So, you’ve decided to start a blog on something you’re passionate about: beauty! If you’re the person your friends always turn to for advice on makeup, how to style their hair, or what styling products and tools you use to get your signature look, sharing your beauty tips with the world through your blog seems like a logical next step.
You may have already decided on a blog name and used a website builder to create a beautiful backdrop for your beauty content. But where do you go from there? There are many beauty bloggers out there, so standing out from the crowd can seem like an uphill battle, but with the right growth strategies and best practices in place, you can turn your beauty blog into the go-to destination for hundreds of thousands of visitors.
From following SEO best practices to building backlinks, blog monetization strategies, and more, there’s a lot to consider, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by information overload. To help you identify the most effective growth strategies for your beauty blog, we reached out to a panel of beauty bloggers and blogging experts and asked them to answer this question:
“What’s the number 1 thing bloggers can do to grow their beauty blog?”
Meet Our Panel of Blogging Experts:
Keep reading to learn what our panel had to say about the best things you can do to start growing your beauty blog today.
Shayan Fatani
Shayan Fatani is a Digital Marketing Strategist at PureVPN.
“Considering the blog has zero traffic and your website is new, the best way to bring traffic to your website would be trend jacking. Trend jacking, as the name suggests, refers to taking an advantage of a trend which ultimately amplifies your web content.
You do not necessarily have to cover a trend through text-based content just because it is a blog. Make use of mediums like videos applying different products and podcasts about beauty tips. According to Discoverpods, 59% of respondents spend more time listening to podcasts than on social media. And according to Cisco, by 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic — 15 times higher than it was in 2017.
To add to this, stay engaged with your community. This does not mean that you have to do it as a brand. Do it as an individual who is associated with the brand and connect with people rather than pitching your blog. This could mean answering questions with good research on Quora and Forums/Boards or wherever your target audience spends time.”
Anna Barker
Anna Barker is a personal finance expert and the founder of LogicalDollar, where she helps others get on the path to financial freedom using the experience she gained from turning $60,000 in debt into a six-figure investment portfolio.
“The number one thing that any blogger should do to grow their blog, including beauty bloggers, is to create shareable content. This could be in the form of articles, although my personal favorite is creating highly shareable infographics. These work particularly well in the beauty niche, which is highly dependent on using images for building an audience. This can be seen when, for example, people see before and after photos of beauty routines that they then want to do themselves.
Content like this is not only great for driving traffic, as people click on the content and visit your blog, but the more other websites share your content, the more backlinks are created. These backlinks, in turn, are excellent for SEO as they help to prove your authority to Google. The outcome of this is that your other content will start to show higher in Google search results which, in turn, generates even more traffic.
In my experience, I’ve found infographics to be more shareable as people are often more willing to post these on their own site to provide information at a glance in visual format, rather than linking to one of my entire articles. That said, it’s a good idea for beauty bloggers to test this to see which types of content are more likely to be shared. That will then give you the opportunity to really refine your shareable content so that you can start to maximize its benefits for your blog.”
Kryz Uy
Kryz is a Life + Style + Travel blogger who records her daily sartorial adventures, beauty discoveries, inspirations, and interesting chronicles. She has contributed to various publications in the Philippines, including Candy, Preview, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Mega, Lifestyle Asia, Meg, Chalk, and many more. She has also been featured in numerous glossies all over the globe and is currently ranked among the top bloggers in the Philippines.
“The number one thing bloggers need to do to grow their blog is to develop a content strategy and stick to it. As a beauty and lifestyle blogger for about a decade, I’ve cut my teeth on running an online business. It’s awesome when the numbers are good but painful when they’re not. I’ve learned that if there’s one thing bloggers need to do, it’s to make sure their plan for content is ironed out.
Like most bloggers, I started out posting informally. I wrote whatever I felt like writing. One day I would write about my personal life, and another day I would write about fashion tips. Sometimes, I would stress for days on what I should write next! Eventually, I found that it takes more than casual blogging to consistently produce content while attracting and keeping a steady audience. It does so much when you define your goals, study your target audience, come up with content ideas (and relevant keywords), and make a content schedule.
When all these things were ironed out, I no longer worried about what to write, and it was all about enjoying making content for my tribe. Here are some clear next steps to create a content strategy:
- Get into the mind of your target audience. Make a list of content that you know they want to read about. Is it a list of website tools they can use? Is it a “How To” that is relevant in your niche? One way to help make this list is to study the content your competition is creating.
- After completing your list, schedule when you will write, video, or record your content and get to work.
- Follow up with your tribe and see how they liked the content. Make sure there is a feedback loop so that you know what works and what doesn’t.”
Renee Shaw
Renee Shaw teaches blogging tips and tech for creative women over at That Little Blog.
“Scaling any blog starts with a well-defined audience. As a beauty blogger, you may be in a completely different sub-niche to another beauty blogger, despite looking similar to outsiders. Growing your blog and traffic first comes from understanding where your audience hangs out online (Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram?). I’d encourage beauty bloggers to start first with an overall audience audit and go from there. (Would email opt-ins, giveaways, or ebooks work best? etc.)”
Charlie Worrall
Charlie Worrall is a Digital Marketing Executive at Imaginaire.
“One of the best ways to make a blog grow is to collaborate with others. In the beauty world, there are so many different areas that can be focused on. Whether you’re working with a dressing table company or a mirror company, being able to collaborate with others in so many different industries will help you to become a recognized personality in the beauty blogging world.
When considering collaborations, you shouldn’t be afraid to branch out into different sectors, too. For example, you could talk to a sleep expert about the best sleeping conditions or to a mental health expert about how lowering stress levels can be a part of skincare.
Another great tip is to make sure that your SEO is on point. If not, then it will be hard for people to naturally find you when searching for something like ‘the best Amazon beauty products.’ Being able to optimize your meta tags, write for SEO and the reader, and gain links is tricky but can be done!”
Brian Robben
Brian Robben is the CEO of the international digital marketing agency Robben Media, which grows businesses via SEO, ads, and website conversions.
“Your beauty blog is guaranteed to thrive when you generate enough high-quality backlinks. Google ranks pages higher the more backlinks they have. With top-ranking pages, you’ll soon receive thousands, hundreds of thousands, and then millions of page views. This audience will spill over to follow your social media accounts and join your email list. Now, you have engaged distribution platforms to send new content, get survey feedback, launch products or services, and monetize your brand.
Plus, other brands will notice your reach and pay you to promote their offers. In the past, the business model was to build a product or service and then find the audience to monetize. The new model is to build an audience and then monetize with offers. Remember, this all starts with driving backlinks to the main keyword pages you want to rank first for on Google.”
Austen Tosone
Austen Tosone is a beauty and style blogger and YouTuber based in NYC. She has worked on paid brand deals with Revlon, Garnier, and CVS Beauty.
“The best thing beauty bloggers can do to grow their blog is to share product reviews of new releases as close to when they come out as possible. The reason this works well is that their posts have a chance to rank on Google because of search engine optimization. By naming your blog post [Product Name] Product Review you are creating content that people are searching for, because new products likely don’t have a ton of reviews when they first launch. By choosing keywords that lots of people are searching for, but most likely not many people are creating content for, you have a better chance to show up on the first page of Google and grow your blog traffic.”
Ashley Madden
Ashley Madden is the Founder at Helianthus Advising, Marketing, Content Creation, & Consulting.
“The number one thing a blogger can do to grow their beauty blog is to incorporate SEO and SEM into their writing and within the website itself. Writing a blog is about far more than writing about things people want to read. You also have to write about your topics in such a way that Google wants to show them to people who wish to read them. That could mean taking an online class in SEO and doing it yourself or hiring an agency to review your posts and optimize your website.
Things like metadata, image alt text, and keywords shouldn’t sound like Greek if growth is the goal. By leveraging proven SEO tactics, your site growth could skyrocket.
Even still, it’s important to remember that SEO takes time. The biggest mistake I see people make is to give up after a month. On average, it takes three to six months to see results from an SEO campaign. From there, you can’t stop. Every post you create needs to be optimized, and your website pages need to stay at the top of their game. Otherwise, competitors will pass you by as they continue to work on their site. Finally, stay up to date with SEO and SEM trends. Google is always changing and growing, and that means you have to change with them.”
Samuel Kane
Samuel Kane is the Co-Founder of TheMoneyPig.
“Beauty products have a relatively high demand compared to their counterparts. After starting a beauty blog, one of the best things you can ever do is selling beauty products to your readers. By so doing, you will be creating a friendly environment that can persuade customers to keep visiting your blog for new products.
A good plugin to help you get started is WooCommerce. This plugin helps you convert your blog into an online shop. This is, however, most effective after building your audience, since your products would require a good market. In a nutshell, this method is a secondary way of growing your beauty blog.”
Trishan Mehta
Trishan Mehta has grown multiple blogs from scratch since 2010 using the power of search engine marketing and blogger outreach. Currently, he shares actionable blogging and SEO tips for budding bloggers on WPBizBlog.com.
“Unlike other niches, beauty is mostly a visual niche. The blogger must show their expertise as a beauty blogger. That means there have to be lots of images in the content where the blogger shows how to apply or use different beauty products like foundation, makeup, hair styling tools, etc.
Preferably, beauty bloggers should publish before and after photos of their transformation using the beauty products that they are writing about. For promoting their blogs, beauty bloggers should promote their blogs on Instagram and Pinterest where lots of young people, and especially women, hang out. Use a free tool like Canva to create stunning visuals that can go viral on these social media platforms. Also, don’t hesitate to reach out to fellow bloggers to link to your content to get more exposure to your blog.”
Brian DeChesare
Brian DeChesare is the Owner and Founder of Mergers & Inquisitions.
“While I’m not familiar with the beauty industry, I am an expert on generating exposure for blogs. Start by adding free content to your blog, specifically videos and video-based courses. Once you’ve developed a following you can start expanding to paid video content. This played a major role in the growth of my blog. Videos attract attention in addition to being sharable. Additionally, if aesthetics worked in finance, then they’ll certainly have a greater positive impact in the beauty industry.”
Jessica Randhawa
Jessica Randhawa is the head chef, recipe creator, photographer, and writer behind The Forked Spoon. She creates delicious family-friendly recipes that anyone can make. Her website has over one million users per month.
“When it comes to content marketing, we are discovering that the highest organic CTR rates on The Forked Spoon come from quality posts that answer users’ questions with proper implementation of Google’s schema markup. A good example is our Bubble Tea recipe, which has CTRs as high as 75% on decent-sized long-tail keywords. We have found that keeping Google schema up-to-date is key to driving a good CTR when your blog post has high-quality content that is answering your target audiences’ questions. How-To schema is another great markup for mobile users which we have implemented on a few posts. It’s important to have star ratings to accompany it for desktop queries, as How-To rich snippets only serve on mobile queries.”
Brian Lim
The founder and CEO of INTO THE AM and iHeartRaves, Brian Lim, was featured on ABC’s Shark Tank and received a deal from Mark Cuban & Daymond John.
“If you’re looking to grow your beauty blog, mobile site speed is huge. We started to use AMP on our blog pages, which reduced page speed load time to under one second. As a result, we’ve seen a 20% lift in traffic to our blog. Bringing more traffic to our blog increases the likelihood of making a sale as customers continue to navigate through the site.
We make sure that our mobile site loads quickly a few other ways, as well. First, we compress our images. This ensures that all our images are optimized for site speed while still retaining image quality. We also took steps to minify all our liquid code and prioritized script load order while trimming down the total number of scripts being called. Removing unnecessary assets on some pages while reducing image assets on others helped reduce site load time, as well.”
Camille Chulick
Camille Chulick is the Co-Founder of Averr Aglow.
“My top tip for being a successful beauty blogger is to always be relatable as a person. This is the same tip I give for success in business in general, but it’s especially important for someone with a blog as their main platform. You might not always want to show your bad skin days or rough hair days, but if you always look perfect it’s going to be hard to relate to you as a person who actually needs the products or tips you write about. Be a real person behind the blog. Be someone your readers can see themselves in every time they read your words.”
Jessica Rose
Jessica Rose is the Owner of Clean Beauty Gals.
“The #1 thing bloggers can do to grow their beauty blog is to reach out to like minded bloggers and cross-promote. Because our readerships are all a bit different, there is great value in introducing each other to our readerships with the goal of mutually increasing our visibility. We are all in this together! In my experience, this kind of cross-promotion can be a great way to grow your beauty blog and increase its range and visibility.”
Alyssa C Davis
Alyssa C Davis is a social media guru who specializes in female empowerment. As a plus-size model, she is passionate about opening doors for women who feel underrepresented in the fashion industry.
“As a blogger, the most important tool you can use for organic growth is Pinterest! Pinterest has over 320 million monthly users, and a Pin has an average lifespan of a week (as opposed to 24 minutes on Twitter). By creating a Pinterest Business account, you can exponentially grow your beauty blog. It’s important to use eye-catching graphics that clearly sum up your blog post and to add a description to your Pin. A call-to-action can also generate more clicks.”
Samantha Moss
Samantha Moss is the Editor and Content Ambassador at Romantific.
“We all want to excel in our chosen fields. Blogging is one of the ways we can express our expertise on specific things, and being critical when choosing the right platform, the right time, and the right audience will surely make you succeed on whatever topic you are going to share.
I speak from experience here. In order to succeed at being a beauty blogger, I suggest you follow these steps:
- Carefully select a website platform. So far, WordPress is the most recommended blogging website because of its very easy-access features. You might want to start there as a beginner.
- Create a memorable domain name. Your domain name might be one of the hardest things to decide because it must reflect your topic and your overall style. So, make sure you choose a specific domain name and one that really represents your blog’s content.
- Pick a suitable theme. Of course, you want your blogging website to be unique and beautiful. So, pick the best theme that can make your blog posts even more visually appealing.”
Shari Smith
Shari Smith is a business coach and founder of Shari-sells.
“Blogging is a popular way to promote awareness of your product. Bloggers have to compliment the taste of today’s generation and formulate content that will meet their expectations. As an online entrepreneur, it is important to be relevant and become visible, which is why I also have my own blog.
Beauty bloggers, just like any other blogger like me, can gain blog traffic by continuously updating their content, and they should consider adding visual presentations to their blog as it will hook the audiences and keep them interested.
Beauty bloggers should also take advantage of social media platforms since they are full of potential audiences, and sharing is rampant, which greatly increases your visibility. Having interesting content with powerful subject lines will drive audiences to your blog, so it is wise to review your content before posting it. You should also use keywords that will adapt to the current trends so that audiences will be constantly engaged and can relate to your blog.”
Paige Arnof-Fenn
Paige Arnof-Fenn is the founder & CEO of global marketing and branding firm Mavens & Moguls based in Cambridge, MA. Her clients include Microsoft, Virgin, The New York Times Company, Colgate, and venture-backed startups, as well as non profit organizations. She graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Business School. Paige is a popular speaker and columnist who has written for Entrepreneur and Forbes.
“I started a global marketing and branding firm 19 years ago. You do not exist today if you cannot be found online. As a blogger, you must have a website, and I¹d argue you always need SEO because the whole point of having a website is to make it easy for your audience to find you.
Being invisible online is a terrible strategy, so making sure your site is keyword rich, mobile friendly, loads quickly, and produces meaningful content today is the price of entry. That also happens to be a great foundation for effective SEO. The main strategy I recommend incorporating into your plans is that your blog must be optimized for voice search. A voice user interface allows users to interact with websites through voice commands. It adds usability and functionality to your site, making it accessible to all users, including those with limitations and disabilities. It is not just about complying with the ADA, responsible web design, and corporate social responsibility goals, but it is also good for the bottom line by reaching a broader audience. Inclusion is the right thing to do, and it is good for business.
One key trend to address to grow your audience today is that smart speakers and voice search are growing in importance, so being able to optimize for voice search will be key to maximize the marketing and advertising opportunities on Siri, Alexa, Google Home, etc. Brands that perfect the branded skill with more customer-friendly, less invasive ads are going to win big. Are you prepared when customers ask for help with questions like, ‘Alexa what is summer skincare trend?’ or ‘Which nail polish color is best?’ If not, you are missing a big opportunity!
There are always new shiny objects in marketing to distract you. Social media and technology are 24/7, but SEO is here to stay, whether it is via Google or voice. You get one chance to make a great first impression. If you want to improve the impression you are making and give your business a boost, make sure your site is optimized.”
Brandon Foster
@4SchoolSupplies Brandon Foster is a Parent, Teacher, and Blogger at MySchoolSupplyLists.com.
“Focus on Instagram more than other social media platforms to drive traffic to your beauty blog. The Instagram photo-sharing app is best for the beauty industry. Its engagement rate is even higher than Facebook’s.
All you have to do is post engaging content aligned with the interests of your audience. Try to post content during peak hours and select highly relevant hashtags to enhance the posts’ engagement. You can post a trailer video on your Instagram account and hook the audience to your website by saying, ‘Visit the website for the full tutorial.’
You can conduct a weekly poll by giving your audience five topics to vote on and creating content on top three. The content you create using this method will be related to your audience’s interests, so they will be more likely visit your website.
Last but not least, build a network on Instagram. You can comment on other posts or collaborate with other bloggers for live sessions that benefit your audience. It will be mutually beneficial for both parties.”
Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms for beauty bloggers, so why not grow your Instagram following effortlessly while you’re focusing on growing your beauty blog? Our Instagram follow button takes just minutes to install and is totally free to use. Plus, it makes it easy for your blog visitors to follow you on Instagram with just a single click!
