- 3 days ago
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Ready to share your ideas with the world? Start your blog →
This article offers a step-by-step overview of how to start a fashion blog independently or as part of starting a business and includes how to make money with it too.
Having a great sense of style and affinity for new trends, it’s no wonder why you’d want to become a fashion blogger. In much the same way as fashion transcends borders, creating a blog lets you bring your ideas and expertise onto the global stage.
There are several things to consider when blogging as a beginner, such as defining your audience, planning how to make a website from scratch and publishing the right type of content.
Learn more: Why start a blog?
Starting a blog should feel exciting, not overwhelming, right? With the Wix Blog Maker, you get everything you need to create, design and grow your blog from scratch–without needing a tech degree. Use Wix’s intuitive tools to share your ideas with the world.
How to start a fashion blog
01. Create your blog
Joining the blogsphere allows you to show off your skills and lets audiences gain access to your fashion knowledge. As you set out to start a fashion blog, you’ll need to make sure every element on your page is on-point with your message and the type of website you're creating.
Begin by choosing from professionally designed free blog templates that offer popular features and tools that are in line your industry. Each one of these templates is fully customizable and can be edited to match your themes and goals.
The next step is to find a color scheme that sets the perfect tone for what you want to convey. If you’re writing a blog dedicated to French style, using the nation’s blue, white and red colors could evoke an authentic mood for your readers. In terms of design, take a look at blog examples for inspiration and see how others have successfully merged the world of fashion and web. You can also check out all types of blogs for inspiration, we love travel blogs for this.
Additionally, when crafting a blog logo think about what best describes your overall concept, is it chic or edgy? In the case of the former, picking a logo font that has a classy and minimalist look reminds us that elegance is no-nonsense, true to your position on couture. Learn more about how to make a fashion logo.
Every aspect of your blog should be working to support your statement, including the name. If you're still looking for ideas, check out the blog name generator. Or start with these fashion blog name ideas.
For an example of how brand and visual choices anchor a fashion-adjacent online presence, consider Freya Simonne, co-founder of Shaun Oliver, the Savile Row-trained bespoke tailoring brand based near London. "Visit our website and you won't find a single product for sale," she explains. "For a bespoke high-end brand like ours, I believe a website's goal shouldn't be to sell a product but rather, to sell an experience." Her brand discipline, every visual choice serving one tightly-defined audience, is the same instinct that separates fashion blogs that build a real following from ones that try to appeal to everyone.
Learn more about some of the best fashion website builders out there.
02. Get a hosting plan and domain name
Publishing your blog online is a two-step fold, you’ll need to store it on a web space, which is where visitors are able to access it and link that to a domain name. Consider these helpful suggestions for getting started:
Get a web hosting server to make your site live. Web hosting provides space to hold all your data on its server, keeping your site fully functional. Wix offers free web hosting that’s secure, reliable and automatic once your site’s published.
Pick the perfect domain name to help visitors find you in search engines. Making a great first online impression can start with your domain name so be sure it sounds professional and memorable. Your domain name should be closely associated with that of your blog’s, a variation or an extension of it. If you haven’t settled on a blog name yet, you can enlist the help of a blog name generator. When coming up with a domain name avoid using numbers or hyphens, as it might make it difficult for your audience to remember. Taking a name like ‘little-silver-dress.com’ is less likely to be found than, say, ‘littlesilverdress.com’ as the latter falls easier on the eyes. Before you make a final decision, check that it’s available by doing a domain name search, as well as looking across different social media handles.
03. Select a fashion blog niche
Anyone who has thought to start a fashion blog may already be familiar with the wide range of choices out there. There are celebrity blogs, ones on personal or street style, fashion critique and news or shopping. Depending on your preference and personal experience, you’ll want to figure out a blog niche that’s right for you and your audience.
Focusing on a fashion niche will help you establish authority in the field. By becoming specialized in something, you can really begin to take on the specific wants and needs of your audience. You’ll also feel better connected with them and vice versa. Plus, down the line, targeting a niche will make it easier for you to create more engaging content and winning marketing campaigns.
Worth knowing: A niche feels narrowing but it usually does the opposite for new bloggers. A fashion blog covering "sustainable workwear for women over 40" will attract a smaller but more engaged audience than one covering "fashion." Smaller and engaged converts to readers, subscribers and eventually monetization but broad and shallow rarely does. If the niche feels almost embarrassingly specific when you write it down, you're probably close to the right level of focus.
04. Publish high-quality fashion content
Before you begin writing a blog post, think about the people who’ll read and benefit from it. This will help you narrow down fashion topics that’ll resonate with your audience and encourage them to come back for more.
A blogger’s goal is to attract visitors. With this in mind, research topics before investing in them and ask if they’ll provide value to your audience. By creating fashion content that meets or exceeds their wants and needs you can ensure a good retention rate for your blog. If they are more keen on keeping up with the Kardashians than looking at what everyday folks wear, then producing content around subject matters like red carpet dresses or TV beauty trends is hands down a better fit.
After you’ve captured their attention, you’ll want to hold on to it with quality content. Set up an editorial calendar to stay on top of your all published pieces and track any blog goals you may have, such as meeting a target number of posts per week or introducing fresh subject matters. Having a schedule will allow you to brainstorm topic ideas, let you review existing content, evaluate what’s working or not and help develop your blog.
You can read more about this in our comprehensive, step-by-step blog post checklist to help you begin writing.
One thing worth knowing: The gap between publishing a post and that post finding readers is usually months, not days. The bloggers who build durable traffic spend their first six to twelve months publishing for an audience that hasn't arrived yet. That's not a sign the work isn't paying off, it's the normal shape of the curve. Plan content you'd be proud of even with zero readers, since most of your early audience will discover the posts long after they're written.
05. Grow your blog traffic
When you first planned to start a fashion blog, you were probably already envisioning how many people would find it and become instant fans. That’s where SEO, or search engine optimization, comes into play.
SEO is the process of optimizing content to improve a website’s position within search results, ensuring that you’re being found by users who are interested in or may find value in your content.
By performing some keyword research, you’ll find the different terms people use when they look for something in your field of expertise on search engines. Implementing targeted keywords in your content, therefore, can help optimize your posts. This will boost your blog’s search performance or improve the chances that your blog is seen by someone searching online.
Take some time to read through this complete guide on SEO for bloggers to learn the best ways to grow your web traffic. Worth knowing: SEO results from a new blog typically take weeks to months to compound, regardless of how well-optimised the posts are. Newer blogs in particular often see ranking movement only after six months of consistent publishing. Plan SEO as a long-term channel and run other channels (social media, email, guest posts) in parallel for the early months so the blog has readers arriving while organic traffic builds.
The SEO-blog-as-traffic-engine approach also works outside fashion and the lessons translate. Gita Jacobson, the founder of In the Deets, a renovation consulting firm in the USA, built her business almost entirely through her Wix blog's SEO. "It seemed easy to work with, and the website templates were very high-end looking," she says. "I also liked that I didn't need to know how to code, I could just drag and drop elements and get creative." Her blog became her first client acquisition channel, replacing what would otherwise have been ad spend. The principle (consistent SEO-targeted blogging brings strangers to your site over time) holds for any niche, fashion included.
06. Promote and expand your reach
In order to grow your readership, you’ll need to pick the right marketing efforts for your fashion blog. This way, you can successfully expand your reach across all the relevant channels.
There are many types of marketing strategies to choose from, including being active on social media, sending newsletters or guest writing, to name a few. If you haven’t already, ask yourself who’s on your blog and what are they reading, so that you can segment your audience and tailor your efforts to fit each group’s specific needs, behavior and interest.
At this stage, it’s vital that you really get to know your readers. You’ve done some of this work by picking your niche. Now you can begin gathering specific information about your audience by interviewing current readers or conducting online surveys. Once you’ve got a good impression of who they are, you’re ready to take more actionable steps to reel them in.
Here’s a selection of popular strategies to help promote your fashion blog:
Social media marketing is the process of creating and sharing content on social networks to promote a business or brand. Your content should fit the platform that you’re partaking in to effectively drive up engagement and improve your brand awareness. One of the biggest reasons for marketing on social media is the combined billions of users that check in everyday. These free platforms allow for a flexible marketing strategy and can be customized to fit your brand. You can choose to promote your blog using paid advertising on them too. Take a look at these two social media examples to learn a bit more on what each one entails. Instagram is most often the first choice for many fashionistas, whose greatest asset is their visual appeal. It allows them to connect with others through photography, live streaming and compelling video making. On the other hand, Twitter is successful in providing a direct line of communication between you and your audience. It’s a good place to churn out quick and easy updates in seconds, which followers will appreciate. According to Dana Srebrnik, Brand Engagement and Reputation Team Lead at Wix.com,
"When building a comprehensive brand strategy, it's always important to familiarize yourself with the unique features and everchanging guidelines of each social media platform and adapt your content strategy accordingly. This then allows you to then tailor content formats, hashtags, and posting frequencies to suit the preferences of each platform's audience."
Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies. The benefits of this practice include building engagement with your blog and turning one-time visitors into loyal followers. There are different types of email marketing campaigns to choose from - automated emails, campaigns and newsletters - which can be combined or work as standalones. Starting a newsletter, for example, is a good and organized way to share your blog content on a consistent basis. You can plan to send it as you see fit. If you want to save time, you can implement automated marketing emails into your strategy, which are automatically sent when triggered based on specific actions readers take - or not. For example, they can be a welcome email that’s sent after someone signs up for a mailing list or a birthday campaign.
Guest blogging gives you access to new crowds. It’s the process of blogging on an external publication and formally presenting oneself to an untapped audience in hopes of generating wide awareness of one’s brand or blog. Your guest posts should be informative and possibly can shed light on something new. Writing about an expert topic or taking on a new angle offers a lot of value to readers and encourages them to return to you.
Create a member’s area where people can choose to follow specific posts and customize their notification preferences, improving their overall experience on your site. This is also an ideal place for readers to get to know each other and interact on a community level. Having a member’s area also lets you observe what diehard followers are up to on your pages. As a result, you can see what they like to read and follow and what posts have piqued their interests.
Worth knowing: fashion bloggers who try to be active on every platform at launch usually end up half-active everywhere and strong nowhere. Pick one primary channel that suits your content shape (Instagram for outfit posts, TikTok for trend videos, Pinterest for editorial styling, a newsletter for written analysis) and treat the others as cross-posts at most. Going deep on one channel for the first year almost always outperforms going wide on four.
07. Monetize your fashion blog
Ready to get fashion blogging? Get started with Wix today.
You’ve successfully become a fashion blogger who not only creates influential content but has built a dedicated following. Now it’s time to learn how to monetize a blog and explore the different ways that’ll work for you.
You probably ran this thought through your mind once or twice when you first set out to start a blog. Here are some additional ideas when considering how to make money blogging:
Consider paid membership plans. You decided to start a fashion blog because of your expertise and due in part to the fact that you have a unique sense of style. People seek your blog because it’s an invaluable source of content that they’re not ready to part with anytime soon. In fact, they would probably pay money to get their hands on some more. So why not put that in the form of a pricing plan. You can offer premium content to paying members, while keeping the rest of your blog for free viewing. Schedule in some member’s only blog posts in that handy editorial calendar you’ve put together. You can select premium content according to their exclusivity. A sneak peek of any upcoming fashion launch could be just the thing to turn the right amount of heads.
Become an affiliate marketer. Perhaps you like the sound of working with another company. In turn, the other business sees this as an opportunity for them to gain paid access to your substantial following. Becoming an affiliate marketer lets you partner with other brands and promote their products to your readers, earning a commission for every sale generated from an affiliate link. Take time to research the different affiliate programs, including the Wix Affiliate Program, before you reach out.
Create sponsored content. This is another way to partner with other brands. A sponsored post often includes a product review or shows how you use the company’s product or service for yourself. Unlike an affiliate program, you will earn a steady income that does not depend on sales alone. Look out for brand partnerships that fit you. Maybe you prefer to make weekly posts over daily ones. Think about how many sponsored posts you'll need to create to earn a good revenue from the deal. Don’t be shy to inquire with businesses about potential partnership opportunities. Worth knowing: monetization works in proportion to audience trust, not just audience size. A fashion blog with 2,000 engaged readers who treat the writer as a stylist they trust will monetize better than one with 20,000 occasional readers who treat the blog as a feed they scroll past. When you're early, prioritise depth of trust over reach. Affiliate links, sponsorships and paid memberships all depend on it.
Check out these stunning fashion portfolio examples for inspiration.
What are some common mistakes to avoid when starting a fashion blog?
Starting a fashion blog can be exciting but it’s easy to fall into common pitfalls that can make it stressful or limit your growth. Here are some of the main mistakes to avoid:
Lack of a clear niche: Trying to appeal to everyone dilutes your content. Define a niche, such as sustainable fashion, street style or luxury trends, to establish your blog's unique identity.
Inconsistent posting: Infrequent content updates can deter followers, create a realistic content calendar to maintain consistency.
Neglecting the quality of your images and design: Poor-quality photos and unappealing layouts can diminish your fashion blog’s credibility. Invest in good photography and a clean, user-friendly design.
Ignoring SEO: Overlooking search engine optimization (SEO) means your blog won’t reach its potential audience. Research keywords and optimize your posts to rank in search engines and bring you traffic.
Copying other blogs and bloggers: Mimicking others hurts your own creativity and may alienate your readers. Showcase your personality and unique perspective on fashion first and foremost.
Overloading with ads: Excessive advertising can make your fashion blog look unprofessional and annoy readers, so balance monetization with valuable content.
Not engaging with your audience: Failing to respond to comments or interact on social media can make your blog feel impersonal. You need to build a community by connecting with your audience. One nuance worth knowing: the mistake most fashion bloggers actually make first isn't on the list above, it's quitting. Fashion blogging is one of the most competitive blog niches, and the readers, traffic and income often arrive in the second year, not the first. Many promising blogs disappear in months four to eight, right before they would have started compounding. Set a realistic time horizon (12 months minimum) before judging whether your blog works.
