Another clear fact about Internet advertising, for your Yoga teaching services, is the return-on-investment is there. Let's face it, only people my age, or older, still read the Yellow Pages. Forget the papers, unless you can afford to be on the front page or right next to a mailing label. Most of the people who read the paper, from cover to cover, are older than I am and have a lot of time. Most of them don't advise their younger family members to participate in Yoga. There are a few exceptions; it's just not the rule.
The bottom line is that you will never find a better advertising tool, at this time, than your own web site. You can get a free web site, Blog, or a paid web site for next to nothing (average $150 per year). If you can't do it, find someone young who will. If you are like me, and you want to do it yourself and have your hand held, go to Network Solutions. You can get a ?start up? site for around $75 per year.
There are always better deals around the Internet, but the Network Solutions template sites are ?user friendly? for the less technical people like me. You don't have to know HTML, and even a dinosaur like me can learn how to put one together over a weekend. If you have your written content in a Microsoft Word format, and some pictures ready to go; you will be up and running in a day.
The only drawback with templates, or template sites, is that some are not search engine friendly. This will have an adverse effect on your search engine rankings, but if you are reaching into a specific geographic area, with specific keywords such as ?Los Angeles Yoga,? you have only so many Yoga teachers struggling for a front page rank. Some templates are more search engine friendly than others, so you should do some research before purchasing anything.
In other words, you are not competing with every Yoga studio and Ashram on the Internet. My studio in North Providence is not relevant to the Yoga student searching for classes in Los Angeles. The keywords that I focus on are related to my geographic area and to the services specific to our wellness center.
Therefore, the competition for any local Yoga teacher, within a specific geographic area, is limited. So, it should not be hard to establish yourself in the rankings, even if you are located in a large city. Every large city has specific keywords that refer to the exact neighborhood where you teach Yoga.
It does not matter if another Yoga teacher comes up first under the keywords ?California Yoga,? if a prospective Yoga student Lives at the other end of the state.
? Copyright 2006 ? Paul Jerard / Aura Publications
Therefore, stay away from SEO services that will ?get you ranked with 12,000 search engines for $9.95.? Those services will usually get your Yoga website ?blacklisted,? if they continuously submit every month. The search engines just ignore your continuous submissions as SPAM. If you want to save significant money, and do some of it yourself, buy the book, ?Search Engine Optimization for Dummies.?
One last point to bring up about SEO: There are only a few search engines that you really need to submit to. Start with these: Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Ask, Netscape, Dog Pile, and Alta Vista.
The above-mentioned eight search engines receive over 90% of all the traffic on the internet. Currently, Google easily gets more than half of all the Internet traffic. Some statistics claim that Google gets over 75% of all the web traffic.
Yes, there are thousands of other search engines, but what is their geographic reach? Many of them are specialized search engines that are made for a particular country or language. If you have a local Yoga studio, do you have to be listed in a search engine on the other side of the planet? For example: Let's say you teach Yoga in a suburb of Denver, Colorado and are listed in a Korean search engine. That's nice, but I doubt that you will get any walk-ins, from that listing, in your next Yoga class.
Pay-per-click campaigns can get your Yoga business a space on the front page of most search engines. Google has more than half of all the internet traffic, so their Adwords program, alone, is worth looking into for a start.
Here's an idea: Start your Yoga web site, or Blog, ASAP (as soon as possible!), keep it running, and expand when you grow. Do not get hung up on perfection; that's what causes procrastination. If we did that in Yoga, none of us would become Yoga teachers.
I don't care if you're teaching Yoga in a cellar, barn, loft, garage, in the woods, at the beach, or just thinking about it. People won't know you are a Yoga teacher, if you don't announce it.
? Copyright 2006 ? Paul Jerard / Aura Publications
Paul M. Jerard Jr. has sinced written about articles on various topics from Leadership, Yoga Practice and Anger Control. Paul Jerard is director of Yoga teacher training at Aura in RI. He's a master instructor of martial arts and Yoga. He teaches that along with fitness. He wrote: Is Running a Yoga Business Right for You? For Yoga students who want to be a teacher.. Paul M. Jerard Jr.'s top article generates over 165000 views. to your Favourites.