How to Start a Successful Fashion Blog with WordPress + Tools You Need

how to start a fashion blog

Fashion blogs are one of the most exciting and famously insane kinds of websites on the internet.

Although the fashion trends keep changing every other month (or week), it still offers some decent rewards for site owners.

If you’re seriously into fashion, regularly help your friends rock their attires, and know what’s trending, starting a fashion blog would be an excellent choice.

You can start a successful fashion blog with WordPress. It makes managing a blog like a child’s play.

To start a fashion blog, all you need is a domain name and a reliable web hosting service.

In this guide, I’ll talk about a step-by-step guide to start a fashion blog from scratch on a budget and make it successful.

You will also learn how can you make money from your fashion blog.

Are you excited? I’m too. So let’s get started.

What is a Fashion Blog?

According to Wikipedia, a Fashion blog covers the following topics

A fashion blog can cover many things such as specific items of clothing and accessories, beauty tips, trends in various apparel markets (haute couture, prêt-à-porter, etc.), celebrity fashion choices and street fashion trends.

According to Technorati Inc., there are over 2 million fashion and shopping related blogs running on the internet.

Why Should You Start A Fashion Blog? The Top Reasons

There are tons of fantastic reasons why one should start a fashion blog, but let’s discuss the most interesting ones.

1. Create A Brand

If you’re someone already working in the fashion industry, or looking to join up, a blog can help you build a brand that speaks for itself.

You can promote yourself, express your creativity, your sense of fashion, and show the industry how talented you are.

Also, a blog can help you build a portfolio which can be pitched to bigger brands.

WhoWhatWear.Com has a good post on becoming a successful fashion blogger. Read the article if you would like to know some secrets of becoming a fashion blogger.

2. There’s Money to Make (A Lot of Money)

Admit it.

Directly or indirectly, every step you take is towards success and a fat bank balance.

Fashion is the gold mine where you can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars and live a lavish life (you always dreamed of.) Fashion blogs go hand in hand with affiliate marketing.

Unlike other niches where people read reviews before buying, fashion followers do not. They just want a unique, stylish piece of creativity, which can make them look high-profile.

harpersbazaar.com has listed some ways fashion bloggers make money.

3. It’s A Huge Niche to Explore

I wholeheartedly accept that fashion is the most competitive niche for blogging. There are at least hundred thousand huge blogs with millions of followers & chances of ultimately beating them is negligible.

But, there’s a good part. Fashion is a huge niche. There are dozens of smaller niches to specialize and build a brand.

If you’re a one man/woman army, it is highly recommended that you target a sub-niche and be the best in it.

And if you have millions of dollars to burn, go ahead and compete with those monster size brands.

4. Free Stuff

I saved the best for the last. With a fashion blog, you can lure brands in giving you free stuff in exchange for reviews.

Once you’ve started to get a decent amount of traffic and have a few thousand social media followers, you’re entitled to enjoy free products.

You just have to find new brands looking for exposure, mail them and ask for free products in exchange for (honest) reviews, and see the magic.

Now that you know the perks of starting a fashion blog let’s go and make it happen in reality. Follow my lead.

Step-by-Step Guide to Start a Fashion Blog

1. Find Your Perfect Sub-Niche

As discussed earlier, you don’t want to mess with the sharks in the tank, but you can compete with those small fishes.

The first thing you need to start a successful fashion blog is to find a sub-niche which is both popular and less competitive.

You can browse the catalog of popular fashion websites and marketplaces to see what’s trending now and if people are buying those products.

Let’s take an example of Amazon.com. Visit the homepage and browse to Departments > Amazon Fashion.

fashion blog niches

Now you need to decide who will be your target audiences based on gender and age. I’m choosing women as my target audience.

Narrow down a bit more.

fashion blog sub niches

Let’s just choose Clothing. After clicking on Clothing, Amazon will suggest you what’s trending right now.

Browse through the catalog and see if you can blog about any of those hot sub-niches. Alternatively, you can still narrow down using more categories presented on the left side of the window.

After you’ve found a perfect sub-niche, go to any social media channel and see if people are excited about it.

For this guide, I’m taking “Bomber Jackets for Women” as my niche. Let me run it through Pinterest to see if it’s popular.

niche example for a fashion blog

People are repining those, and that shows a positive sign.

You can also read this post to get some niche fashion blog ideas.

Note: Take time & do your research before picking a niche. Make sure you’ve knowledge about the niche, and you can sit down and write original content. You can choose more than one niche for your blog if you want but don’t try to cover everything on your blog. Always differentiate yourself from others and give your blog readers a reason to follow your blog.

2. Get a Slick Domain Name

The domain name of your blog is your brand. It is how your readers will know you and refer to their friends.

Word of mouth marketing has potential but is often overshadowed by silly brand names.

There are few golden rules for every brand names, as follows –

  1. It should not be too long. Try to keep your brand name as short as possible.
  2. Always go for top level domain extensions (.com, .net, .org, etc.) If you’re taking a random extension, then there’s a good chance that people will forget the extension and will just search for a brand name. And I bet, your blog won’t be the first in the results.
  3. You can even have your name as your brand name, and it’ll work great (that’s the beauty of Fashion blog)
  4. Stay away from Copyright Infringements. Give extra care and make sure that your blog isn’t violating any of the copyrights. It could land you in serious legal trouble once you get popular.

If you’re struggling to find a good domain name for your blog, you can use FlameDomain (A domain suggestion tool) to find one for you.

I use the tool to find a domain name for my fashion blog and it gave me the following suggestions.

domain name suggestions for fashion blog

Once you have found it, you can either register your domain name from GoDaddy, NameCheap or get it free with web hosting (Keep reading this article to know more about it.)

3. Buy Web Hosting & Install WordPress

WordPress is an open source, free, and most popular blogging platform today. However, you need web hosting to install WordPress and store all the files you need to run a successful fashion blog.

Self-Hosted WordPress provides you with a visual dashboard to manage your content and design of your blog.

I can’t stress enough about the importance of having a reliable WordPress host. Most of the new bloggers will start with a cheap web hosting service which can’t even handle few hundred visitors.

Since fashion blogs are bound to be viral anytime, you got to be prepared. A cheap web host will only affect your brand negatively.

I recommend starting with Godaddy web hosting. It is one of the most reliable web hosting services with premium support. You also get a free domain name (worth $10) with the purchase of your web hosting.

The plans start at just $1/month which is one of the lowest in hosting industry.

You also get 100 free professional email accounts when you buy web hosting from Godaddy. You can use these email account to create your email address on your domain e.g YourName@YourDomain.Com

Also, installing WordPress is just of matter of clicks with Godaddy. Here is a video that you can watch to understand the process.

Note: Do not confuse Self-Hosted WordPress with WordPress.com (free and limited)

4. Install a Stunning Theme

Once, you have installed WordPress; it is time to make your fashion blog look beautiful. WordPress supports the installation of third-party themes, and you can find tons of beautiful themes from various theme sellers.

You can do your research or choose from the below list of handpicked WordPress themes for Fashion Blogs.

  • Feminine from MyThemeShop
  • Noemi (available on ThemeForest)
  • Mode (available on ThemeForest)
  • Fashion Chic (available on ThemeJunkie)

How to Install Themes on WordPress?

To install a third-party downloaded theme, go to “Appearance” > “Themes” > “Add New” > “Upload Theme” & upload the .zip file you downloaded.

5. Essential Plugins & Tools for Fashion Bloggers

Now that the structure of your fashion blog is ready, it’s time to add some functionalities to it. Here are few essential plugins you should install right away.

  • SEO by Yoast: To handle the on-page SEO of your blog.
  • W3 Total Cache: Make your blog load faster than usual with caching technology.
  • Akismet: Help you fight comments spam. Usually, come bundled with WordPress installation.
  • Rocket Lazy Load: Makes your images lazy load as and when they appear on the screen.
  • WP Polls: Allows you to run polls on your fashion blog.
  • SumoMe: Add subscriber forms and popup windows to collect emails of visitors.
  • Pinterest Hover Pin-It Button: Add pin-it button on your images.

Essential Tools for Fashion Bloggers

  • Canva: Design eye-catching graphics for your blog.
  • SEMrush: Steal the tactics from your competitors and analyze their traffic.
  • Buffer: Schedule & automate your posts on social media with one-click.

Here are some more tools that you can use a fashion blogger to manage your blog.

6. Plan Your First 25 Blog Posts

The next important part is to write high-quality engaging articles. Your articles will represent your blog, and that’s what will get you popular.

You need to update your blog with helpful articles regularly but the first 25 blog post will either make or break your blog.

You need to have a proper plan to cover the valuable tips first and get the attention of the masses. Whenever there’s something new in your field, you should be the first person to educate your readers.

You may sometimes run out of ideas to come up with new articles. To overcome this situation, read news, forums, Google Trends, and check your competitors.

It is a good practice to write long-form content (over 1000 words) and publish at least 2-3 articles every week.

Tip: Check out the 50 blog post ideas to help you create quality articles, consistently.

7. Promote Your Fashion Blog

After a bit of hustle, your blog is live with a beautiful design and few quality articles. The next part is to promote your fashion blog & bring the traffic.

Here are the ways you can Promote Your Fashion Blog –

Be Active on Social Media Channels

Your blog will take the time to rank on search pages, but you can always have a boost of traffic from social media channels. Start by creating your profiles/brand pages on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter.

Follow the followers of large pages in your sub-niches, and soon you’ll collect a good amount of targeted followers.

Use automation tools like Buffer to schedule contents on these channels while you’re working on creating more quality materials.

Build A Network

Networking with other bloggers in your niche is probably the best working method for your blog success. Although, they are your competitors, having a good relationship will only help you in getting more shares and exposure.

Also, you can get some quality backlinks by networking with other bloggers who in turn boost your blog quality (regarding SEO.)

Regularly reading their blogs, following on social media, sharing their contents, and commenting should be the ideal approach for networking.

You can also suggest some improvements (not criticize), and most of the times they’ll appreciate you for it.

Get Natural Backlinks

Google favors sites with more number of quality links, and therefore you should also try to get some natural backlinks from related websites.

Avoid spamming and low-quality links as they’ll only affect negatively in the long run.

Final Words

There. You’re now a proud owner of a successful fashion blog. Didn’t I tell you, it would be easy work?

Focus on building a brand out of your blog and soon you’ll find yourself among the big sharks in the tank.

I hope some of you out there have found this guide helpful and will hopefully start a fashion blog of your own.

Let me know if you’ve any questions about launching a fashion blog. I’ll be glad to help you out in every possible way I can.