As you might have noticed, I tried to publish one business post a week. It doesn’t work that good, so it’s time to change that: from now on I’ll publish a new business post every Monday. If you want more information about a specific topic or have any questions, please don’t hesitate to leave me a comment and I’ll keep it in mind for one of the next business posts. It can be about anything: SEO, design, CSS, Social Media, Lifestyle, Health,… whatever you have in mind. Let’s start with the following topic:

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How to start a Fashion Blog

It’s not a secret that fashion blogs are huge right know. It’s a real big trend, and I’m sure a lot of you are thinking about starting a fashion blog, am I right? 😉 But starting a fashion blog today isn’t as easy as it was a couple of years ago. The standards are high, and that’s why starting a blog has to be well-wrought.

Before you start

You shouldn’t just find a name, register the domain and start blogging. There are a few things you have to think about before starting a blog; it should be well thought out. So before you start your fashion blog you need to know:

a) Why do you want to start a fashion blog?
b) What is your niche? What do you want to write about?
c) Your blog name

You shouldn’t just start your blog because you want to get free clothes and stuff. Let’s be honest: a blog is a lot of work, and you can get way more than just free clothes, you can actually earn money with a blog. But it requires a lot of work, so you should be aware of it and willing to do it. There are too many blogs out there doing a good job just to start a blog for free clothes. It’s very important to think about the reason you want to start a fashion blog first. When you think you have a good reason and if you know what it is all about, you can start thinking about a sub-niche or point of view you want to concentrate on. You need something to mark yourself off from everyone else. You need to give people and brands a reason they should follow and work with you. The next step is to find the perfect blog name. I would recommend choosing your name wisely. Choose a name that’s not about one specific topic, find something more neutral, something you can still use when your blog and it’s topics change after a while.

Domain & Hosting

Now that you know why you want to blog, what you want to blog about and what your blog name will be, it’s time to register the domain and to find a hosting service. I would always recommend setting up a self-hosted version of WordPress because it’s much better than Blogger or a WordPress-hosted blog. You’ll need your own hosting account, reserved space on the web for your website and all your websites data. Of course, you have to pay for your own hosting account, but it’s not that much. I pay about 50 Euros a month, but you can work with less for the beginning. Some hosts cost less than 10 Euro a month.

CMS & Design

I already recommended WordPress before, because it’s pretty easy to use and offers a lot of possibilities. You can change and customize almost everything. Once you’ve registered your domain and hosting account, you’ll need to go through the process of installing WordPress. The actual software you need to start is free. Once WordPress is installed, you can start choosing designs and customizing your blog. Some templates are free, but they’re very basic and don’t offer a lot of functions. If you don’t want to pay someone to build your own design – that’s something you can think about, when you already successful with your blog -, you can check ThemeForest for nice templated with favorable prices. That’s where I bought my first design. 🙂 Once you found a design, you have to install it, and you can start customizing it afterward. Add pages, build a menu bar, fill your sidebar, etc.. The most important pages you need to start your blog are probably: Imprint, Contact and, of course, the front page where people can see your latest posts.

Content is King!

You’re done with the steps I described before? Then you’re ready to start adding content to your blog. Write about five blog posts and publish all of them within a week. People want to see something when they visit your blog. If there’s nothing or if you don’t post regularly, they do not have a reason to stay or stop by regularly. And when I say publish five posts within the first week, I’m talking about high-quality posts! Don’t waste your time and do it half-ass because in this case it’s almost the same as doing nothing at all. Maybe it’s worse than doing nothing.

You won’t have a lot of readers and followers in the beginning; it’ll take time, a lot of time, but you should never stop posting regularly! Believe in what you’re doing, stay focused and always keep it up! One day it’ll pay off. 🙂