How To Start a Home Decor 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 home decor blog today.

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What Is Your Blog About?

If you are reading this article, you already know what you want your blog to be about - home decor! Having a topic in mind is important, but to succeed you will want to think a little deeper about what you want to accomplish with your blog. Are you starting a home decor blog for apartments? A blog about home decor on a budget? A home decor blog for retirees? 

Knowing on a deeper level what you want your blog to be about will help you focus and allow you to stand 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 Good Housekeeping all at once, you will find yourself squarely outmatched and very disappointed.

The key is to find a subject that is more narrow than, “home decor”, but wider than “wall hangings for apartment living”. If your topic is too wide, you won’t stand out. If it’s too narrow you’ll quickly run out of things to say or never establish a large enough audience to sustain your blog. 

Some examples of niche home decor blogs are:

• Home Decor for Apartments Blog - Apartment Therapy
• Remodeling and Home Decor Blog - Remodelista
• Turquoise Home Decor Blog - House of Turquoise

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 has never considered home decor before, or are you writing for an audience that knows everything about it - and wants to learn even more? No matter what the core focus of your blog is, considering the people you want to read it will have a major effect on the tone of the blog and the content.

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 home decor 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 home decor blog may include:

• HouseBeautiful.com
• ElleDecor.com
• GoodHousekeeping.com
• CountryLiving.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 home decor 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.

One great option for evergreen content on a home decor blog is to write articles on the basics of home decor. While what the basics are will depend on your niche, you likely have some strong opinions about what works and what doesn’t in home decor. You can write articles teaching the basics of decorating a home, apartment, or whatever space you prefer. By giving good advice on essentials, you create content that will attract new readers now and in the future.

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.

How-to videos are the perfect fit for a home decor blog. They give you the opportunity to produce video content that your audience will find useful, and they can be made as part of your overall content strategy. If you want to write a blog about how to decorate a child’s room, you can also create a how-to video on the topic. That way, those that prefer text can get what they need, while those that prefer video can also get what they want. No matter your niche, you can make quality video content work for you.

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.

New trends and the end of old trends in home decor are great topics for news-type articles. You are bound to find plenty of opinions on what is hot, what is not, and what the future holds for home decor in your niche. You can weigh in with your own opinions in news-type content that alerts your readers to what you see happening in the world of home decor. Since you are probably reading news-type content as a part of your research for your blog, you won’t have to stretch for at create similar content of your own.

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.

There are several good options for image-heavy content on your home decor blog. You may start your own decorating projects, which you can document with photography. You may go to events to check out new offerings from designers and take pictures to post on your blog. Wherever you get your images, weaving them into your content will make it stand out for your readers.

Even if you are not a photography enthusiast, you can learn the basics - enough to allow you to confidently record your projects as you write blog after blog. You will eventually develop a strategy for collecting images and/or taking your own to incorporate in your blog

Mix and Match

Your blog needs a variety of content delivery strategies to attract the widest audience. While it is normal to have a preferred type of content you like, such as long-form how-to articles on different decorating projects, you can learn to create other types of content with a little trial and error. Stretching yourself will give you more types of content and help you learn skills that will serve you and your audience far into the future.

How To Make Money From A Home Decor 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 home decor 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 a great fit for a home decor blog. The platform is easy to add to your blog and it pays commissions to publishers for sales that they help facilitate on products from Amazon.

Blogging about home decor offers an effortless way to include affiliate links to Amazon products. Whether you write about decorating projects, review books about decorating or discuss new methods for decorating, you can find products to link in your blog. Your readers are going to expect and appreciate those links. Using them, they can find and purchase the products you are writing about - and you can get a small commission on the purchases. 

Many home decor blogs start with Amazon Affiliates as their first source of income, and most stick with it for a long time. Small blogs can look to make a few dollars per month, while larger blogs can bring in thousands with 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 great example of a digital product that a home decor blogger could sell is an online course in decorating. You can base the course on your niche and the needs of your audience - a decorating course for country homes, apartments, children’s rooms - it all depends on what you think your audience wants. You can develop video modules that answer the common questions your audience has and sell them for a premium. A well-produced course in this niche could easily sell for $300 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 home decor blog should be based on the niche and the desires of the audience. If you write about your love of red in home decorating, you could purchase or print products in red - like journals for design notes - for just a few dollars a piece. You could then mark the products up significantly to sell to your audience. If your blog becomes popular enough, you could develop your own line of home decorating products to sell.

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.

If your home decorating blog becomes popular, you can capitalize on that demand by offering services that you know your audience will want based on your niche. You could offer personalized decorating services, design services, group coaching, and more. 

Since you have positioned yourself as an expert, you can charge a premium for your time. Just be careful to balance your time, because it is easy to overextend yourself when demand for your services is high. Blogs selling services can make a vast range of incomes, with the best creating a full-time income for the owner and any staff they decide to take on. However, it is important that providing services does not prevent you from keeping up with your blog. It is your blog that drives your business.

Next Steps To Get Your Home Decor 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!

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