How To Start a Men's 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 men's fashion blog today.

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What Is Your Blog About?

You already know what you want your blog to be about - men’s fashion! But deciding your basic topic is only the beginning of starting a successful blog. You need to dig deeper to determine exactly what you want to accomplish with your blog. Do you want to write a blog about men’s fashion for college students? A men’s fashion in NYC blog? A men’s fashion blog for retired men?

Your blog needs a focus, one that will help you stand out from other blogs and one that will help direct your writing.

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 GQ all at once, you are going to be fighting an uphill battle until you give up from frustration and exhaustion.

You need to find the Goldilocks subject, one that is narrower than “men’s fashion”, but wider than “appropriate shoelaces for formal dinners”. A topic that is too wide will never let you stand out, while one that is too narrow will limit your audience and you may run out of things to write about pretty quickly.

Some examples of niche men's fashion blogs are:

• Men’s Fashion on a Budget Blog - George Hahn
• Vintage and Avante Garde Men’s Fashion Blog - Steven Onoha
• Men's Fashion Shoes Blog - The Shoe Snob

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.

Who are you writing your blog for? Are you writing for men who know nothing about fashion and want to learn more, or are you writing for men who have been obsessed with fashion for decades? The differences in your content and tone will vary substantially based on your audience, so you need to be clear about who you are trying to reach with your writing.

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 men's 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 men's fashion blog may include:

• GQ.com
• Esquire.com
• MensJournal.com
• TheAdultMan.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 men's 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.

The evergreen content you create for your men’s fashion blog will depend on your niche, but a good tip for deciding on evergreen content is to look for things that tend to stay constant - like basic men’s fashion advice. Sure, fashion is changing all the time, but you know that the fundamentals tend to remain the same year after year. Reviews also make for good evergreen content, such as reviews of products that people are likely to be interested in years later.

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 fit for a men’s fashion blog. You can take videos of your trips to fashion-related events, you can video an “outfit of the day”, and you can make how-to videos to help your audience try out different fashion ideas. What you do for your blog will be based on your particular niche - like how to choose the right shoes for a shoe blog, or how to wear a mustache for a grooming blog. Regardless of your exact topics, you can incorporate video into your blog without too much trouble if you focus on what your audience wants to see on a video.

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.

The fashion world generates a ton of news, and men’s fashion is no exception. There are always exciting new trends, trends that have been thrown out the window, product releases to get pumped up about, and more. Just be keeping abreast of the news in your niche, you can find plenty of news-type blog topics to write about.

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.

Men’s fashion topics, whatever your niche, are ideal for image-heavy content. The things you are writing about are centered around the visual, so you can expect your audience to want images galore. You just have to decide where you are going to get those images. 

For some topics, like the latest fashion on the runway, you can find images online that you can share in your blogs. For others, like your how-to articles on how to incorporate various knots in your tie repertoire, you may need to take your own photos. Many fashion bloggers work on their photography skills because they want to deliver the best possible images to their audience - without having to spend money purchasing those images. With a little practice, you can take impressive photos and keep your audience coming back for more.

Mix and Match

For your blog to reach the widest audience, you need to incorporate multiple content delivery strategies. It is totally normal to prefer one type of content over another. You might love writing long how-to articles, or you might be passionate about taking photos and packing images into your content. While you should lean into the content that excites you, don’t forget to try new things regularly to gain skills and flesh out your blog. Try out videos, write more news-type blogs - whatever areas you are uncomfortable with, you can become more familiar with those areas and maybe even come to enjoy them. It may take time, but eventually, you can master all the main content types to really make your blog shine.

How To Make Money From A Men's 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 men's 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.

Since you are building a men’s fashion blog, you will need to explore the different men’s fashion affiliate programs out there - and there are plenty to choose from. 

SAYKI is one affiliate program that many men’s fashion bloggers promote because of the high commission they offer. You get 10% of every sale you facilitate, which is high compared to many other commission programs. The Menlo Club is another big affiliate program among men’s fashion bloggers. Formerly known as the Five Four Club, this is a subscription box service to help men upgrade their wardrobes. You get a flat $30 commission from every lead you generate, which can quickly add up. 

As with all affiliate programs, remember to do your research and only promote those that you feel good promoting. While high commissions can seem great at the beginning, maintaining the goodwill of your audience is more important over the long-term.

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.

You have plenty of different digital content options as a men’s fashion blogger. One of the most lucrative could be an online course, depending on your niche and your audience. For example, if you blog about men’s grooming, you could create an online course on how to grow the healthiest, most impressive beard. You could make video modules covering grooming tools, grooming products, diet, cleansing strategies, and more. Well-produced courses in this niche can easily sell for $100 or more.

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.

By writing about men’s fashion, you are positioning yourself to sell products related to your fashion niche - whether you are blogging about shoes, coats, socks, grooming, or pretty much any other topic. You will need to build trust and a decent audience, but eventually, you can design your own products or partner with other companies to create products based on your niche.

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 come to be a trusted name in men’s fashion with your audience, which makes it possible to earn an income from the services you offer - with sales being driven by your blog. You could offer group seminars in men’s fashion, one-on-one coaching, design services, or some other service that makes sense based on your niche. 

One challenge that many men’s fashion bloggers encounter when they start offering services is overcommitting themselves. When so many people are asking for your services - and you can charge a premium due to your blog - it is easy to say yes to everyone. But you only have so much time and you need to maintain your blog to maintain your business. Strive to balance short-term service offerings with the long-term gameplan you have for your blog and your business.

Next Steps To Get Your Men's 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!

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