How to Attract Your Ideal Health Coaching Clients with Your Blog Content
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I’m not just saying this because I’ve been a wellness blogger for many years, but: as a health coach (and particularly if you’re an online health coach!), blogging is one of the very best things you can do to grow your audience and connect with new clients for your health coaching practice.
I’ve chatted before in our health coach resources about the many, many benefits of blogging for growing your health coaching business. But, to give a quick recap here:
Blogging improves your health coaching website’s SEO (search engine optimization), which helps put your website in front of more people searching for content exactly like yours. And, more website traffic = more potential health coaching clients. (Yay!)
Sharing your expertise via blog posts helps to establish you as a wellness authority and thus gain potential clients’ respect and trust—before you start trying to make a sale to them. (You’ll generally have much better luck selling premium health coaching programs if you share plenty of quality free content first!)
Content marketing (like promoting your wellness blog posts via Pinterest) is my favorite cost-effective marketing strategy for new health coaches, and helps to expand your reach—specifically within your target audience of ideal health coaching clients.
Regular blogging helps to establish your own voice and personality as a health coach, and helps potential clients feel like they’re getting to know you as a person and possible future health coach. Health coaching is a very personal practice, and most clients feel more comfortable purchasing services from someone whose personality they’ve seen and know they’ll feel comfortable with.
Blogging as part of your health coaching business is certainly well worth the time for new health coaches looking to grow your audience and connect with more clients—no matter how you go about doing it.
But, there are also some specific tips and tricks to keep in mind to be sure you’re most effectively using your wellness blog posts to attract your ideal health coaching clients.
Blogging basics for health coaches
Here are my top tips for starting (and growing!) a wellness blog that helps to connect your health coaching business with your ideal clients:
Know your health coaching audience
Presumably, the end-goal of your blogging efforts is to convert your wellness blog readers into happy paying health coaching clients.
This means that your blog content should be specifically relevant to your target audience (aka your “ideal” health coaching client). Targeting your content to this specific audience is essential for a couple reasons:
In order to attract your ideal health coaching client in the big wide world of the internet, you need to provide content that’s interesting and helpful to them; and
You only want to focus your energy and resources attracting the people who are most likely to be interested in the paid health coaching services you offer, and would receive the most benefit from them.
Your wellness blog may inadvertently attract others along the way as well, and that’s fine. But aim to focus your blogging efforts on specifically targeting and helping your target audience of ideal health coaching clients.
Be helpful + offer real value
Yes, blog content is free.
Many people (not just health coaches, but business owners of all types) worry that giving away their expertise for free de-values their paid products, or renders those products obsolete (why pay for something when you can get it for free, right?!).
While giving away personal health coaching services for free would de-value your paid coaching services, offering free introductory content can actually add value to your paid health coaching programs, rather than detract from them.
How?
Your free blog content helps to establish you as an industry expert, introduce you to potential health coaching clients, and offers a way to build trust and rapport with them.
Health coaching tends to be both a high dollar value product, as well as a very personal experience, and most people are not likely to spend big $$$ on services from someone who a) they’re not sure is a wellness expert, b) they’re not sure can help them with their wellness challenges specifically, and c) they’re not comfortable discussing their most personal health concerns with.
So, the purpose of your free wellness blog content is to:
demonstrate your wellness expertise
show prospective clients that you have wellness tips + resources that can actually help them
show your personality as a health coach so prospective clients feel like they know you and can trust you
Start with the wellness problem, offer a solution
When planning your wellness blog content, focus your posts on specific problems or common questions your target audience has—How do I lose weight and keep it off? What are the most important grocery items to buy organic? Why am I so tired all the time? etc.
Remember, people Google their problems, and they Google questions they’re looking for answers to.
Besides helping to structure your blog post content in a way that’s sure to offer value to your target audience, keeping in mind the problem/solution approach to writing blog content also helps with SEO and getting your blog post in front of people who are actively looking for specifically that.
(And, since you’re crafting content that’s specifically relevant to your target health coaching audience, you’re naturally attracting those lovely people to your website, via your relevant and helpful blog posts.)
Craft a clear + engaging blog post title
A clear, engaging and strategic title is key to getting the right people to read your blog posts. Each blog post title should clearly articulate the content inside of your post, what wellness problem it solves, and what the reader can expect to get out of it.
Also, be sure to use language that makes sense and is meaningful to your target audience. Avoid industry-specific terms your audience might not use or be familiar with, or that they haven’t yet connected to the specific “problem” they’re seeking a solution to. For example, instead of structuring a blog post title around the name of an obscure herb that can be used as a remedy for a common health concern, craft a blog post title that uses the most common words a client may actually be using to search for potential remedies to that health concern.
The CoSchedule Headline Analyzer is a helpful (and free!) tool for crafting SEO-friendly, clickable titles for your wellness blog.
Use strategic headings throughout your wellness blog content
Organize and structure your blog posts with thoughtful, hierarchical headings. Besides the SEO benefits of doing this, it’s important for your readers’ experience, as it helps to break up large blocks of text and walk them through the different sections of your post. Many readers, whether consciously or not, will first skim headings before choosing to delve into the content in more detail.
Website headings are hierarchical, so it’s important to use them in the order they’re intended. Your blog post title will be assigned Heading 1 (h1) by default, so use h2 and h3 throughout your blog posts as sub-headings—h2 being higher-level headings than h3 (which is typically good for lists or side notes).
One of the SEO benefits of using headings in your blog posts is that the words used in each heading are weighted higher in search engines—meaning, they help search engines better understand what your blog post is all about, so they can put it in front of the right people. So, be sure to strategically incorporate relevant keywords into your blog post headings.
Show your personality as a health coach
One of the awesome things about blogging is that it helps to bring out your own personality and thus build a deeper connection and level of trust with your audience (and prospective health coaching clients!).
Showing your personality in your wellness blog posts could include:
sharing behind-the-scenes stories or snapshots to connect your readers to your health coaching services
telling personal stories about your own wellness (origin stories—how you got here—are a good one)
using humor
running a wellness series specific to your niche and area of expertise
design elements like the layout, fonts and colors of your blog
signing off with a custom branded blog signature that highlights you as a health coach
Include a specific call-to-action related to your health coaching business goals
As a marketing tool, your wellness blog should be optimized to achieve your health coaching business goals.
This means that every post should include a specific call-to-action: What do you want your readers to do after reading your post?
Possible wellness blog post call-to-actions:
a button to visit something / join something / buy something
a link to another page or resource
a freebie download (yay opt-in gift!)
a written summary of the article’s takeaway and what the reader is encouraged to do (like our “Four Wellness Tip” at the end of each post on our wellness blog)
social share buttons and an invitation to share the post with someone else who would like it
Though a blog post can have multiple ways for your audience to do something with the information or inspiration they’ve received from reading your post, it’s best to emphasize one primary call-to-action (e.g. signing up for that related opt-in gift) and make this very clear.
You can give blog post readers these opportunities at the end of your article or throughout the text—whichever makes more sense for your purposes.
Here’s our list of the best opt-in gifts for health coaches, if you need some ideas!
Promote your relevant wellness content
It’s a great idea to use your newer blog posts to link to other existing wellness content on your website.
You can link to other relevant pages or blog posts directly within your text (like we’ve been doing throughout this post). And/or you can create a “Related Posts” reel highlighting other blog posts with similar content your readers may be interested in (like we have at the bottom of this post).
Creating a related posts reel for your wellness blog
To set up a Related Posts reel, you’ll just use a Squarespace summary block, connect it to your wellness blog, and sort the displayed content by category or tag—that sorting is what keeps the recommended posts relevant to the content the reader just finished.
Use content marketing to promote your wellness blog
And, finally, after creating wellness blog content that is properly structured to attract your ideal health coaching clients—it’s time to put it in front of them!
Content marketing is the practice of marketing your free blog content—rather than marketing your health coaching services or other paid products directly.
The gist of content marketing is: You write helpful blog content on wellness topics relevant to your audience; you make that blog content available to people who are looking for it; and you include within each post opportunities for readers who enjoyed your content to get more.
Over time, this helps to build awareness of your wellness business, build trust and rapport with prospective health coaching clients, and makes it much easier to sell your paid health coaching services to people for whom they’d be a good fit.
Pinterest (plus a Pinterest scheduling tool called Tailwind) is a cost-effective way for health coaches to promote your wellness blog posts via content marketing. For more details on that, here’s an entire post on how to grow your health coaching audience with content marketing.
Perfect your health coaching website
Grab my free checklist for optimizing your wellness website!
It’s got all the big picture must-haves (& all the important little details!) to make your health coach website shine. ✨
