If you wanna learn how to start a health blog step by step this is a complete guide to follow. One thing I love about blogging is a passion, and your days don’t feel like work. There are a ton of things to write when it comes to health or wellness, and one of the best things is that you can work on your own time and schedule. You will have more time to do the things you love and spend time with your close ones.
This is a complete guide for starting a health blog, you gonna learn a few things on how to monetize it and how to grow it.
One of the main reasons for starting a health or wellness blog is that you can learn much more about different things. You will spend time looking for articles and your competition, so you will always gonna push yourself to do better than others. Blogging usually starts as a hobby, but after a while, you will be amazed by the opportunities that will come. It does not matter on which end of the world you are, you can always provide value to people with blogging.
Starting a health and wellness blog is much easier than you think. If you are not experienced in building websites, you will quickly learn how to start. Firstly, I wanna clear some things before we start.
Starting a Health Blog with Purpose
Having a purpose is crucial when you start a health blog. Your purpose will keep you going when your blog doesn’t get many visitors, that’s when you start pushing to get results.
- People think that blogging is a quick-rich scheme, but it is not and it takes a lot of hard work when you start. Because it is pretty cheap to start a blog, there are a ton of bloggers that just sit there with no content. Purpose and passion can keep you going when you start a health blog.
- Being patient. Often overlooked by soo many bloggers, we as humans are used to get paid at the end of the week or in the end of the month. Putting a few articles up on your health blog will not make you money instantly. Nothing happens overnight, that’s why it is important to be persistent if you wanna see results and build something that can last for years.
If you agree with me, then let’s move on.
1. Health Blog Name
Having a domain name that is short and easy to remember can be crucial when you are starting your health blogging journey. Having something that is easy to remember and catchy can attract many more people than something longer.
You need to have your domain name with .com, build trust from the start with your readers, and in my next paragraph will give you an idea of how to get the best deal.
2. Hosting & Domain
Building trust and relationship with your readers is a must, that’s why I don’t advise any of my readers using free platforms of free hostings. Some of the free platforms are blogspot.com or weebly.com, and when you make a website with them for free, your health blog will look something like healthblog.weebly.com. You have limited features and ads running all over your blog. You do not have full control over your wellness blog and can be easily shut down.
So what is the next step?
Registering a domain name could cost you around $15 per year, and basic hosting can cost around $7-10 per month. This can be a lot for a beginner that wanna start a health blog. That’s why I have a very special deal for you.
For as low as $2.95 per month, you can get a FREE domain name, free SSL certificate that protects visitors data, security features for your blog with amazing 24/7 customer support and of course 60% OFF on hosting. This is a deal that you do not want to miss.
I’ve been using BlueHost for many years, the customer support is top-notch and you can always reach them 24/7 are available. You can enjoy the SSL certificate that they offer for free (other hosts charge for this), and you get a super-fast loading speed on your health blog under 1 second. A perfect deal if you starting a health blog.
After you open the homepage of BlueHost, click on the Get Started button and you will see the following screen:
I recommend selecting the Basic plan because you are just starting and you get a perfect deal for 50 GB SSD storage with unmetered bandwidth. Once your health blogger gets popular, you can always upgrade so no worries.
The next step is creating a new domain, type the name that you will name your health blog and click next.
After you fill all the personal information, if you have enough budget I recommend getting Domain Privacy + Protection, this is perfect if you do not want to get any annoying calls from people that wanna help you with your website, BlueHost information will be public and not yours. If you don’t have enough budget, you can always upgrade later. Then you make the payment, and we go to the next step.
3. WordPress Installation
Once you purchase your domain and hosting, you have full control over your health blog. BlueHost is very well optimized for the script called WordPress, and it is really easy to manage it. WordPress.org recommends BlueHost for one of the top web hosting providers to use their script. Usually, WordPress is installed automatically on your website, if not, BlueHost offers a one-click install feature for under 1 minute to have everything set-up. If you are missing something just reach the live chat support they will assist you to get it done for you.
After everything is installed, you probably wonder how to log in.
Go to yourblog.com/wp-admin and the following screen show up:
Type your username and password, click Log In and now you can see the Dashboard of your blog.
The first thing I recommend doing is changing Permalinks, you can do that by going to Settings -> Permalinks.
You need now to select Post name and save the changes. I recommend this highly because your blog posts will look something like yourblog.com/healthy-diet, and not like yourblog.com/2020/01/01/healthy-diet.
4. Installing Plugins
Having a few plugins will help your website performing better for search engines, and for your visitors as well. On the left side, you will see Plugins, the point at them then click Add New. You can find plugins here and install them.
Recommended plugins:
- Yoast SEO: The most amazing plugin when it comes to On-Page SEO, you can change titles and descriptions, you can create a sitemap.xml for the search console from Google, so your posts can be easily crawled.
- WordFence: This plugin is perfect to protect your blog from any malware.
- Social Pug: Plugin that will allow your readers to share your posts on social media.
- Contact Form 7: This is a plugin that you can create a contact form and add it to a page.
- W3 Total Cache: Amazing plugin that offload some of the work hosting servers needs to do and makes your website loading faster.
- Classic Editor: If you are not a fan of the new WordPress style when it comes to posts, you can always switch back the old version with this plugin.
All of the recommended plugins above are free, but some of them have PRO options, and once your website gets profitable, I recommend upgrading to the PRO versions to unlock all the features that they offer.
5. Installing Theme
You want to have a good looking health blog so your visitors can easily navigate. There are two options available.
- Free Themes: Head over to Appearance -> Themes -> Add New. When you select, you will see all the popular themes that most of the websites use. If you like some, you can install it and then activate it. If you fall in love with the theme, you can always upgrade it to the PRO version if it has it.
- Premium Themes: These kinds of themes will make your blog looking unique and they are always up-to-date. Their developers take care of them really well and trying to make them as secure as possible. Depending on the theme features, you looking at $20-250 at a premium theme. I recommend StudioPress premium themes, they are SEO-friendly and really good looking. If you decide to purchase a theme, you will download the .zip file, go to yourblog.com/wp-admin/themes.php, click Add New then Upload Theme.
6. Getting a Logo
If you have good designing skills, you can always make one for your health blog. You have two options:
- Canva: I use it personally for a lot of images for my websites or my youtube channel. They have incredible free designs and by changing some things you can make a really good decent logo.
- Fiverr: If you do not have any designing skills, I recommend getting a logo designer from Fiverr. The logo might cost you around $5-25. Make sure they offer revisions because if you don’t like the logo they can go back and change it.
7. Pages
Adding a few pages for your visitors to read your story can only bring trust from them.
I recommend a few pages like:
- My Story page: You can write a page and explain to your visitors why you started blogging about health and wellness and how you learned about it. You can tell a bit about yourself and what you doing daily bases. People love good stories, that’s why we have so many shows on Netflix.
- Contact page: A place where your readers can reach out and ask for help or any kind of collaboration. That’s why I recommended the Contact Form 7 plugin.
- Copyright page: This is a page that you explain why you don’t want your content to be stolen and that is fully yours.
8. How to Start a Health Blog with Quality
Posting high-quality content and providing value to your readers is a must if you want to be successful blogging online. By providing the value your blog will gain authority and Google will soon start to rank you for low-competition keywords. There are a ton of topics that you can write about when it comes to the health and wellness niche.
You just need to take action and analyze your posts On-Page SEO with Yoast.
9. How to Start a Wellness Blog with Social Media
If you want to get free traffic from social media, you need to be involved there also. This can results in potential customers as well.
- Instagram: On this platform, you can easily grow by providing high-quality photos and videos when it comes to health. There are a lot of Instagram accounts that help people lose weight, help them meditation, help them live better and healthier lives. You can bring traffic by putting your health blog link in the bio and by swipe up on stories.
- YouTube: If you are not afraid to be on camera, you can always make 2-3 minute long videos that provide value to people. I have seen a lot of YouTubers that are in the health niche and they just talk on their videos without showing their face, and still manage to get millions of views per video. This is a good way to bring traffic from youtube forever because the videos stay there forever.
- Pinterest: Usually this platform is about fashion, health and 70-80% on it are women. You can tap on this social media much easier because the posts can go viral much easier. It can bring thousands of traffic per month if you do the moves correctly.
10. How to Start a Health Blog and Make Money
After you set-up your health blog successfully, you can start focusing on making money off it. Health blogging can be very lucrative for yourself.
Digital Products with Affiliate Marketing or Cost Per Actions:
One of the easiest ways to make money from your blog is to recommend digital products to your visitors. This is one of the best ways because you don’t worry about customer support on the products, you didn’t create them. The owners of these products take care of all that. ClickBank and MarketHealth are the best examples. You can easily make $40 commission on a product if someone buys it through your link. You can see a ton of health offers on these platforms and you can recommend some to your visitors when you are writing posts.
Google Adsense:
This is something you do not need to do much. Sign-up for Google Adsense account, and after you get approved you can post a banner on the first paragraph on your post. Installing a plugin called Quick Adsense will help you manage the banners easily. After your blog has a lot of visitors, you can switch to Ezoic or Mediavine to earn 10x on what you earned with Google Adsense.
Amazon Associates:
You can recommend products or health books that are on amazon. You can earn a commission around 3-10% depending on the product. Sign-up for Amazon Associates account and recommend a health blog from Amazon.
Starting a Health Blog – Conclusion
Hopefully, this guide helped you learn how to start a health blog successfully. You have amazing steps on how to monetize it and how to bring traffic from social media.
Do not think that there is too much competition about health blogging. This is a weak mentality.
Your health blog will tell a unique story and that’s why you will stand out from the crowd.
You can work on your own time and your own schedule. Soon enough you will start ranking for the low competition health keywords.
Don’t be afraid to make the jump in health blogging.
