Frequently Asked Questions
How does this work?
People can sign up for B3 at any time - but if you register on the 1st day of the month, you won’t be assigned a partner until the following month.
On the 1st day of every month, partner assignments will be posted to the site. By the 10th of that month, everyone should have written and sent (or posted to their site) seven questions for their partner. By the 20nd of that month, each person should have answered those seven questions, and emailed the answers back to their partner. By the 28th of that month, each person should have posted their interview to their own site, and left the URL of that post here on the hub site. (Hint: the earlier you post your completed interview and leave the URL in the comments, the faster you’ll get SEO for your own site.)
Who’s eligible?
Anyone who blogs primarily about beauty - makeup, nail polish, skincare, hair care, beauty products and cosmetics in general. You can be a professional beauty blogger (paid blogger), or an amateur (just doing it for love of the subject). If you run a beauty-product company, you may join…but keep in mind that you could be asked to interview competitors and feature those interviews on your blog at any point. If this makes you uncomfortable, this may not be the network for you.
The only requirements for blogs in the network are: they’re publicly accessible; they’re in English (or have English translations alongside their primary language); they’re at least six months old; they update at least twice a week; their posts are at least 50% beauty-related.
So anyone who has a beauty blog can join?
At this point, yes - anyone who has a beauty blog that is at least six months old, and has been updated at least twice a week, can apply to join the network. Beauty bloggers are a diverse group of people, and sometimes in the great madding crowd we may not get the chance to see smaller, lesser-known blogs that may nonetheless publish stuff we really, really like - so we want to provide this as a way to knit the beauty blogging community together, get us all genuinely interested in each other’s sites. (We may change these restrictions as time goes by to try and minimize participation by the overly commercial, extreme-narrow-focus beauty blogs who are just looking to get more business for themselves, but we’re hoping that people who blog solely about the products they sell or represent will see that this isn’t the best way to try and get customers.)
How do I get accepted?
Just register for the site, list your URL in your profile, indicate whether you want to sign up for just B3 or for both of my sites (Beauty Blogs Backstage and Sparklecrack Central) and I’ll go check you out. Once you’ve been reviewed and approved, you’ll receive an email telling you how to update your profile. You may also want to follow @beautybloggers on Twitter - I’ll post regular reminders there for partner assignments, sending your interview questions, sending your answers, posting your interviews, et cetera.
What are the rules? Do I have to display a badge? Do I have to participate every month?
No, you don’t have to display a badge…unless you really want to. You must send seven questions to your partner each month you participate; you do have to answer the questions your partner sends you; and you do have to post your partner’s responses on your blog. You don’t have to display a badge…but you may if you wish to.
Once you’ve been accepted into the network, you are assumed to be participating every month unless you contact us by the 3rd of that month and say, “I’m taking this month off.” You may have a vacation coming up. You may be slammed at work. You may just need a break. No worries…just please let us know as soon as possible, so that we can assign everyone an active partner for that month.
Since each “round” takes a full month, you should generally have enough time to research your partner, come up with your seven questions, and answer the seven that you receive. Very rarely, though, you’ll have some emergency come up last-minute, and it’s the third week and even though you thought you could participate you just *can’t* this month…there’s still an option. Contact us and your partner by the 21st, and we’ll interview your partner for that month. Then, when you come back next month, you’ll be assigned the same partner, and you’ll have a chance to interview them and post your answers to their questions. (Meanwhile, they may be asked to angel someone else that month.) So while there’s an “emergency-out”, this isn’t a way to avoid interviewing one particular blogger, or to only interview bloggers who you think will give you the best exposure/best SEO/so forth.
(It doesn’t matter if you’re doing this as a hobby, if you’re doing this as a pseudo-internship to help you get a foothold in advertising or marketing or fashion or beauty, or if you’re an established professional blogger with advertising deals and sponsorships every month. Everyone who is accepted to the Beauty Blogs’ Backstage network will be interviewed by, and will interview, all types and levels of beauty bloggers.)
What happens if I don’t send review questions one month, or don’t post the other person’s answers to my questions?
If you’re accepted to the network but don’t send quality questions, don’t answer your partner’s questions, don’tdon’t post your partner’s interview on your site, or don’t leave the URL of your partner’s interview displayed on your site, you may be removed from the network. If that happens, all your interview-answers will be removed from the site hub, and your partners have the option of removing your interviews from their sites. This will lose your site links and mentions, so this is probably not something you want to do.
If you remove yourself from the network - you contact us asking that you be removed permanently for whatever reason, and you’ve been an active member for more than six rounds - your previous interviews will remain on the site’s hub.
What’s a “quality question”? Who decides?
A quality question is something that isn’t answered in your partner’s site FAQ (if there is one). A quality question is something that lets the blog owner tell a story, or provide some insight to their thought processes. A quality question is something that you haven’t asked every single other partner you’ve had. These interviews give you a chance to write interesting answers and publicize your site, but you have to do some work, too. Be a good interviewer! Dig through your partner’s site, come up with questions whose answers would genuinely interest you, come up with questions that you’d like to be asked, come up with questions that aren’t too similar to questions they’ve already been asked in previous rounds by previous partners. If we notice that you’re asking all of your partners the same questions, or highly similar questions, we may remove you from the network. This isn’t supposed to be a “cookie cutter” set of interviews, this is supposed to let us, and all of our respective readers, learn more about us and our blogs.
As to who decides…we decide. We don’t make snap decisions; and we’re not likely to remove a blogger from the network if one single interviewee says that they received uninteresting questions. We’ve got to see a pattern, we’ve got to see a real genuine reason to remove someone from the network. What one person thinks of as interesting questions may sound kind of lame to another, and a third person may find some interesting and some not quite so much. (We also know that people have bad days, there may be friction between bloggers, et cetera et cetera. One negative report from one source isn’t going to get us to send you a Dear Joan letter.)
Will I always have a new partner?
You will have a different partner every month, unless you “emergency-opted-out” the previous month. We’re hopeful that the network will grow large enough that people will have plenty of possibilities for interview partners; and we’ll try to avoid matching up bloggers who’ve interviewed each other before. If you should happen to get a blogger who you’ve interviewed in the past 12 months, contact us and we’ll see about changing partners.
How long do I have to keep interviews up on my site?
For the life of your site, or for the life of this network - whichever ends first. If you’re beauty-blogging for the next ten years and this network doesn’t survive past three years, you can remove the back interviews from your site. However, we (and your interview partners) would hope that you’d leave the interviews and links in place for the life of your site, since that knits the larger beauty blogger community together.
I’ve received an interview partner whom I really don’t like. I don’t find their site interesting, and I don’t think my readers would, either. Can I get a new partner?
Think of this as a challenge to your creativity and ingenuity as an interviewer. We’re fully confident that you will think up questions to ask that will appeal to a wide range of interests. (In other words…no, you can’t avoid interviewing or being interviewed by a certain blogger.)