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How to start a health blog

If you’re interested in health and wellness, you might consider becoming a professional health blogger.

Of course, starting a blog is difficult. You’ll need to be tech-savvy and take time to strategize how to promote your content. But if you want to share your knowledge with the world, being a blogger might be right for you.

Likewise, if you’re a health brand, starting a blog can improve your marketing efforts by helping you attract more customers.

Health blog posts are similar to other types of blogs. For example, you can write an opinion-based blog or one that focuses on the facts. Health blogging is not the same as health writing. Blogs allow you to take a more personal approach and provide stories or anecdotes from your life, while health writing is based on facts. However, they can both make a blog with valuable content.

When starting a health blog, you’ll be the expert or authority on a topic, so if you’re not already a health expert in some way, starting a blog will be difficult. But you can interview other experts and use research to inform your audience about different topics.

Interested in becoming a health blogger? Let’s discuss everything you need to know about starting a health blog.

Get your blog up and running

Before you can start blogging, you’ll need a website. You can easily start a blog with a few platforms like WordPress or Wix. In fact, many platforms make it easy for you to design and implement a website in less than a day, depending on your skill set and how much time you want to invest.

Remember, the better the quality of your website design, the more users you can attract, so consider investing time and money into the process to ensure your blog looks its best.

Creating a website is a process in and of itself, so we won’t get into all of the details here, but you can learn more about how to get started with a little research online.

Start a content calendar

Whether you want to write about supplements, exercise, diet, or a variety of health topics, you must have a content calendar to help you organize your ideas.

If you don’t start a calendar, you could get stuck not having anything valuable to write, preventing you from staying on schedule. A content calendar allows you to organize different topics and decide when you’ll write and publish them. They’re beneficial for new bloggers because they’ll keep you on a schedule so you’ll never forget when to publish your articles.

Of course, to start a content calendar, you’ll need to have topic ideas. Since you’re starting a health-based blog, you probably already have some ideas ready. Keep a Google Sheet of all your ideas to help you see the different topics you want to write about. From there, you can start to brainstorm titles and begin research.

Check out our eight tips to create an effective content calendar.

Do keyword research

You’ll need to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) if you plan to become a full-time blogger and make money off of your blog.

Luckily, SEO is fairly easy to understand, and anyone can optimize their websites to help them rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Explore these 10 free courses online to level up your SEO skills.

One of the most important aspects of SEO is keyword research since search engines crawl your content and use Keywords in titles, subheadings, and body text to determine the topic of your article and its relevance to various search queries. Once you have a topic, you can enter a few keywords into Google and read the top results to help you get an idea of the types of content that rank highest.

If you really want to improve the odds of ranking higher on SERPs and increasing your website traffic, you should invest in SEO tools to make keyword research easier. These tools will tell you everything from search volume to top-ranking pages, and they can help you evaluate your competition.

Check out these 11 free SEO keyword research tools that you should consider.

In addition, you’ll need to monitor updates in search engine policies and algorithm changes. Health and wellness blogs fall under the Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) category on Google, which refers to any type of content that can impact someone’s health, happiness, safety, or finances.

Since your blog may offer advice about disorders, medications, and other health topics, you’ll need to ensure your content follows Google’s EAT Parameters. EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, and there are several ways to make your content all of these things.

If you’re an expert in your field, ensure your credentials are on your website. However, if you’re not an expert in the field of health and wellness, you should interview experts and provide citations in your articles to ensure Google understands whether or not your content should be trusted by users.

Check out our 12 SEO marketing tips for beginners.

Invest in marketing

Marketing is crucial if you want people to read your blog. You can write the best health blog in the world. However, if you’re not doing any marketing, it’s unlikely anyone will read it.

Definitely market your blog in many different ways, but we recommend having a robust strategy with different campaigns to ensure you can get as many readers as possible.

You can use everything from email marketing and social media to paid ads to attract new website visitors. What you choose may depend on your budget, so try to set aside some money for advertising in case you need it to attract visitors.

Check out our 19 tips to drive traffic to your new blog.

Monetize

Blogging is time-consuming, and you deserve to be paid for your time.

Many people blog as their full-time career, but earning enough money to make a living blogging can be difficult.

Once you start getting enough visitors, you can monetize your vlog in a few ways. The easiest way is to allow for ads. However, you can also work directly with brands to offer advertising space, become an affiliate, or join their influencer program.

Check out 10 of the most profitable blog niches. Plus, see these four ways to sell advertising on your website.

Establishing your health blog

Building a successful health blog takes time. You won’t be able to establish yourself as an expert overnight.

Instead, you’ll need to continuously write valuable content and attract website visitors through the right marketing efforts. Building a credible blog can take months or even years, depending on your background and whether or not you have any marketing skills.

Monitor the performance of your blogs to help brainstorm new ways to improve them, attract new customers, and write valuable content to increase the number of visitors to your website.

While you’re starting your health blog, consider leveling up your digital marketing strategy. DailyStory specializes in automation, email marketing, audience segmentation and more. Level up your process, and schedule a free demo with us today.

About the author

Ashley Nielsen earned a B.S. degree in Business Administration Marketing at Point Loma Nazarene University. She is a freelance writer who loves to share knowledge about general business, marketing, lifestyle, wellness, and financial tips. During her free time, she enjoys being outside, staying active, reading a book, or diving deep into her favorite music.

10 of the most profitable blog niches

Creating a blog not only supports your content marketing efforts. It can help you make money, too.

But to nail your profitable blog niche isn’t easy. Blogs are very popular. About 70 million posts are published each month just by WordPress users. In order to succeed, you must stand out.

Fortunately, you have numerous profitable blog niches to explore so that you can find the topic that best suits your expertise, your brand and (truly) your passion. That way, you’re crossing what makes sense for you with what can make you money.

The following (in no particular order) are 10 of the most profitable blog niches to consider before you even begin to plan your first post.

Digital marketing

Digital marketing’s importance for small businesses is only increasing. But at the same time, it can be an overwhelming topic for many business owners.

The topic of digital marketing covers a range of online strategies that market one’s business to its intended target audience. This includes (but is not limited to):

Email marketing campaigns
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SMS text message marketing
Pay-per-click advertising
Social media marketing
Online branding
Influencer marketing
Affiliate marketing
Content marketing

Successful digital marketing efforts can lead to increased conversions and sales for businesses. So, whether you’re social media savvy in general or have a degree and many years of experience in the digital marketing field, an increasing number of businesses are seeking understanding and tips from people just like you.

Of course, you can narrow down your focus to a more specific segment of digital marketing and really leverage your blog as a valuable resource that internet users will want to return to and even subscribe to for the latest updates. Affiliate marketing could be a great way to generate an income through this topic. But the simplest approach is selling digital advertising space on your your blog website.

Do-It-Yourself

Search engines are constantly being used by people trying to figure out how to do a project themselves. Are you an avid DIYer? Maybe you have life hacks when it comes to one-off repairs in older homes. Or, you’re a contractor who rebuilt your entire home from the ground up. The sky’s the limit.

Clearly, this is one type of profitable blog niches that cries out for tutorials and how-to articles. But YouTube can be a great pairing with your blog here as well.

Build a big enough audience on YouTube, and you could be paid directly for your content.

Health and fitness

The total market size of the global fitness club industry alone is more than $87 billion. And the COVID-19 pandemic has only underscored the importance of living a healthy lifestyle.

Of course, the overall topic of health and fitness is about as diverse as you can imagine. Whether you’re a health professional leveraging your expertise about macronutrient nutrition (for example) or an amatear transparently sharing your personal fitness journey (and everything in between), you have the opportunity to connect with others through your blog.

As far as making money, one way in the health and fitness industry to do so would also be affiliate marketing, but you also could offer an online-only health program or sell a subscription to your video content (whether they’re workouts or cooking tutorials, and so on).

Check out our four tips to become a fitness affiliate marketer, as well as 18 of the best fitness affiliate programs to boost your income.

Recipes and food

Not necessarily tied to the health and fitness industry since food can definitely be “not healthy” but just as engaging, recipes and food in general is big business online.

Food itself is an evergreen topic, good anytime for a long time. This makes it particularly profitable as a blog niche.

Whether you specialize in quick-and-easy weeknight meal recipes or anything and everything with cheese in it, determine where you can specialize since this niche is so saturated. You’ll also want to include plenty of eye-catching visuals. Consider pairing your blog with an Instagram, Pinterest or Facebook presence.

To drive income through the food and recipe blog niche, you could partner with brands to create recipes using their products, sell a printable cookbook and more.

Parenting

The audience for parenting advice is so large that if you’re a parent, this is one type of profitable blog niches worth considering. Think mommy bloggers.

But beyond just being a parent, what specifically can you focus on? Maybe it’s a stage of parenting (like raising toddlers), a type of parent (like older parents) or even your status (single father). You’ll want to outline your blog’s brand so that you can stay on topic to help build your audience.

Of course, to make money, product partnerships, sponsored ads and more can all help turn a profit.

Personal finance and investing

Who doesn’t want money advice? People always are looking for ways to more effectively manage their money and improve their investing outcomes. Google searches about financial planning are only increasing.

Personal finance blogging is a great opportunity. If you’re a financial advisor, you can offer a wealth of tips to be more money wise. You also could be an avid couponer who has tips to share on how to save the most money when shopping.

Whatever your angle, the best way to make this niche profitable is to think through what you can offer that will help readers make more money in the long run. That could be an online course or paid webinars.

Fashion

Fashion is an immensely popular and diverse blog niche. Whether you’re a designer, love modeling new looks, intensely follow the industry and its news, or something else entirely, fashion blogging could be for you.

Just like food, visuals are key, and a pairing with Instagram or another visual social media platform would be helpful.

To make money, you could leverage Instagram Shop to directly sell your products, sell advertising space on your website or explore affiliate marketing.

Technology and gaming

It makes sense to use the online medium of blogging to connect with others who are interested in technology or gaming. In 2020, the gaming industry alone generated about $155 billion in revenue.

You could share in-depth product (hardware or software) reviews, post tutorials to help people use a specific piece of software or even break industry news if you’re an insider.

To make money, there is a great opportunity to use affiliate links to products or software that you’re writing about.

Travel

If you’re dream retirement is to live the life of a travel blogger, we don’t blame you. But you also don’t have to wait. Travel is a very popular and one of the most profitable blog niches if done right.

Many begin by blogging about their own travels, but you’ll want to focus your content a little bit more than that. Remember, you want to stand out. Maybe you’re a particular type of traveler (like a family or a solo female). Perhaps you’re focusing on a particular area or continent. Whatever it is, you want to have a theme or brand that’s clear to your readers. Having this makes it easier to monetize your content.

Profit can be driven through affiliate links to hotels or other travel accommodations and products.

Self-care

A popular trend in recent years is self-care. About 73 percent of Americans were more conscious of needing self-care in 2020 (with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic), while about 69 percent planned to do more self-care in 2021 than they did in the previous year.

But self-care is as popular as it is diverse. From stress management to journaling, a trained psychologist, wellness coach or counselor can really add to the self-care conversation.

To make money within the self-care blog niche, consider promoting products in paid partnerships that can help your audience achieve their goals, offering life-coaching sessions, developing a podcast where you can sell ad space with a big enough audience or even directly selling your own digital products, such as a robust journal template.

In conclusion

When creating your blog and choosing a profitable blog niche that works for you, remember that you have something to contribute to the already existing and ongoing conversation. Make sure you identify what helps you stand out and leverage that every chance you get in order to connect with your own target audience.

Of course, many of the methods mentioned to drive an income from your blogging efforts are only the tip of the iceberg. There are many ways bloggers are profiting from their content. But either way, profit depends on growing and maintaining a significant amount of website traffic and engagement.

Check out our 19 tips to drive traffic to your new blog.

As you gain traction with your new blog, consider optimizing your digital marketing process, such as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

19 tips to drive traffic to your new blog

Blogs can be a large part of your content marketing efforts.

Each month, about 409 million people view more than 20 billion blog pages.

If you haven’t already been maintaining blog content for your brand, you might be deciding that now is the time to get started.

Great! But once you launch your new blog, how do you begin to drive traffic to it? Clearly, a blog with no page views is like a tree falling in the forest without anyone hearing it. In other words, you’re not going to hit any of your marketing or revenue goals with a low-performing blog.

The following are 19 tips to help your new blog get attention.

Determine your target audience

This is a common requirement for any sort of successful content marketing tactic. While many small businesses would love to target everyone all the time (because who wouldn’t want your product or service?), you have to get real.

First, everyone has a budget. And yours is going to go much further when you are targeting a more specific group of people than if you’re trying to reach everyone.

Second, you’ll be that much more effective by targeting a niche of consumers who are most likely to purchase. That’s right. Aiming “small” (but targeted) will lead to a better ROI (return on investment).

Of course, your target audience is more than a handful of demographic characteristics. See our seven tips to help you determine the best target audience for your brand.

Plan engaging blog content ideas

It might sound obvious, but there’s not a huge reason to push for more blog traffic if your content is lackluster. You’ll simply lose the readers you do get and definitely won’t be able to build a relationship with them.

Content that’s clear, engaging and even solves a problem that your target audience might be dealing with will not only attract visitors but also leave your audience wanting more. Both are good things!

Consider as your brainstorming blog topics:

Your expertise. What relevant knowledge can you share?
The interests of your readers. What are they wanting or needing to know?
Trending topics. What can you contribute to the conversation?

Once you have a list of topic ideas, get organized. Check out our eight tips to create an effective content calendar.

Develop attention-grabbing blog headlines

Headlines can greatly impact how well your blog posts perform. They are on the frontlines representing your content and impacting whether an internet user will click through on your link or not.

In a nutshell, you want to be clear, catchy and detailed while also not being too long.

See our 19 tips to write effective, engaging headlines.

Optimize for SEO

Keep in mind the phrases and keywords that your target audience will most likely use in search engines, like Google or Bing. You’ll want to naturally incorporate these throughout your content.

You can try any of these 11 free keyword research tools to get an idea of the proper keywords you should use.

This effort can help search engines find you and recommend your specific piece of content to the potential searching audience, which can then lead to free website traffic.

See our 12 SEO marketing tips for beginners to dive deeper.

Consistency is critical

You’ll want to publish new blog posts consistently. Of course, consistency does not mean posting daily at the same time each day. It just means that you must decide on a posting schedule and then stick to it.

This serves your visitors, so they know when to expect new content, but this also can help your ranking for search engines, which trust websites with consistent new content versus those with an erratic posting schedule.

When deciding how often to post, consider your time and resources first. You don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver as soon as you start. Remember that you can always build up your posting schedule over time as it makes sense to do so.

Go long with your content

This isn’t permission to go long just for the sake of going long. There needs to be substance behind it, of course.

Long-form content offers readers deeper, more concise information. But that’s not the only benefit.

Sharing rates typically increase along with the content length of your blog on all the major social media platforms, especially Twitter and Facebook. In addition, the top ten results for any given search tend to go to content with at least 2,000 words, and the rankings tend to decrease along with the word count.

Just make sure that you break up your longer content with subheadings, images and so on.

Never go out of style with evergreen content

Evergreen content remains relevant over a long period of time. It’s not time-sensitive in any way, but it could be seasonal, where the content can continue to come back every year and be just as relevant. This sustainability will help feed continued traffic to your blog.

To get the ball rolling on evergreen content, think about the questions you’re frequently asked by customers.

Use visuals

We as humans are more visual by nature. Our eyes are drawn to images before text.

About 80 percent of people remember what they see, compared to 10 percent of what they hear and 20 percent of what they read.

Leverage this by incorporating images, GIFs, videos and graphics into your new blog. Plus, you have the ability to properly tag your images so that search engines can understand the types of assets you’re offering to visitors within your text content.

Confirm your website loading speed

About 57 percent of online shoppers will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds for a page to load. And search engines are paying attention to your loading speed as well, which will lower your search ranking if you’re slower than you should be.

Not sure what your website’s loading speed is? Start with Google’s Page Speed Insights. You’ll not only find out the loading speed of your pages on mobile but also get some diagnostic advice on how to fix any of the slower pages.

Website loading speed is critically important to mobile marketing in general. Check out our 14 tips to help you optimize for mobile consumption in additional ways.

Embrace internal linking

Internal linking is all about linking to your other content that’s relevant in the current blog that visitors are reading.

This benefits your SEO efforts, and it can help keep visitors on your website longer by visiting that related content in addition to your original content that attracted them in the first place.

Just make sure that you’re only using links that are relevant and valuable. Keep an eye out for opportunities to link to other content as you’re working on new content.

Build up quality backlinks

Backlinks are hyperlinks that point from one website to another (as opposed to internal links that are linking within your website). About 91 percent of all web pages never get any organic traffic from Google, and that’s mostly due to the fact that they don’t have backlinks.

Don’t be one of those pages.

We all want to improve the search engine ranking of our website, but when it comes to getting others to link to you, it’s easy to feel lost. Plus, you don’t want just any backlink for your site. Quality (meaning that the backlink is coming from a trusted website) is important as well.

See our seven tips to help grow quality backlinks to your content.

Consider guest blogging

By featuring other writers on your blog, you’re not only adding to the value you have with different perspectives, you’re also potentially reaching a new audience.

When you’re working with potential guest bloggers, make sure you agree in advance on how the partnership will work.

Will they share the content on their own social media channels? If so, how often? What does that look like?
Does anything need to be linked back to for them? What links? How many?

Of course, this can also be flipped where you’re guest blogging on another website.

Partnerships can truly be a win-win for everyone involved if planned and talked through in advance.

Social media promotion is key

Maintaining an active social media presence goes a long way toward driving traffic to your new blog. You can directly share your content with the context that should encourage users to click through to your blog.

You’ll want to consider every social media platform different and unique. What works on Twitter is not the same as what can work on Instagram.

Consider your audience and the platform when posting. You might even want to consider creating a YouTube channel to work in tandem with your blog.

In addition, having social media sharing buttons that are alongside your content will make it easy for your visitors to share your content organically on their own social accounts as well.

Learn about what you should know about social media.

Leverage email marketing

Email marketing is a great way to build personal relationships with your subscribers, and you can use snippets of your blog content within your emails that can link back to your full content.

In 2022, the number of email users worldwide is estimated to be about 4.3 billion. This is expected to grow to about 4.6 billion in 2025, making up more than half of the estimated world population.

See these 48 statistics that show the value of email marketing.

Even in a world of social media prevalence, more consumers use email than any social media platform, and more than half of consumers check their email before they check their social media in the morning.

Check out our 16 email marketing best practices so that you can put your best foot forward.

Host a contest or giveaway

You can create opportunities for your audience to win prizes by subscribing to, liking, commenting on or sharing your blog content, which can all further the reach of your blog.

Prizes could be a product you sell or a service you offer to keep it simple.

Make sure you plan ahead so that any giveaway works efficiently for you and for the participants. Plus, you’ll want to keep it all legal with thorough Terms and Conditions tied to your giveaway.

Encourage comments and discussions on your blog

Google naturally improves the search ranking of a blog that’s receiving a lot of comments because it indicates that the content is engaging.

Of course, what can help these discussions is your thoughtful responses to any comments left by readers. It creates a trusting relationship and encourages them to continue commenting.

You can always try to get the comments going by ending your blog post with an open-ended question that readers can answer in the comment section.

Participate in various Q&A websites

Question-and-answer websites are definitely one of the biggest online communities in the digital world.

By answering questions on such platforms as Quora, TripAdvisor and others, your answer will be live for a long time and could potentially drive traffic to your blog.

That being said, you want to avoid any link dumping on these sites. Instead, focus on giving as detailed an answer as possible and only include a link if it makes sense to do so.

Experiment with influencer marketing

In the simplest sense, an influencer is anyone with a digital following (or audience) on a social media platform or elsewhere whom you’d like to attract to your own brand.

The purpose of influencer marketing involves increasing brand awareness, targeting new and niche audiences and increasing impressions and reach.

By identifying and partnering with an influencer, you can reach that new audience and drive up traffic to your new blog.

But before you dive in headfirst with your first influencer marketing campaign, check out our seven tips.

Spread social proof across every platform possible

Social proof refers to potential customers assuming that what others are doing is correct based on how often they see those actions. In other words, social proof is about looking to others to figure out the right way to interact in any given situation.

You can use social proof to promote your blog on your website and across your social media channels.

Here are a handful of ideas to get started:

Use a feedback form to collect user feedback about your blog that you can then share.
Ask users to rate your blog articles.
Share your social media following number, email subscribers or any other numbers.

Learn more about what social proof is and nine ways to use it, as well as 17 of the best social proof tools that you can try.

In conclusion

The biggest thing to keep in mind when launching a new blog is to have patience. Growing your website traffic organically can take time.

Focus on offering quality content that resonates and getting creative with your promotion beyond even these tips.

Check out our seven tips to level up your content marketing, as well as our Digital Marketing 101 Guide for Beginners.

7 tips to write an author bio that gets noticed

Author biographies are an opportunity to personally connect with your blog readers.

There are more than 500 million blogs out of 1.7 billion websites, and about 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages each month.

Your goal as a blogger is to stand out. An author bio can help.

An author bio is roughly a paragraph about you, your credentials, your hobbies and/or any other information you wish to share with readers.

A compelling author bio will not only help build a relationship with readers, but if you are guest blogging, it can actually drive traffic to your own website or social accounts (whatever you’re linking to).

The following are seven tips to write an author bio that gets noticed.

Consider your personal brand

An author bio is essentially an extension and reflection of your personal brand. How do you want to be perceived in relationship to your blog article?

Check out our 10 tips to build your personal brand if you need a little help.

Understand your audience

Especially when you’re guest blogging, you can engage with many different types of audiences.

Whom you’re speaking to can (and should) impact your author bio.

Just like you should understand your target audience when you’re creating a piece of content, whether it’s a blog or something else, you should extend that same effort for your bio.

Depending on the audience, the details you include might vary.

Keep it short and sweet

It’s tempting to outline your full resume of professional experience and accomplishments in your author bio.

But resist the urge.

Listing every detail simply to list it (or to establish your authority on your blog) will lose your audience.

Narrow it down to what you would include in an “elevator pitch.” What are the top three things you would say about yourself? Remember that you want to include the most attention-grabbing points about yourself (just not too many).

Speak in third-person

Regardless of what voice your blog article is written as, you want to write your author bio in third-person voice only.

It’s simply more professional.

List any achievements sparingly

Again, too much is obviously too much. And a long list of degrees or awards (or both) will make the eyes of your readers glaze over.

In addition, it could come across as more boastful than impressive.

If you want to include something, consider your biggest or most recent achievement.

Feel empowered to get personal

Blogs are not as formal as other mediums of communication, so you have the opportunity to add a few compelling, personal details about yourself.

This is especially the case if your blog article focuses on a more personal or first-person topic.

You’ll want to be selective with these details as well. What makes the most sense to include? What might connect with readers?

Include a professional photo

There is a big difference between a selfie (no matter how flattering) and a professional photo.

Characteristics of a professional photo include a background that is not distracting and good lighting. They’re typically shot straight-on, featuring a clear image of the face. Headshots traditionally refer to professional photos that show the face and at least some of the upper body.

Of course, you can certainly show your personality in a professional photo. See some examples for inspiration.

As you’re creating your author bio, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory and our 21-day free trial. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.