Do you love fashion? Do you want to work from home, make money, and earn your living by writing about fashion (while maybe scoring some free stuff in the process)? We’ve put together a short guide to help you get started with building your very own blog.
Fashion blogging is big business these days, with top bloggers seeing incomes of 80k per month. Prominent, top bloggers also hold a lot more influence over the industry than ever before. From book deals, to collaborations with designers, the opportunities are seemingly endless.
Here’s how to start a fashion blog, and our recommendations.
Your Own Website
While there are some advantages to signing up to sites like Tumblr or Blogspot and starting your blog that way, if you’re interested in maximizing the potential of your blog we instead recommend purchasing a domain name and building the site yourself.
Sound intimidating? Don’t worry! With the help of the excellent, user-friendly control panels offered by web hosts, and popular blogging platforms like WordPress, this process is easier than ever before.
Going this route will not only provide you with an opportunity to fully brand your blog with your own name, giving it a distinct presence on the web, but it will leave you will better advertising options and increased room for growing your business later on.
You’ll also learn a lot of useful skills along the way, giving you more control over running your blog.
Registering Your Site Name and Hosting Your Fashion Blog
We recommend the hosting company Bluehost for getting started with your first fashion blog. It’s inexpensive, costing less than $5 per month, and for the first year your domain will be free (typically the domain name renews yearly for $10-$15 a month).
Once you decide on a domain name (try to select some short, fashion themed, and easy for visitors to remember), visit the Bluehost site, and select a shared host plan for $4.95 per month. You’ll be lead through the checkout process, select your domain name. Don’t worry about the add-on options for now.
Once you complete your checkout, Bluehost will send you an e-mail with your login information.
Installing WordPress
The next step is to install WordPress on your new site. Though there are other options for blogging software, like the Joomla CMS and Drupal CMS, WordPress is by a wide margin the most supported and most user friendly. Bluehost has an excellent video tutorial for beginners on exactly how to go about doing this. You can view it here: How to Install WordPress
Once WordPress is installed, you’re ready to start writing about fashion and making money while do it. If you’re totally new to the concept, and the way WordPress works, WordPress.org has a lot of great information to get you up to speed.
If you’ve made it this far, find out what’s next, and most importantly, how to make money with your new blog, in How to Start a Fashion Blog for Money, Power and Glory in 2014: Part Two