Online yoga sensation Adriene Mishler reveals her 2 tips on cultivating a strong following

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Six years in the making and “Yoga With Adriene” (YWA) is one of the top-ranking brands on Google and YouTube when searching for yoga tutorials.

Having accumulated 4 million subscribers and produced over 400 videos on YouTube alone, the YWA brand’s host, Adriene Mishler reveals her two top tips to cultivate a strong following – whether that’s online or off.

“The number one thing is consistency,” Mishler, entrepreneur and host of “Yoga With Adriene” told CNBC Make It. Speaking in London, the yoga instructor explained how from a practical, business standpoint, consistency is a quality that we are often taught to embody during our lives.

“We hear this from our teachers, our professors: If you want to be a teacher (for instance), you can’t sub out, you need to show up. And it’s not just in the digital space — for anything, any practice, any service.”

At the end of the day, “it’s a commitment” when seeing something through to completion, Mishler explains, offering examples such as work tasks, being a sponsor for someone in recovery and a mentor. While millions may follow the YouTube channel now, in the initial years, Mishler and her producer Chris Sharpe would get excited when a video received just 100 views.

“I was like: ‘100 views. Oh my gosh, this is amazing. A hundred people are doing yoga. This is amazing, let’s keep going’,” she said.

Now, videos tend to get hundreds-of-thousands of views, with the channel’s most popular tutorial — a 20-minute video for complete beginners — having received over 18 million views to date. While Mishler explains that it may be easy for her to say this now, she adds that it comes from knowing that it’s hard to be constantly available.

“You have to show up when you don’t want to. You have to show up when you have a big pimple on your face. You have to show up when you’re in the middle of a breakup or a loss, and you have to show up even when the light is bad.”

“I can think of a million things over the years where I didn’t want to show up for the ‘Yoga With Adriene’ videos — but I’ve never missed a week of the year, except for two times. And those were the two times that I had vocal surgery – and even then, we did a little series of silent ones.”

“So, I don’t say that to say, ‘We’re so amazing.’ I say it because it’s hard. It’s probably the most challenging thing.”

With a dedication to show up for the community, this is where the second tip comes in: Authenticity.

“You grow a community by letting people really see you,” said Mishler.

“One way of thinking about it is just allowing people to really see you – for who you truly are, which is also a little bit difficult,” she adds, explaining how combining these two tips can help push a brand further.

“I think those things go together: if you show up consistently and allow people to see you,” Mishler said, adding that she wasn’t trying to act like the best yoga teacher but rather, trying to be of service.

And with that, Mishler concludes, this helps “create a mutual respect” between you and your community.

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