Sigh, blogging about mental health.
Before we dive into this topic I want to provide you with some background. I’ve helped over 1,600 people build blogs in the past 4+ years.
At the time of writing this post, I’ve helped over 2,000 people work on their online businesses with almost all of them involving a blog.
Add that to the people whom I’ve helped over email and it’s a fairly large number of people that I’ve interacted with who wanted to make money with their blog.
I mention this to you because there has been a healthy number of people who have asked if blogging about mental health is feasible and how can they make it successful.
This is a tough one to answer because I fully believe that if you feel strongly about something you should pursue it. This applies to blogging as well.
However, if I’m being realistic I’ll let you know that if you wish to make money with your blog then DO NOT MAKE MENTAL HEALTH YOUR MAIN TOPIC.
Why?
It comes down to money.
Blogging About Mental Health and Making Money Is Hard
To understand why this is the case you simply have to understand how you get traffic to your blog.
For now, we are going under the assumption that your main revenue source is going to be ads. It’s not what we want you to pursue first and foremost, but it makes sense to have ads as one of your revenue sources.
If that’s the case then you are going to need a lot of traffic to really see any significant money ($1,000+) with your blog.
That means you’re hoping that a lot of people are actively looking for topics that revolve around mental health.
How many people are doing that?
I honestly don’t know but you also have to consider that the people that do are probably getting authority sites.
Medical sites that are sourced by health professionals.
You might not be a health professional but let’s say you’ve suffered through depression and want to share your story with others.
That’s awesome and I applaud you.
But again, how are you going to get enough people to your site to make the money that you want?
Do people who suffer from depression actively search for depression topics online?
These are the things you have to ask yourself and you need to be honest.
Now, does this mean you need to completely avoid writing about mental health?
I don’t think so.
Remember my advice from above?
Don’t make Mental Health the MAIN topic for your blog.
What if your site is about self-care and one blog post just happens to be about depression?
What if your site is about parenting and sometimes you write about autism?
With these examples, you still get to write about the topic you want to talk about, but you have other topics (pieces of content) to supplement your business and attract most of the traffic.
People Want Improvement
It’s important to understand that people wake up every day looking to improve.
Improve what?
Something.
When they are searching for things online it’s because they want to improve. How do you improve mental health?
I can’t tell you that because that’s not my thing. However, if you’re going to try and help people then you need to understand how you can help them.
But you also have to be very careful as mental health falls under what is known as YMYL.
What’s that?
Your Money Your Life
Google doesn’t want to send people to sites where they can get “advice” that could cause them harm so unless you’re professionally trained and have a reputation online it’s going to be tough to rank for other mental health topics.
But things like self-care? That’s something anyone can rank for.
There isn’t much to know if you’re showing someone how to sit down with a glass of wine and relax.
So you need to understand what is possible with any topics around mental health because it’s not just about you sitting down, writing, and then watching the traffic come in.
My advice?
Choose another niche if you want to make money.
Stick with mental health if you just want to help.
