How To Start a Fashion Blog

Starting a blog is one of the best ways to build an audience, get your ideas out into the world, and possibly make some (or a lot) of money while doing what you love. 

Getting started and taking the first steps can feel like a huge challenge. Building a website, planning your content, and finding the right business model are just a few of the tasks you’ll need to do to succeed.

Don’t worry! By the end of this article, you should have the knowledge and tools you need to feel confident and prepared to start your fashion blog today.

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What Is Your Blog About?

If you’re here, the answer to this question probably seems quite obvious – you are starting a fashion blog! But, while it is definitely great that you have a general topic picked out, the fact is that you will need to dig a little deeper to determine what you want to accomplish with your blog. Do you want to create a blog about older women’s fashion? A fashion blog for teens? A fashion blog for college men?

Knowing on a deeper level what you want to create with your blog will help you stay focused and ensure that you build something that stands out from the crowd.

There’s a quote that fits this situation perfectly:

"If you try to be everything for everybody, you will be nothing to no one."

Establish Your Niche

When creating a new blog, you need to find your niche. This is the corner of the market that you have the most knowledge about, the place you can establish yourself as an absolute authority. If you try to take on In Style all at once, you will find yourself squarely outmatched and very disappointed.

The goal is to find a subject that is more narrow than “fashion”, but wider than “fashion for 10-year-olds in rural Oklahoma”. If your topic is too wide, you won’t stand out. If your topic is too narrow, you will quickly run out of things to say or never build a big enough audience to sustain you.

Some examples of niche fashion blogs are:

• Curvy Female Fashion Blog - Girl With Curves
• Emerging and Luxury Fashion Blog - Camille Over the Rainbow
• Kids Fashion Blog - Paul & Paula

Name Your Blog

Once you’ve found your niche, it’s a great time to start brainstorming a web domain name for your blog. You’ll want to pick a name that’s brandable and available. Use our domain name tool to check if your name is available. If it is, scoop it up before someone else gets to it first.

Brand Your Blog

The strongest and most memorable businesses are built on a solid brand. When developing your brand, think about what your business stands for. Customers and clients are looking for companies that have a compelling brand, as much as they are shopping for high-quality products and services.

Creating a logo for your business is vital for increasing brand awareness. You can design your own unique logo using our Free Logo Generator. Our free tool will help you brand your business with a unique logo to make your business stand out.

Finding Your Audience

Having a good sense of who is going to be reading your blog is one of the best ways to know what type of content to create, how to shape it, and, ultimately, how to grow your following. With a clear understanding of your niche, understanding your audience should come more naturally.

Finding your target audience - the people you want hanging out on your blog - isn’t only statistics and demographics. It requires a deeper understanding of who these people are and what they want. Your target audience is the people you’re writing to when you write your blog.

Are you writing to an audience who knows nothing about fashion, or one that knows everything and wants to know more? What about an audience of mothers interested in kid’s fashion, or an audience of teens who want to be in the know minute-by-minute? Knowing who you want reading your blog will greatly impact the way you write and what you write about.

Create a Persona

One way to understand your audience is to create a persona of your perfect target audience member. This essentially means creating a mock-up of the ideal person you hope to reach with your blog.

Here is an example of a target audience persona:

Having a persona for your perfect audience member helps you to visualize and understand who you are writing for and provides important direction to your content.

Be Your Own Persona

Another popular way to find your perfect target audience is to be your own persona. Many of the best products and services come from scratching your own itch. It’s possible you’ve searched for the perfect fashion blog to read, came up short, and decided to create it yourself. This makes you the perfect audience member for your own blog.

This can be a great strategy for creating highly effective content. If you’ve noticed a meaningful omission in blog content, chances are you are not alone. By writing personally satisfying content you are likely to reach an audience in search of the same things.

Where Is Your Audience Hanging Out?

No web content exists in a vacuum. While you should strive to create uniquely entertaining content for your blog, your target audience is almost certainly already out there reading other blogs, engaging on specialized forums, and using social media. Finding the sites where your audience already mingles is a great way to discover what topics they are most interested in, what language they are using, and what valuable content you can add to that mix.

Some examples for your fashion blog may include:

• FashionNova.com
• Elle.com
• HapersBazaar.com
• Bustle.com

Visiting these sites is also a great way to begin engaging with your audience before your blog has even gone live. Jump into conversations on forums and in comments sections and get to know the people you’ll be writing for. This is a great, organic way to build relationships and direct people to your blog in its early days. Sharing your passion with like-minded people will make them more excited and passionate about supporting you in your blogging endeavor.

How Will You Present Your Work?

Traditionally, when most people think about a blog they picture written content on a page. However, there are several different ways to present your ideas on your blog, depending on your subject matter and target audience. Every blog will thrive with different formats, so it’s important to think carefully about how to best showcase your content before you start.

There are several effective methods of presenting the material on your fashion blog. They include:

Evergreen Articles

As the name suggests, evergreen articles are composed of content that lasts. These articles are designed to have a long shelf life and continue drawing readers to your blog over time. They are typically long-form, text-based articles that delve more deeply into a particular topic.

An excellent option for evergreen content on a fashion blog is covering fashion basics for your audience. While your choice for evergreen content will vary dramatically by the niche you choose, you can safely say that some topics in your niche are likely to remain relatively constant – certainly some will stay more constant than others. Fashion basics are things that your audience needs to understand to build their own sense of style and are topics that will keep attracting new readers year after year.

Videos

While the video format is not new, the explosive growth of YouTube and the advent of new and innovative video-based tech like Snapchat and TikTok have shown the true power of video as an online medium. While you may think that creating video is much more difficult and expensive than writing your content, you have access to all the technology you need to make high-quality video content right on your smartphone.

Video is a great content medium for fashion blogging because it allows you to show your audience your fashion approach in real life. You can create how-to videos, for instance, that show your readers how to incorporate specific fashion ideas into their own styles. You could also create daily outfit videos, showing you choosing from your wardrobe so that they get an idea of how you do what you do. Quality video content can help you reach an audience that wants more than just text.

News-type Articles

News articles or other “announcement” type content can be a great way to gather new readers. One benefit of news content is the short-term but powerful increase in search volume during an event. While this bump may be temporary, it can be a great tool for grabbing new readers who end up coming back for more.

Writing about current events or new happenings also means there will typically be less competition for readers. Other blogs and media sources are all getting the information as it develops. Since the base of knowledge available is smaller, this gives you a good opportunity to add your own flavor to the article.

The downside to news-type articles is that they tend to lose popularity much more quickly than evergreen content. While the interest for an event may be very large one day, the next day people may already be moving on to the next shiny object.

Your fashion blog is the perfect place to create news-type articles. You know fashion is in constant flux, with new ideas and approaches arriving practically every day. You can write about emerging trends, fashion choices of celebrities – whatever topics fit within your niche and interest you. And if you want, you can put a strong dose of opinion in there, too – which your audience will likely love.

Image-heavy Content

While most people expect to be reading when they visit a blog, image-heavy content can be very appealing and break up your text-focused posts to keep people’s attention. Depending on the topic of your post, displaying multiple images per page on a single subject can give your audience a better sense of what you are trying to convey.

While some topics may take to images very easily, like a car blog or a celebrity gossip site, others may require some deeper thinking to make this strategy work.

Your fashion blog is the place where you can really learn to get the most out of images, incorporating them throughout your blog on a regular basis to emphasize and support your text. Whether you are posting photos of your daily outfits, photos to explain how-to articles, or collecting and sharing images from other places around the internet, you will have plenty of options for producing image-heavy content.

Try to think about images as part of your research and writing process. With each new topic, you can gather or create images as part of the writing of the blog. Then, you can incorporate those images in the text.

Mix and Match

You don’t have to stick to just text, just video, or just any single type of content delivery strategy – in fact, you shouldn’t stick to just one. Successful fashion blogs utilizes a variety of content types to appeal to the broadest audience possible. Even if you are not comfortable creating a particular type of content, try to stretch yourself and learn new skills. Eventually, you may find that you are great at many different types of content and that you enjoy the variety both for you and your audience.

How To Make Money From A Fashion Blog

One of the main reasons people start blogs is to generate some sort of profit. Whether you’re looking for a few hundred dollars per month or a job-replacing income, blogging is still an excellent way to make those dreams a reality.

There are a few great ways to make money from a fashion blog:

Display Ad Networks

Display ads are the simplest way for websites to generate any sort of income. Ad networks, like Google Adsense, are fairly simple to be accepted into, and implementation onto your site is streamlined and clean. If you’re just beginning to see some traffic to your blog and want to turn this into dollars, display ads are where most people start.

There are a few downsides to display ads, however. The first is that some feel they detract from the user experience on your blog. Most people have been to a site where large ads pop up and block the content in the middle of reading. This can be distracting, frustrating, and even drive people away from your blog. While it’s possible to clean up and control the type of ads you use, it can be a constant battle to balance effective ad placement with aesthetics and readability.

The other main downside is that they don’t pay a lot. These networks generally use a pay-per-click (PPC) model which, depending on the niche, can pay anywhere from $0.01 to $1.50 per click, most on the lower end.

While display ads are a great way to make your first dollars, you’ll want to make sure any negatives they bring are worth the profits they provide. Once you develop a solid following, you can consider moving on to more lucrative and effective profit-making options.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing programs like Amazon Affiliate have become much more popular over the past few years, as they take the payment model from pay-per-click to cost-per-acquisition (CPA). This means you can refer as many users to an advertiser’s product as you want, but will only get paid when the user makes a purchase.

Both advertisers and publishers benefit from an affiliate marketing setup. The advertiser pays nothing until a sale is made and the publisher enjoys much higher commissions than the pay-per-click model.

The Amazon Affiliate program is an awesome way to start bringing income from your blog, even if it only starts as a small amount. The platform is easy to incorporate into your blog and will give you a commission for every sale that your referral leads to.

Blogging about fashion is especially well-suited to the program because you will want to incorporate Amazon links in your content as a matter of course. Whether you are talking about accessories, shoes, clothing, makeup or some other products, chances are you can find many of them on Amazon. You want to make it easy for your readers to pick up those products while reading your blog – and a link to Amazon will make the process seamless.

Many fashion blogs start with Amazon Affiliates as their first source of income and keep going with it for years. Small blogs may make a few dollars per month, while larger blogs can bring in thousands from this model

Sell Digital Products

Digital products are an online entrepreneur's dream. You create the item once, then sell it as many times as you can, with little to no cost of reproduction. This means that you can scale your business to infinity.

Examples of digital products are:

• Ebooks - A piece of writing, generally in PDF format. These can contain literally anything that your audience would want. They can either be true book-length all the way down to a few pages of content. Depending on your niche, audience, and subject, these can run from $1 to $100 per sale fairly easily.
  
  
• Gated Content - This is content that is served on your website just like any other article, except that is behind a “paywall”. If you are creating content that you don’t want to be released to anyone but your true followers, you have them sign up for an account on your site and charge them a subscription fee for access. Generally, authors charge anywhere from $5 to $200 per month for access to gated content.
  
  
• Online Courses - If you can teach a skill that your audience wants to learn, you can create an online course to sell to them. These courses can be formatted in whatever way makes the most sense to you, but most nowadays are video courses. Online courses can sell from $10 to well over $10,000 per course, obviously depending on the subject matter and audience.

A good example of a digital product that a fashion blogger could sell is an online course on how to improve your wardrobe. You could gather ideas from your audience on what kind of specific help they need when it comes to their wardrobes, and then create video lessons that go in-depth to answer those questions. A well-produced course in this niche could easily sell for a few hundred dollars or more per sale.

Sell Physical Products

Selling physical products is the original money-making strategy. You gather an audience that is hungry for something, you sell it to them, and everyone wins. You don’t have to be an inventor, designer, or manufacturer to sell products. Sites like Alibaba and AliExpress import already-made items into the United States and sell them for a markup.

The two main methods for the distribution of these items are: dropshipping and self-fulfilled.

Dropshipping is a method where you advertise a product on your site that you do not own. Once you make the sale, you inform the manufacturer, who will handle the shipping and handling to the end-user. While this is simple because you don’t have to worry about storing or shipping any items yourself, you’ll find that the margins can be quite slim.

Self-fulfilled sales are much more of a hands-on approach to sales. You buy the item from the manufacturer, store it, then ship it to the end-user once you have made the sale. While there is much more work involved, you’ll find that the margins per sale are much higher.

Product sales through a fashion blog should be relatively easy to do. As long as you understand your niche and the kinds of things that your audience will want to purchase from you, then you can develop products based on that demand. For example, if you blog about fashion accessories, you can sell your own brand of accessories on your site. You can also offer branded items like keychains, lanyards, and other inexpensive products – ones you can purchase for a few dollars and mark up significantly.

While it can be very profitable when done well, selling products is not generally recommended for the beginner blogger. It’s best to secure an audience that you know will be receptive to the product before making a large investment in product development or acquisition.

Create A Service

Providing a service is another very basic money-making plan. If you can provide a service that you know your audience needs, you have a viable business on your hands.

Whether this service is delivered through one-on-one interaction with the user, through a piece of software that you develop, or by directly completing a task for the user, this is a great way to monetize your skillset and your blog.

You can create a service based on the focus of your fashion blog. If you write about makeovers, you could offer personalized makeovers done by you in the home of your clients. It all depends on your skills, your audience and what they are likely to want from you.

You have positioned yourself as an expert through your blog, which means you can charge a premium for your time. Just be aware that it is easy to accidentally overextend yourself, especially if demand is high. Try to balance your services with your blog – because your blog is what drives your business. With the right strategy, you could make a full-time income from your services, especially when combined with your blog.

Next Steps To Get Your Fashion Blog Started

Now that you have the strategies in place to build and grow your own blog, check out our free course: How To Start A Blog.

This course includes all the essentials on how to get your blog out of your head and onto its own website. Starting a blog is simple and inexpensive, so there’s no reason that you shouldn’t start today!

Free Course: How To Start A Blog

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