Fitness blogging has vastly increased over the past decade. Have you ever wondered how you could get in on the action & how your brand can take advantage of the blogosphere – even potentially influencing peoples taste and choices to buy your products? Follow these steps to do so…
It is important the blog is written in a personal tone, the reader must feel as if a friend is writing something to them (All Business, 2016). Much like when writing to a friend, there should be room in the conversation for a question, either by leaving it open ended or asking a question for people to respond to. Like when speaking to a friend, you must develop a consistent tone with the audience so they know to come to the blog to be cheered up, or given advice, or to get motivated – especially with a health and fitness blog (Warner, 2016). For health and fitness blogs it is useful to include elements of humour to empower female fitness (Andreasson & Johansson, 2013).
Much like consistency is key in tone, it is also crucial in terms of blog postings – friendship doesn’t work if you dip in and out of contact as you please, it must be worked at, let your customer know when a blog will be out. Frequent postings once a week or once a month is necessary for a blog to work and a relationship to be built with your readers – they also allow your blog to appear higher in the search rankings as search engines give greater visibility to fresh and frequently updated content (Sanusi, 2014). Make your blog shareable – have icons allowing your audience to share your blog with their friends via Facebook, Twitter or just a URL to share via their phones to extend the relationship built to a wider audience and build a community (Antunovic, 2013).
A blog post should be between 300-500 words, allowing them to be little ‘snackbites’, which a reader can quickly read whilst on the go, but also left wanting to come back to the blog for another post. To aid reading further, ensure the text is scannable with clear headings and bullet points (All Business, 2016). Although this is stated, interestingly the most successful blogs viewed did not contain paragraph headings. This suggests perhaps this is not such a crucial element provided the text is kept short and in text bites, allowing it to be scannable without large headers.
It can be seen that not only are there only 300-500 words, but the words are also broken up, making each paragraph or sentence more digestible and making the text less overwhelming (All Business, 2016). To break up the text, photographs are used to reinforce the point being made, or show what is being spoken about (In the Frow, 2016; Wilkins, 2016).
Ensure you know your audience. Translate how much you know by choosing a theme and content which not only represents yourself but also them (Millburn, 2015). For the vast majority of blogs, using technical terms will not translate. Write content that they will want to read and find not only useful, but valuable (Millburn, 2015). Give them tips to solve a problem, information they haven’t heard before or a new idea on how to do something, even giving them inspiration to try something new. This will again encourage readers to come back and get more inspiration/advice. It seems important that content for health and fitness blogs includes food/nutrition, inspiration to get fit, lifestyle and exercises (Andreasson & Johansson, 2013).
Bloggers are so popular because they are so relatable. Although fitness blogs should be motivational, with inspirational pictures to encourage people to get in shape, it may be difficult to find ways to be relatable, however, perhaps for younger readers discuss going out with friends at the weekend, or for an older audience talk about fitting fitness around motherhood (Andreasson & Johansson, 2013). However, Antunovic & Hardin (2013) argue that people do not necessarily want to lose weight so have the bikini body nor simply post pictures of ‘the perfect woman’ stereotype, therefore it may be wise to post pictures of a more average, healthy woman working out than a size 4 bikini model, as most females are not athletes, they just want to keep fit. Blogs that do these appear higher in search rankings when typing ‘Fitness blog’ into Google, perhaps proving this point.
Plan your content to make it easier to ensure you have a frequent blog posting and titles to ensure it gets posted and attracts the right viewers. A good tip is to use Google Adwords to find keyword people use to find your services/products. Once keywords are identified put these in your blog title into a phrase that accurately describes your blog and will entice people to read it, as not only does it allow people to find your blog post, but it also drives traffic to your blog (Wainwright, 2016).
Benefits of Blogs
Blogging allow fitness brands to develop a relationship with their customer – if information posted on the blog proves useful, people will come back to your blog, and keep your brand on the customers mind. The more useful the content the stronger the customer-brand relationship leading to increased retention.
Also if people find content useful, readers may share the blog with their friends, increasing traffic to your brand and brand recognition. Furthermore, if an influencer writes a guest post, they will publicise this, and who knows – they may have an influencer friend who may publicise this post too, gaining your brand further recognition.
Blogging also allows you to know your customer & audience better from how they react to your posts. This may allow you to adapt your product range accordingly, in turn increasing sales.
Limitations
For brands who are fitness blogging, readers are aware that you have a product to sell ultimately, so will be reading the blog with this in mind. This is why it is important the blog consists of information that they will find useful so that they are not put off by your ultimate call to action. It is important that the focus of the blog is information that is useful to the customer rather than the product you are trying to sell – this will also make your blog more likely to appear in search results was people are more likely to type into google ‘Fitness workout’ than ‘[Insert your brand’s name] blog’. Furthermore, if you give your customers useful information, people are more likely to return to your blog.
People can easily post negative comments, which can impact others’ views of your blog. If you delete these comments, it looks as if your brand has something to hide, however, if you respond positively to the complaint and offer a useful solution, people are more likely to speak positively about your brand and drive further traffic to your blog.
Measure Your Blogs Performance
The obvious way to measure your blog’s performance is to measure page & post views. Google Analytics can also be used to measure sentiment surrounding your blog, be it positive or negative comments on each blog post. However perhaps the most beneficial measure would be to see what content drives the most traffic to your blog using Google Analytics (Millburn, 2015). You can then utilize this when writing future content to maintain consistently high traffic to your blogs (Sanusia, 2014).
If you want to find out more about how to write an effective health and fitness blog you may be interested in these links:
- Fitness On Toast
- 50 Bloggers Making a Difference in Fitness, Health and Happiness
- How to Optimise Your Fitness Blog for Human & Robot Consumption
- The Nine Ingredients That Make Great Content
References
- All Business (2016) 5 Tips for Writing an Effective Business Blog [Online] <http://www.allbusiness.com/slideshow/5-tips-for-writing-an-effective-business-blog-16799694-1.html> [Accessed 21st March 2016]
- Andreasson, J., Johansson, T., (2013), “Female Fitness in the Blogosphere: Gender, Health, and the Body”, SAGE Open, vol. 3, no. July-September, pp. 1.
- Antunovic, D. & Hardin, M. (2013), “Women bloggers: Identity and the conceptualization of sports”, New Media & Society, vol. 15, no. 8, pp. 1374-1392.
- In the Frow (2016) Why it’s okay to Alternate your Style [Online] <http://www.inthefrow.com/2016/03/okay-alternate-style.html> [Accessed 21st March 2016]
- Millburn, J. F., (2015) How to Start a Successful Blog Today The Minimalists, 10th November 2015 [Online] < http://www.theminimalists.com/blog/> [Accessed 21st March 2016]
- Sanusia, A (2014) How to Write a Successful Blog that also Promotes your Business The Guardian, 24th June 2014 [Online] <http://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2013/apr/30/how-to-write-a-business-blog> [Accessed 21st March 2016]
- Wainwright, C (2016) How to Write Catchy Headlines and Blog Titles Your Readers Can’t Resist Hubspot, 23rd February 2016 [Online] < http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/a-simple-formula-for-writing-kick-ass-titles-ht> [Accessed 21st March 2016]
- Warner, J (2015) Writing a Good Blog Creating Family Web Sites for Dummies [Online] < http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/writing-a-good-blog.html> [Accessed 21st March 2016]
- Wilkins, S. (2016) Paris: Exploring the Ile de la Cité. Sainte Chapelle, the Conciergerie & Notre Dame Liberty London Girl, 8th March 2016 [Online] <http://www.libertylondongirl.com/2016/03/08/ile-de-la-cite-sainte-chapelle-conciergerie-notre-dame/#more-26962> [Accessed 21st March 2016]