This guest poster teaches women how to be creative and joyful fashionistas through her blog, Creative Fashion. She also explores the ways to achieve happiness in extra-challenging marriages such as intercultural marriage at Offbeat Marriage. 

When I started my first fashion blog, all I had was my love for fashion. I had a very limited fashion vocabulary; I had no online community, I had zero knowledge of html and I was not even an owner of a quality camera. I had no journalism degree. I was a high school Maths teacher and a professional debate trainer. Would I make it to fashion blogging? My future in publishing a fashion blog was bleak. But fast forward two and a half years later and I´m now a full-time fashion blogger.


You don't need a Journalism degree and you don't have to go to fashion schools to make it in fashion
blogging. As long as fashion is your passion, you are ready to learn, you have enough skill to make people buy what you write, and you have a never-give-up attitude, you are going to make it in this field.

If a full-time fashion blogging career is your dream and you are willing to work hard to achieve it, these
11 tips that I gathered from my more than two years of experience will help you build and publish a
successful fashion blog.


1. Identify the type of blog that you want to publish

Many fashion bloggers are publishing a personal style blog, featuring daily what they wore. It´s fun
thinking for an outfit, gathering inspirations and channeling them into an ensemble, and conveying
them through your photos. However, while a what-I-wore blog is fun and glamorous, you run the risk
of spending a fortune for your clothes and shoes. You don´t want to bore your audience by repeating
fifteen shoes every fifteen days. You face the pressure of purchasing more fashion goods. But if you have a closet full of clothes, shoes and bags to supply you for the first couple of months of fashion blogging, and if you are creative in mixing investment pieces with bargain buys and thrift store finds, then perhaps a personal style blog is for you.

If you're not into personal style blog, an editorial or content blog is an option for you. Your contents
may include fashion tips, fashion reports, fashion commentary and your own personal style. It gives you more freedom to cover other topics than a personal style blog. You can also publish your own outfits whenever you want.


2. Find your Niche

Whether you´re publishing a personal style blog or a content blog, it´s important that you identify your
niche. What is your market and who are your target audience. Would you like to concentrate your
contents on work outfits, street style, trend fashion, frugal styling or high class glamor? Is it a female
fashion blog, a male fashion blog or a Mr&Miss fashion blog? Is your blog purely about fashion or does it also include beauty?

Getting ahead in a very saturated online fashion market is extremely difficult, although NOT impossible. Competing with big brands is like bumping yourself on a wall. One way of achieving success faster is by narrowing your niche. For example, instead of publishing a fashion blog that covers everything, from runway to street style and from fashion to beauty, promoting a mall of fashion products, you can build a fashion blog that concentrates on a particular group of items such as shoes for work, evening dresses, trendy jeans, fabulous handbags, female casual outfits, or all about coats. If you narrow your niche, there are fewer competitors to deal with making it easier for you to get ahead and lead the niche. However, if you so decide to narrow your niche, see to it that you don´t make it too narrowed. Your narrowed niche should easily allow you to expand in time when your blog reaches its plateau and you've exhausted all the keywords. For example, if your niche is “flat footwear”, you can include flip flops, ballet flats, slippers, flat shoes, flat boots, etc. But if your niche is narrowed to “gladiator flats”, you don't have enough space to expand.


3. Find your Voice – fashion reporting or fashion commentary

Fashion blogging is a fast-paced form of fashion writing. You are a fashion writer and you need to find
your voice. Are you good in reporting or commenting? If you´re a good observer, you like structured
writing, you tend to ask questions and listen carefully to answers rather than talking a lot, and if you
prefer news programs on TV over debates, most likely you´d fit the shoe of a fashion reporter. On the
other hand, if you´re opinionated and you love to talk a lot, you´re good on doing product reviews and
trend commenting, then you´re best as an opinion writer. Which are you good at?


4. Be Familiar with Fashion Lingo

As I´ve said, I was not familiar with the fashion lingo when I first plunged into this field. But it didn´t take me long to get equipped. I downloaded tons of lists of fashion lingos, read and memorized them. While you don´t need to be an expert immediately, it´s important that you know the difference between a pair of Capri pants and Bermuda shorts, and you know what I mean when I say, “Red is the new black.”

Read, read and read.


5. Polish Your Writing Skills

Indeed, you don´t need a journalism degree to make it in fashion writing, however, if you can´t write
decent paragraphs worth a decent article, it´s unlikely that you earn your readers ‘respect and trust,
much more of the advertisers´. Practice is one way to improve your writing skills. You can take writing
classes by correspondence or online class, or you can read books about writing articles. You can as well download plenty of resources from the internet.


6. Build Your Brand – Domain Name, Header , Logo and Site layout,

Now that you´re ready to publish a killer fashion blog, it´s time to build your brand. To start with,
what is your brand? Is it you, is it a topic, or is it a niche? It’s imperative that the main topic of
your blog is included in your domain name. Take as an example a very fashion domain name
www.thestylishjennyxoxo.com. It´s gorgeous, right? What do you expect to read from a blog with such
domain name? You´ll probably think of the blogger´s stylish outfits with Gossip Girl attitude. But what
if the blog is all about “scarves”? The domain name is quite irrelevant to the topic. A domain name like
www.scarvesdistrict.com would be a better choice. However, if the brand is you, then you can use your
name as your domain name.

Decide for the header, logo and layout of your site. You´d need them to embody your brand. They must immediately and clearly convey the message, so that when the readers download your site, they can quickly figure out what your blog is about.

In choosing a template for your blog, it´s practical to go for templates that come with SEO pack. This kind of templates is powerful because they easily allow you to optimize each of your pages. Do your research,find a great template.


7. Write compelling, quality contents

“Content is King.” This statement is so overdone but still stands true. What drive a successful fashion
blog are quality contents. But what is a quality content? A content is considered quality if it´s relevant
to your readers, if it solves a problem, if it entertains and inspires your readers, or if it convinces them
to take action whether it is to subscribe to your email list, leave a comment on a post or purchase a
promoted product.

A checklist for creating quality content includes but is not limited to: Am I being funny? Am I giving
interesting and correct information about my topic? Am I authentic? Am I revealing my character? Am I telling stories? Am I convincing? Am I inspiring my readers to be creative? Etc.


8. Learn SEO techniques

Other fashion bloggers smoothly pulled traffic to their blogs through their fabulous outfits; I pulled traffic to my blog through SEO techniques. I didn´t learn them overnight, though, it took me almost two years to master them, and until now, I´m still learning. But you can start learning them as soon as you publish your fashion blog. Begin with the basics – what is SEO, how to use keywords to boost your site, how to optimize a page, how to use analytics and how to track down what your readers need from you. There are plenty of SEO and online marketing gurus that can teach you how to do these, for free. All you have to do is Google them.


9. Learn How to Take and Edit Photos

This is another skill that is a must for fashion bloggers. If you are to publish a quality fashion blog, your
photos must be of quality too. Get yourself a powerful camera, preferably a DSLR. Install photo editors
in your computer, preferably Photoshop. Photoscape is a free tool that I found to be very useful too,
introduced to me by my husband. Learn how to use them.

Most fashion bloggers have functional photographers, either a husband or a boyfriend. In my case, my
husband takes my photos. If you don´t have a photographer to take your photos every time you need to do outfit pictorial, then make use of your tripod. You can set your camera up on a tripod and use a timer to take your photos.


10. Promote your Blog

Publishing quality contents for your blog is not enough to achieve success; you will have to promote it.
The most common way of promoting your blog is by visiting and commenting on other blogs. An ethical blogger will always return the comments left at her blog, unless otherwise if they´re too overwhelming to do so. If you leave a comment on a blog, most likely you will get a comment back. Once other bloggers find your blog and leave you comments, your site becomes alive and discussions are generated. Do the same, return every comment that is left on your posts.

Guest post. If you want quality, one-way inbound links, guest posting on other blogs is the way to go.
Identify blogs that are related to your topic, with good page rank and with sufficient following, to submit guest post articles to. This is great to pull up the page rank of and to generate traffic to your blog.

Buy links. If you have enough budget to kick off the promotion of your blog, you can purchase paid posts from companies such as Review Me, Pay per Post and Sponsored Post. This is the easiest and the fastest way to get inbound links and additional traffic to your site.


11. Monetize your blog

There are many ways to monetize your blog. You can sell banner and text links from your site, you can
accept sponsored posts, you can do paid reviews and you can promote products from your affiliate
brands. You can also create you’re your own product to sell on your site such as a style guide e-book, t-shirts with your logo, etc.

Selling banner and text links from your site, and doing sponsored reviews, are the most common way
of monetizing a fashion blog. While they prove to be a good source of income, they have both pros
and cons. They tend to be a disadvantage if you plan to become a super affiliate – generating revenue
mostly from affiliate products. This is because paid links are paid only once, and the links stay at your
site forever, serving as exit doors for your “buying” readers. The affiliate links, however, if promoted and optimized properly, will earn you revenue as long as your blog exists and as long as the product being promoted is on stock.

Before you start monetizing your site, you have to be certain that it´s already ripe and marketable. It is
said that unless a blog collects 2000-3000 unique visitors per day, it´s not yet ready to get monetized.
If you decide to monetize it early, however, you put yourself on a disadvantage position, unable to
negotiate for the right price of your hard work.

Fashion blogging is a very exciting and glamorous career you can ever have. But you got to love fashion enough to make it a full-time job. Publishing a successful fashion blog is not easy, but not impossible. As long as you are determined to achieve success, you've got lots of never-give-up attitude, and you're willing to apply the steps I've outlined above, you're good to kick-start a compelling and successful fashion blog.


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