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How To Start A Money-Making Fashion Blog
Do you own a fashion blog or website? Or you want to create one and don’t know where and how to begin. While it is easy to create a blog, making money from it can be the more difficult task. If fashion is something you can write, talk or generally passionate about, then getting paid for what you love doing is an added incentive to getting it done.

The best time to have created a fashion blog was like two years ago but the next best time is now. You don’t need to be a stylist, designer or tailor to get started. You might just love outfits, and voila!, you start earning a lot of money. To be a fashion blogger, you must have a unique perspective on fashion.

This article highlights how you can get into the fashion blogging industry. Let’s get started.

What Should Be On A Fashion Blog

A fashion blog should be a reflection of who you are. To be an authority on the online fashion space, there are some things you should have on your blog. The best fashion blogs in Nigeria such as Bella Naija and Madivas keep attracting a lot of readers due to the amount of information they churn out.

We have highlighted some of the best sections a fashion blog should have:

Weddings: Having a Wedding Section is surely advised. People keep looking out for new trends, new fashion tips and the best accessories combination for that special day. Partner with top brands and even budding entrepreneurs to promote their wedding gowns, shoes, and accessories. Also, write on wedding colour themes and event decoration.

You can give tips on how to accommodate different cultures on the wedding day. You can also decide to sell wedding apparel yourself by integrating payment gateways and e-commerce plugins such as WooCommerce.

Fashion News and Opinion: This section should be what readers and users see first when they access your blog. Push the latest news in the fashion space, what a celebrity is wearing, the best and worst dressed celebrities at shows.

You can also write opinion articles. For instance, during the rainy section, you can create a post titled, “How To Ensure Your Fashion Game Is Still Tight During The Rainy Season “. For so many people, this is a challenge. By writing a post that talks about a common and recurring problem, you become an authority.

Trends: You must be in tune with the latest trends in the fashion world. What are the new colour combinations people are trying? Which accessories are trending? These trends must be featured on your blog. Research a lot and also go for a lot of fashion events and meetups to be abreast of the latest designs and happenings in the industry.

Beauty and Lifestyle: On a fashion blog, you can never go wrong with having a Beauty and Lifestyle section. Write blog posts on topics such as Skincare, makeup, hair care, manicure and pedicure, and anything that relates to beauty. Feature products that focus on different skin types to attract a wide range of visitors. You can also talk about lifestyle with topics such as Relationship Talks, Healthy Living, and even Nutrition. They help drive traffic as well.

What You Need To Start

The first thing you should do is choose the platform on which you want to build your blog. There are a lot of Content Management Systems that you can use, but WordPress is highly recommended. It’s support system and ease of use are excellent It is very user-friendly, meaning you don’t need to be a techie to get the hang of it. To get started with WordPress, there are a few things you need:
- Domain Name: When using wordpress.com, you can get a free domain name that is a subdomain of wordpress.com (e.g. myfashionblog.wordpress.com). If you would prefer your own domain name (e.g. myfashionblog.com), you can purchase a domain name from whogohost.com by clicking this link.
- Web Hosting – This is where all your website files will be stored. When using wordpress.com, you don’t have to bother about this, hosting is taken care of.
- Theme: A WordPress theme provides the frontend of your blog. You can search the WordPress Theme Repository for a theme that suits your taste. There are free themes and premium themes which cost about ($45 – $60). You can also get a custom theme built to fit your brand or your specific design preferences. You can get in touch with us for that.
Choosing a Design

Being a fashionista, your blog shouldn’t be drab. It doesn’t matter if you only do product reviews, or a designer showcasing your products or a blogger that shares fashion news. Your blog should look appealing and needs a design that appeals to the reader. It must also represent your unique sense of style and creativity.

There are thousands of WordPress theme for fashion blogs that you can choose from. A lot of themes have creative designs which are flexible and easily editable. You can add your logo, choose colors and change basic settings. The most important feature of a theme is responsiveness.

A responsive site is a website that looks just as good on mobile devices as it looks on a computer. It’s easy to read on any screen size without the need to zoom, resize, or scroll horizontally.

Content Quality

While a pleasing design will attract people to your website, having good and useful content is what will keep them coming back. Pages such as About Us and Contact Us help make you look professional. Once you have set up those pages, you can start adding posts, images, and pictures.

Research for fashion topics that people search for, and write content around it. Your blog posts should be entertaining, informative, and helpful. Keep up to date with fashion trends and update your blog with new trends and news. You also need to be consistent, as regular updates mean that more people will get to read what you are writing.

Visit popular blogs in the fashion industry to find trending topics you can blog about.

While doing this, you can’t copy and paste content from other sites. This is plagiarism, and is illegal, especially if the source has a copyright on the article. Your site would also get penalized by search engines like Google if your blog contains plagiarized content.

Social Media

Leveraging social media is important to build your audience and the reputation of your blog. A lot of your intended audience is already on different social media platforms, especially Instagram. You can get access to that vast audience by following trends and making sure you are in the conversation. You should also direct your social media followers to your website by sharing links to your articles.

Page Optimization

Getting users to find your website out of the millions of websites out there is a skill that will set you apart from the rest. Here are ways you can improve your website visibility.
- S.E.O: Search Engine Optimization is a long-term and continuous effort that pays large returns. Ensure that your blog posts contain keywords that your intended audience search for. This would make your website rank higher in Google search results.
- Improve your site speed: Page speed is very important for user experience. You wouldn’t want a situation where people have to spend a lot of time before your website pages load. While network and signal strength affect page speed, there are steps you can take to make your website faster. Test the speed of your website or theme that you intend to use for your website here. Also, try to avoid uploading large images on your website cos they reduce your page speed, you can compress your images here.
- User Engagement: Put yourself in the place of the user. What would you do when you first arrive on a website? You must be able to track what your audience is doing, this helps you know what you need to improve on as you will see the pages with the most and least visits and other useful information. You can use Google Analytics for this.
Let’s Make Some Money

Once your fashion blog is established and has a sizable audience, brands may pay you to promote their brands. That should be your goal, as it offers you the opportunity to earn while doing what you love. A lot of successful bloggers their income from paid and sponsored content.

Here are some other ways to monetize your fashion blog.
- Google AdSense: AdSense is an advertising program by Google that lets you display ads on your website and make money. You get paid based on the number of views and clicks that the ads on your site get. In a future post, we would explain more about Google AdSense, but you can find out more by doing research online.
- Become an affiliate marketer: How cool is it to get paid for referring people to buy a particular product? That is how affiliate marketing works. You get paid a commission when you recommend a product. You can be an affiliate marketer for fashion brands and online fashion stores. Once people buy these products via your site, you get paid a commission.
- Sponsored Posts: A sponsored post is a post written on behalf of a brand or company to promote their products or brand. You can write sponsored posts for brands and charge for it. Another form of sponsored posts is featured posts. For a featured post, a brand provides the content but post it on your blog in order to get access to your audience.
Setting up a money-making fashion blog requires a lot of patience and consistency. You might struggle to earn at the initial stage, but doing the aforementioned puts you in the right direction, though you must also research and keep up with emerging trends in the fashion space.

If you liked this article, connect with us across all social media platforms @MactavisDigital, and do check out our portfolio to see examples of the projects we have done in the past.
June 26, 2018
6 Tips For Choosing The Best Domain Name for Your Website

The first thing most people try to figure out when they want a website is what domain name to use. A domain name is basically the address and name of your website (e.g. mactavis.com). It’s what people type into their web browsers to get to your site. Most people try to have a domain name that’s the same as their brand name. That’s good but there are chances that it is in use by someone else. Don’t be too dispirited about it, you are not alone.

It is good practice to decide and check the availability of a domain name first before settling on a brand name. This is important because you might register your business name (with the Corporate Affairs Commission if you are in Nigeria) and by the time you want to have a website or presence on social media, you discover that the name is already in use. This article highlights important things you should consider to get the best domain name for your website.

It can be argued that the success of a website is closely tied to its name. If you make the mistake of choosing wrongly, it can be difficult to switch names without hurting your brand and affecting your search rankings.

Brand first, keywords second

When choosing a domain name, it is important that you use a name that is unique. For SEO purposes, it is beneficial to have keywords in your domain. By doing this, you tell search engines what your website is about. This will help you rank higher in search engines such as Google, though having quality content and good user experience is equally as important in ranking on Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

Finding a domain name with target keywords that are not taken already is like finding a needle in a haystack, but you can be creative and combine your keywords to ensure your domain name stands out. You can check for the availability of a domain name by using this site.

Use .com if you can

We’d personally recommend a .com domain name extension and here’s why. Dot com domains are the most common and most likely to be typed in browsers. Many users, especially those that are not too techy automatically type .com at the end of every domain without thinking twice.

There are a lot of top-level domain extensions available at the moment such as .net, .org and even niche extensions such as .pizza, .blog and even .photography. That said though, .com is still the most widely used domain extension that most users are familiar with.

Make it brand-oriented

To make your domain name stand out in your reader’s mind, it should express your brand name which should be unique. For example, Mactavis sounds good and is unique.

Your domain names should be unique, catchy and memorable as well. Truth is, this is not easy, but not impossible. Only takes time and a lot of creativity.

Keep your domain name short, spell-able and easily pronounceable

Most brands make the mistake of using homophones when selecting a domain name. Homophones are words that sound the same but are spelt differently. Examples are air and heir, stair and stare, and shore and sure. Words with suffixes such as psy-, ph- should generally be avoided, as their complete word pronunciations don’t always have the same spellings.

You should be able to easily share your domain when speaking as well as writing. It should spell as it sounds.

Domain names with long character length may result in typos when users try to look up the website, and that may mean you lose traffic to other websites. It is recommended that you keep your domain name under 15 characters as longer domain names are more difficult to remember. Also try keep the number of syllables under 3 or 4. Domains with 1 or 2 syllables are the easiest to remember.

Avoid double letters and hyphens

Try to avoid hyphens when choosing a domain. Remember our rule:

A good domain should spell as it sounds.

Hyphens are generally not easy to remember. They are also a common feature in domains used by phishing sites used for fraud as the fraudsters try to mask legitimate domains by adding hyphens.

Users may also end up at your competitor’s site if they forget the hyphens in yours, and that’s a great risk.

Also, try to avoid the use of double letters, because they increase the chance of typos, which ultimately lead to a loss of traffic. Imagine a website with the name, “happinesssecrets.com”, there is a big chance that one of the “s” may be skipped which leads the user to an entirely different website.

We hope the article helped inform you on the necessary tips to consider on choosing the best domain name for your website.

Connect with us across all social media platforms @MactavisDigital for your website and mobile application design and development, training, Search Engine Optimization, and other digital services.

June 21, 2018
4 Best Nigerian Payment Gateways

Payment gateways have simplified the payments in Nigeria. Back in the day before the advent of e-commerce platforms, paying for goods and services involved going through many processes that wasted time and resources. Let me tell you a story. Mr. Lukman is the owner of a printing firm at Somolu, which is the hub of printers in Lagos, Nigeria. He often struggled with customers paying for his services, as time and time again, he delivered his orders without being paid in full.

When a web developer spoke to him about getting a website and integrating a payment gateway, he realized that he didn’t have to go through any stress to get paid for his services. All his customers had to do was input their card details on a platform and voila, he got credited. A payment gateway had done all the heavy lifting for him.

Most payment gateways have plugins that you can seamlessly install if you have a WordPress site, they also have plugins for other platforms such as Opencart, Magento, Drupal etc.

Here are 4 payment gateway platforms you can use for your website.

Paystack

If you are looking for value and quality at the same time, Paystack is a good bet. They are a fast growing payment gateway in Africa and have worked with a number of popular brands. You don’t need to write any code. They also offer subscriptions which is useful if you offer a service and need to bill your customers at certain intervals. Paystack also has zero integrations fees unlike some other payment gateways, which is a major advantage and point of consideration.

Most web developers opt for paystack because of their seamless integration, extensive documentation, and wonderful User Interface. It is also quite easy to ‘Go Live’ with Paystack.

*Go Live refers to moving your account from a test account to a Live Account, this is a daunting process with Interswitch-based payment gateways such as GTPay, Webpay etc.

Note that for business accounts, you need to upload business information such as CAC Documents, ID of business owners and some other information to go live.

You can see how it works in this demo.

Rates: You pay 1.5% + ₦100 for local transactions and the ₦100 fee is waived for transactions below ₦2,500. For international cards, you get charged 3.5% + ₦100 and you get paid in 24 hours. Transaction charges are capped at ₦2,000. Find out more at paystack.com

Rave by Flutterwave

Rave is a payment gateway that allows multi-currency transactions. You can get payments from cards, mobile money wallets, and bank accounts. Implementing Rave is easy, and you don’t have to be a developer to use it. For your checkout page, all you need is to add the code snippet for the page and API keys, and you can use their plugins for easy integration to your website. Like Paystack, Rave doesn’t charge for integration. Go Live is also a breeze with Flutterwave.

Rave is PCIDSS level 1 compliant. Some advantages Rave currently has over Paystack are lower transaction fees and dollar currency support. With Rave, you can list amounts in dollars, a feature Paystack currently doesn’t support. Find out more at ravepay.co

Interswitch Webpay

Interswitch is one of the most trusted payment gateways and is one of the first payment gateway providers in Nigeria. It is used by major brands in Nigerias. They are a secure, reliable and scalable platform for electronic transactions processing.

There is a one-time integration fee of ₦150,000 and for every successful transaction, there’s a transaction fee of 1.5% of the value of the transaction which is capped at ₦2,000.

The major issue with Interswitch is their Go Live process, it is long and complicated. It involves scanning and printing of forms, sending several mails, and filling of several forms again. Note that, it is not for the faint-hearted and can be annoying. Interswitch is a wonderful payment gateway, but they are badly in need of a modern on-boarding process. Another major problem is integration, Webpay and other Interswitch-based payment gateways such as GTPay are not all that easy to integrate and don’t have very good documentation as you would get with Paystack and Rave.

Webpay also doesn’t provide a dashboard for users to view their transactions which is a major turn-off for most businesses.

GTBank GTPay

Guaranty Trust Bank is one of the leading financial institutions in Nigeria, and their payment gateway, GTPay is a secure web payment solution that enables merchants to receive payments from both local and international payment cards.

GTPay is based on Interswitch’s Webpay, so the integration and on-boarding process is similar. It is plagued by most of the issues WebPay has.

Before using GTPay, you should know that they currently charge a one-time integration fee of ₦75,000.

An important advantage of GTPay and WebPay based payment gateways is better security. The lack of a user-dashboard and a seamless onboarding process can be considered a feature and not a bug, cos it makes fraud by much more difficult. A User dashboard can be an avenue to siphon money and defraud a business if it can be accessed by fraudulent people or even the web developer of the business owner.

There are a number of other payment gateway platforms that you can use, but these four are some of the best out there.

If you liked this article, follow us on all social media platforms @MactavisDigital to connect with us for all your website development, Search Engine Optimization, content production, and training needs.

At Mactavis, we help brands, companies and businesses integrate payment gateways on their websites. Check out our portfolio to see some of our web development projects.

June 14, 2018
5 Best Search Engine Optimization Techniques to Help You Rank Higher

Have you ever searched for anything on Google and perhaps other search engines? Well, I bet you have. Everybody uses Google! Research has shown that 60% of search engine users never go to the second page of the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) and 90% of the people that use search engines only trust the first three results. It is therefore imperative that as a brand or company, you must strive to be displayed on the Top 3 results page when people search for products or services that you offer.

Search Engine Optimization is a very broad topic but this article highlights 5 techniques that can help you rank higher. To be able to gain more website traffic, increase digital visibility and get more traction in the online space, you must invest and continuously improve your SEO.

Here are some of the best practices that can help you become a big brand online. Come with me.

Keyword research

One of the most important things you have to do is to know and uncover words and phrases people are searching for. Most people go online to get answers to a lot of things. Those problems are what your organization, website, and brand are actively looking to solve, and you must have content that guides them properly. You must have primary keywords (keywords that actively portray what your website is all about) and also secondary keywords that share the Intent of the reader.

You can also do this by doing some SERP investigation. Perform a search query in Google, and see the suggestions that follow. They are often EMBOLDENED. It simply shows the most frequently searched phrases as regards to that keyword. You can also use MOZ Explorer and other SEO tools to do keyword research.

Accessible and crawlable URLs

A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the address of a world wide web page. It simply means the name of your website. When people use search engines, the search engines have robots that crawl and access websites to understand the content, images, videos and anything you have on the page.

They do this in milliseconds in a way that they put it into their web index. Your URLs must be concise and in sync with what your website is all about.

Your content must be brilliant and unique

The ability to create credible, worthy content is not as easy as people think. You must find people that create quality content. The reason why this is important is that your articles, images, and videos must contain your primary and secondary keywords in a systematic way. When you overuse the keywords, Google detects some anomaly and won’t rank you well.

Therefore, getting keyword-optimized content is very useful. Also, never use content lifted from other websites without stating the sources. That is plagiarism, which Google frowns at.

Link building is important as your content becomes very credible in the eyes of Google. Use social media and other platforms to promote your content. When a particular piece of information has many credible sources linking to it, it helps build page rank and authority.

Optimize your page speed

Page speed is very important as it helps keep readers and users on your site. Ensure that the time your website takes to come up is very fast. When people spend a lot of time trying to access your website, they might not come back. There are numerous page speed insight websites and apps that can guide you in how fast your site comes up. You can use Google Insights for this.

Reduce the sizes of your images. Larges image and videos reduce the speed of your website as it takes longer time for the servers to bring up your site. You can click here to compress images.

Also, ensure that the time taken for people to get things done on your website is minimized. Your User Interface and Experience considerations must be top-notch as it makes the work of the user easier and less challenging.

Use compelling title tags, meta descriptions, and rich snippets

A Meta description is an HTML tag that is a snippet of what your content is about. It is what appears on Search Engine Results Page. It is a snippet of around 155 characters. You must ensure that the keyword you are trying to rank for is in the meta description. How Google displays your results determine whether people will click on your link or another.

For images, Googlebots can’t read pictures and other media in their visual form, therefore it is important that you optimize. What do I mean by image optimization? It means renaming your images in such a way that makes them an authority when people search online. An HTML tag called the “alt” is the best for this. Make sure all your images are original, in high-resolution and are named properly, and that they link back to your website.

Keep working on your S.E.O

While these five techniques are important and critical to improved page ranking on Search Engines, you must keep learning and practising new methods of beating the opposition to that customer.

Search Engine Optimization techniques keep changing from day to day, and you must be in tune with them. Connect with @MactavisDigital across all social media platforms or contact us via www.mactavis.com. We make sure your website can be easily found and accessed through all search engines.

June 7, 2018
4 Best Product Review Plugins for WordPress

People check out product reviews when buying online. It helps them discern easily what products have been vetted by others and is good values for their money.

Reviews mean that people are talking about your brand and that you have built credibility on the online space. In this article, we have selected four of the best product review plugins that you can use on your WordPress site.

What’s the need for a Product Review Plugin?

People check out product reviews when buying something online. A brand that has positive reviews online has higher propensity to attract new customers. Many brands know that having good reviews help to drive sales, and you must also use that platform to help your SEO.

Many WordPress users write product reviews to make money online. Some use affiliate marketing to earn revenue while some get paid directly by the company for the review. You can write your reviews as a blog post.

The problem with this idea is that the blog post doesn’t use the format supported by search engines in product reviews. This means that your article will not be highlighted in search results as a review. For better visibility and traction, your users need to write reviews with Product Review Plugins.

They help your users write search engine friendly reviews that help you rank higher.

Come with me to see 4 of the best product review plugins for WordPress.

WP Product Review Pro

This Plugin has it all, really. There is a detailed settings section that allows you to choose how you want to manage and displays reviews on your website. Select the product review option when writing a blog post and the settings to write your review comes up. Simplify your review into features, add images and more.

You have sidebar widgets to help showcase your reviews, and use it to collect submitted reviews that allow users to add their own rating and reviews in the comments. This plugin also has all reviews displayed in schema.org rich snippet format for maximum SEO benefit.

All in One Schema Rich Snippets

Like the name suggests, this plugin allows users to write different posts using the rich snippet format. This also applies to product reviews. What you have to do is quite easy: Select ‘Item Review’ from a drop-down menu when writing a blog post, and the plugin automatically shows review options like reviewer name, product name, and star rating.

For user experience, this plugin is one of the best. Users don’t have to go through a lot of steps to review products. This software can also be added to articles, products, software and so much more.

WP Review Pro

This is also another excellent alternative when it comes to adding product reviews in WordPress. It is very easy to use and is perfect for beginners. After activation, all the user has to do is write a new post and select the review type. It goes further than the star rating as it supports points and percentages: anyone you feel most comfortable with.

It also supports user ratings that allow users the opportunity to submit their own ratings for a product. For the creative mind, this plugin is perhaps the best as it comes with styling options.

You go to Settings > WP Review page. There, you can choose your own colors for the review box to match theme colors and brand colors.

Rich Reviews

This plugin is free and allows you to add reviews of your own products, services, or website. Your customers can also submit reviews. This plugin uses shortcodes to display reviews, and you can display a review anywhere on your website including posts, pages, and sidebar widgets.

The plugin’s settings panel comes with detailed instructions on how to use the feature of approving each review before publishing it.

We hope this article has been helpful in knowing four of the best product review plugins for WordPress. Do find us on different social media platforms @MactavisDigital to connect with us. Discuss business, make inquiries and ask questions about web development and other digital services that we offer.

June 1, 2018