How To Make Money With Your Mental Health Blog | How to Monetize Anxiety

Do you blog about mental health? Then you might be wondering how to make money with your mental health blog or how to monetize anxiety!

I started my mental health journey with some therapy and I tried a lot of tools and spiritual tricks along the way. And everything I did for myself gave me new tools.

In therapy, I learned mental health tips and tricks related to cognitive behavioral shifts I could make. I also learned to be proactive in practicing self care, and I did a minimalism challenge that changed my life and routines in a profound way. Today I am really great at managing my time, not overextending myself, practicing a mindset routine and asking for help when I need it.

I started my first blog in 2011 (which has now been sold to a new owner). And while it started as a way to sell my art, it became a way that I was able to monetize by anxiety by providing value and resources to others.

Here’s the process I used and teach others for how to monetize anxiety. 

How To Make Money With Your Mental Health Blog

After spending so much time on my own mental health, I started to notice that my conversations changed.

I started sharing my experiences more transparently and talking about the tools that I had learned. And I realized that I actually had a lot to offer people.

My blog started changing from an online diary into something that offered valuable content to people who really needed help.

If you have a blog where you share your own journey in hopes of helping other people, here’s how to make money with your mental health blog.

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The Basics Of How To Make Money With Your Mental Health Blog

The basics of how to make money from your mental health blog are very similar to the steps you would take to monetize any blog.

For more info read this post about how to make money with a blog.

You need to really nail down who your audience is so you can speak to them as clearly as possible, you need to figure out how to get people to read what you are putting out there, and then you need to figure out what you are going to offer or sell to generate income.

It can feel overwhelming to monetize a blog, but there are concrete, proven steps to follow:

1. Blogging About Mental Health: Nail Down Your Niche

Before you start learning how to make money from your mental health blog, you need to have an audience who feels close to you and trusts you.

In order to do this and speak as closely to people as possible, you need to nail down your niche.

It is easy to want to be general and talk about everything.

And then when you think about selling, why would you want to exclude anyone being too specific?

But quality is better than quantity.

And specializing in something is better than being sorta good at lots of things.

So don’t just be a mental health blog, but figure out what specific aspect of mental health you have gotten really good at, or what people have started going to you for.

2. Name And Branding for Monetizing Anxiety

If you want to make money with a blog while learning how to monetize anxiety, you first need to figure out WHAT about your story other people will relate to. People have to understand “what’s in it for them” if they are going to keep reading. So while a personal journal-type blog might be interesting for people who know you, some kind of brand and cohesive message is needed to intrigue people who DON’T know you. (Make sense?)

What do people think of when they think of you? Your name and your branding are going to be really important in speaking to your niche and drawing the right audience.

Think about the language that you are using. Is it confusing, or can people hear your site name and get an idea of what you are about?

Decide on your look, your colors, fonts, branding, What do you want to portray, what is your message and what does that look like visually to you?

3. Set Up Your Website

If you are going to learn how to make money from your mental health blog…

You are going to have to have a blog. 🙂

Or maybe you’ve already been blogging about mental health, but it’s messy, old and there is no way to really grow it or optimize it. Time to start over and make something that is modern and pleasing to viewers.

There are plenty of free resources out there you can use. You can set up a professional looking site with free templates and cheap hosting and spend practically nothing on launching a blog you can feel comfortable selling from.

My Digital Marketing QuickStart course is a great low cost option for creating your own website, including all of the annoying tech details that can trip people up. You can literally create your website in a weekend! (Or I can do it for you in a couple hours for $500.)

4. Write Great Blog Posts Related to Mental Health and/or Anxiety

Before you do anything, you’ll need to research and write at least 10 to 20 blog posts that are relevant to your mental health blog niche.

I’ve had clients generating income from blogs with as few as 5 blog posts!

So while YES, more content is helpful for SEO (below) and driving more traffic, but don’t let a small number of posts stop you from starting to generate traffic to your new mental health blog.

Thinking about incorporating video with your blog? Read about video for beginners.

5. Start Generating Traffic

There are a few ways to start generating traffic when blogging about mental health.

Below, I mention SEO, and Pinterest, and both of those are critical for long term traffic to a mental health site. However, there are a few ways you can take advantage of short term traffic wins too! For example, you can post on social media and clicks from people who view your posts. I love Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Some of my blogging buddies swear my Twitter.

If you plan to utilize social media when your audience is small, I recommend checking out my tips for monetizing a small audience.

Pick the platform where you think your audience is, or what you think best suits your brand.

Looking for more ways to get free traffic? Checkout this blog post on how to get free website traffic.

Besides posting on social media there are really two major ways to get traffic to your site: SEO and Pinterest. Additionally, writing for mental health websites can help generate backlinks.

6. SEO: Search Engine Optimization

The best and most stable way for gaining traffic for your mental health blog involves optimizing for search engines. This means that when writing your blog posts, you want to do some research to understand what words your READERS are using to find the content they’re looking for online.

Check out my blog post on SEO for beginners.

In short, the words you use in your blog posts that match what your readers are using – are called keywords. And using search engine optimized keywords in your blog posts can hep people find your site. Use a tool like Yoast SEO which is a free WordPress plugin to guide you through all the details and nuances of optimizing a post for SEO.

SEO is a long term strategy (6 months minimum) but works.

7. Pinterest

I wish I had found out about Pinterest years ago. But Pinterest is not a social media platform like you might think…

It’s a search engine, like Google search. In other words, it’s a platform people go to ask questions and seek answers. And the platform (Pinterest) tries its best to show pins that answer the users’ questions.

Once I started thinking about it this way I realized how effective it is at generating traffic, even on a brand new mental health blog.

When blogging about mental health issues, Pinterest often offers much quicker traffic wins than SEO. However, it can also be less stable and it requires daily effort. This is why you’ll want to focus both on SEO and on Pinterest in the early days for your blog.

8. Capitalize on Traffic With An Opt In

Now that you have traffic coming to your site, you want to start capturing your audience so you can communicate with them on a regular basis.

To get someone’s email address, you have to offer something valuable in return or they won’t give it up.

Create a free offer in exchange for people opting into your email list. Your email list is a priceless tool that you will use to build trust with your audience and eventually sell to them.

9. Generate Income (Finally: Making Money…)

There are tons of ways to generate income if you want to make money through your mental health. My favorite way to monetize anxiety: sell your own offer. Ultimately, I recommend creating and selling something of your own. But in the meantime, there are other ways you can make money even without creating your own product. Examples:

Ads: In the beginning you can turn on Google Ads as soon as you have content on your website. It’s just a little in the beginning, but once your traffic grows you can qualify for higher paying ads.

Affiliates: You can integrate affiliate links into your posts to generate passive income, but be sure to only promote products that you would use or would truly recommend to your readers.

Sponsored Posts: Again, be careful not to push something to your audience that they are not going to be interested in or find valuable. You still want to maintain trust with them. But you can get paid to write a post that promotes someone else. This can be a way to make money before selling something of your own.

10. Sell Something

If you want to generate more reliable income and know how to make money from your mental health issues blog, selling your own products is going to be more consistent than ads and affiliates.

Products are tangible things that you offer and services are skills or your personal time that you provide.

Products

You might consider creating worksheets and printables, coffee cups with metal health quotes, t-shirts, meditation cds. These are just some suggestions, but the list is endless. Products are scalable, meaning you can sell an unlimited amount. So they typically generate less income than services.

Services

Services include things that you do for other people that require your personal time. It might be coaching or virtual assisting. You can also consider group coaching and creating online support for your readers that ads value to the community.

How To Make Money From Your Mental Health Blog Brainstorm

I thought I would end this blog post with a quick little brainstorm of things you can offer to sell when thinking about how to make money from your mental health blog.

1. Ads
2. Affiliates for mental health products
3. (Meditation pillows, B vitamins, supplements, journals, planners, online therapy)
4. Sponsored posts
5. Create worksheets
6. (Morning mindset worksheet, Feelings worksheet, diet/mood tracker)
7. Create a custom mental health journal
8. Write an Ebook
9. Create an online course to sell
10. Create custom products to sell
11. (Mugs, shirts, lip tint… something that fits your brand)
12. Create an online support group with a membership fee

Integrity and Disclosure with a Mental Health Blog

Lastly, it’s important to note that if you’re going to have a mental health blog, you need to make sure to point your readers to other resources when they need them.

There’s a TON of value you can provide as a mental health blogger, and you can definitely make money by selling resources you create. But make sure to also help people understand when they need to seek help, such finding a therapist either online or in person.

Need more help and support?

When you’re ready, there’s a few ways I can help you make more money with your mental health blog.

1. Join my free group: Mindful Marketing Mavens
2. Find out about blog coaching

Comment down below and let me know: what is your blog URL, and how is it going?