Developing a strategy around your brand and learning how to market it are pivotal to the success of not just your brand, but your business as well. And that’s exactly what we’re discussing in today’s blog post. 

If you’d like to learn more about what a brand is and the different elements that comprise it, check out part one of our Guide to Branding, “What is Branding?” here. 

What is Brand Strategy and Marketing?

A strong brand strategy helps you present a unified, consistent brand identity in market: Ranging from your site design, to your social media profiles, and even to how you communicate with customers. 

Consistency is pivotal to branding because it helps set expectations with your audience, and a consistently good experience with your brand increases brand loyalty. Without a brand strategy to drive that consistency, your business will suffer. 

Crafting a brand strategy isn’t difficult, but it does take time and effort. 

A good brand strategy helps you understand your business values and directs your brand to grow in manners beneficial to both your business and customers. It’ll help you communicate with your audience clearly and effectively, attract the right customers, and positions your brand in a way that helps you grow your market share. 

Why is Brand Strategy Important?

Without a good, consistent brand strategy your business will suffer. 

Crafting a brand strategy helps you understand who you are and what matters to your business, like your values and mission. Those are vitally important to understand when making marketing and business decisions. 

When you have an inconsistent brand, your marketing and communications take a hit, and if you can’t clearly communicate your brand and values to your customers, you’ve lost them. 

So let’s look into how to create a brand strategy and what you can do to succeed against the competition. 

How to Create a Brand Strategy

Before sitting down to create your brand strategy, it’s good to have the following information at hand:

• Who’s your target audience?
  • Who are you trying to reach? Do you know what your ideal customer looks like? To craft an effective brand strategy you must know who you’re talking to and what their needs are so you can offer the appropriate solution. If you know your audience, you can speak to them more effectively.
• Who’s your competition?
  • What other businesses and brands are competing for the same customers and audience? This information is vital to know. If you understand your competition, you can figure out how to position yourself in the marketplace to stand out from them and attract customers. 

Once you have that information handy, it’s time to start strategizing. So, let’s do it. To build your brand strategy, follow the steps below. 

Understanding the Core of Your Brand

Your business holds a set of core beliefs that drives and influences every aspect of your brand. You can think of these beliefs as your business values or your mission. 

When your brand and core business beliefs are aligned, it’s a powerful thing. When they’re not, well, you’re facing some issues. 

If you understand what drives your business, what drives your brand, then you can successfully communicate that to your customers both verbally and visually. It allows you to grow your business in a way that successfully sets you apart from competitors and engenders you to your audience. 

Without a set of guiding beliefs, your messaging will be erratic, employees may feel directionless, and overall, your business will suffer. 

To help you determine your core values and beliefs, ask yourself the following questions:

• Who am I? Why does this business exist?
  • These questions help you understand the purpose of your business. 
• What does the future of my business look like? What does success look like and how do I create it?
  • These questions help you understand your business’s vision and mission, and help you determine what needs to be done to support them. 

It’s essential that you start your brand strategy by diving into the heart of your brand and determining your values. These values and your core brand can then be shared with your audience and in market through messaging and visual representations. 

Define Your Brand Voice and Messaging

Now that you understand what makes your brand tick, it’s time to figure out how to communicate that to your customers and in the market. You can think of this as an exercise in brand messaging. 

Brand messaging is the practice of talking about who you are. Like with any practice, the more you hone and refine your messaging, the better it gets. Defining your brand messaging helps your brand communicate honestly and effectively. 

It’s important to spend time figuring out your brand messaging before jumping into the more visual aspects of your brand. That’s because your brand’s visual assets are largely an extension of your messaging and how you represent yourself online and in market. 

For example, when developing Domain.com’s brand strategy, we determined that our messaging needs to be authentic, interesting, and straightforward. Cleverness is okay, but we’re not cutesy and we won’t pander. We try to be honest and transparent while speaking clearly and simply — no “fluff.”

In turn, this helped us craft our visual identity — bold, strong, and energetic. Our approach with images and the more flexible creative elements of our brand is to find clean, clear imagery for complicated concepts. Our minimal illustration style is designed much like our messaging, again, no “fluff.”

To craft the best brand messaging, you’ll need to understand three things:

• Your brand’s personality. 
  • Long gone are the days when businesses were entirely formal and focused on transactions alone. Now, your brand needs to have some personality. What characteristics and human attributes does your brand express? Are you fun and cheerful or serious and direct? Determining what attributes to highlight in your messaging helps you build relationships with the right audience. 
• What voice to use. 
  • Your brand voice is unique. A car dealership doesn’t have the same voice as a non-profit, and for good reason. Your brand’s voice is your brand’s personality put into words and articulated in your customer-facing messaging. 
• What tone to take. 
  • A good way to determine your tone is to think about how you want your messaging to make people feel. Your voice won’t change, but your tone can depending on the context of your message or who you’re talking to. Just because your voice is clever, doesn’t mean you can’t have a serious tone when necessary. 

Once you’ve defined your brand messaging, it’ll be so much easier to communicate effectively and talk about who you are in market. Your brand messaging and voice should be used when sharing your brand story, making a pitch, or making a promise to your customers. 

Define Your Brand’s Visual Identity

Usually, when someone hears the word “brand” they immediately jump to thinking of colors and logos. However, we chose to include visual identity as the third step in your brand strategy because it’s a continuation of your brand messaging. 

Your brand expresses itself through colors, images, and icons just as much as it does with words. When crafting your visual identity keep in mind that you’re designing not just for your immediate needs, but for your brand’s future, too. 

With that said, your visual identity needs to be clear and intuitive so that the different elements, like colors and logos, work together. There needs to be an element of flexibility so that you can adapt and grow as your business does and as you introduce new products or services. And it needs to be comprehensive. Detail your color palette and what your imagery is meant to convey so that your employees or contractors understand and can apply your visual identity to their tasks and responsibilities. 

Translating Your Brand Strategy into Brand Guidelines

Now that you’ve gone through the exercise of determining your brand strategy it’s time to finalize it. 

Translating your brand strategy into a tangible document that contains your brand guidelines is an essential step in achieving business success. Having this information documented not only keeps you accountable, but it makes it easy to share with whomever needs the information, whether that be employees or an outside contractor. 

We recommend using a cloud-based tool, like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, to track this information. Both tools make it easy to work from wherever you’re located and you can access your files across various devices. They also make it easy to collaborate with others and stay on top of tasks. 

Your brand guidelines should detail the following information:

• Mission
• Vision
• Voice & Tone
• Color Palette
• Logos, Taglines, and Icons
• Typography and font
• Visual Language and Identity
• Media kit 
  • Your media kit should include downloadable files of any logos or design elements that your employees or contractors may need to support your brand. 

Putting Your Brand into Market

Ready to take your business and brand into the market? Congrats!

Now that you’ve established your brand strategy, you’ve set yourself up for success. 

You can use your brand strategy and guidelines to talk your customers online and off — in email, via social media, and face-to-face. And you should absolutely use and refer to your brand guidelines when designing your website, the core of your digital identity. 

If you don’t have a website, we can help. With Domain.com’s WebsiteBuilder, you can get online quickly and easily. And while our AI-powered site builder helps make life a little easier by getting your site design started, you retain full control over customizing your site to support your brand identity. 

So what are you waiting for? Get started today. 

Your brand is what makes you and your business unique — if it could be distilled down into something tangible, we’d venture to call it your “special sauce.”

Your brand is a first impression — the first impression that customers and potential clients will have of your business. You don’t get a second chance at a first impression, so make it count.

The good thing is, you don’t have to go at it alone. We’re here to help you understand what it takes to craft the perfect brand and take it to market in our two-part guide to branding.

What Is a Brand?

Your brand comprises many things: It’s your business and website colors, your logo, the products and services you offer, and the way you present your business online. It’s the feeling someone gets when they hear your business or domain name, and it’s what they think of you as they browse your site. And yet, that still doesn’t fully capture what your brand is.

In essence, your brand is the summation of every single touchpoint a person can have with your business and what they think about you. That includes your site, social media, products and services, logos, your business’s mission and values, the way you speak to your audience on your site and in your blog, and how you provide customer service.

You can build and work on elements of your brand to influence it; however, keep in mind that it’s just as much what someone thinks of your business as it is the elements you can control, like your logo and colors. Ultimately, your brand lives and dies in the eyes of the consumer.  

To get a bit more technical, let’s look at how Merriam-Webster defines “Brand.” They say it’s a “class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer, a characteristic or distinctive kind, and a public image, reputation, or identity conceived of as something to be marketed or promoted.”

Why Are Brands Important?

Your brand sets you apart from the competition. When all else is equal, a customer’s brand loyalty is the deciding factor in where and with what business they choose to transact. Jeff Bezos once said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

So, what do you want your customers to say about you? And how can you influence it? Let’s explore different elements of branding that you can work on to craft the perfect brand identity.

Elements of Branding

Your brand isn’t entirely within your control. You see, it’s a living, evolving thing. You set the foundation upon which it grows: Deciding on a domain and business name, your logo, your colors, and your typography. Then, it evolves as people and customers interact with you, get to know your products and what type of service you provide, and when they buy into your mission and values as a business.

Business and Domain Name

Names affect brands, but how?

A good name lends trust and credibility to your business, to your brand. A good name is one of your company’s most valuable assets, and if you don’t believe us, you need only look to one of the largest businesses of our time, Starbucks, to find out why.

Starbucks co-founder, Gordon Bowker, tells us how Starbucks got its name in an interview with The Seattle Times. He says, “We were thinking of all kinds of names and came desperately close to calling it Cargo House, which would have been a terrible, terrible mistake. Terry Heckler [with whom Bowker owned an advertising agency] mentioned in an offhand way that he thought words that begin with ‘st’ were powerful words. I thought about that and I said, yeah, that’s right, so I did a list of ‘st’ words.

Somebody somehow came up with an old mining map of the Cascades and Mount Rainier, and there was an old mining town called Starbo. As soon as I saw Starbo, I, of course, jumped to Melville’s first mate [named Starbuck] in Moby-Dick.”

There you have it — Starbucks was named, in large part, due to the perceived strength of the “st” sound that begins its name.

“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

Jeff bezos

Words can indeed cause people to feel different things depending on the sounds in the word. Christopher Johnson, Ph.D., a verbal branding consultant known as “The Name Inspector,” discusses these sounds or “rhythmic contrasts” in words in his book MICROSTYLE The Art of Writing Little.

Did you know that business names can be thought of as either feminine or masculine depending on the sound or rhythm of the word?  He uses the examples of Chanel, a “feminine brand name”, and Black & Decker, a “masculine brand name”, as explained below.

The name Chanel is an iamb, meaning it consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (shə-NEHL or chaNEL.) “Iambs tend to sound lighter and softer,” Johnson writes, while “… trochees tend to sound heavier and harder.” Black & Decker is an example of a trochee; those consist of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable (BLACK & deck-ER.) He notes that “Most people ‘feel’ this difference even if they find it hard to pinpoint.” Keep in mind that means people will feel a certain way about your business name, probably without realizing it, so put some extra thought into naming your business.

Choosing the right domain name should be part of the process of selecting your business name. Both will support your brand, and for consistency, they should be as similar (if not exact) as possible. Successful businesses in this day and age require having an online presence, so a website (and therefore, domain name) is a must.

Here’s what else you should keep in mind when deciding on the perfect domain name for your brand:

• Does it pass the radio test?
  • If someone were only to hear your domain name in passing on the radio and never see it written out, could they navigate to it? If the answer is no, consider going back to the drawing board and choosing another name.
• Avoid unique spelling, punctuation, or excessive numbers.
  • For starters, it won’t pass the radio test. Do you really expect people to remember that instead of the letter “I,” you use the number “1” in your domain name? Or that you have approximately five hyphens and three numbers in your domain? No, you can’t reasonably expect that. And if people can’t remember or spell your domain name, the chances of them getting to your website are slim.
• Make it memorable.
  • Try to keep your domain name short. The longer it gets, the more chances people have of mistyping and never reaching your site.
• Buy alternate misspellings of your domain name.
  • This helps in two ways:
    • If there are common misspellings of your domain name, purchase them to ensure you get any traffic from people who mistyped your correct domain.
    • It prevents competitors from purchasing misspellings of your domain name. If your competitor owns those misspelled alternates of your domain, they can redirect traffic from there to their own site.
• Consider a new domain extension.
  • Is .com really king? It’s well known, and people recognize it, but nowadays, there are thousands of domain extensions that can help you get the perfect domain name.
  • Starting an online store? Try .store. Opening a yoga studio? Try .yoga. There is a domain extension for just about everything, and these TLDs can help add context and memorability to your domain name.

Business and Brand Logo

Humans are visual creatures, so hook their attention with a good-looking logo.

Why are logos important? Just like with domain names, a good logo is a calling card for your brand. Your logo should be memorable and unique enough that when people see it, they instantly think of your brand and don’t confuse it with another.

There are various types of logos, ranging from strictly visual (think abstract logos like Chase Bank) to mascots (used by many sports teams), emblems (law firms or universities), and lettermarks and wordmarks (like CNN or Google, respectively.)

Domain.com uses a variety of logos, like you see below, to help support our brand. 

When designing your logo, keep the following tips in mind:

• Leverage white and empty space. 
  • Your logo doesn’t need to look “busy” to communicate your brand.
• Rely on your business’s color palette. 
• Where will your logo be displayed? 
  • You’ll likely need different versions or sizes so that it looks good on your website, in your emails, and on social media. 
• Relevancy is key. 
  • Your logo is representative of your brand, don’t forget that. 

With Domain.com, it’s easy to create a professional logo to support your brand. All you need is a name, and Domain.com’s LogoMaker will instantly create hundreds of logo options for you to choose from. Then, you can customize everything from colors and fonts to icons and more. 

Sign in to your Domain.com account today and select “Business” at the top of your control panel to leverage the power and design capabilities of LogoMaker. 

Color Psychology and Branding

Designing a website can be a lot of fun, especially when you use a tool like WebsiteBuilder, which does all the heavy lifting for you. That gives you more time to focus on the creative aspects, like the color palette your business and site uses. 

Your brand’s color palette can affect the way people interact with you. This is due to color psychology, or “the study of hues as a determinant of human behavior.”

Certain colors lend themselves to specific associations. In Western culture, we say that green is the color of envy and think of blue as relaxing and meditative. The color black, for example, is believed to represent wealth and prosperity in Eastern cultures and is foreboding and threatening in Western cultures. 

Domain.com’s primary color is Carmine Red, as you see below. We chose it to help us create a strong, bold, and energetic brand expression that helps us stand out and build recognition. 

From there, we selected an accompanying functional color palette — one that’s monochromatic and leverages greyscale to add a stark contrast to our primary color. 

Go into your color selection with an idea of what you want those colors to exemplify. For Domain.com, we embrace a minimal and clean color palette to allow for deliberate emphasis on bold visual elements. Our colors are meant to inspire and drive action, to help the Doers out there get more done. 

Font and Branding

A successful brand understands that different fonts send different messages to their audiences. So choose your fonts carefully — no one wants to send the wrong message to their audience accidentally. 

There are hundreds and hundreds of fonts available to you, some you can find for free, and others require purchase. However, most of the fonts you’ll want to use fall into the following categories:

• Serif
  • Serif fonts are distinctive due to the flourish or decorative stroke at the end of the letters (both horizontally and vertically.) These fonts generally give your site and brand a more formal tone. 
• Sans 
  • Sans fonts add no serifs, or decorative strokes, to their letters. In fact, in French, “sans” means without. These fonts give off a modern and straightforward vibe. 

Domain.com uses Lato for its branding, choosing it for its flexibility and bold, modern style. 

What are you thinking about using for your brand? Why? Let us know in the comments!

Customer Service, Values, and Branding

A consistent customer experience is at the core of your brand. To put this into perspective, let’s look at Starbucks again to see what they’re doing right. 

Whether or not you’ve had their coffee (and with over 28k locations, we’re betting you have), the odds are good that you’ve heard of Starbucks. How did they get to be so big and such a well-loved brand?

The intelligent minds at Starbucks realized that their brand, their business persona, was in the hands of their customers. Understanding that, they’ve since done everything they can to enhance the public’s perception of them positively. 

Starbucks trained its partners (what they call their employees) to greet you when you walk in the door and know that it should only take 3 minutes from that moment until you get your drink. I don’t know about you, but a cheerful greeting and expedient service are likely to make me think more fondly of a business.

Starbucks provides a consistent experience. You’ll find similar menus across most of their locations, all of which are easily identifiable by the green siren logo. Not to mention, that logo is one of the world’s most recognizable logos. Their locations are comfortable, inviting, and positioned as a “third place” — a place between home and work that’s welcoming and relaxing.

Starbucks’ mission statement is, “To inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.” They live this mission in their stores, and it’s reflected in the materials they choose to share on social media. They do such an excellent job of living their mission statement, and so it’s how their customers think of them — it’s the heart of their brand.

What would happen to the Starbucks brand if they decided to double all their prices, increase the wait time for drinks, and hire only surly service workers? Those wouldn’t be changes to the material goods they offer, but changes that affect the customer experience. Their brand would undoubtedly suffer because it lives in the eyes of the consumer.

Have you ever been to the Starbucks website? In our original definition, we said that “Your brand is the summation of every single touchpoint a customer can have with your business and how they think about you.” Websites are customer touchpoints, and Starbucks’ site is designed to reflect their commitment to their mission statement and ease of use.

We understand that you may not have a Starbucks-sized budget to run and market your business, but you can still cop a few of their tactics to grow your brand. Put your customers first, provide a good and consistent experience, and live your mission statement.

A Successful Brand Is a Successful Business

Take the time to focus on building and crafting your brand before launching your business in the market. 

Structural elements like your logo, color palette, and typography and fonts keep your brand consistent and robust. These core pieces work together to make your brand recognizable wherever it appears. 

Once you’ve nailed your structural elements, you can approach your brand’s more flexible and creative elements, like selecting what photography and illustration to use on your site. All of these things help communicate a broader range of emotions, showcase your products, and create clear points of view for your customers. 

Ready to work on your brand and bring your business to life? Domain.com has all the tools you need, so get started today. 

As you begin learning the SEO ropes, you may feel like you’re learning a complex second language.

Don’t let that defeat you — you’ve got this, and SEO jargon doesn’t have to be a mystery. Use this glossary of SEO terminology to help orient yourself and understand the terms you need to know to succeed in search. 

Already a master of SEO lingo? Scroll down to the bottom for additional SEO resources, including a beginner’s and more advanced technical guides.

SEO Terms: A Glossary

A

Algorithm – A computer program used by search engines. This program allows them to retrieve data and deliver results for searches.

Algorithm Change – Refers to when search engines update or change the algorithms they use.

Authority – The signals search engines use to assess and “grade” sites and pages to determine rank in search engine results. 

B

Backlink – AKA inbound link. A link from another (3rd party) site to your site or one of your webpages.

Black Box – This term is used to describe Google’s esoteric programs. Google’s algorithm is a “black box” — we can observe it in action and see its effects, but can’t fully access the program itself or know everything about it. 

Black Hat SEO – Risky and ill-advised SEO tactics that Google frowns upon. These tactics are contrary to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Engaging in black hat SEO tactics can result in penalization or removal from search rankings. 

Competitor – Your competition in the market. Generally, they fall into two categories:

• Direct – they sell similar goods and services to a similar target audience.
• SEO – competitors who bid on the same keywords as you and increase competition for the same organic traffic. 

C

Crawler – The program(s) a search engine uses to crawl the web. AKA: Bot, Spider.

D

Domain – Your website’s name. It follows the ‘www.’ in the URL, and also what follows the @ symbol in an email address. For example, in ‘www.Domain.com’ the ‘Domain.com’ is the actual domain name.

G

Google – The most popular search engine. Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in September 1998. Google created a revolution in search — moving away from human-edited web directories and toward web crawling technology using an algorithm(s) to analyze and rank websites.

H

Heading – Also called H tags, they range from H1-H6. These tags designate sections of your content from the most important (H1) to the least (H6.) Heading tags, especially the H1, should always incorporate your target keywords.

Headline – An H1 tag. The most important of your headings, and should always include your keyword(s.)

Head Term – A keyword with high search volume (e.g. “email” with 1.2 million). Since head terms are popular search terms, it’s harder to rank for them. AKA: Head Keyword, Short-tail.

K

Keyword – The word or phrase you’re focusing on in your content. Keyword selection should be influenced by the terms your target audience is using in their online searches. Including keywords in your content helps search engines know what pages to surface in search results.

Keyword Research – A process of discovery. It helps you understand what keywords your audience uses in their searches and provides insight into the topics and themes most relevant to them. You also determine the keyword volume (frequency in search) and what competition exists for the term. All of this helps you determine the best keyword(s) to focus your efforts on.

Keyword Stuffing – Spam (Black hat SEO) tactic. It’s the practice of using a keyword too many times or using irrelevant keywords, in forced and unnatural ways. By doing this, spammers hope to rank higher in search results. It could result in page demotion or removal from search page rankings.

Knowledge Graph – Google’s database of knowledge. Contains data about keywords and search intent which is used to improve search results and surface relevant or related results. Displayed in a Knowledge Panel, or carousel, at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP.)

Knowledge Panel – A specific section of results in the SERP. Appears as a box at the top of the first page of Google’s search results (or right side of the page on desktop.)

L

Link – A connection between two sites or web pages that are created with HTML code. They’re integral to how sites and pages are graded by search engines and pivotal to site navigation.

Long-Tail Keyword – Multiple-word search terms. Usually highly specific. People who use long-tail keywords are known to display greater purchase intent. These keywords are less popular and it is normally easier to rank for them. E.g. “Email marketing” with 18k in search volume instead of “Email” with 1.2m in search volume.

M

Manual Action – The term Google uses to describe a penalty. This happens after a human reviewer manually reviews a site to verify whether or not it complies with Google’s Webmaster guidelines. If not, pages or sites can be demoted or entirely removed from search results.

Meta Description – The short blurb that describes what a search result is about that appears below the title and link on the SERP. It’s a tag added to the head section of an HTML document, it succinctly illustrates what the content on a webpage or site is all about. The more accurate and engaging your meta description, the better your Click Through Rate (CTR) will be. Include keywords.

O

Off-page SEO – SEO boosting activities and tactics that do not occur on your website. E.g. — brand awareness campaigns, social media marketing, offline marketing, and link building all help improve SEO without occurring on your actual website.

On-page SEO – The SEO boosting activities that occur on your website. This can include optimizing the HTML code across your site (heading tag, H tags, meta descriptions, etc.), publishing good content that targets the right audience and keyword(s), intuitive site navigation, and more.

Organic Search – AKA unpaid or natural search results. Organic search results are ranked and displayed in order of most helpful and relevant. The ranking is done in accord with search engine-specific algorithms. You do not and cannot pay for organic search result placement.

Outbound Link – Links that direct away from the domain they’re found on, these links direct visitors to other (3rd party) websites.

P

Pagerank – This algorithm measures the importance of a page based on not just the volume of links leading to it, but also the quality of those links. Google says, “Not all links are equal.”

Page Speed – How much time elapses before a webpage completely loads. This factor affects your search results ranking.

Paid Search – Search results whose position is paid for. These pay-per-click ads are marked “Ads” in Google search results and are placed above and sometimes below organic search results.

R

Rank – The placement of a specific webpage in organic search results concerning a specific query.

Ranking Factor – Ranking factors are the various things deemed important (or not) that all influence search engines’ respective algorithms. They help search engines understand where to place a webpage in search results. You can directly influence many ranking factors on your webpages and site.

S

Search Engine – Computer programs that index websites, webpages, and countless documents and files on the Internet. They make it possible for users to input queries and receive results from the search engine’s index. They’re created and updated over time using crawlers and the information and data therein are analyzed by algorithms.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – The practice of optimizing a site and all of its content so that it’s highly visible and gets good placement in organic search results. Good SEO involves keyword research, understanding your audience, creating good and relevant content, and good website structure, navigation, and loading speed. A great SEO strategy addresses content and marketing, and technical elements, too.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – This page is full of the results provided by search engines after an online search is conducted. Results are sorted in order of relevance and helpfulness. SERPs normally include a list of no more than 10 links, but they can include other sections like:

• Ads
• Images
• Knowledge Panels
• Local Pack
• Shopping Results
• And more.

U

Uniform Resource Locator (URL) – This is the string of numbers and symbols located in the address bar at the top of your web browser, which includes all of the information your computer needs to find the right page, image, or document on a website. For example, “https://www.domain.com” is the URL for Domain.com.

Put these SEO terms to good use

It’s time now to build an SEO strategy that’ll help increase the visibility of your website and drive more traffic to it. As you do so, keep this glossary of SEO terms handy for use as a quick reference.

You don’t have to do it alone though. We’ve got the resources and tools you help you create that amazing SEO strategy of yours. 

SEO Resources

Check out these blog posts for more information, advice, and next steps:

A Guide to SEO Basics for Beginners

Achieving online success — whether that be launching a lucrative eCommerce business or hitting a milestone of 10k blog subscribers — is directly influenced by SEO. You can’t build a successful strategy on a shaky foundation, so start with this post if you’re new to search engine optimization. 

The Complete SEO Checklist for Blog Posts and Webpages

This helpful infographic lays out the 10 things you must have to achieve SEO perfection on your blog posts or webpages. Hang on to this one, you’ll come back to it as you create content for your site. 

For the Love of Your Business — SEO Strategies to Implement Now

When we wrote this post, we did so with your website’s best interests at heart. We consulted Mike, our resident SEO expert, and asked him for 10 elements that together, create an effective SEO strategy. Show your site how much you care about it by implementing the tactics covered here. 

SEO Audit Your Website in 2021 [Technical Guide]

Ready to level up your SEO game? This guide lays out your path. What does a website audit entail? What tools are available to you to conduct and track the audit? What should your goals be? We get into the minutiae in this post, but don’t let that deter you. Read this post, take action, and outperform your competitor in the SERPs.

How to Audit Your Online Presence in 2021

Not all SEO-boosting activities occur on your website (reference glossary above: Off-page SEO.) Not as technical as the previously mentioned resource, but just as thorough and equally as important. First, get your house in order with on-page SEO, and then, grow your off-site reputation with the strategies you learn about in this post. 

Keep this SEO Terms Glossary handy

Download this Glossary of SEO Terms to always have on-hand when you need it. 

Relevant, insightful, and well-crafted audio content delivered in a friendly yet authoritative voice can be an easy, intimate, and powerful way of connecting with different segments of the audience, educating them about your business and its products, generating brand awareness and love, strengthening your identity and eventually boosting your sales. 

If the numbers stated above don’t make a convincing enough case for the humble podcast as a worthy addition to your content marketing mix, the six compelling reasons mentioned in this article surely will.

However, before you get into making the most of your newfound passion, you must address the first step — building an identity for your podcast. This starts with registering a domain name. 

Instead of going the traditional route, consider getting a little creative and giving your podcast a meaningful and contextual online identity.

For example, if your podcast is more tech-oriented, you could register a domain name on .tech. If you’re talking about small business marketing or subjects like SEO and customer management, you could opt for .online or .site. If you’re speaking to creative professionals, or have something to do with housing, design, or outer space, you could opt for .space.

New domain extensions such as these add more character and flavor to your online identity and make you stand out. This ensures that your listener is impressed with you right from the beginning.

6 Ways Podcasts Supercharge Your Marketing

1. Easy and Inexpensive to Produce

It costs money to produce well-researched, high-quality, professional-looking content. But when it comes to podcasts, your production costs are far less than those for other forms, especially videos. 

You don’t need to hire a professional cameraperson or editor to create a podcast. A basic headset with a mic is all you need to get good audio quality. Podcast editing software such as Alitu and Audacity are fairly simple to use and there are enough tutorials on YouTube to help you get started (Audacity is also completely free).

If you are a good writer, you can write your own podcast script, one that channels your thoughts in your own voice and thus is more authentic. However, if you don’t trust your writing skills, hiring a freelance content writer from a platform such as Fiverr is also an option.

2. Stand Apart from the Competition

Content marketing is highly competitive. Almost every brand has a blog, a YouTube channel, and an active social media presence. Compared to these, podcasts are still relatively untapped, yet they have a fast-growing listener base. The number of podcast listeners globally has increased by 42% during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Moreover, research has shown that podcast listeners are dedicated to the podcasts they love. According to this 2019 report by Edison Research on Podcast Consumers, 52% of monthly listeners will listen to an entire episode. And, even though it is easy to listen to podcasts while doing something else, 70% of the listeners claim that, at least sometimes, they listen to podcasts while doing nothing else. 

This is your chance to stand apart from the competition, create simple, meaningful content, and connect with a niche audience that sees the true value of what you have to offer and has great potential to become loyal to your brand. 

3. Establish Your Authority

People nowadays look toward brands as more than just transactional entities. They gravitate towards companies that are experts in what they do, whose products and services are guided by knowledge and experience, who aren’t just in the business of selling but of truly understanding and satisfying their needs. 

This evolution of the customer-business relationship forms the crux of content marketing, and with podcasts you have an edge over other formats. As revealed in the 2019 Podcast Consumer study mentioned above, 74% of listeners say that they listen to podcasts to learn new things, while 71% do so for entertainment. By tapping into this medium, you can establish your brand’s authority not just as a business but as an industry expert and an authentic source of knowledge and entertainment. 

4. Better Engagement

Unlike videos and articles that require people to focus their sight and thoughts on a screen, podcasts can be consumed anywhere, anytime, and in conjunction with other activities. People can listen to them while driving, doing household chores, exercising, or just before bed. 

But ease of consumption isn’t the only way in which podcasts offer better engagement. This is a chance for you to also engage more personally with your audience. Through your voice, you are able to infuse your personality in your content, while a conversational tone makes your matter more relatable. It’s like a person is having a real conversation with you rather than reading an email from you. 

In fact, you should consider including real conversations in your podcasts to encourage audience participation. You can do this by incorporating live chats and Q&As, reading comments and feedback shared with you in real-time, and giving shout outs to people who are tuned in. All of this makes for a wholesome interaction that is missing from other forms of content.

5. Connect with New Audiences

Your podcasts can cover a range of topics all directly related to your business industry — such as trends, product reviews or tutorials, or other general interest topics. For instance, a bike company can have a fitness or travel podcast, while a travel company can have a nature or photography podcast. 

As the owner of a company, you can even leverage your personal brand to gain more customers for your business. For instance, let’s say that you’re an avid surfer who runs a sports equipment company. Talking about your passion for surfing on your podcast and sharing your expert tips and exciting experiences is all sure to help you attract fellow surfers. By identifying topics that interest different segments of your target market, you can reach new audiences and build brand affinity with them. 

If you’re collaborating with another brand on your podcast or inviting people to co-host or interview, you are also opening up immense opportunities for cross-promotion and tapping into yet another consumer base. All you have to do is make sure that all parties involved are actively sharing and promoting your podcast on their platforms.

6. Build Deeper Connections

When you’re talking to your audience through your podcasts, you are quite literally telling your brand’s story in your own words and in your own voice. The very nature of the medium makes it one of the most authentic, personal, and heartfelt forms of communication. It helps people see your brand in a more personable light.

Writing about your brand’s journey, the passions that led to it, the struggles you faced, and the successes you celebrated are good enough, but nothing beats the sentiments that a human’s voice can evoke. It helps people relate better, feel empathy, get inspired, and form a deeper connection with your business; and these are the kind of connections that transform into long-lasting relationships based on friendship and loyalty. 

Get Started with Podcast Marketing

Now that you are well aware of how a podcast can boost your marketing, it’s time to hone your speaking skills and put your voice out there! 

Ensure that you have the right recording equipment that does justice to your content and voice. Find a recording space that permits minimum disturbance. Look for the right music to complement your podcast’s theme and mood. If you’re looking for co-hosts or guests, try to find people who would appeal to your target demographic or whose demographic you’d like to connect with. 

Make sure you put out at least a few (typically three) episodes to start with, so that people who are curious to engage with you more get a chance to do so. This increases their likelihood of becoming your subscribers and potentially becoming your customers and brand ambassadors. You can experiment with different formats and episode lengths to see which ones work best for you. 

Remember that the key is to deliver great content consistently to entice people into coming back for more. 

Author Bio

Alisha is a Senior Content Marketing & Communication Specialist at Radix, the registry behind some of the most successful new domain extensions, including .STORE and .TECH. You can connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

There are millions of published blogs — over 570 million, and that number keeps growing. And nowadays, it’s easy to start a blog with no technical knowledge. 

If you have a passion for beauty, skincare, and appearance, then creating a beauty blog is a great outlet for you. With a blog, you can share your passion with the world, earn income, and potentially make a name for yourself in the industry. 

The beauty business is booming and is anticipated to grow annually at 5.1%. The sooner you get started and make your mark, the better your chances of establishing yourself as an essential part of the industry. 

Today, we’re talking about how to create a beauty blog. From planning, creating, branding, building, marketing, and best practices — we’ve got you covered. 

Keep reading to learn how to start a beauty blog step-by-step. 

Start a Beauty Blog

Beauty blogs are popular and there are quite a few out there you can look to for inspiration before starting your own. 

Why do people start beauty blogs? There are many reasons, but here are some of the common ones:

• Connect with a wide audience of other beauty aficionados.
• Provide tutorials on how to achieve the perfect look.
• Build a brand.
• Become an authority in the beauty industry.
• Earn an income doing something you love.
• Inspire confidence in others.
• Access to exclusive or limited edition merchandise and samples.

What is your motivation to start a blog? Your reasons and motivations will help inform the type of blog you ultimately create and the audience you target. 

How to Create a Beauty Blog

You wouldn’t build a house without a framework, and the same thing is true for your blog. Now that you’ve had some time to think about your motivations and reasons for starting a blog, it’s time to plan. 

There’s no right way to plan your blog — some prefer good ol’ pencil and paper and others prefer to keep their plans online. If you choose the latter, consider using a tool like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Both offer the ability to create, edit, and track documents from wherever you have an internet connection. Your plans are your blog’s roadmap, so you’ll want to keep a record of them to refer back to and make adjustments as your blog grows. 

What kind of planning is needed to start your beauty blog? Let’s look at what it takes. 

Decide on Your Audience and Niche

We see a lot of first-time bloggers fall into the trap of thinking that they’ll make waves and draw lots of visitors by creating a broadly generic blog that “appeals to everyone.”

But here’s the thing… nothing appeals to everyone. 

If you want to establish a well-known and trusted beauty blog, start small and identify your niche. Doing this allows you to define your target market and create content for your blog that resonates with your readers.

Let’s work on defining your niche. Your niche is “the industry or genre that you specialize in and the types of products or services you offer.” 

Beauty is a great place to start, but it isn’t your final niche. Think of beauty as a large, overarching category comprised of many subgroups. 

Are you an expert on eye makeup? Is your take on beauty inspired by your culture or how you identify?

Representation is important, so for example, your blog could focus on “Indian beauty” or “Trans beauty.” Even those niches could be further refined. Perhaps your beauty blog isn’t about everyday looks and instead focuses on extreme makeup tutorials. The more you narrow your niche, the more your blog will benefit. 

What Are Your Goals?

What do you hope to accomplish with your beauty blog? Take some time to think about your goals and how your blog can support them. 

Want to make revenue? That means you’ll need a hosting plan that offers eCommerce functionality. Just hoping to make connections in the biz? A more basic hosting plan could do the trick. 

At this point, it’s okay to keep your goals high-level. However, as you work on your blog you’ll want to create smaller S.M.A.R.T. goals to keep you on track. 

Building Your Beauty Blog

So, are you ready to turn this blog idea into a reality? 

To create a tangible blog you need two core things:

1. A Domain Name.
2. Blog Hosting and Building. 

Domain Names for Your Beauty Blog

Ever heard the saying, “The first impression is the last impression?” Your domain name is the first impression someone will have of your blog, well before they ever land on one of your posts or makeup guides. 

Now, we’re going to hazard a guess and say that, as a beauty aficionado, you understand a thing or two about appearances and impressions. Don’t you want your first one to be good?

With that said, let’s explore some domain name options. 

You really have two choices when it comes to a domain name for your beauty blog:

1. Purchase and own your domain name. 
   1. Example: yourblog.com or beauty.blog
2. Use a free subdomain that belongs to a larger business. 
   1. Example: yourblog.othercompanyname.com

Of those two options, which do you think is the better choice for making a good impression? The one that emphasizes your blog and your brand — or the one that advertises for another company in the domain name? 

Obviously, we think the first option is the better choice for anyone looking to establish themselves as an authority in the beauty blogging sphere. 

When you register your domain name, you’re its sole owner for the duration of your registration period. Domain name registrars offer multiple-year registration lengths, and good domain registrars offer a way to auto-renew so you never lose your domain name. 

Getting a free domain name sounds too good to be true… because it is. 

If you run a quick online search for “free blogging platforms” you’ll see a plethora of results. These services are great for the casual blogger who doesn’t intend on growing their blog into their own business or brand. When you create an account with one of these services they offer a free domain name, but be aware that what they’re giving you is really a subdomain. It’ll look something like this: yourblog.bloggingservice.com. 

Why is that an issue? Well, if you want to move your blog to another service, you don’t get to take that domain name with you. That means you’ll have to start from square one all over again. 

And what if you want to monetize your blog by running ads? Most free blogging platforms don’t give you an option to do that or they might give you a small percentage of the profits from the ads that they run on your blog. Doesn’t sound like a fair deal to us. 

Tips to Choose a Domain Name

When it comes to choosing a domain name, you can get as creative with it as you can with your makeup. 

While it’s true that .com is the most popular domain name, it’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the wide array of available domains. It’s also notoriously difficult to get the .com you want because it’s been around so long that many highly desirable .coms have already been registered. 

So what are these other domains you should consider? For starters, there’s .blog. That one seems pretty straightforward. Is your blog going to focus on tutorials and makeup guides? There’s .academy, .camp, .expert, .guru, and .info, and we’re only just beginning. 

No matter what domain name you choose, keep the following things in mind:

• Make it memorable. 
  • Keep it short and don’t get unique with your spelling. 
• Think about keywords.
  • Your readers will likely find your blog via an online search. Help those search engines know you exist by targeting the keywords your desired audience would use.
• Pass the radio test. 
  • If someone were to hear your domain name on the radio and never see it written down, could they make it to your blog? Keep the hyphens and irrelevant numbers out of your domain name. 

Your blog is an investment in your future. While searching for the perfect domain name, you might come across some domains that are more expensive than others. Those domains are probably premium domain names. Premium domain names have already been registered, but whoever owns them has made them available for purchase.

Premium domain names are often short, memorable, and keyword-rich, and are perfect for brand-building. While they may cost more upfront, they’ll renew at regular rates, just like the average domain name, and they’ll only grow in value. 

Once you’ve selected your domain name go ahead and register it. There’s no “holding” or “dibs” on domain names — what’s available today may not be available tomorrow. 

Blog Hosting and Building Options

You can build and host your blog without any technical knowledge, we promise! If you want to build your blog by coding it, that’s an option, too. 

WordPress

WordPress is an immensely popular choice for building websites and blogs. It’s a free open-source software that can be used and edited to build your site, and it powers 39.5% of all websites. 

Depending on your skill level and technical know-how, you can either work directly with the WordPress code to build your site, or you can customize a WordPress theme. WordPress offers a great deal of flexibility and customization options, so even if you use a popular theme, your blog can differentiate itself from the rest. 

At Domain.com, we offer a few different WordPress hosting plans for your beauty blog. 

WP Live

If you’d like in-depth guidance and one-on-one support while working on your WordPress blog, our WP Live plans are the perfect fit. With WP Live, you get unbeatable WordPress help from experts who customize sessions based on your needs. Live screenshares and step-by-step walkthroughs make it easy to follow along and solve issues fast.

And we don’t stop with set-up assistance. When you use WP Live, you’ll receive the following features:

WordPress Hosting Plans

Want to use WordPress but don’t need as much assistance as our WP Live plan offers? We’ve got you covered. 

Domain.com offers two WordPress hosting plans: WP Starter and WP Essential, both of which offer unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, a customized control panel, and a plethora of pre-installed themes and plugins. 

Our hand-picked selection of popular WordPress themes are sure to start your blog off right. With a multitude of customizable options, you can edit these themes to build a beauty blog that reflects your brand. And to optimize your initial setup, we automatically install and configure your WordPress website with some of the most helpful and widely-used plugins.

WebsiteBuilder

Getting your beauty blog online has never been easier. With Domain.com’s WebsiteBuilder, you can build your blog in minutes. 

How does it work? 

No time to waste wading through hundreds of templates? WebsiteBuilder has you taken care of. Our intelligent technology starts your blog design for you. Answer a few quick questions and our AI-powered builder will select the right layout, including images and initial content, for your site.

There’s no need to fret with code when you use WebsiteBuilder. Its mobile-responsive templates offer built-in design protection to help ensure your blog’s look stays consistent and professional across desktop and mobile devices. 

Did we mention that it’s just fun to use? Our drag-and-drop functionality and image library (over 550,000 images for you to freely use!) make editing enjoyable. Or you can also upload your own images and logos to make your site completely personalized. We’re pretty serious about security though, which is why every WebsiteBuilder plan includes an SSL certificate to ensure your data stays safe. 

And if you want to grow your beauty blog into an eCommerce site where you can sell your own makeup line (dream big, amirite?), WebsiteBuilder is there for you, offering everything you need to scale your online business. 

Beauty Blog Content and Marketing

Once you’ve built your beauty blog, it’ll need some content. 

Content is what engages your audience and keeps them on-site and interacting with you. As a beauty blogger, your content opportunities are as endless as your creativity. 

It’s a best practice to create a content calendar, somewhere you can track all created and upcoming content to help you stick to a schedule. When you post consistently, your readers take note and will come back to your blog time and time again. Search engines are also fond of a regular content cadence or content updates. 

Consider using cloud-based software, like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, to create and maintain your content calendar. This way, you’ll have access to view and edit it wherever you are and can share it with others if need be. 

Beauty Content Ideas

What type of content should you create? 

Blog posts are essential to success, but don’t stop there. Multimedia content is your best friend in such a visually-driven niche. Videos, infographics, GIFs, tutorials, and guides all appeal to your audience. 

Here are some suggestions to spur your imagination:

• Product Hauls
  • What are you shopping for? Share your latest finds with your audience and give them all the deets — where’d you get it? Why? What does it do?
  • There are many ways to frame your haul, from seasonal hauls to specific-look hauls, your options are endless. 
• “Get the Look”
  • “Get the Look” type makeup tutorials are immensely popular! How many times have you seen a celebrity or influencer and thought, “I wish I could do my makeup like that,” or “I wonder how they get such clear skin”? If you haven’t, your audience certainly has!
  • Not sure what looks to cover? Engage your audience by asking them and give the people what they want. 
• Product Reviews
  • Pretty self-explanatory. Buy a product, use it, and review it. 
  • Be helpful above all else. Sure, you can take two seconds to tell someone you did or didn’t like a product, but how does that help them? Tell them the why behind it. Did it make your skin super oily? Did it cause a breakout? Hard to blend? As you provide more information, your audience can make more informed decisions about what they purchase, and they’ll thank you for not wasting their time or money. 
• “Empties”
  • Okay, so why on earth would you want to share empty and used-up products with your followers? Because there’s no better testament to how much you loved that product! 
• Recurring features
  • Monthly favorites
  • Weekly steals
  • Recurring features lead to recurring visitors, so give them something to expect and look forward to on a regular basis.

Content Marketing

There’s one thing to always keep in mind when marketing your beauty blog: You are your biggest champion. 

Want people to share your posts and tutorials? Ask them. Need subscribers? Ask them.

Your beauty blog is only part of your brand. We recommend supporting it with social media accounts where you can share your content, connect with like-minded individuals, and grow a larger audience. You don’t need to have a social media presence on every platform, but make sure you’re present in the channels that your audience uses. Instagram immediately comes to mind as a great option since it’s such a visually-forward platform. 

Pro tip: Your social media handles should match your domain name for branding consistency. 

Email marketing is another great way to keep your audience engaged. Include an email sign-up form on your blog so that you can share new blog posts or recently-published content with your subscribers. 

And last, but certainly not least, focus on your SEO!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s essential if you want to be found via online search engines. Now, it may sound counterintuitive, but SEO isn’t about optimizing search engines. Instead, it’s about optimizing your site so that it performs well in search results. We put together an SEO cheat sheet so you can create perfectly optimized posts, check it out here. 

Monetize Your Beauty Blog

You’re putting a tremendous amount of thought and hard work into starting a beauty blog — why not make some money from it?

Remember, this isn’t usually possible when using large, “free” blogging services. If you’re hosting your blog and own your domain name, it’ll be a lot easier to monetize your blog.

To start, consider including ads on your blog. You can do this either by working directly with advertisers or by creating an account with Google AdSense. 

If you choose the former and want to work directly with advertisers, then make it easy for them to contact you. Create an Ads Page on your blog that details important information for advertisers like your site traffic, views, and demographics, and mention what ad spots you have available. Don’t forget to include your contact information. You can then share this page with your desired advertisers while pitching your blog. 

Start Your Beauty Blog Today

Ready to create your beauty blog? We’re excited to see it.

Once you’ve created your blog, drop a link to it in the comments below. We’d love to hear about your process and learn more about your experience. Don’t hesitate to share any tips or tricks you learned along the way, too. 

If you’ve found this post because you’re thinking about starting a fashion blog, we’re betting that you know a thing or two about the art of dressing. Want to share your style and expertise with the world? We support you, and we’re here to help.

Follow along with us as we discuss what it takes to create your fashion blog. We’re starting with how to identify your ideal audience and niche, we’ll talk about branding and owning your content, different website and hosting options for your blog, and dive into marketing and monetization.

Starting a Fashion Blog

We hear a lot of people say that starting a blog or site is intimidating. “I don’t have the technical know-how,” and “I don’t have the time to devote to building a blog,” are two common refrains.

Well, folks, we’re delighted to break it to you: Your blog can be up and running in half an hour. The tricky part is learning how to grow, market, and monetize your blog so that you see a return on your efforts. And we’ll address that, too.

We’re confident that you can launch a successful fashion blog and stand out among the 600 million blogs published online. Use the following tips to craft an exceptional blog.

• Identify your niche
• Choose the perfect domain name
• Select your hosting provider
• Decide what to include in your blog
• Create your content and content schedule
• Market your blog
• Monetize your blog

Identify Your Niche

Fashion is a broad term that means different things to many people. Someone who’s into a post-punk look might not find a preppy style fashionable and vice versa.

The more you’re able to narrow down your niche, the better your chances are of connecting with the right audience. 

Think of fashion as an umbrella term. Where do you fit in? Are you an expert in grunge? Maybe haute couture? Once you’ve condensed your aesthetic to its core style, look at other blogs similar to what you want to create. 

How is your sense of style different from those bloggers — what makes you stand out? That’s your unique twist and something you can capitalize on to differentiate yourself from your competitors.  

Search engines, especially Google, want to serve people with the best and most helpful result for their inquiries. So, if you’re a cottagecore enthusiast, use that term to describe yourself and your blog. As tempting as it may be to say you have a “country and farm-inspired style” to cast a wider net and get more visitors, it’s a tactic that will end up backfiring when those visitors bounce from your site. And search engines will take note of that, deeming your blog less helpful than others and potentially lowering your position in search results.   

Once you’ve distilled your fashion sense into your core style and identified your unique interpretation you can create targeted content and messaging that appeals to the right audience.

“Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.”

Francis Bacon

Choose the Perfect Domain Name

You’re into fashion, so you know presentation matters.

Think of domain names as a representation of your brand. It’s the first impression someone will have of your blog, before the page loads and they see your stylings. What do you want that impression to be?

If you want to be seen as legitimate, own your domain name. 

Owning your domain name gives you credibility and helps you brand yourself. There are plenty of sites that offer free domain names when you host a blog on their service, but spoiler alert: When your domain name starts with the name of another company, it’s not really yours. 

Your domain name is a brand asset, why use it to advertise for someone else?

The best thing you can do for your blog is to plan for its growth, and your domain name is a small investment in a big future.

Here’s how to choose the perfect domain name for your fashion blog:

• K.I.S.S. – Keep it short & simple.
  • Your fashion might be memorable, but long and convoluted domain names aren’t.
• Avoid unique spelling, hyphens, and excessive numbers.
  • Your domain name should pass the “radio test.” If someone were to hear your domain name on the radio and never see it written down, could they find your blog?
• Be descriptive.
  • Your domain name speaks to your blog and what type of content people will find there. A relevant, descriptive domain name can capture your desired audience’s attention.
• Get creative.
  • Have you heard that .com is the king of domains? It’s an incredibly popular domain extension and likely the one you’re most familiar with. But familiarity doesn’t necessarily equate to “best fit.” If you’re dead set on acquiring a .com domain name, be prepared to invest in it as it may already be registered to someone else.
  • There are thousands of domain names that you can choose from that are relevant to your blog. Some to consider are .blog, .fashion, .style, .clothing, .art, .shop, and .online. You can find hundreds more here.

Select Your Hosting Provider

Once you’ve registered your domain name it’s time to find the right hosting provider for your fashion blog.

With a variety of hosting options available, it can be hard to determine what works best for you. Should you get a free domain and hosting from a blogging service? Do you purchase your own hosting? Here’s what we think of the former option: 

Pros:

• Free.               

Cons:

• The domain isn’t yours, you have a subdomain that belongs to the service.
• Can’t control ads shown on your blog.         
• No customization beyond a selection of templates.
• Difficult if not impossible to monetize.

If you’re hoping to monetize your blog and potentially earn a living from it, find a hosting provider and self-host your blog. Many blogging platforms won’t allow you to put ads on your blog; instead, they run ads on your blog and you don’t see a dime of that money. 

Do you really want your hard work lining someone else’s pockets, just to save a few dollars upfront? Let’s look at some self-hosted options.

WordPress Hosting

WordPress hosts about 60 million blogs and is an authority in the blogging sphere, so, naturally, you’d be interested in learning more about it.  

At its core, WordPress is a platform for creating and managing all kinds of websites and blogs. They’re known for providing free, open-source software that can be installed on any hosting platform and entirely customized to suit your needs. It’s a great solution for people of all skill levels because you can either build your blog working directly with the code or by customizing an existing WordPress theme.

Here at Domain.com, we offer two WordPress hosting plans to help get your blog up and running quickly. 

These hosting plans are designed to make blogging easy and come with pre-installed plugins for optimal functionality, curated selections of mobile-friendly themes, and a customized, user-friendly control panel.

And right now, you can even get a free domain name for one year with the purchase of a WordPress hosting plan. For more details and a coupon code, check out our WordPress hosting plans here.

Website Builders

Blog creation doesn’t have to include the whole blood, sweat, and tears thing, so let’s finally do away with this pervasive myth that building a site is difficult.

If you’re short on time or don’t consider yourself technically savvy, website builders are the perfect solution as they’re engineered to be intuitive and user-friendly. You don’t have to worry about code when your builder offers a plethora of customizable features and drag ‘n’ drop functionality.

Whether you plan on creating a simple blog or want to include a store so people can shop your styles, we’ve got you covered. 

Domain.com offers three WebsiteBuilder plans to suit your specific needs.

Begin by answering a few questions about your blog and our AI-powered builder will start your site, including initial images and content, and then customize it to make it truly yours. And don’t worry, our built-in design protection makes sure that your blog always looks professional across different devices.

“Fashion is part of the daily air and it changes all the time, with all the events. You can even see the approaching of a revolution in clothes. You can see and feel everything in clothes.”

Diana Vreeland

What Pages to Include in Your Fashion Blog 

After settling on your blog’s domain name and where to host it, it’s time to build your fashion blog. As with any project, it’s best to go in with a plan, so let’s discuss the different pages and elements your blog should have.

About Page

Every good blog includes an about page. No need to be bashful, this is where you get to tell your readers all about yourself to build credibility and relationships.

Use this page to tell people about what inspired your style, how you got into fashion, share your values, and let them get to know the person behind the screen. If you want to set expectations about what people will find on your blog, do it here. 

Contact Page

Dreaming about becoming the desired influencer that brands and fashion houses want to work with? Make it easy for them to contact you by including a form that can quickly be filled out. If you choose, you can also include your email address and other contact information. 

Homepage

When people find your blog through search results, they’re likely landing deep in your blog on a post page. But that doesn’t mean you can neglect your homepage. Your homepage should make clear what your blog is all about and support your branding. If you’d like, include some links to your most popular posts on this page.   

404 Page

No one enjoys clicking links only to land on broken pages, but instead of losing your readers when that happens, turn it into an opportunity. By creating a custom 404 page, you can educate your customers on what to do or include a selection of popular posts to keep them engaged and on-site. 

Gallery

If you’re going to start a fashion blog, you need somewhere to showcase your looks. In addition to including your stylings in blog posts, consider creating a gallery where people can quickly find and view your aesthetic. 

Privacy Page

This page exists to inform people about the data you or 3^rd parties may collect on your site and how it’s used. There are many free privacy policy page generators online, or you can take a look at privacy pages on other well-established blogs and use them as a guideline. 

eCommerce Shop Page

Want your readers to shop your looks? You can send them to external retailers or keep them on-site by creating an online store. (It’s easier than you might think if you use a website builder and dropshipping model.) This leads us to the next must-have page…

Terms of Service

If you sell goods or services on your blog you’ll need to include a Terms of Service page. Just as with privacy pages, you can find templates to help you craft your Terms of Service. Keep in mind that this is a legal document, so you may want to seek professional legal help in drafting this page. 

Content Pages

Your content pages are the heart and soul of your fashion blog. Here is where you get to share your two cents with the rest of the world, exemplify the ins-and-outs of your aesthetic, and really build relationships with your audience. 

Creating Content and a Content Schedule for Your Blog

It’s time to write another blog post… about what?

Searching for blog topics every time you need to create a post is exhausting — you can spend hours perusing competing blogs or scouring through your blog to find topics to expand upon. 

Add that to the other hats you wear as a blogger: editor, SEO researcher, social media manager, graphic designer, and marketer, and you’re likely to become overwhelmed before the first word hits the page.

The biggest favor you can do for yourself is to sit down and create a content calendar before starting to write any posts.

For a basic calendar, all you’ll need is a list of blog topics and the dates you intend on publishing them. However, we recommend including additional information such as targeted keywords so that you have the information at hand when you’re ready to write.

To make your posts as SEO-friendly as possible, check out our complete guide to blog post SEO below.

Consider including other types of content in addition to blog posts. You can create online quizzes to help your readers determine their personal style, or design infographics explaining how to put together the perfect outfit. Many free online tools can help like Canva. 

“I firmly believe that with the right footwear one can rule the world.”

Bette Midler

Marketing Your Fashion Blog

What good is a blog without readers?

Marketing and promoting your blog is essential to growing your audience. Here’s what you can do to increase awareness and readership of your blog:

• Include links to your blog in your social media profiles.
• Share blog posts on your social channels.
  • Don’t share it just once and expect big results. Test sharing posts at different times of the day and different days of the week to see when your followers are most engaged with your content.
• Make blog posts easy for your readers to share by including social share buttons.
• Perform a technical SEO audit
  • Odds are good that most of your readers will find you via an online search. Make sure your website is SEO optimized to give yourself a better chance at ranking high in search results.
• Create an email newsletter.
  • Keep people coming back to your site by notifying them when new posts go live.

Monetizing Your Blog

Including ads on your blog posts is a great way to earn money from your blog. You can do this by working directly with advertisers or by creating a Google AdSense account.

If you choose to work directly with advertisers, you’ll need an ads page that includes information about your blog (traffic, views, demographics) and that details what ad spots you have available. We advise including your contact information on this page so that advertisers can quickly get ahold of you. 

Ready to launch your fashion blog?

Blogging is a fun hobby with the potential to become so much more. With careful planning, you can grow your fashion blog into a business that helps support your dreams.

Once you’ve launched your blog make sure to share it in the comments below, we’d love to see what you create!

SEO Checklist for Blog Posts

Do your keyword research.

It may feel tedious, but this is a game-changer. Aim for keywords that match the intent and lingo of your reader. 

There are many free keyword search tools available to help you choose the most targeted ones for your audience. 

Be smart about keyword usage.

Keyword stuffing is a no-no. Instead, work your keywords into your headlines, image alt tags, & meta description. 

A blog post stuffed with keywords reads awkwardly and can drive away your readers. Search engines will take note and won’t reward that behavior or tactic. 

Use supporting keywords too.

Throw some secondary keywords in too, like synonyms for your targeted keyword. Search engines pick up on this.

Include internal links.

Give visitors a chance to engage with other pages on your site by linking to them. This also signals to Google that people like your content.

Pro tip: Make sure those links are set to open in new tabs.

…and external links too.

Throw in some links to helpful content from other sites too. Search engines & visitors alike appreciate the nod to additional info that’s relevant.

Build relationships with other bloggers by giving them a heads up that you’ve linked to their site. You never know, they may reciprocate the favor.  

Keep it conversational.

Technical jargon can be uninviting and dissuade visitors from staying. Keep your writing at an 8th-grade reading level and use an active voice.

Use a tool like the Flesh-Kincaid reading scale to grade your writing’s reading level and adjust accordingly. 

Don’tcrowdyourwords.

Proper formatting can make or break you. Make use of white space, plus your H & title tags. The more skimmable your post, the better.

Nail your title.

Make sure to include your keywords and keep it under 60 characters so it isn’t truncated in search results. 

Finesse the URL.

Your URL should include your keywords, but don’t fill it with conjunctions, adjectives, and articles. Separate your words with dashes.

Update your meta descriptions.

And make ’em good. These short blurbs are often what capture a visitor’s attention. And of course, don’t forget to include your keyword!

Want to start a blog?

At Domain.com, we understand that you’re busy. That’s why we developed our AI-powered WebsiteBuilder. It’s here to help you get online fast without sacrificing quality. 

Prefer WordPress? We’ve got you covered with a great selection of curated, mobile-friendly themes and pre-installed plugins for optimal functionality. 

Let us help you find the perfect domain name and launch your blog to share your great ideas with the world. 

Do you want to make the most out of your website — increase your conversion rate, improve your SEO, and have the most engaging content? Because to do so you’ll need to audit your site on a regular basis.

In this post, we’re covering ways you can perform a review of your site so you know what’s working and what needs improvement.

How to Perform a Website Audit

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

In order to successfully audit your site, you need to know three things:

1. What a website audit entails.
2. Who your ideal audience is.
3. What your goals are.

The first because, well, how can you perform an audit without knowing what it is? And the second because your site should be designed with your ideal audience in mind. Any improvements you make to your site based on your audit should make life easier for them, not harder. Finally, you need to have identified your website goals. The improvements you make to your site should support your goals (e.g. – increase conversions by 5% month over month.)

Many people and online resources will tell you that a website audit has everything to do with SEO. While that is a large part of it, your site is more than just an SEO machine and we have to look at the bigger picture.

We appreciate BluLeadz’s definition of a website audit. They say that “a good website audit takes into account all the factors that can influence your website’s success: From your perspective, your customer’s, and Google’s.” Considering Google held 88.47 percent of the search engine market as of 2019, their perspective and opinion of your site is absolutely crucial to your success. Your customers’ perspective is essential, so part of your audit will revolve around reviewing the user experience of your website. And of course, your perspective is vital. Who knows your goals and motivations better than yourself? Now is the time to make sure your website is aligned to support them.

Website Review and Audit Tools

It’s difficult to determine where you should begin working on your site if you don’t have a solid understanding of how it’s currently performing. It’s best to first perform your audit and then plan your improvements based on the results.   

A good thing to do at the beginning of every website audit is use a tool built for that specific purpose. You can find both free and paid website audit tools by doing a quick Internet search. Many free tools require that you provide an email address in exchange for their services (it’s called lead generation), or you can pay for a tool to provide a more in-depth review of your site.  

Website Grader

HubSpot created a popular tool, Website Grader, that provides information on your site’s performance, mobile-friendliness, security, SEO, and more. Check out Domain.com’s grade below.

What isn’t pictured here is the plethora of information you’ll receive by starting your website audit with this beginner-friendly tool. You can use the insights from the audit to hone in on the areas where your site needs the most or immediate work. In fact, the last section, titled “What Should I Do Next?” lays it out for you.

Google’s Site Audit Tools

Google offers multiple tools to help you review and understand your website. Here are three of their resources that can best assist you with your audit.

PageSpeed Insights

The name, “PageSpeed Insights,” is pretty telling isn’t it? It’s a tool that “reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.”

Insights ranks your webpages using a numeric grade — 90+ is a fast page, 50-90 is middling, and anything below 50 is without a doubt a slow webpage.

Note that this tool only reviews the webpage URL that you supply, not your entire website at once. Depending on the size and complexity of your site, it may not be feasible to enter the unique URL for each and every one of your webpages.

Maximize the efficacy of this tool by identifying the most important pages on your site and reviewing those first. You can figure out what pages are most important and receive the most traffic by using heatmapping tools, or by utilizing the next Google tool in this list.

Google Analytics

Analytics provides an incredible amount of information and insight into your website. If you’ve never used it before, here’s a great beginner’s guide to Google Analytics to help you get started.

Now, some of you might be wondering why we’re focusing on this tool since it provides in-depth information on your site visitors’ behavior. But think about it: Your site visitors’ behavior, in large part, correlates to the quality and efficacy of your website and its content.

Have a slow loading site? You’re going to see some big bounce rates and small dwell times. People won’t hang around waiting for the page to load; instead, they’ll leave and find another faster loading website that suits their needs.

Google Analytics helps you identify your most popular and well-trafficked landing pages. These could be the pages that people are landing on from search results, other sites, etc. most often. Consider running these pages through the PageSpeed Insights tool to make them as good as can be before moving on to less trafficked pages.

Google Search Console

Once upon a time, Google Search Console was known as Google Webmaster Tools. We like the newer name, because it speaks to this tool’s purpose: to help you “…monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.”

If you have a website, you can benefit from Search Console. It’ll tell you things like:

• How often your site appears in Google search results.
• What terms and queries people search by that lead to your site in the results.
• Indicate any issues you may be experiencing with indexing.
• And more!

Google provides instruction on getting started with Search Console here. The information and insights you gather from this tool will be instrumental in improving your website’s SEO and overall success.

Questions to Ask During a Website Audit

Going into things blindly isn’t a great plan. This is especially true for your website audit.

Before spending a lot of time with the resources we mentioned in the last section, make sure you know what questions they’re supposed to be helping you answer.

Auditing Your Website for the User Experience

Your website’s user experience is integral to its success.

When you create a user-friendly website, you’re really inviting those users to stay longer, interact more, and hopefully, convert (that just means they take the action you want for them to take — purchase, sign up for email, etc.) on your site.

To audit your site for user experience, ask yourself the questions below. (Bonus: Many of the improvements you’ll end up making for user experience will directly improve your SEO!)

• Do I know my target audience?
• Are my CTAs (call-to-actions) and content geared toward my audience?
  • Good CTAs are effective. They are clear and deliberate in telling someone what action to take.
• Is my marketing funnel optimized for these users?
• Is my site’s load time too slow or experiencing any issues? (If so, it could mean the answer to the following question is “Yes.”)
• Are my site visitors bouncing?
  • Follow up by looking into their dwell time.  
• Is my site mobile responsive?
  • If your site doesn’t display well on mobile devices, you’re missing out. As of the end of 2019 mobile devices drove the most website traffic, coming in at 52.6%.
  • This is also important for SEO because Google uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.
• Does your site navigation make sense?
  • Once someone lands on your site, will they be able to easily find what they’re looking for and move around?
  • Here’s an (admittedly extreme) example of a site with terrible navigation.

• Is your website design up to par?
  • If your site looks like it walked straight out of the 90s then you’re in trouble.
• Do you have a lot of broken links?
  • It’s a bad look, and your visitors won’t think of your site as reliable.
• Is your contact information easy to find?
  • We recommend making it available on every page, even if at the footer.
• Do you have any intrusive pop-up ads or is your site cluttered in ads?
  • Use a browser in incognito or private mode to get a sense of the ad experience for your visitors. 

Audit Your Website for Technical Issues

A technical audit helps get down to the nuts and bolts of your website: Are the systems and technologies working, or are they not?

• Is my website secure?
  • SSL is integral to the security of the information exchanged on your site.
    • Without SSL, information passed from an end-user (site visitor) to unsecure sites (like during a purchase or email sign up) and vice versa isn’t encrypted. This means it can be intercepted by lots of bad actors out there on the Internet.
  • Secure websites are favored by Google in search results.
  • Browsers display whether a site is secure or not, and that can make all the difference in a visitor’s trust (remember, they’re your potential customers.)
    • Below are examples of sites with and without SSL.

• Is your personal information protected from the Internet’s prying eyes with Domain Privacy + Protection?
  • Keep your site safe from both hackers and human error.
• How does your site display across the most popular browsers?
  • Test your site across all the major browsers so there are no surprises or bad experiences for your visitors. Make any necessary changes to improve how your site renders on these browsers.
  • Don’t forget to test the mobile versions of these browsers!
• Are you using a CMS (content management system) like WordPress?
  • If yes, are you using the most up-to-date and secure version?
  • Audit any plugins to make sure they’re running the newest versions and don’t pose security issues. Remove any no longer needed or used.  
• Is your site backed up?
  • Before making any big changes to your site, you should create a backup. Wouldn’t it be terrible if something went wrong while making updates to your site? Without a backup created of your site, that can equal lots of heartache, time, and lost revenue. 

Audit Your Website for SEO.

An SEO audit helps you optimize your website so that it performs well and ranks higher in SERPs, search engine result pages.

• Do you have a sitemap created so that Google and other search engines can easily crawl and index your site?
• Is your robots.txt file accurate?
• Are all the pages on your site optimized according to the various SEO ranking factors?
  • Moz provides a run-down of different On-Page SEO ranking factors here.
• Are you using appropriate and relevant SEO keywords across your site and content?
• Do all your pages have title tags and meta descriptions?
  • Title tags and meta descriptions are HTML elements that appear in the header on a web page. When a page shows as a search result, its title tag and meta description normally display right along with it on the SERP (search engine results page.) This is important because it can influence whether someone clicks through to your site from the SERPs.
• Is your website accessible?
  • Do your images have alt text?
• Do you have any broken or misdirected links?
  • Domain.com’s resident SEO expert, Mike, thinks SEO Minion, a free 3^rd party SEO tool, is good for checking broken links. Please note, this is not a Domain.com product or resource.
• How many backlinks do you have?
  • Backlinks are links created when one website links to another. You may also hear them referred to as “inbound links.”
  • Are they quality backlinks?
  • Moz created Link Explorer, a free tool to help you identify your backlinks and provide other link metrics, but it does require that you sign up for a free Moz account.
  • SEOquake is another 3^rd party tool (free plugin) that offers great insights into your SEO.
• Is your URL structure optimized?
  • URL structure matters to both search engines and the people visiting your site.
  • Here’s Search Engine Journal’s guide to an SEO-friendly URL structure.

Wrapping up Your Website Audit

Auditing your website can seem overwhelming at first. If that’s the case, break it out into smaller sections and complete them one by one. It could take a few days or a few weeks, but either way, audits are necessary for the success of your site.

You should plan on auditing your website at least a couple of times each year. For more complex websites, consider auditing them more frequently.

Reviewing and auditing your site will give you a leg up with search engines, your customers, and your competitors.

Did you have any other tips or recommendations for auditing sites? Let us know in the comments!

A large part of that success consists in understanding the performance of your cumulative digital efforts. You have to take stock of everything you’ve done, and beyond that, your total digital presence.

You may think that means reviewing the actions and things you directly control online, like your website, your social media profiles, and your on-page SEO. And you’d be correct… to an extent.

Don’t forget that you can’t control the entirety of the conversation around your business on the Internet. If you want to audit your total online presence, look to the areas you can’t directly manage, too.

We’re going to discuss the various parts of a total online audit in this post, and we’ll point you in the direction of some tools that can help you accomplish the task. A comprehensive audit takes time, but is vital to your business’ online success, so if you can’t dedicate any time to an audit, consider hiring an expert who can help.

Performing a Complete Online Audit of Your Web Presence.

You should go into your audit with a plan, and you should be able to put one together using this guide. So let’s get to it.

We’ll be learning a lot about performing a web presence audit today, like:

• The issues it can help you uncover and solve.
• The items and areas to be reviewed in your audit.
• The insights you’ll gain into your online presence [Office1] and business post-audit.

Why You Should Perform a Total Online Presence Audit.

There seems to be this recurring trope in Hollywood — the one about someone who’s born lucky, or has some magical event befall them, and then everything they do works out in their favor. Do you know the one?

Somehow, that mentality has gotten into entrepreneurship. We hate to break it to you, but that happens in the movies and only in the movies.

If you’re an entrepreneur, business owner, blogger, or side-hustler, you’re going to have to make your own luck. And fair warning: It’s going to look a lot less like luck and a lot more like dedication and hard work. But the end result — success on your own merit, is so worth it.

The first step to success is understanding your business.  

Do you know who your ideal customer is? Can you describe your marketing funnel(s)? Wondering why some competitors perform better than you do for certain keywords in SERPs? Or why certain pages of your site have high bounce rates?

These are all questions you need to know the answers to, and your audit will help you gain these crucial insights.

Tracking Your Audit Findings.

Before getting started, make sure you have a way to track and record your audit and your findings.  

If you use a cloud-based solution for record-keeping, then you can quickly and easily share your findings with anyone who needs to access them.

Depending on your preference, we offer and recommend both GSuite, which comes with all the Google tools you know and love, like Gmail, Sheets, and Docs, and Office 365, that offers all the familiarity of Outlook, Excel, and Word plus a host of other features.  

Parts of a Complete Online Presence Audit.

Now that you have your tracking tools at hand it’s time to plan your audit. It will consist of reviewing the following areas:

• Website
  • SEO analysis, both on and off-page
  • Content
  • Analytics
• Marketing and digital campaigns
• Social media platforms and profiles
• Local directories
• Review sites
• Google My Business Listing

As we move through each section we’ll tell you what to look for and provide you with a set of questions to guide you. Feel free to add your own as you go.

How to Audit Your Website.

Your website is your home base online. It’s where you drive customers and generate business, so you need to treat it well.

We really like that John Jantsch, of Duct Tape Marketing, recommends starting website audits with your homepage. He writes that, “If you find issues on your homepage, odds are you’ll find issues throughout the rest of your website as well.”

When you review your site, you’ll discovers answers to things like:

• What actions are your site visitors taking?
• Where are people clicking on your homepage?
• What landing pages receive the most traffic?
• How long are people staying on site?

And all of these insights can be used to further refine your site and improve your marketing funnel.

A website audit, in and of itself, is a large but fruitful task, so don’t hesitate to ask for help from a professional if you need it. We wrote an entire guide dedicated to auditing your website, and it includes tips and the tools you’ll need to accomplish it. Check it out here. This guide also includes the instructions for performing your on-page SEO reviews. In the next section, we’ll cover how to review your off-page SEO, or SEO factors that aren’t on your website.

How to Audit Off-Page SEO.

If you haven’t heard of SEO yet, let us explain. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Don’t let the name fool you though, when performing SEO tasks you won’t be directly affecting any search engines. Instead, you’ll be optimizing different factors on your site so that they rank higher in search engine result pages, or SERPs.

Along with those website SEO factors, referred to as on-page SEO, there’s also off-page SEO.

Off-page SEO mainly consists of building back links to your site from other online sources. That could mean a variety of things, like linking back to your site from social media or other blogs and sites. In fact, backlinks can be bucketed into three general groups:

• Natural Links
  • Links made to your site organically by others. Like if someone were to link off to your site in a blog post they write without you having to ask them to do it.
• Manually Built Links
  • These are links that appear on 3^rd party sites or platforms, but you’ve had a hand in getting them there. This could mean you’ve asked a customer or friend to share it, or maybe you hired an influencer to do a social media campaign that links back to your site.
• Self-created Links
  • These are the bad boys of backlinks, and we recommend you use caution before plastering your site links all over the Internet. Search engines don’t look fondly on spammy links, so if you’ve inserted them where they don’t belong — like random blogs and websites that don’t relate to you in some meaningful way — you could be doing yourself a disservice. Only post your links where it’s appropriate and makes sense.

You can use Google Search Console, a free tool, to audit your links. Use Google’s instructions to start your free account and then you can download a list of all your backlinks. Then, if you can, remove any that fall into “spammy” territory.

How to Audit Social Media.

Your social media profiles comprise a good portion of your total online presence. Social media is a place to connect with and grow an audience, identify new business opportunities, and tell your story the way you want it told.

Auditing your social media can help you find new audiences, improve relationships with existing ones, direct people to your site to transact, and more.

You’re going to want to start your social media audit by tracking down all your social media profiles. In your Google Doc or Excel Spreadsheet, record the platform (like Instagram, Facebook, etc.) and the link to your profiles. Also include:

• Your social media username, or handle.
• What your goals are for the channel.
• How frequently you post to support those goals.
• Top performing content.
• Information on your audience or demographic.

Then, stop and reflect on the different social media platforms and channels. Are they supporting your goals as-is? What needs to be refined? Are there any you don’t need to be on?

Remember, it’s not about being everywhere, it’s about being where it counts, or where your audience is.

How to Audit Marketing and Digital Campaigns.

Are you running any marketing or digital campaigns?

Those should be part of your complete web presence audit, too. As you compile your different campaigns, make sure you’re clear on their goals. Create S.M.A.R.T. goals for each of your campaigns.

Once you know the goals of your campaigns, you’ll want to review their looks to make sure they’re on-brand. Is your type consistent? Are your logos the same?

Check out this thorough guide from FlypChart to help you analyze the headlines and copy of your campaigns to make sure everything is support of your goals.

How to Audit Online Reviews.

When it comes to online reviews, there’s not much that can be done to change any that exist, but it’s a good idea to audit them anyway.

Auditing your online reviews, on sites like Yelp or Facebook, can help you keep your finger on the pulse of what people are saying regarding your business.

Lots of positive feedback? You must be doing something right.

Too much negative feedback? Use the critiques and criticism you see to improve your business and after doing so, encourage people to leave new, positive reviews if they’d had a good experience.

No reviews at all? That doesn’t mean people don’t like your business, but it may mean that you’re not exactly memorable enough. You can work to implement a word-of-mouth-marketing strategy that can help increase what people say about you — online and off.

How to Audit a Google My Business Listing.

Have you set up a Google My Business Listing (GMBL) for your business?

If not, you’re missing out. Google is by far the most popular search engine, so it’s good to have a GMBL. These listings have all of your important business information like your hours of operation, contact information, and website links, along with the ability for customers to leave reviews on your listing.

We recommend using Google’s guide to setting it up, or making sure yours it set up correctly, as part of your audit.

Audit Your Web Presence to Better Your Business.

Total online audits have a lot of parts to them, it’s true. We don’t expect that you’ll be able to complete your audit in one day, and that’s ok.

Break your audit down into manageable chunks and record your findings and results as you go so that you don’t forget where you left off.

If you need help, don’t hesitate to contact an expert.

2020 wasn’t kind to traditional retail models — malls and main streets have seen declining foot traffic for years, and the Coronavirus pandemic isn’t helping.

So, what’s an aspiring business owner to do?

Luckily, brick-and-mortar isn’t the end-all-be-all of business models. Instead of investing in a physical property, consider taking your small business dreams online.

Today, we’re taking a deep dive into dropshipping. It’s a great way to start your online business both quickly and easily. In fact, with dropshipping, you can start your business for as little as it costs to create and host a website.

In this guide, we’ll discuss the following questions and topics:

• What is dropshipping?
• What are the pros and cons of dropshipping?
• How do I find a dropshipping supplier?
• How do I determine what products to sell?
• What kind of website do I need for dropshipping?

What is dropshipping?

As you begin researching how to start an online business, you’ll come across the term “dropshipping.” But what does it mean?

Dropshipping is “a streamlined form of retail business wherein the seller accepts customer orders but does not keep goods sold in stock.” That may seem a bit confusing at first… how are you supposed to sell products when you don’t have any inventory? Is it a scam?

Hardly.

The dropshipping eCommerce model takes the fulfillment of customer orders out of your hands. Instead of paying for an inventory that may not sell and the storage fees to house it all, you’ll get your customers’ orders fulfilled at the source. This is usually done by a wholesaler, manufacturer, or 3^rd party vendor (i.e. – “dropshippers”), who’ll manage packaging and shipping the product to the customer. 

Dropshipping example

Renata is a makeup artist living in New York City. She wants to grow her career in her industry. In addition to teaching people how to enhance their natural beauty, she wants to provide them with the makeup and tools they need. As she researches how to start a business, she realizes she has a big problem. Where is she supposed to store all the goods in her 300 square foot apartment? Property is expensive in the city, and she can’t afford to take out a new lease for storage space.

Enter dropshipping. All Renata needs is an eCommerce website where she can adopt a dropshipping model. She selects the products she wants to sell, and every time someone orders makeup or tools from her site she passes that order along to the dropshipper. They then package and ship the item to the original customer. In this scenario, Renata never touches the product (and this process doesn’t have to be disclosed to the end buyer, so they’ll be none the wiser.)

The pros and cons of dropshipping.

Dropshipping, as convenient as it may be, isn’t for everyone. If you’re trying to determine the best eCommerce model for your online business, consider the following pros and cons. 

The benefits of dropshipping.

• There’s a low barrier to entry — all you really need is a website.
• When you choose to pursue dropshipping, you’re freeing yourself from the worries and obligations of manufacturing, inventory, fulfillment, leasing space, and staffing, thereby saving yourself from those substantial expenses.
• You have a greater ability to test products in the market. Since you aren’t buying products in bulk to store and sell, you can quickly adapt and change your offerings depending on market interests. If something isn’t selling, switch it out!
• It’s almost like having a passive income stream. In a traditional retail model, you’re responsible for every aspect of the transaction. With dropshipping, you can focus on other aspects of your business, like marketing, while customers shop your site and a 3^rd party fulfills it.
• Work from anywhere when you dropship. Want to work from the comfort of your couch? Go for it. Prefer a typical office environment? You can do that, too. Like working from exotic locations? That’s doable as well. You can be anywhere in the world and rest assured that your products are reaching your customers.
• No issues with logistics. Worried about having too much inventory to move? Or not enough in stock to meet demand? You don’t have to worry when you dropship — these issues are all taken care of on your behalf.
• You only pay when your customer does. With dropshipping, you only pay for products that your customer has already ordered and paid for, so you’re not losing money on stuff that doesn’t sell. 

The cons of dropshipping.

• There’s a low barrier to entry — all you really need is a website. This looks familiar, we know because we also listed this as a “pro” for dropshipping. Since the barrier to entry is so low, many people can start a dropshipping eCommerce business. If you’re using the same dropshippers and selling the same goods as everyone else, it’ll be difficult to stand out and succeed.
• There can be quality issues. Take this “con” with a grain of salt. If you don’t do your research and choose a poor dropshipper with a less-than-stellar reputation, you’re likely to have issues with your products. This issue can be avoided by researching your suppliers before entering into any agreements with them.
• Your products can change, and you’ll be none the wiser. Your supplier may decide to start using cheaper materials to craft products, or different packaging materials, and you’re likely not to know about it until a customer complains or asks about the change.
• You bear the brunt of customer returns. As a business owner, it’s your responsibility to handle customer complaints and product issues. If someone decides to return a product, they aren’t sending it back to the dropshipper, they send it back to you. You’ll be responsible for providing any refunds unless you have a no-refund policy (n.b. — that might not sit well with potential customers.)
• Shipping times can be lengthy. Amazon Prime, Instacart, and many other services offer near-immediate gratification with super fast shipping. Consumers understand that they may not get the same lightning fast shipping with a small business, but if your dropshipper is located on the other side of the world it can take weeks for products to arrive. Either choose a dropshipper with faster shipping times or be very transparent about shipping times prior to purchase. 
• If you’re selling the same products as everyone else, you may end up paying more for your SEO keywords to try and get a leg up on your competitors. 

How do I find a dropship supplier?

As with most things nowadays, an internet search is a good place to start. If you aren’t finding many options by searching “dropshippers” try going beyond page one of the search results, or expanding your search with other terms like “supplier” or “eCommerce distributor” along with terms relating to the products you’re interested in selling. 

Take time to review the dropshippers you find — have other customers left reviews? If so, do they trend positively or negatively? Find out what their average shipping time is, and always, always read any contracts thoroughly before signing. 

Can’t find what you want on the Internet? Don’t fret — just contact the manufacturer of your desired goods directly. Those manufacturers can provide you with information on their vendors and dropshippers, and perhaps even set up a connection. And then there’s always the possibility that they’ll work directly with you, so don’t hesitate to ask!

If you really want to make sure you’re choosing a reliable manufacturer and dropshipper, consider ordering some of your potential products for yourself and testing them out.

What kind of products should I sell on my eCommerce site? 

Want to know what kind of products you should be selling on your eCommerce website? Well, it depends on your market and more specifically, your niche. 

You aren’t going to succeed trying to be a jack-of-all-trades. Amazon and Walmart already exist, and as a small business owner, it’ll be hard to compete. 

Do your research instead of allowing your personal passions and interests to dictate your products. What does your ideal customer look like? By targeting a niche and understanding their spending habits, along with other demographics, you can cater the perfect selection of products to entice them into purchasing from your site. 

Another big thing to keep in mind is that you shouldn’t be thinking in terms of your own pocketbook. Just because something may seem a little too expensive for you, doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there willing to pay that amount. This is why market research is vitally important to your success. 

Need some ideas to start identifying products you can sell? Take a look at the following suggestions. 

• Items geared toward hobbyists. 
  • Hobbyists and side-hustlers are booming right now, and there are many who’d pay a pretty penny for a desirable item in their niche. 
• Clothing and accessories. 
  • People purchase clothing at unprecedented rates. If you’ve got an eye for style and trends, and know your market, this can be a lucrative path to follow. 
• Repeat purchases or subscriber products. 
  • What’s better than making a sale? Making multiple recurring sales. If you sell subscription products or products that need to be replaced often, you’re in a good position. 

What kind of website do I need for dropshipping?

Wondering what kind of website you need so that you can start your business? You’ve come to the right place, we’re experts on websites (and domains, obviously.)

When creating your website, you need to build it with the future in mind. If your thought process is something along the lines of, “I don’t have any customers yet, I’m going to get the most basic thing I can find,” then you’re not planning for your business growth or your future. 

If cost and pricing worry you, they shouldn’t. You can create great websites for less than the price of a couple of coffees. 

Here are things to consider when planning and creating your website:

• What is my domain name going to be? 
  • Your domain name is like the digital address for your site, and oftentimes the first impression someone has of your site. 
  • A good domain name is short, memorable, and relevant. Too many hyphens and random numbers, and no one will remember it meaning they won’t get to your site. 
  • Maybe you’ve heard that .com is king, but that isn’t necessarily true. A key tenant of a good domain name is relevance, so perhaps consider a .store or .shop for your eCommerce site. 
• Can you sell products with the plan you select?
  • Not all quick website creation plans offer the ability to sell goods and services online. Make sure yours does. 
• Hosting and bandwidth. 
  • As your website grows and gains more online traffic, you want to make sure everyone visiting your site has a good experience. If you don’t have great hosting or enough bandwidth for your visitors, it can make for a poor experience. (Think slow-loading pages and pages timing out.)
• Do I want to create it myself or hire someone?
  • At Domain.com, we offer a smart WebsiteBuilder that helps you get online with ease. Answer a few quick questions and our AI-powered builder will select the right layout (including images and initial content!) for your site. Don’t waste your precious time wading through tons of templates — let us help. 
    • It is important to compare the features and select the plan that best fits your needs, however for anyone intending to create an online store, the eCommerce Plan is going to be ideal. Not only does it include everything needed to sell goods, services, or even downloads of digital goods online, but also priority support to help ensure any issue you experience is resolved as quickly as possible.
  • Would you rather someone help you through the process of creating your website so you can focus on other aspects of your eCommerce dropshipping business? We can do that, too. Our experts can build you a beautiful site from start to finish, provide a strategic marketing plan that’s tailored to your needs, and teach you how to manage your site for long-term success. 

Ready to launch your eCommerce business?

We’re excited for you! We hope you’ve found this guide to dropshipping helpful, and let us know in the comments below if you have any questions. We’d also love to hear about what has and hasn’t worked for your eCommerce site so we can all learn from it. 

We wish you the best of luck and let us know if you need any help with creating your site — we’re here to help!