Fashion is always changing so there are always new things to blog about, but long term success is about more than finding the right blog ideas. You also need to know how to make money as a fashion blogger.
👉 This guide will show you six ways to make money as a fashion blogger:
- Find affiliate programs for your favorite brands
- Run AdSense on your site
- Use alternative ad networks
- Run your own ad program
- Accept sponsored posts
- Offer paid tutorials and courses
Let’s get started!
How to make money as a fashion blogger
1. Find affiliate programs for your favorite brands
Affiliate marketing is a business strategy where you post links to products or services that you love and make a small commission every time someone buys one of those products or services through your links. This can be a great way to earn money by recommending things you already enjoy.
Many bloggers start with Amazon Associates. This can be effective because it’s easy to sign up, and Amazon sells everything under the sun. However, you can often make more money by working directly with the creators of the products or services you use. Some examples of fashion companies with high-quality affiliate programs are Pretty Little Thing and Hugo Boss.
You can also use a plugin like Thirsty Affiliates to automate parts of your affiliate marketing. This makes it one of the easiest strategies in this guide on how to make money as a fashion blogger.
2. Run AdSense on your site
Another excellent way to make money from a fashion blog is to run AdSense on your site. All you need to do is sign up for AdSense, put some ad codes on your site, and let AdSense choose what to advertise based on keywords found on your site. You can also create Ad Units if you want to have more control over how ads are displayed on your site.
If you don’t want to mess with code or worry about ad management you can use a plugin like Easy Google Ads. This plugin automatically optimizes ad placement, content, and appearance to appeal to your audience.
3. Use alternative ad networks
AdSense is the most well-known ad network, but it’s far from the only one. There are, in fact, numerous contextual ad networks that use the content of your site to determine what ads they’ll display. Possibly the largest of these is Media.net, run by Yahoo and Bing. Other high-quality ad networks include PropellerAds and ylliX.
If you want to take this route, you have two choices for displaying your ads. The first is to manually add them by placing ad codes on your site. The second is to use a plugin like AdSanity to place and manage your ads. The latter option is not only easier, but helpful for setting up the next income stream we’re going to discuss too:
4. Host your own ads
Ad networks are easy to set up, but they often pay pennies for every purchase your customer makes, so they shouldn’t be the only strategy you consider when deciding how to make money as a fashion blogger. You should also consider setting up your own advertising program.
There are a few advantages to this approach:
- You have full control over the companies you work with.
- You establish a rapport with high-quality fashion companies.
- You get to choose how much you charge for each ad and what the payment structure is.
However, there are also a couple of drawbacks.
For starters, most companies won’t invest in ad space on your site until you’ve established a significant audience. You’ll also need to do more outreach to find companies that want to work with you, then negotiate contracts with those companies.
All in all, hosting your own ads is one of the best ways to monetize a fashion blog, but you’ll need to establish an audience before you can sell ad space. This means that selling ad space should be a long-term goal, not the first way you attempt to make money.
5. Publish sponsored posts
Sometimes companies will pay you to write articles related to their products on your site. Most often these are tutorials or reviews, but they can be anything relevant to company’s products. For example, if you’re hired to write for a high-end fashion company, they might want you to publish an article about your personal experience upgrading your wardrobe.
The potential for earning money with sponsored posts is endless, with some blogs charging thousands of dollars for a single sponsored post. To tap into this income stream, though, you’ll need to be able to prove that your blog is worth investing in. This typically means you’ll need to have consistently high traffic levels for at least a few months before brands will sponsor you to write for them. Some brands may also require you to have a certain number of subscribers.
Because of these audience requirements, we recommend starting with small brands. These companies may only be able to pay $100 for each post, but working with them will help you get the hang of sponsored posts and give you something to show larger companies you hope to work with in the future.
6. Offer paid tutorials and courses
Video tutorials are single videos that teach users how to do a specific thing, such as how to measure themselves before buying clothes online. Courses are more detailed series of videos that dive deep into a specific subject, such as the history of a specific fashion trend. Both can be incredibly lucrative, selling for hundreds of dollars and being re-sold thousands of times.
With this earning potential, it should come as no surprise that this is the most challenging strategy in our guide on how to make money as a fashion blogger. You’ll need to come up with topics your audience is interested in, script your content, invest in filming equipment, and either pay for video editing or learn how to do it yourself.
The good news is that once you’ve created your educational videos, turning them into a course is easy. Plugins like WP Courseware offer visual course builders so you can design your curriculum, create promo pages for your courses, and sell them with ease.
Final advice on how to make money as a fashion blogger
Competition in the blogging sphere is fierce, but it’s still possible to learn how to make money as a fashion blogger. In fact, you can combine several money-making strategies to build a robust business around your blog.
Here’s a quick overview of the strategies we looked at today:
- Affiliate marketing is a great way to start monetizing your blog from the moment of setup. You can make more money by working directly with the creators of products or services you love instead of using Amazon Associates. Check out our guide on how to find affiliate programs for your blog for additional assistance.
- AdSense is another monetization stream you can set up right away, often in just a few minutes.
- Other ad networks can give you access to different types of ads and advertisers, all while being remarkably easy to set up.
- Selling your own ads is often more lucrative than relying on ad networks, but you’ll need to have an established audience to make money this way. This makes it an ideal long-term goal for your business.
- Sponsored posts can help you earn significant amounts of money and also gain free access to new products and services. Start with small or local businesses and build up a reputation that will help you pitch bigger brands.
- Creating video tutorials and courses is a lot of work, but can be highly lucrative. This is a great long-term goal for your fashion blogging business.
👉 Want to learn more about building a business around your blog? Check out our guides on creating a blogging roadmap to your success and how to get your blog noticed!
