5 Tips on How to Charge for Online Yoga Classes
f you've invested in deepening your yoga practice to include professional certification, you're probably interested in converting that education into a lucrative career. For success in running an online yoga studio, you'll need to know what people are willing to pay and how to justify what you're charging.
Below you’ll find five major tips on how you can successfully charge for instructing yoga classes online. Learn how to manage payments for your yoga instruction along with some additional tips provided here, and you can set the groundwork for a thriving business based on your yoga practice.
Article Topics
How Do Online Yoga Classes Make Money?
If you’ve looked up yoga videos online recently, you might notice that many of the yoga tutorials and sessions provided at YouTube and similar places are free to use. It can be difficult to see how anyone would want to pay for online yoga classes when they have access to so many of them that cost nothing to use.
The key to making money with an online yoga class is offering services and products that yoga students can’t get from watching a free video on YouTube or other social media outlets. Offering free yoga videos as part of your practice in online yoga can also be used as part of a social media marketing campaign to get more people interested in your paid yoga courses.
Here are a few of the ways that online yoga classes can make money:
- Offering private or group sessions with a certified yoga instructor: Teaching private individual lessons is one way to make good money with online yoga. Many people are willing to pay double or more for private lessons than a group glass. Many new yoga students also prefer individual lessons out of modesty or lack of confidence.
- Offering remote yoga instruction: The benefit of enrolling in online yoga lessons is that your students don’t have to go through the trouble to go to a yoga studio. They also have access to more advanced forms of yoga instruction online than they might have access to in person.
- Creating products for the yoga community: If you’re serious about making money with online yoga instruction, consider setting up a digital storefront to sell products related to yoga, such as instructional ebooks, essential oils, or yoga props. These product sales can help increase your bottom line and make your studio more profitable.
- Creating online coursework or workshops: Online workshops can be a way to charge for extended hours of instruction in a few days versus incremental instruction over several weeks. Putting together written coursework such as yoga sequences, playlists, or guided meditations can also be an incentive to purchase lessons.
- Earning backlinks, affiliates, and corporate sponsorships: Free YouTube yoga videos don’t earn yogis money directly. However, if you get popular with your yoga on YouTube or other social media you can earn money through affiliate sponsorship and backlinks with a social media marketing program.
- Teaching yoga both online and offline: Charging for online yoga classes isn’t the only way to build a thriving yoga studio. Diversifying your services by offering both online and offline classes is a smart way to double your yoga-related income.
Online yoga classes make money from enrollment, but they’re only a small part of how an online yoga studio can bring in money. The passive income earned from selling ebooks and other materials can help supplement the money you get from teaching.
To successfully charge for online yoga classes, you have to build up enough of a presence on the Internet to earn decent pay. It also helps to incorporate online yoga courses into offline yoga classes. This build-up may take several months or even years, but eventually if you continue to maintain yoga certification, you should be able to set up a thriving yoga practice.
What Is the Average Cost of an Online Yoga Class?
Online yoga courses tend to be slightly less expensive than yoga courses if they’re paid online courses. Many yoga courses aimed at beginners are free online. Even though they offer free courses, yoga instructors can make money off their online courses in other ways by offering paid courses for more advanced techniques.
The average cost of an online yoga course is between $10 and $30, while in-person yoga classes run between $25 and $35 a session depending on where you live and what kind of yoga class it is. Private classes are more expensive than group studio classes. (Source: VeryWellFit)
If the average cost of online yoga classes is relatively cheap and there is so much access to free information, how does a yoga instructor keep online yoga classes profitable? It’s all about knowing how to price your yoga classes correctly.
How Do I Price My Yoga Classes?
One of the biggest mistakes that many newly certified yoga instructors make is that they don’t price their classes high enough. It’s important for yoga instructors to recognize their own value while also recognizing that they need to offer tangible services and products in exchange for that value. Some yoga sessions with reputable yogis can run as high as $100/hour. (Source: Kriya)
You don’t have to undercut the prices of your yoga classes in order to draw in customers. On the contrary, very low lesson costs may make potential customers skeptical of the utility of your class. Keep in mind that many people are willing to pay extra for a service that they deem valuable, while balking at services they deem “cheap.”
Pricing your yoga classes is about walking a fine line between knowing what you can reasonably charge without driving away customers and keeping class prices high enough to be able to pay bills with yoga as a profession.
Just be aware that people who are buying yoga classes are using disposable income, so they may be willing to pay more than you think as long as your offered services are high in quality.
How Do I Charge My Zoom Yoga Class?
The easiest way to charge for Zoom yoga classes is to set your classes up on Zoom as a webinar. Setting up your Zoom meetings as a webinar allows you to set up a paid registration system. To run paid webinar courses through Zoom, you need the following:
- A linked Paypal account
- Zoom webinar add-on
- A set-up webinar with paid registration activated
By setting up a paid registration with Zoom Webinar, you can get paid automatically for the class when students enroll. Zoom also gives you the option to easily refund a student’s registration if you run into issues, and allows attendees to cancel their registration at any point before the webinar starts.
5 Tips on How to Charge for Online Yoga Classes
Charging for online yoga classes is not a cut-and-dry science, so you may need to do a little experimentation to hit on a pay rate that you can work with. If you charge too little for your online yoga classes, you may not make enough money to make running the classes worth the time and energy you put into them. If you charge too much, you may have less people attend.
Here are five of the best tips you can follow to set up a thriving online yoga studio.
1. Learn How to Use Social Media
Some of the biggest online yoga instructors in the world got their start running online yoga videos on YouTube. However, you need to know how to use YouTube effectively to gain digital visibility and earning money through backlinks and affiliates.
Visibility through your YouTube channel and related social media can be one of the best ways to increase interest in your online yoga courses.
By showing you have to offer through a few free yoga videos, you can encourage interest from potential students. You can then provide links to paid yoga courses on the descriptions for your free yoga courses as a way to drive traffic to your online yoga classes.
You also have to learn about pitfalls that could hurt your online YouTube presence, such as accidentally using copyrighted music or interacting with the community in a negative way.
2. Offer Private Online Classes
Private classes offer you a way to charge much more for online yoga courses than you could reasonably charge for a group session.
The downside to private online classes is that it might be difficult to build up a base of clientele for private lessons unless you already have a thriving social media presence. People won’t want to pay extra for private lessons unless they’re convinced the lessons will be worth it.
3. Offer More Value to Charge More for Yoga
To justify charging on the higher end of the price range for online yoga classes, you’ll need to be able to show that your level of yoga instruction is worth the investment. As long as you offer a high-value online class, you’ll find students willing to pay for it. Follow these tips to add value to your online yoga course and successfully charge more for enrollment:
- Offer secondary resources and class materials: Materials that your students can keep after the paid class is over, such as ebooks, music playlists, or other consumables, add value to your class by giving students instruction even after the class is over. These resources also serve to remind students of you and encourage repeat business.
- Add hours to your certification: As an instructor with 500 hours of yoga training versus an instructor with only 60, you’ll have more grounds to charge a higher base rate since you’re offering expert instruction from a subject matter expert.
- Expand your knowledge pool in yoga: Learning about different types of yoga and how those classes can be conducted differently allows you to offer several different types of yoga for instruction. This puts you in touch with a bigger pool of potential students and serves to make you look more experienced, too.
It’s easy to undervalue your services as a freshly-minted yoga instructor, but you don’t want to lowball yourself. By doing so, you might be crippling your budding yoga business before you can get it off the ground. Add value to your practice by offering more comprehensive services related to yoga instruction and you’ll feel more confident charging what your online classes are worth.
4. Know the Market for Online Yoga Classes
To get an idea of how much to charge for your online yoga classes, a smart way to get an idea of what people are paying is to do some comparison shopping.
Pretend that you’re a yoga student looking for online instruction and start fishing around. You’ll quickly see that online yoga coursework is offered in a huge range of price brackets, so there is no wrong or right price if the market demand is there.
It’s not a bad idea to charge modest fees for your services to start to gauge the market and see what available students are willing to pay for. This is especially smart if you don’t have many certified instruction hours under your belt. However, if your classes are full and your bank accounts are low, you might be pricing your classes too low.
Studying other online yoga courses can also give you some strategies on how to conduct your own online yoga business. You can get ideas on secondary materials to provide as well as subject matter you might want to cover to gain more interest from potential students.
5. Make Sure Your Course Is High in Quality
As with many things in business, when you’re running an online yoga studio it’s the details that will make or break the model.
Taking the extra effort to set up a visually pleasant studio space to shoot your yoga videos from and making sure that you have video and audio recording equipment that can capture your yoga session in high definition can make a big difference in how popular your yoga videos become.
Making sure your videos are edited cleanly and your social media photos are curated are also important parts of curating your brand as a yoga instructor online.
To charge premium prices for an online yoga class, you have to be willing to take the extra steps to make the process as streamlined and enjoyable as possible for your students. This extra effort allows you to charge more for your courses and also makes new students more likely to be interested in your paid services.
Charging for Online Yoga Courses Requires Business Savvy
Being a good yoga instructor is only one part of the puzzle if you want to be successful as an online yoga instructor. You also have to understand how social media marketing and online business models work to make a profit.
