Having been sold the dream of making oodles of money, with clients queuing up to hear my words of wisdom, I buckled down to a three year course to become a nutritionist, qualifying just before the Internet become readily accessible to the public.
You might think the Internet opened up a world of new opportunities for nutritionists. It did, but only if you had the vaguest idea how to promote your nutrition business online. And I didn’t!
Making ANY money as a nutritionist was hard. Not at all like the dream we’d been sold when signing up for the course.
It wasn’t just me – of all the students on my course I was one of quite a small number to be still working in the industry just a year later. That was only because I’d been lucky enough to secure some freelance writing work in health and nutrition. That earned me far more than being a self-employed nutrition consultant, which had been my initial goal.
Several years on, most of the students in my course year (and others of the same generation) have left the industry completely.
So with work thin on the ground, the question became….
How Can a Nutritionist Make MORE money?
Here are some ideas:
- Work specified hours at a local gym – be careful – these facilities tend to pay less per hour than you’d expected to earn as a private nutrition consultant. That’s because the gyms argue that they’re bringing the clients to you in their facilities. (They know that if you resort to working in a gym, you’re unable to find your own clients so it’s a seller’s market-place.)
- Public speaking, hoping that you’ll pick up some clients or sell some products. Pick your audience wisely, many are just out for an entertaining event rather than real knowledge.
- Offer group coaching – good idea if you can persuade enough people to attend a venue. Of course in 2020 and beyond this would be most cost-effectively done as a webinar online platform. You could pre-record a webinar and allow people to attend on demand. Accompany it with canned ‘live’ questions so attendees think you are doing it ‘live’, when actually you’re relaxing with your feet up. I’ve seen this style of webinar done very effectively and it doesn’t require such heavy advertising as it doesn’t matter if no-one attends. You can ‘pop in’ at the end, to pick up on any unanswered live questions.
- Even better, create an online nutrition course and sell it as a membership site, bringing in a regular monthly income. Setting this up takes quite a lot of technical expertise and sadly a cursory search online finds you’d be competing with many ‘free nutrition courses’, so be ready with a persuasive sales page.
- Promote affiliate information products on a nutrition blog – I had a little success with this, but attracting regular visitors to your blog isn’t easy. Be sure you have a lead capture mechanism in place otherwise first-time visitors may drift off to do further research and buy elsewhere.
- Sell supplement products in your own shop – this is promising, but relies on you having clients to recommend them to.
- Write your own book and self-publish on Amazon / Kindle and many other book selling sites. I published a couple of books online and did indeed make a few sales, but not enough to justify the hard work in creating them. And while ‘Amazon customers come to you’ your competitors are right there too. When inevitably the time came to revise my books with more up-to-date research, sales hadn’t justified the effort in creating them so I discontinued them.
- Freelance Writing Work – Health and Nutrition was my most profitable and enjoyable. More below…
I tried several of these methods, although the technicalities of some of the online ideas were beyond me.
Freelance Writing Work – Health and Nutrition
The freelance writing work was my most successful online nutrition venture and how I made more money as a nutritionist.
But – apart from one regular client – it was hard to secure new work because competition was high. For example, I found a doctor (overseas) with a bachelor degree in medicine and surgery offering to write 500 word articles for £4 each. Now I COULD quite easily knock out 500 word articles for £4, but that also includes 3 revisions and obviously the initial negotiation to secure the work. Life’s too short!
I hope I don’t sound lazy – because I did, at the time, work very hard to try and make money as a nutritionist. I so badly wanted to recoup the cost of the 3-year training course.
After several disappointments it became obvious that I was making more money in the freelance computing business I had sought to replace – and it was far less hassle. So I gave up dreams of a successful nutrition business and continued with my computing business instead.
Of course I still retained an interest in supplements and healthy living; I just never pursued any of it as an income stream.
Then I saw a friend looking for writers to join a team promoting a nutrition supplement business. Nothing new in selling nutritional supplements as an affiliate. The novelty of this approach was that we would be co-operating with each other, rather than competing.
I asked him for more information and what he told me excited me more than any other potential nutrition work for a long-time.
Freelance Nutrition Writing in a Team of Bloggers
A team of freelance writers, now including me, create articles on an authority health and wellness blog. Everyone’s articles promotes their own affiliate links to a health products business and the products themselves.
Payment comes when YOUR article makes a sale, so the more you write the greater your sales potential.
Being freelance, we can choose our favourite topics, and there is an infinite number of different angles to write about.
We are assigned a free nutrition supplements shop. Click HERE to look at the quality and quantity of the products I can sell and – having once developed a website to promote nutritional supplements, I can appreciate just how superb that is, compared to my own clunky effort.
All shipping, invoicing and customer support is handled by head office so I don’t hold any stock personally. Head office is based in the USA, but they will deliver worldwide.
A big advantage of the team (especially for new or aspiring bloggers) is that the blog has already been set up for us by experts. I wish something like this had been available when I started my own nutrition blog so that I didn’t have to go through that steep learning curve myself.
With a team of us working at producing articles, many articles are posted daily – possibly a dozen on a good day – but we’re free to set our own schedule. Although I have been blogging personally for some time, on my own blog there’s no way I could produce the same volume of articles as the team site.
Because Google likes frequent publishing it is sending potential clients to us, instead of us having to go out there and look for them.
The type of people who come to us may:
- Be looking for a way to make money as nutritionists – starting their own business and selling supplements
- Or be researching health questions, and feel delighted that Google offers them an informative article. The potential client may or may not buy a product from that author’s shop, but after the initial writing work, your article is a virtual sales-person working 24/7 for you.
As well as Google sending us visitors, the team leaders are investing some of their profits into paid advertising to send us more clients.
3 Steps Show You How a Nutritionist Can Make More Money
In my experience of trying most of the earlier suggestions, freelance writing work in health and nutrition was the most enjoyable and profitable.
Combined with my ‘part-time business’ status now as I move towards retirement, it has the best earning potential, because after the initial work of adding articles onto the blog, Google will be trying to match those articles to the most suitable article reader and sending them to whichever team author wrote the article. It could be me – or it could be you. But only if you get started.
It’s not a ‘get rich quick scheme’ – if that existed I would have found it!
But spend a little time at least 3 times a week for 90 days, creating your own online ‘salesman’ and only then evaluate the results. That’s probably a far shorter time than you’ve spent to-date trying to make money as a nutritionist.
Don’t let this opportunity pass you by. The size of our team doubled in the last 60 days. The sooner you start writing the sooner you can start earning.
You Can Start Now
- Now click HERE to learn what’s on offer (free) to potential team writers who qualify as fully-fledged writers. (Full training is included – you don’t have to be a qualified nutritionist to sail through it.)
- Learn more by opening a free wholesale account using my link above. Then join our Facebook group and take the free training course. ‘Meet’ the other authors you’ll be working with and assess the types of articles they’re writing. Each product has a ‘product information page’ that will spark plenty of ideas for your topic. As a nutritionist you may have a lot of material pre-written – it’s probably just a matter of matching your own studies to the nutritional products in your shop.
- Within your wholesale site, place an order for $60 of products that you’d like to write about and I can give you a $25 discount voucher on your first order. We have more than 50 products costing $30 or less. Request your discount by contacting me on Facebook AFTER registering for your free account above, but BEFORE placing your order.
PS I don’t do videos myself, but many of the team authors are speeding through the ranks faster than I am by doing talks on video. The choice is yours!
Just click HERE to learn the advantages of being part of the team.
