more thoughts on growing classes??

[loris]

Hey all -

How great to have a site for marketing! It is much needed, since it does seem to be true that yoga teachers aren't exactly our own best marketers.

I'm a vinyasa teacher who now lives up in the teeny tiny county of Humboldt, in Northern Cal. I grew up, practiced, and trained in Los Angeles, and when I moved up here 4+ years ago I wasn't planning to teach yoga, even though I had been certified. But another job fell through, and nobody up here was teaching the kind of yoga in which I was trained, so I decided to give it a shot.

Previous to my starting, the yoga up here was all either anusara or gentle, restorative yoga. I teach a vigorous vinyasa class and I teach it to music. (Some classes to funky mixes with whatever I feel like putting on the mix; some with more "yogic" music). I am the only teacher in the area doing this, and I also have been fortunate enough to have a local radio show that is both a yoga class on the air (to music ) and a regular, DJ'd music show. (So I get to do two things I love - teach yoga & be a DJ!). This radio show has aired a couple times on one station, and is going to be monthly on that station and weekly on another, smaller station.

I taught classes around town for a year and a half before I was offered the job of yoga director for the only gym chain in the area (there are no yoga studios...yet.) I ran that program for about 2 years, and just left to go back to teaching my own classes out in the community, since I am much more suited to work for myself.

So now I'm back to building up my clientel. Some of the gym clientel followed me; some didn't.

Before I go on, I should say that I LOVE teaching classes. I would also like to have a few privates a week, but my interest and talent really lie with teaching classes and workshops. It's what I do best, and I am lucky to be able to have the potential to make more than enough money teaching classes. Although I am sure I could make more with privates, I really don't want to go that direction as my primary goal.

I rent space at a community center. Six weeks into starting these new classes up, I am averaging 5 students/class, which is what I expected for the beginning. I need to average 25 students a class to make the income I want, which is admittedly large for this small county, but I know it can be done.

I have given myself 6 months to build the classes up to 15, and another 6 months to build to 25.

My classes at the gym, which are often bigger than classes elsewhere, average about 30, and the classes I taught before starting at the gym averaged 13.

So - at the moment I am looking for techniques to build classes. I continually flyer the heck out of the area, am starting to get invited to speak at stress reduction classes and the like, am formulating a couple ads for craig's list (one for classes; one for privates) and have another page of marketing ideas which may or may not work.

My website is http://www.grooveyoga.org.

The website is just being designed, so of course feedback would be wonderful.

One of my students has a website placement service and got me hooked up with all the yahoo search engines, but I don't know how to get found on google.

Thanks again for everything! I also posted asking where to find information on the book you were mailing.

Happy spring!

Lori S