Blogging can be incredibly rewarding--it's a fun hobby, it can improve your networking, photography, writing, and other skills, and there is a good opportunity to make some money and/or try out complimentary products! Like many things, however, you often need to put in a lot of effort before you can start reaping the benefits, especially when you want to start profiting off of your blog.
Certain blogs seem to cost more than others, fashion and beauty especially! I don't know about my fellow beauty bloggers out there but I seem to spend so much money trying to keep up with my favorite brands and the latest trends. I imagine fashion bloggers feel the same way! Over the past year or so I've discovered a lot of amazing sites that can help you increase your platform, save money, or make money. While some of them are targeted mostly for fashion/beauty gurus, any blogger can find them just as useful as I do!
Influenster
This is a service that allows influencers (YouTubers, bloggers, Instagramers, etc.) to sign up and receive free products to review! It's a pretty easy setup but I definitely think it's geared more for YouTubers than bloggers. Basically you connect all of your social media accounts and it will display your combined social impact score. If you have a 1000 Twitter followers and 2000 Instagram followers, for example, your combined score would be 3000. Based on this score you can qualify for VoxBoxes containing different products and brands to try! These can be luxury, drugstore, one brand or multiple brands. I have gotten two since signing up and a third is on the way, which is really exciting! You aren't obligated to post about the products but you may qualify for more VoxBoxes in the future if you do post about them. The reason why I think this is geared towards YouTubers is because if you connect your blog to the site it won't add your blog followers to your total impact score, which is kind of frustrating but it's still a useful site for all kinds of bloggers!
Hootsuite
I use this app constantly to schedule my tweets and shorten my post links! I know there are a lot of apps that do this but I feel most comfortable using Hootsuite. If you don't have a scheduling app yet I would check this one out!
MagicLinks
As a beauty blogger, I'm constantly giving out free promotion to my favorite brands and products. Whether it's a haul or a review, I can mention anywhere from one to a dozen products per post! I've always liked to provide links to the products I'm reviewing so that my readers can find it easily online, and this website gives you a (very, very small) cut off the profits if someone clicks on your link. For reference I have had 68 clicks since I started using MagicLinks and I've made $0.47 from that. Obviously this isn't a ton of money, but it all adds up! It's very easy to use. You just find the product you're mentioning online (from Sephora, Ulta, Amazon, Target, Macy's, etc.) and then enter the link into MagicLinks, click "create link" and then insert the new link into your post. This is a site that any blogger or YouTuber can use!
Crowdfire
This is another app that is good for managing social media! It helps build your Twitter following by showing you accounts that you should follow, tweets to favorite, inactive accounts you should unfollow, etc! When I'm bored I love to go on here and refine my Twitter account, even though I don't tweet anywhere near as much as I should. If you want to you can also set up one of those automatic DM things with this app, but I personally haven't used that feature.
Ebates
Blogger or not, if you shop online you need to sign up for Ebates. It's free to sign up and basically it gives you money back when you shop online through the website! When I was buying my textbooks this semester, for example, I went to Ebates and searched "Amazon", then got directed to Amazon and got about 5% of my money back (a grand total of about $9). If you have more than $5 back then they will send you a check or they will put the money in your PayPal account! The money back rate per website changes often, sometimes it's only 3% and other times it's 8%, but either way you are getting money back so this is really useful if you're like me and shop online a lot.
I hope you found something new that you can use! If you have any favorite blogging websites or apps I would love to hear about them.
Xx Katie
