When you’re serious about the online biz part of your yoga business and want to attract more people to your website, for example to join one of your retreats, I strongly recommend adding a blog to your website.
Think of it this way: if you have a website for your business, you probably have between 5 and 10 pages of content to offer to search engines like Google, hoping it will stand out against a million other sites with nearly the exact same info. But if you add a new blog post each week, after just one year you have an additional 52 pages with content for Google to find and direct people straight to your services. Plus, a blog gives you the chance to establish yourself as an authority and to connect on a deeper level with your students. And finally, I think blogging is really fun. You should give it a go.
This all sounds great, right? But maybe you’ve been blogging for a while now without seeing any results. So, let’s talk about taking your blog to the next level.
#1 Have Great Content
Content always comes first. If you’re creating excellent, useful content, then you’re on the right track. Choose topics that will solve one of your readers problems and help them achieve something they always wanted to achieve. Focusing on quantity and not on quality is the biggest mistake a lot of bloggers make. If your content is not of a good quality, it doesn’t matter how much you publish. This also means that you don’t have to publish so much content, as long as it’s good quality. That’s good to hear, isn’t it?
#2 Find Your Blogging Niche
For best results, narrow your focus and only blog about a certain topic and not a bunch of different things. For example, if you are known for pre-natal yoga, don’t blog about vegan recipes but choose topics related to your niche. This way you get the chance to stand out as an expert in YOUR topic and become the go-to site for information on this. This will help you growing your tribe of people who are genuinely interested in what you offer. They will engage with your content, share it and one day maybe become a new client. If you have a very broad niche this will be much more difficult.
#3 Create an Editorial Calendar
You’re busy teaching classes, then you’re gone on a retreat, and before you know it, it’s been 2 months since your last post… To help with this you need to plan ahead. You should try to stick to a regular posting schedule, so your readers know when they can come back to see new blog posts. Whether that’s once a week or monthly, it helps to keep things consistent.
An editorial calendar is simply a schedule for your upcoming blog posts. You can also use it to keep track of posts from concept to development to publishing. I like to plot out at least a whole month of content ahead of time. That way I can look at it from a big picture perspective, and make sure I’m including a good mix of content across all the categories my blog covers.
#4 Start Guest Blogging
This is especially helpful if you don’t have a big audience yourself yet. You can write an original post for one of the bigger yoga community websites or you can get in touch with other yoga bloggers to collaborate.
Note that it’s important to write original content for your guest blog post, you can’t simply reuse a post you’ve already published on your blog as this could get you punished by Google.
Before you craft a pitch for a publication, be sure to research the types of pieces they usually publish and make sure you check out their submission guidelines and adhere strictly to the instructions.
#5 Add Video Content
Embedding videos on your blog post is a great way to attract new readers. Let your readers know that your blog post contains a video by putting this information in the title – this will help you draw in more readers. But don’t just post the video, add some text content too to give your readers some context before asking them to watch an entire video. To embed a video from YouTube you simply copy the embed code from the YouTube video and paste it into the text page of your blog post.
#6 Host an Online Event
Increase engagement and loyalty of your readers and build trust by hosting an online event, for example a challenge where you post a new video and tips daily over a week. It’s also a great idea to partner up with other similar blogs to reach a broader audience.
#7 Build a Community
If you really want to grow your blog – and consequently your online business – you should work on building a community. People need to relate to you: so be YOURSELF! Write like you normally speak. Share your opinions. Be personable. Imagine your readers are sitting across from you at a coffee shop. What would you say? Just do whatever feels like you, because it’s hard to build a community when readers can’t connect to the blog’s author.
A way to do this is to prompt readers to share what they think at the end of your blog posts. Asking a question gets your reader involved and best of all, gets them to think about your content in terms of their life. Think of something specific, but open-ended. When people give you a piece of themselves, they’re likely to build a more meaningful connection with you.
