Do you know what the single most common New Year’s resolution is? If you guessed weight loss, you’re not far off: 82% of people say they want to improve their health in some way.
Health and wellness are extremely popular topics. When you consider that major problems like obesity and stress run rampant in our society, it’s not hard to see why. If you’re passionate about health and fitness, or you have valuable information to share on things like family medicine, you may feel that learning how to start a healthy living blog is the right step for you.
Of course, deciding you want to be a health blogger is one thing. Figuring out where to begin is quite another, as the process of starting any blog can be overwhelming.
When it comes to how to start a healthy living blog, facing your fears is going to be the first step. Many people who would like to start a blog are worried about what others will think of them, especially when it comes to sensitive subjects such as womens health, pediatric healthcare, and the like. Others feel that they aren’t qualified to write about healthy living and struggle with severe imposter syndrome. And lots of people who feel inspired to write about knowledge are fearful of being targeted by those with opposing views, or even by online bullies.
Sadly, these concerns are very much grounded in real life. Any time you put yourself out there and state an opinion, you’ll be at risk of being attacked by someone who disagrees with you, no matter how well-researched your ideas about CBD health supplements are. And when you’re writing about something as critical as people’s health, you do have a big responsibility to your community to make sure your information is accurate.
That being said, fears like these shouldn’t stop you from learning how to start a healthy living blog if it’s what you really want to do. Blogging is tough work, but it’s also one of the most rewarding and freeing things you can do. In this article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know how to start a healthy living blog.
How to Start a Healthy Living Blog: Choosing Your Niche
Once you know that blogging is what you want to do, and once you’re committed to doing the hard work to make it happen, the first step is choosing your niche. That’s not the same as choosing your category, or subject: in this case, your category is health. Your niche is like a sub-category of your category, like how womens health counseling is a unique niche within health advice and counseling in general.
Some categories have more niches than others, but the health category has several. This includes the following:
- Weight loss and diet blogs: These blogs either provide dieting information or document a personal weight loss journey.
- Health food blog: These blogs focus on healthy eating, with easy recipe ideas, advice, and food photography.
- Specialized exercise blogs: These sites provide helpful tools and information for people in niche exercise communities, such as runners, weight trainers, and yoga practitioners.
- Fitness professionals: These blogs publish articles and advice from personal trainers and coaches who sell their training services.
- Healthy lifestyle: These websites feature information on all aspects of staying healthy.
The most important question you have to answer when choosing your niche is, who are the people you want to help with your health information? This should usually be a group that you’re a part of, or a group you’ve had significant experience with. For example, if you used to be a yoga instructor, making a yoga blog would make sense. If you’re a passionate runner, a running blog would be the most authentic expression of your knowledge. And if you’ve had significant experience working the older people, a blog on elderly care might be a great idea.
Along those lines, it’s important to recognize that the categories listed above aren’t the only niches you an use. If you have an idea for a blog that combines niches or fits into a different niche altogether, it could still be a viable blog. The important thing is that there are other people out there in that community, who need that information. As long as those people exist and you understand them, your blog idea is probably worth pursuing.
Whatever niche you choose, it’s especially important that it’s something you’re passionate about. To become a respected and reliable blogger, you’re going to have to stay up to date on everything that happens in your space. If reading about health clinics and the different types of medical practitioners bores you to tears, you aren’t going to enjoy doing that kind of research for your medical advice and reviews blog. On the other hand, if you practically live and breathe weight training or bodybuilding, chances are you stay up to date on those things already. In this case, simply writing about what you learn would almost be a labor of love for you.
If you’re on the fence about what niche to write in, there are a couple of techniques you can try. First, start with a broad niche that you’re interested in, then narrow it down to a smaller sub-niche within it. For example, since you want to write about health, define what you consider to be the most important part of healthy living. Maybe the most important thing to you is food and nutrition. In that case, narrow your niche down further, to a sub-niche in the food category. This might be vegan or paleo diet foods, or even recipes that are compatible with popular brands like the Bulletproof Diet.
You can also incorporate aspects of healthy living with mental health. Here, you might be able to offer organizational tips for the home and talk about the benefits of going to a therapist. When it comes to organization, a clean home can help create a clearer mind. You’ll feel more relaxed every time you come through the door when you’re not worried about clutter getting in your way. Tuck your storage boxes safely behind your garage door to keep them safe from the elements, especially with winter on its way. You can even learn how to build storage above garage doors to keep your footpath clear should you actually use your garage for your car. Cobra garage door racks and similar brands are key in helping you organize your space.
But talking about the importance of going to a mental health professional is also key. You won’t want to offer any concrete advice unless you have a license. But talking about your own experience with a therapist can encourage other people who are struggling to follow suit.
The second way to choose a niche is to investigate what’s already popular. One of the best ways to do this is to find out what search terms people are using to find health information, and which terms aren’t producing many relevant search results. If lots of people are all searching for the same things, and no major health websites are providing significant information on those subjects, that’s a good sign that there’s high demand and low supply for that topic. Tools like Buzzsumo and Answer the Public both have features to help you discover what people are searching for online. This is also a great way to get started with search engine optimization, or SEO, which is an important part of how to start a healthy living blog.
Research and Plan Your Blog
Once you know your niche, the next step of how to start a healthy living blog is to do your research and make a content plan. This basically means figuring out what you’re going to write about, and getting the information and sources you need to write it.
Create blog posts that people not only find, but want to read, is much harder than it may seem on the surface. People are more distracted with more options than ever before, and blogs know this, with each one competing jealously for readers’ attention. If you want your blog to stand out and get read, it’s not enough to simply have accurate and useful information, especially if you want to appear in Google search results. Every time you write a blog post, your goal should be to write the best article on that particular subject. If you can write the first article on a given subject, that’s even better.
Even though your blog is still in its planning phase at this point, it’s still a good idea to begin outlining some of your future articles. Specifically, you should be thinking about something called evergreen content: the articles that matter most to your blog and your blog’s niche. These articles should be on subjects that people keep coming back to — topics that aren’t exclusively relevant to any point in time. For example, a long blog post called “everything you need to know to start losing weight” is going to be relevant for a long time, if not forever. On the other hand, a review of the latest smart watch device for health tracking is only going to be relevant until the next device is released.
You want to come up with as many ideas for evergreen content as you can because these are going to be your blog’s foundation. In many ways, they’ll determine whether people see you as a real expert or a wannabe, so it’s important that your information is accurate. Your presentation of that content should be clear and easy to understand, but it should also be presented in a way that expresses your unique style as a writer.
Besides planning and writing some evergreen blog posts, you should brainstorm other posts to publish between your evergreen pieces. Your first two or three posts should probably be evergreen posts, but after that, you want to sprinkle in some lighter, more timely articles in between your evergreen content. These should be easier to write. They might be things like book reviews, opinion pieces on latest diet trends, and interviews with local home health care services — things that aren’t really foundational to your entire blog’s niche, but still important to readers.
Begin Setting Up Your Blog
As you’re figuring out how to start a healthy living blog, the preparation should always come first. Choosing your niche, doing your research, and starting your writing is an effective way to make sure you really have a viable idea on your hands, and that you have what it takes to work at it. You don’t want to go to the trouble of buying a domain name and setting up your website if your idea hasn’t been validated first.
Now that you’ve got your research done, it’s time for the next step in how to start a healthy living blog: setting up your site. It’s at this point that you must decide what kind of blog you want yours to be. Will it be a laid-back, more personal blog, perhaps to document your experiences and research with healthy living? Or do you want it to be the next big contender in the online health space?
Setting up a website for a blog is a lot simpler than building a professional site for businesses like home care medical supplies stores. A simple, personal blog is easy to set up and start writing for. You can sign up for a free Blogger or WordPress site, and you don’t even have to buy a website address. You’ll be allowed to customize your blog’s appearance, although customization will be limited, especially on Blogger. You’ll also be able to set up things like an “About Me” page, a contact form for people to get in touch with you, and organizational and metadata tools for blogs.
The best things about simple blog sites like these is that they range from very cheap to completely free, and they’re relatively easy to set up and use. In fact, you won’t normally require any technical skills at all, once you figure out how the interface works. If you want the simplest user experience possible, Blogger is your best option, while WordPress is better if you need more options or want to upgrade to a professional site later.
If you want to launch a legitimate, professional blog to compete with the big health websites and magazines, you’re going to have your work cut out for you, but it can be done. Most professional bloggers use the WordPress platform on an external web hosting service, such as GoDaddy or WP Engine. This can become complicated if you use a professional hosting service like Amazon’s AWS, but most other web hosts offer streamlined interfaces with one-click WordPress installation.
Once WordPress is set up on your hosting service plan, setting up your blog is usually as easy as it is with a basic, consumer-version WordPress site. However, you will need to purchase a domain name (also known as a web address or URL) and connect it to your website. Depending on where you buy your domain name and what hosting service you use, this can become difficult. The simplest option is usually to buy a domain name from the same company that hosts your website because the two will typically be integrated together. For example, if you’re using GoDaddy to host your site, using them to purchase your domain name as well should result in a simpler setup process.
Start Publishing
With your website set up, the next part of how to start a healthy living blog is simply to begin publishing your writing to the web. If you want your blog to be as well-known and respected as your favorite therapist finder website, you should consider hiring an editor to proofread your writing as you publish it, or at least use proofreading software like Grammarly. When you write about sensitive or scientific health data, you must also remember to link to your sources, and it’s a good idea to have a medical practitioner approve what you’ve written.
From here, there are lots of ways for you to promote and monetize your blog. But this should be everything you need to know on how to start a healthy living blog.