Health blogs are extremely popular on the internet today.
Almost everyone wants to lead a healthier lifestyle. This translates to the huge following that health blogs command. If you have a health blog, chances are you already have a good number of visitors simply by creating content for this niche.
If you are passionate about everything to do with health, nutrition, fitness, and other related health topics, you should consider starting a health blog and sharing your passion with the world.
You can take things a notch higher by monetizing your blog and making money from it. If this is your plan, then this article has been written for you. Here is how to monetize a health blog.
WHAT IS A HEALTH BLOG ?
Let us start with the basics. What is a health blog?
Well, put simply, a health blog is any blog that caters to a subject in the health niche.
The health niche is a very broad niche. It has to do with everything from fitness, nutrition, weight loss, general well-being and disease management.
If you want to start a health blog, it is a good idea to pick one health subtopic and focus on that on your blog. Once you have a good health blog going and you feel you are ready to monetize it, here are a few options you can consider.
1. AD NETWORKS
Ad networks are a great way to make money online.
However, health-related ad networks can be pickier than other niches. You need a good privacy policy page if you want to earn the trust of your ad networks.
In addition to an acceptable privacy policy page, most health-related ad networks will require you to set aside space at the top of your blog posts above the fold to hold two ads.
You also need to meet a minimum threshold for traffic. Usually that threshold is at least 5000 page views per month.
2. OFFER SERVICES
You can also monetize your blog website by advertising your services on the platform.
If you are a nutritionist, a physical trainer, a massage therapist or any other health professional, there is no better way to boost your business than by marketing your services through your blog.
Your marketing will need to be targeted to your local community. This is a specialized type of marketing, but it is extremely effective because most of your competing service providers will not have your marketing knowledge.
You will use SEO and social media effectively and get ranked higher than them in the search results. This will result in more traffic and therefore more business for you.
Offering your services on your blog is also a brilliant way to boost your brand recognition. Brand recognition is extremely important. It takes a long time to cultivate it. Offering services locally makes it easier to get your brand recognized because of the limited geographic area that you will cover.
3. AFFILIATE MARKETING
You can also monetize your health blog by signing up for affiliate programs.
As an affiliate marketer, you earn a commission by promoting other people’s products.
You market these products on your blog site and earn a commission whenever your readers make a purchase.
There are several benefits of affiliate marketing. It is one of the few online business models that will allow you to pick your products, your hours, how much you want to work and when you want to work.
The amount of money you get is directly proportional to how much work you put into the business.
Another huge benefit of affiliate marketing is the fact that it has an uncapped earning potential. This means that the sky is the limit. You can make as much money as you want, there is no limit to how much you can earn in a given period.
The simple and straightforward nature of affiliate marketing is what makes it such an attractive venture. Please notice that I said simple – not easy!
Furthermore, it is cheap, with little to no start-up costs.
The freedom it grants you and the job and financial security you get as an affiliate marketer is also just amazingly fulfilling.
To get started as an affiliate marketer, you need to decide the type of product you want to recommend to your readers. These products can broadly be categorized into two:
Physical products
You can choose to find excellent physical products related to your niche and recommend these products to your readers.
There are many ways to get physical products to market on your website. You can check out Amazon and the products that they have.
Amazon is the largest affiliate merchant for physical products. They have almost every product catering to every niche.
However, you should consider looking for other merchants besides Amazon and finding out what their commission rates are. Amazon is notorious for commissions in the low range of the scale (4% – 8%).
The best way to go about recommending physical products is to recommend stuff you already own or that you have used yourself. The fact that you have experience with the product you recommend automatically ads value to your opinion.
If you have the product, share the ways you use it. What you love about it and what you don’t like. Be real and genuine. The other advice I have is to stay away from stock photos of the product if you own it. Take your own pictures from different angles. Take pictures of you using it. It will add real value to your review. You will also gain more trust from your readers.
I understand that you cannot own every single product that you may want to recommend to your niche. In that case, make sure you do as thorough an investigation as you can. Amazon has a great customer review section. Other sites also have customer review sections.
Look for notes that say “verified buyer” or something like that to make sure the review is from a real consumer and not from some paid guy/girls.
Dig deep into the product searching every angle you can. Pay particular attention to the negative reviews to see if there is a pattern. You want to be absolutely certain that your recommendation is based on accurate info. Your reputation depends on it!
Digital products
You can also find digital products to recommend to your audience.
Consider finding digital courses relating to your niche and promoting them on your website. These courses can be text, video or a combination of both.
The beauty of digital products is that they get delivered immediately to your readers online.
Digital products are the preferred recommendations for affiliate marketers. This is for 2 reasons:
-Immediate delivery
-Higher commissions (typically between 25% and 75%)
But you need to be extremely careful here. Digital products are full of inferior quality and outright scams. Make sure to never recommend a digital product unless you are absolutely sure that it is what it claims to be and that it will provide value to your niche.
The sales pages are a good place to start investigating products but they are nowhere near enough to make a good recommendation. By nature, sales pages are designed to attract buyers. They do this by painting the rosiest picture of a product. They are designed to sell to the consumer, not to educate them.
Your job is to educate them.
Again, make every effort to own the product. This way you will have in-depth access to it. If you are providing a review of the product, this access will allow you to be thorough and attentive to details. Both of these things are valued by your readers.
If you are not providing a review, at least go through the whole content and curate it. Is it good content? Will it help your niche? Does it work? Is it worth the money?
Consider all these questions before making a recommendation for a digital product. Again, your reputation depends on it!
If you can’t own it (some of these digital products cost thousands of dollars) then do your due diligence. Scour the internet for any and all information relating to your recommendation.
Look at complaint sites to see if any complaints have been lodged against the product and its owner. Use google to do this. One note of caution here. Make sure you exercise good judgment when investigating complaints. Unfortunately, it is way too common for merchants to lodge false complaints in order to discredit a competing product.
Look at multiple reviews online. Essentially do all the detective work so you know the product in and out. You are also doing the research so your audience will not need to. This is a great service you are providing as long as your recommendation is unbiased and honest. Your readers will thank you for it by trusting your recommendations and purchasing them.
DO YOU NEED SOME MORE HELP?
Make sure you thoroughly research the product you are recommending to your audience. Never break the trust of your customers by recommending substandard products for easy cash. Do not compromise the integrity of your brand in this way.
If you need some help with affiliate marketing and the steps outlined above, I would like to offer you a hand.
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If you like this video then you will love the content that I am offering you!
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CLICK HERE NOW FOR MY IN-DEPTH REVIEW OF WEALTHY AFFILIATE
I hope that you found the content of this post helpful. My aim is to provide my readers with in-depth and actionable content that will help them in their endeavors.
Please leave me comments or questions below and I will answer them as soon as I can!
To your affiliate success,
Mike
Good topic, very useful and full of information.
Affiliate marketing is so much rewording for the hard work and , best of
all, it keeps paying in time.
Good steps to follow, thanks for sharing
Hi Marian,
I am glad you found the content helpful. You are absolutely right in saying that affiliate marketing is rewarding. You do the work once and get the rewards over and over down the road!
That is true that you can start a blog for little cost. The thing you pay for it with (in my experience) is sweat equity. It’s a lot of researching your topic and putting that research into words-and then in a post. You most definitely want to make sure your blog, health related or not, is something that you love spending time on because it takes so much of your free time. I love the idea of digital products as well. No shipping or handling-just boom! In their inbox (or available to download) right after checking out.Thanks for also mentioning the traffic as far as monetizing goes. That’s so important for me before stepping up to the big boys to advertise. How long have you been doing affiliate marketing?
Hi Jennifer,
Thank you for your in-depth comment. I agree that it is very helpful to blog about a subject you love because you will be spending a lot of time doing it. You are also correct that digital products are extremely convenient because the delivery is almost instantaneous (and so is the feedback). I have been affiliate marketing since 2006. At the time I got scammed into a “data entry” online program that turned out to be an adwords program. I lost hundreds of dollars in a matter of a few days on that endeavor 🙂 I am happy to report, that it has been a fantastic experience since then.