The Yoga Teaching Money Making Experiment
Welcome to the behind the scenes of being a yoga teacher. Can you make money teaching yoga?
Before we begin, let me introduce myself. My name is Steph.
I’ve been a yoga instructor for four years and I have yet to master the art of consistently earning money as a teacher. There are some months where I earn $5,000 and other months where I earn $2,000. Let’s be honest here, there are even months where I earn $500.
I thought it would be fun and perhaps helpful if I gave everyone a sneak peek into the earnings coming from teaching yoga; the sources of income, in-studio, private, online, etc. I want to find out if it is truly possible to make an income teaching yoga. The plan is to post total earnings once a month.
For those of you newcomers, I started a yoga / fitness website, Steph Yoga, in 2018. Since then, I’ve had over 700 women join the website. This website has been a massive success. However, the initial success did not seem sustainable. Through this experiment, I want to find out if you can make a living teaching yoga. Perhaps even make it rich? Ya never know.
Drumroll please…….
Here are this month’s earnings:
+ $30 in-studio yoga
+ $400 private yoga
+ $167 Steph Yoga 6-Week Body Transformation Program
My biggest takeaway this month:
Focus one getting better at ONE thing. I find I spread myself thin by attempting to be all things to all people. I’m teaching in-person, private yoga, doing photography, the business of yoga, website design, you name it, I’ll do it. When you focus on getting a little bit better at a lot of things, you get nowhere in your business. When you focus on the disciplined pursuit of less, but better, you make progress.
See the image below:
I’ve been reading the book: The Essentialist by Greg McKewon, and he explains it perfectly: It’s super easy to do a ton of things kind of well. It takes discipline to do one thing exceptionally well.
Consistent effort executed over a long period of time = results. Consistently creating yoga sequences and selling them online? That’s pretty awesome. Consistently creating yoga sequences and selling them online while trying to get 1% better every day? That’s really awesome.
I’ll be exploring two things each month: the actions I take (both the quality and quantity) and what worked v. what didn’t work. My hope is that by doing this experiment you can learn something new and apply it to your own yoga business.
Alright, let’s dive in!
What worked:
+ Creating a private yoga client: A friend of mine from high school reached out to me and requested I start teaching her kids yoga. Initially, my answer was a big fat NO. I’ve taught kids yoga one other time and let’s say I swore off the entire thing after two children were crying and one had potential head trauma. Who knew yoga could be so dangerous? After a bit of convincing, I obliged to a trial session. We decided we’d go from there.
Much to my surprise, the trial session went great and we set up a schedule of teaching twice a week for $200/class.
Takeaway: in order to create value for both you and the client as a private yoga instructor, it’s important to schedule more than just one session at a time. By enrolling your private client into what is possible through a consistent yoga practice, you can create a reliable stream of income for your business, plus you can create transformation for your client. I mean, win win? I think yes.
+ I didn’t promote my online Body Transformation Program, Steph Yoga, and someone still bought it for $167. This is the power of having an online stream of passive income. While $167 isn’t a lot. It’s pretty neat to see that appear in your bank account after doing nothing.
What didn’t work:
+ Sending Cold Invites to HR Reps for Corporate Yoga via LinkedIn: I sent out about 15 inquiries to HR Representatives via LinkedIn and I got…..drumroll please…. 0 responses. Did I really think this was going to result in something? Yes, I kind of did. See below for the message I sent.
The process:
I googled, “The Best Start-up companies to work for in San Diego.” Figured this could be a good start. I went through each company on the list and visited their website. After reading through their core values. if I felt aligned with the company, I searched for the HR representative on LinkedIn and sent them a message. (Side note: I did the 30-day free trial of LinkedIn Premium). Is this the best way to create corporate yoga clients? I doubt it. But this is an experiment, so I figured I’d try.
Also worth noting (mostly for the sake of my ego), I spent a decent amount of time not working on this segment of my business, which is why these are the results I’m achieving. I focused a ton of effort on the photography element of my business, which I am seeing takes away from my ultimate goal of creating an income just from teaching yoga. Takeaway: the disciplined pursuit of LESS but BETTER.
Thanks for taking a peek at the behind the scenes of Steph Yoga. I’m excited to share more about how to make money teaching yoga. Every month I’ll check back in and share what I’ve learned, and in the meantime, please let me know if there is any information I can share that would be helpful or interesting for you to know.
xo,
Steph
*I have income from other sources aside from teaching yoga, but for the sake of this experiment I will just be reporting on the income I earn from teaching yoga.