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Today, I am lucky to have a guest post for you to enjoy:
If you really want to start a health blog, you must first know what the most difficult thing is. Do you know what that most difficult thing is if you want to become a health blogger?
It is not the technicalities of setting up a blog – that part is pretty easy, all done in a few clicks of your mouse these days!
Neither is it sifting through tons of technical data in the health industry! – time consuming, yes, difficult, not really!
It is getting started, and getting started in the right way avoiding potential pitfalls, minefields and setting up your site in a way that helps you on the way to sustainable success!
If you don’t set your health blog up the right way you will be facing greater difficulties further down the line when it comes to pulling in traffic and be facing an uphill struggle when it comes to getting those juicy commissions that can end up helping you to quit your day job!
And let’s face it, you don’t want to be toiling over your laptop forever and a day frustrated and fighting to get traffic to your fabulous health blog. You want to be chilled out, relaxed and traffic flowing to your site, trouble and anxiety free for you!
And with those job quitting commissions rolling in!
Sadly, just about nobody is showing you how to start a health blog the right way – until now!
If you are interested in this hot new niche of CBD Oil or thinking of starting a CBD oil business you certainly ought to read this article to the very end before you go any further!
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WHO AM I?
I’m Derek From BloggersHQ.Org very much the headquarters for bloggers where I show, outline and detail how to start a blog in just about any niche as well as tip to get your started on the road to building a successful blog.
In this special article, I am helping you to get started in the health blogging industry. Keep reading to find you the best way to set up your health site for sustainable success and keep an eye out for some potential pitfalls to avoid!
STARTING A HEALTH BLOG
In this article, I will detail a variety of aspects that are key components of running a sustainable and successful blog, not only in the field of health but in other related and unrelated industries.
The skills are easy to learn and fully transferable.
- How To Drill Down On The Health Industry To Find Your Niche And Why You Absolutely Must Do it!
- Walk Through Step By Step tutorial on finding your niche
- How To Find Products In Your Niche
- Finding competing sites and reverse engineering them
- Monetization Of Your Blog And Your Options.
- A Word On E-A-T and what it means for you.
- Conclusion
This knowledge is going to place you a good “step ahead of the game”, help you to avoid and avert potential problems, pitfalls and save you a ton of time.
It will also help you to rank your site better both short and long term when you start a heath blog.
The Definition Of Health
As the WHO – The World Health Organization and their official definition of the word “health” they define it as a complete state of mental, physical and social well being going beyond being free from disease and illness, emphasizing a proactive approach to well being and the maintenance as well as improvement of health.
Key Facts Regarding The Health And Wellness Industry
The Wellness Industry, globally speaking, is worth trillions! (yes, trillions with a “T”!) and is currently growing at a very ample 12.8% from $3.7Tr to $4.2Tr market – yearly!
The global expenditure within the overall health industry stands at $7.3 Trillion USD and is representative of 5.3% of the worldwide global economic output.
This is highly indicative for a market that is thriving and one most certainly worth entering!.
Key Market Sectors:
- Nutrition, Weight Loss & Healthy Eating ($702Bn)
- Fitness & Mind-Body ($595Bn)
- Personal Care, Anti – Aging, Beauty ($1.083Tr)
- Preventative And Personalized Med. ($575Bn)
- Traditional And Complementary Medicine ($360Bn)
The key market sectors that I have highlighted above are one in which there are plenty of purchases being made online (57%+) and have increasing predicted growth in online sales in the coming years.
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FINDING YOUR HEALTH NICHE
As you can imagine and of course have already seen the health niche is absolutely massive – period! And I’ll be honest with you here…
….You won’t make a single dime in the health industry with a generalized non specific site.
(unless of course you have a team of writers behind you pumping out content daily!).
The competition is huge, yes absolutely huge in both senses of the meaning! Huge massive sites that are well established and incredibly difficult to beat in the search engines rankings page.
There are also, crazily speaking, a large number of sites generically targeting the health industry.
However, that said you can of course get more specific, get more targeted and find a particular niche within the health industry.
Less crowded, less competitive and your site with more targeted information for the reader is what can and will set you apart from the rest.
This is what is called finding your niche or niching down.
A niche is in the simplest of explanations is a given sector or segment of a larger market.
For the rest of this article we will dealing with natural health, which in itself is a segment of the larger health market.
Simply due to less complicated rules and regulations in most countries and states regarding the sale or promotion of Pharmaceutical based medicines and certain licenses being required.
Also, if you later want to go down the road of paid traffic both Google and Bing will require you to have a government issued pharmacy license to bid on certain keywords – even if and when you are an affiliate site.
Sure there are FDA regulations regarding natural health products, and what you can and can’t say – we will get to that later.
(I have two natural health sites and have been running them successfully for a few years.)
Homing in on your health niche does require some though. One way is to target as specific health condition and who may suffer from it.
For example, weight loss and dieting, is incredibly popular and also incredibly difficult to gain any traction for your site in search engines for.
However, you can target obesity, which is a particular segment of the weight loss area. Still it is just too big. You can zoom in a little but targeting a particular group of people, for example Teenagers, Men/women Over 50 with a heart condition.
Unique Angle Alert!: instead of becoming unseen in the crowded Weight loss or diet market a very unique angle is to target “Obtaining The Ideal Weight” Or “Getting and Maintaining the Ideal Weigh..keeping the weight off!”
Do you see how easy this is, with each step homing in on a particular audience?
This, as professional bloggers is exactly what we do! We start with an end in mind and work backwards!
Right there I have just revealed 3 possible niche sites in the diet industry.
Health => Natural Health => Diet/Weight loss => Managing Teenage Obesity
Health => Natural Health => Diet/Weight loss => Weight loss For Men Over 50 with a heart condition
Health => Natural HealthDiet/Weight loss => Weight loss For women Over 50 with a heart condition
Those last two, are very targeted, and for a specific reason, weight loss amongst this group of people is particularly difficult due to A) age and B) potential difficulties in strenuous exercise.
What site do you think they would seek out a generic diet/weight loss site or one catering to their exact needs and circumstances?
(It is, as you rather smartly guessed, the latter.)
As a quick word, at this juncture, you most certainly do not want to drill down too far and too deep as you will end up with an audience that is far too targeted, tight and small. So small so that you will end up with little earnings for your effort.
You can take a similar approach when it comes to exercise of any type, just replace “Diet/Weight loss” for Yoga, Pilates, calisthenics, Body weight exercise, Aerobic exercise or whatever exercise style or method that comes to your mind.
You can also vary the age range and health condition. Let’s run through this as an exercise and see what comes up!.
Health => Natural Health => Yoga => Women Over 40
Health => Natural Health => Yoga => Post Partum Ladies!
Health => Natural Health => Workout’s => For Men/Women That suffering from Knee/Hip Injury
In all essence all we have to do is change the variables given and put in a little thought.
Take for example the beauty industry, something that is considered part of the overall health market and worth a trillion bucks per annum globally!
Wow!
Here a little brain storming, and you can target a very specific area of beauty that women (or men) are wild for!
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Skin care!
Just for clarity, absolute clarity, my Vietnamese girlfriend has a site in this exact area. Of course she has the helping hand and the benefit of my years of expertise and experience.
When it comes to Skin care site, just like the weight loss and exercise example above you do need to drill down on this as it is just too generic and too big. You need to get….there’s that word again…Targeted!
Pick a particular area of skin care, and if you need to, home in on it again. In the case of “our” Skin care site we opted to go for facial moisturizers.
Do you see how we homed in on that niche?
Health => Natural Health & Beauty => Skin care => Facial Moisturizers For Women.
We could have gone deeper and specifically targeted an age range, but that is something that is done on site targeting specific moisturizers in relation to skin type (oily, acne prone, dry etc, etc) on site within the relevant category.
When it comes to skin care, which is really a whole industry on its own you can actually viably target a specific product type for a particular audience, just as we have with moisturizers.
Such example include anti aging creams, neck and décolleté, cleansers.
Naturally speaking, you can of course drill down to include a specific skin type. I am pretty sure that for Grace, the owner of this very site, she would be more interested in a skin care site that is specifically for Asian skin.
Within reason you can get very targeted here with the trendy and popular K-beauty and J beauty trends and dedicate a blog to Korean & Japanese skin care.
Still struggling to find your health niche?
Let’s do a little “live” exercise with global leader Amazon, and exactly how they can help you find your niche in the health market.
Let’s pop on over to Amazon and do this niche finding exercise right now!
From the Amazon home page, and that all too familiar search box select Health & Home as the department from the drop down list and then click the search button, leave the search area blank!.
Let’s see if something magical happens!
Abracadabra!
Amazon reveals a list of niches right there, Health care, sports nutrition, Oral care…those are all viable niches, health care is still a little wide and not targeted. Let’s click this one a see what happens.
(You can dig deeper into any of these “sub departments” in amazon to get more targeted and more defined and find your niche.)
Now we’re talking! Alternative medicine, diabetes care, eye care, first aid, foot health and so on. All great and viable niches right there for the taking. Now you are targeted!
(Bullseye!)
From this list I wouldn’t particularly niche down any further, with one exception. Alternative medicine.
You can go right ahead and make a site about alternative medicine no problem at all. Or you can get specific and targeted. That is your own choice.
I am sure you already know there are just a ton of sub niches in this quite large area of alternative medicine.
If you are interested in alternative medicine, I suggest you go one step further and click that category even if you do wish to cover alternative medicine as a whole, you will just come up with a great structure for your site with categories related to what Amazon reveals.
For those wishing to specialize, just pick one of those categories shown in the image below.
The brilliant and simple ingenious thing about leveraging Amazon in this way for our marketing efforts and finding a niche is the fact that they have spent BILLIONS of USD into this research and absolutely tens of thousands of man (or lady, lets not get sexist here!) hours into this kind of research and know exactly how to categorize and group niches and products in a consumer and search friendly way!
Now, our research is not done here, we need to know if the Niche is worth our while or not! You know if people are making buying decisions and buying products in the niche of your choice?
I most certainly don’t want you to be wasting your time building out a site and for there to be absolutely no money moving in the niche.
And for that…we use…
…*Drum roll*….
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This next step is just as important as any in your niche hunting journey. You absolutely must know if there are products available in your niche of choice. And if people are buying them and if they are of quality or not.
Thankfully, Billionaire Bezos saves us a ton of research and quite literally does a large portion of our homework for us.
As part of this exercise, and as establishing yourself as a brand you most certainly want and darn well ought to be aligning yourself with quality products. If you don’t you are going to be seen as a low quality yourself, besides you will end up with more chargebacks, deductions on your commissions earned due to returned products.
(Get too many and you risk being kicked off of an affiliate network or program!)
Thus quality only! Got it? Yes?.
Amazon, helps us to find quality products in a given niche (or sub department!) in a single click! It is that easy!
Down on the left hand side…just click the “4 stars and up” and all other products will be filtered out.
Next I do suggest that you select the option in regards to a products value by opting for products in the $25 to $50 range. Ideally, and this will entirely depend on your niche, aim for products to recommend to your audience that is $50 and up.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that you are building a business here and you do want some nice commissions for your efforts.
One caveat.
Don’t go about recommending right away the absolute most expensive product just for the possibility of a big commission.
Only do this if the product meets your quality requirements, sells well (we’ll get to that in a second!, bare with me here!) and is of use and benefit for your audience.
Highlighted in red, where you click the 4 stars to ensure only quality products are shown. Immediately below that (out of picture) is where you can select the price range of the products.
Also highlighted in red is how we tell if a product sells well. The number of verified product reviews. I have a strong tendency to favour products that are at least 3 figures and up or close on.
Using this number we can deduce that the products sell well and that the products not only sell well but there is an adequate audience in this particular niche (which is sleeping and snoring related).
Let’s now analyze the sleep problems niche using google trends.
Sure, the sleep problems niche can be drilled down further to be more specific and include snoring, sleep apnea and so on. Incidentally, it is a specific market that is worth in excess of $4bn USD annually!
Also, on its own, Insomnia is a great niche.
From here on in. I will deconstruct the sleep problem niche as an example case study. All you have to do is read intently, follow the exercises just replacing “sleep problem niche” with “Your Niche”.
Make a start with amazon and Google trends as shown above, if you have not already!
Let’s see what my fave keyword research tool Jaaxy says about the traffic potential.
Yep. Plenty of traffic and keywords you can create content around for an insomnia blog. The KQI, keyword quality indicator, is good high SEO scores meaning you can rank with some effort and time for these articles on google.
You will have noticed I searched for “Sleep Problems” and not actually Insomnia. There is a reason for that. Assuming you are going down the natural health route you are not allowed to name any medical condition by law!
If you are recommending non-natural health solutions, for insomnia or “sleep problems” then, sure you can use that word and avoid the verbal gymnastics.
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WARNING! ATTENTION! FDA REGULATIONS REGARDING NATURAL HEALTH SITES!
There are certain FDA regulations regarding what language you can and can’t use regarding natural health sites.
I got caught offside by not. Simply put I did not know, thankfully I am here to tell and educate you a bit and help you avoid that!
Save you from a site overhaul of years worth of content!
I faced being kicked off of a well paying affiliate program, thankfully it was the merchant that forewarned me.
Had it been the FDA I could have faced my site being shut down, or worse still a huge law suit from them.
The following words are not to be used due to FDA Regulations!
- diagnose
- cure
- mitigate
- treat
- prevent
- disease
- Name of any known disease
Recommended instead:
- “Promotes Healthy (serotonin, for example) Levels”
- “Supporting Healthy Sleep”
- “Has the ability to support natural/optimal hormone levels/natural levels of sleep”
- “Supports Energy”
- “Supports Mood and Wellbeing”
- “Sleep Difficulties” or “sleep problems” are acceptable alternatives to insomnia (we are not allowed to directly name a known disease or condition) You may use your own alternatives.
Basically, everything needs to be on the positive end of the spectrum without guaranteeing any results.
No use of “XYZ herb can increase the quality of your sleep” (for example) but “XYZ herb could/may promote healthy (or optimal) sleep quality”.
QUICK RECAP
So far, you have discovered:
- the importance of niching down in the health or any other industry
- how to find your niche using amazon
- if there are products available in your niche
- an audience that is buying those product
You have also learned how to discovered:
- the long term viability of your niche using Google trends
- if there is sufficient search traffic
- topics to write about in your chosen niche by using a keyword research tool, Jaaxy.
Jaaxy is a keyword research tool that does come with 30 free searches and is included in your Wealthy Affiliate membership, where both Grace and I learned how to start a blog.
We are not quite finished establishing if our/your niche is fully viable one yet!
Many others would have you stop right here and have you go off and ready to build your site. Not me, I am known as the Niche guy online for a reason!
Besides, others are mostly trying to rush you in the door and sell you something.
I go that step or two further! And really dig down and help you to find out if the business that you want to build, is truly viable.
And for that we absolutely MUST do a bit of competition research and seek out alternate traffic sources.
It would, after all be an absolute kick in the backside if you were to go right ahead, build that absolutely banging blog and be doomed from the very start because the competition was too tough.
As well, you would never rank for such terms and there was no or very little alternative “secret” traffic sources should you get thumped by, and on the wrong side of a google algorithm update.
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CHECKING OUT THE COMPETITION – COMPETITOR RESEARCH!
First and foremost, I don’t believe in competition. I believe there is enough money going around in all niches for all of us to make money.
Sure there might be thousands, heck maybe even millions such as the very niche that Grace, the owner of this site, and I are involved in.
Luckily for me “Littlemama” is as like minded as I am and knows deeply that there is no competition, only other sites that you can build relationships with and collaborate with, like I am here, working with her, writing an article for her site.
(I’ll be honest here, it is an absolute honour to be writing on such a fabulous site, writing for and helping you guys out!)
However, it is absolutely essential that you fully check out successful sites in your niche market. Put simply you need to know a few key things.
- Are there successful sites in the niche already getting traffic and making money
- Can you outrank them?
- How long have these sites been established?
The reasons behind these should be a little obvious.
Firstly, if there are successful blogs in your niche the likelihood is that you can and probably will do so also.
Secondly, you do, obviously want your share of the organic highly targeted search engine traffic.
Finally, if a site has been established long term, unless something dramatic happens you can rest assured that you have good long term potential for building an online business that is truly sustainable for many years to come.
How To Find Popular Blogs In Your Niche
Thankfully, this is easy peasy lemon squeezy!
Can you type “Popular Blogs Sleep Problems” into google (or “Popular Blogs “Your Niche””)?
Yeah! I bet you never thought finding competing sites was that easy!
Highlighted in red from top to bottom, the super easy search term for finding popular blogs in a given niche.
The date of an article (indicating long term potential). This, just as a matter of fact is not always shown. Final one, my fave source for finding top blogs in any given niche.
This, was only step 1. And do ideally properly seek out at least 5 or 6 blogs.
Trust me on this, you will appreciate the effort that you put in now…and maybe even love..or at least thank me for it later…
(Do leave your appreciation in the comments box below!)
The second step here is to fully check out a few good quality blogs in your niche. This is something that, as an internet user you should have a natural feel for.
What you are looking for:
- Sites that are doing well, have affiliate sales, affiliate product reviews.
- A fair amount of content.
- Well established and got traffic.
- Media Vine ads – not essential but this is an indication of good quality site with at least 800 traffic daily. (This is a little competition research secret I never share with anyone! Consider yourself lucky I am feeling generous today while writing this!)
- Site age. Do a ‘whois’ reverse look up of the site name to find when it was established.
While checking out sites keep vigilant for:
- Content gap, a gap in their content and what they are not covering.
- Length of the content, are they lacking depth and detail? Can you do better (yes you can!)?
- What type of content are they creating? (How to’s, Best of, list posts, reviews?)
- Are they helping to solve their audiences potential problems? If yes, what ones? How? And are they missing out on helping their audience in any way?
- Can you take a unique approach, do something different? (No need to reinvent the wheel here!)
- How is their branding? Can you brand yourself better and in a more personal and trusting, niche relevant way?
- How is their marketing style? – you’d be surprised here! Many blogs don’t actually promote themselves outside of their own channels (social media, etc), Are they collecting emails? (get on their list!) Are they using Push notifications? How is their social media effort (join/follow them). Here’s a biggie…are they building their own online community?
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Phew! A lot of work…but trust me on this one. Going this extra mile is going to be worth it.
It is going to save you a lot of time way down the line and a lot of heart ache…(should you have done what others recommend and go right ahead and start building your site without this extra step).
But hey..I’m Derek “The Niche Guy” Marshall, And I’ll get you building your blog on a rock solid foundation for long terms success by teaching you exactly how I go about niche research and getting you to go that extra mile!.
As we run through competitor research I am going to use Ahrefs free version, the worlds most powerful research tool for full competitor analysis.
In essence here we are using big data to perform a full analysis on a successful or potential competitor, which will be better-sleep-better-life.com
Ahrefs one of my fave tools! I do use the free version!
Ok, on the face of it, this is a tough competitor. Going by their Ahref rank, which is based on the strength of their backlink profile. Their UR and DR strength is quite high but with effort can be matched or beaten.
The UR and DR number a bit like Domain Authority or DA for short is niche relevant. You ought to not aim for super high number (out of 100) but take a look at how other excellent sites in your niche are performing and aim to match them. It is very niche related.
An affiliate marketing blog can have a rating of 30 something and be considered as so-so where as a more specific Sleep Problem site 30 can be deemed good. Look at the average for your industry and use that as a yard stick.
This site, few things that stuck out, spelling “game on” for me. Ranking for only 1,000 keywords in the top 50 of search results. With consistent effort and just keep on going and getting regular content out there and published you can easily beat that.
The penultimate column, “Organic traffic” this is a bit of a red herring. The only true way of telling how much traffic a site gets is to ask the site owner. I very much suspect that this site gets way more than 67 visitors in a month!
However, you can use this number to compare its traffic vs another site in a similar niche. If a similar site is showing 100 traffic you can assume that it is getting 50% more traffic that this site by calculation the proportion. (100 is approximately 67 x 1.5 thus 50% more traffic).
There is a little alarm bell ringing here regarding the number of backlinks and referring sites 2,260 links for 296 domains.
An average of about 7.5 links per unique domain. A very questionable number. It is quite likely that all of those links are natural and not bought, most likely by means of commenting on blogs in a related and similar niche.
But, I did discover a couple of things that are a bit fishy after having a look at their backlink profile.
This site has a slightly high, not by much, proportion of dofollow to nofollow links ration.
The big screamer is 18 .EDU links. Incredibly difficult to obtain and I suspect that they are bought or achieved by non natural means, which is against Google’s terms and conditions regarding link building.
Also, the vast majority of the links are of low quality from low quality sites in the range of 0-10 DA. Really no (ok 1!) link of any real significant value.
It is very probable that those links of DA 0-10 are obtained by means of commenting in the comments section of blogs.
In short, despite the Ahrefs rank of 1.8million (which is kinda high!) the actual backlink profile of this site is not that strong.
More information from Ahrefs, providing the details of the top 10 competitors for our target site based on competing keywords. Do keep an eye on the sites that come up here, you can get some great content ideas from them.
This is where you save time – you will find what your competitors are ranking for, easy pickings for keywords, saving you a bit of keyword research and doubting if you can rank for it or not!
Just click where the arrow is “Top Pages” and viola!
Now y’all know why I love Ahrefs eh, I can honestly quite literally see Grace’s eyes lightening up like Heathrow runway 4! I have been harping on at her to get using this very tool!
Boom! The site is in my crosshair I know exactly what keywords they are ranking for, where in the rankings, the keyword difficulty level (a bit on that in a sec!), the exact URL to find the article, and the site has a kinda weak backlink profile despite the actual numbers.
I also know approximately speaking what their traffic share is for said URL/Keyword.
Keyword Difficulty in Ahref is on algorithmic scale. Meaning a keyword in the 0-30 range is much easier to rank than a keyword in the 30-40 range, it gets exponentially more difficult as the number increases.
Do stick to 0-20 Keyword difficulty and certainly don’t go over 30 unless you are fully competent in SEO and have an established site.
In the image above, I intentionally selected positions 1-20 as the free version of Ahref will only show keywords in this rankings range.
I also selected KD – Keyword Difficulty range of 0-20 to show easy to rank keywords keywords. This site actually only had 15 articles ranking in the top 20 for a KD of 0-20.
You can actually play around with this metric and setting and get more keywords and URL’s for the target competitors website.
For bigger websites I tend to search in sections like 0-10, 11-20. 21-30, 31-40 and so on and simply screen shot what results come up for future reference.
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What Can You Do With This Information?
A lot actually!
Take note of the actual keywords, check out the articles for length (competitors URL) and have a good look at their on-page SEO.
- Can you write a better more detailed article?
- Does it have the keyword in the URL address, header, sub headings, first paragraph, last paragraph?
- Are the phrases that are synonymous with the target Keyword? No? (good thing for you!) yes? (what ones?) Are the synonymous keywords used in Sub headings? Again yes/no
- Social media activity? Any? How many? Which social sites? (could be an indication of where you audience is more active and where to find them!)
- Does it have a video?
- Internal links?
- References?
- Link to authority sites using the keyword or partial match of the keyword (ie. not exact match!).
Also search for their article in google using the search term. Check out where they are, even if not on page 1, and have a look at what their meta description and titles are.
The arrow point to the meta title and the highlighted box the meta description, search term “Bamboo pillow benefits”.
The thing to look for here is simply: Can you make a better meta title and meta description? Can you optimize it better for the given keyword phrase?
The answer is simple!
Yes, note they are missing the keyword phrase in both the description and title. Now, compare this to what is ranking in the top of the search engines. Our target site is currently ranking 14th.
Let’s check out the top ranking sites!
Oh my oh my oh my!
It does appear that our competitor has missed out massively on the opportunity of hitting the holy grail of all search engine rankings…Position zero! Above position 1 in the search results!
And I, as one who does get a few of those position zeroes can testify that you get a ton of traffic from your site being featured here.
Note: not all search terms or keyword phrases will have the opportunity to be featured in some way in position zero.
Getting featured here is excellent for enhancing your authority in the niche and increasing the awareness of your brand.
Do note that the site featured in position zero has massive amount of search engine “real estate” dedicated to it, featured snippet and image as well as the web address.
There was no actual exceptional SEO performed by the site here just having the keyword in the URL, meta title and although an exact match keyword “Bamboo pillow benefits” is NOT in the meta description a partial match synonymous keyword is “Benefits of bamboo pillow”.
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See the importance of good SEO and using synonymous keywords and how effective they are?
Now let’s take that actual keyword and do some keyword research on it Using Ahrefs.
This is something you ought to do for every single keyword that your competitor is ranking for, including the steps we have already taken.
Because you really want to know, not guess but KNOW that you will rank on page 1 with a well written, better and more detailed article.
Optimizing your meta titles and meta description is just one part of getting a feeling of you ability to sniff out a rank-able keyword.
Let’s see what happens when we click the “search” icon.
And thankfully a lot of good…ok great information came up!
Straight up, this keyword is incredibly easy to rank for, it has a VERY low keyword difficulty level of…just 1.
The USA search volume is 250, which is a very reasonable and ample number with 400 searches globally in the English language.
Typically links from just 2 domains in average will get you on to page 1 of google for this search term.
The bottom part of this results page on Ahref’s does reveal some very good and very interesting information, of which I will now detail and help as well as teach you to take full advantage of.
Lot of information given by Ahrefs in regards to the Search Engine Rankings positions and data.
Firstly, the most notable was that this search term “Bamboo Pillow Benefits” has the potential of a featured snippet (as previously shown), secondly we can see that it triggers 4 related questions.
These are questions that you can, and really should head right out and create content around and give far better answers and more detailed and referenced that what is currently being given.
In the vertical highlighted column we can see that actually very few links are going to the pages ranking for the search term in both number of links and referring domains. We can also see what the top performing Keyword is for each page.
I can see right away that with just quality detailed content and a bit of time for it to mature you can, and probably will rank in position 6 or 7, maybe even as high as 5th with little effort.
With a bit of effort and absolute whitehat backlinking techniques you can break into the top 5 and maybe even the top 3 for what is a really good volume keyword.
What we are going to do here is find out who exactly is linking to the sites by clicking where it says domains this will tell us who is linking to the site in question.
The photo above shows exactly who is linking to our potential rival for that keyword. The results as you can see have been filtered to show only the highly valuable “dofollow” links.
Other filter for larger number of links you can apply include language and the amount of traffic.
Where there are a large amount of link I have the tendency to give preference to getting links from sites who’s links get clicked most, meaning I have a greater potential of traffic from that link than others.
Do take note of that, it is not always the higher DR or UR that is the best to get a link from.
Now, all you do is open in a new window and check out those sites and find their contact details. If they have a mailing list. Get on it and start establishing a relationship with the site owner. A very good way is by replying to an email of theirs.
Don’t go right off the bat and ask for a link, establish a relationship with the site owner, create a mutually beneficial relationship, starting off with a compliment regarding their site, maybe offering to interview them or feature them.
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Do go through their site and make a genuine comment or two on their content just to get your name out there, in their minds and attention.
Later, once established a good relationship you can mention politely that you have a much better article regarding the benefits of bamboo pillows and if they could link to you.
Linking to your better more detailed article is also good for their SEO and outbound linking profile as they are linking to a more detailed resource.
Finally, get your dancin’ shoes on and have little song and dance as you have just won a good backlink and established a nice relationship in your industry.
A relationship you can later leverage and help each other with.
This is something that you can, and most certainly ought to do when it comes to your first 10-20 articles, gun down your competitors!
Now we have fully covered and given a practical exercise and low down on exactly how to find your niche, study your competitors, who they are, what they are ranking for, quality of their content, and generally speaking if you can or better put how you can put out a site that is much better and more detailed than theirs.
Also you have covered finding and nailing down on what your competitors are ranking for, how to out rank them for the same or similar keywords and found who is linking to your competitors.
We now basically know that for the sleeping problems niche that we can rank this site and stake our claim in that niche.
Following the steps and instructions given you ought to be able to have a good feel for your particular niche and your ability, with time, to plant your flag and stake your rightful claim and piece of the action in your niche of choice.
Your next step is to find affiliate programs in your niche.
FINDING AFFILIATE PROGRAMS
We have already covered one affiliate program at the start of this rather detailed article, Amazon. Understandably, Amazon, is not quite the program of choice or “cup of tea” for everyone. There are a number of reasons for that.
One is the ever changing rules and the low commission structure which is 4.5% for most categories. The cookie length is actually pretty short, only 24hrs.
However, Amazon does enjoy a rather high trust factor which helps you to convert at a higher rate than independent retailers.
Also, Amazon is not available in all states and countries and thus it is a good idea to see alternatives. Besides, a wide and varied income source, something I will get into a bit later when it comes to income and monetisation strategies.
Just like your traffic sources, your income should not be fully dependent on one single source of type of income. Ideally 3 affiliate programs evenly balanced 40% 30% 30% and two other income producing methods outwith affiliate marketing ought to be utilized.
For this section let’s focus on finding affiliate programs before I talk to you about alternate income sources.
How To Find Affiliate Programs
Thankfully this I super easy! I’ll give you a demonstration with the “Sleep Problems” niche all you have to do is replace the words “sleep problems” with your niche of choice.
Go through the affiliate programs that are listed and do your research on the products that you do find as you most certainly want to be only recommending top quality solutions to your audience.
You can perform searches on Clickbank, Amazon, eBay, and Udemy to find products that are related to your niche and you can gain a commission from.
Relevant searches on CJ.com (formerly known as commission junction) Rakuten, ShareASale and Awin can be performed also. These are larger and well known affiliate networks.
There are benefits of using an affiliate network vs independent program, one of which particularly stands out is it being much easier to reach minimum payment thresholds and checking your affiliate stats is much quicker with a network than with several independent programs.
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OTHER MONETIZATION METHODS
There are what I call and refer to as 3 stages to building out a magnificent money producing blog and stage one is winning or earning affiliate sales.
Some experts will say affiliate marketing is the very best of them all, but opinions vary. I am of the school of thought of a balanced source of income being a healthy option for greater long term sustainability.
Let’s not forget here you are not just building a blog, you are building a fully sustainable business. And the faster you get your head around that the more serious and professional your approach will be.
Yes, one of the beauties of affiliate marketing is that there is no ceiling on your potential to generate affiliate sales for your niche site.
Simply put, the more traffic that you can drive to your money pages, and the better you can convert “tire kickers” into buyers the more money you will earn.
One of the absolute beauties of the affiliate side of your business is that you do the work once and get paid many times and for many months and even years down the line.
Just keep your watchful eye on your pages, how they are ranking, maintain them ranking high and pulling in the traffic and money.
Personally, I have written product reviews that took a few hours, like 4 to create, nearly 3 years ago now, and they still pull in $200/month.
That might not sound like a great figure like “ohh wow..$200 a month for a review” Let’s put that into context. I earn about $2,500 a year from ONE REVIEW that I wrote 3 years ago which took 4 hours to write.
That to date works out at $7,500 for 4 hours work! Excuse my math but that is nearly darn well $2000 an hour!
(Of course I have many more reviews on that site and other sites.)
That is the beauty of affiliate marketing! Do the work once and get paid many times for it!
A Stage two site is a site like this one, that has two methods of revenue generation, usually affiliate sales and Display Advertising.
Monetization Method 2: Display Ads
Display advertising is actually something that you can do from your very first day and in conjunction with affiliate marketing.
But, my absolute suggestion is to hold your horses!
I know it can be very exciting building a brand new blog or website for the first time and getting that adrenaline rush when making money online.
But it really is a fair bit of work, even for experienced individuals like myself or Grace.
There is a whole lot of stuff going on in the background that you need work on that are far more important that are you making “extra” money with display adverts.
Once you introduce adverts, obviously, you do want to be getting the maximum benefit from them and thus a lot of optimization going on.
Same with your affiliate sales.
Much better that you hold back on adding adverts to your site until you have sufficient amount of traffic and affiliate earnings.
Besides, with little traffic you are going to get very few clicks on those adverts and the difference is really going to be only pennies.
Forego the pennies now and get the pounds later!
The top two most popular display advertising programs are Google Adsense and Mediavine. There is a third popular program, which is run by Amazon, but if you are running amazon affiliate sales I do question the distribution of income as both your affiliate sales and display ad revenue would be coming from the same company.
Getting a varied income source and model is your end goal to aid you to independent income sources.
Both Amazon and Google Adsense allow you to put display adverts on your site from the very beginning. Where Mediavine, which does appear to be the most popular choice amongst successful bloggers, has a slight quality control road block.
They require that you have at least 25,000 monthly sessions before allowing you to join their advertising revenue share program.
Now given that the average income per 1000 sessions is $20 to $50 USD, a figure that is dependent on your niche, and your ability to optimize your site for ads and to get clicks for those ads.
This, in very simple monetary terms means that once you qualify for Mediavine ads you can be earning upwards of an EXTRA $500 to $1,250 in a single month completely passively…doing nada! Nothing!
(Do note that I said “Extra” this on top of your affiliate sales and other revenue generation methods that you may be using!)
Stage 3 Site Make Money Selling Your Own Products
A stage 3 site is one that is already earning sales from affiliate marketing and will continue to do so and a significant income from having advertising on their sites.
Stage 3 is simply adding in your own products, which can be either physical or digital products. This is fully dependent on your niche and of course your personal choice.
It is at this stage that you have the opportunity to turn things on its head and have affiliate marketers join your independent program and promoting your product(s) in exchange for a commission.
Naturally speaking, you absolutely do want to be putting out the very best quality products that you can be they digital or physical. Not because you can charge more, but for branding issues.
You want to be seen as a producer of high quality products thus for videos it would be well worth your while booking out a studio and using professional equipment and having them professionally edited and processed.
Also, quality will sell better, sell more of them.
Quite difficult at this juncture to name some products for the sleep problem niche, but let’s do a live brain storm:
Physical Products: Organic Bamboo Pillow, Natural Bamboo Mattress, Sheets and pillow cases made of soft chemical free organic materials. Herbal sleeping aids and formulas or teas.
Digital Products: Meditation audio track, digital informational video product detailing sleep problems and all natural solution that a sufferer can try at home. Ebook detailing recipes for delicious meals that aid sleep.
Where and when it comes to your niche this is something that you need to sit down and brain storm when the moment comes.
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CREATING YOUR HEALTH SITE – Some VIP Must Do’s!
Some important aspects to keep in mind when creating you site in the health niche is E-A-T which stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. This is something outlined in the Famed google quality raters handbook.
E-A-T scores are something that is taken into account when it comes to YMYL sites – Your Money Or Your Life, generally referring to anything finance, making money online and health sites.
Expert:
This is essentially how or why you are an expert in a particular niche. In the health niche area this is generally proven by your professional qualifications and experience.
However, this is not an absolute must as the quality raters handbook does clearly state that on can gain expertise by means of life experience.
One of the examples given was about a person being able to be considered an expert in regards how long a person could expect to live after being diagnosed with cancer due to having personal experience in this area due to taking care of a relative or family member that was or is suffering from cancer.
Credibility and expertise is also gained by being referenced to by other authority sites in your industry.
If you want to enhance your credibility here it is suggested that you link to your linked in page on your About me, which will have your professional qualifications and experience.
If you are not a health professional, do state your experience related to your niche be it personal experience.
If you have written for prestigious online publications, do mention them and link to them on your About me/About Us page.
Also, if you hire a medical professional to write your content do have an about page for them and link to their linked in and other sites they have been featured.
Authority & Trustworthiness
The Authority and Trust lies within the quality of the content that you create, do fully reference any claims that you make to known and trusted sources such as well respected sites in the health field like WebMD, Healthline, known research institutes, universities, and government research agencies such as the National Institute of Health.
Also into play here is reviews from other sites about your site and the content. Do make sure it is accurate, detailed and if possible reviewed by a respected Doctor, and updated regularly.
STARTING A HEALTH NICHE BLOG – THE CONCLUSION
You have learned in this article all that you need to know to start a successful health blog and some techniques that you can apply to any niche, particularly those related to niche research, drilling down on your niche, finding competitors, fully analyzing the competition, and finding the keywords that they are ranking for and if (and how) you can beat them in the rankings.
Above all, do follow my advice as it will save you a lot of trouble and hassle down the line, particularly as far as the FDA regulations go.
Take Action!
Now that you have learned all that and been shown exactly how to start a health blog, what are you going to do with that newly found know how?
You can of course sit around do nothing and day dream all day long about that health site you have been thinking about for a while, and then mumble and grumble and cry into your chardonnay when the next big bill comes.
Or
You can GOYA!.
Get off your….A….
(you know that last word!)
And take action! Get out there get building your dream money producing natural health blog.
Step 1: Just pop on over to BloggersHQ.org
Step 2: Enter your email address in the email form,
Step 3: Check your inbox and confirm your email address.
Step 4: Reply to the first one telling me you read my article on Grace’s fabulous Work Anywhere Now site and I will send you a second free report all about traffic generation and becoming google independent – something that in my own experience in health niche is something that is absolutely vital for your long term success!
Never get hit by an algorithm update period!
Imagine if Grace aka Littlemama cried into her glass of wine about how tough life is and how unfair instead of building this site.
Well, you wouldn’t have read this article, nor gotten this opportunity! Take advantage of that! Go Grab your freebie now!
If you have any questions, leave a comment below, due to professional and personal curtesy I will reply back as soon as I can.
To Your Success and Blogging best
Derek.
Author Bio:
Hi Folks,
I’m Derek Of BloggersHQ.Org. I am what you would call a blogging geek, when not blogging, thinking about blogging or just naturally seeing niches and sub niches everywhere and investigating them and their viability. If are interested in Niche Site Marketing or Blogging, or just curious as to your genius idea’s viability – hop on over to my site and shoot me an email – If I have not covered your niche, I might just give you a full on report myself! Don’t ask – don’t get as they say! Ask away!
This is a guest post by Derek Marshall, if you would like to guest post for WorkAnywhereNow.com, please contact me here.
If you don’t understand a lot of what was discussed above on how to start a health blog, it’s best to get training from the right place.
Where Derek and I both trained at to learn how to build an affiliate blog website is at a comprehensive affiliate marketing training platform that specifically teaches you on how to create such a blog as discussed in this article.
Check out my free guide here to see where the best affiliate marketing training platform is at!
Let’s make money online!
thanks for sharing the valuable information.
You bet. Thanks for stopping by.