The Top 5 Skills You Need to Become a Nutrition Blogger

So you wanna be a nutrition blogger, huh? Great! Welcome to the club!

Nutrition bloggers will ideally supply practical, accurate, and, yep, somewhat entertaining information to their audience. If you love nutrition and are a curious, passionate writer, this is your dream job.

But there are some essential skills you should hone before you put your blog out there.

Think about your goals as a nutrition blogger. More than likely, you want to:

Give your readers information that will positively impact their lives
Support yourself as a trusted nutrition professional

To achieve these goals, nutrition bloggers need to focus on the 5 skills we’ll explore in this blog:

know your audience
solve their problems
know your subject
learn some SEO techniques
and make it fun

Nutrition Blogger Skill #1: Know Your Audience (plus one sneaky pre-skill)

Knowing your audience is crucial for giving a speech, dropping the F-bomb, and writing blogs. If you want to become an excellent nutrition blogger, you have to know who you’re talking to.

Strangely enough, this is closely connected to knowing yourself.

How so?

Figuring out what you want your focus to be as a nutrition blogger determines your audience. Period. (Like, that’s it. There’s no arguing this.)

This is popularly called ‘niching down,’ and it’s critical for small business owners of all ilks. But it’s particularly important for online businesses (like yours).

Niching down into a specialty ensures that you create content that generally centers around one main subject like IBS, Graves’ disease, SIBO, restless leg syndrome, erectile dysfunction, nutrition for kayakers, nutrition for endurance runners, nutrition for women over 40, etc.

This really, really matters, and we’ll get into the details of why it matters when we talk SEO.

For now, pick your niche. If you need help with that, check out my blog on choosing a nutrition career that makes you happy.

The steps for choosing a satisfying career work beautifully for niche picking.

Ok, now on to knowing your audience. Once your niche is finalized, learn everything you can about the people in that niche. Who are they? Where do they hang out? Do they drink Coca-Cola? Do they chug kombucha? And most important for nutrition blogging, what is their biggest problem and how does this problem affect their life?

Most of your blogs will center around solving your readers’ problems.

So you want to offer solutions that are right for them—their vibe, personality, and stage in life. You want to use words that resonate with them and recommend products (hopefully yours) and valuable resources that increase their trust.

Knowing your audience means you can write blogs that your audience will read and use. And then they’ll come back to your website to read more. That’s a win-win-win.

Nutrition Blogger Skill #2: Solve Their Problems (with one exception)

You might want to write blogs about the physiology of mitophagy or the etiology of Hashimoto’s disease.

And that’s great if you’re writing to a heady, science-minded audience. (Spoiler alert: you usually won’t be writing to a heady, science-minded audience…but we’ll cover one exception).

As a nutrition blogger, you need to write in a way that quickly, practically, and accurately solves your readers’ problems.

So, how do you do that?

go back to skill #1 and make sure you know your audience and their specific problems
make practical lists (ahem)
create H2 and H3 headings that highlight important takeaways
leave lots of negative space in your blogs so they’re skimmable, memorable, and immediately useful
provide helpful links (yes, it’s 100% ok to link someone off your website, even better to link them to your offerings )
don’t give them too much information at one time

Pay close attention to that last point.

You know a LOT. You could write an encyclopedia with the amount of nutrition knowledge you’ve acquired over the years.

But don’t unload all that info on your readers in one blog. Spread out the goodness. It will be better for their comprehension and better for your website.

Finally, there’s one exception to science-y speak in your blogs: give your nutrition blogs a little pump with just a tiny bit of science terminology. It’s a signal that lets readers know that you know your shit. Do it in a way that’s humble, educational, and brief.

Most nutrition bloggers go overboard on terms and concepts that readers care nothing about (and then wonder why no one is visiting their site or booking an appointment).

Nutrition Blogger Skill #3: Know Your Subject

Accuracy is just as critical as practicality.

Yes, you want your blog to be useful in the real world of eating through rushed mornings, doctor’s appointments, and vacations.

But you also want the information you provide to be as accurate as possible.

This point may seem obvious, but it’s not followed by some of the most popular nutrition bloggers.

Why?

Creating scientifically accurate information that’s also practical is freaking hard.

Science is not black and white, it’s not always straightforward, and it’s certainly not established. The field is just a little over 100 years old, and there’s still a lot we’re figuring out.

So just say that.

You can be an expert nutrition blogger while also presenting the multiple and sometimes contradictory facets of your field. (Psssst…this is your chance to show off your stuff in 100 words or less!)

In fact, your readers will love you for your transparency, for ferreting out the sometimes non-intuitive details of their particular situation (like the fact that soy might be therapeutic for some people with systemic lupus erythematosus but perhaps not so great for other autoimmune diagnoses), and for including them in the often opaque world of science-speak (1).

Knowing your subject inside and out is another benefit of niching down—becoming an expert in one condition or on one group of people is infinitely easier than keeping up with the literally millions of studies published each year.

You become a true expert and establish yourself as an educated source. This leads us to skill #4.

Nutrition Blogger Skill #4: Learn Some SEO Techniques

If you write a fabulous nutrition blog, chances are you want people to read it.

And there’s only one way for readers to find your blog: learn some SEO techniques.

SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. It means optimizing your nutrition blog and website so that when someone searches for content, they find you versus other nutrition bloggers.

Imagine your potential reader using Google after seeing a doctor and getting a thyroid diagnosis. She sort of remembers the doctor saying a name that sounded like “hash,” but she can’t remember exactly what it was. Her brain is fried.

She does know that she’s exhausted, that she just had a baby but barely has the energy to change his diaper, is depressed, her skin is drier than it’s ever been, and her hair is falling out all over the place.

What is she going to Google?

“Hashimoto’s thyroiditis” or “Why am I so tired after having a baby”?

SEO tip #1

Use words your readers will use, NOT the science lingo that you know so well.

SEO tip #2

Put more energy into being a nutrition blogger than a social media superstar.

Your website needs words (and lots of them) to get found on search engines. So blog away, preferably blogs that are 2000 words or more.

SEO tip #3

Create custom meta descriptions.

Meta descriptions are little snippets of content below the search engine hyperlink to your blog or webpage:

They should be about 160 characters and describe what your blog is about. This is your chance to give potential readers a taste of what they can expect when they click the link to read your blog.

HubSpot has a great article on writing top-notch meta descriptions.

SEO tip #4

Don’t freak out about SEO.

Many nutrition bloggers get bogged down in the particulars of SEO, leading to a downward spiral of simply not posting at all. Bad move.

The best way to improve your nutrition blog’s find-ability is to get words published. So go for it. You’ll learn a lot along the way.

Nutrition blogger skill #5: Make it fun

Humans love a good story. Storytelling is in our DNA—we used to sit around campfires telling tales, and now we sit around with our phones watching IG reels.

So do your best to tell a compelling story, a surprising fact, or even a joke. There’s something about nutrition that you love, so let that passion out in your writing. Make your subject matter fun and easy to engage with. Ideally, your readers will feel like they’re part of the blog, enough so that they leave a comment telling you their thoughts (also great for SEO, btw!).

If you don’t feel like an entertaining person (and I can relate…I usually want to rattle off research facts to my audience), then share your story. Vulnerability is incredibly appealing, and your audience will appreciate learning more about you, the expert, while also learning how to help themselves.

Need help becoming a nutrition blogger?

Nutrition blogging can feel overwhelming!

If you want more support, check out the Blog Bootcamp: 5 days of blogging know-how, copywriting pearls, Q&A, and daily co-working. See you there!

References

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28294088/