If you’re a yoga studio owner, this is the time of year that excitement is typically building for your Fall teacher training. If you’ve offered a 200 Hour program previously, and are certified with the Yoga Alliance, you can offer your program partially or fully online until the end of 2020.
This is a huge opportunity that you don’t want to miss. Not only can you still run your YA accredited program, allowing all of your graduates to become certified instructors, who can register with YA, but you can expand your student-base outside your local market. Plus, there are millions of people stuck at home, feeling frustrated and spiritually bankrupt from the current crisis, who have lots of time on their hands to finally do that yoga training they’ve always dreamed about.
Lastly, we probably don’t have to tell you that teacher training programs are the biggest revenue booster for yoga studios and the decision to move forward with an online training could make or break your business this year. A typical 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training program is priced at around $3,000.
And if you make a portion of your content available on-demand (pre-recorded), you can overcome one of the biggest complaints that many would-be students have: fitting the training schedule into their personal one.
We’re here to help you break through procrastination and fear and show you how simple and powerful your Punchpass software is for running an online yoga teacher training.
Step 1: Decide Whether or To Offer Your Program 100% Virtually
Many yoga studios are combining optional, small, in-person sessions with virtual programming. One way to make sure that you don’t have to duplicate your teaching modules is to use your Punchpass Zoom integration to host live, online streaming of content you deliver with your in-person students.
If you choose to go 100% digital with your teacher training, you may want to enlist at least one or two support staff to work with you as you film your content, one to manage filming and responding to students through Zoom, and the other to be your “student” who will demonstrate poses as you walk students through alignment, anatomy and other teaching principles.
Step 2: Plan Your Curriculum
Running an online teacher training is going to take more advance planning than in-person training, because you’ll want to know exactly what content you’ll be delivering during each online session that your student’s will log into online. If you want to get really sophisticated with your training, you can even pre-record certain sessions for your students to access at their convenience, and to free yourself up from having to teach live at specific times. Just make sure that you’re also scheduling sufficient live, interactive sessions to meet contact hour requirements, to answer questions and build the magic and community that comes from group sharing and contribution.
Take time to sit down with your teacher training curriculum and schedule and choose which sessions must be done in live or hybrid format, which one will require you to have another person present for “demo” purposes, which sessions are more like “lectures” and might be able to be pre-recorded, and then assign yourself and your team to deliver the modules, just like you would in your studio, but using your Punchpass Zoom integration and content library instead.
You may find that the combination of live and pre-recorded class delivery makes this one of the most easeful teacher trainings you’ve ever led!
Step 3: Set Your Training up for Registration and Market It Far and Wide
Offering a virtual teacher training means you can invite students from around the world to join you. Setting up your training and taking reservations and payments online is simple with Punchpass (here’s how). Once your student’s have registered and paid, launching your online training on Punchpass is as simple as scheduling live sessions with access limited to only your TT registrants, and password-protecting your on-demand video content for teacher trainees only.
A huge bonus of Punchpass’ online content library is that you can also upload and share supporting documents like PDFs, so you can put your teacher training manual, reading lists, journal exercises, anatomy diagrams, meditation scripts, and all the other supporting content of your program online.
Step 4: Build community through alternative means
One of the biggest gifts of a yoga teacher training is the lifelong and life changing bonds that happen between students – and even between members of the teaching team. While there isn’t a true substitute for being in person, there are ways you can foster community and still be safe.
Set up a Facebook Group and make sure that you or one of your lead instructors is actively posting and moderating. Use video posts and live sessions to let your humanity shine through.
Consider scheduling online class sessions that are outside the official curriculum hours of your training, that are for open sharing and dialogue. Allow students to talk freely about how their training is impacting their lives.
Step 5: Market your program
The potential revenue growth from a full 200 Hour or 300 Hour Yoga Teacher Training is so large that it is worth investing in paid advertising. Facebook and Instagram make it easy – whether you’re simply “boosting” your event page for $5, or creating an entire campaign with custom ads.
Use Punchpass’ new MailChimp email integration to create beautiful, branded emails to let your list know about your training.
Be sure in all cases to invite and encourage your contacts to share your training announcement with their friends. And make sure you’ve included the link to register and pay for the training in the social media posts and ads and emails.
Prominently display information about your upcoming training on the homepage of your website, your pricing page and workshop and special event announcements page.
ProTip: Make sure to record all of your sessions and you’ll have a 100% complete and packaged online teacher training to continue to market and sell worldwide in perpetuity. With or without the coronavirus pandemic, and regardless of how long YA allows for certified programs to be offered online, whole new markets for online training programs have opened up, and they won’t ever go away.
Imagine running a teacher training where instead of working – or paying other instructors to work – hundreds of hours, your students access your content online, on-demand and you work only during the live, group calls and absolutely critical live parts of your training. Give it a go!
