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
