To be fair, when I first started publishing my musings online I was too young to think about making a serious impression in the blogosphere.
I was mainly writing to kill time, unlike today where I write to share my experiences in the beauty world and aim to make a career out of it someday! I would have never imagined I’d still be actively writing on my little slice of the internet, but here I am still going strong! If I could turn back time, here are the tips I would give myself for starting a beauty blog.
Things I wish I knew back then
Quality over quantity will win every time! I used to have a terrible habit of publishing scraggly 150-word posts just to get something new on the site. I wish I could back and smack myself up the head and sink my time into meatier posts.
It is far better to spend a few days creating one polished article that will benefit readers for months or even years than it is to focus on pumping out new, but unsubstantial posts every day.
You may have heard the term “evergreen post” thrown around in the writing community. This is a timeless post that you’ve spent time polishing, editing, and perfecting into something readers can go back to time and time again. I don’t have nearly as many of these as I’d like to, so this is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black.
You’ll also want to re-visit your posts from time to time to make sure they are still relevant and tweak things as needed. In my opinion, even 2-3 evergreen posts are immensely better than 15 mini-posts.
Learning the basics of SEO
I’ve found that keeping up with the latest tricks to boost your site’s SEO ranking is a lot like herding cats. I rely on two sources to keep me up to date on the ever-changing topic of SEO: bblogger Facebook groups and the channel Income School over on Youtube. Joining a blogging community can really help out when first starting up. I’m a big fan of Moz’s articles on the subject as well, or you can always look into SEO consulting services.
A good idea when starting your beauty blog for SEO purposes is to put your website into local citations and business listings.
Join a blogging community
Connecting with other bloggers who are most likely running into the same problems as yourself will spare you from researching the same issue that 50+ people have already experienced, resolved, and shared online. It’s also interesting to see what new tips and tricks group members post so you can experiment with your site and discover what works best for you. Two all time favorite FB groups that I’ve gotten the most support and help from are Girlcrush Collective and Boss Girl Bloggers.
Last but not least, here’s a final round of some quick and easy essential steps to take before launching your blog.
- Have contact info easily available
- Test your site’s template to ensure it’s mobile friendly
- Create a privacy policy! Here’s a crash course I used.
- Save a backup of your website before ever tinkering with your template! (Learned this one the hard way… don’t follow in my steps!)
