In the growing world of wellness, yoga remains a favorite for many, helping connect our minds, bodies, and souls. For many yogis, attending a yoga workshop is an exciting way to deepen their practice and skills.
As interest grows, it’s becoming harder to create a workshop that offers unique value and stands out from the crowd. Setting up a successful program involves careful planning, good marketing, and smart ways to keep it profitable.
Whether you’re an experienced yoga instructor or just starting out, this guide offers practical advice to make your workshop a repeated success.
Table of Contents:
- 4 Steps to Build Your Best Yoga Workshop
- Choose the Right Topic
- Bring Value to Clients
- Keep It Engaging
- Rinse & Repeat to Create Recurring Revenue
- Tips for Successful Marketing
4 Steps to Build Your Best Yoga Workshop
In the ever-evolving world of yoga, creating a workshop that stands out from the crowd is both an art and a science. A memorable yoga workshop not only imparts knowledge and skills but also offers a transformative experience that resonates with participants long after the session ends.
Whether you’re a seasoned instructor or a passionate enthusiast looking to share your love for yoga, curating a distinctive workshop requires a blend of planning, authenticity, and creativity.
Choosing the Right Topic
Your workshop topic should be an area of your expertise.
Sharing the knowledge that you are passionate about and well-versed in is crucial to the depth and value of your workshop. This is where having a niche might be useful.
If you prefer not to work within a niche, then lean on the part of your yoga business you are strongest in. Examples include:
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- Yoga philosophy
- Arm balances
- Inversions
- Anything else you excel at
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Your knowledge and passion will shine through when you choose a topic that means something to you, and if you have a personal story about why it is so important, this can be a great introduction, helping to connect your participants to you and to the subject through sharing experiences.
Bring Value to Your Clients
The next step is figuring out what your community wants or needs in a workshop. To get started, consider the following:
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- What would they like to learn more about?
- Is there something you can help them with?
- Do they have a problem you can solve?
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For example – do you have clients who really want to build and advance their asana practice? Consider an arm balance workshop.
Do you have clients struggling with stress? Maybe an introduction to meditation would be a good idea.
But if you have clients who are interested in chair yoga, chances are they aren’t coming to your handstand workshop. However, that is not to say you can’t reach new clients who might want this!
Keep it Engaging
A great workshop needs to be interesting in terms of delivery.
The layout of your workshop should suit attention spans – if it is more than 90 minutes, include a break.
If it is a full-day workshop, how will you keep the attendees engaged? Breaking up the content, including movement practices, making time for a snack/lunch break, and instructing group work are all ways to vary the learning environment and improve engagement. Take these considerations into account during your planning stage.
Also, think about your value-add. The best workshops are the ones that give the participants a takeaway that they can’t wait to apply immediately.
Leaving your workshop with a skill that they understand and can use right away is what separates good workshops from mediocre ones. Giving insight or knowledge that can be applied right away makes your workshop all the more worthwhile and will get you great reviews.
Rinse & Repeat: Make Your Workshop a Recurring Revenue Stream
Once you have prepared, launched, and succeeded with your workshop, you now have an opportunity to take it forward in a few ways:
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- Ask for feedback – crucial to your growth and perfecting what you offer is to ask for feedback on your client’s experience.
- Market it – to studios or to run it independently. Once you have a great yoga workshop to offer, take it around to local studios as a workshop that you can teach for them. This is a great way to connect with studios, and studio owners and managers often appreciate having a ready-to-go offering to put in front of their clients, especially if you already have some marketing prepared.
- Reuse the content – could you pull a small amount of content from it to create a lead magnet that would drive potential clients to your site? Once you have put the effort into creating content, there are so many ways you can repurpose it in your marketing and in your business.
- Record it – could your workshop become an online course or an on-demand video on your website? This is another really good way to keep the income recurring on it. We recently teamed up with Mastering the Business of Yoga’s Amanda Kingsmith to design a mini-course on creating on-demand videos.
- Hide the workshop webpage until you need it again – If you are already an OfferingTree user, then you know how easy it is to take pages on and off your website literally at the click of a button. And that feature is so useful when you have a workshop that you might only run periodically throughout the year. You can publish the page whenever you want to, or you can keep the page ‘unlisted,’ which means it can only be seen by anyone with the link and not on your main website (which also works for lead magnets!)’
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Tips for Successful Marketing
How big is your audience? How do you communicate with them about your offerings?
If folks don’t know about your workshop or don’t have enough lead-in time to sign up, they won’t come — no matter how much work you put in on all other fronts. Here are some quick tips to utilize:
Build a timeline around your marketing:
Account for the workshop’s cost to you and what you need to charge your clients.
As a rule of thumb, the more expensive the offering, the more of a lead-in time you should give when advertising it so your participants have time to budget for it. For example, if your offering costs more than $200, the average participant is going to want to think about that investment and budget for it.
Consider Long-Term the Workshop’s Potential Long-term Benefits
Ensure you collect contact information from attendees and add them to your email list.
Consider offering new clients a discount on your other services. This will help you make the most of the marketing you have created and the interest that your workshop generates, as well as bring any new clients right into your community.
Grow Your Yoga Business with OfferingTree
OfferingTree is the perfect platform to house your yoga business online. With scheduling, payments, Zoom integration, unlimited pages, email marketing, and so much more built into our standard packages (with no hidden fees), we really do work behind the scenes to take care of the tech and systems for you. Sign up for a 14-day free trial today, no strings attached!
