If you’re eating paleo, you’ve probably come on quite a journey with your diet and health. Maybe you’ve suffered with health issues and paleo is how you’re overcoming them. Maybe you were overweight and eating paleo gave you the freedom to eat as much as you wanted and lose weight at the same time. Or maybe you’ve always been curious about healthy eating and paleo is just what makes sense to you.

Whatever your background is, the chances are that other people out there are on a similar journey to you. The chances are that someone somewhere could benefit from hearing your story. Your knowledge and experiences could help someone to turn their life around. Maybe you could even save a life.

Could You Be A Health Coach Or Writer?

Health coaches and bloggers draw on their experiences, knowledge, and studies to help people like them prevent and cure health issues through food. They can have a huge impact on the world. 

But being a good health coach or writer requires more than knowing your grains from your legumes. While the knowledge side of health coaching is extremely important, health coaches also need business and marketing skills. It’s no good having the expertise if you’ve got no one to give it to.

This is where the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and Health Coach Launch come in. The Institute for Integrative Nutrition is the world’s largest nutrition school. It’s the premiere online health school offering a Health Coach training program and it’s been helping those interested in pursuing a career in nutrition for years. Health Coach Launch is our very own guide to launching your own health coaching website. It takes you step-by-step through the process of building your site, so that you can promote your services and demonstrate your expertise to potential clients.

You can get your free copy of Health Coach Launch here and sign up for a free taster class with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition here. Otherwise, read on to hear our best tips for starting your very own health blog.

5 Tips For Starting Your Health Blog

1. Choose a solid hosting provider.

The last thing you want to do is put together the perfect site and then find out no one can see it (yes, this actually happens!). Hosting is essentially your plot of land on the internet. It’s where your site will live. A hosting provider is the company that provides you with that land. It’s really important to host your website with a really reliable hosting provider, otherwise you may wake up one day to find that your site’s down and no one can access it.

You can see a comparison of different hosting providers here, but, to cut to the chase, we recommend Bluehost. Bluehost is rock solid. It’s the industry standard and you can get 50% off their hosting package plus a free domain name using this link. 

Action: Get a solid hosting provider by signing up with Bluehost.

2. Build your site on WordPress.

There are lots of options out there for building your site but the builder we recommend is WordPress. In the past, to build a site, you had to know how code with things like HTML and CSS. WordPress changed all that. Essentially, WordPress is a program, much like Word or any other program on your computer, that lets you build pages and blog posts into your site. WordPress gives you complete control over your site, so you can use whichever theme you’d like and install plugins to add functionality. 

That said, there are two versions of WordPress. WordPress.com is web-based and has limited functionality. If you go this route, you’ll be limited in terms of what you can do to your site and what you can make it do. The WordPress you want to use is the self-hosted one available from WordPress.org. To use this version, you need to download it and then upload it to your hosted site. From there, it’s just a case of installing it and setting it up however you’d like. If this sounds confusing, see our step-by-step guide to starting a food blog.

Action: Install WordPress. 

3. Brand your blog. 

Often the most successful health blogs are branded. This means they have a brand name (such as Ultimate Paleo Guide or Paleoso) rather than the blogger’s name (such as Joe Bloggs). Branding your blog will make it memorable, so it’ll be more likely that your readers will return to your site. Branding can also build trust, because most people are more likely to trust a brand than a random person from the internet who they’ve never heard of before.

To brand your site, you’ll need a brand name and a domain, a logo, and a solid design. Your brand name could consist or two or three words that briefly and accurately describe what you do. Here are some good examples of health-related brand names:

• Ultimate Paleo Guide
• Balanced Bites
• Healthy Crush
• Paleoso

Once you’ve decided on your name, you’ll need to secure the domain name for that name. The domain name is the address of a website, for example www.ultimatepaleoguide.com. Again, you can get your domain name by hosting your site with Bluehost.

Depending on your skills, you can either do your website and logo design yourself, or you could outsource it. Here are some great places to find a designer:

• Fiverr
• 99designs

If you’re building your site using WordPress, you’ll need to choose a theme to install. A theme is like the skin on your site. There are plenty of free and premium options out there. In our experience, it’s best to install Genesis and build sites on that. Genesis is highly customizable and we use it on all our sites. 

Action: Brand your blog by choosing a domain name, getting a logo designed, and installing a quality theme such as Genesis.

4. Focus on quality.

To provide the best experience for your readers and to promote yourself in the best light as a health coach, it’s important to make your blog as good as possible. This means writing the best quality articles that you can. Your articles should be informative and, if that’s the style you’re going for, entertaining. Inject your personality into your writing and show what you know. 

But it doesn’t stop there. To make your site as appealing as possible, you need to format your blog posts well. This means finding attractive and high-quality photos or images to accompany your posts. Make sure you have permission to use any photos you find online and credit the photographer if attribution is required. 

Action: Write high-quality articles and illustrate them with beautiful images that you have permission to use.

5. Help your readers.

Want to know the most important thing you should do if you want your site to be a success? Help your readers. Make everything you do about providing value to those who visit your site.

• Write comprehensive articles, just like we’ve written guides like The Ultimate Paleo Guide to Eating for Autoimmune-Related Conditions.
• Answer your readers’ questions, just like we’ve done on Paleo FM. 
• Recommend products and resources that your readers would benefit from using, just like we do in our emails and all over the site.
• Put together information products to help your readers meet their goals, just like we’ve done with our 30 Day Challenge. 
• Provide one-on-one help to your readers, just like we do with our coaching service.

Make everything you do about providing the best experience for your readers, and you’ll have no problem turning your health blog into a business or profitable side project.

Action: Focus on providing value.

Conclusion

Starting a health blog can be a lot of fun, a way to continue learning about health, a source of income, or even a new career. It all depends on you and on what you put into it. These tips should get you on your way to starting a successful and helpful health blog, but if you’re looking for a more in-depth guide to starting your health blog, check out our How To Start A Food Blog guide and get your free copy of Health Coach Launch.

Photo credit: Dan Taylor