Hey, are you a fashion blogger struggling to get traffic to your site and to make money out of your blog? Or maybe you are just thinking about starting a fashion and style blog but you are so afraid to fail and have no idea how successful bloggers in this niche grow their sites and get paid.
One of the fashion bloggers – he actually is a man in the fashion blogging niche which makes his case even more interesting – shared in his income reports for a few previous years that he made consistently over $120,000 a year with his blog.
I’ll talk more about his biggest income streams later but for now, here is what I am going to share with you today:
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Contents
The Potential of Fashion Niche on Pinterest
First, I will show you how big (or small) the fashion niche is on Pinterest. Meaning, you will know what is the potential outcome of your efforts on this platform – should you expect a lot of traffic and reach or not? Keep in mind that not always the most profitable blog niches are the same ones where you can get the highest amount of traffic.
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Analyzing Successful Pinterest Accounts
Second, we will look at the accounts of some successful fashion bloggers to see what kind of boards they have and what exactly they do with their Pinterest accounts – are they sending all the traffic to their websites or maybe somewhere else?
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Popular Monetization Strategies
And the third part is probably the most interesting for you – I will show you some of the most popular monetization strategies fashion bloggers use to make money out of their activity on Pinterest.
With all that’s said, let’s begin.
The Potential of Fashion Niche on Pinterest
If you’re on a business account, you will need to go to Analytics, then Audience Insights. On Audience Insights, you will click the All Pinterest Users tab. It’s Pinterest audience insights for the entire platform, not just for your account. You see about 47% of all Pinterest users are interested in women’s fashion category, it’s one of the popular niches close to the top of the list. And on the right side, you can see some of the popular topics inside the niche, such as women’s jewelry and accessories, dresses, women’s style, skirts, etc.
Another place we can get some additional insights is Pinterest Categories page. This is the page where Pinterest shows all its new users when they sign up on the platform. In here, you will find something related to fashion. In men’s fashion, we can see that there are over 36 million Pinterest users are interested in Men’s Fashion.
And somehow, there’s only 11million are interested in Women’s Fashion.
I find these numbers a little odd because we know that about 70% of Pinterest users are women. But at the same time, keep in mind that women can look for clothes as gifts for their sons, husbands, boyfriends, and fathers. So maybe it includes all the men and women who are interested in men’s fashion.
But anyway, you can do your further research through some suggested related topics like Fashion Trends with 2.3 million followers, and other popular categories.
It is a pretty big niche on Pinterest based on these numbers, so it’s definitely worth being on Pinterest if you are a fashion blogger. And by the way, if you pay attention to these repin counts while scrolling down the page, you can get an idea of how much traffic some of these pins are driving potentially even if they get 15,20 or 35K repins only.
The second and third parts of this blog post go hand in hand. So we’ll be checking some successful Pinterest accounts, looking through their boards, their pins, checking where and how they are driving traffic to. And based on all of that, we’ll also find out how they monetize their Pinterest activity and for some of the bloggers we’ll be able to see the income reports they shared.
Analyzing Successful Pinterest Accounts & Popular Monetization Strategies
So here is Sandy and her Pinterest account. She has a pretty decent number of monthly viewers on Pinterest.
And a few years back she published an income report when she made $3600 in a month from her blog. The majority of her income was made with sponsorships that she found through blogger networks.
It’s interesting she even shares which networks she worked within that particular month and with which brands:
And her other income source were affiliate links networks:
Now, let’s see how Pinterest is helping her get traffic to her site. First, we can go see what kind of boards she has. We can see that she has some boards that consist of pins that are redirecting to some products. She also has boards where she has pins linking back to her own blog posts.
I noticed that a ton of her pins that her images do not have text overlay so she could have potentially gotten much more traffic if she did this. I would recommend for her to write the title of her pins on top of her images as text overlays.
If I click through her site, I could see the type of content she creates. These are the top 20 bestsellers of 2019. Basically, what she just shows here are some products and some clothes that she recommends. Most of these links are sending traffic to online shops and she has most of the links redirected to RewardStyle using her affiliate links. So as you can see, this blogger does not rely much on advertising. She mostly gets her money through affiliate links and sponsored posts.
Now, let’s look at this male fashion blogger that I mentioned at the beginning of the blog post. But actually, inside his income report post, he gives us an interesting graph.
It shows us that in 2017 and 2018, he made about the same amount of money which I believe is about $120,000 in both of these years. He also shows how this income is distributed through different income streams. We can see here that advertising (the red color) is one of the biggest income sources for him. Then sponsorship is another income source while affiliate and product links are in the last place.
So we can tell in addition to what the first blogger was doing, he’s also doing really well with traffic because for getting so much money with display ads, he must have a lot of traffic.
If you think that all successful fashion bloggers must have a big Instagram following, then let me prove you wrong.
This blogger for example currently has about 33k followers only. And you can see that Instagram is far not his biggest priority and not his best income stream.
I can see the same for this established fashion blogger Jo-Lynne Shane – She currently has 23.7k followers on Instagram but her reach on Pinterest is at 4 million monthly viewers. And she has almost 118k followers on Pinterest.
So this means that she must be doing something very good at Pinterest. If we go to her boards, we’ll see here that she has a board linked to all her blog content. And you will notice on her board titles that a lot of content in the fashion niche is seasonal.
As you may know, Pinterest is a platform where seasonality and holiday-related content always rocks. I have a Pinterest Marketing Planner where it’s based on some Pinterest trends and keywords that are trending in every month of the year. Through this, you will be able to set yourself for the whole year and plan out what you need to post in advance because that is what you need to do if you want your pins to get viral on Pinterest. Check it out here.
I can tell that she invests a lot of effort in driving Pinterest traffic to her website because if we look at her pins, she mostly has a text overlay on them. This always helps in her click-through rates.
And if we scroll through her blog content, we’ll see as usual affiliate links and products. In this case, she is redirecting to Shopstyle products. And I actually think this is a smart strategy: when you are driving people first to your blog post and you show the product. In her case, she is wearing the product themselves. And then she’s driving people from her blog post to the shop. This is definitely better if you are just directly putting out affiliate links on your pins. Though Pinterest allows linking to some affiliate networks, it doesn’t mean you should always use this strategy because of three reasons:
- If your account consists of only pins that are linked to affiliate networks, it’s probably going to get suspended because Pinterest wants a healthy mix of pins linked to your verified domain, some repins, then some affiliate links.
- Since it’s a verified domain, Pinterest gives priority distribution to pins that are linked back to your site versus pins that are linked to other affiliate networks.
- The conversion rate will probably be higher because they will see how the product will look on someone. From there, they can trust your opinion and will help them decide if the product is worth it.
When I was looking into an account of another fashion blogger, I noticed that her site has some interesting blog posts. She shows the product and she has a block like this below her post that redirects to her affiliate network. This is another great strategy of showing the products you are promoting. You can check her post here.
So you probably noticed that majority of the fashion bloggers I’ve shown you so far make their money through sponsored content. That’s actually good because even as a new blogger, you will already have an income source even if it’s not that big. It’s something that you can start making even in your first month unlike display ads where you need a high amount of traffic volume for your website.
A perfect example of this is this blogger who shared in her income report exactly month by month how she was making money. We can see here that around the summer of 2018, she is starting to get more and more income from her site through ad revenue.
On her explanation, she mentioned that she transferred from Google Adsense to Mediavine most probably because she reached the required sessions. She also mentions here very interesting: she reached 3 million monthly views on Pinterest. She then shows her analytics and how her traffic was growing.
And I can tell you honestly that it wasn’t easy to find a lot of income reports in the fashion niche because they don’t usually talk about money on their blog, of course. So for many niches like fashion, food, or home decor, you can hardly find any posts on income report.
In these tough times, any improvement in their online income can be a huge help. I know a lot of fashion bloggers who do well on Instagram but not so great in terms of income and they may be missing an entire bunch of income streams because they do not know how to add content to their fashion blog or just use it as an accessory for their Instagram account and not the other way around.
In my opinion, it’s a big mistake because your site is YOUR site – no one can take it away from you, it’s you who decides how many income streams you want to use and how to use them on your site. An Instagram account can be penalized, it can be hacked or simply blocked by the platform itself. I’m not saying it’s bad to have an Instagram if you are a fashion or style blogger. It’s just might be limiting your opportunities on income growth.
Here’s another tip for you: If you struggle to understand the basics of search engine optimization for Google, check this free training by Mike Pearson who has his Google SEO figured out and making over $10,000/mo with each of the two niche blogs he runs.
I hope this blog post was helpful. If you know some fashion bloggers who are struggling to make money with their blogs, then feel free to share this post!
Pinterest for Fashion Blogs: How Fashion Bloggers Make Money
Instructions
- The Potential of Fashion Niche on Pinterest
- Analyzing Successful Pinterest Accounts
- Popular Monetization Strategies
I’m Anastasia and I’m a full-time blogger, online entrepreneur, and Pinterest marketing strategist. I help digital entrepreneurs and bloggers drive targeted traffic from Pinterest either through my online courses or through Pinterest consultancy.