Facebook and Instagram had an outage yesterday.
Although the outage was short lived, some content creators have reported losses of anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars lost in revenue.
On a larger scale, Meta looses about $2,700.00 USD every second it’s down. That’s about 9.6 MILLION lost in just an hour.
These numbers are wild and certainly concerning. But short term outages and even temporary bans don’t do much to hurt my bottom line and it’s thanks to the fact the I actively blog.
Having my own blog provides me a platform that I control. When Meta is down, I can still communicate with my core audience and more importantly, potential new readers can still find me.
In fact, the bulk of the affiliate links that I make commission off of come from this very blog and the majority of the traffic is straight from Google and Pinterest.
I recently took a poll (before Instagram had its black out) and the majority of you said that you would love to see some blogging tips for those who want to start fashion blogging.
So for today’s blog, I’ll be sharing three reasons why fashion content creators need their own platform.
This blog contains affiliate links. They are placed for your convenience. If you choose to use them, we earn a small commission that we use to support this blog. Thanks.
Table of Contents
Blogging Made Easy For Fashionistas With WordPress
This post in a prelude to a free blogging series that I’m doing called Blogger S.O.S, designed to help fashion content creators like yourself start their own platforms.
In the next post in this series, I will be walking you through how to set up your very first blog.
That post will be much more detailed, but for now, I wanted to quickly share the content management system (CMS) that I use, which is WordPress.com.
If you don’t have much of a technical background or much time to do a lot of backend work to make your site look just right, WordPress.com is going to be your best friend.
You can get started with WordPress.com for free and they offer many reasonably prices packages for those looking to expanding their platforms.
They have so many free site templates as well that can be edited with their ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) editor, and there are ton of templates available for purchase on Etsy as well if you want something more custom.
Most importantly to me, WordPress.com makes it so easy to write content.
Once you get your site set up, you can just create–which is all I want to think about.
Get started on your blogging journey today and create your free WordPress.com account here.
Building Authority In Your Niche
The thing that all top creators have is authority in their chosen niche.
When you need to know information or get inspired, you know which creators you can turn to.
The more authority that you have in a niche, the more you’re content is pushed to audiences with similar taste thus expanding your reach.
Of course you can build up your authority just by using Instagram, YouTube or TikTok; plenty of people have and are successful.
Adding value for your audience
But if you’re looking to add affiliate linking as a major part of your strategy, especially for my fellow fashion creators, then having a blog is going to accelerate your reach.
This is because long form written content can offer an immense amount of value for your audience.
While TikTok is on the rise as a search engine, Google is still the top site people turn to as a starting point when they want information. And Goggle still promotes written content on its first page.
Think about it this way; there is only so much information that you can convey through a picture and a short caption, or through a 90 second video.
And while long videos are nice, there’s a bigger barrier there to create thoughts and people like to be able to skim information.
Blogs, especially those that are organized and well written, allow readers to easily skip around to the parts that they want in order to find the information that they need.
So how does this translate into helping you building authority in your niche?
How ranking on Google helps you
Well, the more high quality blog post you write, the more likely it is that Google will start to rank your post.
When your post start ranking within the top 5, you’re much more likely to start getting a steady stream of traffic.
And with the more post that you have that are ranked, the quicker your newer post are likely to rank.
For example, it took 2 years for my Chanel WOC review post to rank top 5 on Google (mostly because I wasn’t utilizing keywords or backlinks effectively). But now that I have built up authority in the fashion and beauty niche, the latest Dior Beauty review I did is now the second hit on Google for Dior’s spring collection and that only took 3 days.
Make More Money From Your Content
As mentioned earlier, having a blog makes it that much easier to make money from your affiliate links.
This is for a few reason. The first being that, most people visiting your site searched specifically for your content.
Better use of your affiliate links
While the algorithm for social media platforms is definitely not random, your content is being viewed by a more diverse audience.
By this I mean a post you share on instagram will be pushed to those who are interested in your niche, but the algorithm doesn’t yet discriminate those who are actively looking to shop and those who just want to get some inspiration.
So while your audience may have a general interest in what you’re providing affiliate links for, they may not be motivated to buy.
In comparison, if you have a review blog about a particular product(s), the vast majority of people coming to visit your blog are actively considering making a purchase.
These audience members are much more likely to click on your links and make a purchase that will earn you commission.
The beauty of this is, all you need is one solid blog post and it can generate income for you for years!
For example, my Teami skin care and Non Latex Ballon posts have steadily been bring in income through affiliate linking for the past 5 years. The non latex ballon blog alone has already generated enough income to cover my blogging expenses for the year.
I’m currently on my own journey to grow this blog even further, but one goal of mine is to establish a few magnet post that can generate 4 figures monthly on auto-pilot.
Get more money from brand deals
In contrast, unless your post is going super viral, Instagram and TikTok post don’t typically have this same type of longevity and will require you to consistently make post to generate income.
With this longer longevity of post, many brands are willing to pay you more for long form content.
The starting offer for my first 4 figure brand deal done some years ago was initially a lot less. However, when I mentioned to them that I had a blog (which was a LOT small at this time mind you), they increased my pay.
While that stories I posted are long gone and the instagram post is no longer getting any traction, the blog post is still getting attention for the brand years later
Especially for fashion content creators who talk about trends that can last for years, having a post that can stay relevant for just as long is a great way to make the most out of your affiliate marketing and brand deals.
Fall Back For Social Media Outages & Bans
With the recent event of Meta’s outages, having something that you can fall back on has it’s clear advantages
What would happen to your brand if Meta was out for a full day?
What would happen to your brand if your social media accounts got banned for a week or two?
For those with blogs, all these events are frustrating but it doesn’t stop us from creating content and connecting with our audiences because we still have our own platforms that we control.
What happened when I stopped posting on Instagram for months?
During chemotherapy and radiation, I really only had the energy to keep up with 1 platform. So I chose my blog.
Like many of you, I use my Instagram account to easily connect with my audience. So I was a little bit afraid of what would happen when I took such an extended leave.
But this blog flourished during my break from socail media!
Even with limited posting my traffic spiked because I had built up a trove of valuable content on here that can perform well even if I’m no longer frequently posting.
Even without my instagram to drive traffic to my blog, my blog was fine and I was still making money off of affiliate links.
If I only had an Instagram account and took that amount of time off, I don’t think my affiliate links would have performed as well.
An email list to further connect
Having your own blog is all about being able to connect with your audience on your own terms.
Building up and email list is a great way to stay connected with your people and send out relevant, valuable content directly to their inbox.
Instagram and Facebook do have limits on the amount of bulk messages that you can send out to your audience. And sometimes a post just isn’t enough to get all the information you want out.
But thanks to my blog, I have been able to build up an email list of almost 1,000 subscribers to whom I can directly send email blast to.
If my instagram account were to be banned today, I can still directly reach my audience and they can reach me.
This is an incredibly powerful tool to have, especially as a fashion content creator.
This year I plan on expanding and lean in to my email list a lot more.
Final Thoughts
For fashion content creators having a blog of your own offers an unique opportunity to expand your reach, provide more value to your core audience and extend your income through more efficient affiliate marketing and brand deals.
While you can be very successful creating content solely on other platforms, having a blog of your own gives you a lot more control over what you can post and how you can interact with your audience.
For fashion content creators particularly, having a blog helps to give your content longevity which can mean more people seeing and using your affiliate links.
And with a blog, it’s much easier to build up an email list who is engaged that you can leverage and mobilize to view and interact with your content.
I encourage fellow fashion content creators to view having a blog as creating a central hub for themselves.
Instagram, Youtube and TikTok can continue being the major focus of your brand, but having a healthy and established blog will always give you something to fall back on if something goes wrong with one of the other platforms and will better position you to become the source of information for those who are researching a particular item to buy.
I hope that this Blogger S.O.S was helpful for all of you considering getting started with your own blogs. If you do decided to create a blog, keep your eyes peeled for the next article in this series, Blogger S.O.S–How To Start A Profitable Blog: Building Your Framework.
And if you have a fashion blog already, I would love to see it! list it down below or come join us on Instagram and share with the community over there.