Admit it. Yoga teachers are fountains of knowledge. Rather than keep all of that delicious wisdom to yourself, you can share it with your students and other yoga teachers by creating website content that inspires.

Website content can be anything posted on a website or a blog, including pictures and videos. Most often, though, it means writing articles for people to read, share, and discuss.

If you use the Internet, you are already familiar with website content. Some of what you read is even about yoga, meditation, or life. Writing articles for a website, though, isn’t something that only “writers” can do.

If you get excited when you share yoga with your students, or when you talk to other yoga teachers about pranayama and other techniques, then you have the most important skill needed for writing articles for a website: passion.

Follow these simple steps for creating website content, and you’ll be writing inspirational articles before your students can come out of Savasana.

Simple Steps for Creating Website Content

Choose a Topic: Writing articles that people like to read takes passion, and a little bit of creativity. Select a topic that you get excited about, such as your expert advice on how to master handstand, or how to help your students bring yoga into their daily lives. Readers can sense when you aren’t fully interested in the topic, so choose something that makes your yoga heart flutter.

Focus the Topic: Ideally, your article should be 300 to 800 words. Narrow your topic to fit this length. “The History of Yoga” is too broad for a blog post. “Opening Eyes in the West: The Early Years of Yoga in America” might work. Even better would be “Swami Vivekananda: The First American Yoga Workshop in the 1800s.”

Identify Your Main Keyword: Keywords are what drive search engines like Google. If your title is “Achieve Handstand With One Week of Yoga Practice,” and your article contains the words “yoga” and “handstand” several times, then Google will figure out that your article is about doing handstands in yoga. This makes it easier for people to find your website content. In addition to a primary keyword, you can also pick one or two related keywords. Use these keywords in the title and throughout your article.

Write a Clickable Title: If your title isn’t interesting, no one will bother to read your article (e.g., 3 Reasons I Won’t Date My Yoga Teacher). Don’t go overboard, though. The title should match the content. Don’t try to “trick” people into reading your article. SEOmoz has a great article on creating irresistible titles.

Hook Readers With Your Opening Line: The first line of your article is almost as important as the clickable title. Spend some time on this. Think about what would make yoga teachers or students keep reading. Check out some of your favorite website content for inspiration.

Identify the “Call to Action”: This marketing concept basically says, “What do you want your readers to do?” Try out your method for handstand? Write comments in response to your website article? Be sure to include this in your article, e.g. “Build these steps for handstand into your daily yoga practice.” [Or “Follow these simple steps for writing website content,” as I used above.]

Flesh Out Your Article: Use the title, first line, and keywords to guide your website article. These will help you stay on topic. Try to keep your article to 300 to 800 words. If you go over, you may need to refine your article more, or split it into multiple articles.

Trim Your Article: Most articles start out much longer than needed. Look over your website content for pieces that don’t support the title. Don’t be attached to keeping your content. You can always recycle interesting—but off-topic—pieces for other articles.

Pay Attention to Formatting: People don’t like to read large chunks of text online. Break things up with bullets or smaller paragraphs. Use subheadings (include your keywords in these whenever possible).

Choose a Picture to Accompany Your Article: Pictures are essential for website articles. The Google Advanced Image Search is a great way to find photos of people doing yoga, or just sitting quietly. Look for photos that are free to use. Write a description of the image using your keyword. When you tag photos with this description, search engines (and yoga teachers and students) are more likely to find your article.

Proofread: Don’t skimp on this step. Would you trust an author who misspells words? If you aren’t comfortable editing your own website content, find someone who can help.

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Photo: Next Dimension by Some rights reserved by h.koppdelaney