If you’re hoping to sustain yourself financially from teaching yoga, having a website is pretty much mandatory.

Initially, your website will serve as a credibility booster aka your online resume. This alone is worth the effort required, however that’s not all your website can provide…

In fact, you can also earn an income from your yoga website.

I know… this sounds crazy.

In fact, before we started earning an income from our website, I didn’t believe it.

Let’s rewind back to 2014… only less than 1 year after we created TheYogaNomads.com, we saw real dollars flowing into our bank account.

WOW, what is this? Magic?

Our website is actually turning a profit! We couldn’t believe it.

Is it easy?

No, but nothing worthwhile in life is easy.

In fact, it requires consistent hard work over time. Don’t be fooled by get rich quick promises. No such thing exists.

As Brandon says, “you can’t just punch your keyboard and hope that money will come out.”

Instead, think of your website as a tool to diversify your income. All the top yoga teachers earn an income from many different sources (classes, online, workshops, etc.) which is also what you should be striving for in your yoga career.

Ok, so what should I do to get started making money online?

Luckily, you’ve already completed step 1: getting your website up and running.

Next step is to familiarize yourself with the different ways to monetize your website. Then, select the best income strategies based on your ability and your goals.

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We’ve spent over 3 years testing out various ways to earn an income online and helping our clients implement them. Now we’re sharing the best strategies with you!

Like we always say, take what works and leave the rest. Identify one or two that resonate with you most and try them on for size. 🙂

Pin Me First? Then keep reading! 🙂

1) Affiliate Marketing

According to dictionary.com, affiliate marketing is:

A marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays a commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals. 

In order words, you earn a small commission every time someone purchases something you recommend online. This comes at no extra cost to the person making the purchase.

For example, in this article we review our favorite yoga mats for traveling. Every time someone reads this article and ends up buying one of those yoga mats via Amazon, we earn about a 5% commission. Each sale is worth a very small amount, but these add up. (Also why it’s so important to learn how to market your website properly! More views, more money.)

Affiliate marketing is an excellent way to earn mostly passive income to your site.

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You can start earning right away with affiliate marketing, but it will take time to build your income to something significant. 

When choosing affiliates, be selective in the process. Choose only products and services that you trust and that are related to your niche and/or your overall brand.

If you start publishing articles comparing car parts on your yoga blog, do you think your readers will take your advice and make a purchase? No, they won’t… and you will confuse your readers and hurt your brand.

The amount of money you can earn from affiliates varies greatly and is dependent upon many factors.

In general, you will only earn a small amount for each sale, so the more readers you have the more income you will earn.

However it’s not all about numbers… building trust with your readers is more important. I would rather have a small community of raving fans that trust us and love what we’re all about instead of a massive following of people who are indifferent.

Lastly, not all affiliate programs are created equal, and they’re subject to change at any time (i.e. Amazon recently changed their commission structure which lowered our income by 30%).

2) Create an Online Course

Do you have extensive knowledge in something that you could teach others? Is there an area of yoga that really interests you? Do people continually approach you on the same topic?

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How many times have you gone to the internet (helllllo YouTube!) to learn something new?

The desire for information and online instruction has created a wonderful opportunity for you to get paid for teaching others what you know.

Creating an online course and using your website to facilitate sales can be a very lucrative tactic. Although the creation can be a bit time intensive upfront, it can pay off big time in the long run. Now before you feed your mind with doubt and excuses, no you don’t need to be an expert at something to create a course. You simply have to know more about it than the audience you’re teaching. 🙂

Since this is a popular way of learning, there are many online course platforms to choose from.

Some of these platforms help you market your course, too, but in exchange will take a cut of the sale. One example is Udemy which is super easy to launch, but we don’t prefer their model.

Udemy takes a 50% commission, the maximum price you can charge is $50 for your course, and you don’t retain your customer information.

What do we recommend?

Although it takes more effort upfront, we recommend offering your online course through your own website instead of using a platform.

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Offering an online course on your own website gives you full control to create the exact course your students need, you can charge what your course is worth, and you retain access to your customers.

We love online courses and purchase them regularly. Also, we earn a significant portion of our total income from our online course: CreateBeautifulYogaWebsites.com

3) Create a Physical Yoga Product

Before you write this off entirely, you don’t have to consider yourself an engineer to create a physical yoga product to sell. That’s where manufacturers come in. 🙂

Your job is to find a need in the market that isn’t being solved yet.

For example: only a few years ago, yoga gear (mats, pants, etc) was found in all solid colors. Then all of a sudden a ton of companies popped up selling beautifully patterned gear.

This is a large opportunity because the retail side of the yoga industry is by far the biggest category (way bigger than yoga classes/studios).

Luckily, it’s easier than ever to sell products online. In fact, you could design the product in your living room, have a manufacturer produce it in China, and have Amazon handle all the transactions, shipping, etc. Whew, it can be THAT easy!

Other options include: Etsy, eBay, etc.

4) Offer Online Yoga Classes

Just as people turn to the internet to learn new things from online courses, they also turn to the internet to take yoga classes!

Not to mention a large % of yoga students don’t have access to yoga studios. Many people live in rural areas without studios, some people don’t like the studio environment, some can’t afford studios, and others don’t have time to attend scheduled classes.

Lots of free classes can be found via YouTube and other sites like DoYogaWithMe. However, there are plenty of subscription and membership based sites as well that offer an entire library of classes available at your fingertips for a nominal monthly fee.

If you love to teach yoga and are at capacity with teaching studio classes, online classes are a great way to earn additional income. Using your website to host these classes is a great way to reach a large, targeted audience.

You can host your classes on your website (higher risk, higher reward or on another platform – easy to set up, earn less per viewer).

5) Create a Membership Community

Are you a great organizer or facilitator?

Consider building a community around a topic you love.

Online communities create a container for like-minded people to exchange ideas and knowledge. The admin of these communities (in this case, you) would facilitate the conversations and provide content about topics that is of value to the group.

You don’t to be an expert to organize a community, but you do need to curate amazing content and add tons of value to your people. 🙂

The revenue model of membership businesses is very attractive because you earn “recurring revenue” instead of having your customer pay once and next come back. (It’s much more expensive to find new customers than it is to retain current customers).

For example: Let’s say each member pays $30/month. You only need 100 members in order to earn $3,000/month. For fun… what if you had 1,000 members? You’d be earning $30,000/month.

6) Offer Yoga Events (retreats, workshops, trainings)

Selling yoga retreats, workshops and trainings are common ways to earn an income in the yoga industry. With the help of your website, you can market these offerings to your followers.

If you have a website describing your retreats online, you can leverage it to setup workshops at yoga studios around the world as you travel from place to place.

Protip: Your website is crucial, but the most effective way to market your events is by leveraging your email list. (Learn why and how in this article).

Keep learning:  How To Create A Successful Yoga Workshop

7) Sell Products and Services Related to Yoga

Let me guess, yoga isn’t the ONLY thing you are interested in…? I consider yoga to be the gateway to many other things in which I have a deep interest. Chances are you have experienced something similar. Yoga led you to chiropractic care which led you to acupuncture which led you to aromatherapy which led you down the rabbit hole of essential oils.

Sound familiar?

If you have a profound interest in something loosely related to the practice of yoga, have you considered adding this to the list of offerings on your yoga website? This could be anything from selling nutritional supplements, health coaching, and offering astrological readings via Skype.

Brainstorm what else you’re interested in and see if it’s something you could potentially offer as a product or service!

8) List ads on your website

If you create a niche website (like yoga) that gets a decent amount of traffic, you can start selling ads on your site.

Personally, we don’t like this form of income. We would rather not clutter our site with ads and as a reader of many blogs, I don’t like ads. However, to be fair we’ve only experimented with this on a small scale. Some people do quite well with ads. Up to you. Tomato, toe-MAH-tow. 🙂

9) Leave Reviews in Exchange for Products, Services and Events

While this doesn’t directly bring money into your bank account, it does offset costs of paying for these goods and services. Is there a yoga event you’d like to attend but can’t quite bring yourself to spend the money on a ticket? Check with the organizers to see if you’re able to score a ticket in exchange for writing a review and helping market their event on your website and social channels.

This will work best once you’ve built up a solid following and have a high number of monthly readers on your site. Event organizers and brands will be more willing to give you their products if you’re website will reach a lot of people.

10) Offer 1:1 Yoga Skype Sessions

Often times, yoga in the studio isn’t accessible to the masses. It’s either too expensive, the student is too intimidated, physically incapable, live in a rural area without a studio or gym, etc.

Offering private yoga to reach the students who can’t make it to the studio, is not only a great way to earn an income from your website, but also a wonderful way to give back to the community.

You can market your yoga Skype sessions through your website and even offer these to your current students at the various studios and gyms you teach.

Private yoga sessions are the quickest way to increase your income as a yoga teacher. Most private sessions run between $75-150 per hour.

Let’s say you added 5 private students each week @ $100/session. This would add up to over $2,000 per month. If you combine privates with a few studio classes and some affiliates, this would add up pretty quickly!

Time to take action!

Which income ideas resonated with you most? We recommend starting with just 1 or 2 ideas from this list and testing them out on your website!

Any questions?

We love this stuff so if you have any questions at all, send us an email at [email protected] – we respond to each and every note.

Until next time,
Anne

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