With the ever increasing prominence of the Internet in every area of life, including education, business, entertainment, and social endeavors, the opportunities to connect with more and more people, and make your ideas heard, has never been greater.
Blogs have a become a great outlet to showcase ideas, provide advice or step-by-step instructions on a wide array of topics, discuss and debate news and information, and record thoughts and feelings.
But with the increase in the number of blogs on the web comes not only more competition, but more noise. It can be very challenging to grow a healthy readership, especially if you’re just starting out, and there are plenty of reasons that your blog may not be having an impact.
But the first step in solving a problem is realizing that you have one, so if you know your health blog isn’t growing like you want, or you just want to take the next step to engage a wider readership, consider the following three ways to make your health blog more engaging and create impact for the readers.
3 Ways to Make Your Health Blog More Engaging for Readers
1Improve the Quality of Your Content
If you’ve been blogging long enough, and reading a host of different blogs, you’ve probably read some pretty terrible stuff. An example that you’d never want to use in your own blog might be, “Welcome to my blogg! I’m Chirs and your going to be so excited to learn all of the stuff I can tell you to get more good at working out!” Painful, right?
While that may be a bit of an exaggeration, the point is that blogs are, first and foremost, a medium based in the written word. Since people who use blogs extensively most likely enjoying reading in all aspects of their life, you can bet that if your blog is filled with typos, misspelled words, and poor phrasing, you’ll turn your readers off quicker than a blown fuse.
I’m not saying that you have to be an expert author; if you’re waiting until you can compete with J.R.R. Tolkien or Frank Herbert before you start publishing your blog, you’ll be waiting about 20 years, at least. What I am saying is that you need to make a conscious effort to improve your writing – learn basic grammar (even if you don’t adhere to it all the time), use your word processor’s thesaurus function to expand your vocabulary, and for pete’s sake, use your spell check function!
These are just the basics, and seem simple enough, but without a solid foundation, you won’t be able to focus on ways to phrase your ideas better, or better connect your key points with your overall theme.
Aside from your writing, don’t forget to give some consideration to the images you’re using to illustrate your points. You need high resolution, quality images to engage your readers with what you’re talking about, and give a visual indicator that lends substance to your words. These don’t have to be images you shoot yourself, since quality cameras and editing software are expensive. You can use free stock fitness images that will illustrate your point perfectly.
2Introduce a New Perspective
People will come to your health blog initially because you offer something different, or write about your health topics with a unique voice, or maybe because you’re just downright funny and entertaining, and that’s awesome! That’s exactly what you’ll need to get started on the right foot.
But as time passes, you may find that your blog gets a healthy number of readers, but you’ve stagnated. Your loyal readers remain loyal, and you might still be producing quality content, but no one new is checking out your blog.
If you find yourself in this situation, you should consider introducing new voices to your blog.
The blogging community is unique in that, unlike more traditional roles that revolve around writing, such as magazines and fiction writing, there is a lot of opportunity for collaboration and sharing. Bloggers often become bloggers because they’ve subscribed to, and regularly read, the posts from authors that they admire and aspire to emulate.
Beyond just admiring and praising them, why not invite those same authors who inspired you early on to come and contribute to your blog? Guest posting is a common practice in the blogosphere, and it can beef up your readership in several ways.
First: inviting guest contributors to write for your blog will not only bring a unique perspective to your blog that will pique your reader’s interest, it will allow you access to your guest’s audience, in the same way that you’re opening yours up to them.
Second: you’re heightening your own credibility. Successful bloggers are very careful and considerate when deciding whether or not to associate their brand with another blog, and for good reason! They’ve spent a lot time, and invested a lot of hard work, to make their blog a success and establish trust with their audience They want to ensure their host is relevant, accurate and honest, in order to preserve their own reputation. If you pass their checks and they agree to contribute, it will go a long way towards improving your own credibility.
Finally: inviting others to contribute to your blog is a declaration from you that you value your community, and welcome different voices to enrich your content, to the benefit your readers. People are naturally inclined to reciprocate the good will that’s extended us. By inviting others to contribute to your blog, and telling them how much you admire their work, you’ll find that you’ll start receiving opportunities of your own to contribute to other blogs. This will allow you not only access to a potential new stream of readers, but potentially, any business partners that blog may have as well.
3Establish New Partnerships with Health Industry Businesses
If your blog has grown to the point that you have a healthy viewership, with regular daily and weekly visitors, you should consider partnering with businesses and advertisers.
To get your blog to a very high level of quality, and to post new content at a rate that keeps your readers engaged, you’re going to have to invest a lot of time and effort. That’s time and effort that could be spent with family, friends, or getting a higher level of education for your full time job. If you’re going to invest that much in your blog, it should be giving something back to you, and a partnership with a business will allow you to earn revenue, at the same time as you provide new content that’s relevant to your readers.
Through a partnership with a businesses in the health industry, you’ll be able to earn money through advertising, as well as product reviews and paid guest contributions to that business’s own blog. Your readers will benefit because you can educate them about products and services they can use to address the health concerns that they came to your blog to learn about in the first place, from the perspective of a person they know and trust.
If your blog focuses on fitness, and you just wrote a post about exercises to strengthen your back, which help stabilize and strengthen the other muscle groups, why not take it a step further and recommend a sponsored rowing machine that targets those muscles!
Be Who You Are; Just Be Better
I hope these ways to make your health blog more engaging have got your mental gears turning, and you’re already considering some news ways that you can improve your blog and get new readers. At the same time, I’m not advocating you to completely change who you are.
Your readers love you for a reason, and a lot of it has to do with who you are as a person and a blogger. Don’t ever lose sight of the reasons they subscribe to you in the first place, but instead, keep that same strong sense of self you’ve already established, and use it as your foundation to grow!
