at only the first screen or so of the message, so don’t bury your lede. A line or two about an upcoming offering, a link to a longer blog post about your theme for the month, or even a share of something you found meaningful is all you need. Give your readers a clear call to action, like a button or a link saying “Sign up here!” or “Download the meditation.” A rule of thumb: Your newsletter should effectively be no longer than three social media posts. Two is better, and one is often enough, especially if it’s for a big announcement like a retreat or a forthcoming book.
Don’t overlook the title and the secondary line, which is what displays in readers’ email applications as a preview of the content. These should match your teaching tone and invite the reader to open the email itself. Instead of “November News,” go with something like “Ready to Run Away to Costa Rica?” or “You’ll Doze Right Off with This Meditation for Better Sleep.” Survey the offerings from both local and national teachers and pinpoint what you think works well, then model your newsletters on that formula.
If you feel, as I do, that setting up your newsletters is like pulling teeth, block out a few hours, set up in your favorite working environment, and knock out several at once. Any newsletter service will allow you to schedule these in advance.
Aim to send a newsletter at least quarterly, so that your readers remember who you are. But, at the other end of the spectrum, don’t send newsletters more than once a week unless you do it rarely, in service of a special event.
Strategize Your Newsletter
Any task is less daunting once you start to break it down into smaller chunks. Here’s how to get started on creating a newsletter.
▸ Subscribe to several teachers’ newsletters to have role models. Choose peers in your area and some nationally or internationally known teachers.
▸ List the steps you will take to get sign-ups and what you’ll need to do to implement them (e.g., speak to the manager at the venue where you teach).
▸ Look at the available options—one might be via the website builder you choose—and settle on a newsletter service. Read that service’s best-practices articles, and if they offer a video series or a help session to get you up to speed, use it.
▸ List some content you can promote. This could be a video series you’ve created, or a blog post you have written, or the handout from a workshop you’ve taught. All of these will be explained in part 4. You can also point to someone else’s content that you found especially helpful.
▸ Write a plan to “drip” (trickle out piece by piece) this content across several weeks or months of newsletters.
▸ Draft your first newsletter. Each service will have a set of templates for you to choose from. Find the one that is most in line with your brand, pop in your content, and schedule it.
▸ Check your statistics. What was clicked on? Let that guide you to your next newsletter topic.
social media
Social media is a major tool for yoga teachers to reach their current and potential students and to develop their brand. There are millions of directions to go with your social media and other content campaigns—and the social media landscape is constantly changing, so you’ll need to adapt accordingly. But here’s how to get started with social media, or to revamp your approach to make it more systematic and professional.
Find Role Models
Start by considering your current and your desired student base, which may be the same or could be quite different. Are they using social media, and if so, what platform will you find them on most of the time? If your students don’t use social media, you may not want to put much time or energy into establishing a presence there. There’s no requirement that teachers use social media! If a particular platform confuses you or makes you feel anxious and irritated every time you use it, don’t waste effort in establishing a foothold there. Better yet, consider deleting the app from your phone or even suspending your account. Instead, enhance your presence in the places you do enjoy scrolling, commenting, and posting. It will be a much more positive experience.
If you do enjoy spending time on social media, you likely follow several yoga teachers already. Think about why you chose to follow them and how you respond to their posts. Make note of the teachers whose message resonates best with you—and those whose promotion doesn’t work for you. From your reactions, you can reverse engineer a strategy of your own that feels authentic to you.
Some of my favorites on Instagram are, for students, Mary Ochsner (@maryochsner), and for teachers, Jenni Rawlings (@jenni_rawlings). Mary’s work gives bite-size tidbits for people to add yoga to their lives at any stage. Jenni consistently posts creative exercise physiology–based sequences that could fit into the context of any flow class to keep it challenging and varied. Both women deliver high-quality content on a regular schedule. Follow them for inspiration—and to recognize how much work this truly is!
Consider Establishing a New Business Account
Depending on when you first joined various social networks, your personal page may have evolved into a yoga-business page. Or you may already have a separate account for your yoga business. If you don’t, consider creating one now. That will both serve your old friends in your hometown who don’t want to hear about your upcoming workshops in your new location and help your yoga students see you as a professional. The handle for this account could be @yournameyoga or @yogawithyourname. Take a month or two to post weekly, inviting your yoga students who follow your personal account to follow you there instead. Then you can mention it only every other month or once a quarter, maybe when you post yoga-related content to your personal page: “For more yoga content, please follow my business account at @yournameyoga.”
Depending on the platform, this new account can be set up as a business account, rather than a personal account. On Instagram, for example, this gives you access to “Insights,” statistics on how many people are viewing your posts, saving them, and clicking through to your profile, as well as a few demographics about who these viewers are (age, gender, region). Looking at these metrics will show you what content is most popular with your followers, and you can then create more along those lines. And if you want to be sponsored by a brand, the brand may want to see your statistics to determine your reach.
Create a Content Calendar
While you may have been posting on social media on an ad hoc basis—when you feel like you have something to say—you can and should plan your posts just as you do for your newsletter. Develop a content calendar with your upcoming events, like the addition of a new class, a workshop, a video series, or a retreat. Work back from the event date to schedule posts promoting the event. These posts can mention a problem that students may have and how your event will solve it.
Your content calendar could be in a spreadsheet, or, for a minor fee, you can schedule your content using software like Hootsuite or Buffly. These applications will post your content for you on a schedule of your choice, or they will suggest the best time to post automatically. This can be nice if you like to batch your work for maximum efficiency. Be sure to visit the posts once they are up and answer any student questions or thank them for their comments.
print marketing
While you probably don’t need many printed materials, it’s good to have a few. You can design and order these yourself online using tools like Canva or Moo.
Business Card
Have your name, web address, and professional contact information, including your business social media handles, if you use them. You don’t need 500 or 1,000 cards—your information will likely change before you get through that many. Just order 250 and share them liberally.
Postcards
If you are promoting a series or retreat, or a workshop you would really like to fill, consider printing postcards to advertise it. These aren’t actual postcards that you would mail—be sure to use all the space on both sides.
Flyers
For workshops, series, and retreats, a single-page flyer can be useful. Before investing much effort in designing and printing these, think through where you might hang them. Use big fonts and bright colors, which makes the flyer more accessible to any reader. Less is more. Be sure your flyer covers the basics of what, when, and where, and that it’s obvious where to register.
advertising
The aphorism attributed to John Wanamaker goes, “Half the money I spend advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” That was especially true in the era of print advertising, where it was very difficult to track whether and which advertising worked. Print advertising is out of virtually every teacher’s budget, and you’ll get better, more trackable results by instead focusing on online ads. These can be on Google Adwords or on social media like Facebook or Instagram. If you are generating good content, which you’ll be equipped to do when you finish this book, you won’t need to advertise much to garner awareness of your brand as a teacher. Advertising may be useful when you have something specific to promote, like workshops, retreats, and online content, which which we cover in part 4. With online ads, you can dial in the audience so that your ads are targeted to the people most likely to be interested in how you can help them with yoga.
promotion in class
Depending on where you are teaching, you may have a clipboard of studio announcements to read before class. Perhaps you can add to this a mention of your own offerings, especially at the studio itself. If you do this, be sure not to overdo it. Mention one thing at the start of class and reiterate it briefly again at the end, rather than subjecting students to a litany of sales pitches. If you’ve got the go-ahead to point students to your newsletter or website, let them know where they can find more information and sign up.
Be very clear on the studio guidelines before mentioning anything you are offering off-site. Some studios disallow any promotion for outside events, even a mention of your social media or newsletter, regarding that as solicitation of the studio’s students. You may even see a nonsolicitation clause in your contract to this effect. Others, like ours at Carolina Yoga Company, allow you to promote outside events like retreats, but only orally during your class. All paper you bring, like a postcard touting your event, leaves with you. Otherwise, the counter and flyer boards are riddled with conflicting branding and we wind up devoting all our marketing space to something we don’t make money on. But this policy is unusual; expect the first instead, and be sure to ask your hiring manager so that you are completely clear on what your studio expects from you. Good communication will prevent suffering on all sides.
Are you pumped? I hope so! Of course, you need an offering to promote, so let’s talk about how to get your first class or make a move into a new student base by creating opportunities to teach a regular weekly class.