The market for healthy living has never been bigger than ever, with more people looking for ways to exercise effectively, eat well, and generally improve their well-being. If you’re a health influencer, especially one who already has something of an audience, you might be looking for a way to turn that attention into a living, and maybe even make it your full-time career.
There are a lot of routes you can take towards monetizing your platform, and not all of them are going to be for everyone, so let’s take a look at what routes you can take.
Affiliate Marketing
When you’re able to hit your influencer goals of driving more traffic towards your site and increasing your brand awareness, then you might be able to start earning a commission through affiliate marketing. This usually takes the form of recommending, reviewing, or simply showcasing products, which can include things like supplements, fitness gear, or wellness apps, and placing affiliate links on your website that lead to the brands you’re working with.
The key to successful affiliate marketing tends to be promoting those products that you genuinely have an interest in and that you’re audience is well-suited to. Authenticity is what keeps their trust and ensures they keep coming back time and time again.
Produce Sponsored Content
Although they both involve producing content in partnership with a brand, there are differences between affiliate marketing and sponsored content that make them distinct strategies. Affiliate marketing typically involves creators earning commissions on sales generated through affiliate links or codes.
On the other hand, sponsored content typically sees you getting paid, sometimes a flat fee, sometimes a variable fee based on content performance. Sponsored content is more openly an endorsement or promotion of the product or service involved, however.
As such, influencers have to be even more mindful of the brands they produce sponsored content for, as their connection tends to be a lot more open and upfront than standard affiliate marketing. That said, disclosure is important and, in many territories, legally required, regardless of whether it’s an affiliate or sponsored relationship.
Teach Health Classes Online
As you dig into, explore, and explain various topics, you may be able to demonstrate an expertise in the subject matter that your most invested followers would be willing to pay to learn more about. Finding the right platform to teach health online can make use of the booming online education sector, allowing you to lead virtual classes on topics related to nutrition, fitness, mental wellness, holistic living, and much more.
Your ability to lead a class will depend on your personal branding as an expert, so it may be worth completing some further education or training of your own to formalize your knowledge. However, teaching can also even further position you as an expert in the influencer space.
Selling eBooks and Guides
While there are many who prefer a more video or live feed-driven teaching experience where you can guide them through the subject matter, for those who prefer to self-pace their learning or dig into topics independently, you can also sell digital products like eBooks and health guides. For instance, you could write a guide on meal prepping, fitness for beginners, stress management, or clean eating on a budget.
These resources provide value to your audience and are easy to sell through your own website or through the various eBook platforms online. The biggest benefit of eBooks is that they can keep generating passive income long after they have been written, provided that you’re able to capture your target audience and market it well.
Consider Going Into Coaching Or Consultations
If you’re a trusted authority in your particular lane of health and wellness, and you have a passion for helping people directly in a one-to-one sense, then personalized health coaching might be a highly lucrative path for you, as well. By offering one-on-one or group coaching, you can guide clients through nutrition planning, fitness routines, habit formation, or mental health strategies.
This approach sees you working much more closely with individuals and, as a result, tends to fetch a much higher price than other online services, as a result. Many coaches use tiered pricing and service schemes to make sure that they’re able to reach as wide a market as possible. As with some of the other methods mentioned above, you don’t necessarily need formal certification to coach, but it does help.
Transition Towards A Subscription-Based Community
Influencers and content creators online have typically had a hard time going full-time through their content alone. However, this has recently changed with the rise of subscription-driven platforms like Patreon or exclusive Discords and even X (formerly Twitter) subscriptions.
You can offer exclusive content, live chats, behind-the-scenes videos, member-only classes, or monthly health challenges.
This recurring income model not only gives you further incentive to stay consistent with your content calendar, but it also helps build a more loyal following, as your more invested fans and likely to become even more engaged once they’ve committed with some financial backing, too.
Get Into Long-Form Content
If you have the energy and the depth of knowledge for long-term content, then creating a YouTube or podcast channel might be a way to further grow your online brand.
Health topics offer great room to expand on the topics you’ve perhaps already covered, and you can monetize them in different ways, as well. On YouTube, you can earn through ads, sponsorships, memberships, and affiliate links. Podcasts can be monetized via ads, listener donations, or premium episodes.
The more personal connection that these mediums tend to allow for can help you include more personal stories, interviews with others in the same space, and a Q&A format with your listeners, as well. Good long-form content that’s evergreen can also help you generate views and income for years to come, much like eBooks.
There are a lot of paths to monetizing your experience, platform, and expertise as a health influencer. Hopefully, the tips above have helped you see some that might suit your own ideas of what you want to do.
