This global pandemic has issued us an enormous wake-up call. I believe this universal disruption of every aspect of our lives is an opportunity, albeit an extraordinarily painful one, for us to learn and evaluate.
To see what we DO have, not just what we’ve lost. To explore how we can put our years of practice into play and look beyond the self. To get creative with how we stay connected and support and hold space for each other.
And that’s where today’s topic comes in!
If you’re a yoga teacher or any kind of wellness coach, I think you too should offer an online course if you don’t have one yet, and I’m going to share 5 reasons with you why.
#1 The Global Pandemic
A lot of people are feeling fear and stress right now and the world needs yoga and spiritual guidance, now more than ever. It’s your time to stand up, and to be the leader your students deserve. They need you! They need your expertise and your help in trying to find their way in this new reality.
Actually, even before the corona virus disrupted our lived the yoga industry has already beenmodernizing and changing, but the crisis has accelerated this 10-fold. It‘s been so inspiring seeing how so many yogis embraced online yoga and also learning new things online. It’s never been easier to connect online thanks to the advances in technology, or to sell your services to an online audience and help people from all over the world. If you get started now, you have the chance to be on the winning end of creative new business models for yoga teachers.
#2 Convenience for Your Students
It’s the pandemic that’s forcing us to go online, but it’s also ease of use.
Firstly, the barrier to entry is almost nonexistent these days — everyone tends to have an iPhone or an iPad or a computer to listen or to watch.
Online learning allows your students to learn on their terms. They can go back and re-watch something they maybe didn’t get before or pause it. They get to shape their education.
Also, not everyone has the time or means to visit a yoga studio or work with a health coach one-on-one. What about people who live somewhere remote? Or have a full-time job and a family and simply don’t have enough time for a 90-minute class in the studio, not counting the time to get there?
When you say you don’t want to teach online, or you think that what you teach can only be taught in real life situations, you are actually doing your students a disservice. I’m not saying that you should only teach online. There’s a lot of value and beauty in real live connection, no question. But why not offer both?
#3 Go Deeper
You became a yoga teacher, or wellness coach, because you want to help people with your teaching, right?
With an online course, you can teach so much more than in a normal yoga class or a 2-hour workshop, and thus help your students on a much more profound level. You can go deep, and share really helpful things, that get your students a real transformation. This is soo gratifying, it’s what I really love about online courses!
You can change people’s lives, in a way that you probably never will with teaching yoga classes in a studio.
You can help them get real results.
This doesn’t mean that every online course has to be life changing. You can offer a smaller course that gives people a quick result, something that makes their life a little bit easier or solves a smaller problem, like a handstand course.
Not being able to do a handstand is probably not a huge problem for a lot of people, but there might be someone who wants to learn it, for whatever reason, and this course would solve that tiny issue. This would be a smaller course, something that you could sell for around a $100.
Or you can offer a bigger course that promises a bigger transformation, like for example how to get your life back on track after a divorce, with self-help practices and coaching.
Here you teach a process you take your students through from start to finish. It’s specific and detailed. It includes your entire framework from start to finish and can lead to a total transformation for your students. Typically, you could charge more for this, at least $500 or more.
#4 Help More People
An online course is scalable, so you could help a lot more people than teaching 1-on-1. I have students from all over the world and I love that! I love connecting to people in Canada, and Australia, and Europe. Everywhere.
Now, my business is in English, so I’m serving a global audience. You might be more local, and teach in another language, like German, or French. Start small, start in your local language. Even if you’re teaching in English, you don’t want to attract everyone who speaks or understands English.
This is not what I mean by helping more people
Yes, I know, everyone needs yoga or healing or coaching, and by niching down you might think that you exclude people and limit yourself. But there’s so much power and opportunity in niching down and getting really clear in who you want to serve, in what way. Your potential clients have different levels of experience as well as different ages, genders and backgrounds. Carving out a specific offering to meet the specific needs of a specific type of student can be highly beneficial for your business. People have specific problems and they are looking for experts, or leaders, who can help them with that.
Here you can learn more on why you need a niche and how to find yours
#5 Not Having to Trade Time for Dollars
If you’ve been teaching yoga in studios, or seeing clients 1-on-1, you know how hard this is, and very often not sustainable. Teaching 10, 20 or more classes a week, it’s exhausting! Or seeing clients all day long.
I’m not going to tell you how selling things online means you make money in your sleep. Or it’s passive income. Believe me, there’s nothing passive in building an online business. It takes a lot of work to create an online course. But it’s scalable!
You create something one time, and then you can sell it again, and again, to as many people as you want. If you get sick or want to take time off to go on a vacation, when you have an online business you can still earn money. You can sell your online course automatically while you sleep or walk the dog.
And yeah, it’s a pretty great feeling waking up and seeing that you earned money over night!
But it’s not about the money alone, it’s about the freedom you can have in your life! Being able to work in your own time. From anywhere in the world. And again, having an online course doesn’t mean that you have to stop teaching yoga in your studio or seeing clients. It can be an additional income stream that means that you still earn money when you take time off, for example to take care of your family.
I meet so many yoga teachers who love teaching yoga but they are struggling financially. Unfortunately, it’s a fact that teaching yoga is not the fast road to financial freedom. To quote Eoin Finn, founder of Blissology: “If you want to make tens of dollars, become a yoga teacher!”
If you started your yoga career as a passion project but now you’re at a point where you’re ready to grow your business and earn a steady income, offering an online course is what you should do.
A lot of yoga teachers start with selling yoga videos, or audio meditations, for a few dollars. And while that’s great, it’s also really difficult to earn any significant amount of money through this. If you have a cheap product, or a low-priced product, you need a lot of customers to earn significant money.
If you have a $10 product, you need to sell this 100 times to earn $ 1000. But if you have a $100 product, you only need to sell it 10 times to earn $1000. Which actually can be much easier!
When you’re just starting out you probably don’t have a huge audience and so selling enough of a low-priced offer like a yoga video or a monthly membership to make it worth your time is hard, if not impossible. With a higher priced online course, it’s okay if you only sell a few, you still will make enough money to feel the difference in your income. AND, you have all the other advantages like a deeper transformation for your students. It can be life-changing, for you, and your students.
And I promise, you too have an online course inside you! We just need to unlock it and get what’s in your head and your heart into the hands of the people who need it.
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