We have never had any desire to shroud the workings of Beaut.ie in mystery, but have realised recently that there's a lot of misinformation floating around about how we do things. Kirstie filled you on on the day to day workings of the blog and now it's my turn to show you the money.
Of course we need money to run a site this big and people are always curious to know exactly how we do it. There's no mystery and perfectly straightforward answers. We've spoken about all this before (at Wordcamp for example) and a simple Google search will tell you how to generate revenue with your blog anyway. We're happy to share our experiences.
Grow your traffic
Yes that's right. Your stats must be big enough to warrant interest from advertisers. As soon as you decide you'd like to take ads you'll be independently assessed and your stats verified. The quality of the site will also help to determine the price you charge. I'm not going to go into CPM and all that jazz now, but if anyone is interested in hearing more let me know.
Advertising
We have good traffic on this site, thanks to you guys and so advertisers know that when they put a banner ad on the blog it's directly targeted at the group that reads us (female aged 20-35). This means that we get good ads (sometimes with competitions or freebies in them) that you will like and we think they enhance the site. But we don't advertise anything that we don't like and we don't think is a good fit - so we end up turning down quite a lot. This bit includes Google ads too - we've always had a couple of these on the site and no matter how small your blog is you can too. They've always worked very well for us.
Advertised
We also charge companies to advertise their product through competitions - and we get them to give you great prizes while we're at it. Occasionally we will promote or launch a product that we like and we tell you that we're promoting it so it's all clear and transparent.
Affiliate Marketing
There are certain sites that we like - and we think you will too. So if they're a good fit we will become an affiliate of theirs. This means that every time you click through the links we put up and choose to buy something we will get a tiny percentage of that sale (usually between 2% - 5%). So if you like Beaut.ie and want to support us, click our links. We put an asterisk * after every affiliate link so you will be able to see clearly that it is an affiliate and can choose to click on it or not. We choose affiliates based on how good we think they are.
How we don't make money
We never ever write posts for money (sponsored pay per posts). We never have and we never will. You can't buy our opinion at Beaut.ie - we'll say exactly what we think about something. We have no connections to the cosmetic or beauty industry, we are totally impartial. If we think something is crap we'll say so. And we do. And so do you in the comments! You can trust us to be honest. Sometimes brutally honest! This loses us advertising - of course it does. But if it's the difference between having an ad on the site for a slimming product that causes you to poo in your pants or not, we choose not.
Some other facts about Beaut.ie that have nothing to do with money - but people think they do
We get free products sent to us
Of course we do. We're the biggest women's interest site in the country - far bigger than most magazines. Wouldn't you send us product if you were a cosmetics company? But they all know that we will write what we like about it. If it's terrible we will tell you. So that means you've heard all about the rashes, the allergic reactions, the clumpy mascara and the split nails - as well as all the great things we've found. We buy tons of stuff ourselves too of course.
We love what we do - and that's why we do it
When we started we were both working full time and this was all a hobby. And you know what - that's what it still is. We love what we do and we get such a laugh out of it. Anyone could do what we did - if they're prepared to work their asses off, get up in the mornings and post, sit through meetings and presentations about the latest product, build up expertise and become recognised as leaders in their field. And yes a blog can do all this for you. But before you get too excited about the Internet and its riches: don't. Online advertising spend in Ireland is tiny compared with other markets and the recession has meant the whole thing has gone into free fall.
Advertised
So don't set up a blog and plan on buying a BMW tomorrow - it's not going to happen. But if you love blogging and writing and meeting people - that's the reason to go for it.
