How to Build a Yoga Blog and Help Others Focus

If you practice yoga, perhaps you’ve considered starting a yoga blog. Almost three-quarters of people who use yoga regularly have been doing it for five years or less. With that many people being relatively new to the activity, yoga is fertile ground for informative blogs and websites.

A large number of Americans are yogis (a yogi or yogini being someone who practices yoga). How many people are we talking about? Estimates vary from 36 million to 50 million, so it’s safe to say that one in 10 Americans are practitioners.

Ten percent of Americans are a lot of people. But around the world, another quarter of a billion people practice yoga. That’s a broad potential audience any way you look at it.

Build a Yoga Blog and Help Spread the Word

Yoga is a physical, mental, and spiritual practice that originated thousands of years ago in India. The term “Yoga” means to join or unite. The word is used to symbolize the union of the physical body and the consciousness. If it works for you and you find it beneficial, you probably recommend it to others.

What better way to showcase all the positive aspects than with a blog?

People who practice yoga are often also interested in healthy lifestyles. Exercise (other than yoga), healthy eating, increased focus, and a positive outlook are fundamentally intertwined with yoga.

For some reason, here in America, yoga is primarily practiced by women. There are three yoginis, female practitioners, than yogis, male practitioners. That provides some unique opportunities for choosing the target audience for your yoga blog.

A Good Yoga Lifestyle Blog Deserves a Good Home

The basic building blocks for a yoga blog, or any blog, are a domain name and a web host. Choosing the right domain name is part art and part science. Choosing a host is also not always a straightforward comparison of features and price. Those things are important, but there are other considerations.

Half of American yoga practitioners say that they live green, eat sustainably, and are of service to their communities. That’s your audience. What better way to appeal to their green lifestyles and beliefs than by choosing a green web host?

That’s why I’m recommending GreenGeeks. The name says it all! GreenGeeks is powered by renewable energy. For every amp your blog pulls from the grid, GreenGeeks matches three times that power in the form of renewable energy via Bonneville Environmental Foundation.

Your yoga blog will be “carbon-reducing” when it’s hosted at GreenGeeks. Your audience will appreciate that you use an eco-friendly platform and that you’re helping to make a difference. It’s the perfect solution for a yoga blogger or any other conscious and concerned website owner.

And as I mentioned earlier, you also have to compare technical and cost issues when shopping for a blog host. GreenGeeks checks all the boxes where features, quality, and price are concerned. But when you are looking for a host that’s actively working to preserve the environment, there’s simply no other choice.

Using WordPress for Your Blog Is Only Natural

They didn’t invent blog software, but their motto is, “Code is Poetry.” Now, aren’t those the kind of developers you want on your side? Anyone who approaches a technological product with a philosophy like that has my vote.

It doesn’t hurt that they make the best blog software money can buy, but don’t charge a cent for it.

WordPress is free, and it’s easy to set up, use, and maintain. As the proprietor of a yoga blog, you should be concerned with yoga. Not keeping your website up and running. Let WordPress (and GreenGeeks) handle the nerdy part. With a GreenGeeks account, you can install WordPress with a few clicks and get on with more important things.

WordPress Plugins and Themes for a Yoga Blog

Once WordPress is installed, you choose a theme. The theme controls how your blog looks. WordPress also uses plugins. They do the specialized technical work that WordPress doesn’t do by default.

As far as themes are concerned, you can buy a commercial theme or use one of the thousands of free themes available. I’m going to show you a couple of free themes here today.

If you like having tech support available or want some advanced features, you can also consider a paid theme.

Pranayama Yoga

Pranayama Yoga is a free theme that’s simple, adaptable, and flexible. Designed for yoga, fitness, or sports-related blogs. It’s easily customizable and SEO friendly (more about that in a minute). The theme makes full use of the WordPress customizer.

Yogaclub Lite

Yogaclub Lite is another free theme designed for Yoga, Spa, Fitness, and physiotherapy. It’s attractive with a simple layout while maintaining a professional appearance. It’s easy to set up and includes all the features needed to create your yoga blog.

There aren’t any specialized yoga plugins for WordPress. If you’re managing a yoga studio or other yoga-related business, there are tools to help. But if you’re writing about yoga, you don’t need any special tools. That isn’t to say that there aren’t plugins that will be beneficial for your blog.

There are. Here are a couple that you might find useful.

Yoast SEO

I said we’d talk about SEO (search engine optimization), and it’s a vast and intricate subject. But all you have to know about optimization to get started is Yoast SEO. It handles a lot of crucial technical SEO tasks automatically, and can even give you SEO-related writing tips.

You’re going to work hard on your blog, make sure people can find it. Yoast will help with that.

Site Kit by Google

Site Kit by Google integrates Analytics, Search Console, AdSense, PageSpeed Insights, Tag Manager, and Optimize with WordPress. Sure, you could access all of those Google tools outside of WordPress, but now you don’t have to.

The Events Calendar

You can use The Events Calendar plugin to publish and promote yoga-related events and dates. Display events on a monthly calendar or in a list. It even has built-in Google maps support.

You Can Market Your Yoga Blog Without Compromising Your Values

Marketing, promotion, hype – whatever you want to call it, it gets a bad rap. But the internet is a big place, and there are a lot of voices vying for attention. If you want to connect with people, you have to promote your blog. And, like becoming proficient at yoga, it won’t happen overnight. It’s a long-term commitment.

Social media is key. You should set up a Facebook page and an Instagram profile and post links to your blog. But take a bit of time to give some thought to your message. One way to focus your message is to think about your niche. Your niche is your target audience.

You might think, “Well, my target audience is people who are interested in yoga.” Yes, but that’s a broad spectrum.

Can you narrow it down? Do you specialize in one kind of yoga? Blogging about Vinyasa-style yoga, Ashtanga, Sivananda, Jivamukti, Iyengar, Taoist or Yin, Bikram (okay, maybe not Bikram), are all very different things. Write to a specific audience, and your message will ring more clearly.

You Know the Value of Yoga; Now You Can Help Others Discover It

I hope I’ve given you a few helpful tools to start your unique yoga blog. If you approach it with the same tenacity and mindset that you use for yoga, you can be successful.