How My Health Blog Makes $1K/Month Through Ad Placements

Alexandra Ng

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Published: July 23rd, 2023

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Alexandra Ng

Founder, Life Boost Nutrition

$1K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Life Boost Nutrition

lifeboostnutrition.com

from Singapore + United States

started August 2022

$1,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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G Suite

blog

WordPress

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?🔗

Hello! My name is Alexandra Ng, and I am the founder of Life Boost Nutrition, a digital platform offering comprehensive reviews of health supplements and guidance on maintaining your physical and mental health.

Our main product is not a tangible one but information—critical, well-researched, and comprehensible content about supplements, their uses, and their effects, particularly on aging bodies. We sell advertising placements to brands in health and wellness, anything from physical supplement brands who want to advertise their brands to fitness brands.

Our primary audience is anyone who is looking for credible information about solving their health problems. However, we are planning to specialize in content about the aging population, their caregivers, and anyone interested in preventative measures.

With consistent growth in traffic and a content team behind us, our content aids our audience in making informed health decisions.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?🔗

I hail from Singapore, a country facing the challenges and opportunities of a rapidly aging population. My journey with this issue began with my grandfather who struggled with bone health issues in his later years.

It was heart-wrenching to witness his discomfort, and it became increasingly clear that there was a dearth of easily accessible, reliable information about supplements and nutritional strategies for bone health.

I've always inclined healthcare and nutrition. So, leveraging my background in digital media and marketing, I decided to fill this information gap with LifeBoostNutrition.com.

The "aha" moment was realizing that my grandfather's situation was not unique—there were millions out there grappling with the same issues. To validate my idea, I conducted extensive market research and found that while there were health blogs and supplement review sites, none focused specifically on problems relating to an aging population as well as sensitive health issues.

At the time, I was financially stable with a full-time job, but the pull toward starting something of my own was stronger. I took the plunge and devoted my savings, time, and energy to build LifeBoostNutrition.com.

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.🔗

Building LifeBoostNutrition.com wasn't about producing a physical product, but about curating quality content and presenting it in an easily digestible format. The process started with designing the website to be user-friendly, particularly for an older audience.

Good, reliable, and accessible information can make a real difference in people's lives.

The early interface was simple, clean, and easy to navigate, designed to allow visitors to find the information they need quickly. It was built on wordpress and we are using one of the standard themes right now because we wanted to focus on traffic before paying a developer to do cosmetic changes.

We began with a small team of freelance writers who were either nutritionists or had a health background. We currently have 1 writer from the States and 1 nomad writer who is based in Bali now.

They were responsible for producing well-researched, fact-checked, and easy-to-understand articles. Every piece of content was meticulously reviewed to ensure credibility. This was our MVP—providing valuable, reliable, and understandable content.

In terms of costs, the main expenses were website development, hosting, and content creation. It costs about $2,000 to pay for our writers and we hope we can bring them on full-time as our revenue grows.

To comply with regulations, we made sure to include necessary disclaimers and adhere to all advertising and medical information guidelines.

Over the 1st month, we saw very little progress.

However, as our site became trusted with Google, we started to rank for more and more keywords, allowing us as a publisher to get traffic and brands reaching out to us about sponsorships and partnerships.

Brands have also started sending us PR packages to actually test out their products as well, right now we are writing articles about these brands.

However, in the future, I would like to open a video studio so that we can even do custom video reviews of these products!

Describe the process of launching the business.🔗

Our launch strategy was primarily content-driven. We started with a handful of in-depth articles and relied heavily on organic SEO to gain visibility. We DON’T do any social media at all and want to focus ONLY on SEO as an acquisition channel.

We self-financed the business, with costs going toward website setup, content creation, and initial marketing.

Initial traction was slow, but as our content began ranking on search engines and gaining shares on social media, traffic started growing steadily. These articles started to rank on page 1 of Google, which directed a significant amount of traffic our way.

That is where we learned that there is a big difference between being ranked number 1 on Google vs number 7 on Google. Number 1 is where the BULK of the traffic lies.

One of the biggest lessons I learned from this process was patience. Growth, especially organic, doesn't happen overnight, but persistence and consistent quality work pay off eventually.

Never compromise on the quality of your product or service—it's the foundation of your brand's reputation.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?🔗

Post-launch, our most effective strategy has been a strong focus on SEO. We continuously optimize our content and website structure to improve our search engine rankings. We also started a bi-weekly newsletter, offering exclusive content and supplement recommendations to our subscribers.

Because of my background, I was aware that a lot of supplement brands, nootropics, coffee, food-related brands, health and wellness brands selling stuff like massagers, fitness rings and accessories, and athletic clothing brands face stiff competition when spending money on Facebook and Google ads.

They want another avenue of advertising that is less dependent on ad platforms and more stable, which is why we focused on SEO and good content from day 1.

Content marketing is still super effective because of the credibility and non-sales approach that it does in the consumer purchasing cycle.

From the traffic from our website, we attract inbound advertisers and brands who also want to diversify their traffic sources, so they choose to advertise on a website like ours which already owns the traffic and distribution.

We have different types of customers including supplement brands who want to acquire customers and have an SEO presence outside of Facebook and Google ads so that in the long term they reduce their risks of reliance on these platforms.

The only things we do that move the needle for us are:

Researching keywords and topics that people are searching about
Investigating, writing about them, and publishing good high-quality content
Reaching out to potential prospective brands

The process of researching keywords is very simple: Get a free or paid tool like keyword planner, put in a base keyword like ‘fish oil’ and Google will spit out a bunch of NEW keywords you never knew.

So your 1 keyword becomes > 5 keywords > 10 keywords > and now you have 50+ keywords to write about.

It’s not rocket science. But it is time-consuming & takes REAL effort, that’s why most people don’t do it.

At the same time, we are also planning to open up our email list to advertisers so that there is another revenue stream coming in and a placement that supplement brands can advertise in.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?🔗

Today, LifeBoostNutrition.com is profitable with a consistently growing reader base. We have a healthy return on ad spend, with our customer acquisition costs decreasing as organic traffic increases. Our website metrics are promising—the average time spent on the site is increasing, indicating that readers find our content valuable.

We don’t spend money on customer acquisition costs, because of our strong focus on content marketing instead of paid acquisition.

As of now, all of our traffic and revenue come through our online platform. Moving forward, we're planning to expand into different aspects of health and nutrition for aging populations, including heart health, joint health, and mental health. We're also considering localized content to cater to specific regions' nutritional needs.

We do have plans to also localize the content to geographies outside of the English speaking countries as we want to also do Chinese, Korean, and Bahasa Indonesia in the future. However, because there is complexity in creating subdomains and the tech side.

That is something we are looking towards but have not figured out just yet. Hiring languages whose mother tongue is not our means that we do need additional vetting as well.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?🔗

Starting a business in an area as sensitive as health and wellness comes with its own set of challenges. One of the major lessons I learned is the importance of credibility and maintaining high standards for information quality. Building a brand that people trust with their health is not easy but immensely rewarding.

On the flip side, starting LifeBoostNutrition.com reaffirmed my belief in the power of digital content. Good, reliable, and accessible information can make a real difference in people's lives.

I have received messages from our readers, even though our viewership is not as big as CNN or a big news outlet, heartfelt messages that our articles are very informative and useful to them which warms my heart that we as a business are providing genuine value to our readers.

At our size, we are already getting messages like this, I cannot imagine what bigger media sites are getting.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?🔗

We use WordPress for our website due to its flexibility and robustness. For SEO, Ahrefs and Google Analytics are our go-to tools. Mailchimp handles our email newsletters, but we are planning to move over to ConvertKit or something else.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?🔗

"Start with Why" by Simon Sinek has been incredibly influential in shaping my approach towards my business. In the realm of podcasts, I regularly tune in to "The Nutrition Diva's Quick and Dirty Tips."

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?🔗

Start with a problem that you genuinely want to solve, and don't shy away from niches. Validate your idea thoroughly, and once you're convinced, be patient and persistent. Most importantly, never compromise on the quality of your product or service—it's the foundation of your brand's reputation.

I don’t treat my business as work because I love doing it. That’s probably why even though people might see my progress as ‘slow’ I thoroughly enjoy it.