How to start an online meditation business

If you have your own meditation practice, you understand how powerful meditation is as a tool to maintain mental, emotional and physical well-being. Coaching, facilitating, and teaching meditation online provides an opportunity to help others as well as your business to grow and stay healthy. 

The meditation and mindfulness industry is one of the fastest growing health movements in America, and starting a meditation business online is an excellent way to take advantage of this growing industry. 

While reflecting on the 100’s of students we’ve helped create their meditation business plans, I broke the process of setting up a meditation business into 7 key steps.  I hope you get something out of it!

How to Create a Meditation Business in 7 Steps

1. Get Appropriate Meditation Training

Obviously, if you’re building a meditation business, you need to be able to facilitate meditation experiences for your clients or audience. Completing a meditation facilitator training is both the most efficient and effective way to obtain the knowledge you need, without having to go through years of trial and error. 

There are a lot of meditation trainings on the internet, but very few of them are designed for entrepreneurs, like yourself. Most trainings focus on creating meditation teachers, not guided meditation facilitators.

 Here’s the difference:

1. Meditation Teacher: teaches students how to meditate, including demonstrating proper posture, breathing techniques, etc.
2. Guided Meditation Facilitator: guides participants through a meditation experience, using guided imagery & targeted questions, to assist people in finding clarity around specific topics

If you want to build a successful meditation business, your business needs to produce results for clients. If you want to produce results for your clients, you need to help them solve serious problems. And teaching your clients about meditation techniques, the history of meditation, religions or stuff like that is not going to cut it. 

What will cut it is becoming an immersive meditation leader. You need to be able to guide your clients or audience through meditations to help them access their creative problem solving ability & use targeted deep inquiry techniques to help them discover the answers they are looking for. If you can do that, you can build a successful business, but you’re going to need training to accomplish that.

Learning how to lead a guided meditation is one thing, but a good meditation training will also need to teach you how to implement your skill set in practice. Make sure that any meditation teacher training you invest in covers how to integrate meditation into a coaching session, how to create workshops, how to facilitate group meditations, how to facilitate on Zoom, how to create meditation audios, how to shoot & light video, and any other topics you need to implement your training right out of the gate.

Additionally, you’ll want to make sure that any training you choose has MANY resources & meditation scripts for you to use so you can hit the ground running with enough content to last you until you have the experience you need to create your own guided meditations.

Lastly, mentorship will be key for you as a new meditation facilitator. So, make sure that the meditation training you choose has a long-term group coaching & mentorship program in place so you can get your questions answered as you’re learning, starting to build your business & guiding your first meditations.

If your sights are set on getting professionally trained as a meditation facilitator, I suggest you check out my article on selecting the best meditation training for you.

2. Choose A Niche

When starting a business, it is vital to select a niche, meaning a subset of the market that has both a specific problem & a need for a solution. For example, computer engineers who have a fear of public speaking.

By selecting a niche, you not only give yourself the opportunity to become an expert in a particular field, but you make the process of crafting & selling your offer much easier.  The meditation industry is filled with generalists, so by becoming a specialist, you’ll gain a competitive edge in the market. Additionally, by becoming a specialist, you’ll also be able to charge more for your services. For example, brain surgeons make a lot more money than pediatricians.

When selecting your niche, you’ll want to make sure that the problem the niche has is both painful & something you can help them solve.  In the computer engineer example, having a fear of public speaking is a painful problem, because engineers who can’t confidently present their ideas to their superiors, investors or colleagues will have a much harder time getting a promotion, standing out amongst their peers or getting money for a potential business idea. As a meditation coach, you could use guided meditation as a tool to help these engineers overcome their fear of public speaking, opening the door to professional opportunities that could end up increasing their ability to make money significantly.

If you focus your meditation business’ services on a specific niche, writing effective marketing copy for your website, ads or social media profile becomes far easier. If you target your message to everyone, it will resonate with no one. But, if you focus on solving the problems of a specific demographic, like the example in the paragraph above, it’s obvious how you could craft a compelling message that would resonate with millions of computer engineers around the globe who are hamstrung by their fear of public speaking.

Lastly, focusing on a specific problem means you can provide a specific solution, in the way of your offer. Offers that solve specific problems are worth more to potential clients, meaning you can charge more, and with a clear objective in mind, a niche targeted offer will be easier for you to craft.

3. Craft Your Offer

After you’ve selected your niche, it’s time for you to craft an offer.  An offer is simply the solution to your niche’s problem. Your niche is at “Point A”, they want to get the “Point B”, and your offer is the bridge between those two states.

The success of your meditation business will depend upon the effectiveness of your offer, so it’s important that you take the time to craft an offer that delivers on its promise of solving your niche’s problem. Also, it’s important that the format of your offer is congruent with the amount of work necessary to produce the desired outcome.

With the computer engineer niche, for example, the format that would work best would likely be a 6 to 9 week coaching program. This niche would require 1-on-1 attention, with meditation experiences & advice tailored specifically to them. Getting over a fear like public speaking won’t happen in one session, so the structure of your offer would need to follow a realistic & well-thought out path of transformation from “Point A” to “Point B”.

Let’s say the niche you chose had a less significant issue, like working women who need clarity on their professional goals for the year. This is a broader niche, with a less painful problem, therefore, your offer or solution should scale down accordingly. In this case, your offer might be a 2-day workshop of clarifying your goals for the new year.

After choosing your offer, it’s time to determine the delivery mechanism.

4. Choose The Delivery Method For Your Offer

Below are the 3 main delivery methods to discuss:

Workshops & Events: 

Leading Group Guided Meditation workshops or classes is a great way to offer affordable meditation sessions, and it’s a natural way to grow your client base. Additionally, it’s a great way to demonstrate your expertise & attract potential 1-on-1 clients. If you’re leaning towards facilitating groups, be sure to read my 9 Tips for Leading a Group Guided Meditation Session.

Group or 1-On-1 Coaching: 

Working with client’s 1-on-1 or providing group coaching is a more profitable business model, because you have the ability to serve a select niche & solve specific problems. It’s certainly achievable to grow a business to 6-figures in this service method, but scarcity in your schedule will make scaling beyond impossible for 1-on-1 & very difficult doing group coaching.

Online Courses: 

If your goal is to scale your meditation business to the moon, online courses are the best option. That being said, it’s critical that you’ve gained substantial experience in the previous two service methods before trying to essentially automate your ability to deliver a solution to your niche. Additionally, building a quality online course & successfully learning how to market it will likely be one of the biggest challenges you’ve ever undertaken.

Whichever method of delivery you choose, the important thing is that your offer delivers the result for your niche. That means that the format should be dictated by the problem you’ve chosen to solve for your particular niche. Smaller problems can be addressed with workshops, classes & events, while bigger issues require bigger solutions, like coaching programs or online courses.

5. Sell before You Build

Now that you’ve selected your niche, built the skeleton of your offer & determined the format you’ll use to deliver it, you don’t just want to rush ahead & build an entire website, coaching program and/or online course around it, just yet.

The next step is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received in business: Sell before you build.

So, why would you want to sell your service before you’ve actually finished creating it?

Because before you invest a lot of time & money in building a website, branding and marketing your business, you want to make sure that there is demand for what you are selling. There wouldn’t be anything worse than spending months building an online course for computer engineers looking to overcome their fear of public speaking, only to find out that computer engineers don’t desire a solution to that problem.

The easiest & most effective way to test the demand for your meditation businesses services is to speak directly with your niche, and try to sell them on your service. You can do this by reaching out to people on LinkedIn, finding people in Facebook Groups, speaking to friends of friends or any other means of getting the opportunity to speak one-to-one with a person in your niche, diagnose their problems & pains, and get them to purchase the solution from you.

When you do this, it’s vital that they actually give you their money. People will say anything to avoid confrontation & make others feel good, so a true financial commitment is the evidence you need to validate your niche-offer combination. 

Once you’re able to get about 5 to 6 people in your niche to purchase from you, you’ve established a proof of concept. Once you have a proof of concept, you should feel confident that time spent building a website, online course, coaching program, etc. will be worthwhile.

6. Build Your Website

It is crucial to establish your online presence, regardless if you offer your product or service online or in person. 

To start, create the initial brand components, including business name, logo, color palette, etc. to establish the look and feel of your business. Over time your brand personality will materialize.. 

When you’re ready to go public and put your brand identity on the web, your website should include:

1. Who you are (your name or name of the business)
2. What you do (the niche you’re in and the problem you solve)
3. Your Solution (the product/ service you offer) 

Next, start to populate your website with additional information and resources. A great way to demonstrate your expertise and commitment to a particular niche is to write a blog. I’m not suggesting that you make an SEO play, that is very long-term & requires too many resources, but it’s important that you establish credibility with your customers by showing them that you know what you’re talking about and that you understand & care about the problems of the niche. 

Great blog posts can also be used as lead generation tools in paid advertising & email marketing. Promoting blog posts on social media with brand awareness campaigns get a lot of reach & very cheap clicks, and can be a great way to build retargeting audiences to market your services to.

If you’re just getting started building a website, I would suggest going with Kajabi or Webflow. 

Kajabi is an all-in-one solution that can enable you to build a website, write a blog, build funnels, host live events, sell coaching services, build online courses, etc. It is improving all the time, though I will admit that their development team is slow to implement new features. Once you get used to the interface, building a website is very simple & page load speeds are pretty solid (if you keep your image sizes small).

Webflow is a relatively new player in the website & funnel building industry. In my opinion, it’s a far better option than ClickFunnels or any other option I’ve seen. You can’t build an online course on it yet, but they are adding features & improving their product all the time. It’s a little bit technical to get started, but with tons of beautiful website templates to choose from & Webflow experts for hire on their website, with a little determination, you shouldn’t have any issue getting your website off the ground in jiffy.

7. Advertise Your Meditation Business 

Once your website is up and running, it’s time to start writing advertising, marketing and generating sales for your business. You have a few paths to take in this arena depending on your niche, offer & skill set. For ease, I’ve narrowed it down to the three I find to be easily accessible and the most rewarding:

Facebook:

Facebook is a powerful advertising platform. The Facebook algorithm, in combination with the ad targeting features, make it incredibly effective at finding people in your niche who are interested in what you’re selling. 

The downside is that advertising on Facebook is highly competitive. You’re swimming with the big fish on Facebook, so in order to compete, you’ll need 2 things: a high-ticket offer & good copywriting skills. If you’re selling coaching services, I highly recommend you get your product or service addressing a problem that is worth at least $2,000 for your niche to solve. This will give you enough headroom in your margins to survive the learning curve of being new to advertising. Ideally, you’ll be able to charge $3,000 or more, but you should be able to be profitable, even while making some mistakes at the $2,000 mark. For copywriting, just start reading some copywriting books & giving it your best shot. Follow best practices for direct response advertising & be prepared to fail forward, a lot.

Organically, Facebook Groups are also a powerful option to grow a community & attract potential clients. By building a Facebook Group centered around building a supportive community focused on the solutions to your niche’s problem, you can build a powerful lead generation source at little to no cost. All you need to do is to become a resource for your group, hosting live Q&A sessions, guided meditations, etc., to demonstrate that you have the ability to get them from “Point A” to “Point B”. Additionally, you can use the questions asked in Q&A sessions to inspire content to post on your Facebook Business Page that will be directly relevant to your niche & ultimately, attract more potential clients into your group & business.

YouTube:

YouTube is a great platform for organic marketing & paid advertising, if you have the ability to create video content. Organically, creating content on YouTube has a long-tail effect that doesn’t exist on any other platform, because YouTube videos continue to get views long after they’re posted. If you create valuable content for your niche, eventually, you will get customers from a well-thought out YouTube strategy, though it may take some time. On the paid traffic side of things, YouTube Ads are far less competitive than Facebook, and in my experience, deliver much higher quality leads. The downside is that video ads are harder to make, the targeting is less precise & the Google Ads interface takes a little bit of getting used to. But if you’re up for the challenge, YouTube is still a fantastic platform for new businesses.

Direct Outreach:

Direct Outreach is a great strategy to supplement paid marketing and round out your lead generation strategy. High quality organic leads can be generated by simply finding them on social media, getting to know a bit about them & pitching them on your product or service. A fantastic platform for organic reach & direct organic outreach is LinkedIn, especially if you are in a niche that is easily searchable. Direct outreach takes a lot of trial & error, but if you’re persistent, it works. I’ve found direct outreach works best on LinkedIn, but they can also be effective on Instagram & Facebook, if executed correctly. The bonus of direct outreach is it’s completely free & requires zero advertising expertise, however, it does require some solid sales skills.

In Conclusion:

I know that was a lot of information, and a blog post can only take you so far, but I hope that I gave you some valuable tips for how to start your online meditation business off on the right foot. My passion is helping entrepreneurial empaths build their businesses, because right now, our world needs people like you more than ever. 

If you’re looking to start your meditation business right now, you can start learning for free with some resources I wrote about how to lead a guided meditation and/or how to start a meditation group.

If you’re ready to get started with step 1 of this process, check out our The Guided Meditation Framework’s guided meditation facilitator training!