How to make money online blogging about nail-polish

Alice Sanderson's career as a successful online nail artist and award-winning beauty blogger began at the age of 15 for the simple reason that she needed to cure her nail-biting habit.

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Today her self-taught skills are sought-after by beauty companies who want her to teach others how to use their products and she has amassed a following of 150,000 on social media.

But it all started with a set of nail art paints when she was a teenager.

“I was about to go to college,” says the 21-year-old from Holmfirth, “and I was embarrassed about meeting new people when I had such horrible, scruffy nails, so I decided to start painting them to stop me from biting them.”

The ploy worked, but only because Alice, a former student at Greenhead College, chose to give her nails an artistic makeover.

She explained: “My grandma bought me some nail art paint, so I started doing some designs. When I look back on it they were quite ambitious. But I knew that if I just painted them one colour it wouldn’t be enough motivation to leave them alone.”

A friend, impressed by what she saw, suggested that Alice start writing about her creations on the microblogging and social networking site Tumblr.

“I didn’t know people wrote about their nails,” said Alice, “but there are loads of nail blogs. So I started posting pictures as well and in 2011 I started a blogspot.”

After a few months Alice’s blog began to attract attention from the beauty industry. She said: “I started to get people wanting me to review products and then I was offered paid work making tutorials. In 2013 I won the Cosmopolitan Best New Beauty Blog award, shortlisted from 27,000 applicants, and last year I was shortlisted for the established beauty blog award.”

While Alice doesn’t feel that her nail blog, www.onenailtorulethemall.co.uk , can be a full-time career, she has earned enough to support her studies at Sheffield University, where she has just completed a three-year history degree, and it helped her to buy a car. Now back home she’s found a job working on the service desk of a Huddersfield car dealership.

Perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that Alice has such marketable design abilities. Her father Andrew is a professional photographer and her mother Debbie George is an artist.

Their rural home is brimming with artwork.

Her father’s photographic expertise has also been extremely useful, as Alice explains: “When I first started posting, the quality of my photographs was awful, but my dad built me a light box which I can stick my hand into to photograph my nails. It’s just made from a lined cardboard box with a camera taped to the top, but it works. You can buy them, but they’re £50 or more. I’m lucky to have a dad who can do things like that.”

over 1,000 nail polishes and products

Alice has also utilised the talents of her boyfriend Luke Smith, who designed a logo for One Nail to Rule Them All.

The practicalities of being a nail blogger mean that Alice paints and re-paints her own nails several times a week — although less in recent weeks as she has been studying for her finals.

She has a stock of over 1,000 nail polishes and products, filed in her student house in colour order, and regularly reviews new products.

She said: “If I’m reviewing, I’m saying how many coats a polish it will need and how it goes on, that sort of thing. Some companies approach me with a theme and ask me to do designs or online tutorials that they put on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.”

So far, Alice has worked for corporate giant Avon and popular brands such as Barry M, Rimmel, River Island and American online magazine Devine Caroline. She’s even been asked by Penguin books to design nails to complement book jackets and she is currently designing a range of false nails.

“You can get some really lucrative work from this,” says Alice, “but I can’t make a full-time job out of it because the work fluctuates constantly. I might get £200 for one job or £3,000, but then nothing much for a while. When I was at uni, it meant that I could run my car and go out for meals.

“I really enjoy it, it’s mini art.”

Alice taught herself to manicure and paint her nails by finding tutorials on YouTube and seeking out other nail bloggers, many of which she now counts as her friends. However, she has had some formal training after being invited by Gelish, a gel nail company, to travel to London for a one-day course that covered everything from nail care to using its products.

Unlike many in the nail art world, she keeps her nails short. But even so, a particularly complex design can take her up to five hours to complete. “I think short nails look so much better and they are less likely to break,” says Alice, whose likens the ideas she comes up with to ‘doodles’.

Fashions in nail art are constantly changing but she certainly has trends at her fingertips. “There are a lot of nude colours about at the moment,” says Alice, “and designs with negative space where you paint the design and leave a space to show the natural nail colour.”

Her top tips for nail care are: “Never peel off gel colours because they strip the nail. You have to soak them in acetone for 10 minutes. And don’t be impatient for nails to dry.

“I paint mine while I’m watching television so I can sit and watch the rest of the programme while they’re drying.”

http://www.examiner.co.uk/lifestyle/fashion-beauty/feature-alice-nailed-world-blogging-9384419

How To Find Profitable Niche Markets & Keywords

How to Create A website or Blog

Content Marketing Strategy Tips by Jo Sabin

© Image: Shutterstock / patpitchaya

EDITORIAL

CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY TIPS

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Jo Sabin, marketing communications manager of DesignCrowd, a logo, web and graphic design marketplace. Sabin discusses the ways individuals can make the best use of content marketing — for which brands are increasingly turning to crowdsourcing platforms. As always, guest contributors’ views are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Crowdsourcing.org.

Small and medium-sized businesses need a profitable content marketing strategy if they are to remain competitive. If you have never done so before, though, knowing where to start can be very overwhelming and intimidating, especially in light of Google’s recent, crushing updates.

However, a strong plan will help you overcome the obstacles of digital marketing. The following are tips to get you started with a strong content marketing strategy so you can more easily keep up with (and even surpass) your competitors.

Related:
- DesignCrowd Acquires Creative Contest Platform Worth1000

Create Buyer Personas
Most businesses already know their general target audience, but narrowing down to an ideal customer gives you a base from which tocreate a buyer persona, an audience segmentation model of sorts, around which you can shape your marketing strategy.

To find your ideal customer, start with your general target market, then choose one segmentation, and pick the best customer to build a persona from. For each persona, describe his or her income, goals, problems, home life, education, possibly region, and also why your company would appeal to this persona. Personas work best, too, if you give them a name and image. This helps you and your sales team ‘see’ personas as real people to whom you are trying to relate.

Define Conversion Goals
Before a buyer makes a purchase, he or she goes through several stages and at each point reaches a conversion point before moving to the final conversion of an actual purchase. Most businesses define the conversion process as first awareness of a product, next evaluation and research, and third the purchase. Your goal with content is to figure out how the buyer will move through the purchase process, and this starts with knowing their questions.

Ask Questions for Target Audience
When creating questions your buyer persona may have, start at the very beginning. For instance, let’s say a property management company’s list of personas includes a retired male who owns five or fewer rental properties. What questions may lead him to be aware of the need for property management in the first place? Then, when he is intent in searching for a property manager, what questions may he research?

A newbie rental owner may have no clue about what you offer. So, he may first research how to turn rental properties into passive income. From this search, he may read about property managers. Now he will want to know what services a property manager provides. He will want to know the cost of a property manager, and if the company offers more than one package of services. You can now create content that answers these questions for your target market.

Determine Placement and Promotion
Be sure to consider the best placement for content in each step of the conversion, and how you will promote this content. Placement of content could be on social channels like Facebook and Twitter, third party blogs, your company blog, landing pages, etc. Just make sure to fine tune each placement with the stage of conversion the buyer is at and take advantage of the free targeting tools social media sites offer to ensure your content is posted in the news feeds of the target audience. For instance, emails for those who have voluntarily signed up for your newsletter directly on your blog probably will already be past the awareness stage.

Also, while an audience could just stumble upon your content in a search, this probably won’t be enough. Come up with a plan to direct them to your content with promotional emails, social media, texts, ads, etc. You’ve invested time creating the content and building a business asset, so make sure to invest in distributing the content through relevant channels.

Compile Content List and Timeline
Your entire content marketing strategy will fall apart without cohesiveness and a timeline. Create a list of content for the stage of awareness, for the stage of research, and for the final stage of purchase. You may also have separate content for different personas in each stage. Then create a timeline so that you can keep up momentum and keep track of results. The next level would be to tailor trigger emails to leads you capture via content so they start their journey towards purchase.

Think Scalable and Repackaging
If you are worried about keeping up with the amount of content your target market may require of you, then consider creating scalable content that you can repackage. For instance, a series on a certain topic or even simply a group of articles on a topic could be repurposed in an ebook. Weekly email tips could be made into an article or, vice versa, an ebook could be made into short email tips. In 2015, video’s dominance will solidify as more brands use video to connect with their audiences. Facebook has invested in its video platform so expect to see it compete heavily with YouTube this year. There are lots of video making apps to help you turn your static content into short, low cost, engaging slideshows to drive engagement.

Include Keywords and a Call to Action
Every piece of content you produce should include a keyword related to that specific set of questions you are answering. Make sure you test your visual design content as well as text. When Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer was at Google she was famous for testing every design element, including 40 shades of blue to see what shade made users click the most. This decision generated the company anadditional $200M in revenue. Just be sure to write to the buyer persona, not the keyword, and only insert the keyword a few times when it sounds natural. And don’t forget to end with a clear call to action. Ask yourself what you want a reader to do once he or she encounters your content and then make this action clear to the reader.

Once you have your plan in place, you are ready to start writing. Just be sure to use the above tips so that your content marketing strategy effectively turns curious prospects into buyers.

http://www.crowdsourcing.org/editorial/content-marketing-strategy-tips/36069

How to make Money from your Hobby ?

Whether you want to make a bit of money out of a hobby, or you hope to launch your own retail business, reaching would-be buyers on your own can be tricky. However, by joining an existing website you can find a ready-made audience of consumers. Alongside some of the biggest online names are specialist websites which might suit you better if you’re selling handcrafted goods. Here’s a look at how much some of the main players cost to use and what you get for your money.

Etsy

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If you can limit your set-up costs while you build your confidence and test the water, so much the better. Etsy is fantastic for this as listing an item costs just 20 US cents (roughly 13p) for four months or until it sells, plus commission of 3.5% (plus VAT) on each purchase. If you are selling a quantity of the same product, these fees apply to each item sold. The item price is converted into dollars by Etsy before the fees are applied.

Other websites offer much more by way of marketing, but that comes at a cost.

The US-based website’s greatest strength is its vast scale – it has 30 million registered shoppers – but this can also be a disadvantage as you are among many rivals. It is open to anyone to use, which helps if you do not have a track record of selling or if your products don’t fit in with the style of other, more selective websites, but it also means there is no quality control. Indeed, Etsy’s craft disasters – from Sex Burger, a less-than-erotic painting of a naked couple embracing in a sesame bun, to a clock made from a cheese grater – earned themselves such a reputation that was celebrated on the now sadly defunct website Regretsy.com.

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Etsy allows factory manufactured products for sellers who have outgrown the capacity to handmake all their products, but some feel this betrays the website’s crafty roots. It also allows the sale of vintage items, but stipulates they must be at least 20 years old.

Simmi Duffin, 35, from the Forest of Dean, sells felt creations and sewing patterns under her brand Grace’s Favours. “It is incredibly straightforward to use and there are very helpful guides that show you how to set up a shop and what categories to list under,” she says. “You can get sales from all over the world but also choose where you want to make your items available, right down to individual products if they are difficult to send abroad.” Duffin says one of her biggest selling products is a Cuddly Campervan because it is unusual and comes up in searches both on Etsy itself and when enthusiasts are hunting for memorabilia on Google. “Jewellers, on the other hand, complain that it is very hard to be found because there are thousands of other sellers,” she says.

Folksy

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Folksy is the UK equivalent of Etsy, but much smaller. It insists on products being handcrafted, with no mass-manufactured or vintage products allowed. It turned over around £1m in sales in the year to September and has around 300,000 visitors a month. Sellers have two options: the basic account costs 15p per item you list and 6% commission (plus VAT) on every sale . Alternatively, you can list as a Folksy Plus seller with the same commission charge on every sale, but unlimited listings for £45 per year (including VAT). Users say it is very simple to set up.

Clare Freemantle, 34, from Newcastle runs Serious Stamp, creating custom-made ink stamps for use on wedding invitations and loyalty cards among other things. She uses several channels including Etsy, Folksy, Dawanda and Not On The High Street. “Folksy is my quietest platform. It is still a bit small, but they don’t charge a lot for what you get,” she says.

Given the low set-up costs, it makes sense to list with both Etsy and Folksy if you can to maximise your chances of reaching buyers. With both sites, the more you can do to drive traffic to your store, the better, so build up your social media profile.

Not On The High Street

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The barriers to entry are considerably higher, but many traders say it is worth the extra effort and cost. It has 2 million unique visitors per month, which doubles at Christmas. It costs £199 (£238.80 including VAT) to join and you pay 25% commission (plus VAT) on each sale. The website is highly selective about which products it features.You can apply via a form on the website and you should get a response within seven working days.

Freemantle has had a great experience selling her stamps on the website. “I’ve found Not on The High Street to be the best,” she says. “You have to adhere to its terms and conditions, such as the fact you are not allowed to tell customers from the website about any of your other online stores. It has quite high standards of entry for products and photography but what you get is their marketing might, which is quite substantial. There have been TV adverts, gift guides and press.”

Amazon Marketplace and eBay

You can use these websites to sell homemade creations, although it’s harder to get noticed. “I have used eBay to sell my sewing patterns, but the downside is that people tend to shop there when they are looking to get something cheaply,” says Duffin. “Amazon Marketplace is good if you can do a quick turnaround, such as with printed clothes or cards, as shoppers tend to use it for last minute buys, but it is not suitable for me.”

On Amazon Marketplace, sellers pay a “per-item” fee of 75p for every single item sold, plus a “referral fee” of between 7% and 25% (plus VAT), depending on the category of what is being sold.“Pro merchants” can pay a £25 monthly fee instead of the 75p-per-item fees.

On eBay, as a private seller you can list 20 items for free and after that you pay 35p for each. You can choose to list your items for auction or with a “buy it now” option. Various listing upgrades are available for an extra fee, including larger photographs, multiple categories and subtitles. You also pay a final value fee that is 10% of the total transaction including postage. An extra fee of 3.4% plus 20p is due if your buyer uses PayPal. Alternatively, you can set up a “basic shop” for £19.99 per month with 100 free listings and 8% final value fees. There are further subscription options for businesses selling higher volumes with fees of between £17.38 and £217.38 depending on scale.

Build your own website 

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Some traders love the freedom of having their own website, whether it is their main online store or an adjunct to shops on other platforms. Nat Rigby, 38, from Cornwall, makes jewellery from recycled skateboards under her brand Thrashion. She has an Etsy store, but now finds most of her sales come directly from her own website. She says: “Social media has been great. I upload a picture every day to Instagram and that drives people to my website, particularly as it’s a site that’s used a lot by the skate industry.” Rigby used Create.net to build her website and shop, which costs between £5 and £36 per month depending on the functionality you choose, but it is free of listing fees and commission on sales. She says: “It has been amazing. You get an account manager you can talk to when you have issues and it was just as easy as setting up on Etsy.”

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/feb/05/make-money-from-hobby

Blogging tips

Tube Sniper Pro 3

If you are looking to build a high quality membership site, you have to make sure the right approach is being taken immediately. If you don’t do this, you are going to get stuck in a situation where the membership site does not attract a lot of people and does not make you the type of money that you are after as can be seen with a lot of people who go down this route and are never able to get high quality results. Rather than dealing with these kinds of issues, it is smarter to be careful with the results that you are getting and use the tips that are going to be listed here. One may visit the site of JVZoo Value AddOn to get more info on the product.

Plugins – WordPress is one of the main tools that you are going to come across and only when you have the right plugins will you be able to get the results that you want. The page of JVZoo Value AddOn may have some important info on the IM product.

There are a range of plugins that are on offer and you have to make sure the entire site flows. You should always go with these plugins because they are the easiest to trust in this day and age. If you take a look at all of the major membership sites, these are the ones to go with. It’s not a bad idea to visit the page of JVZoo Value AddOn before making a final call.

Aweber – You should also make sure the email situation is sorted out immediately because this is how you are going to remain in contact with your subscribers and clients. Aweber is one of the best tools online for such purposes and is regarded as a leader for all emailing purposes. One may choose to visit the page of Tube Sniper Pro to get some inside info on the IM software.

Don’t settle for anything short of the best because your site is a main moneymaker that should never be ignored. It is these details that end up pushing a great website over the top in its niche.

http://www.pressreleaserocket.net/abraham-enterprise-releases-info-on-membership-site-building-software/76398/

How to choose A profitable niche in 2015

Some tips on how to look for your profitable Niche :

How can Stay At Home Mums Make Money Online ?

After getting  a few requests from “Stayathomemums “  I thought it will be a good idea to list some points which helped My wife generate an income as a stay at home mum:

1. Find your Niche 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaCd65BFl5s

2.  Register to A Blogging Service  such as wordpress or Blogger .  (there are some nice  turitorals on Youtube)  and start blogging .  Make your blogging skills clean, simple, and precise. No need to show off your high vocabulary skills which makes people consult the dictionary or check other references.

Stick to your unique style in blogging to stand out from other bloggers . Building authority in the online industry is one of the most important aspects for effective blogging.  Try and post on a frequent/regular basis .

3.  Create A LinkedIn Account :  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE7GYoZFSIU

4. Create A Facebook account .

5. Create A Pinterest Account :  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-1tH-Dts1Y

6. Create A Twitter Account 

7. Share your posts on Social media  as well as Leveraging Pulse on the LinkedIn network.

 For More Tips : http://www.tipshowtomakemoney.com  or just contact me for free tips at :

eddie@tipshowtomakemoney.com