Part 1 of a 3 part marketing series for the podcast was on websites and I answered the commonly asked question of “do I need a website?”. While you never need to do anything, if you want to be a successful + sustainable yoga teacher, a website is a good idea.

Here are 5 ways in which a website will improve your career as a yoga teacher:

1.It allows you connect with your students

Have you ever finished teaching a class and had a student ask you “where else do you teach?” or “where can I find out more about you?” because something you said during class really resonated with them?

This is the moment where a website can come in handy.

Yeah for sure, you can find more out about me at www.mbomyoga.com. Here, I’ll write it down for you! All my contact info + class schedules are on the website.

And, on a deeper level than this, it allows your students to keep up with what you’re up to when you move around.

Say you are a full-time teacher based out of Atlanta, and you decide that you’re going to move to Austin. Instead of losing your entire following, you have a space where you can send them so that they can keep up with your offerings.

2. It gives you a platform to collect email addresses

Collecting email addresses is a great way to share your offerings with the people on your mail list, and having a website gives you a platform to do so.

My mail list is through MailChimp, and I have a form on my website where people can enter their email addresses and then I can send them weekly or monthly updates about what’s new with M.B.Om.

Having email addresses is very important if you do move around, or if you plan to provide other offerings in the yoga space, such as retreats, workshops or trainings. See point 3 for more on this!

Ps. If you want to get on this mail list, sign up here!

3. It’s the perfect place to promote your other offerings

If you work full time at a yoga studio, you are most likely able to host workshops + promote them in that space. You can probably also hang posters for your retreats there, but that is only reaching a small number of people.

If you have a website, you can put your offerings for workshops, retreats and / or trainings on your website and promote them to the entire internet. The difference in reach is massive, and you may attract people that you had never expected to attract.

A website is the perfect place to promote your offerings and to help you grow your business as a sustainable yoga teacher.

4. It can help you network in the yoga industry

Let’s say that you show up at Kathryn Budig’s workshop and you have a couple minutes alone with her where she asks a bit about what you do. You give her the elevator pitch about yourself as a yoga teacher and what you offer, and she says “Awesome stuff, I’d love to learn more about you.”

If you don’t have a website, you think on your feet and then perhaps send her to your Instagram account.

If you do have a website, you quickly give her your URL and thank her for her interest in what you do.

There is a huge difference between these two things, and I recognize that not all of us are looking to grow our following or becoming yoga-lebrities, but it gives us the opportunity to easily network with other yoga teachers in the industry.

5. It turns you from yoga employee to yoga entrepreneur

I talk a lot about yoga employee vs. yoga entrepreneur, and I think that it’s really important for us as yoga teachers to remember that we work for ourselves. The space in which we teach in may belong to someone else, but we make the choice to offer our services there, not vice versa.

Having a website where you can capture the different places you teach gives you the identity of being your own person + having your own brand. People come to yoga studios for the teachers, and you may find that you will have students who follow you from studio to studio just to experience your classes.

A website gives you all of the benefits I stated above, plus it legitimizes your identity as a yoga entrepreneur + gives you a slightly higher level of professionalism to your brand.

Still not convinced why you need a website? Listen to the episode here!