7 Ways You Can Build An Online Business Around Your Nutrition Business
Running a nutrition counseling practice can be rewarding. But the hustle of getting consistent leads, endless client calls, and often meager returns on effort can become demotivating quickly. At the end of the day, running your nutrition practice is a job that you need to sustain your life.
Hustling to build a traditional nutrition counseling practice has become outdated in this age of the internet. Nutrition practitioners are becoming savvy entrepreneurs, who understand the value of the internet and how to not just build a nutrition practice but a modern-day nutrition business.
If you have to rely on making money only from nutrition counseling sessions, rethink how you are building your nutrition business. The internet has opened up a treasure trove of opportunities to make money online. More importantly, millions of people are looking to pay money online for the knowledge and expertise you have as a nutrition business owner. So, why not take advantage of this craze to build a nutrition business that doesn’t only rely on counseling?
But before we share ideas on how you can build an online business around your nutrition practice, it’s highly important to figure out your target audience.
Identify your Niche & Ideal Customer Profile
When you think about building an online business, it doesn’t make sense to create a product or service for everyone on the internet, does it? Every business needs a particular target audience that they should be able to focus their business efforts on. And your nutrition practice & online businesses should lead with the same idea.
Here are two ways you can define your target audience.
Niche down your audience
One of the major prerequisites for a successful marketing strategy is to niche down your audience. By picking a niche, you can target smaller and precise demographics which gives your practice the potential to secure clients easily. Furthermore, niching down your audience allows you to present yourself as a go-to expert for a specific issue your target client might be dealing with. They will prefer to get guidance from someone who offers solutions for their specific problems rather than an expert who gives general nutrition advice.
The most important thing while choosing a niche is identifying the kind of problems you relate to.
It can be problems that you have gone through. This will also help you in creating a brand story around yourself and you will find personal gratification in helping people who are going through the same because you understand and empathize. It can also be problems that you have seen around you within your family, friends, or colleagues.
Create an ICP (Ideal Customer Persona)
An ICP can be defined as a detailed outline of your nutrition business’s ideal clientele which can help you construct your business & brand strategy. The purpose of creating an ICP for your business is to properly define the specific characteristics and requirements of individuals who will look for services that you can provide through your business.
Creating an ICP can provide you with a glimpse into your target audience’s deepest needs and enable you to set up a business that will truly connect with them.
After you successfully identified your niche & possible ICP for your business offerings, let’s see which online business ideas you can possibly build around your nutrition practice.
7 Ways You Can Build An Online Business Around Your Nutrition Practice
There are numerous ways to make money online, but the best avenue is to build an online business that is sustainable in the long run, potentially generating consistent income.
We have filtered down the many options for online businesses to seven of the best ways you can build an online business around your nutrition business.
Blogging or Digital Media Business
As a health & nutrition expert, sharing nutrition advice with your clients becomes necessary. How about you do it through a blog? Creating a blog requires nothing but a website, which is why it’s one of the most popular forms of online business that has an excellent return on investment.
Before getting started though, you should have a clear idea about your niche. Your niche will help you determine which topics you want to create content on. Being a nutrition expert, you can think of sharing nutrition advice, healthy recipes, fitness advice, and lifestyle tips as potential niche areas for your blog. You should consider blogging about your specific niche and share your personal journey to figuring out solutions that solved the problem for you. People get inspired by personal stories & blogging about your own journey can help you build credibility as a niche nutrition expert.
There are many ways you can monetize your blog as well, including
- Traditional advertising through Google Adsense or other Ad publishers
- Sponsored posts where you are paid to write articles to promote a brand
- Sell digital products like ebooks
Having a blog will create an excellent channel for getting new leads for your counseling business and help you get established as a thought leader.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is an added way to monetize your blog or any other content platform. With affiliate marketing, you can earn commissions for each sale of any product that you suggest to your audience. It’s easier done when you have an established content channel like a blog.
You can also use your expertise in nutrition & online authority as a practitioner to recommend products to your clients & audience to earn affiliate income. Just make sure that the product you suggest is a good fit for your readers.
Becoming a Social Media Influencer
In today’s age of social media, becoming popular in a niche on social media platforms is a prime way to establish influence among audiences. As a social media influencer, your large audience will attract brand deals from companies, who will sponsor you to promote their products to your audience. As a social media influencer, you can extend your sound nutrition advice to large audiences to bring about a considerable impact, along with the option of earning additional income.
Many health & nutrition influencers create content sharing their own personal struggle with their niche problem to create a familiarity within their audience. This boosts credibility within your target audience as you get to stand as a niche expert who has solved the issue for themselves.
For example, Tallene is a PCOS dietitian who chose her niche on weight loss solutions for women dealing with cyst problems. She even created an online platform, called ‘The Cysterhood’ where she offers health & nutrition counseling to help women thrive with PCOS and lose weight. Building her business around a specific niche, she garnered more than 300K followers on social media who revere her content.
Check our Free Guide to Instagram Marketing for Nutrition Business Owners.
Becoming a YouTuber
If you’re comfortable creating video content, consider youtube as a potential online business along with your nutrition business. Apart from helping you build a loyal audience, you can make a considerable amount of money on YouTube through advertising, selling membership subscriptions, and affiliate marketing.
Like a blog, YouTube can also create an excellent channel for generating new leads for your nutrition business. Just remember to be consistent with your content creation efforts and keep patience during the early stages of your journey.
Starting an Ecommerce Business
If you have an idea for a physical product that would benefit a large number of people, consider setting up an e-commerce store. Unlike selling on large e-commerce websites like Amazon, Etsy, or eBay, building an e-commerce store will give you complete control over your products and sales strategies.
Being a nutrition expert, you can sell health products that comply with your nutrition advice. You can also sell your product offerings on a subscription plan.
You don’t have to be worried about the manufacturing, labeling, warehousing, and shipping of your products, as all of these processes can be outsourced easily.
Nutrition Business Coaching
If you’ve been running your nutrition counseling business successfully for years and have come to enjoy the business side of things, consider guiding other nutrition practitioners on building a successful nutrition counseling business. Becoming a nutrition business coach can be very rewarding and convenient if you already have a well-established nutrition business yourself. Because chances are many new nutrition business owners look up to you for inspiration and business advice.
Starting a coaching business won’t require a large investment either and, being a counselor yourself, you already are well versed in advising and motivating clients.
Creating Online Courses
The internet has changed the way we learn things, with information readily available at the tip of our fingers, just a “Google search” away. Where traditional learning models failed, learning via online courses is thriving and has become the rage right now.
Take advantage of this craze for online courses by creating courses on any and every topic of expertise you have, starting with nutrition advice for the general audience to nutrition business advice for nutrition practitioners. It’s a completely passive channel of income and has tremendous returns.
Putting it all together
Building just a ‘nutrition counseling practice’ is counterproductive to all the effort you are investing in right now. Not being unique among the sea of nutrition practitioners will never help you get a consistent stream of leads and you will struggle to generate outstanding revenue.
Building online businesses around your nutrition counseling practice enable you to showcase what’s unique about your business. And people in today’s day flock to what’s new and unique. Having online businesses will not only secure your nutrition business overall but let you build authority in your industry.
And one of the best ways to experiment with online business is to use a platform like Zoconut, that allows you to build a blog, integrate affiliate marketing, manage social media content, on top of being a practice management software to help you manage every aspect of your nutrition counseling business. You also get to share your own client-facing app, the e-Diet app, which functions as a pocket assistant that will keep your clients motivated and compliant with your advice.
With Zoconut you can build a truly borderless business using our Online Clinic solution. Eliminate all geographical constraints and build a fully online business.
To learn more about how Zoconut’s practice management tools can 3X your online nutrition business, start your free trial today or schedule a demo with our team.
