Can optimizing your online content help boost your branding? The short answer is yes.
Well-optimized content can help you boost your earnings and help your brand grow. The longer answer is what we’re going to get into in this post.
More than ever, you have to focus on building a brand, promoting that brand, and generating amazing content for search engines as well as your audience. Let’s get started.
Let’s face it. We live in a greed-driven world and because of that, most businesses focus on profit. Google has had enough. If you’re not creating value and working for the money, then you’re not going to rank well.
In the spring of 2021, Google unveiled the first step in its plan to reward brands and online businesses that focused on value and punish those who did not.
This update is all about reviews. For nearly two decades, all a blogger or affiliate marketer had to do was copy and paste some specs and fluff out some content, add an Amazon link, and they could rake in the cash.
Strategies like this will no longer work.
The update was a two-pronged attack. The first leg started in April of 2021. Many people in the health and beauty space were hit hard. Google told people not to freak out. Fix the issues and you’ll be rewarded with the second phase.
Phase two started at the beginning of December 2021 and was completed on December 21st, just days before Christmas. Luckily, most people were done with their holiday shopping before they faced the consequences of not following the rules.
However, if you want to make money online in 2022, you need to make changes pronto.
If you want to see increased sales and Google rankings in the new year, you need to focus on being compliant with this new update.
From now on, you should actually do the reviews yourself. Provide the most in-depth reviews you possibly can. A good strategy for this is to do a search on Google, read through posts from your competition, and then take the time to write something better.
Take pictures and videos of yourself with the products in your hands. Nothing is going to make your review more authoritative than having YouTube evidence of yourself performing the review. You can then link to your channel from your blog and vice versa, generating additional revenue.
The second tip is to give your readership options for purchase, even if one of the options does not have a viable affiliate link. To be honest, Amazon isn’t the best resource for sales anymore.
Health and beauty bloggers and entrepreneurs have a huge variety of products and brands to choose from. You can take your time and visit networks like ShareASale and CJ Affiliate for something that piques your interest. Beauty affiliate programs are abundant, but stick to products you have tried and would personally recommend to friends and family.
For anyone who wants to make money online in 2022, you’re going to need a website that’s fast. How fast? There is no such thing as too fast.
If you think your website is fast enough, then go over to Google and get an official page speed score. You may be surprised at what you see. A 70 or 80 isn’t good enough. You want your score to be higher than 90.
So how do you make this happen?
The first thing you need to do is use the right plugins. You’re going to need 3 at a minimum:
There are plenty of premium options out there that will do all of these things. But the free options are just as good and they won’t slow down your website. They’ll help make it faster.
As far as caching plugins, the two best free versions are W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. A caching plugin allows information to be temporarily saved for return users. This means a faster load time for static pages. Both of these free plugins are CDN compatible.
A CDN, or content delivery network, is a series of servers all over the world that allow your website to load faster. If you have a US-based site on a US server, the load time significantly increases in Europe and even more so in Asia or Australia.
The best free CDN is Cloudflare, which is also a publicly-traded company. They’ve been around for years and while they have premium features, the free version is fine for most people.
Next, grab yourself a free search engine optimization plugin like Yoast or Rank Math. These plugins will help make it easier for Google to crawl your website, track keywords, and give you tips on best practices.
These plugins don’t technically make your website faster, but if they help Google crawl your site faster, it could have an impact on your rankings.
When it comes to site architecture, you need to do some things yourself. Site architecture is all about website organization.
This means you have everything in the right categories and pages as well as subpages and subcategories. As an example for beauty websites, let’s say you have categories for make-up, fashion, and one for working out.
Each of these categories should have a tab on your main page with applicable subcategories that bring up a user’s desired content. Proper site architecture is all about making it easier for users to find the content they want.
Lastly, you want a great image optimizer plugin. Health and beauty bloggers have to use a lot of images in their content. It’s not beautiful if no one sees it, right? WP Smush is one of the best.
This plugin works by compressing images. It also lazy loads, which means it keeps images that are off the screen from loading until the reader scrolls to their location.
You’re going to have a difficult time making sales if you do not interact with your audience.
Do you have to reply to every single comment? Not necessarily. Do you have to reply to every viable complaint? Probably.
It’s also important to make friends. Sure, some of these folks may be your competition but that doesn’t mean you should ignore them or be hateful.
At some point, you’ll want links to your content to help with your SEO efforts. This includes both guest posting and outreach to website owners linking to a competitor’s website. If you wrote something better, reach out and tell these website owners you wrote something their readers might get extra value from.
In all of the above cases, you’ll need to be friendly, helpful, and professional.
No one ever said starting a beauty brand or being a beauty blogger was easy. It’s probably one of the most challenging things you’ll ever do.
It’s also one of the most rewarding. If you follow today’s tips, not only can you still make money online in 2022, but you’ll be well on your way to building a successful brand and creating long-lasting relationships.