As a yoga business owner in today’s modern world, I use technology extensively in most aspects in my day to day business and teaching. There are so many amazing tools we have at our fingertips to help us grow and support us within what we are doing BUT because there is so much choice and variety, I know as a new teacher, it can leave you feeling overwhelmed.

So today I’m going to share with you 6 tools to get you started…

The tools that I’m going to share with you are EASY to use and user friendly because I know you don’t have time to learn loads of new programs, neither do I!! So you can do everything yourself in this list.

As I have grown, I have hired help and so could you as you grow but at this point these will set you off with an easy kick start,

helping you to work smarter and not harder.

I use all of these on a weekly basis and guess what, they are all free!! Some I have upgraded as I have grown my yoga biz but all you have to do to get started is sign up and start using them. So lets dive in.

1. Google calendar - Scheduling and Organisation

It’s time to get organised!! If you’re not organised with your yoga teaching, I can tell you, you will not last long.

There are many different things to juggle as a teacher, the teaching itself is only one aspect of this. You have your admin time, travel time, class preparation, selfcare and your own practice and much more. And if you have other things going on outside of your teaching which all of you will have. Perhaps with another job, kids, family or other projects you need to see clearly what is going on in your week, month and year.

My recommendation is to use a digital calendar and my favourite and the one I use is google calendar. You can access google calendar on your phone and your computer desktop so it is really easy to look at the update at home and on the go. You can colour code different tasks and it is easy to see the white space to make you allow time off.

Google calendar is easy to integrate into other systems such as zoom, Calendly (a scheduling and booking system) and much more for when you start to book private clients for example.

2. Zoom – Online Streaming Tool - Use zoom for your online live offerings

Over the last 3 years teaching online has become the norm and as a new teacher this gives you the opportunity to practise your teaching straight away and grow and serve your community immediately out of YTT. If this is your jam then zoom is your go to streaming platform.

I use zoom to teach yoga, it was a saving grace over lockdown. I use it to lead my online mentoring programmes, to mentor my 1-2-1 clients and so much more. Each feature within the zoom app makes it so easy to do anything that I need to do, from recording the sessions to sharing my screen for training and sharing my music in class. If you have the free membership you have a max time limit of 45 minutes.

If you want to learn more about getting your classes online head over and grab my free workshop that I taught over lockdown on how to get yourself online quickly and easily. GRAB YOUR FREE WORKSHOP HERE>

3. Google docs - Keep all of your templates, content and spreadsheets in one place

Google docs is such an amazing free tool. It’s the only platform you need when it comes to organising and storing your content. It has different features, excel, word, forms and much more. I use it to write content for my different platforms on word (i'm using it to draft this blog right now), to plan everything on excel, such as my content calendar and I create surveys for my students and teachers on google forms.

You can share your documents and folders with anyone you want and everyone the docs are shared with can edit or contribute in real-time. This is so valuable if you have events that you’re organising with other teachers, for collaborations or if you're creating content with someone else. And no matter where you are in the world you can use this so you could be collaborating with someone in NZ while you’re in London.

Everything is saved in the cloud as you work so you don’t need to worry about losing your work. And this is a great way to free up space on your computer as it is stored on google drives. If you’re not using this already I suggest you get on it today!

4. Canva - Content creation and graphic design

Creating images and visual content used to be something you would have to hire a professional graphic designer to do. This was expensive and time consuming. But this is a thing of the past. Canva is a tool I use in my business every day. I use it to create all of the graphics I have on my Instagram, marketing, facebook and my website.

And it is free!! You can get the paid version with added extras such as loyalty free images and much more that in my opinion are worth it but to start with it's free to join, to head in, have a look around and get familiar with it.

My favourite feature is that it has a brand folder where you store all of your brand colours, fonts and logos (which you can also create on canva) so every piece of content you create you can tie it in with this tool.

This tool is going to save you time and money, no need to hire a graphic designer when you can do it yourself!!

5. Planoly - Social Media Scheduling

There are so many social media management tools out there. I've tried a few but have finally landed on Planoly. It’s an easy to use system that allows you to load up all of your posts and schedule them in. It allows you to write your captions straight onto the desktop from your computer which saves a lot of time and also saves your eye health so you're not staring at a small screen and trying to type your captions from your phone which can be a time waster and frustrating to say the least.

You can also create hashtag blocks in the app to then easily copy and paste straight into the post.

Then on your phone you have the app and you post from this app straight into Instagram. Planoly saves me a lot of time and stress with social media.

6. Mailerlite – Email Marketing

One thing as a yoga teacher you should be doing right from the start is growing and nurturing your community and email is a great way to do this. So using an email marketing platform is essential.

There are many different options but the one I would recommend is Mailerlite. It is free for up to 1000 subscribers and has many free features such as email sequencing in which you can set up an automated email sequence that welcomes your student once they sign up for your emails.

Mailer lite is an easy to use system with drag and drop feature and also has lots of free video tutorials you can access to help you to set things up.

You can even create landing pages or opt in pages if you want to create a freebie for your students or for your signup page that are fast and simple to set up.

SO WHICH ONE ARE YOU GOING TO SET UP FIRST ?

Let me know by emailing me at info@amymcdonaldyoga.co.uk. I’d love to hear from you.

PS. I go into depth on how to utilise these in my ‘Evolve Together’
Yoga Teacher Group Mentoring Programme & doors are opening for enrolment SOON
To get on the waitlist and to save £100 email me.

We start soon. 🚀

6 FREE TECH TOOLS YOU CAN USE TO SET UP YOUR YOGA BIZ