Making Money, Working With Brands Articles on IFB

So You Want a Review Sample

This post is by Sonja, the beauty editor at The Coveted I asked her to write this post because of the great way she's built relationships with beauty companies over the past months since she's started...

‘Free’ Ethics: How to accept products for review, or as gifts…

image by powerbooktrance While getting products ‘for free' is always a nice thing, sometimes I can feel torn about receiving them. Particularly in the early days of my blog where I wondered if ...

Ethical or Not: Selling Gifted Items

In the last few weeks, the ethics of reselling gifted items has come up often. I've talked to bloggers who need to cull their wardrobe and feel conflicted or unethical about their desire to resell lig...

Fohr For Fashion Bloggers: Everything You Need To Know Before Joining

Have you heard of Fohr (formerly known as Fohr Card)? Fohr is a membership network that connects brands with influencers. And It's free for influencers and bloggers to join. All you need to do is go to foh...

Introductory Guide to Accepting Guests Posts For Your Fashion Blog

IFB's Introductory Guide to Accepting Guests Posts For Your Fashion Blog. I penned a blog post about growing your audience that sparked some conversation in the comments about the idea of guest posting. ...

A Full-Time Income With No List

Update: Our webinar was great. We covered a lot of info on building your audience and monetizing your blog. Check out the replay here. In 2011, my friend Shawn Blanc quit his job to begin blogging for a l...

How to Approach Brands for Freebies

Many bloggers, fashion bloggers included, see freebies as a "perk" of running an even moderately successful site. Whether you describe such free items as "gifts," "review samples," "collaborations" or somethi...

Stand Out from the Affiliate Crowd with Thrive Market

As a fashion blogger, one of the most common ways to monetize your site is through affiliate programs, and most fashion bloggers know of the few big programs out there. While they're great programs and of cours...

Why Personal Blogs Can Never Really Survive Monetization

Are you a personal style blogger? Do you blog about your life in hopes of making it in the "big time?" It sounds amazing, like do a job you love and never work a day in your life, and you love your life... bu...

Why You’re Not Making Money from your Affiliate Links

As a follow-up to my last post on how to start affiliate marketing, I want to mention some reasons why you might not be making any money if you've already started adding affiliate links to your blog instead o...

How To Get Started with Affiliate Marketing

There are lots of ways to monetize your blog: advertising, affiliate marketing, ebooks, selling a product. It's always best to diversify though, and find the right mix of all of these things for you and your ...

Update : You Don’t NEED 250,000 Page Views to Earn a Living Blogging

Just about a year ago, I wrote an article here on IFB sharing on average how much I make a month as a "professional" fashion blogger. Especially in light of "82% of Bloggers made more money than ever last yea...

Do Bloggers Really Get Paid for Press Releases, Freebies or Campaigns?

Ok, so when I started blogging in 2007, I did not know a thing about the publishing industry. Not. A. Thing. In retrospect, I wish I had someone with experience sit down and tell me what was what, because I mad...

5 Tips for Successfully Approaching Brands

Yesterday I participated in a webinar for brands on identifying & working with social (media) influencers. This included bloggers of course, and I shared some of my experiences as a blogger/influencer wor...

How to Negotiate an Ad Contract for Your Blog

I've talked about negotiating on IFB a couple of times now, both on the affiliate side and the ad sales side, but there's always more to say because negotiating is a complex topic...especially when you're fir...

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The Independent Fashion Bloggers Guide To…Gifting and Product Reviews

As a fashion blogger, receiving products for review or as gifts can be a great way to try out new items and share your thoughts with your audience. However, it's important to approach this with a keen sense...

Advanced Affiliate Marketing: How to Negotiate for Higher Commission Rates

It seems like every fashion blogger is a part of an affiliate network now. From Skimlinks to RewardStyle, partnering up with a brand (or dozens of brands!) has never been easier. In case you haven't heard of ...

Introduce Yourself to a Fashion Publicist with this Handy Email Template

One of the questions I get asked often by bloggers is what exactly they should write when introducing themselves to a fashion PR agency for the first time, and it is one of the more common deliverables that I...

6 Ways to Get Products You Actually Want to Review for Your Fashion Blog

I love writing reviews. Every week, I write a review on Eat, Sleep, Denim about a different pair of jeans. It's a great way to get content useful content about fashion on your site, while still interjecting...

10 Tips for Maximizing Affiliate Income (Without Losing Your Soul)

Last week I addressed the Fashionista article which claimed that some personal style bloggers would earn up to $50,000 a month in affiliate commissions via RewardStyle. Then I countered with my own average af...

You Don’t Need a Massive Following to Make a Living Blogging

Most of you have probably already read Fashionista's article about "personal style bloggers raking in millions", but in case you haven't, the gist of it is that there are some fashion bloggers out there who mak...

The Guide to Affiliate Companies Every Fashion Blogger Must Know

You probably already know that affiliate programs are one of the easiest ways to monetize fashion related traffic. Even if you only participate in affiliate programs to answer your own questions: how many cli...

The Fashion Blogger’s Quick Guide to Monetization

Now that you've figured out it's time to monetize your fashion blog, how do you do it? There's no "one" right way or the "best" way to monetize your blog, you'll just have to figure out what works for you a...

Are You Selling Anything Yet?

Ebooks, digital courses, consulting, t-shirts oh my! On your path to turning blogging into a career that supports you (day job not included), developing a signature product is a super smart way to go. Why? ...

Make More Money From Your Affiliate Links By Learning These Terms

For bloggers looking to monetize, affiliate links are often the easiest way to start. While different networks have different requirements, it generally takes fewer visitors or pageviews to be accepted into a...

Monetizing Your Blog: How to Figure Out Your Banner Ad Rates

Despite the increasing popularity of new ad types like native advertising, advertising and programmatic ads, banners are still one of the most popular forms of advertising, and they're usually the first kind ...

5 Ways to Find Contact Information for Fashion PR Agencies

Being connected to fashion publicists is great. You get the inside scoop on all sorts of great designer collections, events and opportunities to partner with brands for fun and fame and financial gain. However,...

3 Things to do Before Contacting a PR Agency to Send You Free Stuff

Let’s be real: one of the great perks of being a fashion blogger is the opportunity to connect with PR agencies and have them send you lovely things to wear and write about. Who doesn’t love getting goodies i...

Behind the Scenes: How a Fashion Blogger Makes Money

I always appreciate getting a "behind the scenes" look at income breakdowns and the nuts & bolts of making a living as a blogger, so I thought I'd get on the other side of it today and give you a peek ins...

Get Paid: Invoice Template for Your Blogger Services [DOWNLOAD]

The good news is, your blog is in business. You've got your first project approved by the client, and now what? You need to GET PAID! Sometimes business is done with a handshake, but for tax purposes, b...

4 Creative Examples of Successful Sponsored Posts

After affiliate links & advertising, sponsored posts are the third tier in monetizing your blog. But how do you present these without them seeming like adverts in the midst of your otherwise heartfelt con...

Collaborate: 23 Beneficial Ideas To Do With Blogger Friends

By Jessie Holeva of trendhungry.com Blogging can be lonely. Whether you blog in the early morning before your 9 to 5, on the weekends, or 24/7 it’s usually a solo task. But take a look on Instagram. A lot of y...

Case Study: Affiliate Earnings With Rewardstyle vs. ShopSense

Are you struggling to make money with affiliate links on your blog? I was too. (Even though this happened.) Let me explain: I've been a part of the Rewardstyle affiliate program for years, but only starte...

Capitalize on Your Influence with Beso Rewards

Tapping into that trust as a monetization stream is a key strategy for financially successful bloggers. That’s where affiliate programs like Beso Rewards come in.

How I Finally Started Making Money With Affiliate Links

Here's the thing about advice: you can listen to it, read it, and agree with it - but actually putting it into action? That's something totally different, isn't it? As an editor at IFB and a personal sty...

25 Ways To Make Money Blogging

Bloggers from all areas of the globe have different ways of sustaining their lives as independent professional bloggers, we wanted to put some options together for you... all in one place.

The Anatomy of A Blog-to-Brand Deal Part I: You Pitch Them

Fair warning bloggers: this is a long post. When I started analyzing how many steps go into the back-and-forth communication that leads to a blogger-and-brand deal, I had no idea how long it would actually ...

Blogger Tutorial: How to Set Your Rates

When you start monetizing your blog, the biggest question in your mind is probably, "What should I charge?" Figuring out what to charge is probably a question that will never have a permanent answer. Rat...

How To Write A Crystal Clear Post Disclosure

We here at IFB tried to tackle the issue of blogger transparency with a different approach -- by highlighting bloggers and campaigns that did it right, and showing exemplary practices that you can use as an outline for your own disclaimers.

IFB’s Ultimate Guide For Choosing An Affiliate Network

When we talk about monetizing our fashion and style blogs, we come back to affiliate links and advertisements over and over again. It's not because it's the only way, but because it's one of the easiest. Affi...

Will The Blogger Making $10K Outside NYFW Please Stand Up?

Last week, the New York Times published an article about how bloggers were paid to wear clothes to Fashion Week so they can get shot by street style photographers, "Popular bloggers and other so-called infl...

How Much Does It Cost to Be a Fashion Blogger?

What are the real costs of being a fashion blogger?

How Condé Nast Salaries Stack Up With Blogger Incomes

Most of Cone Nast's salaries don't really surprise me (yes, there are people only bringing in $25k a year while working at Vogue), but I wondered how bloggers' incomes stacked up next to these coveted editorial positions.

3 Ways To Make Money Off Of Instagram

While Instagram has gained a reputation for turning just about anybody with a smart phone into a decent photographer, some entrepreneurs have been using the free social media platform for marketing and selling their product. In an article by Business News Daily, they interviewed fashion businesses that have utilized their Instagram accounts for e-commerce. See their three secrets to Instagram success here: