34 ways to promote yoga classes

1. Invest in some quality professional photos! We all know that people are attracted to beautiful images. They are so much more powerful than text. Do yourself a favor and invest in some professional photos that you can use on your website, in brochures and on your social media posts. One of reasons that Superstar Yoga Instructor Kathryn Budig attributed to her massive success is having professional photos. She invested in them early on and did an amazing job leveraging them to get more teaching gigs. Here’s a tip – Ask some yogi friends if they’d like to split the cost of a photo shoot with you.

2. Shoot some videos of different length sequences to share with your audience! Videos are even more popular than plain images. YouTube has become the 2nd largest search engine behind Google! Start up a YouTube channel to host the videos and get yourself out there. Create 5 minute, 10 minute, 30 minute and 60 minute sequences that people can follow along with.

3. Determine WHO your ideal clients are. What niche are you interested in working with the most? Who do you want to be a hero to? Focus your messages for that group. The more specific you can get, the easier it is for you to target your ideal audience.

4. Start building up your email list! You want to make sure to capture the email addresses of your students and followers. Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways of staying connected with your audience and promoting your services, classes and workshops to them. Bring a newsletter signup sheet to all your classes and workshops.

5. Commit to a regular interval of email communication to stay in touch with your followers. The key is consistency, so commit to monthly or weekly newsletters. Be sure NOT to call your newsletter a “newsletter”… no one wants to read that! Instead, think of a message that you want to share with your audience (perhaps a theme you shared in yoga classes that week), and write something about it. Keep it short and sweet and be sure to include a beautiful image.

6. Create a contest to motivate your students to bring a friend to class or to share your social media posts. People LOVE contests! Give your students incentives to help you grow your classes. Consider doing a drawing for a free private yoga session. They get an entry into the draw for each friend they bring to class. You give away 1 hour of your time, but gain a ton of new students in your classes. The best part is that the winner may love the private session so much that you can get a new private client out of it. You can also use contests to have your followers share your social media posts. Use your imagination!

7. Ask your students for a video testimonial after a great class experience. Social credibility is absolutely essential when trying to grow your business. People love hearing about the experiences of others because it makes them believe that they can have the same experience. Share the testimonial on your website and social media pages.

8. Pitch the idea to a studio owner of doing a free community class for beginners. Promote it out on social media – perhaps create a contest to have your followers attend and share it. Hand out flyers to local patrons walking by the studio. Work it out with the studio owner that if the class is a success, you get rewarded with a new beginners class to teach. The studio owner will LOVE your enthusiasm to help grow the awareness of their studio. You just might find yourself getting rewarded with even more classes to teach.

9. Offer a free class to local associations and networking groups. They are always looking for good speakers, and a yoga class is a fun way for them to create a “special” event that their members will enjoy. After teaching the class, you’ll get a room full of people that you can pitch private yoga sessions to and/or promote your public classes, workshops and retreats to.

10. Create your own high-paying yoga teaching opportunities. Connect with local corporations, apartment buildings, senior living centers, mommy groups, churches, etc. and offer to do a series of classes for their employees/residents/members. Always pitch the idea of having the organization pay for the classes, but if necessary, you can open it up to allow the participants to pay – if and only if they pay for a series of classes UPFRONT.

11. SEO

SEO is the best source about promoting methods online but it needs more time so that I will focus on other methods below:

12. Optimize Old Content

Because you are tracking your keyword rankings (you are, right? If you’re not, use SEMrush), you can find the keywords that you rank near the bottom of the first page and go add useful content to those pages to help them rank better. Google also prefers updated and new content over old stale content.

13. Create YouTube Video Tutorials 

Did you know that YouTube ranks 2nd in the world? YouTube is a great resource for driving free organic traffic to your website.

I have developed 3 YouTube channels for 3 niches: job search, fitness, dating and YouTube brings 35k visitors / month to the 3 above sites.

14. Create content for Slideshare

Slideshare is its own content social network. By creating content for Slideshare specifically and promoting it, you can also land on the popular content sections of their homepage which drive great traffic. Make sure you link back to your site from Slideshare too.

I created three slideshare.net accounts for 3 niches: job search, dating, fitness. Then I uploaded 312 rich documents on slideshare.net. The total traffic I got are 45k visitors per month.

15. Blogspot.com

Blogspot.com is the largest free blog service in the world. Along with wordpress.com, tumblr.com ...

Blogspot.com of the best free traffic generator and backlinks for your website. In addition, Blogspot.com has many great features that other blogging platforms do not have such as: enable code insertion into templates, enable redirect blogs on your domain (included free hosting).

I started using Blogspot.com from 2010, I now have 182 Blogs with an average blog visitors of 1000-15,000 visitors per month. The total number of visitors to all my blogs is 850,000+ visitors. These free blogs have generated free traffic to my 3 niches of 31k visitors per month.

16. Create Pinterest boards

Pinterest is a super strong domain and your Pinterest boards can rank very well. Do your typical keyword research for your website, then take some of those keywords and target them on Pinterest. A pro tip is to use your other online resources (website, Instagram, etc) to get them indexed faster and ranking better.

I have created 3 boards for my 3 niches. In the last 4 years I have uploaded 512 rich images on Pinterest. Total traffic from Pinterest 32k visitors / month

17. Guest post on similar sites

Similar to acquiring new users, guest posting on similar sites that likely have your audience and have read your site is a great way to remind them about your site/product as well. I started performing guest posts from 2015 with a total of 174 articles. The traffic I got are 11k visitors/month. Although traffic is not much, but I still evaluate this as a source of high traffic and quality backlinks for your website.

18. Answer Questions on Quora

Quora is a great medium for driving traffic to your site. Answer questions on this platform and link the right keywords to anchor content on your site or blog. However, don't use this platform to spam. Ensure that your answers are detailed and that you know what you're talking about

I started answering on Quora since 2014, initially I mainly inserted links, then my account was locked. I began to study the famous Quora accounts and I realized they gave very so good answers. I re- registered Quora account, currently I have 346 answers on Quora. The amount of traffic pushed to my website is 12k visitors/month. What I'm most surprised at is that I currently have followers 46k followers on Quora.

19. Linkedin

LinkedIn has become much more than a means of finding another job. The world’s largest professional social network is now a valuable publishing platform in its own 16 right, which means you should be posting content to LinkedIn on a regular basis. Doing so can boost traffic to your website, as well as increase your profile within your industry especially if you have a moderate to large following.

I created a Linkedin account from 2013, so far I have created 122 articles, my Linkedin account has 75k + followers. An article on Linkedin will have links: linkedin.com/pulse/article- url. The traffic I got from Linkedin are 18k visitors/month

20. Post Useful Content On Reddit

Another great way to drive traffic to your site is to use Reddit. Reddit is a wildly- popular platform where you can share useful information and engage in conversations with millions of people from across the planet. The domain is extremely popular, making any link from the site extremely useful for boosting your visibility across the web.

I have posted more than 400 free materials on Reddit for my 3 niches and currently I got 26k visitors/month.

Social advertising

Social advertising on Facebook, Twitter, and other networkds is still relatively cheap today as compared to Adwords. Many of them also allow you to segment down by demographics or target by keywords so that you hit your ideal audience.

PPC

PPC is usually best used for conversion-oriented keywords, which is great because it gets you a new audience that is also ready to convert.

Utilize Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to drive traffic to your site or your blog, and to promote any offers, but it also means that you need a list to market to. Create a lead magnet and build a sales funnel immediately if you haven't already done so, in order to build up a list that you can eventually market (not spam) any of your offers to.

Run YouTube Ads

Can’t create videos, but there are videos on YouTube that your target audience watches? You can run YouTube videos.

Purchase Ads Through Facebook

Want access to the global populous? Clearly, you can advertise on a platform like Facebook. As long as your offer is enticing enough, and you can convert that traffic into sales with a great sales page or free offer, then you can scale this marketing initiative out infinitely to drive nearly unlimited sales.

Advertise On Instagram

Instagram now has a clear revenue strategy, and that includes placing ads on the social network. This is a terrific way to reach people in your area and offers you a highly-targeted approach to reach potential customers to buy your products and services.

Interview Industry Influencers

Remember the importance of content marketing I mentioned earlier? Well, interviewing an industry influencer is a prime example of how to create epic content.

Interviews work because they are win-win situations. The interviewee gets more exposure, while the interviewer gets their hands on some hot content for their publication, which in this case, is your blog.

Make the most of the interview by asking relevant questions surrounding not only their lives and careers, but also the industry as a whole. This will ensure that fans of the influencer get a taste of their personality, while others will value their expert advice.

Publish a Press Release

Lots of new online stores push out press releases in order to attract media attention, but fail.

It goes without saying that to get ignored by every single news outlet when distributing a new press release is demoralizing and often a huge waste of resources.

The secret to getting noticed is simple. Don’t publish a lousy press release!!!

First of all, make sure your news actually is news worthy. Don’t expect a massive response unless you’re giving the public something seriously interesting to read about. Also, a press release should be presented in a way that is concise and professional, without being too monotonous.

Start An Affiliate Program

If you’re struggling to make sales and you don’t have the cash to hire sales or marketing help, consider adding an affiliate program to your store. You can get other people to promote your product for a commission. You’ll only have to pay them if they make a sale.

Affiliate programs typically work by creating a custom URL for each person promoting your products. They can share this link on social media, in a blog post reviewing your product, or even in a YouTube video where they’re showing it off. Through the custom links, you’ll be able to track who is driving sales for you so you can compensate them.

Instagram

Instagram has over 400 million active users and its visual focus is perfect for promoting products. Half of those users are on Instagram every day. Any brand would do well to share their products on this network.

There are several ways to use Instagram to promote your store. You can share captivating images of your products, share a stop motion video of one of your products in action, run a contest, or reach out to influential

Run a Contest

Contests are an easy and affordable way to get your brand in front of a lot of people. By giving away your product, you can make sure your contest gets in front of the right kind of people: potential customers.

However, many contests fail. There are a few key mistakes to avoid when running a contest to promote your business. Make sure the platform, the timing, the messaging, and the steps people have to take to enter your contest are well thought out.

Create free Online Courses

The great thing about the Internet is that you can publish any type of content you want. By creating longer form content like courses that are targeted around both user needs and specific keyword phrases (don’t forget keyword research!), you can drive more traffic to your site and convert them into email addresses that you can then take down your funnel.
Plus, online course websites exist in plenty so you can put them on places like Lynda.com to further your reach.

Launch Infographics

If you have a designer in your company or can find one online, create useful graphics that tell a story and help people see your content in a new way. Do outreach for links, promote on Pinterest, etc.

Give Podcast Interviews

Podcasting is HUGE these days, and one of the best ways to grow a podcast audience is to invite influential people onto your podcast. Think about it like audio version guest posts. So, get one or two podcasts under your belt (or launch your own) then start targeting podcast producers to get onto their shows.

Promote pins on Pinterest

In this day and age, it’s not just enough to create content and expect it to rank and drive traffic. Rankings are influenced by engagement stronger than ever before, so use some budget to promote pins on Pinterest to your target audience.

Partnerships

Especially in B2B spaces, partnerships can be gold for customer acquisition. Build out referral programs with complementary companies to yours and try to funnel some of their traffic back to your site, either through website mentions or even their email marketing.

Link acquisition

This feels like an old school tactic, but it’s still true that the more links you have to your site, the better your site will rank. So acquire links to your site from content, from relevant resource pages on other sites, and from outreach that you do.

Promote content via Outbrain/Taboola

Content promotion is so cheap these days that you’d be silly not to do it. I know people with content sites making literally thousands of dollars a day all from promoted content.

Create satellite websites

If your main website is around one niche yet you operate in many niches, you can build out websites specifically targeted at those other niches and use them to funnel traffic to your other sites. You need to disclose that you own those other sites, but this is a great way to spread the organic reach.

Speed up your website

A fast site not only converts better, but on a big site you will also get more organic traffic because the search engines are able to crawl your site faster and find more content. Start with switching hosts then optimizing your code, all while making sure you are using aggressive caching and a content delivery network (CDN).