Healthcare is an enormous industry, with many facets. And you don’t have to go very far to find extremely specialized healthcare blogs. Why has healthcare created so many niche healthcare blogs, and does that reflect on other industries and their blog opportunities?

Natural Niches

Healthcare blogging is interesting because, in a sense, the audience comes already broken up into niches and in fact there’s a strong history of niche employment in the healthcare field. That’s been supplemented by a strong trend in the healthcare industry towards practitioner specialization over the last few decades; most doctors choose a specific discipline to focus on instead of a more general perspective, as there’s more money in a specific field. It’s also a prerequisite for research, an increasingly important career path for many newly minted doctors.

That creates a fertile ground for niche blogs, and truthfully it’s harder to find a “general interest” healthcare blog aimed at professionals than a niche one. There are already academic publications aimed at each of these niches, so you have a readership that’s not only used to niche publications, but actually expect to find them catering to their needs. Adding to those niches are topics of intense interest specifically to healthcare professionals, such as medical ethics or healthcare law. Most doctors and nurses want to be aware of the latest changes and advances in these fields, and in fact that awareness might be part of their job, but they’re of little interest to those outside the industry.

In short, healthcare is ideally suited for niche blogs: The industry is practically built to create small, but incredibly engaged, audiences with strong interest in content. But how do they engage, and build, audiences?

Filling Out The Niche

There are a few strategies among healthcare blogs that really catch interest. The first is that some blogs aim to be even more niche within their niche; for example, a pediatrics blog is not just about general pediatrics, for example, but also has regular content about subcategories like pediatric cardiology.

True, that does trim down readership for some articles, but it also means that those readers are tightly focused and highly engaged with the content, posting comments, asking questions, and discussing the content of the article in-depth. It puts user quality over user quantity, and the advertising strategies reflect that.

Another strategy is to tightly network with other blogs. Healthcare blogs are in a unique position in that many of them often share the same readers and will often be read by each other in the first place. The net effect is not unlike an advertising cooperative; they share content and link each other constantly, and it’s not uncommon to see writers hopping between the sites or even having articles on different sites the same day. It helps to keep the blogs in business and it strengthens reader engagement even more for both blogs.

Learning From Healthcare Blogs

The result of looking at healthcare blogs is a fascinating and unique publishing ecosystem. The healthcare industry is a highly engaged professional audience with a strong interest in niche content, and catering to that is often the key to a successful healthcare blog. It’s an important lesson for online publishers looking for the right numbers: Sometimes, it’s all about the quality of your audience.