As a fashion, lifestyle or beauty blogger, you have a lot of options for monetizing your blog. There’s working directly with brands, there are banner ads through services like Google Ad Sense and there are affiliate sales. Some bloggers even expand to offering their own products or consulting to other bloggers or even brands. If you’re at the point in your blogging career when you’re ready to monetize, but maybe aren’t sure how, I got your back. Here is a basic guide how to make money with your fashion blog and the top three ways to do so.
Working Directly With Brands
By far my favorite way to make money blogging is working with brands on sponsored content. I like this the best for two reasons. First, they’re usually really fun. I come from an advertising background, so I love helping brands meet their marketing goals by being creative and doing my thing (here’s an example of a recent fun sponsored post of mine!)
Secondly, this is where the money is at. If you have a million Instagram followers, you can easily make $15k for just ONE sponsored Instagram post. I’m not at that point yet, but I am making enough money to live in San Francisco, which says a lot. Blogging is my fulltime job, so it’s really nice signing onto campaigns that have big payouts, the kind you can’t usually get with banner ads or affiliate sales.
Want to start working with brands on sponsored posts? The fastest way is to sign up for a bunch of influencer marketing agencies. Read my post here to find my top 25 influencer networks to join!
Affiliate Sales
Next is affiliate sales. What is an affiliate sale you ask? And an affiliate sale is when you make money when someone clicks on your link, or buys a product from one of your links, or both. It’s basically a commission. There are SO many affiliate networks you can join, and some brands even run their own programs. To get started, I think the top two to join are ShopStyle and/or RewardStyle. Both of these affiliate networks are focused on fashion first and help you create beautiful product widgets like the one below.
There are pros and cons to each platform. I’ll write a post going into those details and when it’s live, I’ll update this post with a link here. In the meantime, here are the big ways RewardStyle and ShopStyle differ so you can decide which is right for you. RewardStyle pays a commission when a reader clicks on your link and then buys something, anywhere from 5%-50% of the sale. ShopStyle pays you just when someone clicks on the link, usually 2-5 cents per click. You have to decide which way of earning money is better for you. I personally use RewardStyle, but some people’s readers click around a lot more than they buy, so ShopStyle is a better bit.
And then there are other affiliate networks like Share A Sale, LinkShare, Rakuten, EBates and more. One of those may be a better fit for you. The things to keep in mind are that most affiliate networks have a minimum you have to meet before they’ll pay you out. Usually, this is $100, so even if you make $99 in affiliate sales, they won’t pay you until you make one more dollar. For this reason, I recommend picking an affiliate network and sticking with it, so you can put all your eggs in one basket and maximize your affiliate payouts.
Ad Banners
The third most popular way to make money blogging is using ad banners on your site or YouTube. While you can usually find banner options on any affiliate network that will generate an affiliated banner for you, I recommend a Google Adsense banner.
Why? Because Google has a complex algorithm that will tailor your banner ad to each viewer. They pay out on views, but also on clicks, so the more custom your banner is to the viewer, the most money you can make. It also keeps your ads fresh. Speaking from experience,it’s a pain to manually swap out code to refresh my banners. Adsense does that for me. Also, if you have a YouTube account, you can hook your Adsense account to it to run ads before your videos. You’ll be putting all your banner eggs in the same basket.
Now that you know the top three ways to start driving income, it’s time to talk about the most important thing to do to start earning money on your fashion blog.
Asking For Money.
Yup. So many girls I know don’t ever ask for money from brands they work with, but then at the same time keep talking about how much they want to be a fulltime blogger. While I do get a fair amount of campaigns now that are clearly paid ones from the beginning, I still have to ask for money all the time. Or ask for more money. At the beginning of your blogging career, brands don’t just find you and start offering you the big bucks on the initial email. You have to fight for your worth. Talking about money is hard for some people, but if you want to make your fashion blog your fulltime job, you have to get good at it!
I hope this helps you think about ways you can make money with your fashion blog! If you have any questions or things to add, leave a comment below!
