Blogging Success Tips for Beauty Schools

If you have a website for your school, you may already have a blog started. Or perhaps you’ve thought about it but don’t know where to start. How can you take your blogging to the next level?

Why Blogging Is a Great Marketing Tool

Blogging is a way for the public to see your expertise. In a crowded field, you want to differentiate from other beauty schools in your market. One way to do this is to be a thought leader, which requires that you put out fresh, original, true-to-you content. This is content marketing in a nutshell.

Even though blogging has been around for years, it’s still relevant. Blogs have been rated the fifth most trustworthy type of source for online information, and marketers with blogs get more leads than those who don’t.

This medium also allows your personality to shine through. Is there a particular aspect of your school that makes it special? Carry that through in your choice of topics and how you write about them. For example:

If your beauty school is all about personalized attention to students, chronicle your students’ journey (securing their permission first, of course) with photos of the amazing portfolios they have created or one-on-one time with instructors.
If you’re proud of the cutting-edge techniques taught by your instructors, have them guest blog about these and how they teach them as part of the curriculum. Or do staff interviews or Q&As to emphasize their professional credentials.
If your beauty school has a very strong alumni base and reputation among employers, profile alumni and the jobs they’re in now, or do an interview with a series of employers.

Blogging Success Tips

While a lot of blogging success boils down to “just start,” there are definitely ways to position yourself better for traffic success.

Tip #1: Publish consistently

If you’re going to commit to blogging, establish a schedule—once a week on Fridays, for example. While there’s no rule of thumb for blogging frequency, you do want to show that you are an active presence. Once a month is likely not enough to get traction.

Although easier said than done, especially if you’re a one-person marketing and admissions team or school owner stretching your time to cover the blog yourself—consistent publishing demands planning. Create a content calendar of topics so you’re not tempted to just skip a week when other priorities call.

Tip #2: Select topics with care

It’s tempting to use the blog to talk about the easy stuff to feature at your beauty school—seasonal events, special popup classes, etc. These are important to cover so that life at your beauty school comes alive to an online audience. However, you will likely find that your best-performing blog posts over time are:

Evergreen, meaning they are not particularly time-sensitive or perishable. These are perennially useful or relevant topics, such as “how to prepare for your first day in beauty school” or “salaries for entry-level stylists in [your city]” that you can update annually at the same URL.
Unique on your site. Don’t tread over the same topic over and over, because these blog posts will compete with each other. For example, if you have blogged on “how to prepare for a salon interview,” don’t write another on “interview tips for beauty school grads.”
Conversion-friendly, which means they are topics that are top-of-mind for prospective enrollees. Put yourself in the shoes of your interested students who are actively researching this big life decision: What are their pain points? What are they worried about before making the leap to beauty school? How can you help provide information so that they feel confident about their decision? Examples of such topics could be “how to select the best beauty school” or “how to pay for a cosmetology program.”

Mix up your topics so they are not all the same type. For example, if all of your blog posts are highly conversion-oriented, the blog won’t come across as authentic or provide an organic picture of your presence as a well-rounded business.

Tip #3: Focus on providing valuable information

What is original content? It boils down to “insider” information that they cannot easily find or figure out on their own. Even if a topic has been done a lot, you can still add a lot of original value just by being a beauty school with practical expertise on the subject, or by adding a local spin (such as by providing real names of beauty employers in the area for a career tips article), or by providing very specific detail.

Images can be powerful value additions to blog posts. However, don’t grab stock photos just to provide visual relief from text-based content; original photos or diagrams are likely to convey originality and value. A candid shot of one of your instructors showing a certain technique to students, for instance, tells a lot about what it would be like to be a student in the class in a way that a curriculum class description cannot.

Tip #4: Promote your posts through other channels

After you’ve done the hard work of writing your blog post and posting it to your website, don’t let it just sit there. Get extra mileage out of your content by repurposing it across all your other channels, both to provide fodder to market across your other channels and to amplify the reach of your original content.

Create a Facebook post teasing the blog with a link to the full article, do it again on your Google My Business Posts, and take a particularly visual aspect of the topic to post to your Instagram. If you have an email list, bundle it with some other blog posts or articles and send a newsletter periodically.

Tip #5: Link to related content

Whenever you have a phrase that relates to another blog post, link to it. Also link to your core pages on your site: for instance, your admissions landing page, your curriculum, your instructor bios, or your contact us page. Think of internal links (i.e., links between pages on your site, as opposed to links to other people’s websites) as a literal web that makes your site stronger the more you weave connections together. This is good for readers of your blog and good for search engines associating the right topics to your blog posts.

Tip #6: Monitor comments and interaction

Allowing comments is not necessary for a successful blog. But if you do, don’t skimp on moderating the comments. Check regularly for spammy comments to delete them, and reply as quickly as you can to the readers who do post with questions or comments, even if it’s just a quick thank-you message.

The more you show that you can be responsive, the more your beauty school looks like what it is: a collection of real people who care about beauty education and interact respectfully and promptly with prospective students, current students, and graduates.