The Beauty Blog Makeover Story – Chapter 1: Reboot!

We believe that anyone can become a successful beauty blogger if you find the right niche, are passionate about your topic, and learn a few basic  blogging lessons.  And we’re PROVING that this approach works with our Beauty Blog Makeover contest. Jenn of Literature Couture won the contest and we’ve been working with her over the last few months to improve her blog. Now we’re ready to start sharing her results.

Chapter 1: Reboot to a self-hosted WordPress blog

Jenn is a fantastic writer and she’s VERY passionate about her topic. But, she needed some help with the technical side of blogging. She originally set her blog up in two places: on Tumbler and on her own hosted site. Unfortunately that approach was a bit of mess and it cost her more money than it should have. So, in our first lesson, we helped her set up her own hosted site on Wordpress. Now she can customize her blog however she wants!

Here’s her original Tumblr site – as you can see it had several issues:

  • Her content was below the fold so readers wouldn’t stick around long enough to scroll down and read her posts.
  • Her calendar took up too much precious real estate at the top of the blog.
  • She had a lot of wasted space on the sides that could have been used for money making ads and other features.

Original site – click to enlarge

And here’s what her attempt to self-host her blog looked like:

  • Content was not visible on the landing page.
  • Background image was hard to customize.
  • RSS feed was awkwardly placed.
  • Again, there was wasted space that could have been used to make money.

Self-hosted site – click to enlarge.

Finally,  here’s how her site looks today. She can still customize the look with graphics, colors, and fonts but look at the improvements she’s made just in the last month or so.

  • She has a clean, readable look with content front and center.
  • Tabs that direct her reader to her most important information.
  • RSS feeds make it easy to follow her content.
  • Money making ad opportunities built into each post.
  • Social media (Twitter) is built right into the landing page!
  • Plenty of customizable white space for widgets to use for ads, Facebook, “Popular Posts” and much much more.

New WordPress site – click to enlarge

We’re really excited about the progress Jenn has made already and we’re preparing other lessons to help her to continue to improve her blog in three critical areas: doubling traffic, building advertising income and getting offers for free products to review.

If YOU want to be more successful with your blog, stay tuned for our updates on the Start A Beauty Blog program. (Next time we’ll show you how Jenn is using WordPress to create fabulous posts!)

Your beauty blogging buddies,
The Beauty Brains

If you like Jenn’s new look leave a comment with some words of encouragement.

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