Do you want to know how to make money with a beauty website? In this article, I’m going to show you how to earn an active/passive income with your site. What’s really great about it is that you can work on your own schedule so you have more time and freedom to do other stuff you like in addition to making money. Here’s how to do it.
What You Need
WordPress
First of course, you need to create your website. I strongly recommend using WordPress for your beauty website. WordPress is by far the most popular website platform on the internet—and for good reasons. The software is free—you just have to pay for your hosting. Plus, you get the flexibility and control to build your website the way you want to.
Sure, you could use one of those website builder services, but I would strongly discourage you from using them. Using WordPress is less expensive and you get ownership of your website. If you want to move it somewhere is, you’re free to do so. Don’t try that with Wix or those other website builders.
You can create all types of websites with WordPress. And, there are definite search engine benefits using a WordPress site since it’s easily optimized for SEO.
Web Hosting
To create your website, you’ll first need to get your web hosting. Because of WordPress’s popularity, it’s easy to find some great deals on WordPress web hosting these days. Here are some of my favorite web hosting providers that I personally use for my websites. They’re affordable, offer great features, and have optimized WordPress environments.
InMotion Hosting
I’ve used InMotion Hosting longer than any other web host in the industry. With InMotion, you get great website speed and performance, super-responsive customer support, and excellent WordPress features. In fact, they have probably the best support staff that I’ve contacted over the years.
InMotion Hosting will pre-install WordPress for you so you don’t need to worry about that part. If you prefer to use a website builder, they include the BoldGrid WordPress site builder to make things even easier.
GreenGeeks
GreenGeeks is another excellent hosting choice for WordPress websites. WordPress is a major focus for the GreenGeeks team and they’re a global sponsor of the WordCamp conferences. All of GreenGeeks’ hosting plans include features that improve the speed and security of your WordPress websites.
And, if you’re concerned about our environment, you’ll be pleased to know that GreenGeeks is at the forefront of green web hosting practices—you might have guessed that with a name like theirs. So, you can get great WordPress hosting and help our planet!
A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting is also one of my top recommendations when it comes to WordPress website hosting. With A2 Hosting, you get their optimized WordPress environment for better speed and security. And, if you want an even faster performing website, you can choose one of their Turbo Server plans.
A2 Hosting is great for both new and experience WordPress users. They will pre-install WordPress for you and you can use their optimization plugin to setup your site. Also, A2 includes many premium WordPress features that cost much more money with other web hosts.
Passion
We’ve covered the technical requirements as far as getting your web hosting and using WordPress for your website, now let’s address the other part of the formula—that’s your passion for the topic of your website—in this case, it’s beauty products and services. It’s true that the more passionate you are about your topic, the easier it is for you to create useful content, the more dedicated you’ll be in continually and consistently writing about your niche, and the more enjoyment you’ll have as you help your audience achieve their goals while you’re making money online.
I truly believe that key to creating a successful website that allows you to make money is to stick with a subject that you’re really interested in. If that’s beauty products, then you’ve already got a big advantage.
Designing Your Website
Here’s the area where most people get in wrong. Yes, we all want our website to look nice, but the key is not to be overly concerned about appearance—especially when you’re just starting out. It’s much more important to focus on creating your content (in this case your blog posts and articles) rather than stressing out on fonts, colors, layouts, etc.
One of the great things about WordPress is that you can start off with one of the many free website themes that are available. You can search the repository from your WordPress dashboard. Personally, I like the Astra theme that you can get here. I would start off with the free version. Later, if you need more customization you can opt for the premium version. But as I mentioned, the key at this point is to focus more on creating your content rather than designing your site.
Sign Up for Affiliate Programs
So, how do you actually make money with your website? Here’s how you monetize your beauty blog or website. First off, if you have your own beauty products or services that you want to market, then you’ll want to focus on showing how they can help your audience improve their lives.
However, if you don’t have your own product, don’t worry. That’s where affiliate marketing comes in. As an affiliate marketer, you promote other company’s products and services. When you make a sale, you earn a commission. The amount you earn will vary depending on that particular affiliate program.
Here’s how it works. Since you’re creating a beauty website, you need to search for beauty and fashion affiliate programs. You can also go online to some of the big affiliate networks and search for products to market there.
Here are just a few examples of some affiliate programs in the beauty niche:
- Sephora
- Sigma Beauty
- BH Cosmetics
- No7 Beauty
- Nordstrom
- MAC Cosmetics
- Beauty Forever
- eSalon
- Coco & Eve
For a more complete list of affiliate programs, sign up to get my Free guide listing Beauty and other affiliate opportunities.
Once you go ahead and apply to be an affiliate for these products, and are accepted, you’ll be given your own specific affiliate links. You include these links in your website blog posts and articles. When someone clicks on your link and makes a purchase, you earn a commission!
Create Your Content
Here’s the area where you should spend the majority of your time—creating your awesome content. The key to remember here is that although your end goal is to make money, in order to get people to purchase items from your links, you’ve got to get them to trust and believe in you. The way you do that is to help them by providing useful content on your website.
The beauty area is an ideal niche where people are looking for latest and hottest products. So, in your website articles and blog posts you want to give them helpful advice. Don’t make every post a sales pitch for your products. The way to gain your audience’s trust is to help the solve their problems or answer their questions. That should be the main focus of your content. Now, as part of your blog posts and articles, you can suggest and recommend your affiliate products—that’s where you can include your affiliate links.
Along with your beauty articles, you can also promote your products through blog posts that feature Top 10 Lists, Best Beauty Products Lists, Beauty Product Reviews, and Head to Head Beauty Product Comparisons. These are excellent vehicles for including your affiliate links. Remember though, you don’t want to appear like you’re over selling or only want to sell to your audience. It’s always a good idea to include some content that isn’t flooded with your affiliate links.
Promote Your Content
While creating your content is the most important step, promoting your content is equally important. Contrary to what you may have heard, you can’t just build it and expect people to come visit. You need to optimize your content for Google and use your social media channels to funnel people over to your website.
Let’s start here with social media. While you definitely want to promote your content on your channels, there is some disagreement on how you should go about it. Ideally, you want to utilize all of your social media (Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, etc.). However, some experts (and I tend to agree) recommend that you concentrate on one traffic source first. Once you perfect and get that traffic stream going, then you can move to the next one. For example, if you like doing videos, focus on YouTube or TikTok first, then move on to Facebook, etc.
The social media outlet you choose to focus on first really depends on your niche and your personal preferences. What’s great about the beauty niche is that is really attracts audiences in all the major social media channels. So here, I would suggest you start out with whichever outlet you’re most comfortable with. If you’re comfortable in front of the camera, then do videos. If you like Facebook, then create a discussion group or page where you can build an audience.
Now, while social media is important, Google may still be your most important traffic source. That’s where improving your SEO benefits your website. We’ll go over SEO more in the next section. For now, let me just stress that these days, Google really does emphasize content value. What that means is you need to make sure that your blog posts and website pages are not just pages with affiliate links. You have to make sure to provide answers to questions, include information that supports your answers, and again, helps your readers to solve their problems.
Improve Your SEO to Increase Your Audience
As I mentioned above, one of the ways to promote your content is to improve your SEO so your content ranks higher in Google. The better your Google rankings are, the more traffic your website gets.
Here is another great reason to use WordPress for your beauty blog or website. WordPress not only has built in SEO benefits, but by simply adding one of the popular SEO plugins, you can easily optimize your site even more for the search engines.
Installing the Yoast SEO plugin will take care of on-page SEO items such as your meta titles, meta descriptions, and keyword focus. The other part of SEO is obtaining backlinks to your website. While it may be tempting, please don’t buy spam links for your site. Google doesn’t like that and they really won’t help your search engine rankings.
After you establish your beauty website, you should start to receive some backlinks naturally. If you think you need some extra help in getting quality backlinks, there are some legitimate SEO companies you can work with that can get you legitimate or “white hat” backlinks as they’re called.
Be Consistent and Persistent
It bears repeating here: The key to a successful website is to consistently provide useful content for your audience. You’ve got to be consistent and persistent in creating blog posts, reviews, product comparisons, how to articles, and other helpful content to grow and engage your audience.
Creating an editorial calendar for your blog posts is a great way to keep you motivated to continually schedule and create new content for your beauty blog or website.
I would suggest searching the WordPress.org repository for a free editorial calendar plugin.
Earn with Passive Income
While there are no guarantees on the money you can make online, the above steps are a proven formula for tons of affiliate marketers that are making money through their websites. It’s also important for me to point out here that although the goal is to earn passive income from your website, you do have to put in the time and work to generate and promote your content so that you can earn money literally while you sleep.
Just remember, it’s not a get rich quick scheme.
Rinse and Repeat
I recommend that you focus on your one website until it’s fully established and you’re earning income on a steady basis. However, what’s also great about affiliate marketing is that you can use this same formula on other websites in other niches to earn even more income. The steps are the same, you’ll just need to create content around another niche and become an affiliate to companies in that industry as well.
It’s very possible to make money from your beauty website. Remember, the key is to consistently post helpful content for your visitors along with your affiliate links—and to promote your content as much as possible.
I wish you the best on your efforts. Now it’s your turn, so go ahead and create that
Beauty blog or website you’ve been thinking about. Not only will you be sharing your ideas and passion with others, but you’ll also be able to make money.
Free Affiliate Program Guide
And, if you want a little boost to started, click below to get my Free Affiliate Program Guide that lists hundreds of affiliate programs you can sign up for—including many in the Beauty niche.
