Stephanie Ball-Mitchell is the founder and lead trainer of Online Yoga School.
My success was accidental. Before COVID happened, I was a yoga teacher at a range of spas, gyms and studios across the Poconos; I was constantly driving around with mats, bolsters and blankets in my trunk. Because winters in the Poconos tend to be very snowy, causing people to become housebound or not want to drive long distances, I put some of my yoga videos and training materials online. I had simply done this as a matter of convenience, so people didn’t have to “miss” yoga due to inclement weather. But, the feedback I got from students was that they liked it—sometimes even better than in-person classes.
So, I started putting more and more modules online, including a whole 200-hour yoga teacher training course. Initially, other yoga instructors’ reactions were very negative: A lot of people said, “You can’t learn to teach yoga online!” I ignored them, and sure enough, my business grew exponentially.
Then, the pandemic hit—and all of a sudden, these same naysayers were all putting their yoga training courses online. Frustratingly, many of them were doing so in the exact format I had already perfected over the past few years. Suddenly I had a ton of competition—and if I was going to continue to thrive, I needed to figure out a way to differentiate myself, fast. Here’s what I learned.
1. Change your approach.
When you’re the only one doing something, you don’t have to worry about making sure people choose your product. You’re literally the only game in town. So when I suddenly had competition, I had to revamp my thinking. I quickly realized that it didn’t just matter if my program was the best—it also had to be on people’s radar. I had to catch their attention.
I decided to learn about SEO. I had previous experience in advertising, but there were many things I didn’t know—things about character- or word count, on- and off-page SEO and making sure people were linking us. I had to network with other yoga practitioners, saying, “I’m going to share this link to your website because I think it fits with this blog I’m writing; would you mind linking mine, on this topic?” It was a lot of organic outreach to people so that we could get the backlinks coming in. Honestly, I had to initially shift a lot of time from interacting with students to creating content—but, I realized that if I wanted to stay relevant and competitive, it was an upfront cost I had to pay.
2. Always add value.
Affordability and accessibility are very important to me, in part because of my own background: I became a mom at 16, and when I began my own yoga practice I struggled to be profitable for a long time. So, making yoga an affordable practice and even offering “freebies” were things I knew I wanted to do, however possible.
I decided that when students enrolled in one of our core trainings (200-300 hour programs) they would receive complimentary continuing education courses that they could use through Yoga Alliance (our community’s biggest professional organization), thus allowing them to obtain the hours required to renew their registration every year. I also offered free months of membership to our own virtual yoga studio so they could take advantage of the on-demand library there. To me, these were ways we could ensure our customers obtained more value from our programs than they had even signed up for—which I suspected (correctly) would be a good way to retain customer loyalty, as well as being the right thing to do.
3. Create a network.
Despite the perils of competition in an increasingly crowded market, I believed then—and still do now—that yoga is about community and connection. I wanted to create a way for yoga practitioners and learners in different locations to connect, particularly during the pandemic when everyone was practicing out of their homes.
So, we created a yoga directory, for which we’re now building an app. There are yoga instructors out there who have great ideas and beautiful offerings—and yet they don’t have any students because they don’t know how to do SEO. With the directory, if someone is searching for a yoga teacher in a specific city, or a specific type of yoga teacher (say, Vinyasa or Bikram), then they can put these terms into the search engine and find a teacher who meets their needs. Teachers in our directory have the opportunity to upload pictures or connect their social media handles or websites. Creating a network was something we felt we could contribute to the global yoga community, and in doing so, help elevate other practices as well as our own.
4. Focus on authenticity.
There’s a lot of static out there: My smartphone knows I’m into yoga (just as all our smartphones know way too much about us), and I’m constantly getting ads for programs other people are running. Particularly as more programs started to follow a similar online format as my own, it became that much harder to avoid the trap of wondering, “Oh, should I be giving away 100 meditation scripts?” Or, “Maybe it would be better if I offered this other type of 200-hour class.”
I had to internalize that it was not about being better or worse—it was about being authentic. I truly believe that if you’re offering something from your heart, from a place of authenticity, then it’s going to be well-received. Two people can do the exact same thing. But if it comes from one person’s heart, whereas the other person is just trying to duplicate the first person’s work, their results will not be the same. You have to do what you’re good at naturally; you can’t worry about what everyone else is doing, because that just pulls you away from an authentic place.
I’m a big believer that sometimes you must stop and ask yourself, “Why? Why am I doing this? What is my purpose—not just in this business, but in life?” Ask yourself why you were put on this Earth, and then use that purpose to catapult your business forward. It doesn’t matter what the competition is up to. If what you are doing is authentically you, and irrevocably what you are meant to do, you cannot fail.
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