If you operate anywhere within the beauty industry, you no doubt realize that it’s a growing multi-billion dollar industry with plenty of areas to navigate and niches to profit in.
And it’s no secret that beauty blogging, when done correctly, is a very lucrative venture.
Whether you are blogging about makeup, skincare, haircare, natural DIY anti-aging recipes, even a fashion blog, you likely realize that tons of blog traffic can pay off greatly.
But what if you don’t have a great amount of traffic yet? There is a way to make money, and build your business even before Google decides to pour an avalanche of visits into your corner of the internet.
And that’s by targeting and capturing HIGHLY-TARGETED traffic, and it’s something you can start doing today with great success.
Do you know the true value of driving targeted traffic to your beauty blog? Fact is, not all website visitors are created equal.
The Importance of Changing The Typical Blogger Mindset
Oftentimes bloggers get excited about the amount of visitors they can get to their website instead of the type of visitors they get, in fact, it’s often the only thing that’s important to them, and that’s the reason that many of them fail.
One of the most important keys to having a successful business online is being able to attract highly-targeted traffic.
Why is that?
Because attracting targeted traffic means that you are drawing people to your online presence who are more likely to spend their money with you, become fans of your brand, and tell others about you.
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Helping You Understand The Concept Of A Targeted Traffic
Let me give you an example to help you understand the concept of targeted traffic. Let’s imagine that you are an interior decorator based in Manhattan. How would you define who your target audience would be? Who are the folks that you want to find your blog the most?
The answer would be people who are looking for an interior decorator, right? Well, yes.
Here is the issue though:
Think about the different motivations a person might have in order to go to Google and look up the word “interior decorator”. A person might type “interior decorator” into a search bar for various reasons.
Some people might just want to know who are the most famous interior decorators, others might want to know how to become an interior decorator. Even still, others might be searching for information about what interior decorators do, or how much money they make.
In your case, your targeted traffic would be the people who are searching for interior decorator services.
To be more specific, your target audience would be people who live in the New York area and are looking for an interior decorator.
Think about this:
India has more than 560 million internet users, but will that traffic help you? Not one bit!
The people who you want reaching out to you would live in the New York area, so logically, your efforts should focus on those people. An interior decorator who attracts the attention of 10 people in need of an interior decorator in the New York area is better off than the direct competitor who attracts a thousand people who want information about interior decorators, but live in India.
How Targeted Traffic Turns Your Blog Into A Real Business
There are four major benefits you reap from attracting your targeted audience to your blog, let’s discuss them…
- Your targeted audience is far more likely to spend money on your offerings. Since you are able to attract people who are specifically looking for what you have to offer, it only makes sense that you have put yourself in a superior position to be able to convert traffic into sales.
- Your targeted audience is far more likely to spend more time on your site even if they are not ready to buy at the moment. This sends a good signal to Google that you have a high-quality site because people are engaging with your content. In turn, Google and the other search engines are more likely to send more traffic to your blog because you will have a lower “bounce rate” (the percentage of people who leave your blog after visiting the first page on your site) than a website that attracts people who are not the targeted audience.
- Targeted traffic is more likely to bookmark your website, sign up for your newsletter, and become repeat visitors.. You will convert far more visitors into fans of your work. This is a great source of motivation, and an excellent base for building your business.
- Lastly, people who are your ideal audience are more likely to recommend and share your website with others, whether by word-of-mouth or on social media. Social media signals like this help to boost your reputation online and send positive signals to the search engines that your site can be trusted and is worthy of more traffic.
How To Do It: 3 Proven Methods Of Attracting Highly Targeted Traffic To Your Blog
Whenever you are looking for your target audience you have to take in consideration what your niche is and where you would find the people who are interested in what you blog about. Being that this tutorial is targeted towards people in the beauty blogging industry I already know the primary places that our audience hangs out at because I blog about natural hair products and beauty.
And I know from experience that one of the main places that you will find your targeted traffic is on Pinterest, so let’s talk about it…
Method #1: Pinterest Post Conversion Optimization
Is search engine optimization on Pinterest a part of your blog traffic strategy? If you are a beauty blogger, then it needs to be.
Because Pinterest, which boasts more than 250 million monthly users, is one of the best places to find targeted traffic for the beauty niche, by far. So if you blog about skincare, fashion, and clothing, or natural hair care as I do, you have targeted traffic just waiting for you to come grab it.
Many people mistakenly view Pinterest as a social media app, while it’s true that Pinterest started off trying to be a social media website, that did not work, people don’t go to Pinterest to make friends and socialize. Wisely though, the people at Pinterest accepted their platform for what it had become and for what people used it as, a search engine for things to learn about and buy different products.
And this image-laden search engine can give you an uneven playing field against other bloggers in your niche if you use it the right way.
Now if you search online for tips on the best way to optimize your Pinterest postings, without a doubt, you will run into a bunch of articles teaching you how to optimize Pinterest images for the best size and color-scheme in order to attract attention.
Although helpful, such information is also very rudimentary, so we won’t discuss that here.
Instead, I’m going to show you how to find the exact keywords your target audience is searching for and how to use them correctly to attract the perfect people you want visiting your blog.
Step number one: optimize your posts on Pinterest for keywords that people are searching for.
Ask yourself… What are your current blog articles about? What does the blog content that you are planning to create pertain to?
Think of a short phrase or even one word that fits. Now search for that in the Pinterest search box.
Let’s pretend that your blog article is targeted toward people who want makeup ideas.
You’d enter “makeup ideas” into the Pinterest search box, as illustrated below.
And make sure your search is set for “All Pins”, that way it will search through all of the millions of pins on the platform and not just your pins alone.
Take a look at the illustration below.
Do you notice the words that are inside of the rectangular boxes below the search box? These words automatically appear when you make a search for a general term surrounding the idea of your content.
Do you realize how valuable this discovery is?
Pinterest is literally telling you what people who are interested in makeup ideas are searching for on the platform. This information is gold, these are the exact words that you will use in the description of your pins in order to be found by your target audience on Pinterest and draw click to your blog post from targeted traffic.
Many times you can get up to 40 of these different terms to use.
Here’s how to do it:
You, of course, need to have a Pinterest account, if you don’t, create one.
After you’ve logged into your account you need to click on the plus sign in the Pinterest dashboard, and then click where it says “create pin”.
Here’s what to do next:
After you upload your blog image, you’ll want to take those same keywords that you found under the Pinterest search box and mix them into your Pin title and description.
Do you remember the keywords that we discovered?
Among them were:
“natural step by step, for brown eyes, dia, dramatic, for black women, easy eyeshadows, colorful, for prom, for weddings”
So you could use some or all of these keywords and come up with a traffic-drawing Pinterest description, something like this…
“It’s only natural that you’d want your makeup to look gorgeous, whether it’s for prom or for weddings, dramatic and colorful eyeshadows can change your look and we have some easy tips for you to follow…”
You’ll notice in the example Pin description above that I bolded the keywords for you so that you can see how the keywords are used.
In the illustration below, you can see…
- Where your image would be uploaded
- Where your Pin title goes
- Where your description goes, and lastly….
- Where you would put your website URL.
You don’t have to use EVERY every keyword you found, simply pick the keywords that fit your content or that match content that you plan on adding to your blog post.
I’ve often added information to my blog posts to match up with discovered keywords so that when Pinterest searchers click-through to my website they find what they were expecting to see.
This tactic has done wonders for my newest natural hair products website:
The above image is a peek into my Google Analytics account, as you can see the Pinterest traffic acquisition method brought my newest website 272 unique visitors and 334 pageviews over a recent 6-day period.
This is something you can easily do and the traffic builds as you continue adding pins. I hope you’ll take action on this, targeted blog traffic is waiting for you!
Method #2: Social Media Traffic Sniping On Twitter
Next, we’re going to focus on Twitter.
There is much value of “social listening” on Twitter, you can find your target audience very easily and make contact with them instantly and anytime you want!
Twitter is a prime platform for social listening because its users are active, and engaged.
The fact is, as of January 2018, there are 330 million monthly users of Twitter, sending around 500 million Tweets per day.
Best of all, people on Twitter tell the world exactly what they are interested in, you simply have to listen and find those who are calling out for what you already provide.
In this way, you are creating awareness with your target audience and the benefits are huge!
One of my favorite tactics is to track brand mentions in my blog niches and mentions of my competitors as well. This way I know who to engage on the platform.
I do this by using search strings on Twitter.
And here is one of my favorite search strings to use to find my target audience. In the Twitter search box, I search for keywords that I know my target audience would be using online and I filter out the links (filtering out the links removes a lot of the commercial content).
For example:
For my websites that are focused on natural hair, growth oils & beauty, I like to use this search string, “my natural hair -filter:links”.
You’d do this for whichever keywords or language YOUR ideal traffic would be using on Twitter.
And as illustrated below, make sure you click on the “latest” tab so that you see the most current tweets that are using the keywords you’re searching for.
So let’s pretend that your website is focused on skincare and beauty.
You might want to search using a string like this: “my skincare routine -filter:links”.
As you can see in the image below, 5 people have used that exact term in the last 30 minutes. not everyone who has used that term will be a perfect candidate for your target audience, but the vast majority will be.
Now all you have to do is engage with them. You can do this by liking their tweets or other tweets on their profile, following them, commenting on their tweet, retweeting, or all of the above.
Below, you’ll see how I “liked” the skincare routine tweet…
This will definitely catch your target audience’s attention, and many of them will come to your profile to check out what you have going on. Since your content addresses exactly what they are interested in, they are very likely to follow you and engage with your content.
You can really get creative with the different search strings you use to find your target audience on Twitter, and thankfully, Twitter provides a lot of information to help you understand how to use different search operator strings.
And although this can be a lot of manual work, I have also found a lot of success in using various Twitter listening tools, so that’s also an option that you can look into in order to save time.
Give it a try, it’s a great way to find highly targeted traffic for your beauty blog.
Method #3: Answer Google Questions Related To The Interests Of Your Target Market
Most bloggers mistakenly start their careers by trying to get traffic by targeting some of the most competitive search engine keywords in their niche.
The problem is, the competition for such highly trafficked keywords is extremely fierce and the larger, more established websites will easily outrank you 99-times-out-of-100.
And this is why many new beauty blogs fail. That doesn’t have to be your situation.
Why?
Because Google has created many new search features—many of which can be used to get highly-targeted search traffic without having a major beauty blog.
The best part about these search features is that most bloggers never even try to take advantage of them.
This leaves a great opportunity for new beauty bloggers to grab their ideal blog visitors.
I often take advantage of one of these features in particular, one that’s relatively new:
And that’s the “People Also Ask” related questions search results that Google has implemented.
You may have noticed these when searching for various phrases or terms. The People Also Ask results appear as small boxes within the search results themselves (usually around the 4 or 5th position).
When a searcher clicks one of the questions, the snippet expands to show a brief potential answer and displays a title URL link that the information searcher can click on for more in-depth information:
These links get high click-through rates, and the clicks they attract are from people who are leaving no doubt about the type of specific information they want.
These are the easiest types of visits to monetize.
Tips for Optimizing Your Blog Content for Google’s “People Also Ask” Snippet
People Also Ask search engine snippets are generated algorithmically, so there are no specific markups available that will boost your chances of being included in Google’s People Also Ask search result snippets.
That doesn’t mean that we’re left clueless as to what’s needed for your blog content to be considered worthy of inclusion though.
An Ahrefs study found that search queries with the following words have a better chance of getting featured:
- Recipe
- Best
- Vs.
- Make
- Definition
There are also a few “best practices” that many webmasters have agreed on in regard to influencing inclusion into PAA answer snippet:
- Give short, yet concise questions and answers
- Write in plain, non-salesy language
- Use Q&A schema
Many bloggers assume that People Also Ask questions are only triggered by Q & A pages or that your post has to be heavily informational: this is not the case, I’ve seen it with my own two eyes.
If you make a practice of visiting the pages that earn the PAA snippets, you’ll see that they are often not focused solely on answering questions or extremely deep informational sources. They simply contain the information that answers a targeted question and are structured in a way that Google prefers to display.
Here’s what I’ve done to successfully rank in PAAs:
- Search general phrases or keywords associated with current blog content or future blog content ideas.
- Take note of the PAA questions that show up as well as the answers shown so that you can answer them in a similar, yet more informative manner.
- Add these same questions and answers to your blog content.
- Mimic the formatting of the People Also Ask results that are currently appearing in the SERPs (are they using bullet lists? Numbered list? You can too).
- Using the right headings to mark up such Q & A elements (h1, h2, h3, whatever is appropriate for your blog post).
- If you don’t currently have any blog content that covers a certain keyword theme, go ahead and create new content that matches the keyword intent that Google is favoring.
Even simple FAQs blog posts could help you consistently win featured snippets like People Also Ask and draw highly-targeted traffic that is easier for you to convert into fans of your helpful content and future customers!
If you implement these 3 insider tips for grabbing your highly-targeted traffic, you’ll be able to build momentum and even convert visitors into fans before Google decides to let you compete for the huge keywords with the giants in your industry.
And CONSISTENTLY implementing these methods while providing high-quality content can truly help your blog to become one of the more formidable and high-earning bloggers in the industry faster than expected. I hope you’ll take action today!
About Author: Melissa Lee is co-founder of NaturalHair-Products.com as well as other blogs related to the beauty niche, she has been a full-time blogger and online marketer since 2008.