We were lucky to catch up with Christel Oerum recently and have shared our conversation below.

Christel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

My husband and I talked about starting our own business during our first date back in 1999, but it wasn’t until 2015 that we realized that we’d stumbled upon a niche and found our business opportunity. In 2014, I started competing in bodybuilding competitions and realized how complicated that is when you live with insulin-dependent diabetes as I do. I couldn’t find any good and easily accessible information online on how to manage it all, so I started to document my experience online in a personal blog. The blog quickly grew and that’s when we realized that we’d found an unmet need.
We knew nothing about online publishing, so we spent several months researching how blogs and websites work, their monetization models, and what it takes to be successful. At that point, especially food blogging was very popular and we could see that many of the successful food bloggers were making good money. We felt that we could do the same in the diabetes niche.
We started Diabetes Strong in 2015 and it quickly grew into one of the largest websites about exercise and diabetes. We re-launched it in 2017 as a website covering all aspects of living with diabetes and with expert contributors from all over the world. It now gets about 1,000,000 visitors every month.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Diabetes Strong is a website written by people living with diabetes for people living with diabetes. It’s founded on the belief that if you have the right knowledge and tools, you can live a happy healthy life with any type of diabetes. We wanted to create a platform where people could find practical information on everyday diabetes situations. Where they would find information coming from a fellow person living with diabetes rather than getting a medical lecture.
We frequently receive emails from people telling us how the information we provide has changed their lives, and that tells me that we’re on the right path.
Growing and monetizing a website is not easy and it takes time. Diabetes Strong is completely free to use and the website is set up so that the majority of our traffic is organic through search. For that to be successful, we spend a lot of time on SEO (search engine optimization). That means creating content that answers people’s questions, writing for other publications to build backlinks, and nourishing our peer community group.
Neither my husband nor I were writers or SEO experts when we started Diabetes Strong, but you can learn a lot from online research, YouTube, and by connecting with others in similar fields. We’ve learned a lot from the food blogging community and other people in the diabetes community.
And finally, we learned that when it comes to online publishing, we don’t have competitors – only collaborators. In this business, we all benefit from supporting each other.

Let’s talk M&A – we’d love to hear your about your experience with buying businesses.

In 2020, we bought the website DiabeticFoodie.com. It was created by a lady with type 2 diabetes who used it to share her favorite diabetes-friendly recipes. It was her passion project and she never really bothered with monetization or search engine optimization. We saw a huge potential in the more than 600 recipes she had published and we spent more than a year updating them with new images, better information, and clearer nutritional info before we finally merged the website with DiabetesStrong.com in 2023. We are still waiting to see what the long-term effect of adding all these recipes to our main website will be.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

In the beginning, we focused a lot on social media and build up large followings on Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. The main method we used to grow social media was our annual “Fit With Diabetes Challenges”. They were free 3-week educational challenges where people could sign up to receive daily emails with diabetes information, healthy meal plans, and motivation. We also had a Facebook group for the challenges that quickly grew to over 20,000 people.
Today, we do almost nothing on social media. Facebook and Instagram have made it almost impossible to grow and connect with followers without paying or posting low-quality content that is designed solely for engagement. This is not what we want for our community or our brand.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://diabetesstrong.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/diabetesstrong_ig/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DiabetesStrong/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheFitBlog