Yoga Teacher Guide – Part 3 – Best tools for yoga teachers

We believe in the power of the right tools. Would you dig a hole with your bare hands or would you use a digging tool to save your hands and your time? There are plenty of jobs to be done as a yoga teacher, and you will soon realize. Don’t work with your bare hands. With the right tools for yoga teachers, you will be able to enhance your productivity and ultimately improve your earnings.

If you need a complete guide for yoga teachers to earn, learn and grow, head on to this complete yoga teacher guidebook. It is consolidated and summarized from my 3 articles below:

1. Yoga Teacher Guide – Part 1 – How to increase earnings as a yoga teacher
2. Yoga Teacher Guide – Part 2 – Resources for yoga teachers
3. Yoga Teacher Guide – Part 3 – Best tools for yoga teachers

Yoga Teacher Guide – Part 1 is NOT to show you how to become a millionaire as a yoga teacher, but to show you how to make a decent living as a yoga teacher. Yoga Teacher Guide – Part 2 is a database of amazing resources that help yoga teachers learn and grow. Yoga Teacher Guide – Part 3 shows you different set of tools that make your life, as a yoga teacher, much easier and more productive.

Now, let’s explore Part 3 – great powerful tools for yoga teachers (many tools are free to use). With these sets of tools, they will certainly make your life, as a yoga teacher, much easier and more productive.

TEACH – ONLINE TOOLS FOR TEACHING YOGA

1. Pocket apps ($5 – only for Apple device)

If you need an easy-to-use app to create customized yoga routines, Pocket Yoga Teacher is a great one to consider. It allows you to build, edit and share complete yoga practices. Below are some of the app features:

• Easy to create sequences
• Adjust pose durations
• Add music
• Try your practice with a soothing voice narration
• Share your practice – Email, message, or AirDrop your practice to a friend for them to try or print it out.

2. Tummie ($4/month)

Similar to Pocket Yoga app, Tummee is also an app that can help you with class planning with a Library of thousands of yoga Poses. You can also get Yoga Sequencing Ideas from 300,000+ pre-designed Yoga Sequencing Lesson Plans by the Tummee users.

• Easy and Intuitive to Create Yoga Class Sequences
• Easy to Follow Yoga Class Plans
• Neat and Beautiful Figures and Printouts
• Affordable Pricing for Yoga Teachers

3. Clickup (free)

ClickUp is designed to make people more productive and gain back at least 20% of the time to dedicate to other things.

If you are a person who needs a tool for productivity, we can’t recommend ClickUp enough. It is such a powerful tool that you will use every day to organize your teaching or your personal daily activities. The good thing is you can use their free version forever, which is good enough for a yoga teacher.

We have used Asana, Monday, Trello. However, nothing can beat ClickUp. Once you know ClickUp, you will never want to use any other productivity tool, especially when there are so many great functions and updates from ClickUp.

4. Zoom or Skype (free)

During the Covid time, you might have heard the trend “let’s zoom today”. Zoom is the name of the app that help deliver video communications. It is a cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, collaboration, chat, and webinars across mobile devices, desktops, telephones, and room systems.

We find Zoom quite convenient for hosting online yoga classes as people can easily join the class without an account. All you need to do is to send people a link with code to “enter” into this online class.

Similar to Zoom, Skype is also a platform for video and audio conferencing that you can use for online teaching or conducting an interview.

5. Canva (free)

You will soon realize that teaching yoga is just a part of what you need to do. If you are serious about teaching yoga, you need to do lots of marketing to promote your own profile, your classes, workshops, events. And you know people are usually drawn into good photos or great designs. So prepare yourself to become a designer too.

If Photoshop is too complicated for you, try Canva instead. It is a great and free tool for you to start with. Canva has an extensive library of pre-designed templates that you can use right away. The pro version is awesome with more advanced features. However, as a yoga teacher, you can just utilize the free features which are good enough.

6. Interact (free)

Interact is a tool for creating online quizzes that generate leads, segment your audience, and drive traffic to your website. We like that Interact has templates for yoga and health quiz that can help you get started attracting an audience and growing your email list.

WRITE – ONLINE TOOLS FOR WRITING YOGA CONTENTS

You know that not everyone loves writing. Why? Because it takes time, and it is not always easy to write. That’s the fact. People love reading, but they are generally too busy or too lazy to write. That’s where you make a difference. You do what people don’t want to do. You write!

But you need some tools that make writing more enjoyable and more productive. Let’s explore.

1. WordPress (free)

Sooner or later, you will need a website, as a yoga teacher, if you are serious about teaching yoga as a career. You soon realize social media is great channels, but not enough. If you want to reach a broader audience organically without paying ads in a medium and long term, a website is a must.

There are many platforms to create a website easily, such as Squarespace, Wix. However, we would recommend WordPress because it is easy to use, and it is free to start with. If you would need a website for blogging purposes, WordPress is the best.

2. Grammarly (free)

So now you have a website, let’s write some articles that everyone loves to read! But before you publish your articles, make sure you have checked all the spelling errors, and corrected all grammar mistakes. Microsoft Word has the spelling checks.

However, we find another better tool for you: Grammarly. Not only it is free to use, but also it is super user-friendly and enjoyable to work with. You will be surprised by how many mistakes we make when writing articles. So it is better to get help from Grammarly before publishing any article on the web.

3. Scrivener ($49 one-off payment)

If you just need to write independent articles or contents, Microsoft Word is a powerful tool for word processing and is more than enough for this writing purpose.

However, if you plan to build your blog as an intensive content library about yoga, or if you plan to write an e-book about yoga, consider using Scrivener.

Scrivener is the go-to app for writers of all kinds, used every day by best-selling novelists, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, students, academics, lawyers, journalists, translators and more. Scrivener won’t tell you how to write — it simply provides everything you need to start writing and keep writing.

Once you’re ready to share your work with the world, compile everything into a single document for printing, self-publishing, or exporting to popular formats such as Word, PDF, Final Draft or plain text. You can even share using different formatting so that you can write in your favourite font and still satisfy those submission guidelines.

Scrivener unites everything you need to write, research and arrange long documents in a single, powerful app. At its heart is a simple ring-binder metaphor that allows you to gather your material and flick between different parts of your manuscript, notes and references with ease.

4. Mailchimp (free, up to 2000 email contacts)

It is important for you as a yoga teacher to build up an email database since the beginning. This is your audience. You have great contents, beautiful videos, quality articles. But to whom you are going to share them? Post them on social media is one way. But another effective way is to send updates via newsletter to your audience.

So start to collect emails from your website. Don’t be shy to put a pop-up form to ask for an email subscription.

5. Google Drive (free, up to 15 GB)

Google Drive is like our storage, up in the air. So we can access our files and documents everywhere we go.

The amazing thing about Google Drive is that it is free if we don’t exceed 15 GB. And it is very easy to use, to upload, download and share files to any people.

    Plagiarism Checker (free)

Since the presence of the Internet, plagiarism has become easier than ever. However, it has also allowed plagiarism detection software to be developed. Even though you write the content on your own, there is still a chance that your content is somewhat similar to another contents on the internet. Do not take the chance of being accused of plagiarism.

We would recommend “Plagiarism checker”, which is  an effective way to check your contents or articles for any chances that may arise that could suggest plagiarism to a potential marker.

TALK – ONLINE TOOLS FOR MAKING YOGA VIDEOS & PODCASTS

If you are comfortable and passionate about making videos, go ahead and create a Youtube channel. I know some friends of mine created their channels and got a few thousands of subscribers for the first three months. That is to show you that people are still in thirst of information even though there seem to be abundant of videos on the world wide web!

Once your channel generates about 250,000 views and has a good number of subscribers, brands and advertising companies will approach you. Besides, you might also earn passive income from youtube ads shown in your videos. Many surprising opportunities will come to you. Who knows you just need to focus your time on this channel, as it already generates enough income for you to live a decent life!

So let’s check what kind of tools you need to start making videos for your yoga youtube channel.

1. Win X youtube downloader (free)

You happen to see a great yoga video on Youtube or Facebook, and would like to download it to your computer? All you need is this software Win X youtube downloader.

2. VideoProc ($29)

VideoProc is one-stop video processing software to edit, transcode, resize, enhance 4K UHD videos. The simple but powerful video editor polishes any video clips easier to fit YouTube, Instagram and more; it also reduces large-sized 4K/HD footages without quality loss. VideoProc offers other features to save online videos, record desktop/webcam, add subtitle and convert DVDs.

We highly recommend VideoProc if you are a YouTuber and need to edit lots of videos and add subtitles.

3. Downsub (free)

If would like to download a subtitle for a youtube video, just copy the youtube link and head on to downsub.com to download the subtitle in any languages. The subtitle is auto-generated by Google translate, so you need to vet through it and correct any translation mistakes manually before burning in the subtitle to the video.

4. Subtitle Edit (free)

With the subtitle downloaded (usually in SRT file format), you would need a software to edit it. We would recommend Subtitle Edit as it is quite easy and free to use.

SELL – ONLINE TOOLS FOR SELLING YOGA PRODUCTS

Yoga teachers are still human. They can’t just breathe in the air to survive. Off the mats, we are all the same. We all struggle for a living. It is tough for yoga teachers to make a decent life without having another side job.

So don’t be shy if you need to sell a product to earn extra income. You share your opinion and recommendation for a small amount of income.

The important thing is you need to love and trust the quality of the products enough to sell them. Never sell things that you are not comfortable with.

1. Apply to become a wholesaler 

Approach brands for trial products. If you love them, apply for wholesale pricing so you can resell the products with a margin. Most brands (for example Beinks) have their wholesale pricing that can discount up to 40% the retail price.

I would recommend you start with yoga mats, or yoga props (like yoga bags, yoga straps, blocks, bolsters, meditation cushions, essential oils).

2. Apply for Affiliate programs

Affiliate programs are getting more and more popular these days. It might sound alien to many of us, but basically, affiliate programs are any programs that reward you with a commission for any customers you refer.

For example, Beinks has an affiliate program that rewards a commission of up to 15% on any yoga mat sold. You need to register for the affiliate program, share your view about their products by way of writing quality contents and reviews.

You will be surprised that people love hearing your opinion and reading your words. Some of them will be converted into buyers; hence your commission is paid, and your income will slowly increase.

I highly recommend you should have already used these products before registering for any affiliate programs. Once you really love and trust their products, it is most likely people will also appreciate these quality products like you.

    Stripe (charge per transaction)

Stripe is a payment platform that allows individuals and businesses to make and receive payments online. It accepts all kinds of credit cards, and the fee is slightly better than Paypal. So if you would like to collect online payments from your clients or students, consider using Stripe.

Written by: Jivani