How To Start A Fashion Blog 2017

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This guide will walk you through the process of how to start a fashion blog with WordPress, from choosing the right blogging platform to figuring out the technical stuff and the tools you'll need to optimize your blog and speed up growth.

Specifically, we'll show you how to start a fashion blog in six steps:

Select your niche
Choose hosting and install the WordPress software (it's simple, don't worry)
Optimize your blog with the perfect theme and quality plugins
Create a consistent publishing schedule with great-looking images
Market your blog on social media
Monetize your blog

Ready to dive in? Let's get started!

1. Choose your ideal niche

"Fashion" might already sound like a niche, but in truth it's a broad category that contains dozens of smaller niches. Every style has its own niche. Many styles contain more than one niche. For example, within the overall niche of "vintage style" there's the smaller niche of "vintage style found in thrift shops".

This might sound counter-intuitive, but your first goal when you're learning how to start a fashion blog should be to refine your niche to the smallest group possible. This makes it easier to create extremely targeted content and marketing campaigns.

To define the perfect niche for your fashion blog, ask yourself two questions:

What is your core style? How do you describe your core aesthetic? Are you into vintage fashion? Do you consider your style Gothic? Do you like to be one of the first adopters in mainstream trends? Define your style as precisely as possible.
What makes your use of this style unique? That core style you just defined? Thousands of other people identify with it too. To start a fashion blog that cuts through the noise, you need to figure out how you make the style unique. Do you follow it to rarely seen extremes? Do you combine it with a wildly different style? If you're not sure, take a look at fashion blogs run by people whose style is similar to yours. What about your use of fashion is different from theirs?

Combine your answers to these questions, and you've found the perfect niche for you. This will help you with the next step: getting your ideal domain.

2. Find the perfect domain name and web host

Blogs hosted on sites like Tumblr and even WordPress.com are great for hobbyists, but if you want to make money from your blog, you need to invest in your own domain and a hosting plan. This makes your blog appear more legitimate and gives you far more options in terms of design and monetization.

The best option when it comes to ease of use, affordability, and flexibility is self-hosted WordPress (this is different than WordPress.com).

Beyond a platform, you'll also need to choose a name to use as your domain name.

Not sure what to call your blog? Try a blog name generator. These sites make it easy to play around with different uses of a couple relevant words or phrases.

Once you've settled on a name, you'll need to choose a hosting service. If you're not sure where to start, check out our guide to choosing a WordPress host. Most modern hosts offer an easy one-click solution for installing WordPress, so you'll have plenty of affordable options to choose from.

💡 If you don't have time to go through all that's available out there in the market, simply sign up to Bluehost. They're very affordable (from $2.75 / month), and deliver all the features you might require. There's also an easy to use administration panel for your server – you don't need to have any experience working with websites or servers in order to be able to use it.

3. Set up WordPress with the perfect theme + plugins

Installing WordPress may only take a couple of clicks, and if you've chosen a company like Bluehost, then you'll actually get a working WordPress install right out the box – no need to set things up manually.

With that done, you'll need to pick out the perfect WordPress theme. Fashion is even more about the images than most media. You need to showcase cool new looks in a prominent, unique way.

To help you find a great theme with minimal work, check out our collection of the best fashion themes:

WordPress fashion blog theme

Once you've chosen a theme and fiddled with the color settings to make them match your aesthetic, it's time to build the back end of your site with plugins. You'll want to start with some basic plugins that we recommend for every WordPress site:

Jetpack – Jetpack offers an enormous number of features, including advanced site functionality and security.
Yoast SEO – Yoast SEO evaluates your articles in real time for SEO friendliness and readability.
Social Share Buttons Plugins – There are a variety of plugins designed to add social share buttons to your WordPress site. Find one with buttons that match your theme and customization options you can use if you change your theme later on.

Since you're here to learn how to start a fashion blog, you may also want to consider installing a gallery plugin to better showcase your style.

4. Create a consistent publishing schedule

To create a successful fashion blog, you need two things:

Amazing images of your unique fashion
Consistency

You'll have to hone your photography skills with many hours of practice, but you can develop a consistent publishing schedule by creating an editorial calendar.

The ideal publishing schedule for you depends on:

How often your competition posts
How often you can post quality content

Many fashion blogs post every day, but posting frequency should never come at the cost of post quality. If you can only publish once a week to start, that's fine – but think carefully about what you're going to publish in advance.

For more advice on how to create a consistent publishing schedule, check out our guide to creating an editorial calendar with CoSchedule.

Every blog can benefit from some marketing on social media, and fashion blogs, with their image-heavy posts, are ideal candidates for social media marketing. At the bare minimum, you want to add social share buttons to your site and share every post on all your social media channels.

If you're learning how to start a fashion blog so you can transform it into a business, you'll want to take this further:

Integrate your site with Instagram
Build a social media strategy
Work with social media tools to organize your marketing campaigns

If you have some money to invest, you may also want to experiment with social media advertising on platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

6. Monetize your blog

Blogging as a hobby is great, but blogging as a business is even better. If you want to make money from your blog, these are some of the most popular ways to get started:

Affiliate marketing – Become an affiliate for fashion brands you love and earn money when people buy the products you recommend!
Create your own products – Are you a designer? Sell your creations with an eCommerce plugin.
Offer a service – Maybe you're not a designer, but you have the people skills and sharp eye to become a fashion consultant.
Sell advertising spots – Once you've established an audience, you can use those viewers to sell advertising placements on your site. If you choose this route, we strongly recommend only selling spots to brands you love. Readers know when you aren't passionate about something, and can get turned off of an idea fast.

Most of all, remember that blogging isn't a quick way to get rich. Learning how to start a fashion blog is only the beginning. Successful blogs often take six months to a year to start earning a small amount of money, and several years to build a stable income. Don't be discouraged if you aren't attracting thousands of people in your first month.

Final advice on how to start a fashion blog

There are millions of fashion blogs and learning not only how to start a fashion blog but how to also make it successful is a long, difficult process. But if you love fashion and you have something truly unique to share with the world, it can be an excellent way to build a secondary income, or even someday a full-time business.

Remember, to get started you'll need to:

Pick a specific fashion niche
Purchase web hosting and a domain name
Install a WordPress theme and plugins
Consistently publish content
Market your blog to get readers

Do you have any other questions about how to start a fashion blog with WordPress? Ask us in the comments!

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