How to Start a Fashion Blog (and Make Money) – Step by Step
Are you looking to start a fashion blog but don’t know where to begin? It is easy to start a blog, but the difficult part is to be successful and make money from it. In this article, we will show you how to start a fashion blog as well as share tips on how to make money from your fashion blog.
Why You Should Start a Fashion Blog?
If you are passionate about fashion and style, then you must have seen some top fashion bloggers and influencers on Instagram.
These fashion blogs not only provide a platform to the bloggers, but they also bring lots of opportunities their way. You will be surprised to discover the many ways fashion bloggers make money from their blogs.
According to Harper’s Bazaar, designers and top brands spend over a BILLION dollar each year advertising on Instagram alone.
Top 10 Fashion Blog Examples That Are Crushing it in 2018
Apart from money, a fashion blog allows you to express yourself in the most creative way. Here are some of the top fashion blog examples that you can follow for inspiration.
- We Wore What – (Danielle Bernstein)
- Sincerely Jules – (Julie Sariñana)
- The Blonde Salad – (Chiara Ferragni)
- Gal Meets Glam – (Julia Engel)
- Song of Style – (Aimee Song)
- Kayture – (Kristina Bazan)
- Wendy’s Lookbook – (Wendy Nguyen)
- Atlantic-Pacific – (Blair Eadie)
- The Chriselle Factor – (Chriselle Lim)
- Gary Pepper Girl – (Nicole Warne)
One thing you’ll notice about each of the top fashion blog examples above, is that they all have their own unique voice, personality, and taste in fashion. These fashion bloggers bring their own unique perspective to highlight their favorite products, merchandise, and brands.
If you believe that you have a unique take on fashion and style, then you should definitely start a fashion blog.
While setting up the fashion blog part is easy, like all important things in life making the blog popular and monetizing it requires effort.
However if you do it right, then you’ll certainly find the experience to be rewarding and fulfilling.
What You’ll Need to Start Your Fashion Blog
First, you need to choose the right platform to build your own fashion blog. You have plenty of choices, but each one of them have its own pros and cons (see our comparison of the best blogging platforms).
For example, you can start a free blog on a platform like WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogger, etc.
These are called free blogs, and they are very limited in terms of features and flexibility when it comes to growing your personal brand. Most important limitation is your ability to make money from your content.
What about Starting a Fashion Blog with Instagram?
Instagram is awesome, but you don’t own it. You can build a huge following and all of this can go away immediately if Instagram decides that your content violated some of their policy.
We are not saying that you shouldn’t use Instagram. You must use it to build a large audience, but you will need a central platform that you can control where you can keep the audience coming back for years to come.
The best way to build your fashion blog is by creating your own website with complete ownership and full control.
Now the question is, how could a beginner with no knowledge of coding can build a website?
This is where WordPress.org comes in. It is a powerful website builder which gives you absolute control and full ownership of your website. It’s important not to confuse WordPress.org with WordPress.com. They’re two different platforms. (See our comparison of WordPress.com vs WordPress.org for more details).
There are three things you need to start a fashion blog using WordPress.org:
- Domain name – This will be your website’s address and what users will type in browser to visit your blog (Example, wpbeginner.com).
- Web hosting – This will be your blog’s home and where you will store all your website files.
- Your undivided attention for 30 mins
Yes, you can start a brand new fashion blog in 30 minutes, and we’ll walk you through the whole set up step by step.
In this tutorial, we will cover the following:
- How to Register a Domain Name for Free
- How to Choose the Best Web Hosting
- How to Install WordPress
- How to Find the Perfect Theme (website design) for Your Fashion Blog
- How to Add Content to Your Fashion Blog
- How to Get More Visitors to Your Fashion Blog
- How to Make Money from Your Food Blog
- Resources to Learn WordPress and Grow Your Fashion Blog
Ready? Let’s get started.
Setting up a Fashion Blog Using WordPress
A domain name typically costs $14.99 / year and web hosting normally costs $7.99 / month.
That’s a lot for beginners who are just starting out.
Luckily, our friends at Bluehost are offering a free domain, a free SSL, and a 60% discount on hosting to our readers.
Basically, you can get started for as low as $2.75 / month.
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NOTE: At WPBeginner we believe in transparency. If you sign up with Bluehost using our referral link, we will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you (in fact, you will save money and get a free domain). We would get this commission for recommending just about any WordPress hosting company, but we only recommend products that we use personally use and believe will add value to our readers.
Let’s go ahead and setup your web hosting + domain so you can get started.
First you need to go to the Bluehost website and click on the get started button.
On the next screen, you will be asked to choose a plan. We recommend either the basic or plus plans. You can always upgrade later if you need to.
Next, it will ask you to choose a domain name for your website.
Domain name is your website’s address and this is what your users will type in their browsers to visit your blog.
You need to choose a domain name that reflects your personal voice. It should be unique, creative, and interesting. For more details, see our tips on choosing a great domain name for your website.
After you enter your domain name, you need to fill out your details to complete the purchase.
You will receive your account details in an email sent to the address you provided during signup. This email contains your web hosting dashboard link and login information.
Once you have purchased hosting, the next step is to install WordPress. You can do that by following the instructions in our step by step guide on how to start a blog.
Choosing a Design for Your Fashion Blog
A blog about fashion and style cannot just go with a plain looking business or blogging layout. Your website needs a design that represents your unique sense of style and creativity.
Most fashion bloggers are not website designers, so how do create a website design that is unique, elegant, stylish, and of course creative?
Luckily there are thousands of pre-made WordPress templates that you can choose from.
Our editors have hand-picked the best WordPress themes for fashion blogs that you can check out. All themes in the list feature creative designs with flexible options to easily make them uniquely yours. Most importantly, all of them are responsive (aka mobile friendly) which means they look good on mobile and tablets as well.
Each of these themes comes with its own settings page. This is where you will set up the theme, add your website logo, choose colors, and select basic settings.
Depending on which theme you choose, you will find tons of customization options. We recommend striving for simplicity in your website’s design for a cleaner look.
Add Useful Content To Your Fashion Blog
Once you have a functioning design in place, you can start working on content. We recommend adding the static content first.
Static content are pages that are common among all websites on the internet. This includes a contact form page, about us page, and a privacy policy page.
If your theme includes a page builder plugin, then you can use it to create other static landing pages as well.
Next, you would want to start adding articles / blog posts. See our guide on how to add a new blog post in WordPress and utilize all the features.
Now, this is where you will develop your own voice. Your blog posts need to be entertaining, informative, and helpful. Running a blog means, you will need to regularly come up with new ideas for your blog posts. Check out these 73 types of blog posts that are proven to work, and you can easily adapt them for your fashion blog.
We recommend choosing a consistent frequency for your articles. Busier and larger websites post new content every day. You can start by adding a few posts per week and then gradually increase your frequency to daily updates.
To come up with regular blog post ideas, visit popular blogs in the fashion industry to gather inspiration. See what these top blogs are doing and replicate it on your blog.
We are not saying that you should just steal / recreate the same content.
You just need to gather topics, collect ideas, and get inspiration. After that you should use those ideas on your blog by adding your own unique voice, style, and flavor to it.
Optimize Your Fashion Blog to Get More Visitors
Once you start adding useful content, the next step is to make sure that users can find your website.
Here is how you ensure that your website gets visitors and those visitors engage with your content.
Start Working on Your Website’s SEO
Most popular blogs get a large portion of their traffic from search engines like Google and Bing. Marketers use SEO, Search Engine Optimization, to optimize their website for higher rankings.
WordPress itself is quite SEO friendly out of the box, but there are still things you can do to further optimize it. Follow our step by step WordPress SEO guide for improving your website ranking.
Improve Website Speed
Speed is one of the most important factors that affects user experience on your website. It also affects your website’s search engine rankings as Google considers speed one of the top ranking factors.
You can make your website significantly faster by implementing certain performance tweaks in WordPress. We have created a complete step by step guide on how to speed up WordPress and boost performance.
Track User Engagement
Things your users do after arriving on your website are called user engagement. Highly engaged audience means, more page views and more success for your fashion blog.
This is where you’ll need Google Analytics. It tells you where your visitors are coming from, what they do on your website, and how you can keep them coming back.
Simply head over to our tutorial on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress, and it will start tracking your website traffic.
Google Analytics offers a lot of data. How do you figure out where to look for the information you need?
To answer this question, we have a separate article on how to track user engagement in WordPress using Google Analytics.
Start Making Money from Your Fashion Blog
Ever wondered how fashion bloggers afford their clothes, makeup, and accessories? Actually, they don’t have to. Most successful fashion bloggers promote sponsored content where brands pay them to promote products.
Paid and sponsored content is the major source of revenue for many fashion bloggers. Here we will list the most effective ways you can start making money from your fashion blog when you’re first starting out.
1. Display Ads Using Google AdSense
Most websites on the internet rely on ads to generate revenue. Google AdSense allows you to easily display ads on your website and make money from your blog even when you’re just starting.
See our step by step guide on how to properly add Google AdSense in WordPress for detailed instructions.
2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing allows you to recommend products you love. You get a referral commission when your users purchase a product after clicking on your link.
To make money with affiliate marketing, you will need to find fashion products and brands with an affiliate program. The biggest affiliate partner you can sign up for is Amazon Affiliates. They have tons of products in fashion, clothing, and accessories that you can recommend and get paid for it.
See our guide on how to add and manage affiliate links in WordPress.
3. Build an Instagram Following
Instagram has placed itself as the top social network for fashion and style influencers. You need to join Instagram and start posting with relevant hashtags to make sure that your posts reach the right audience.
The best way to come up with an Instagram strategy is by following other top fashion blogs on Instagram. Study their posts, descriptions, and hashtags and try to replicate the same effect with your Instagram posts.
You should also network with other influencers and do S4S, share for share, campaigns. In this strategy, each party will share the other’s Instagram posts and tag them. It helps both people increase their following.
Another easy way to build Instagram following is by sharing your Instagram posts on your WordPress blog.
4. Brand Promotions
Reach out to brands, fashion startups, and agencies to partner up with them. The best way to find which companies are doing blog promotions is to keep an eye on top fashion bloggers and their Instagram posts.
For more ways to generate revenue from your fashion blog, see our guide on proven ways to make money from your blog.
Mastering WordPress Skills
WordPress is easy to use and beginner friendly. However, whenever you start using a new platform, there are always new things to discover and learn. This is where WPBeginner can help.
WPBeginner is the largest free WordPress resource site for beginners. We have lots of helpful content which is created specifically for beginners, business owners, and bloggers.
To expand your WordPress skills you should check out:
- WPBeginner Dictionary – Our WordPress glossary is the best place to familiarize yourself with the WordPress lingo
- WPBeginner Videos – New WordPress users can start with these 23 videos to master WordPress.
- WPBeginner Blog – The central place for all our WordPress tutorials and guides.
You can also subscribe to our YouTube Channel where we regularly upload new video tutorials to help you learn WordPress.
We hope this article helped you start your fashion blog and make money from it. You may also want to see our ultimate WordPress security guide to keep your blog safe.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
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