Whether you’re a brand-new health blogger or you’ve been blogging for several months or years, you’re always looking for new ways to grow your health blog. After all, if you’re monetizing your blog, more visitors means more revenue. If you’re blogging to establish your expertise and build an influencer profile, impressive blog traffic can be a compelling selling point when partnering with brands.
From choosing the right blog topics to using a variety of content formats like high-quality images (including stock photos and custom graphics) and explainer videos, consistently creating new, engaging content, and promoting or advertising your blog on social media, there are many tactics you can use to grow your health blog. But what are the most effective strategies for growing your health blog? To find out what tips and tricks work best for health blogging success, we reached out to a panel of health bloggers and blogging experts and asked them to answer this question:
“What’s the number 1 thing bloggers can do to grow their health blog?”
Meet Our Panel of Health Bloggers & Blogging Experts:
Keep reading to learn what our experts had to say about the #1 thing you can do to grow your health blog.
John Frigo
John Frigo is the Digital Marketing Lead at BestPriceNutrition.com.
“What makes 90% of fitness blogs or even Instagram profiles or YouTube channels effective is one of these three things: The vast majority of successful fitness content creators are either very physically attractive or have a great personality. It’s probably even more so the case with Instagram and Vlogs or YouTubers but still holds true with blogs.
Aside from that I think having a small niche or really unique concentrated area of focus is important for growing a health blog. The fitness niche is one of the most crowded ones, and unless your doing something really unique or already have an existing following, you’re not likely to stand out. For example, my blog is about the Keto Diet for Men or Fitness for Men Over 40. It has to be something really targeted to get noticed.”
John Bedford
John Bedford spent ten years as the SEO and content lead for a major global publisher. In 2019 he founded Viva Flavor, a site dedicated to helping home cooks develop their love of food and drink.
“The most important path to growth is to double down on your credentials. If you – or your writers – have accreditation with any recognized authorities, make sure you link to that authority in each authors’ profile. Even better, if the writer’s accreditation is publicly listed on the qualifying body’s website, link directly to that profile. It is incredibly important to leverage every source of external authority you’ve gained and give Google very clear signposts towards proof of your legitimacy as an expert. Be sure to back up all health-related claims with a link to a recognized external source of expertise throughout your articles, as well.”
Colton De Vos
Colton De Vos is a Marketing Specialist at Resolute Technology Solutions, a full-service IT company in Winnipeg, MB. He specializes in writing about how businesses can solve their unique challenges with specific technology solutions.
“A powerful way to drive engagement, traffic, and new readers to your health blog is to actively engage in relevant health communities. Look for relevant Facebook groups, subreddits, LinkedIn groups, and forums to share valuable information specific to the community. Go beyond just sharing links to your blog, as it can come across as spammy and self-promotional. Try sharing graphic quotes branded with your blog name and URL, answer questions in the community and include you blog URL in your signature, and ask for feedback on certain blogs or subjects.
Try to connect with other health experts and collaborate on future content together. You can produce valuable content and access each other’s audiences for expanded reach. Find out which communities make sense to engage in and what their guidelines are for participating so you don’t get banned.”
Emily Carroll
As a marketing coordinator for Drive Research, Emily relies on content creation to increase new customer interactions within the digital world. Content marketing is often the reason audiences become familiar with their brand. Being the person behind the start of a customer’s journey with Drive Research, well, that’s pretty cool.
“Update outdated content or blog posts. Pages that have been in Google’s index for a long time have a higher ranking power; therefore, marketers are wasting a potential site ranking boost if they ignore updating content on older web pages. Google often tracks the frequency of updated web pages and rewards websites for refreshing stale content.
This SEO strategy is especially important if the article includes a year because it automatically dates itself. Visitors searching on a given topic will view information from, say, 2017 as irrelevant compared to a competitor’s article published in 2020. This is especially true when distributing content related to health, nutrition, and fitness. As a result, this once high-performing post will lose traffic. When updating older webpages, be sure to keep the same keywords you have plugged before and the same URL. Doing so will ensure your ranking is not negatively impacted.”
Neal Taparia
Neal Taparia founded Imagine Easy Solutions, a software company he grew and sold, and also served as an executive at Chegg, an NYSE public company. He is working on a new business called Solitaired now, where they explore connections between games and brain training.
“To grow your health blog, the best thing you can do is to compile studies to share new insights. As an individual, it’s difficult to run your own health study, but instead you can rely on what is out there already. Research all the studies on a given topic. For example, you can look at all the studies on how vegan diets impact blood pressure and diabetes. Summarize all the studies and start presenting takeaways based on all the data you’ve found.
Effectively, you’re creating a meta study based on reliable sources. With this, you can create a blog post or infographic and then reach out to everyone who has covered the topic. Given that you’ve been data-driven in your work, many bloggers and journalists will have interest in viewing what you’ve put together and linking back to it, all of which drives your SEO and improves your health blog’s discoverability.”
Vinay Amin
Vinay Amin is a Health Expert and CEO at Eu Natural.
“Be authoritative but casual in the tone. As a health site, you need to back up claims with independent research. Link to all studies with proper citation. At the same time, avoid industry jargon. Your blog should appeal to the casual reader and not sound like a WebMD article. Write the way you would speak to a friend outside the industry. By being authoritative but non-formal, your blog comes off as trustworthy and reader-friendly.”
Nikola Djordjevic, MD
Nikola Djordjevic, MD is a medical advisor at HealthCareers.
“Avoid COVID. Seriously, although it might seem counter-intuitive to avoid COVID content these days, it will benefit your blog in the long run. For starters, COVID is one of the most competitive keywords right now, with millions of websites competing for it and new ones sprouting every day. Unless you are providing some unique content or an expert take on COVID that hasn’t been published yet, it’s a waste of time to center your content on the pandemic.
In the long run, after all, when COVID-related content has run its course, it will disappear in the internet void, to only be resurrected for academic and research purposes. Health blogs that stick to their original plan and provide non-COVID content will be better off, especially if they’re committed to keeping their content evergreen. So, my advice is to focus on your health blog for the original reasons you started it in the first place. COVID-19 content is unquestionably important to have on your blog anyway here and there, but just try not to overdo it.”
Dawn Perez
Dawn Perez is a former music teacher-turned-writer and stay-at-home mom. She writes about holistic health and balanced living at Wild Simple Joy, a site geared toward educating new moms about mindfulness and nutrition. She is currently pursuing a coaching certification in Sports Nutrition.
“First, narrow down your audience and then determine what they need the most in terms of healthy living. You hit the sweet spot when you not only niche down but also find new subjects that people are interested in. And while we’re being honest, most people aren’t interested in ‘health’ because it’s too abstract a concept. They’re interested in radiant skin, losing weight, having more energy, or sleeping better. So, be specific with your topics and solve people’s problems. The health blogging world is full of people trying to make their way. It’s your job to figure out where you fit within it all.”
Max Harland
Max Harland is the CEO of Dentaly. Founded in 2014, Dentaly.org is the largest source of free and independent information on dental care and oral health problems.
“A great way for you to grow your health blog is to quote experts in your posts and also to have experts contribute guest articles. Quoting experts and including articles written by them can help bring credibility and notoriety to your blog. Plus, those experts are likely to share the link to your site with their followers when you do feature them. It’s easy to find working health professionals who are looking to make extra money on the side by writing about various health topics they’re knowledgeable about. You could pay those experts per article, and their contributor posts are bound to get more traffic on your blog than your normal ones.”
Jon Torres
Jon Torres is the Founder of JonTorres.com, a digital marketing and SEO agency.
“The number one thing bloggers can do to grow the health of their blog is invest in their domain authority. Too often, a blog starts off in a niche and is ranking well in the search engine results but once the content goes too broad, traffic drops off. In 2020 Google has made it pretty obvious that being an expert in a specific field and having your blog reflect that will be rewarded. Keep your blog focused and concise to continue to rank for relevant keywords.”
Glen Wilde
Glen Wilde is the CEO and founder of Diet to Success, a health blog with content procured by life coaches, personal trainers, and nutritionists.
“My number one tip for growing a health blog is to diversify. Having a YouTube channel, Facebook presence, and Instagram page will increase the chances that people will click on links that lead to your health blog. Posting videos on multiple platforms helps create rapport, which is critical for building readership. Plus, engaging videos are simply more entertaining, which will keep them coming back for more. SEO helps, as well, but a pretty specific strategy is necessary to implement it properly.”
Lynell Ross
Lynell Ross is the founder and managing editor of Zivadream, an education advocacy website dedicated to helping people improve their lives. She is also a psychology-trained Certified Health and Wellness Coach, Nutritionist, and Certified Personal Trainer with The American Council on Exercise.
“I have four tips for growing your health blog:
- Provide excellent content. Your audience won’t grow if you provide mediocre content. Make sure your information is accurate, informative, and helpful. Make technical or complicated information easy to understand and offer easy tips to help people change.
- Ask your audience to share on their social media. Your best source of advertising is word of mouth or recommendations from your followers. Ask them to post your recipes, health tips, exercises, or other information on their social media.
- Find a celebrity to endorse your blog. A game-changer for you would be to get a celebrity to endorse you. Find a local fitness entrepreneur, author, or other well known celebrity who is willing to post something about your blog on social media. Often people from your town, those who went to your college, athletes, or people who have some affiliation with you will be willing to help if you have quality content and are providing a helpful service. Don’t be afraid to ask.
- Join online groups and social media groups. Provide valuable content and help for free on group forums. People will be interested to learn more about your blog if you provide value for free. Spend time on discussion websites such as Reddit.”
Natalie Alleblas
Natalie Alleblas is an SEO Sleuth who helps copywriters, marketers, and web developers with their clients’ SEO needs. She specializes in helping writers find the best keywords to use to maximize their chances of being found by Google.
“To grow their blogs, health bloggers should focus on improving the authority of their website. This can be done by getting inbound links (also known as backlinks) from other relevant, authoritative websites. This is where solid networking and collaboration really pays off for SEO. Health bloggers should look for opportunities to collaborate with complementary businesses. For example, a health blogger could write a guest blog on another website with a link back to their own blog. This will help strengthen their website’s authority which could lead to higher Google rankings and more organic traffic.”
Erik Rivera
Erik Rivera is the CEO of ThriveTalk.
“The fastest way that health bloggers can grow their blog is by advertising their content to relevant audiences on social media. Unknown to amateur bloggers, it is possible to quicken the traffic their blog receives by paying social media platforms to drive users into their site. Bloggers can learn social media marketing on their own using online resources. They can also partner with marketing agencies that specialize in social media marketing. The best part about using such tactics is that social media advertising platforms allow marketers to choose the audience for their ads, which increases the chance of success if health bloggers smartly target audiences, particularly those invested in their health.”
Tejas Nair
Tejas Nair is a freelance blogger from India and a master of none when it comes to writing about stuff.
“The one thing that health bloggers can do to grow their blog is to create content based on research, personal investigation, and surveys and not based on trending topics. With COVID-19, search engines – which are still the #1 traffic source for blogs – are very picky about what results they show. So, if you want your health blog to be picked up over, say, a Nature.com op-ed or a Wikipedia article, focus on qualitative and verifiable content. Take time to produce long-form, detailed content that does not focus on supplying random medical advice but suggests well-thought-out tips and tricks – actually backed by science and along with proof – to gather an authority in your space.”
Domantas Gudeliauskas
Domantas Gudeliauskas, Head of Organic Marketing at Hostinger.
“Seek out branded keywords and review practices or products. Find what’s relevant to your audience, check competitor articles, and what sort of traffic these keywords attract. Provide useful content, be honest with your opinions and professional insights, and successfully expand through the help of other companies. Most people read reviews before making purchases, so you’ll definitely find an audience for them.”
Chris Fernandez
Chris Fernandez is the CEO of Women’s Health Interactive.
“The health and fitness category on the web is ultra-saturated in terms of both content and large players that have long-established track records, domain authority, backlinks, and ranking potential far ahead of any startup blog.
That being said, there ARE ways that a new health blog can fight against what can often feel like an overwhelming current. The #1 way to grow your health blog that leverages your efforts for a synergistic effect? Syndication. Yep, that’s right. High-authority sites are crowding out most upstarts, and legacy websites are so entrenched that the amount of time, effort, and expenditures it would take to catch up is cost-prohibitive. That said, there are other strategies that can boost your SEO while simultaneously doing what creates a successful business: growing your brand! Therefore, you need to leverage OTHER platforms like Medium, like-minded websites that allow syndication or guest posting, and select social channels to repurpose your content. You’ll garner branding and awareness, free traffic, and also get backlinks within those articles that point to your other articles and social media posts.
We’re doing this with all our content now, and it’s opening up huge avenues for us – not just for traffic and backlinks but also branding, and we’re even monetizing older content on Medium! It’s a win-win for everyone – the websites syndicating you get free content to grow their traffic and satisfy their existing users, and you get your content seen in more places with the benefit of branding and backlinks. At the same time, you’re not having to worry about competing with larger, entrenched behemoths that you’ll never catch in certain verticals. If I had to choose one strategy, it would be syndicating and repurposing your content every chance you get.”
Alena Schowalter
Alena Schowalter is a certified vegan nutritionist and co-founder of the website Nutriciously.com, where she regularly shares unique recipes, transition tips, and guides for plant-based beginners. Together with her husband, she has published two eBook bundles and helped thousands of people succeed on a whole-food, plant-based diet.
“The most important part of growing your health blog is to be authentic and use great sources to back up your claims. Most people in the blogging business aren’t professionally trained MDs, but the advice that they give is highly influential to their reader’s lives! Not only do we have a huge responsibility to our readers, but search engines have also been rewarding websites with strong signals of E-A-T (expertise, authority and trust) more and more, ranking them higher in the search results and allowing for a greater reach. So, if you don’t have any expertise yourself, make sure to collaborate with MDs or RDs to make your nutritional claims bulletproof. There are too many scammy health blogs out there that publish content with lurid headlines, no sources, and who regularly contradict themselves. Don’t be one of them!”
Tammo Walter
Tammo Walter is the CEO and Co-Founder of ATAQ Fuel. Mr. Walter spent roughly 20 years in branding and advertising before he and his business partner started ATAQ in 2016. ATAQ is a plant-based sport nutrition product brand that only uses whole foods, natural ingredients, and extracts at dosages that have been scientifically tested to deliver results reliably.
“When it comes to growing an audience for a health blog, the best way to go about increasing your readership has to be through content marketing since you can create various helpful pieces that can be repurposed into equally meaningful information. For example, if you create a blog post about how working out and proper nutrition can boost your immune system, specific content (such as statistics) can be transformed into an infographic. You can post the infographic at a later time on your blog and social media sites to grab the attention of others who may have not read the blog post or forgot that information.”
Jessica Rose
Jessica Rose is the Chief Executive Officer of Copper H2O.
“We are a 100% female run e-commerce social enterprise in the health and wellness industry. We started in 2015 and have extensive experience writing for our health blog. Our #1 tip is to conduct detailed keyword research to optimize your blog posts from an SEO perspective. Find the most relevant keywords with the highest search volume related to your subject. Then, think of ways to make substantive additions to your blog post which address those related keywords. To be clear, it is important to not simply include the related keywords in the blog post (i.e., keyword stuffing). Rather, an effort must be made to include substantive discussions in the post which address the questions underlying each of the related keywords. By doing this, the blog post has the greatest chance of ranking well for multiple high-volume keywords and getting as much exposure as possible.”
Ben Aston
Ben Aston is the Founder of The Digital Project Manager.
“Don’t drown out your authentic voice by worrying about perfect writing. Sentence structure, tone, etc. – these can get in the way of expressing your enthusiasm for the health niche you’re in. Communicate naturally and focus on your voice. Let it carry the passion you have for the content your audience is looking for. What really matters is focusing on your ideas and your unique perspective instead of worrying about the technicals.”
Holly Rollins
Holly Rollins is the President at 10xdigital, a digital marketing agency that specializes in marketing strategy, SEO, pay-per-click advertising, PR/backlinks, and more.
“One of the first steps and best ways to grow your health blog is via analysis of potential topics. These topics should be relevant, yet you should do a content analysis to see if there is a void in the landscape for a certain angle or question about those topics that hasn’t been covered. One way to do this is via online keyword tools such as AnswerThePublic.”
Ian Kelly
Ian Kelly is the VP of Operations for NuLeaf Naturals. He’s helped launch two major cannabis brands in both Colorado and Massachusetts and has consulted for many various firms across the country. NuLeaf was ranked #11 overall, #4 for Health companies, and #1 for Hemp companies as the fastest-growing in America by Inc. 5000.
“Focus on a micro-niche instead of trying to cater to everyone. For example, when it comes to weight loss using the keto diet, people prefer to read from a blog that’s completely dedicated to that topic rather than a generic weight loss blog or, even worse, a general health blog. If you find your blog already a bit generic, identify your top ten best-performing blog posts. You are bound to find a pattern in terms of certain topics resonating more with your audience. Pick that micro-niche and start blogging more about it.”
Leesa Klich
Leesa Klich helps credible health professionals scale their online authority with strategically-planned and easy-to-read research-based health articles. She helps them build a reputable brand, establish trust with their audiences, and save them a ton of time so they don’t have to do the research or writing themselves.
“Publish awesome content and share it a lot more! With the massive ($4.2 trillion) and growing wellness industry, there’s a ton of demand for health information. There’s also an increasing supply of it available online. It’s a great opportunity right now in 2020 to grow your health blog by standing out among all the OK-ish content that’s out there.
Quality beats quantity, and everything you publish should reflect the excellence of your health practice. By focusing on quality blog posts (even if it’s not every single week), you can get noticed and shared. What makes a quality health blog post? One that resonates deeply with your ideal clients or patients and helps them reach their goals using scientifically-accurate and referenced information (search engines and social media all have misinformation policies, so being trustworthy is key!).
Plus, when you publish an awesome blog post, you naturally want to share it far and wide. You want everyone to see it, improve their health with it, and recognize you for being the one who helped them. (Yay, you!) When you publish a new awesome health blog post, I’d recommend creating multiple unique social media posts all linking back to that blog post. Then, schedule them to go out to your social media followers intermittently for an entire year to continue driving people to your health blog to continue to grow it.”
Sarah Anne
Sarah Anne is the founder of Good Life Marketing, offering business consulting, coaching, and strategy services to turn humble businesses into well-loved brands.
“The best way to grow your health blog is to plan and action an organic content strategy. Start by performing keyword research and collecting a list of search terms that are relevant, regularly searched, and low in competition. You can do this with free keyword research tools. Pay particular attention to search terms that are extremely low in competition – these can be absolute gems for fast-tracking your growth.
Once you’ve got a list of suitable keywords, prioritize them in order of achievability. If, for instance, you’ve found a great topic with high search volume and high competition, send it to the bottom of your list. Once you’ve established more traffic and credibility with posts targeting easier keywords, your ability to compete on harder search terms will increase. Now you have a content creation schedule.
The next step is to create phenomenal content that entertains and educates your readers. Aim for between 800 – 2,000 words per post, but don’t fixate on post length. Instead, focus on covering the topic comprehensively and enjoyably. Use relevant images, charts, quotes, and statistics to break up your text. Each article needs to be properly optimized for SEO and feature a captivating title. To achieve noticeable growth, you need to be publishing content no less than once a week.
The final and most important step is to share your content. There’s no point writing great articles and crossing your fingers. The smartest way forward is to promote new articles across all your channels, including social media platforms and your mailing list. Make an obvious call to action for your readers to share your article further. Prompts like social media share buttons function as visual cues to remind and encourage readers to share your blog. The key to growing a successful health blog is 50% content and 50% marketing. Give your readers every opportunity to help spread your content, and you’ll achieve excellent growth.”
Looking for an easy, effortless way to grow your health blog? Install our social media share buttons to encourage your blog visitors to share your top-notch health content on social media. Your loyal readers can share your content with just a single click, earning you more blog traffic and valuable word-of-mouth marketing to gain brand recognition. They’re simple to install in minutes, and they’re completely free to use!
