The Business of Blogging and Social Media
I usually find inspiration for my blog posts from the questions that clients commonly ask or that you guys ask on Instagram. While most of the questions are fashion-related, I am constantly asked about my blog and social media, especially how The Wardrobe Consultant makes money besides my 1:1 consulting services.
It’s a common question with a complicated answer, and TBH I am not even really the right person to ask for some of the social media stuff. So I’ve enlisted Katie Mander, who manages my social media and website, to help answer some of the questions about the business side of social media and blogging!
Without further ado, here’s the story of how I started The Wardrobe Consultant and how it grew to become what it is today!
This is one of those extra long stories that I’m going to try and cut down so we are not here all day, and so I’m not writing another War and Peace, lol. About 17 years ago I transitioned from a career in advertising to start my own business, doing 1:1 wardrobe styling and consulting. Back then, my business cards read “Hallie Abrams, Personal Wardrobe Consultant. Helping YOU find YOUR Personal Style.” I had three little kids at home (ages 2, 4 & 5) so it was definitely a part time endeavor. And although part time, I loved it! Helping people feel fabulous filled my cup, big time! I was a better wife, mother, and daughter because I felt fulfilled, I found my purpose.
My business grew - it went from hobby, to jobby, to job and in year 5 I needed to add to my team.
A lovely young woman that was studying fashion at Kent State University was also working in the designer department at our local Nordstrom (ohhhh my Cleveland friends… remember the days when we had designer sections at our local Nordstrom and Saks stores?). Anywhoo, this young woman, Anastasia Walker, was great - and as she tells our origin story - she nicely stalked me for about a year, offering to help or intern. And when I was finally ready (btw, I should have done it sooner) she helped me take my business to another level.
I need to give credit where credit is due, and it was 100% Anastasia that encouraged me to join instagram and start a blog. She was young, hip, and not scared of technology. Granted it was 2010 and Instagram was not the household name it is today.
I remember sitting together and her taking my phone saying I needed a handle for Instagram.
“Handle, what’s wrong with my name?”
“No-one uses their names here, think of something that describes you. Mine is NeonComplex” (btw, that’s still her handle and she’s a stylist to the rockstars in LA now)
“Gosh, I don’t know… Personal Stylist?”
“Nope, that’s taken… How about The Wardrobe Consultant?”
And the new name/brand was born!
When I started The Wardrobe Consultant, my original thought process was this… my business is not something that can be described in a tag line. So putting a ¼ page ad in a local paper, or even a billboard on the highway would not have helped expand my business. The return on the investment didn’t make sense. See, my first life in advertising was paying off!
So I decided to look at blogging and instagram as a brand outreach tool. Not necessarily advertising in the traditional way, but the time it took me to write the copy, find the photos, edit everything, find links, verify prices, create a website to house it, hire a photographer to take my photos - that was essentially the “ad” budget, but it was setting the foundation for building something bigger.
But here’s the thing, it’s not like Field of Dreams, you build it and they come. It took a whole lotta time, effort, trial and error and other experts to get to where it is today. Many, many, many times I felt like Sisyphus from Greek mythology, gaining followers and losing them, it was a heart wrenching cycle. And the blogging, don’t even get me started on that!
I really, like really, don’t consider myself a writer. I mean I could write a kicka** term paper on the history of the fleur-de-lis as used symbolically in the architecture of Versailles - but writing for fun?!? No way. I don’t journal, I don’t write letters - even still, I’d rather talk than type any day.
But in order to blog, I needed to be consistent. So, first I signed up for a writing course to find my voice and then I bit the bullet and committed to publishing something every Tuesday. It pains me to admit it - but consistency, discipline and practice, they really work.
Then, once people started reading, and dare I say looking forward to the blog every Tuesday.
I found myself with an audience who enjoyed my content, fashion advice, and style tips, and I realized that I had the ability to help a lot more than just 1:1 clients. While I absolutely love working with my clients (seriously, I absolutely love it and that will always be a part of my business), I only have so much time. I can only work 1:1 with a limited number of people, but the content that I share online can help thousands at once!
In 2013 I really, really wanted to be part of the Reward Style network (you guys know it as Like to Know it). Back then it was a whole song and dance - you needed to be referred, and then apply to become part of the platform. Your feed had to aesthetically appeal to them, you had to have a minimum number of followers, it was a royal PAIN. And I was rejected TWICE!! Yup, two times.
But I knew, even back then, that my following, while small, was mighty. And loyal (BIG thank you and shoutout to the OG’s - I live for you guys!). So I kept at it. I also knew that the RS/LTK affiliate platforms were right for me and my followers.
Pay-per-click (like if someone clicks to see but doesn’t buy) works if you have a million eyes on your stuff, but I did not. And I also knew my peers were busy. Like superwoman busy, so being able to buy from their phone or computer was essential.
Back to the whole influencer thing…This is how I think of it. Actually I was just chatting about it with an artist when I was in Israel last week (If you follow me in IG stories you might remember him - Martin who crochets handbags). Anyway he asked if I ever get tired of posting, because here I was on holiday (he’s British) and posting.
But this is the thing, yes, it’s work, and yes, I could never do it all alone (huge love and thanks to my team) however, when I write or post on stories I feel like I’m dishing with my pals. I’m excited to share the cool hand made hand bags, or the delish gelato. And then I also love when you all dm me back sharing your fav finds or telling me you’re going to try this or that. You people are my people, and that’s why I think it works - for both of us!!
I told you this was a long and circuitous story… In 2013, after two rejections from RS, I decided to get more serious about my IG. I tried to take a course to learn how to photoshop and to know what hashtags to use etc, but it was a lot to learn and quite frankly I didn’t have the bandwidth. My 1:1 clients needed me and the back end of Instagram was an area I could outsource.
The way I approached it was, my 1:1 styling clients hire me because they want to look and feel good and do not want to waste time or money figuring it out on their own. They want someone that already knows the how-to’s and can personalize it for them. Well, that’s what I wanted for my social media!! And again it was time to grow.
Towards the end of 2017, I hired a social media manager (Katie Mander) and together we’ve been able to create consistent content and grow the online aspect of my business. Trust me, if I needed to edit a reel and add the right music and know the right time to post it, we’d all still be waiting. Katie knows her stuff, and the content is still me and mine. But I do not need to do all of the work on my own - it is so liberating!! I can do the stuff I’m good at and she does the stuff she’s good at!
This year we had a ton of growth - to put it in perspective, we set goals each year. For 2022 the follower goal for IG was 30K and that was a stretch, albeit a realistic one, from 2021. Well, we hit 30K by August when a few of my reels started going viral, and the numbers just kept growing. As of today we are at 115K!
And as I said, I trust Katie with the technical side of stuff so she’s going to explain more about how the social media platforms work below.
Hi! So as Hallie mentioned above, I joined her team when she decided to take her Instagram more seriously as a tool for growing The Wardrobe Consultant. I had actually just finished grad school with my masters in strategic communication and was starting my own social media/digital marketing business. It was by pure chance that Hallie and I crossed paths in a Facebook group for female business owners. She posted that she was looking for help with social media and I responded offering my help.
We realized I grew up just about 10 minutes from Hallie’s house, and after 3 years of working together virtually, I moved back to Cleveland. It’s been so much fun working together in-person (if you haven’t had the honor of meeting Hallie in real life - she’s as cool, if not cooler, than you imagine. What you see online is what you get. She’s not creating an online persona, we’re getting the real, authentic Hallie) and I am so lucky that Hallie took the chance on working with me as my first “official” client!
When I started working with Hallie, she had a small but very engaged and loyal following on her blog and her Instagram/Facebook Page. To have an Instagram business account, you need to have a business Facebook Page. From there, you have the option to share all of your IG posts to your FB page as well, so that’s what Hallie had been doing.
There are several platforms that make up The Wardrobe Consultant’s digital space: the blog/website, Instagram, Facebook, email marketing, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and even Twitter!
That sounds like a lot, and it definitely is, but there are different reasons for using each platform. The main 3 that I will go into the most detail about are the blog, the email list, and Instagram. Those are the three platforms that drive the most traffic, engagement, and revenue for The Wardrobe Consultant. Before diving into those, I’ll briefly explain the other platforms and why we use them.
This one is a must for fashion influencers! Pinterest drives a ton of traffic each month to Hallie’s blog posts, even posts from several years ago. I’m not sure if you’ve ever noticed, but there are 3 Pinterest graphics at the bottom of the majority of The Wardrobe Consultant’s blog posts. Once a new blog post is published, I add those 3 graphics to Pinterest that link back to the blog post. This helps drive traffic to the new blog post.
One thing that is really great about Pinterest is the lifespan of a post. Instagram and Facebook posts have very short lifespans. It has actually expanded a bit since the introduction of Instagram reels, but for the majority of Instagram and Facebook posts, you get nearly 100% of your post views within the first few days that the post has been up. That’s why it’s so important to post consistently. But Pinterest works more like a search engine than a social media feed. Rather than showing you the most recent posts, Pinterest’s algorithm shows you the content that is most relevant to you and your searches, regardless of the date of the post.
By posting graphics that link back to Hallie’s blog, we’re increasing her chances of showing up on the feeds of Pinterest users who are searching for style tips or fashion trends. As of this post (December 2022), Hallie’s Pinterest account is reaching approximately 800k+ monthly viewers!
We have a very inconsistent relationship with YouTube. We don’t try to actively grow Hallie’s audience on YouTube, but we post videos on The Wardrobe Consultant’s channel whenever we can’t post it anywhere else. If we’re posting a video, we’re most likely going to post it to Instagram. But if we’re posting a longer video or a video that we want to embed in a blog post, we’ll post it to YouTube and either embed to the blog or link to the video on Instagram.
Did you know that The Wardrobe Consultant is on TikTok? When TikTok first started establishing itself as a platform, I did not imagine that it would be a part of TWC. But as Instagram started incorporating vertical videos (reels) into the platform, we started playing around with more video content.
We spent a few months posting reels consistently. We started to figure out what type of videos were resonating with her audience through trial and error. Not every reel we posted did well, but I was paying close attention to the ones that did get higher engagement. Once we knew what her followers were enjoying, we doubled down on that and that’s when posts started to go viral.
Eventually we were creating more video posts than photo posts. I am a huge proponent of repurposing content however we can, so since we were already creating so many vertical videos under 90 seconds, we figured we might as well take those same videos and share them to TikTok as well!
Hallie has definitely expanded her audience by posting on TikTok, but her general audience of women aged 35-65+ is still spending more time on Instagram, while TikTok skews younger. We’ll continue posting videos to both platforms, especially considering that TikTok has really established themselves as a relevant social media platform that is not going anywhere, but Instagram Reels are always the priority and focus as far as content creation at this point.
Ugh, Twitter. Personally, I love Twitter - it’s where I get my news and stay up-to-date on memes! If I had been writing this post a month ago, I’d only have good things to say. But in the last month with Elon Musk taking over Twitter, it’s been a whole different story. I don’t know what his plan is for the platform, but it’s been chaotic and stressful to be a Twitter user lately, so it’s not a major part of our marketing strategy.
However, Twitter is a great driver of traffic. I keep mentioning that platforms drive traffic (clicks) to the website. That’s because our favorite platform, Instagram, is notoriously difficult to drive traffic from. I will elaborate when I talk more about Hallie’s IG, but Instagram only allows users to post one link in their bio/profile, and no links in captions. The major driver of traffic on Instagram is stories, and those are only up for 24 hours. So I like to be using additional platforms that are easier for sharing links, like Pinterest and Twitter.
Twitter is a place to post links to blog posts, it actually automatically posts a tweet whenever we publish a new blog post, so we’re posting consistently without actually spending much time on the platform.
Now that you know about Hallie’s Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter, we can talk about the main platforms we use for The Wardrobe Consultant. Instagram and the blog are our main platforms for posting content, and email marketing and Hallie’s Facebook group are our main channels of sharing the content and driving engagement with the community.
The blog is the heart and soul of The Wardrobe Consultant. Hallie has managed to consistently post to her blog every single week for nearly a decade - the dedication to her content and consistency with posting is a major part of her blog’s success today.
Each blog post generally falls into one of the 4 main categories: What To Wear, Where To Shop, How To Style, and Girl Crushes. Sometimes they’ll fall into more than one of those categories, and occasionally we will have posts like this one that don’t necessarily fall into any of those categories. But the bulk of the blog content is focused on what to wear, where to shop, and how to style.
Hallie writes her own blog posts, then I come in and make little tweaks that will optimize the blog post. Search Engine Optimization is a huge factor in the blog’s success. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is essentially the process of improving the blog post’s quality in order to show up in Google search results for specific keywords.
I have 2 main focuses when it comes to The Wardrobe Consultant’s SEO. One is to optimize each blog post to appear in the search results for our target keywords.
My favorite little digital marketing joke is “where’s the best place to hide a dead body?” “On the second page of Google!”
But for real, think about when you’re searching for something online. How often do you even click to the second page of results? My goal is to get Hallie’s blog posts not only showing up on the first page of Google search results, but there is also something called “featured snippets” that you probably are familiar with, even if you didn’t know they had a name.
Featured Snippets
When you search something in Google, especially if you search in a question format, well-optimized blog posts can become a Featured Snippet. This is where Google recognizes that you’re looking for an answer, and they find the best answer to your question and present it to you as a snippet, giving you the answer without you having to search through websites and find it yourself.
If you’re searching for something like “how to wear color”, “can I wear suede boots in the summer”, “wearing white in fall”, “Rosh Hashanah outfit”, “do red and yellow match”, etc. you will see Hallie’s answer to your question directly from her blog at the very top of the Google results!
Backlinks for SEO
The second thing I focus on for improving Hallie’s website’s SEO is backlinks. Backlinks are when another website (ideally one that has a higher overall domain rating than your own) links your domain (thewardrobeconsultant.com) on their website. It’s essentially telling Google that this huge website like insider.com trusts thewardrobeconsultant.com as a trusted resource, so it bumps Hallie’s credibility up in Google’s eyes.
Some of the most exciting backlinks that drive traffic back to Hallie’s website are:
We put a lot of time and energy into keeping the TWC email list active, engaging, and growing. This is because compared to all of the other marketing methods of communication (social media), the email list is 100% owned and controlled by Hallie. Social media platforms have technical difficulties, they go down, they can be shut down at any time, etc. If Hallie only used Instagram to engage with her audience, and then something happened to Instagram or to Hallie’s account, she’d have to start over from scratch.
Every Tuesday, we send an email to the email list with a link to the newest blog post. And then on the last Thursday (approx) of each month, we send out a monthly newsletter. We use Flodesk to create beautiful emails and we try to find exciting ways to get Hallie’s audience to join her email list. Some of the fun ways that we build Hallie’s email list is by offering some freebies, such as the Closet Cleanse Guide, Vacation Packing Checklist, and the Personal Style Quiz.
We understand that people’s email inboxes are sacred, we don’t want to over do it and send an obnoxious amount of emails. It’s an honor to be invited to send emails to Hallie’s audience, so our goal is for our emails to be as valuable to the audience as their email addresses are to us.
If you’re not subscribed to Hallie’s email list, you can join by clicking this link. And if you’re interested in using Flodesk for your own email marketing, you can use Hallie’s link to save 50% on your first year of Flodesk!
Instagram is the platform where most of you probably stumbled across Hallie. If you’re reading her blog but not following her on Instagram, you are missing out big time! That’s where Hallie shares daily IG stories that give you a glimpse into her day-to-day life, and where we post fun exciting content.
On Instagram, Hallie shares 3 main types of content: Instagram Stories, static posts to her feed (images/carousels/graphics), and video posts (Reels). All 3 content types work together to create a well-balanced Instagram account.
When it comes to Instagram (and all other social media platforms), things are CONSTANTLY changing. I feel like every time I open the app, an icon has moved or a new feature was added. Hallie is an amazing client because she is willing to try out any of the ideas I have. Some things work, others don’t, but with all of our trial and error, we’ve figured out what Hallie’s audience enjoys.
A huge part of my job as a digital marketer is to understand the goals of each social media platform. The algorithms change so frequently, it’s not enough to just figure out a strategy and go with it. That strategy could work today, but might not work as well in a month. I try to stay ahead of the trends and figure out what the platform wants from its creators.
In 2022, Instagram has had one goal that we’ve used to our advantage in Hallie’s case. The rapid growth of TikTok has been a huge threat to Instagram. Younger audiences are using TikTok as their main social media platform and IG users are using TikTok more and more.
Instagram introduced reels and has been really pushing for creators to be posting reels and vertical video content on their platform as a way to keep users on their app instead of losing them to TikTok. As we started posting reels, it became very clear that compared to photos we posted, reels were reaching significantly more users than are not already following her.
When we share a regular post to Instagram, it’ll still reach a few accounts that are not already following Hallie, especially through the use of hashtags, tagging other accounts, and location tags. But when we post a reel, it’ll reach those same followers, plus it will be pushed out to thousands of accounts that haven’t seen Hallie’s content yet.
Not only were reels reaching a wider audience and bringing new followers to Hallie’s account, they were also getting a lot more comments, saves, shares, and likes from her followers. We have tried different styles of videos and figured out which perform best, and after several months of posting reels consistently, they started going viral. Hallie has now had several reels that have over 1 million views and those reels are what took her account from 20k followers to 115k followers in a matter of months!
If you’re still here, I’m very impressed. If you used the table of contents at the top to skip directly to this section, I don’t blame you. We kind of had to start from scratch to make this all make sense for everyone, but if you’re already familiar with social media platforms and just want to learn how they generate revenue, this section is for you!
As Hallie mentioned above - influencer has a kind of yucky connotation. We prefer the term content creator that is often used interchangeably. Because that’s what Hallie is doing, creating content for her community. Her goal is not to influence you to buy something, but it is to create content (stories, reels, blogs) that you like and want to see.
Affiliate marketing is an arrangement where a business offers partners (or affiliates) a commission in exchange for any sales generated from the affiliate’s dedicated link. We use different affiliate platforms for The Wardrobe Consultant, but the majority of our affiliate links are from RewardStyle/LikeToKnow.it.
RS/LTK is the clearing house/middle man between the stores and the affiliates. RS works with the most well known brands, in fact the stores you all have told me you like to shop the most. They do all the negotiation and number crunching - and it’s at no additional cost to you.
The way Hallie likes to explain it is, say Nordstrom for example has taken a % to their advertising budget and allocated it to affiliate marketing. So they decide they will team up with RS/LTK and offer a % to influencers that link to our products. If someone buys and keeps the product they will get x % (it varies from brand to brand, anywhere from 2%-20%) at NO ADDITIONAL COST TO THE PURCHASER! And that is big, it’s coming from the brands pocket, so sale stuff is still on sale, and promos are still promos.
Using affiliate marketing allows me to do the heavy lifting for you (finding items, looking at reviews and sizes, trying stuff on) and we can offer a direct link to the product to make it easier on you, and, this is a big and, Hallie can still make some money to offset the cost and time she has put into it.
That is why Hallie is so incredibly grateful when you use her links to shop!
We also use LTK to make affiliate income through Instagram posts. Before we share anything to Hallie’s Instagram account, we post the content to Hallie’s profile on the ShopLTK app with affiliate links to the pieces she is wearing in the post. Then we post the content to Instagram and let the audience know in the caption that they can find the links on LTK. The link in Hallie’s bio will direct you to her LTK profile, then you just look for the post you saw on IG and you’ll find the links!
Click here to watch a walkthrough of how you can shop Hallie’s posts.
A Few Interesting Details About Affiliate Marketing:
(From Hallie)
Influencers get paid 280 days in the rears. Why do they hold the money for so long? To account for returns. When I was starting it was painful to wait so long, now, thankfully, there is stuff in the pipeline so it’s not as hand to mouth.
Some brands of platforms drop “cookies,” so if you click the link but do not buy it right away, but come back within a certain timeframe (again, it varies from 30 min to 30 days) I may still receive commission.
However, if you click my link, put the item in your cart and then use another influencer’s link that takes you to the same site - it is usually whoever’s cookie was last that receives the affiliate commission.
Not all brands work through these platforms, so when I say use code HALLIE10 at checkout, it is often for the brand to account for how much business has been brought to them through my links.
Partnerships are where Hallie has a direct relationship with a brand. Partnerships come in all different shapes and sizes. The Wardrobe Consultant has a standard rate for partnerships that is based on her following and engagement. However, influencer marketing budgets can vary significantly from brand to brand. Hallie loves to work with and support small businesses, but they often have smaller budgets than the big name brands. If that is the case, we always come to an agreement that feels mutually beneficial.
In the first few years of partnerships, we did not really have any set rates or offers. But as Hallie’s account has been growing so significantly, she’s been getting dozens of partnership requests per month (at least). So we’ve put together different options to share with partners for how Hallie can work with them, and she is incredibly picky with the companies she partners with. She turns down far more partnerships than she accepts, so if she’s sharing something with you guys, you can trust that she genuinely loves the products and would honestly recommend them to family and friends.
Partnerships are great for brand awareness, especially when the partnerships are more long-term. We offer one-off partnerships that can be Instagram stories, an Instagram reel, or a regular feed post. We offer sponsored blog posts. But we love and see the most ROI on long term partnerships.
Instagram and TikTok both pay their creators for posting on their platforms. It’s not a ton of money (unless you have millions of followers) but it’s a great stream of income for The Wardrobe Consultant. I have not been active enough on TikTok yet to join the Creator Fund, but I do receive payouts for “Reels Bonus Plays” on Instagram.
You have to be invited by Instagram to join the program. It runs on monthly cycles, so you can only earn based on reels plays for the posts you’ve shared in the last month. It’s kind of a bummer because sometimes Hallie’s reels don’t start really going viral until a few weeks after it’s initially posted, but it’s just a bonus that we’re thrilled to be a part of.
For reference, Hallie makes between $100-200 per month from reels plays.