About Your Yoga Career …
Have you ever felt like you were bumping up against a ceiling of how much you could earn in your yoga career?
You can only raise your class and private client rates so high before hitting a ceiling.
Do you want to create a yoga business website you’re proud of?
You love what you do, but you want to earn more income, serve more people, and get a little more freedom back into your life.
Feelings like that are probably what led you here to explore online courses as something you could add to your business.
You’re thinking about creating an online video based training program. You’re thinking about building a website to make the online yoga course magic happen.
You can do it! Other “non-techie” yogis have come before you and made it happen.
Keep reading and discover the essential steps to make it happen while avoiding the classic mistakes …
Step 1) Choose the Best Yoga Segment to Serve
Successful online yoga courses have a specific audience. And I’m not talking about “level 1,” “level 2,” or “gentle” yoga.
You have to get way more specific than that.
Remember your course will be global. You are offering the course to the entire world; not just to people who live near you.
What specific yoga practitioner do you want to attract?
Try and have at least 2 variables that make up a unique combination like:
- First-time moms recovering from a c-section
- 10 minute beginner practices for out of shape 40 year old office workers
- Back pain relief for people who work in manual labor jobs that are hard on the body
It’s important to pick a clearly definable segment of people.
When these types of people discover your course, you want it to be obvious that it was specifically designed for people just like them.
Step 2) Let’s Be Honest About Your Strengths and Weaknesses
You know from working with people on the yoga mat that people are different.
People have strengths and weaknesses, as I’m sure you do, too.
The thing is, to be a successful online yoga course creator, you need to have some basic skills across these 5 areas:
- Yoga Expertise
- Teaching Ability
- Community Building
- Technology
- Entrepreneurship
Don’t worry if you don’t have all of these areas covered. You can always get some help or learn the basics yourself.
The important thing is that you are honest about your strengths and weaknesses so you can plan, learn, or delegate accordingly.
Step 3) How to Make Sure You Make the Exact Right Yoga Course
Now it may be tempting to set up a camera in your home, studio, or on the beach and start making the course straight away.
But it’s important to slow down here.
Take a deep breathe.
And let’s go validate a pilot version of the course. A pilot validation exercise is designed to make sure people are attracted to and willing to buy your course concept before you go to the trouble of making it.
Validating the course concept with a small group of people also ensures your assumptions about the course content will actually get people the results they want.
To validate an online course concept for a specific type of person, the main idea is to make a few sales, deliver the course live, and get lots of feedback from a small handful of students.
Here are a couple of ways to validate without committing to making the online course videos or the website:
- Advertise the niche offer to your existing community and deliver the training in person
- Post on social media about the new learning opportunity, get paid, and deliver the training virtually through a video call service like your smart phone, Skype, or Zoom.
Once your validation exercise proves successful, you’ll get lots of useful feedback. You’ll also be able to collect the first round of testimonials from your early adopters that you can put on your online course website.
After validating your course idea like this, now you’re ready for creating the video content and the website…
Step 4) Creating the Online Course
Now here comes the fun part…
Outline the course structure on paper, chunking all the content down and organizing it into sections and lessons that make sense. Think of this like the table of contents for a book.
Film the video lessons yourself or hire someone to help with this.
Next create the LMS (Learning Management System) with a simple website publishing tool like WordPress and a LMS plugin like LifterLMS. If you need help with putting the website together, there is free training on how to do this, or you can hire it out.
Now take a moment and celebrate the creation of your online course that is now online and available for purchase from anywhere in the world!
We’re not done yet though…
Step 5) How to Launch and Market the Course For Maximum Impact and Profits
Create some kind of sale to celebrate the public release of your course.
Take a few of your best video lessons and distribute them for free on social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram to attract interested students. This is the classic “free sample” marketing strategy.
Next, do some individual outreach to people in your target market segment that you can find online to announce the release of the course and invite them to join.
You can also spend a small amount of money on advertising to announce the arrival of your course through advertising platforms that allow you to target your ideal student. This includes platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google.
Next, reach out to other businesses or organizations who serve the same segment of people that your course is for but are not direct competitors. See if you can work out a way to cross promote each other in a way that benefits your shared ideal audience.
Step 6) Achieving Maximum Personal Freedom, Impact, and Income from Your Course
Congratulations on making your course and launching it!
Just like yoga, online course creation is a practice.
The more you focus on improving the fundamentals and serving your community, the better things will get over time.
Celebrate your course launch, and commit to improving your course in small ways over time based on the feedback and the results of your students.
Congratulations on your new online business!
Here’s What I’d Like You To Do Next …
If you’d like more guidance and detail on the process outlined in this article …
I invite you to join this free short video course to help you get your online yoga course moving into reality.
It’s called…
The Beginner’s Guide to Building Successful Online Courses.
It’s normally $100, but you can get it free today by signing up here and using this 100% off coupon code below:
NAMASTE
See you in the course!
