Beauty after betrayal: the free beauty magazine that rose from the ashes of an online scam

Falling victim to an online scam was the best thing that ever happened to me. Not a statement you will read very often, but true. Without being sucked into a website con, I would never have founded Regime Skin Care. In turn, my free beauty magazine, which now has a global readership, would not even have been a pipedream. It simply wouldn’t exist. And the real clincher? Without being fleeced, I may not be alive today.

So, what happened? To truly tell the story, we have to turn the clock back to January 2020. I’d just been told I had inflammatory breast cancer and that the first phase of my treatment would be chemotherapy. However, it couldn’t start straightaway. I was told that, first, I had to ‘clear my diary’ to make way for more scans, an appointment with an oncologist and a guided tour of the chemo unit. By the time the first infusion was coursing through my veins (the side effect ‘death’ uppermost in my mind) there was something called Covid-19 in the news.

Inside story: pages from a recent issue of Beauty Portfolio magazine, published by Regime Skin Care.

I went from being terrified of cancer to petrified of a virus. The fear made me a very difficult patient! I couldn’t see a future. I figured, if my Stage 3 cancer didn’t progress to Stage 4, I’d develop a cough and be deemed unworthy of saving due to pressures on the health service and my predisposition to not one but two comorbidities - cancer and a progressive form of lung disease. It was a grim time.

I limped through it, saved by the buzz of online shopping. Confined to the home for more than 16 months, except for hospital trips, I immersed myself in everything skincare and makeup. Behind closed doors, I was playing dress-up with a succession of wigs, eyebrow pencils, false lashes, and a ton of makeup. At the same time, I was looking after my skin with gentle products that kept it soft and healthy, preventing infection. 

Every time there was a knock at the door, I couldn’t wait to hear a van pull off - so that I could retrieve my latest purchase from the doorstep. (Everything was sanitised before it came over the threshold.) It was exhilarating, for a while. Then the treatments started to take their toll… I didn’t have quite so much energy and the inclination to get out of bed, let alone faff about with beauty products, was gone.

The con that shook my confidence (and sparked free beauty magazine idea)

On ‘good days’, I still surfed the web. And it was during what must have been an especially good day that I came across the thing that would change the course of my life. I was browsing an ecommerce marketplace when I spotted an advert for ‘pre-made affiliate websites’. I was intrigued. With a background in journalism and marketing, I thought I had as good a chance as anyone at making something like that work. I mean, if I did pull through, I’d need to work - this could be an option to earn while working from home.

I clicked a link that took me to the product page. It read like a dream. ‘Passive income’ - that’s how they described the benefit of owning an affiliate website. I read some more, and thought how easy it all sounded. Buy a pre-designed website, populate it with content, apply for an affiliate code and, Bob’s your uncle, sit back and wait for the cash to roll in. I don’t even think I hesitated when I pressed the ‘Buy’ button. What a fool!

What people selling affiliate websites don’t tell you is that you need a pre-existing, established (and preferably very large) audience, if you want to earn decent commission on sales. Starting from scratch, with a new domain, no subscribers and no organic traffic, is a dead loss. Even with good SEO skills and savvy social marketing, you’re probably never going to turn a profit on your investment. You'd lose interest before all that SEO kicks in.

Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. I bought the pre-made website and a domain, and immediately started creating beauty content. In spite of my predicament, I literally threw everything I mentally and physically had at it. From developing branding and marketing strategies to writing website pages and blog posts, I was all-in. I drew on my experience as an avid consumer and meticulous researcher to write stories about skincare and makeup product types and ingredients, their benefits and potential drawbacks. Lengthy tutorials followed.

You can read the latest issue of Beauty Portfolio magazine by clicking the image above.

Where's my 'passive income'?

Once the website had content, I applied to be an Amazon Associate - and was accepted! I then invested in an app that would link product pages on my website to Amazon, so that frequent price changes could be updated in real-time. With social channels already set up, I then launched a series of competitions to attract followers and potential visitors to the site. I offered prizes like spa sets and gift vouchers.

Here’s something else you may not know… The very mention of the word ‘competition’ or ‘freebie’ attracts plenty of new followers - but very few are engaged or invested in your marketing messages. In fact, if you do a bit of digging, like I did, you will find a shocking number are ‘professional’ compers. These are people who have separate social accounts for their competition activities so, when they share your posts or interact with you, only they are ever going to see it. 

I must have given away £600 worth in prizes before I realised most of the engagement was ‘false’. None of it was translating into website visits. Well, not in any tangible numbers. So, that was the end of my competition stage. Next, I turned to SEO. Now that can be a slow burner but, over time, it started to work. I was making sales. 

In the whir of all-things content creation, the chemotherapy, surgery, radiotherapy, and a bolt-on eight extra months of the targeted cancer drug Herceptin passed by. One day I was a cancer patient, the next I wasn’t. It was over - and so too was the height of the pandemic. Suddenly, I had a life again. Only, I didn’t - because I was too busy writing features, designing graphics for my social channels and checking analytics. In fact, 18 months on from the day I bought a premade website, things were really starting to look up.

The ‘on a roll’ times were about to come to a screeching halt. I finished treatment in June 2021 and not long after, around October, I went to login to my website - and couldn’t. In fact, the login didn’t exist. Neither did my website. It was gone!

Losing more than money: the emotional toll of fraud

I attempted to reach out to my hosting provider, who happened to be the person who sold me the pre-made site, and he was gone too. Over on his company’s Facebook page, I found some angry comments from people in the exact same position as myself. There were no replies. I contacted the domain registration authority - to see if there was another way to retrieve my website - but, it turned out, he had registered my domain, the one I paid for, in his name. All was lost.

After researching his name, I found a death announcement in the Hull Daily Mail. It cited a person of the same name as having recently died in a cancer unit. The deceased was survived by his parents and a brother. However, my hosting provider had always given me the impression he was from Manchester. And not once, when I mentioned the treatment I was undergoing, did he indicate he had cancer too. Either way, he was ‘dead’ - be it physically or digitally. 

Honestly, I was bereft. Not because I’d lost a potential money spinner, but because that website, the beauty products I bought and the passion I felt for makeup and skincare saw me though. They gave me a reason to get up in the morning and face each day with positivity. They breathed life into a dying soul.

For a while, I kept myself busy simply promoting Amazon links on my social accounts. But it wasn’t the same. In January 2022, I was offered a job in a beach bar - and I accepted it. (My other half recommended me, because he thought it would get me out of the house.) Soon, I had money in my pocket as well as spare time (I was only working 13 hours a week), which got me thinking… What if I started it all again, from scratch?

The front cover of the May 2025 issue, featuring young model Yasmin Brock.

Finding strength in vulnerability: Beauty Portfolio magazine

Of course, a pre-made affiliate website was not going to be on my to-buy list! This time around, I bought my own domain name (exactly the same as the one before except a .co.uk instead of a .com) and paid for hosting with one of the world’s biggest providers. That new website is the one you are on right now. There's nothing 'pre-made' about it; I've designed everything myself. Oh, and in case you are wondering, I knocked Amazon on the head too. 

The idea for a free beauty magazine came about quite early on in the website’s journey. With yet another new domain and no search engine traffic, I had to think out of the box. How could I entice people to my blog? The idea I came up with was simple: produce an easily accessible digital magazine that contained valuable information as well as links to more in-depth stories on my website. Sounds ingenious, doesn’t it? The only thing was… the magazine relied on all the same metrics as the website. It was a chicken and egg situation.

For just over a year, I published the magazine quarterly. It reached 80+ pages and, for the number of readers it attracted, was hard work. I was interviewing up-and-coming brands, organising images, doing all the design, and promoting it - for, in all honesty, not much in return by way of clicks on links. I was living, not for money, but for visitors.

I considered ditching the magazine and putting all my effort into SEO. But…It was another itch that I had to keep scratching! In the end, I decided to reduce the pagination to 42 and publish monthly. My goal was to strengthen the branding while making the benefits of using the magazine as a resource much clearer. With good navigation, voice narration and video, it has become a fully interactive beauty companion. As well as introducing News in Brief pages to increase the story count, I’ve refined the design and ensured that the topics featured complement but are not the same as those on my blog. 

Over the past 12 months, Beauty Portfolio has evolved into a living publication that shares skincare and makeup news while also shining a light on sustainability as well as kindness. In this format, it is attracting literally thousands of readers from around the globe every month. How? Well, all that SEO work that I was doing behind the scenes started to pay off. I embedded the magazine into a few of my most popular blog pages - and it took off!

Want to advertise in it? Sorry, it’s my baby and no part of it is for sale. However, if you happen to work for a brand, I’d love to receive your press releases. 

So, it’s been more than four years since I was scammed. Have I made a fortune in passive income? Nope. Do I want to make a fortune in the future? Definitely not! Regime Skin Care and Beauty Portfolio magazine are passion projects and, because of that, I want to nurture and care for them - so that they deliver real benefits to real people without being tainted by greed.

By the way, I still work at that beach bar!