How to Start a Fashion Blog from Scratch – Complete Guide

With the widespread use of social media, tens of thousands of people are building successful fashion brands and many more are learning how to start a fashion blog successfully.

But not so many have been able to build successful fashion blogs in the mould of Awashti of girlswithcurves.com, or the popular Bella Naija Style.

Although so many have recently become interested in Fashion blogging because of the opportunities it offers and the outcomes they could get there’s a lot more to becoming a fashion blogger and in this tutorial, you’re going to learn all it takes.

Why Become a Fashion Blogger?

You might not really plan to build the next Versace or Gucci or Vuitton with your fashion blog but you can still build a formidable brand that will be patronized by fashion houses.

With the growth of Social Media platforms like Instagram, Tiktok, Pinterest etc you can leverage your brand as a fashion influencer to promote other fashion brands to your audience and get paid in return.

Outside these, you may also use the brand to grow your own personal style fashion, build a fashion house or promote your local fashion items.

Now these are not the only reasons anyone would want to start a fashion blog. There are so many other reasons you’d want to start your own fashion blog and you’re going to read up some of them in this guide…

PART 1: Steps to Start A Fashion Blog

Starting a fashion blog is pretty easy. But, there are certain strategies that can help you to build a fashion blog much faster.

In this paragraph, I’ll work you through the step by step process that will help you as you get on your fashion blogging journey…

Create a Plan

The first thing you want to do as you embark on building a fashion blog is to create a plan.

Your Fashion Blogging Plan does not have to be elaborate. It’s more like a semi business plan, a collection of your goals, systems and approaches you want to use in running your blog.

You want to put this all together so it can serve as some form of guide as you work on building the blog.

Your blogging plan should contain some very basic details about your blog like your goals, the possibilities and odds, the steps you’ll use in achieving the goals.

It should also indicate a rough estimate of other resources like time you’ll have to spend to build, monetary expenses etc and other items that will be spent while you grow the blog.

Build a Brand

One unique thing about fashion and personal style blogging is that unlike other blogging niches, fashion can be very personal and unique to you.

If you’re working on building a personal style with your fashion blog then you want to build something that’s very unique and can be distinguished from others.

Even where you’re building a style blog where you share other people’s fashion from time to time, you also want to create a unique brand for your fashion blog.

You want to make your brand unique in a specific way so you can attract a clearly defined audience.

So going back to creating a unique brand, you want to ask yourself some questions like; is there anything that’s unique about my fashion sense that i can showcase with the world out there?

How can I develop on that and make it stand out as my unique selling point?

The reason for this question is because what you’re going to be doing mostly as a fashion blogger would be projecting and sharing your personal style.

So in as much as it has to be very personal, you also want to project something that’s very interesting and attractive to your audience.

When you find this, you can then go ahead and develop a brand for your fashion blog around your unique selling point.

Choose a Platform

Most aspiring fashion bloggers believe that Instagram is the automatic platform to build a thriving blog as a fashionista.

This belief is fueled by improved features that promotes visual content thus making Instagram a preferred social media platform for fashion enthusiasts and most visual blogging.

But, one thing you want to consider before using social media platforms as your preferred blogging platform is the fact that these platform do not specifically belong to you.

It is run by a third party business, with their own terms and conditions of service. This makes it a bit risky because everything you do must stay within the terms and conditions of use as anything outside that can get your post reported, deleted or your account banned.

In as much as you run and own your social media page on these platforms, there could  be policy changes and other factors that could affect you, thus disrupting your business.

For example, recently, Facebook announced changes on their platforms that made it harder for users to organically reach their audience with content.

Also, at some point, Instagram worked on testing the removal of likes count features on the social media platform, thus disallowing users from seeing the total like counts for each content.

Now, changes like this can affect your business adversely where you didn’t prepare for it in advance.

This is why to safe guard such issues from happening, you don’t want to build your fashion blogging platform exclusively on the social media.

Instead of doing that, build your fashion blog on a platform that you have complete control over its management. 

This is where a custom blog comes in handy. Especially if you’re planning to be doing this professionally and for the long haul.

Now this doesn’t mean you won’t use Instagram as part of your fashion blogging platforms.

Rather, instead of focusing on Instagram alone, use it alongside your main blogging platform to push your fashion content on both ways and still get social media traffic back to your blog…

PART 2: Steps to Set up a Fashion Blog

Now that you’ve finished up the first part of setting out the preliminaries, the following are step by step process to set up the technical aspects of your fashion blog…

Get a Domain & Web Hosting

After creating a brand for your fashion blog, the next thing to do is to choose a domain name for your blog.

Now, your Domain Name should not just be anything catchy, choose it in such a way that it projects your brand and unique selling point in such a way that your readers will be able to know what your fashion blog is all about without much stress.

After choosing a domain name, you want to confirm if the name is available online. To do this, get over to a web hosting company’s website. Under the search bar, you can check if the domain name is available.

Once you find out it’s available, place an order for the domain name and obtain your web hosting plan as it suits your budget.

You can get both a domain and Web Hosting at a single spot from a reliable Web Hosting Company.

When your domain name is activated, get over to WordPress.org and set up your fashion blog.

Choose a CMS

After choosing your Domain Name and Web Hosting plan, It’s time to build your blog. And the best way to do this is to choose a reliable Content Management System for your blog.

Now, when it comes to Content Management Systems, WordPress tops the league. It has been the default CMS for many bloggers due to it’s simplicity and popularity.

You can decide to build your blog on WordPress or any other CMS that you’re much comfortable with.

Although setting up your blog on WordPress could be a bit technical, there are web design guidelines that can help you to set up your blog by yourself.

Alternatively, hire my team to build your blog professionally. When you work with us, we take all the work off you and we’ll still guide you on how to properly get started blogging.

How to Grow a Fashion Blog

After building your fashion blog, the next thing you want to do is to create and evolve a formidable fashion brand that will be widely recognized locally and internationally by your target audience.

The following are growth hack strategies to grow your fashion brand as a blogger…

Create Content

Growing a fashion blog starts with creating Content. So before you get to start creating content, you want to understand exactly what you want to blog about.

To have a better understanding of the content you should create, you may want to create an reader persona of your ideal audience. Ask yourself questions like; what matters to this people? What would they want to read?

Work on creating content that fits in with your answers to this questions.

While creating your content, you also want to observe the reaction of your audience to your content through analytics and other systems and then find out the particular content types and styles to promote and the ones to discard.

Choose a target Niche

Another thing you also want to consider while creating content for a fashion blog is the existing brand you want to target.

Your personality or the kind of fashion you like could serve as a good place to start here.

Be sure the fashion you want to focus on creating content about is a niche that has a sizable number of people interested in it.

For Money Making purposes, your content should also be interesting and relatable to brands you wish to target.

Whatever you come up with here will influence your audience and the kind of brands that will collaborate with you and your blog. So choose it well.

Decide your fashion niche based on your own personal style and the kind of brands you want to attract.

Create a Content Strategy

Creating a content strategy and content schedule will help you as you work on growing your blog. This is why you need to have one in place.

In your Content Strategy, you can decide to divide a year into quarters or months with a specific content theme for each quarter.

With this, you use different quarters or months to create content about various themes that reflects your fashion brand.

With this, you’ll grow your brand more easily without lacking  fashion ideas to write about.

The next thing after this is to decide how often you will be updating your blog. After you settle on this, begin to create your blog posts in advance based on the themes you decided on earlier.

Writing blog posts in advance will help you publish on the scheduled dates without fail…

And before you run out of your pre-written content, you would have already come up with ideas for new ones.

How to Make your Blog Stand Out

When it comes to fashion or personal style blogging, one thing that will decide the success or failure of your blog is going to be your originality.

I want to reemphasize this. Most fashion bloggers basically blog about their personal style. This why most times these fashion blogs are also regarded as personal style blogs.

Because of this, you also want to bring your uniqueness into play like we mentioned earlier by following the steps below…

Blog about your Personal Style

Be creative and innovative about the pictures and other content you’re going to be sharing including the inspiration behind it.

If you were inspired to create a local style by another trending or popular fashion, tell your readers about it. And show them how it can be done exactly like you did it.

Curate Famous Celebrity Styles

Naturally, so many people see celebrities as their role models.

And because of this some of the celebrity fans want to dress like them, be like them or even act like them.

You can work on satisfying this cravings by creating and curating content about these selected celebrities and their fashion sense.

Since there’s perhaps so many other bloggers writing about these celebrities, you can share those beautiful pictures of them from a different angle and tell a fresh narrative about it.

Leverage Social Media

When it comes to fashion blogging, the number one place to find an existing audience is the social media.

And your best social media if you’re a fashion blogger is going to be Instagram. And perhaps Pinterest. And the others.

So you’ll have to get over and be active on these platforms.

Create great content on your social media handles. Update beautifully engaging pictures (just as you’re updating your blog and use the right tags whenever you’re making a post).

Also, don’t forget to include a link to your blog on your profile. And in your posts where possible.

Set up a platform on Pinterest and put up your pins right there on the popular boards too.

Create Content Regularly

Follow a content schedule and work on creating content regularly. Be authentic and focus on posting quality and inspiring content on your blog at regular intervals.

Some fashion bloggers make more than one post in a day, others settle for 5, 4 or less in a week, choose a posting schedule that will favour you and stick to it.

How to Make Money with a Fashion Blog.

One of the most important reasons why fashion enthusiasts open a blog is because they are passionate about taking their passion to a wider audience.

Now besides being a hubby fashion blogger, you can also become a professional blogger, monetize and earn from your fashion blog.

There are so many ways to make money from a fashion blog. One of these includes reaching out to up and coming fashion brands to promote their stuff to your audience and get paid for it.

But besides this, the following are ways you can make money with a fashion blog…

Create Sponsored Posts

Sponsored posts are written or other forms of post paid for and published on your blog by other businesses.

To get started with sponsored posts, you can work with fashion brands and get them to pay you to write about their fashion items, how they are affecting you and how you’re using it.

Write Reviews

You can also write paid reviews about certain fashion items, based on your own personal opinion and usage and get paid for it.

Affilates Marketing

Yes affiliate! When it comes to fashion blogging, using affiliate ads means so much more than getting mere links.

With fashion affiliates, you can blog about the particular brand you want to promote after getting the product.

For instance if it’s a handbag, you can get the bag from the affiliate, dress up with it, take photographs, update an inspiring blog post about it and post it on your blog with a link to the affiliate product.

When this is done successfully, you’ll be paid a commission when someone makes a purchase through your link or per click on the link depending on the arrangement.

You can get affiliate products from international sites like commission Junction (Now CJ), Shopstylecollectives,  Amazon etc.

You can also apply for affiliate programs from other smaller websites.

Engage in Collaborations 

As soon as you keep growing a decent number of traffic to your blog, brands will be opened to collaborating with you or getting featured on your blog.

To maximize this, you’ll want to include a separate page on your blog, a contact email and a notice indicating your readiness to collaborate and feature brands on your blog.

You may also reach out to brands via emails, informing them of such opportunities.

Sell your Fashion Products

Running a fashion blog affords you the chance to promote your own personal fashion products directly on your blog, if you have them.

This is one major way many fashion bloggers make money with their fashion blog.

It doesn’t have to be all about your dresses, you could include other fashion accessories like a private jewelry line, home made perfumes, beauty products etc.

Become a Fashion Consultant

Where you’re a professional with in depth fashion skills, you can consider becoming a fashion consultant.

It doesn’t have to be difficult. You can start with giving out free tips.

The more you learn through the process, the more you’ll grow and build your brand as a fashion expert. From here, you can work on building a business out of your expertise as a fashion guru.

Use Google Adsense and Paid Ads

Now there are so many other ways to make money out of your fashion blog and your brand as a fashion blogger including Google Adsense and other paid ads but this list is a good place to get started with.

Conclusion

Now you just read a complete guide that can help you build up the next successful fashion blog. But, if you’re not going to get started today, nothing’s going to happen.

And as you’re embarking on this, remember it’s going to take effort and time but in the end, it won’t only be rewarding you’ll have a handful to teach others.

And of course, to build a formidable fashion blog in the shortest time possible, you can hire our team to build your blog. Also, sign up for our blogging masterclass to to learn the nuts and bolts about blogging today.

Now, it’s your turn. What’s your biggest challenges when it comes to building a fashion blog? Drop your comments below.