Introduction

When you have a fantastic startup idea, funding is nearly always the pain point. It’s a wonderful idea, after all, but how can you raise the money to get off the ground?

One underestimated form of funding is blogging! With today’s online consumer behavior, blogging is becoming an increasingly popular method for brands to earn income and increase brand awareness. What some fashion entrepreneurs may not know is that you do not have to currently offer a product or service to earn money from your blog. In fact, it is a great way to get your fashion startup funded and develop a potential customer base before you even launch.

In this post, we’re going to cover 11 different ways for funding your startup through blogging and the steps you should take to developing a quality blog that will maximize the income earned from using these strategies. Let’s begin.

Step 1: Have a Clear Understanding of Your Business Plan
Step 2: Identify Your Blogging Skills & Weaknesses
Step 3: Consider These 11 Profitable Blogging Strategies
A Few Extra Tips
Conclusion

Step 1: Have a Clear Understanding of Your Business Plan

The first step to starting a blog that will bolster your future fashion startup is to have a clear understanding of your plan. Understanding your business plan will guide you in your content creation process so can increase “hot” website traffic, persuade readers to donate or invest, and increase demand for your products come launch time.

Your plan should answer the following questions:

• Who are you?
• What do you do?
• Who do you serve?
• What are your key demographics?
• What problem are you solving?
• How are you different?

Important Note: It is not enough to simply start and run a blog. Fashion brands and entrepreneurs around the world have blogs, so differentiating yours is key. Otherwise, why would potential investors and customers see a reason to read your content or buy your future product or service? Once you find your fashion niche and are able to effectively answer the questions listed above, expressing your competitive advantage in your blog content will be much easier.

After you feel that you have a strong understanding of your future startup, you’ll want to consider your technical strengths and weaknesses that will be tested when developing content. Keep reading to the next section to learn more.

Step 2: Identify Your Blogging Strengths & Weaknesses

The next step to funding your fashion startup through a blog is to identify your strengths and weaknesses. Knowing these will help you plan for future content and determine challenges you expect to face.

Consider whether writing is a strong suit of yours, the areas you may need to improve on, and the resources needed to do so. Maybe you find that your strengths are in visual media, like photos, videos, infographics, audio recordings, etc. Going forward, you’ll know that you might need extra help with proofreading your future posts.

On the other hand, maybe you recognize your strong suit is in writing, but not the visual arts. In this case, following tutorials for creating engaging media content may be in your best interest. The point is, you always want to capitalize on your strengths and work on your weaknesses.

Here is a list of good skills to have for running a blog:

• Copywriting Skills
• CSS and HTML Competency
• Photo Editing Skills
• Networking Skill
• Social Networking Skills. …
• Marketing Skills

Important Note: Foundational strengths needed to become a good blogger are a creative mindset, an attitude of perseverance, and of course an excitement towards the topics you’re writing about. The good news is, as long as you have those, you can always improve in all other areas!

Step 3: Consider These 11 Profitable Blogging Strategies

As we mentioned above, there are many ways to start making money from your fashion blog before you’ve launched a product. The income earned typically depends on metrics like monthly blog traffic, email subscribers, and the number of followers on social media platforms. Following steps 1-2 will improve these metrics and position you for success when trying out these featured funding strategies.

Let’s dive in!

1. Place Ads on Website Using Google AdSense & Other Programs

Several websites rely on ads to generate income for their business. Google AdSense and other platforms like Clicksor, adBrite, and ADEngage allow you to display ads on your blog and earn money even when you’re just starting out.

How does website ad revenue work?

• Revenue is generated on a CPC, or cost-per-click, basis. By displaying CPC ads with, you receive a set earning every time a visitor on your blog clicks on the ad. Once you gain traction on your blog, some advertising companies may pay you on a CPM, or cost-per-thousand-impressions, basis. Your payout is based on how many people viewed the advertisement, not clicked.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing allows you to recommend products you love and earn a commission for marketing another person’s or company’s products. The affiliate browses for a product they enjoy, then endorses that product and earns a piece of the income from each sale they make. Sales are tracked by the links on their website.

To start making money with affiliate marketing through your blog, follow these steps:

• Find and join an affiliate program
• Choose which offers you’d like to promote
• Obtain your unique affiliate link
• Share those links on your blog, social media accounts, and website
• Collect a commission anytime someone uses your links to make a purchase!

A popular affiliate partner is Amazon. In fact, they have their own program called Amazon Affiliates and offer a wealth of fashion products, clothes, and accessories to choose from.

3. Network with Other Bloggers on Social Media

Developing a quality blog positions you for a successful networking experience with others in your industry. Instagram is the perfect app to do this, as it is a top social networking platform for fashion bloggers to make money from sponsored posts.

Start feeding your blog content into your Instagram to build up your page. Follow other fashion bloggers and influencers and study their posts to brainstorm some ideas for future content you should make.

Once you’ve developed a following, you can start reaching out to influences to inquire about doing a “share for share” post, where each person shares each other’s posts and tags them. This increases both of your following and your chances of becoming sponsored from other brands on Instagram. It is also a great opportunity to spread the word about your startup.

4. Content Leasing

Content leasing platforms like Written.com let you submit some of your blog posts to be leased out to other blogs. Whoever picks up your post (an advertiser) will typically agree to a month-to-month subscription.

After you have come to an agreed-upon price, all you need to do is redirect your blog post to the their domain so you are not the host. All you need to do is redirect your blog post to the advertiser’s website where your content is now hosted. This is great for blog posts that are hard to monetize on their own.

Reach out to brands, fashion startups, and agencies to partner up with them. The best way to find which companies are doing blog promotions is to keep an eye on top fashion bloggers and their Instagram posts.

5. Public Speaking Opportunities

If you are promoting your own brand along with your blog, you will get a decent following over time establishing you as an influencer in your space. You can utilize this credibility to apply for public speaking opportunities, or, you might even be asked!

Keep in mind, you may not be offered paid public speaking opportunities right away. This is a strategy that builds upon itself.

Many speakers start their public speaking career from free, smaller community events, but utilize their blog space to advertise past presentations and reaffirm their credibility as a knowledgeable person in their field. When organizers visit your blog to see all of the past presentations, it’s also a good idea to include messaging that lets them know you are available to speak at future events.

6. Premium Content for Paying Subscribers

Loyal readers of your blog who show interest may be willing to pay to read more of your work. Creating a space for members-only with access to exclusive posts, visual content, and resources will promote engagement AND allow you to earn income through a subscription rate.

Keep in mind, this is a major time investment because of the constant demand of creating premium quality content for subscribers. If you can pull this off, members-only programs are a great way to generate recurring monthly revenue.

7. Fashion Business Directories

Many companies and customers still use business directories to this day. While generic web directories may be on their way out, local and niche directories are extremely useful.

Consider building your own directory of contacts with your own personal contacts to get a feel for it. Afterwards, start compiling lists in your area that would make good additions to your fashion business directory. Your directory may offer reviews of local fashion businesses or lists of the best products and services in an area.

There are two different ways to earn income from business directories. Charging a fee to the user who wants access to the directory, and charging the businesses listed on the directory for their placement.

8. Subscription Based Event Calendar

A paid event calendar is a nice monetization method for local or industry-specific websites, like a fashion blog! Event calendars allow businesses and people to advertise their events for a fee. This works well if you already have an established audience, because other brands may be more willing to pay to reach this audience.

You could choose to advertise events based on the user’s geographical location. These events may include fashion shows, conferences, webinars, live-streaming events, meet ups, workshops and more.

In addition to earning money with the paid ads, if you opt to offer a ticket-buying service with the calendar, there is also the possibility of earning a percentage taken from the credit card transaction fees.

9. Sponsored Blog Posts

Not interested in displaying monetized ads? Sponsored blog posts may be for you.

A sponsored blog posts works just like it does in sports or movies.  A brand pays you to represent their product or service, speak about it, and encourage your audience to buy it. This requires a little bit more time than affiliate marketing, as you’ll be writing posts instead of posting links.

In preparation for negotiating a sponsorship deal, you may consider compiling a kit that includes your website traffic statistics, social media engagement, and other data that will entice the brand to partner with you.

10. Online Courses and Tutorials

The growing information economy, where knowledge is power, has also increased demand for online tutorials and courses. There is no question that this is a thriving global market and research numbers show it. The desire to invest in education and lifelong learning is an emerging theme for both older and younger demographics.

These trends, along with the growing preference of enjoying the comfort and flexibility of working at home, dodging the downsides of commuting to in-person classes has inspired many people to explore new ways of developing their skills online.

Developing your online presence and email list subscriptions are going to be huge advantages to have a successful course launch. It takes time to attain a loyal audience but keep working at it and you will start to see results.

11. Ask for Donations and Investments

Last but not least, one way you can earn money from your blog is to simply request it.

There are a few different ways to go about this. You can add an donate button to your website, sending the reader to a service like PayPal, or you can use features like email marketing integration, to create a donation form that is hosted within your website.

Because you have to rely on the generosity of your readers, this option is usually more profitable when you offer your readers something for free. In this case, it would be extremely important to create content that is directed towards your target customer that not only educates them on your startup idea, but also offers other valuable advice and resources at no cost.

Conclusions

That wraps up our 11 different ways to fund your fashion startup through blogging! We hope you enjoyed reading this post and are inspired to start earning money  with this unique work from home opportunity..

In Steps 1, we focused on having a clear understanding of our business plan. Brands with defined business plans have much higher rates of success and growth. Without this, it is difficult for any upcoming brand to fund their business and product development. For tips on how to test your fashion business model, visit this post: 9 Tricks to Find Out if Your Fashion Business Model Works

In Step 2 we focused on identifying your skills and weaknesses to help you plan for the type of content you’ll be creating and releasing.

Together, those steps will help you develop content for the right user and use the proper marketing strategies drive sales revenues straight to your pocket.

Here are some final tips and advice to remember as you begin your blogging journey:

• Write about what you love! The money will follow. If you don’t, you will become easily burned out.
• The amount of money you can raise to fund your fashion startup truly depends on how much effort you put in and the time you are willing to invest. Keep at it, even when you face challenges.
• You will be making money based on how much traffic you get, the monetization methods you use, and the work you put in. If something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to try another strategy out. As your startup plan evolves over time, you will figure out which strategy is the best for funding and attracting potential customers.