How to Start a Beauty Blog

With 2020 only a couple more weeks away, this is the time of year where your motivation rears its head and you suddenly find yourself wanting to take on the world. You’ve been putting in the time and effort to hone your makeup skills, and you feel like the next logical step to expand your MUA career and gain more of a following is to start a beauty blog.

What an excellent New Year’s Resolution! You feel good about it. In fact, you’re confident; you’re focused! You’re going to give this beauty blog maximum effort, and slay it without even smudging your lipstick!

Aaaaaaand then you’ll probably lose that drive and give up on your goal before January’s even over. Just like most of us are guilty of doing every year.

You’re not going to let that happen to you THIS year, right? You’ve been putting in way too much time and effort into your passion. You can’t give up that easily. The roaring 20s are back, baby, and this is going to be not just your year, but your decade!

Before you can start building your blog, you need to have a clear idea of what sort of vibe you want it to give off:

In short: when people think of your beauty blog, how do you want them to perceive you? If they were to describe what you and your blog are all about to someone else, what would you want to say?

Figuring out the answers to all of these questions will help you discover what you want your brand to be and how you’ll achieve it. Even if you can’t think of a unique angle for your blog, that’s fine! Maybe the angle you’ll be known for is that your writing is always rock-star solid. Who knows!

Point is, don’t hesitate to think outside the box! Whether it’s beauty mogul, Huda Kattan, or the hilarious makeup tutorials done by the queen of weed, Brandi Fernandez, you’ll very rarely find a niche incapable of becoming popular.

If you do it well and do it persistently, any brand can have an audience.

While you absolutely need to give this step the proper time and consideration, it also doesn’t have to be as difficult as you’ll make it out to be. There are tons of popular cosmetic keywords you can choose to target in your name. You can get help from third-party generators, like the Business Name Generator. You can even get inspiration from the different trends of today’s generation (hint: millennials always go bananas over puns and memes).

One of the most popular blog platforms in the world – and the one that we use – is WordPress. This is what we personally recommend. There are tons of reasons to choose WordPress, but its most attractive features are that:

You don’t need an expensive camera or the writing skills of Shakespeare to create good content for your audience. So long as your knowledge of the beauty industry always shines through and your smartphone’s pictures aren’t the quality of a potato, you’re fine. What’s really important are two factors:

“Wait, what?”

Yeah, you heard me. For starters, not all of your audience will operate in the same time zone as you. Secondly, it’s only natural that there will be times where you’ll want to take a vacation and not be posting. Beauty bloggers are masters of time management; whenever you have more time to spare, you can write multiple articles at once. Blogging platforms like WordPress will even allow you to schedule them in advance, too.

“But I might start writing crappy blog articles in an attempt to always be posting something!”

Good point! Although posting blog content on a regular basis is part of any successful beauty blogger’s job description, quality is still more valuable than quantity. If there are times where your brain’s hit a creative wall, or nothing you write seems to be any better than wet garbage (it happens to all of us), the safest option is not to force it.

In situations like that, try going back through your blog archive and see if you have any articles you can repost, edit, or revamp. When you’re struggling to come up with a brand new, organic idea, sometimes editing is a far easier task. The general notion towards blog content is that there is wiggle room here. So long as you post as much evergreen material as you can (meaning, stuff that’ll stay relevant for a long time), you’ll set yourself up for success.

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter – these are all your best friends! For extra icing on the cake, you can also start using YouTube to post videos of your tutorials, AMAs, etc. All well-known beauty bloggers operate on all different sorts of media to produce their content and promote their business. You definitely should, too. Social media will be your greatest tool in helping your odds of promoting yourself to potential followers.

Just like with your blog articles, there are apps that you can use to bulk schedule your social media content in advance, and then share everything for you. Here at QC, we use Later and Hootsuite, but there are tons of options to choose from.

A strong social media presence shows your audience that you’re there, like an invisible friend. Everyone loves a hard worker that’s passionate about what they do, and who’s succeeding in life. The world sucks in a lot of ways lately, so as a beauty blogger, your job will not just be to provide informative content. It’ll also be to provide a positive escape for all those who will look up to you. You’ll be the comfort zone they turn to when they need a short break from their struggles.

Whether you’ve been doing this for years, or you’re just starting out and still learning how to do makeup, you’ll benefit from exploring different makeup schools and taking classes.

“Whoah, why do I need classes if I already know what I’m doing?”

Just because someone’s a beauty blogger doesn’t mean they know everything there is to know about the craft. The people who think they know everything are usually the ones who know nothing. You might as well call them Jon Snow and exit out of their page. But you? You’re a true artist, and true artists understand that they’ll never know everything there is to know about their passion – but that will never stop them from trying to learn!

Online makeup schools like QC Makeup Academy are the perfect solution! In addition to a variety of makeup courses, programs touching on other popular areas of beauty blogging are also offered, such as Fashion Styling and/or Hair Styling Essentials.

Especially in the world of beauty, fashion, makeup, etc. the trends are ever-changing. Something that’s popular yesterday could very well be replaced by the latest and hippest look today. There will be the invention of new techniques and applications you haven’t tried before. If you think you know everything? #SorryNotSorry, but you’re wrong.

If you really want to be successful and stand out from your competition, you need to be humble enough to accept that there will always be things you can learn and ways you can improve. You may just find that doing so will only continue to grow your beauty blogging business.