How to Start a Mental Health Blog: 8 Essentials for Success

Starting a mental health blog is no easy feat. Blogging requires dedication, passion, and creativity. In addition, you need to have the drive to keep publishing new content regularly for your blog to be a success. If you’re looking for some tips on how to start a mental health blog that will succeed, this article has everything you need!

What’s your mental blog about?

To get started, you’ll need first to figure out what your blog will be about. Mental health is a broad topic, so make sure you narrow it down and focus on one specific area that you’re interested in or knowledgeable about.

The following are just some subtopics of mental health:

• Mental Health Advocacy
• Suicide 
• Self-Care 
• Grief 
• Therapy 
• Anxiety

So, I said choose a niche. But don’t limit yourself to it.

As your blog grow and publish hundreds of articles about your chosen subtopic, you’ll eventually run out of things to talk about.

That’s why following the next step is vital to your success.

Create a brandable name for your mental health blog

Next, create a catchy and memorable name for your blog. Make sure it’s something that stands out and catches people’s attention.

I always talk about how powerful branding is in my blog.

You have to be memorable and stand out from the crowd.

So how do you create a brandable name for your blog?

Many people choose their names as their blogs’ titles, but that’s not always advisable or easy for everyone. That’s why I’m going to share the following tips on how to find a unique, memorable name:

• Come up with a name that is personal to you and your experiences.
• Think about the type of message you want to send with your blog. What are your goals?
• Make sure the name reflects what your blog is about.
• Be creative! The more unique, the better.
• Check to see the domain is available for purchase. This is important, as you’ll want to make sure people can easily find your blog online.

Just a couple of mental health blogs that gets it right:

• Mind
• The Mighty
• Purple Persuasion
• Sectioned
• MQ
• National Elf Service

Use a good host provider for your mental health blog

Once you’ve got a name, set up a domain and hosting account. Doing so will give your blog a professional appearance and make it easier for people to find.

A great host that I’ve used for decades is Bluehost. Their customer service is the best, and they can scale with your business.

Get started with a free domain and hosting account from Bluehost here.

With your blog set up, you’ll want to install WordPress on it. This makes adding pages and posts very easy for the user.

Wix for your mental health blog

WordPress powers millions of websites on the internet, including this blog. You will not go wrong. WordPress is easily customizable using hundreds of plugins.

However, plugins can blot your site and need a little bit of content management system knowledge to fix some issues when plugins have conflicts.

If you don’t want to deal with the headache, I suggest going with WIX.

You can build a mental health blog in minutes using Wix’s nice-looking templates.

Publish content in your mental health blog consistently

Once everything is in place, start writing content! It’s best to schedule out how much time each day or week you will spend creating content for your online mental health blog. Setting goals like this makes it easier to stay motivated to create new things regularly.

Learn a bit about SEO

Search engine optimization or SEO is the method of optimizing your blog posts and website so that they show up as high as possible in Google search results. This means using keywords and phrases strategically throughout your content, titles, and metadata (information about the post that shows up on search engines).

The best and cheapest way to get traffic to your mental health blog is by leveraging SEO. Of course, search engine optimization is a broad topic. But, you only need to learn a few things to get the benefit.

What you need to know about SEO

Use social media to build a brand

To start a mental health blog and be successful, you need to do more than write compelling content. You also need to think about how you’re going to market your blog, how you can make it stand out from the competition, and how you can attract readers.

Traffic from search engines is the best traffic. But, when it comes to branding, social media is the best tool.

Social media creates trust when other people use or talk about your brand. It’s like proof or a vote of confidence that your company does what it says it does.

Of course, it can also negatively affect your brand if people are saying bad things about it. That’s why branding is not an easy game.

Branding takes years. And, it’s hard.

But, you love your business, and you’ll do anything to make it work.

Use these blogging tools

Blogging is hard.

It’s more complicated when you don’t have the right tools.

Just like a mechanic. Fixing cars is challenging without the proper equipment.

Blogging is the same.

I use a lot of software to build and manage my online businesses. I don’t know where I’ll be without them.

These blogging tools will help with SEO, time management, content management, email marketing, digital marketing, and much more.

Tools to manage my blogging business

Conclusion

Blogging is hard work.

You’ll get stressed, anxious, depressed, and will affect your mental health.

It’s great that you’re an expert in mental health though.

But, you need to be an expert in blogging too.

Otherwise, your blog will fail.

Use the tools and resources I’ve given you to help make your blog successful.

And remember, it’s not about perfection. It’s about progress. So don’t give up if things don’t go perfectly at first. Instead, keep working hard, and you’ll see results.