Do you want to have the perfect nutrition blog?
There is no secret recipe other than a lot of work but we can tell you a few things that can make your nutrition blog more efficient.
Just keep in mind that in order to have a successful nutrition blog you should have in mind 2 elements: how would it better serve your visitors and in the same time how can it serve you as a tool of promotion.
The list is not exhaustive but we believe that if you have these elements you will be ahead of most of the other nutrition blogs. And your nutrition website will attract more visitors which will lead to more patients for your nutrition practice.
Quality images
You may write about diets or HAES (Health at Every Size), nutrition myths or the non-diet approach, recipes or supplements, fitness or rest but if you use no image or poor images you are leaving a lot of money on the table.
Articles with images get 94% more views than articles without images.
“A picture tells a thousand words” – I know, we’ve all heard the cliché, but the truth is that our brains are processing images a lot more faster than words and texts.
Your brain is able to recognize familiar objects within 100 milliseconds and familiar faces within 380 milliseconds. That’s much faster than reading even a word from your nice nutrition post title.
A good image tells a story without the need to explain it. Even though it might not be the story you want to tell, it makes people think, dream and feel an emotion.
Avoid stock photos, if possible use photos that you take or with yourself. But stock photos are better than no photos or poor photos.
Small trick: to increase the effectiveness of an image give it a name relevant to your nutrition article subject and put an alternative and title text that’s relevant to your article. Google and his SEO will thank you.
Descriptive titles and snippets
We all want to sound smart and write very artistic titles.
But your visitors would really like to know what in the world is the article about.
The snippet is a paragraph that you will display in the homepage of your nutrition blog or articles page.
Don’t display the entire article, just an intro with a “read more” button that takes the visitor to a separated page where you have the entire article, comments and so on.
Avoid fancy titles and be as pragmatical as possible.
There are 6 questions that an article should usually respond to: who, what, where, when, how and why. The responses to the first 4 questions (who, what, where, when) should be ideally in the title and the snippet (the intro).
Comments for your nutrition blog
Do you like to tell your opinion about nutrition, don’t you? Your visitors would also like to.
Don’t waste a good article without giving your visitors the possibility to write comments.
If you manage to have an engaged audience it’s much more likely to have more traffic. There are also a lot of SEO benefits.
If you are using WordPress or other known CMS there is a native implementation of comments. There are a lot of other services that you can use to increase the engagement like Disqus and Facebook Comments.
Just be aware about the fact that you will have to clean up some nasty comments but there are technical solutions that will help you do that almost automatically.
Small tip: enable threaded comments to increase the readability.
Scrolling sharing buttons
You just wrote a masterpiece article on your nutrition blog. You shared it on all your social media profiles.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if other people would easily share your article too?
There are WordPress plugins and other services that will empower you with scrolling sharing buttons for your nutrition blog easier than you think. A few examples are Sharebar plugin and Sumo tools.
Email list subscription
There are multiple ways to build an audience. The one that you own entirely is email marketing.
Build a newsletter that would allow people to hear from you when you write a new article or have something important to share.
A ton of services claim that they are the best, from Mailchimp to Aweber and ConvertKit. This article is a great introduction to email marketing for your nutrition blog.
At the end of this article you will find a subscribe box. Please leave your email there and we promise we will never spam you.
Your bio as a dietitian or nutritionist
A visitor came on your blog and was intrigued or amazed by what you’ve shared.
She might want to know who is behind the article without searching too much. Put your bio accompanied by a great photo somewhere visible.
Don’t forget that humans are visual beings so try to impress with your titles but also with good images.
Powerful Call To Action
You wrote that nutrition article because you want people to do something.
Contact you, subscribe to your newsletter, read another article, whatever your reason is, make it loud and clear.
Don’t let the visitor think “and now what?” tell them directly. A call to action is an invitation for the visitor to do something.
Have only one major call to action per article and if only one is not possible, add another one just as a secondary action.
You can see an example at the end of this article.
Are we missing any important element for a successful nutrition blog? Please leave a comment below.