How to market yourself as a yoga teacher – Tip #1

Prana Flow with Twee Merrigan

This is the first in a series of short tips on how to market yourself as a yoga teacher, or studio. But even if you’re not a yoga teacher, or running a studio, you’ll still benefit from these tips as the principles hold true no matter what business you are in.

Tip #1 – Take yourself to market

Yes, it’s VERY simple, but so often overlooked – we expect the market to come to us. But “Marketing” is not a complicated, ‘got to go to University to learn how to do it’ kinda thing. In fact, it’s innate to human nature. Back in the day, if you had something you wanted to sell, you literally had to ‘take it to market’ to sell it. So, how have YOU been ‘taking yourself to market’?

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If you want to make a difference in the number of students you have, the number of classes you teach, the number of clients you see, or the amount of traffic you get, all you have to do is commit to doing ONE “Take it to Market” activity a week. If you really get on a roll, you can always do five 🙂

When I first moved to Wellington, I didn’t know anyone, and I really wanted to teach yoga. Now teaching yoga is not the kind of job that gets advertised very often. If I wanted to land a gig, I knew I would have to take myself to the market.

So, I got on the internet, and found out what kind of facilities existed in Wellington. I checked out yoga studios, and I checked out gyms. As I cruised around, I discovered that the University of Victoria had just built a brand new yoga room and it was gorgeous. I thought, “I want to teach there!”

Simple.

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I called up and had a chat to the manager of the Kelburn Rec Centre just to find out what kind of yoga classes they offered. She had nothing going at the time, but I asked if I could drop my resume into her anyway and check out the facilities in person. This is CRUCIAL. As a yoga teacher (or often other healing professionals), it is YOU that sells yourself – not the long list of teacher training you’ve done or the degree in yoga you’ve got. It’s how you present yourself to the people.

So I went in and I meet with the centre manager, and we had a chat, and she said she’d keep my resume on file.

Three weeks later I got a call asking if I wanted to take a class there. Success! But even if that hadn’t worked… I would have repeated the same “taking myself to market” technique until I did get a class.

Today, ask yourself, what’s the one thing I can do this week to take myself out to market? And don’t be afraid to be bolshy either. (Bolshy? Kinda like enthusiastic, confident and a bit pushy all rolled into one). You know you’re great right? Now share that greatness with someone else.

Believe me, this works!

I launched this site last week, and a day later while cruising the net for other great yoga blogs… (always see who else is out there in the market. Other teachers/studios/professionals have the same goals as you, so they are likely a myriad of ways you can work together to boost business – this is the co-operation market model, as opposing to the competition market model, and there will be an article on this in the coming weeks.) … I came across http://yoga.alltop.com. This site has the very best websites in different categories across the web. And I liked what I saw.

You guessed it – I thought, “I want to be on there!”.

So, despite launching only a day previously… I sent them a bolshy letter requesting that they review my site and add it to their list of Top Yoga Sites. I knew my site was going to be great because I love what I’m doing here, and this belief in what I was offering made writing the letter easy.

Yesterday, they wrote back and said they agreed. So now, a week after launching, I’m already on http://yoga.alltop.com (which has some awesome yoga sites on it – check it out!)

Proof positive that successful marketing Tip#1 WORKS.

You gotta take yourself to market!

So this week, do ONE thing that gets you out there connecting with the people.

And let me know in the comments how it works for you.