How to start health & wellness blog & make money

Hi I’m Praneeth Kumar.

In this blog I will walk you through everything you need to know about how to start a health and wellness blog step by step and make money from it.

This is the most comprehensive guide you can find online regarding starting a health, fitness, wellness blog so I would recommend you to bookmark the blog So you can come back and read it again.

So without further ado let’s get started.

Here is a 30000 foot view of the blog post.

What is health & wellness blog?

Basically a health and Wellness blog is a type of blog which publishes information and blog posts related to health and wellness related topics.

Some of the most popular health blogs are nerd fitness, healthline, WebMD, medicalnewstoday, Mayo clinic, etc.

There are various reasons you should consider starting a blog whether it is health or any other topic like,

  • Sharing your thoughts, ideas knowledge and expertise is one of the reason.
  • Building a personal brand online also a good reason.
  • And making extra income online is a good one.

For more information you can read my guide on why start a blog and benefits in detail but for now let’s take a look at how you can start health and wellness blog.

Skills required to start a health and wellness blog.

Let’s take a look at some important skills you need to learn and have in order to start a blog not just health but any blog in general.

  1. In my opinion networking and communication skills is important skill you should be learning to become a successful blogger, such skills can help you lead to many opportunities including increasing your influence and getting a guest post opportunity and getting an interview, i would recommend you to read the book of Dale Carnegie on how to win friends and influence people to improve your networking and communication skills.
  2. Because blogging is a long-term game since you won’t get results overnight so you should be able to have important skills like patience, discipline and consistency in publishing the blog posts regularly if you really want to get successful.

Apart from skills, you should also have some changes in mindset and change in attitude.

You should realise the fact that blogging is no longer a personal diary as it was once used to be in the early 2000’s.

Blogging is a real online business where you earn money by adding value to your audience publishing content around a particular topic and

in order to do that you should invest in multiple things like a good web hosting, email Marketing software, necessary blogging tools like grammarly,

freelance content writers, Digital Marketing services, seo tools like Ahrefs and semrush and

above all you should be open minded and ready to change and adapt to different conditions because blogging in the most cases,

you will be highly relied on Search engine Optimisation which is Google to get traffic to your website and the fact of the matter is that Google is constantly changing with new algorithm updates and changing user behaviour.

How to start a health and wellness blog?

There are exactly 9 steps you need to follow in order to start a successful health and wellness blog.

Select a niche

When it comes to starting a blog or any online business in general the first thing you need to do is to decide a particular topic and industry which you will target.

In a similar fashion you should also consider selecting a niche and industry for your health and wellness blog.

Because health and wellness is already a very competitive industry I would recommend you to start with small and micro niche topic in the beginning and then expand & grow to a larger topic when you gain some authority in the small topic.

Here are some interesting health related topics.

  • Yoga, fitness & Physical wellness
  • Weight loss
  • Weight gain
  • Parenting & motherhood
  • Meditation, stress mental health & psychology
  • Nutrition
  • Children care
  • Skin care
  • Eye care
  • Sexual wellness

Only consider this list of ideas for brainstorming but you should select the right topic for your blog based on your interest and knowledge.

Even though you do not need a degree in order to start a health and Wellness blog or any blog in general but,

because we are talking about health as a topic to start a blog and the information you share will directly influence the life of people who act upon that blog so you definitely need some level of trusted knowledge or certifications,

you should consider hiring freelance medical professionals to write content or fact check the content before you publish it.

You can further learn about how you can select a topic for your blog in detail with my guide here.

Get web hosting

There are many website builders and blogging platforms and some of the most popular ones are,

  • Wix
  • Weebly
  • WordPress
  • Square space
  • Drupal

But I would recommend you to consider with WordPress.org as your content management system and blogging platform.

Although I have already written a detailed guide on why wordpress is the best content management system and blogging platform on the Internet.

You can read that article here but long story short, let’s take a look at a couple of unique selling proposition (USP) of WordPress.

  • It is the largest content management system which manages more than 43% of websites on the internet.
  • It is highly user, beginners and SEO friendly.
  • It is relatively cheaper compared to other alternatives.
  • It is a lot customisable and flexible.
  • Since wordpress is an open source software, you own your website.

Although there are a few disadvantages of using wordpress like learning curve and security which can be easily solved and

you can read my guide on benefits and drawbacks of using WordPress and how to secure wordpress here but for now let’s see how you can start your website using WordPress.

If you have read USP of WordPress, you already know that but wordpress is an open source software so in order to manage your website you must get web hosting service.

Basically you need to purchase a web hosting service so that you can Store all of your website files on a server which can be easily accessed by users on the internet.

You can think of webhosting services as remote computers and all you are doing is purchasing a space for a period of time so that you can store your website files like you would do with rented house.

unfortunately you need to renew your plan with web hosting services every month or every year there is no lifetime deal.

I will not get into the details about how you can host wordpress on your self without purchasing any web hosting service you can read it here.

The ideal situation is to purchase a web hosting company so that you can work on things that are most important which is

creating your website rather than focusing on security & maintenance of servers which you should be doing if you host your website yourself.

Although there are many web hosting companies like, hostinger, bluehost & siteground.

I would strongly suggest you to host your website with Bluehost hosting.

You should use bluehost because of the reasons below,

  • Bluehost is one of the top wordpress hosting recommendations.
  • Bluehost is very cheap yet very powerful web hosting service.
  • Bluehost is very wordpress and user friendly with good support, speed & service.
  • Bluehost manages more than 2 million websites worldwide.
  • Bluehost is one of the oldest, largest yet most popular web hosting companies you can find online.

You can further learn about bluehost with my bluehost honest review.

First of all let me walk you through how you can create a wordpress website on bluehost.

 

 

 

Get a domain name

Basically a domain name is the name & address of your website online, that is what people will search for in Google and on the Internet to visit your website among millions of websites on the internet.

I will not get into further details about domain name you can read it here.

But now let’s take a look at how you can get a domain name for your website and start your project of creating a health blog.

A domain name is something that you need to purchase on a temporary basis and

you need to renew your purchase of domain every year or after every 2 years depending upon how long you have purchased the domain name for.

There was many places where you can purchase a domain name which are called domain registrars like Godaddy, hostinger, hostgator.

Since you are purchasing bluehost hosting from my recommendation, the beautiful thing is that bluehost offers a free domain name for 1 year.

This means that you do not need to invest money in purchasing a domain name for one year which will save you around $15.

After your purchase bluehost web hosting service you can get the free domain name for your website for one year of  You can select the domain name While purchasing the web hosting.

Before you purchase your domain name make sure to read a few guidelines below.

  • Make sure the domain name is easy to read, remember and spell, avoid using hypens and numbers.
  • There are many popular bloggers like Neil Patel, Adam enfroy, etc who have their own name as domain name and if you are also interested in selecting your own name as domain name, you can do that, but, make sure to read my guide on naming your blog after yourself with pros and cons before you select your own name as your domain name.
  • You can also choose a domain name which let user know what your website is all about, for example nerdfitness is a popular health blog which focuses on fitness related topics at the same time there is also healthline which is another blog related to health and web MD and medical news today, you can easily understand that these blogs are related to health so you can also create a domain name that describes what your website is going to be.

Even though you can select any domain extension you want but i would recommend to go with .com or .org one, it is the popular extensions.

Honestly speaking you do not need to spend a lot of time like normally people spend more than a  week in figuring out the right domain name,

Your domain name does not really make much difference in the success of your website, it is the quality of content you publish that makes the difference, if you cant find the domain name you can use domain name generators.

Install WordPress and configure settings

After your purchase web hosting and domain name from bluehost, you will get an email to your account it with the username and

password which you can use to login to your account and get started with your project of creating a blog on WordPress.

Please don’t worry when I say that you should install wordpress first it’s not have big task, you can either contact the support team or read the support documentation of the hosting to help you in the process.

You can read this tutorial on how to install wordpress on your bluehost account.

The good thing about bluehost is that you can simply install wordpress on your hosting open with just single click and you don’t need to be a technical person to do that.

 

After you install the wordpress on your website I would recommend you to configure someone settings and install the right theme and plugin for your website.

 but before that you can click here to learn about all the important settings you need to configure after you install wordpress on your hosting account,

I don’t want to show you all the important settings in this blog if I do, this blog gets over 10000 words long.

Install a right theme and necessary plugins for SEO

After you get all the settings configured it’s time to install the right theme for your website.

A theme is basically the look, feel, design f your website.

In order to select a theme for your website you need to select the themes option in the right bar of wordpress dashboard and select on add new and

you can search anytheme you want and click on install and activate then you can see that theme on your website home page.

On WordPress you can find thousands of free themes which you can install and activate for various different types of websites including news health and finance related blogs, but because we are starting a health blog.

My personal recommendation of themes are below,

  • Astra
  • Generate press.

All of these themes are SEO friendly and also give you lot of room for customisation.

Before you to select your own theme apart from my recommendation you should look at the total installations and reviews of the theme.

But some of the themes are premium one’s which will cost you another couple of hundred dollars.

You need to make sure that you select a good theme because,

people judge a website by its look and your website presentation and theme will play a huge role in building the credibility with your audience.

At the same time there are a couple of different plugins you should install and activate on your wordpress website.

Without getting into further details a plugin is basically a simple line of code which you can install and it gets attached to the core wordpress file of your website and

it will help you add new functionalities within a matter of clicks without you ever touching a single line of code.

Availability of these plugins makes WordPress the largest content management system on the internet.

There are more than 50000 plugins in WordPress plugin directory but you should only install a couple of months and you can read my guide for that on important wordpress plugins to install.

But before you install any plugin on your own I  would recommend you to read my guide on what are the things you need to keep in mind while installing a plugins,

since plugins are something which you need to be very careful as installing wrong plugins can cause slower website speed and your website can even get hacked.

Since wordpress is an open source software I would recommend you to read my guide on how to secure your wordpress website from hackers and malware because such attacks can occur.

Get the necessary tools

Now it’s time to get some necessary tools.

First, you need to connect with your website with two of the most important tools of Google.

  • Google search console – it is a tool which will help you identify the errors and issues on your website and show how your website in performing in Google search engine.
  • Google Analytics – it is a tool which will help you to analyse your website traffic by looking at total business their location and the amount of time they spend on your website, etc.

Obviously you can find many articles and video tutorials online to learn how you can connect your website with these two tools of Google and by the way it is completely free to use so there is no cost involved.

Other than that I would also recommend you to consider using other tools like canva which is a graphic design tool which can help you create amazing custom images and

graphics for your blog posts and images for your social media handles, you can read my canva review here.

If you have enough investment and budget then also encourage you to purchase premium SEO tools like Ahrefs or semrush.

These tools will help you with different activities related to SEO like,

  • Keyword research.
  • Content planning.
  • Seo website audit.
  • Link building.
  • Email outreach.

 There are lots of other tools you can consider purchasing, and if you want you can read this guide on most important blogging tools required.

Do the Keyword research

let’s take a look at how you can start creating and publishing blog posts on your website step by step.

Normally you publish a blog post on your health blog after doing some keyword Research and finding the right content ideas and topics.

For those of you who do not know what keyword research is it is a process of finding the right keywords which are basically words and phrases that people search on Google and

other search engines who are looking for some information and you target those phrases which are called keywords and

write blog posts around them and publish them on your website so that those pages can get indexed in Google and show up in search results of Google and other search engines.

For example if you start a blog on weight gain niche, some popular questions or keywords are,

  • can i gain weight eating bananas?
  • does banana shake increase weight
  • can i gain weight eating watermelon

These are some of the popular keywords I have found doing keyword research which are great ideas to target & write blog posts around on your website,

Slowly they get indexed by Google crawlers and they eventually show up in Google search results which will depend upon the keyword competition and

when page ranks in higher positions of Google like top 3, it can get traffic to your website.

I am mentioning Google more because it is the largest search engine with 92 percentage of market share.

Keyword research is the first step of Search engine Optimisation which is optimising a website according to search engines like Google so that you can get traffic from them.

As an absolute beginner and newbie to blogging and digital marketing space I would not recommend you to invest in tools like Ahrefs, semrush

Which costs 99 dollars per month for keyword research process, obviously there are free alternatives to that.

  • Read ubersuggest review, is this keyword research tool worth it?

Now I will not walk you through how you can do keyword research because it is quite lengthy rather I have already written a detailed guide on how I do keyword research for free using Google you can check that right here and also read the best free keyword research tools list here.

Write blogs

After you do keyword research and find the right keywords to go after it’s time to learn how you can create the right type of content in right format so that it can rank in Google and other search engines and get traffic to your website.

If you want to learn in detail about how you can write a blog step by step you can read my guide here but I will give you a bird’s eye view on how you can approach writing blog posts professionally.

First of all there are different types of blog posts you can write like,

  • Educational posts are blogs where you educate your audience & inform them about something.
  • Commercial posts are blogs where you educate at the same time want your audience to purchase any product or service after reading your blog.
  • Personal blogs are blogs where you share your personal story, daily life incidents and experience on your blogs with your audience in order to build the relationship.

I would recommend you to have 50% of your blogs educational and informative and other 50% of commercial and personal posts.

First of all any & every blog posts is divided in three different sections,

  • Introduction-this is a part where you let users know what the blog post is going to be about and build a connection as author with the reader.
  • Body-this is the part where you share information related to that keyword, this is where you share the different techniques and strategies and solve the problem of the user.
  • Conclusion-this is the part where you conclude the blog post and give a call to action regarding what the user should do after reading your blog post.

Here are some interesting and helpful tips when it comes to writing blog posts.

  1. Always make your blogs personal, think of your blog posts like you are having a conversation with your friend online and use words like you and I more.
  2. Improve the reliability of your blog posts using Heming way editor, no one likes to read big words that are difficult to understand.
  3. Use short sentences & paragraphs, people on the Internet reading blog posts have short attention span and they jump off and bounce away from your website if you have big blocks of text without any space in between.
  4. Use images and visuals whenever possible to illustrate a point and concept because an image can easily replace 1000 words and more attractive, requires less energy to understand.
  5. Always backup your claims and statements with latest studies, statistics and add external links to authority websites in your industry, for example because you are starting health blog make sure to add links to other big health blogs like Web MD and healthline, this will make your blog more trustworthy.

Because health is a topic which will directly affect people’s life when the read your information and

act upon it so you should make sure that your content is accurate and backed by data and studies and you should optimise your content and blog posts for EAT so that you can rank on Google.

Whenever you are writing a blog post, always insert the targeted keyword in important places like,

  • H2 headings.
  • Meta description.
  • First 100 words of your posts.

Since I have already recommended you to install rank math plugin for your wordpress website it will help you easily optimise your blog posts for search engines.

You can further learn more about how you can write a blog post in detail here.

Since you are blogging in the early days you should consider publishing at least two articles every single week to get link velocity going,

read this guide on how often you should publish a blog post on your website.

But now, I hope you have understood how you can write blog posts effectively and now let’s move forward to have you can promote your blog and get traffic and make money.

Promote your website & build links

Now let’s take a look at how you can promote your blog and build backlinks to it.

You can click here to learn in detail about how you can promote a blog but to summarise the ideas of promotion are,

  1. You can build email list of your audience & share your blog posts when ever you publish them on your website using email marketing tools like MailChimp.
  2. You can use social media platforms especially Pinterest, youtube and Instagram because you have a health related blog and these social media platforms are highly visual focused, you can use them to build your brand online and interact with your audience at the same time get traffic to your website, for that case you can use Canva to create amazing images you can publish on social media, you don’t need to create new piece of content rather you can repurpose your existing content of blogs.
  3. If you have enough investment and budget then you can also consider investing in Facebook ads and Google ads on your website to get that initial boost of traffic.
  4. You can also publish a guest post on other authority websites related to your industry and get traffic at the same time backlinks to your website.
  5. You can also use online content publishing platforms like medium and Quora to get traffic to your website by answering questions and publishing content on their platforms.

By the way if you want to learn more about how you can build backlinks you can read my guide on that.

How to make money from health and wellness blog?

There are various different ways you can make money from your health and wellness blog once you get it successful.

Let me state down 5 of the most popular methods of making money from your health and wellness blog,

  1. Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest methods to make money from your health and wellness blog all you need to do is to sign up to affiliate program related to your industry, get the affiliate links, promote them and make money when people purchase the product through your affiliate link for example if you blog related to fitness you can join affiliate programs like horizon fitness, sell the products and make money.
  2. Selling your own products & services is another way to make money, avacadu which is a popular and well known fitness blog is a good example for this because they sell a product called 21day fatloss challenge, & that product is so successful, similar to that you can also create any product related to your industry or you can become a health coach and offer services and consultancy online to your audience.
  3. Displaying ads is considered a popular method of making money from your blog but in order to do that you should first of all reach some goal of traffic, for example if you want to join advertising networks of mediavine or adthrive then you should get at least 25,000 to 50,000 pageviews one month on your website to get approval and start displaying ads on your website or you can create a advertise with us page displaying all the statistics of your website including the traffic and demographics so that you can invite different brands to display their products as advertisements on your website, this website is good example for that.
  4. Publishing sponsored content is another monetization strategy, you should realise the fact that people are more interested in learning about brands and products through blog posts than advertisements because they know advertisements are biased so different brands approach popular blogs in the industry so that they can publish a sponsored post on their website including a backlink to their website to build the credibility to their brand, you can either approach brands to publish sponsored content or you can join different networks like Flyout and adsy which will connect brands with publishers like you.
  5. Becoming a freelance writer is another good option to make money from your health blog because you can show your blog posts on health blog as samples and portfolio and get freelance gigs related to health industry.

These are all the things you need to know about starting a health and wellness blog.

With that being said let’s conclude the blog post.

Ending remarks.

This is all you need to know about how to start a health and wellness blog.

Do comment down if you want to start a blog.

Share the blog post with your family and friends if you have found it helpful, sharing is caring.

  1. I will catch you next time till then keep learning and keep growing.
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