Between my past experience at tech startups and my current occupation working in digital marketing, I’m lucky to have picked up a few SEO tips that I’ve been able to leverage to grow my site even faster than some other fashion bloggers that started building their brand even before me.
So many well-meaning people have asked me how to start a fashion blog and where do they begin, as though I might give a shifty look from side to side and slide them the secret formula that’s been hidden from them.
In reality, I always tell people the same thing:
Just do it!
Nike cliche aside, I think everyone should have a blog in our increasingly digital society.
But I gave it some thought and, surely I could do more to help those who have no concept of the various activities that go into starting a fashion blog:
Registering a domain, building a website, managing social media presence, and of course, creating valuable content that will be both found and remembered.
What better way to give back and support the community than to share what I’ve picked up over the years with awesome, loyal readers like you!
Starting this little fashion blog fresh out of college with little experience and zero guidance was a major turning point for me creatively as much as it was professionally, but I could have grown faster if I had a fashion blogging tips guide like this to start with.
10 Fashion Blogging Tips To Give You An Edge in 2018
These fashion blogging tips will teach you useful, actionable tactics that you can start using right away to help your increase your domain authority, rank your content in Google search, and make your all-important human readers happy too.
Let’s dive right in, shall we?
Choose a Short, Descriptive Domain Name
OK, so we’re not off to a good start here because my domain name is actually a bad example.
I picked my domain name long before I had any understanding of SEO keywords, and I was also terribly indecisive about what I wanted my blog to be about.
Creation Despite succinctly captures the general mood that my blog was born out of, but it’s not particularly optimized for my niches, which are fashion, beauty, and tech.
If you know for sure you want to create a fashion blog, I suggest you use keywords ‘fashion’ or ‘style’ in your domain name for an instant leg up on the competition.
With that being said, this is not entirely necessary since your content is going to make a much greater impact on your rank ability over time – do what you will with this information.
Splurge on the SSL Certificate
Depending on where you choose to host your domain, this might come up during your initial registration process or you might have to go looking for it.
Either way, you’ll want to spend the extra couple bucks to ensure your domain starts with https:// instead of just http://.
Without getting too technical, the SSL certificate is a safeguard feature that lets both Google and site visitors know that a connection to your site can be trusted not to endanger the cached data saved on your visitors browser (like auto-complete passwords and credit card numbers.)
Plus, you didn’t hear it from me but there’s been some talk about this one single thing being an SEO ranking factor and that Google gives preference to content coming from sites with an SSL certificate.
I mean, it couldn’t hurt right? Right.
Build Your Blog With WordPress
There are many site builders out there, but nothing compares with the flexibility of WordPress if you plan on blogging as more than a hobby one day.
Last I checked, 28.9% of all websites in existence were built with WordPress and this number will continue to grow because of how customizable and easy-to-use the interface is.
You don’t need a programmer to get started with WordPress, but if you do eventually hire someone to help with your site, they’ll have a much easier time implementing your customizations compared with any of the other options.
The other thing I love so much about WordPress is the massive library of open-source freemium plugins that are available to accomplish all the fashion blogging basics, like email subscriber pop-ups, social media share buttons, search engine optimization tools, and more.
Which brings us to my next major tip…
Install The Sumo Me Plugin
This should be your next step because, right off the bat, even the free version of Sumo Me has a lot to offer an aspiring fashion blogger.
Your goal with your new fashion blog should be to attract visitors and forge a connection with them so they’ll come back for more.
I’ll have to tell you more about how to attract visitors in another post, but for our purposes let’s just assume that you already have some traffic coming to your site (friends and family perhaps?)
A healthy email subscriber list with good deliverability is still one of the most effective channels of communication available to marketers, but it’s become incredibly challenging just to get in the recipients inbox, nevermind to get them to open it and perform an action.
With that being said, you should still set up an automated email subscriber pop-up, and there’s no easier way to do this than with Sumo Me’s List Builder, included in their suite of free tools.
This way your subscriber list will grow on autopilot and when you’re ready to dedicate some extra time and effort, you’ll have a head start with a few real subscribers to test with.
The other free feature I reeeeeally love from Sumo Me is the super-clean and responsive social share buttons they offer.
This is going to make it really easy for your readers to share your content to their preferred social platform with the click of a button, and can even be configured to display share counts to increase trust for future visitors.
Streamline Your Brand Across Social Media
I feel this should be common sense, but I still see so many bloggers using usernames different from their blog name.
This may be because sometimes a username or domain name we want is already in use on what platform or another, but you should still do your best to use exactly the same name on any and all digital properties.
This is basic branding, and if you’re not treating your fashion blog as a brand yet, it’s time to start.
Make sure your domain name, Instagram username, Twitter name, etc. all match as closely as possible – your audience will have a much easier time following you across platforms and your social platforms will grow to support one another.
Create (The Right) Content
A blog is not a blog without a steady supply of content, so you should start thinking about what kind of content you want to create now.
Consider your natural strengths, resources, professional experience, and the topics which you are knowledgeable about –
Your blogging ideas should flow pretty naturally from there.
For example, if you love shoes and and know all about how to make the perfect cold brew coffee at home, you could start creating content on those topics of interest.
You can always branch out later, but for now you want to find ways to create content that helps you stand out, relate to your readers, and deliver some kind of value.
Blog about your favorite shoe brands, how you choose your shoes, what trends you expect for the upcoming season, and how to pair different shoe styles with your outfits – and don’t forget to link out to the mentioned brands in your post and on social media!
This is an easy way to deliver value to your readers and eventually get noticed by the brands you want to work with one day.
Make Videos
Video content is absolute MONEY right now as Youtube (the second largest search engine in the world) is owned and favored by Google –
Not to mention, many people prefer to watch a video on their topic of interest instead of reading through an article.
If you want to see your content rank faster, you’ll definitely want to invest the time and planning into creating a high-quality video to support your blog content.
Continuing with our previous example, a how-to video showing people exactly how you make your own cold brew coffee would give you some seriously helpful exposure, even if it’s not directly related to fashion.
Youtube is not the wild west it once was though, and quality is key when trying to gain traction on Youtube.
Don’t think you need to do everything yourself to accomplish this though…
If you can put some cash aside for the month and outsource the job to a trusted video editor (like I do) you can have nice videos without spending any time editing.
The best part is, if you do it right, your videos will do better over time as viewers interact positively with them – meaning video content creation is a sound long-term investment in your blogging future.
Join A Blogger Support Group
Not for the faint of heart, blogger support groups are hard work – but they do ultimately work.
They can be hard to find, but if you ask around enough and build friendships with other bloggers, you’re sure to gain access to one of these exclusive digital networking groups (often hosted on Facebook or Instagram.)
Typically, they’ll have set rules you’ll need to get familiar with, but the basic gist is that you get to drop a link to a social post or blog post that you want some help with and the community will click through and engage with your content to help boost your rankings.
The catch, of course, is that you must reciprocate with the rest of the community which can be mind-numbingly boring and extremely time-consuming.
If you do decide to go this route, I do suggest taking some time doing it all manually so you can get a feel for A) what’s involved and B) whether it’s worth it for you.
From there, you can decide to continue doing it all yourself or hire a virtual assistant and outsource of it of course!
Optimize Your Images
Image optimization is incredibly important for content-focused sites like a fashion blog because image files can be so large.
If you’re just uploading images to your site at actual size, your site is going to load very slowly and it’s going to kill your ability to rank in Google (not to mention seriously frustrate anyone that tries to use your site.)
Although there are plugins and other automation tools out there, image optimization can be tedious if you’re like me and like to do it manually to ensure it’s being done juuuuuuuust right.
I’ve yet to find an image optimization tool that I trust to compress my images so that they don’t get too small or corrupt my filenames (can someone suggest one? I’ll love you forever!)
Speaking of which, the filename that you give a photo before it’s even uploaded to your site is pretty crucial because it’s another opportunity to hit keywords that relate to your content topic.
SEO keyword research is another post for another day, but you should definitely give photos a succinct and descriptive filename before uploading to your blog to tap into that Google Image Search traffic.
Be Smart When Structuring Your URLs
This can get really complex, but I’ll try to be brief:
Your URLs matter, as much (if not more than) your chosen domain name.
When you publish a blog post and a unique page is created, the URL may be automatically created based on the title of the post if you don’t pay special attention to this.
But that’s not good SEO, as your URL should be short and descriptive, even if that means it differs from the title of your blog post.
In fact, your title and URL should almost always be different since they serve totally different purposes.
Your title may be longer and may include ‘stop words’ (like to, and, from, with, etc.) which are meaningless mumbo-jumbo to the Google bot that’s gonna crawl your site and try to decipher what it’s all about.
Optimize your URLs with short-tail and long-tail keywords that capture the gist of the content topic in order to reap the rewards.
That’s It For Today’s Fashion Blogging Tips!
Already this post has become yet another content behemoth, so I must stop here for now.
If you want more or there’s something here you still don’t understand, please let me know in the comments and I’ll be happy to elaborate!
As you can probably see, starting a fashion blog is a lot of work (more than I expected) and it seems like the work never ends because there’s always something new to optimize.
With that being said, this blog is one of the most rewarding projects I ever started and I’m SO proud to celebrate Creation Despite’s 3rd birthday this month.
Even if fashion’s not really your thing, I encourage everyone to start a personal blog on a topic you love.
If you want to know more about how I got my start and how you can start your own fashion blog for cheap, please shoot me an email for pricing for business consulting and coaching for aspiring bloggers as well.
DISCLOSURE: This post may make use of affiliate links, but all opinions are my own. Please click here to learn more about sponsored posts.
