Health Coach Blogging – Using Your Blog For Wellness Marketing, Part 1

I get asked a lot of questions about how to blog for health coaches.  While there is no one set answer to this I will share with you what has worked for me and what I see successful health coaches doing.  This is a pretty big topic, so I will be splitting it into 2 articles.  In this first one, I will cover more of the what and why and in the second one more of the how of health coach blogging.

Pick Your Audience

The biggest mistake I see people making is having too broad of a range of topics on their health coach blog.  Just like in building your “tribe”, your blog should be focused around your target audience, niche, or ideal reader.  Does this mean you can’t ever write about anything else?  No, but you will be much more successful if you aren’t perpetually jumping off-topic.

We are all interested in tons of different healthy and holistic topics, but when it comes to building your online audience you really need to pick 1 group that you would like to get your message in front of.  I have written about building your tribe before, but it’s so important that I will probably keep talking about it in some form or fashion forever.

Find Out What They Are Searching For

Online marketers are always talking about keyword research.  While I think this is very important, it is not the end all be all for researching topics to write about.

Hopefully, you are either a member of or passionate about sharing your message with your “tribe”.  Start paying attention to the things people are talking about, asking questions about, and the latest news.

Some places to research ideas:

• Google Alerts – Set up a Google alert for your keyword or topic.  This can be delivered to your email address or even better you can set up multiple alerts and have them sent to Google reader to manage.
• Yahoo Answers – You can search Yahoo Answers for your keyword or topic to see what sort of questions people are asking.  While you are there, go ahead and answer a few.  Your goal ultimately is to be seen as an expert to your niche, so this is a good place to share some of your expertise.  People are looking for answers, go ahead, and help them.
• Keyword Research – You can either use the Google adwords keyword tool or any other keyword research tool you like.  I like Market Samurai since it gives more in-depth data than the Google research tool.
• Social Media – Search Facebook and Twitter to see what sort of questions people are asking.  If you have the answers, go ahead and connect with them.  This has the added benefit of helping to build your tribe in the process.

Go For The Long Tail

People get all excited when then start doing keyword research and see the huge volumes of people that are searching for their topic online.  The one problem is that if you try to rank your website or blog post for a term like “weight loss” or “stress reduction”, you’re chance of getting anywhere close to page one is basically zero (unless you are local SEO).

So what is the solution?  Start taking some of the more exciting keywords you find and drill down to find more “long tail” keywords.  These are keyword phrases related to your main keyword that have much lower search volume and by default lower competition.  You are much more likely to get a hit to your website if you are on page 1 or 2 for a keyword that has 100 searches a day than if you are on page 30 for a keyword that gets 10,000 searches per day.

I’ve written some other articles about keyword research and here is a video I did about using the Google Keyword Tool.

Start Generating Content

You can do all the research and have all the great ideas in the world, but if you don’t start putting content online, nobody will ever hear about it.  As they say, “content is king”, and this is something that will never change, no matter how many search algorithm updates Google puts out.  Their main goal is to connect their users with the most relevant content.

Does this mean you have to become a content producing machine?  No, there are lots of things you can do besides perpetually generating blog posts.  If you are anything like me, even one blog post a week gets to be overwhelming week after week.

Health Coach Blog Content Ideas

• Find some guest bloggers.  Team up with some people in your niche.  If you have an established blog, it should be easy to find a couple of people that would be happy to write guest posts for you.  It is a mutually beneficial deal for both of you.  If you are just starting out, you might need to find some other people that are in the same boat and team up together.
• Content Curation – Some of the most popular blogs online are simply curated news sites.  Your readers are probably interested in the latest news in your niche, but probably not quite as passionate about it as you.  Find the most important stuff, write a little commentary about it and share it on your blog.  Just make sure to credit the original source.  You can do this with articles, video or images.  (Hint:  If you use all three your site will be more engaging)
• Have a list of your long-tail keywords from your keyword research.

Summary

If you are looking for instant results then blogging is probably not for you.  But if you are looking to build your online presence, I highly recommend you get started.  Use some of these ideas to get started and stay tuned for part 2 where I will talk more about how to structure your blog posts and what to do with them once you have them written.