Best strategy for health and fitness blogging in 2024

All blogs are not equal, and blogs in all niches do not perform the same way.

That was a routine statement, you might say. 

You are right, but that carries an important reminder for bloggers who want to earn money from their blog, which is a niche blog- a blog in a specific area such as beauty, travel, photography, cooking or health.

Without wasting time, we shall first discuss the peculiarities of health blogs, and then come to the specific actions we should take so that our blog shines and we are able to earn from the blog, if that is our goal.

In describing how health and fitness blogs differ from broad-category blogs, I will focus on blogs maintained by knowledgeable persons in this field. We shall not talk about blogs/ websites maintained by product companies and bloggers whose primary focus is product promotion rather than sharing experiences, giving tips, etc.

The world of health and fitness blogs

- Small blogs in health and fitness niche have very tough competition from international and local brands, which include drug companies, hospitals and research organizations. Important keywords take visitors to websites of these organizations rather than normal blogs, unless a blog has its own fan following or is well optimized for search engines.

- Google, the largest search engine, and its sister, YouTube, favor health content that is created and  reviewed by certified health experts. So, if you yourself are not an established medical professional, your blog is at a disadvantage. 

Similarly, if you have a health-related channel on YouTube and you do not claim to be a certified medical practitioner, you have an inherent disadvantage. I have seen doctors purveying misleading information and advice and yet being loved by viewers, much more than genuine experts but who do not have a medical degree and a stethoscope around their neck. 

- People often search for health content when in immediate need. For example, a person who has developed itch over his body overnight would look for a quick solution to his problem. If they have money and they live in a city, they would likely consult a doctor offline or online and/or buy a product that promises instant relief. Some might explore the reason for itching and keep looking for more content before taking a decision, and search engines would prominently display content that has promotional intent- mostly the display has been paid for or has been highly search engine optimized. Thus, small and medium sized blogs do not stand a big chance of being shown by Google, Bing or YouTube on top of search pages. 

- A large amount of content on alternative systems of medicine and fitness tend to be written by content creators who do not have deep knowledge of the subject. They end up reaching wrong conclusions and serving wrong advice, and making other blunders. Worse, they do it deliberately, and then put strong clickbait thumbnails and titles and use other SEO techniques to come on top of search results. They are interested in making money by blogging through Google Ads and affiliate commissions, even if it comes at the cost of patients and other information seekers. 

- Conversely, if you are a health professional and want to create a blog, you have an advantage from the beginning not only in terms of your existing client base and the services you provide, but also you are a proven expert in the eyes of search engines, social media platforms and visitors.

 

Now, let's see how we can make our health blog a success despite competition from the big guns. 

The tips I give in the present post are in addition to the many universally-applicable SEO tips given in many other posts in this blog. I am linking a collection of SEO posts at the end of this post. 

Target low-competition niches within broad medical/ health areas

To be successful as a health blogger, you should focus on specific topics, not too broad areas. If you have expertise on a particular field of medicine (e.g. hepatology), concentrate on that until you have established in that field as a resourceful and respected blogger. Discuss and provide tips relating to that field from different angles. 

If you are a general health blogger, who is not a certified doctor, but have good knowledge of human anatomy, physiology and other fields of medicine/ biology/ etc, you still need to pick up something that will have low viewership but even lower competition, e.g. advances in the field of radiology. Alternative medicine and naturopathy give many opportunities to deal with niche subjects, e.g. pranayama, and use of common herbs in treating ENT infections. 

Yes, you cannot create hundreds of posts or videos on a very narrow niche. Even if you could, there will be very few searchers/ visitors interested in that subject. What you have to do is select a medium-broad area and then choose very specific medicines/ treatments/ health issues within that broad area.

Look at the example of hepatology given above: it is a fairly broad area, dealing with health of liver and related organ-systems. Within it, individual posts could be on a particular ailment or a special insight into that particular ailment. For example, even gall stones is a sufficiently broad topic within hepatology, so you should make your posts NOT on general aspects of gall stones but "What to do in case of acute pain due to gall stones" or even more specific.

Make a topic cluster on similar health-related subjects

It helps in terms of SEO when you make a cluster of posts very closely related to one topic. Of course, they should be inter-linked using proper anchor text (=text that describes the link). It not only helps viewers look at closely related posts on the topic they search for, it also tells Google that this website has a lot of varied content on this topic, so it deserves to be given a high ranking for this topic.

Put relevant visual content

Images, animations and videos, explaining the health issue or how a treatment affects different organs, go very well with a discussion on health topics. Putting such visual content on the blog shows your effort to explain the matter and your expertise on the subject. In addition, it leads to the viewer/ visitor understanding the subject better, thus satisfying him/her and possibly making them your regular visitor and follower. 

Can you get a health professional on board?

If you are not yourself a qualified medical practitioner or researcher, consider having a professional to either review your content or, at least, be there as a guest. That endorses your content, and Google and YouTube especially like that. Look how some big health portals give credentials of authors and reviewers on their posts; that boosts their reputation as well as search ranking substantially. 

If you are a medical practitioner or researcher, and an authority, build further on your reputation. Without bragging too much, tell about your expertise on the topic and the overall subject-matter of the blog.

Give references, quote quality sources

When discussing a health topic, especially when talking about latest developments or discussing a topic in-depth, give references at the end of the post, with links to them. They add good value to the content. Besides, giving references shows your genuineness as well as transparency - both attributes that make a person credible and reliable. 

Give genuine information and advice

Unfortunately, bluffs and clickbait thumbnails work a lot in health blogging; they get a large number of views, even if some visitors feel cheated later on. Unfortunately again, search engines and YouTube are not able to filter out or penalize such content beyond a point. 

However, if you are interested in building a long-term fan following, and serve the society, please exaggerate your claims or sprinkle drama only to the extent it helps attract attention of the searcher/ visitor, but do not serve wrong information and advice or mislead your visitors in any other way.  

Please, please, do not use AI for content creation. The machine-created content has soul lacking in it, and we often find repetition of style and substance in such content. In the process of mechanically creating content based on its learning, the AI model often produces a product that is too structured, and seemingly very correct but lacking context. In short, it does not touch the heart of the reader, not as of now. 

If you have the knowledge of the subject and it is crying to come out of your mind into the blog, you will hate to plead Chat GPT or CoPilot or Gemini to help you with content for the blog, no? 

Finally, let me take you to the title of this post: Best strategy...

If you are already running a blog, you have to review your progress- whether you are performing to your satisfaction. In not, what course correction is needed? Hope, the tips given above and some search engine optimization would do the trick. 

However, if your blog is very new or you are yet to open a blog or you want to revive an old blog gone dead, you will need to keep in mind much more. You must work on different aspects of blogging, starting with choosing the right domain name. Just for illustration, if you choose a domain name 'muscle cramp blog' and after some time you decide to expand its scope to include different aspects of physiotherapy, you will need to change the domain name, losing all the acquired brand value. So, start with considering different aspects including time and money in hand, domain name, regularity of posting, technical support required, and so on. Have a mid-term goal, and then evolve a strategy to reach that goal. This post on how to make money from blogging will help you evolve a sound blogging strategy.

Happy blogging!

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